Why didn’t he finish her?

Why couldn’t he finish her?

He told himself it was unwise. She couldn’t stay in these woods indefinitely. He could use her to lead him to others of her kind. Humans are social animals. They cluster like bees. The attacks relied on this critical adaptation. The evolutionary imperative that drove them to live in groups was the opportunity to kill them by the billions. What was the saying? Strength in numbers.

And then he found the notebooks and discovered there was no plan, no real goal except to survive to the next day. She had nowhere to go and no one left to go to. She was alone. Or thought she was.

He didn’t return to her camp that night. He waited until the afternoon of the following day, not telling himself he was giving her time to pack up and leave. Not letting himself think about her silent, desperate cry: Sometimes I think I might be the last human on Earth.

Now, as the last human’s last minutes spun out beneath the car on the highway, the tension in his shoulders began to fade. She wasn’t going anywhere. He lowered the rifle and squatted at the base of the tree, rolling his head from side to side to ease the stiffness in his neck. He was tired. Hadn’t been sleeping well lately. Or eating. He’d dropped some pounds since the 4th Wave rolled out. He wasn’t too concerned. They’d anticipated some psychological and physical blowback at the beginning of the 4th Wave. The first kill would be the hardest, but the next would be easier, and the one after that easier still, because it’s true: Even the most sensitive person can get used to even the most insensitive thing.

Cruelty isn’t a personality trait. Cruelty is a habit.

He pushed that thought away. To call what he was doing cruel implied he had a choice. Choosing between your kind and another species wasn’t cruel. It was necessary. Not easy, especially when you’ve lived the last four years of your life pretending to be no different from them, but necessary.

Which raised the troubling question: Why didn’t he finish her that first day? When he heard the shots inside the convenience store and followed her back to the campsite, why didn’t he finish her then, while she lay crying in the dark?

He could explain away the three missed shots on the highway. Fatigue, lack of sleep, the shock of seeing her again. He had assumed she would head north, if she ever left her camp at all, not head back south. He had felt a sudden rush of adrenaline, as if he’d turned a street corner and run into a long-lost friend. That must have been what threw off that first shot. The second and third he could chalk up to luck—her luck, not his.

But what about all those days that he followed her, sneaking into her camp while she was away foraging, doing a bit of foraging himself through her belongings, including the diary in which she had written, Sometimes in my tent, late at night, I think I can hear the stars scraping against the sky? What about those predawn mornings when he slid silently through the woods to where she slept, determined to finish it this time, to do what he had prepared all his life to do? She wasn’t his first kill. She wouldn’t be his last.

It should have been easy.

He rubbed his slick palms against his thighs. It was cool in the trees, but he was dripping with sweat. He scrubbed his sleeve across his eyes. The wind on the highway: a lonely sound. A squirrel scampered down the tree next to him, unconcerned by his presence. Below him, the highway disappeared over the horizon in both directions, and nothing moved except the trash and the grass bowing in the lonely wind. The buzzards had found the three bodies lying in the median; three fat birds waddled in for a closer look while the rest of the flock circled in the updrafts high overhead. The buzzards and other scavengers were enjoying a population explosion. Buzzards, crows, feral cats, packs of hungry dogs. He’d stumbled upon more than one desiccated corpse that had clearly been someone’s dinner.

Buzzards. Crows. Aunt Millie’s tabby. Uncle Herman’s Chihuahua. Blowflies and other insects. Worms. Time and the elements clean up the rest. If she didn’t come out, Cassie would die beneath the car. Within minutes of her last breath, the first fly would arrive to lay eggs in her.

He pushed the distasteful image away. It was a human thought. It had been only four years since his Awakening, and he still fought against seeing the world through human eyes. On the day of his Awakening, when he saw the face of his human mother for the first time, he burst into tears: He had never seen anything so beautiful—or so ugly.

It had been a painful integration for him. Not seamless or quick, like some Awakenings he’d heard of. He supposed his had been more difficult than others because the childhood of his host body had been a happy one. A well-adjusted, healthy human psyche was the hardest to absorb. It had been—still was—a daily struggle. His host body wasn’t something apart from him that he manipulated like a puppet on a string. It was him. The eyes he used to see the world, they were his eyes. This brain he used to interpret, analyze, sense, and remember the world, it was his brain, wired by thousands of years of evolution. Human evolution. He wasn’t trapped inside it and didn’t ride about in it, guiding it like a jockey on a horse. He was this human body, and it was him. And if something should happen to it—if, for example, it died—he would perish with it.

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?