“Then why are we going?”
“Because we can’t stay here,” he said through gritted teeth. “And if we can’t stay here, we have to go somewhere. If there’s anything like a government left at all…”
He shook his head. He hadn’t come outside for this. He had come outside to bury his wife.
“Go inside, Cassie.”
“I’ll help you.”
“I don’t need your help.”
“She’s my mother. I loved her, too. Please let me help.” I was crying again. He didn’t see. He wasn’t looking at me, and he wasn’t looking at Mom. He wasn’t looking at anything, really. There was, like, this black hole where the world used to be, and we were both falling toward it. What could we hold on to? I pulled his hand off Mom’s body and pressed it against my cheek and told him I loved him and that Mom loved him and that everything would be okay, and the black hole lost a little of its strength.
“Go inside, Cassie,” he said gently. “Sammy needs you more than she does.”
I went inside. Sammy was sitting on the floor in his room, playing with his X-wing starfighter, destroying the Death Star. “Shroooooom, shroooooom. I’m going in, Red One!”
And outside, my father knelt in the freshly turned earth. Brown dirt, red rose, gray sky, white sheet.
12
I GUESS I have to talk about Sammy now.
I don’t know how else to get there.
There being that first inch in the open, where the sunlight kissed my scraped-up cheek when I slid out from under the Buick. That first inch was the hardest. The longest inch in the universe. The inch that stretched a thousand miles.
There being that place on the highway where I turned to face the enemy I couldn’t see.
There being the one thing that’s kept me from going completely crazy, the thing the Others haven’t been able to take from me after taking everything from me.
Sammy is the reason I didn’t give up. Why I didn’t stay beneath that car and wait for the end.
The last time I saw him was through the back window of a school bus. His forehead pressing against the glass. Waving at me. And smiling. Like he was going on a field trip: excited, nervous, not scared at all. Being with all those other kids helped. And the school bus, which was so normal. What’s more everyday than a big, yellow school bus? So ordinary, in fact, that the sight of them pulling into the refugee camp after the last four months of horror was shocking. It was like seeing a McDonald’s on the moon. Totally weird and crazy and something that just shouldn’t be.
We’d been in the camp only a couple of weeks. Of the fifty or so people there, ours was the only family. Everybody else was a widow, a widower, an orphan. The last ones standing in their family, strangers before coming to the camp. The oldest was probably in his sixties. Sammy was the youngest, but there were seven other kids, none except me older than fourteen.
The camp lay twenty miles east of where we lived, hacked out of the woods during the 3rd Wave to build a field hospital after the ones in town had reached full capacity. The buildings were slapped together, made out of hand-sawed lumber and salvaged tin, one main ward for the infected and a smaller shack for the two doctors who tended the dying before they, too, were sucked down by the Red Tsunami. There was a summer garden and a system that captured rainwater for washing and bathing and drinking.
We ate and slept in the big building. Between five and six hundred people had bled out in there, but the floor and walls had been bleached and the cots they died on had been burned. It still smelled faintly of the Pestilence (a little like soured milk), and the bleach hadn’t removed all the bloodstains. There were patterns of tiny spots covering the walls and long, sickle-shaped stains on the floor. It was like living in a 3-D abstract painting.
The shack was a combination storehouse and weapons cache. Canned vegetables, packaged meats, dry goods, and staples, like salt. Shotguns, pistols, semiautomatics, even a couple of flare guns. Every man walked around armed to the teeth; it was the Wild West all over again.
A shallow pit had been dug a few hundred yards into the woods behind the compound. The pit was for burning bodies. We weren’t allowed to go back there, so of course me and some of the older kids did. There was this one creep they called Crisco, I guess because of his long, greased-back hair. Crisco was thirteen and a trophy hunter. He’d actually wade into the ashes to scavenge for jewelry and coins and anything else he might find valuable or “interesting.” He swore he didn’t do it because he was a sicko.
“This is the difference now,” he would say, chortling, sorting through his latest haul with crud-encrusted fingernails, his hands gloved in the gray dust of human remains.
