The Last Star (3 page)

5

I CONTINUED RUNNING
into the wilderness. There was still no pursuit. As the days passed, I worried less about choppers swooping in and strike teams dropping down and more about staying warm and finding the fresh water and protein I needed to sustain the fragile host of the 12th System. I dug holes to hide in, built lean-tos to sleep under. I honed tree branches into spears and hunted rabbit and moose and ate their meat raw. I didn’t dare make a fire, even though I knew how; at Camp Haven the enemy had taught me. The enemy had taught me everything I needed to know about survival in the wilderness, then gave me alien technology that helped my body adapt to it. He taught me how to kill and how to avoid being killed. He taught me what human beings had forgotten after ten centuries of cooperation and trust. He taught me about fear.

Life is a circle bound by fear. The fear of the predator. The fear of the prey. Without fear, life would not exist. I tried to explain that to Zombie once, but I don’t think he understood.

I lasted forty days in the wilderness. And, no, the symbolism wasn’t lost on me.

I could have lasted longer. The 12th System would have sustained me well past a hundred years. Queen Marika, the lone, ancient huntress, a soulless husk gnawing on the dried bones of dead animals, uncontested sovereign of a meaningless domain, until the system finally collapsed and her body fell apart or was devoured by scavengers, her bones scattered like unread runes in an abandoned landscape.

I went back. By that point, I realized why they weren’t coming.

Vosch was two moves ahead of me; he always had been. Teacup was dead now, but I was still bound to a promise I never made to a person who was probably dead, too. But probability had become meaningless.

He knew I couldn’t abandon Zombie, not when there was a chance I could save him.

And there was only one way to save him; Vosch knew that, too.

I had to kill Evan
Walker.

6

CASSIE

I’M GOING TO KILL
Evan Walker.

The brooding, enigmatic, self-involved, secretive bastard. I’m going to put his poor, tortured, human-alien hybrid soul out of its misery.
You’re the mayfly. You’re the thing worth dying for. I woke up when I saw myself in you.
Oh, puke.

Last night I gave Sams a bath—the first in three weeks—and he damn near broke my nose, or I should say
re
broke my nose, since Evan’s old girlfriend (or friend with benefits or whatever she was) broke it first by slamming my face into a door behind which was my little brother, the little shit I was trying to save and the same little shit who nearly broke it again. See the irony there? There’s probably some symbolism, too, but it’s late and I haven’t slept in, like, three days, so forget it.

Back to Evan and the reason I’m going to kill him.

Basically, it boils down to the alphabet.

After Sam hit me on the nose, I burst out of the bathroom, soaking wet, whereupon I smacked into Ben Parish’s chest. Ben was lurking in the hallway as if every little thing that has to do with Sam is his responsibility, the aforesaid little shit screaming obscenities at my back, the only dry part of my body after trying to wash his, and Ben Parish, the living reminder of my father’s favorite saying that it’s better to be lucky than smart, gave me that
ridiculous
what’s up?
look, so stupidly cute that I was tempted to break
his
nose, thereby making him not so damn Ben Parish–y looking.

“You should be dead,” I said to him. I know I just wrote that I was going to kill Evan, but you need to understand—oh, screw it. No one is ever going to read this. By the time I’m gone, there won’t be anyone who can read. So this isn’t being written for you, future reader who won’t exist. It’s for me.

“Probably,” Ben said.

“What are the odds that someone I knew from
before
would still be here
now
?”

He thought about it. Or pretended to think about it: He’s a guy. “About seven billion to one?”

“I think that would be seven billion to two, Ben,” I said. “Or three point five billion to one.”

“Wow. That much?” He jerked his head toward the bathroom door. “What’s up with Nugget?”

“Sam. His name is Sam. Call him Nugget again and I’ll knee you in yours.”

He smiled. Then he either pretended to get what I said a beat later or he immediately understood what I said, but anyway, the smile morphed into a tight-lipped look of wounded pride. “They’re slightly larger than nuggets. Slightly.” Then
click!
the smile flashed back on. “Want me to talk to him?”

I told him I didn’t give a shit what he did; I had better things to do, like killing Evan Walker.

