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?

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.

But there's no one there when the fog clears, and I find myself in a four-poster bed beneath three layers of quilts that smell faintly of cedar. The white nothing fades and is replaced by the warm yellow glow of a kerosene lamp sitting on the small table beside the bed. Lifting my head a little, I can see a rocking chair, a freestanding full-length mirror, and the slatted doors of a bedroom closet. A plastic tube is attached to my arm, and the other end is attached to a bag of clear fluid hanging from a metal hook.

It takes a few minutes to absorb my new surroundings, the fact that I'm numb from the waist down, and the ultra-mega-confusing fact that I'm definitely not dead.

I reach down, and my fingers find thick bandages wrapped around my knee. I'd also like to feel my calf and toes, because there's no sensation and I'm kind of concerned I don't have a calf or toes or anything else below the big wad of bandages. But I can't reach that far without sitting up, and sitting up isn't an option. It seems like the only working parts are my arms. I use those to throw the covers off, exposing the upper half of my body to the chilly air. I'm wearing a floral-print cotton nightie. And then I'm like, What's with the cotton nightie? Beneath which, I am naked. Which means, of course, that at some point between the removal of my clothes and donning of the nightie I was completely naked, which means I was completely naked.

Okay, ultra-mega-confusing fact number two.

I turn my head to the left: dresser, table, lamp. To the right: window, chair, table. And there's Bear, reclining on the pillow beside me, staring thoughtfully at the ceiling, not a care in the world.

Where the hell are we, Bear?

The floorboards rattle as below me someone slams a door. The kulump, kulump of heavy boots on bare wood. Then silence. A very heavy silence, if you don't count my heart knocking against my ribs, which you probably should since it sounds as loud as one of Crisco's sonic bombs.

Thunk-thunk-thunk. Growing louder with each thunk.

Someone is coming up the stairs.

I try to sit up. Not a smart idea. I get about four inches off the pillow and that's it. Where's my rifle? Where's my Luger? Someone is just outside the door now, and I can't move, and even if I could all I have is this damned stuffed toy. What was I going to do with that? Snuggle the dude to death?

When you're out of options, the best option is to do nothing. Play dead. The possum option.