It was the price of survival. The cost of his people’s last, desperate gamble:
To rid his new home of humanity, he had to become human.
And being human, he had to overcome his humanity.
He stood up. He didn’t know what he was waiting for. Cassie for Cassiopeia was doomed, a breathing corpse. She was badly injured. Run or stay, there was no hope. She had no way to treat her wound and no one for miles who could help her. She had a small tube of antibiotic cream in her backpack, but no suture kit and no bandages. In a few days, the wound would become infected, gangrene would set in, and she would die, assuming another finisher didn’t come along in the interim.
He was wasting time.
So the hunter in the woods stood up, startling the squirrel. It rocketed up the tree with an angry hiss. He swung his rifle to his shoulder and brought the Buick into the sight, swinging the red crosshairs back and forth and up and down its body. What if he blew out the tires? The car would collapse onto its rims, perhaps pinning her beneath its two-thousand-pound frame. There’d be no running then.
The Silencer lowered his rifle and turned his back on the highway.
The buzzards feeding in the median heaved their cumbersome bodies into the air.
The lonely wind died.
And then his hunter’s instinct whispered, Turn around.
A bloody hand emerged from the undercarriage. An arm followed. Then a leg.
He swung his rifle into position. Sighted her in the crosshairs. Holding his breath, sweat coursing down his face, stinging his eyes. She was going to do it. She was going to run. He was relieved and anxious at the same time.
He couldn’t miss with this fourth shot. He spread his legs wide and squared his shoulders and waited for her to make her move. The direction wouldn’t matter. Once she was out in the open, there was nowhere to hide. Still, part of him hoped she would run in the opposite direction, so he wouldn’t have to place the bullet in her face.
Cassie hauled herself upright, collapsed for a moment against the car, then righted herself, balancing precariously on her wounded leg, clutching the handgun. He placed the red cross in the middle of her forehead. His finger tightened on the trigger.
Now, Cassie. Run.
She pushed away from the car. Brought up the handgun. Pointed it at a spot fifty yards to his right. Swung it ninety degrees, swung it back. Her voice came to him shrill and small in the deadened air.
“Here I am! Come and get me, you son of a bitch!”
I’m coming, he thought, for the rifle and the bullet were a part of him, and when the round wed bone, he would be there, too, inside her, the instant she died.
Not yet. Not yet, he told himself. Wait till she runs.
But Cassie Sullivan didn’t run. Her face, speckled with dirt and grease and blood from the cut on her cheek, seemed just inches away through the scope, so close he could count the freckles on her nose. He could see the familiar look of fear in her eyes, a look he had seen a hundred times, the look we give back to death when death looks at us.
But there was something else in her eyes, too. Something that warred with her fear, strove against it, shouted it down, kept her still and the gun moving. Not hiding, not running, but facing.
Her face blurred in the crosshairs: Sweat was dripping into his eyes.
Run, Cassie. Please run.
A moment comes in war when the last line must be crossed. The line that separates what you hold dear from what total war demands. If he couldn’t cross that line, the battle was over, and he was lost.
His heart, the war.
Her face, the battlefield.
With a cry only he could hear, the hunter turned.
And ran.
32
AS WAYS TO DIE GO, freezing to death isn’t such a bad one.
That’s what I’m thinking as I freeze to death.
You feel warm all over. There’s no pain, none at all. You’re all floaty, like you just chugged a whole bottle of cough syrup. The white world wraps its white arms around you and carries you downward into a frosty white sea.
And the silence so—shit—silent, that the beating of your heart is the only sound in the universe. So quiet, your thoughts make a whispery noise in the dull, freezing air.
Waist-deep in a drift, under a cloudless sky, the snowpack holding you upright because your legs can’t anymore.
And you’re going, I’m alive, I’m dead, I’m alive, I’m dead.
And there’s that damn bear with its big, brown, blank, creepy eyes staring at you from its perch in the backpack, going, You lousy shit, you promised.
So cold your tears freeze against your cheeks.
“It’s not my fault,” I told Bear. “I don’t make the weather. You got a beef, take it up with God.”
That’s what I’ve been doing a lot lately: taking it up with God.