I stormed down the hallway, into the living room, still close enough—or not far enough away—to hear Sam yell, “I don’t care, Zombie. I don’t care, I don’t care.
I hate her,
” past Dumbo and Megan sitting on the sofa working on a jigsaw puzzle somebody
found in the kids’ room, a scene from a Disney cartoon or something, and their eyes cut away as I barreled past, like
Don’t mind us, we won’t stop you, you’re good, nobody saw nothin’.

Outside on the porch it’s cold as hell because spring refuses to come. Spring is never coming because extinction events piss it off. Or the Others have engineered another Ice Age just because they can, because why settle for doomed humans when you can have cold, starving, and miserable doomed humans? So much more satisfying that way.

He was leaning on the railing to take the weight off his bad ankle, the rifle nestled in the crook of his arm, wearing his uniform of a wrinkled plaid shirt and skinny jeans. His face lit up when he saw me banging open the screen door. His eyes drank me in. Oh, the Evanness of it all, how he gulps down my presence like a guy stumbling upon an oasis in the desert.

I slapped him.

“Why did you just hit me?” he asked, after racking ten thousand years’ worth of alien wisdom for the answer.

“Do you know why I’m wet?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Why are you wet?”

“I was giving my baby brother a bath. Why was I giving him a bath?”

“Because he was dirty?”

“For the same reason I spent a week cleaning up this dump after we moved in.” She may have been a supercharged, technologically enhanced alien-human hybrid with the looks of a Norwegian ice princess and the heart to match, but Grace was a terrible housekeeper. Dust piled in every corner like snowdrifts, mold growing on top of mold, a kitchen that would make a hoarder blush. “Because that’s what human beings
do,
Evan. We don’t live in filth.
We bathe. We wash our hair and we brush our teeth and we shave off unwanted hair—”

“Sam needs to shave?” Trying to be funny.

Dumb idea.

“Shut up! I’m talking. When I talk, you don’t talk. When you talk, I don’t talk. That’s another thing humans do. They treat each other with respect. Respect, Evan.”

He nodded somberly. “Respect,” he echoed—which made me even angrier. He was
handling
me.

“It’s all about respect. Being clean and not stinking like a pig is about respect.”

“Pigs don’t stink.”

“Shut. Up.”

“Well, I grew up on a farm, that’s all.”

I shook my head. “Oh no, that isn’t all. That isn’t half of all. The part of you I slapped didn’t grow up on any goddamned farm.”

He left his rifle leaning against the railing and limped over to the swing. He sat. He gazed off into the middle distance. “It isn’t my fault Sam needed a bath.”

“Of course it’s your fault. All of this is your fault.”

He looked at me, and his tone was controlled. “Cassie, I think you should go back inside now.”

“What, before you lose your temper? Oh, please lose it for once. I would love to see what that looks like.”

“You’re cold.”

“No, I’m not.” As I realized how badly I was shaking, standing in front of him in my wet clothes. Icy water dripped down the back of my neck and traced a path down my spine. I folded my arms over my chest and willed my (freshly brushed, very clean) teeth to stop chattering.

“Sam’s forgotten his ABCs,” I informed him.

He stared at me for a long four seconds. “I’m sorry, what?”

“His ABCs. You know, the alphabet, you intergalactic swineherd.”

“Well.” His eyes wandered from my face to the empty road across from the empty yard that stretched toward empty horizons over which there were more empty roads and woods and fields and towns and cities, the world one big hollowed-out gourd, a slop bucket of emptiness. Emptied by things like him, the whatever-he-was before he inserted himself into a human body like a hand up a puppet’s ass.

He leaned forward and shrugged out of his jacket, the same stupid bowling jacket he showed up in at the old hotel (
The Urbana Pinheads
), and held it out.

“Please?”

Maybe I shouldn’t have taken it. I mean, the pattern kept repeating itself: I’m cold, he warms me. I’m hurt, he heals me. I’m hungry, he feeds me. I’m down, he picks me up. I’m like the hole at the beach that keeps filling up with water.

I’m not a big person; the jacket engulfed me. And the warmth from his body, that, too. It steadied me—not necessarily the fact that the warmth came from his body, just the warmth itself.