The difference between what?
“Between being the Man or not. The barter system is back, baby!” Holding up a diamond necklace. “And when it’s all over except for the shouting, the people with the good stuff are going to call the shots.”
The idea that they wanted to kill all of us still wasn’t something that had occurred to anyone, even the adults. Crisco saw himself as one of the Native Americans who sold Manhattan for a handful of beads, not as a dodo bird, which was a lot closer to the truth.
Dad had heard about the camp a few weeks back, when Mom started showing early symptoms of the Pestilence. He tried to get Mom to go, but she knew there was nothing anyone could do. If she was going to die, she wanted to do it in her own home, not in some bogus hospice in the middle of the woods. Then later, as she was entering the final hours, the rumor came around that the hospital had been turned into a rendezvous point, a kind of survivor safe house, far enough from town to be reasonably safe in the next wave, whatever that was going to be (though the smart money was on some kind of aerial bombardment), but close enough for the People in Charge to find when they came to rescue us—if there were People in Charge and if they came.
The unofficial boss of the camp was a retired marine named Hutchfield. He was a human LEGO person: square hands, square head, square jaw. Wore the same muscle tee every day, stained with something that might have been blood, though his black boots always sported a mirror finish. He shaved his head (though not his chest or back, which he really should have considered). He was covered in tattoos. And he liked guns. Two on his hip, one tucked behind his back, another slung over his shoulder. No one carried more guns than Hutchfield. Maybe that had something to do with his being the unofficial boss.
Sentries had spotted us coming, and when we reached the dirt road that led into the woods to the camp, Hutchfield was there with another guy named Brogden. I’m pretty sure we were supposed to notice the firepower draped all over their bodies. Hutchfield ordered us to split up. He was going to talk to Dad; Brogden got me and Sams. I told Hutchfield what I thought about that idea. You know, like where exactly on his tattooed behind he could stick it.
I’d just lost one parent. I wasn’t too keen on the idea of losing another.
“It’s all right, Cassie,” my father said.
“We don’t know these guys,” I argued with him. “They could be just another bunch of Twigs, Dad.” Twigs was street for “thugs with guns,” the murderers, ra**sts, black marketers, kidnappers, and just your general punks who showed up midway through the 3rd Wave, the reason people barricaded their houses and stockpiled food and weapons. It wasn’t the aliens that first made us gear up for war; it was our fellow humans.
“They’re just being careful,” Dad argued back. “I’d do the same thing in their position.” He patted me. I was like, Damn it, old man, if you give me that g.d. condescending little pat one more time… “It’ll be fine, Cassie.”
He went off with Hutchfield, out of earshot but still in sight. That made me feel a little better. I hauled Sammy onto my hip and did my best to answer Brogden’s questions without popping him with my free hand.
What were our names?
Where were we from?
Was anyone in our party infected?
Was there anything we could tell him about what was going on?
What had we seen?
What had we heard?
Why were we here?
“You mean here at this camp, or are you being existential?” I asked.
His eyebrows drew together into a single harsh line, and he said, “Huh?”
“If you’d asked me that before all this shit happened, I’d have said something like, ‘We’re here to serve our fellow man or contribute to society.’ If I wanted to be a smartass, I’d say, ‘Because if we weren’t here, we’d be somewhere else.’ But since all this shit has happened, I’m going to say it’s because we’re just dumb lucky.”
He squinted at me for a second before saying snarkily, “You are a smartass.”
I don’t know how Dad answered that question, but apparently it passed inspection, because we were allowed into camp with full privileges, which meant Dad (not me, though) was allowed to have his pick of weapons from the cache. Dad had a thing about guns. Never liked them. Said guns might not kill people, but they sure made it easier. Now he didn’t think they were dangerous so much as he thought they were ridiculously lame.
“How effective do you think our guns are going to be against a technology thousands, if not millions, of years ahead of ours?” he asked Hutchfield. “It’s like using a club and stones against a tactical missile.”