The argument was lost on Hutchfield. He was a marine, for God’s sake. His rifle was his best friend, his most trusted companion, the answer to every possible question.
I didn’t get that back then. I get it now.
13
IN GOOD WEATHER, everyone stayed outside until it was time to go to bed. That ramshackle building had a bad vibe. Because of why it was built. Why it existed. What had brought it—and us—into these woods. Some nights the mood was light, almost like a summer camp where by some miracle everybody liked one another. Someone would say they heard the sound of a helicopter that afternoon, which would set off a round of hopeful speculation that the People in Charge were getting their acts together and preparing for the counterpunch.
Other times the mood was darker and angst was heavy in the twilight air. We were the lucky ones. We’d survived the EMP attack, the obliteration of the coasts, the plague that wasted everyone we knew and loved. We’d beaten the odds. We’d stared into the face of Death, and Death blinked first. You’d think that would make us feel brave and invincible. It didn’t.
We were like the Japanese who survived the initial blast of the Hiroshima bomb. We didn’t understand why we were still here, and we weren’t completely sure we wanted to be.
We told the stories of our lives before the Arrival. We cried openly over the ones we lost. We wept secretly for our smartphones, our cars, our microwave ovens, and the Internet.
We watched the night sky. The mothership would stare down at us, a pale green, malevolent eye.
There were debates about where we should go. It was pretty much understood we couldn’t squat in these woods indefinitely. Even if the Others weren’t coming anytime soon, winter was. We had to find better shelter. We had several months’ worth of supplies—or less, depending upon how many more refugees wandered into camp. Did we wait for rescue or hit the road to find it? Dad was all for the latter. He still wanted to check out Wright-Patterson. If there were People in Charge, the odds were a lot better we’d find them there.
I got sick of it after a while. Talking about the problem had replaced actually doing something about it. I was ready to tell Dad we should tell these douchebags to stuff it, take off for Wright-Patterson with whoever wanted to go with us and screw the rest.
Sometimes, I thought, strength in numbers was a highly overrated concept.
I brought Sammy inside and put him to bed. Said his prayer with him. “‘Now I lay me down to sleep…’” To me, just random noise. Gibberish. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but I felt that, when it came to God, there was a broken promise in there somewhere.
It was a clear night. The moon was full. I felt comfortable enough to take a walk in the woods.
Somebody in camp had picked up a guitar. The melody skipped along the trail, following me into the woods. It was the first music I’d heard since the 1st Wave.
“And, in the end, we lie awake
And we dream of making our escape.”
Suddenly I just wanted to curl into a little ball and cry. I wanted to take off through those woods and keep running until my legs fell off. I wanted to puke. I wanted to scream until my throat bled. I wanted to see my mother again, and Lizbeth and all my friends, even the friends I didn’t like, and Ben Parish, just to tell him I loved him and wanted to have his baby more than I wanted to live.
The song faded, was drowned out by the definitely less melodic song of the crickets.
A twig snapped.
And a voice came out of the woods behind me.
“Cassie! Wait up!”
I kept walking. I recognized that voice. Maybe I’d jinxed myself, thinking about Ben. Like when you’re craving chocolate and the only thing in your backpack is a half-crushed bag of Skittles.
“Cassie!”
Now he was running. I didn’t feel like running, so I let him catch up to me.
That was one thing that hadn’t changed: The one sure way of not being alone was wanting to be alone.
“Whatcha doing?” Crisco asked. He was pulling hard for air. Bright red cheeks. Shiny temples, maybe from all the hair grease.
“Isn’t it obvious?” I shot back. “I’m building a nuclear device to take out the mothership.”
“Nukes won’t do it,” he said, squaring his shoulders. “We should build Fermi’s steam cannon.”
“Fermi?”
“The guy who invented the bomb.”
“I thought that was Oppenheimer.”
He seemed impressed I knew something about history.
“Well, maybe he didn’t invent it, but he was the godfather.”