“Another thing human beings do is learn their alphabets,” I said. “So they can read. So they can learn things. Things like history and math and science and practically everything else you can name, including the really important things like art and culture and faith and why things happen and why other things don’t and why anything even exists in the first place.”

My voice broke. Uninvited, there’s that image again, of my father pulling a red wagon loaded with books after the 3rd Wave and his lecture about preserving knowledge and rebuilding civilization
once that pesky little alien problem was disposed of. God, how sad, how pitiful: a balding, bent-shouldered man shuffling down deserted streets with a wagonload of scavenged library books behind him. While others looted canned goods and weapons and hardware to fortify their homes against marauders, my father decided the wisest course of action was to hoard reading material.

“He can learn them again,” Evan tried. “You can teach him.”

It took everything in me not to give him another smack. There was a time when I thought I was the last living person on Earth, which made me all of humanity. Evan isn’t the only one who owes an unpayable debt. I’m humanity, he’s
them,
and after what they’ve done to us, humanity should break every bone in their bodies.

“That’s not the point,” I told him. “The point is, I don’t understand why you did it this way. You could have killed us all without being so goddamn
cruel
about it. You know what I found out tonight, besides the fact that my little brother hates my guts? It’s not just the ABCs he’s forgotten. He doesn’t remember what our mom looked like. He doesn’t remember his own mother’s
face.
”

Then I lost it. I wrapped myself tight in that stupid Pinhead jacket and bawled, because I didn’t care anymore if Evan saw me lose it, because if anyone should have seen, it’s him, the sniper murdering from a distance, comfy in his farmhouse while, two hundred miles over his head, the mothership unleashed three escalating waves of devastation. Five hundred thousand in the first attack, millions in the second, billions in the third. And while the world burned, Evan Walker was smoking deer brisket and taking leisurely walks in the woods and lounging by a cozy fire, buffing his perfect nails.

He should see the face of human suffering up close. Too long he’s been like the mothership, hovering above the horror, untouchable
and remote; he needs to see it, touch it, press it against his perfectly shaped, wholly unbroken nose and smell it.

The way Sammy has. I felt like running inside and yanking him out of the tub and dragging him naked onto the porch, where Evan Walker could count his bony ribs and feel his tiny wrists and trace the hollowed-out temples and examine the scars and sores of the little boy he’s tortured, the child whose mind he’s emptied of memories and whose heart he’s filled with hate and hopelessness and useless rage.

Evan started to stand—to pull me into his arms, no doubt, to stroke my hair and dry my tears and murmur that everything was going to be all right, because that’s his MO—but then he thought better of it. He sat back down.

“I told you, Cassie,” he said softly. “I didn’t want it to happen this way. I fought against it.”

“Until you went along with it.” Still working to get a grip.
Along
came out a three-syllable word. “And what do you mean, you didn’t want it to happen ‘this way’?”

He shifted his weight. The swing creaked. His eyes strayed back to the empty road. “We could have lived among you indefinitely. Hidden, undetectable. We could have inserted ourselves into leading roles in your society. We could have shared our knowledge, exponentially expanding your potential, speeding your evolution. It’s conceivable we could have given you the one thing you’ve always wanted and never had.”

“What?” I snuffled the snot back into my nose; I didn’t have a tissue and didn’t even care that it was gross. The Arrival had altered the whole definition of
gross.

“Peace,” he answered.

“Could have.
Could
have.”

He nodded. “When that option was rejected, I argued for something . . . quicker.”

“Quicker?”

“An asteroid. You didn’t have the technology to stop it or the time even if you did. It was a simple solution, but it wasn’t a clean one. The world wouldn’t have been habitable for a thousand years.”

“And that matters because why? You’re pure consciousness, immortal like gods. What’s a thousand years to you?”

Apparently that question had a very complicated answer. Or one he didn’t want to share with me.

Then he said: “For ten thousand years we had the thing that you only dreamed of for ten thousand years.” He gave a short, humorless laugh. “An existence without pain, without hunger, without any physical needs at all. But immortality has a price. Without bodies, we lost the things that come with them. Things like autonomy and benevolence. Compassion.” He opened his hands as if to show me they were empty. “Sam isn’t the only one who’s forgotten his ABCs.”