Like: God, WTF?
Spared from the Eye so I could kill the Crucifix Soldier. Saved from the Silencer so my leg could get infected, making every step a journey over hell’s highway. Kept me going until the blizzard came in for two solid days, trapping me in this waist-high drift so I could die of hypothermia under a gloriously blue sky.
Thanks, God.
Spared, saved, kept, the bear says. Thanks, God.
It doesn’t really matter, I’m thinking. I was all over Dad for getting so fangirly about the Others, and for spinning the facts to make things seem less bleak, but I wasn’t actually much better than he was. It was just as hard for me to swallow the idea that I had gone to bed a human being and woken up a cockroach. Being a disgusting, disease-carrying bug with a brain the size of a pinhead isn’t something you deal with easily. It takes time to adjust to the idea.
And the bear goes, Did you know a cockroach can live up to a week without its head?
Yeah. Learned that in bio. So your point is I’m a little worse off than a cockroach. Thanks. I’ll work on exactly what kind of disease-carrying pest I am.
It hits me then. Maybe that’s why the Silencer on the highway let me live: spritz the bug, walk away. Do you really need to stick around while it flips on its back and claws the air with its six spindly legs?
Stay under the Buick, run, stand your ground—what did it matter? Stay, run, stand, whatever; the damage was done. My leg wasn’t going to heal on its own. The first shot was a death sentence, so why waste any more bullets?
I rode out the blizzard in the rear compartment of an Explorer. Folded down the seat, made myself a cozy metal hut in which to watch the world turn white, unable to crack the power windows to let in fresh air, so the SUV quickly filled up with the smell of blood and my festering wound.
I used up all the pain pills from my stash in the first ten hours.
Ate up the rest of my rations by the end of day one in the SUV.
When I got thirsty, I popped the hatch a crack and scooped up handfuls of snow. Left the hatch popped up to get some fresh air—until my teeth were chattering and my breath turned into blocks of ice in front of my eyes.
By the afternoon of day two, the snow was three feet deep and my little metal hut began to feel less like a refuge than a sarcophagus. The days were only two watts brighter than the nights, and the nights were the negation of light—not dark, but lightlessness absolute. So, I thought, this is how dead people see the world.
I stopped worrying about why the Silencer had let me live. Stopped worrying about the very weird feeling of having two hearts, one in my chest and a smaller one, a mini heart, in my knee. Stopped caring whether the snow stopped before my two hearts did.
I didn’t exactly sleep. I floated in that space in between, hugging Bear to my chest, Bear who kept his eyes open when I could not. Bear, who kept Sammy’s promise to me, being there for me in the space between.
Um, speaking of promises, Cassie…
I must have apologized to him a thousand times during those two snowbound days. I’m sorry, Sams. I said no matter what, but what you’re too young to understand is there’s more than one kind of bullshit. There’s the bullshit you know that you know; the bullshit you don’t know and know you don’t know; and the bullshit you just think you know but really don’t. Making a promise in the middle of an alien black op falls under the last category. So…sorry!
So sorry.
One day later now, waist-deep in a snowbank, Cassie the ice maiden, with a jaunty little cap made out of snow and frozen hair and ice-encrusted eyelashes, all warm and floaty, dying by inches, but at least dying on her feet trying to keep a promise she had no prayer of keeping.
So sorry, Sams, so sorry.
No more bullshit.
I’m not coming.
33
THIS PLACE CAN’T BE HEAVEN. It doesn’t have the right vibe.
I’m walking in a dense fog of white lifeless nothingness. Dead space. No sound. Not even the sound of my own breath. In fact, I can’t even tell if I’m breathing. That’s number one on the “How do I know if I’m alive?” checklist.
I know someone is here with me. I don’t see him or hear him, touch or smell him, but I know he’s here. I don’t know how I know he’s a he, but I do know, and he’s watching me. He’s staying still while I move through the thick white fog, but somehow he’s always the same distance away. It doesn’t freak me that he’s there, watching. It doesn’t exactly comfort me, either. He’s another fact, like the fact of the fog. There’s the fog and un-breathing me and the person with me, always close, always watching.