“Crisco, you’re a freak,” I said. That sounded harsh, so I added, “But I didn’t know you before the invasion.”
“You dig this big hole. Put a warhead at the bottom. Fill the hole with water and cap it off with a few hundred tons of steel. The explosion turns the water instantly into steam, which shoots the steel into space at six times the speed of sound.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Somebody should definitely do that. Is that why you’re stalking me? You want me to help you build a nuclear steam cannon?”
“Can I ask you something?”
“No.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
“If you had twenty minutes to live, what would you do?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “But it wouldn’t have anything to do with you.”
“How come?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He probably figured it wasn’t something he wanted to hear. “What if I was the last person on Earth?”
“If you were the last person on Earth, I wouldn’t be here to do anything with you.”
“Okay. What if we were the last two people on Earth?”
“Then you’d still end up being the last, because I’d kill myself.”
“You don’t like me.”
“Really, Crisco? What was your first clue?”
“Say we saw them, right here, right now, coming down to finish us off. What would you do?”
“I don’t know. Ask them to kill you first. What’s the point, Crisco?”
“Are you a virgin?” he asked suddenly.
I stared at him. He was totally serious. But most thirteen-year-old boys are when it comes to hormonal issues.
“Screw you,” I said, and brushed past him, heading back toward the camp.
Bad choice of words. He trotted after me and not one strand of plastered-down hair moved as he ran. It was like a shiny black helmet.
“I’m serious, Cassie,” he puffed. “These are the times when any night could be your last night.”
“Dork, it was that way before they came, too.”
He grabbed my wrist. Tugged me around. Pushed his wide, greasy face close to mine. I had an inch on him, but he had twenty pounds on me.
“Do you really want to die without knowing what it’s like?”
“How do you know I don’t?” I said, yanking free. “Don’t ever touch me again.” Changing the subject.
“Nobody’s gonna know,” he said. “I won’t tell anyone.”
He tried to grab me again. I slapped his hand away with my left and popped him hard in the nose with the open palm of my right. It opened up a faucet of bright red blood. It ran into his mouth, and he gagged.
“Bitch,” he gasped. “At least you’ve got someone. At least everybody you ever frigging knew in your life isn’t dead.”
He busted out in tears. Fell onto the path and gave in to it, the bigness of it, the big Buick that’s parked over you, the horrible feeling that, as bad as it’s been, it’s going to get worse.
Ah, crap.
I sat on the path next to him. Told him to lean his head back. He complained that made the blood run down his throat.
“Don’t tell anybody,” he begged. “I’ll lose my cred.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
“Where’d you learn to do that?” he asked.
“Girl Scouts.”
“There’s badges for that?”
“There’s badges for everything.”
Actually, it was seven years of karate classes. I dropped karate last year. Don’t remember my reasons now. They seemed like good ones at the time.
“I’m one, too,” he said.
“What?”
He spat a wad of blood and mucus into the dirt. “A virgin.”
What a shock.
“What makes you think I’m a virgin?” I asked.
“You wouldn’t have hit me if you weren’t.”
14
ON OUR SIXTH DAY in camp, I saw a drone for the first time.
Glittering gray in the bright afternoon sky.
There was a lot of shouting and running around, people grabbing guns, waving their hats and shirts or just spazzing in general: crying, jumping, hugging, high-fiving one another. They thought they were rescued. Hutchfield and Brogden tried to calm everybody down, but weren’t very successful. The drone zipped across the sky, disappeared behind the trees, then came back, slower this time. From the ground, it looked like a blimp. Hutchfield and Dad huddled in the doorway of the barracks, watching it, swapping a pair of binoculars back and forth.
“No wings. No markings. And did you see that first pass? Mach 2 at least. Unless we’ve launched some kind of classified aircraft, no way this thing is terrestrial.” As he spoke, Hutchfield was popping his fist up and down in the dirt, beating out a rhythm to match the words.