I feel my lower lip poking out, like a tiny kid about to collapse completely. My eyes are burning. I bite down hard on the edges of my tongue and force myself not to look away from the cold fire in his eyes.
“Do you want to die?”
Do I nod? I can’t remember. Maybe I did, because he says, “I’m not going to let you. So now what?”
“So I guess I’m going to live.”
“No, you’re not. You’re going to die. You’re going to die, and there’s nothing you or I or anyone else can do to stop it. You, me, everyone left on this big, beautiful blue planet is going to die and make way for them.”
He’s cut right to the heart of it. It’s the perfect thing to say at the perfect moment, and what he’s been trying to get out of me suddenly explodes.
“Then what’s the point, huh?” I shout into his face. “What’s the fucking point? You have all the answers, so you tell me, because I have no idea anymore why I should give a damn!”
He grabs me by the arm and slings me toward the window. He’s beside me in two seconds and flings open the curtain. I see the school buses idling beside the hangar and a line of children waiting to go inside.
“You’re asking the wrong person,” he snarls. “Ask them why you should give a damn. Tell them there’s no point. Tell them you want to die.”
He grabs my shoulders and whirls me around to face him. Slaps me hard in the chest.
“They’ve flipped the natural order on us, boy. Better to die than live. Better to give up than fight. Better to hide than face. They know the way to break us is to kill us first here.” Slapping my chest again. “The final battle for this planet will not be fought over any plain or mountain or jungle or desert or ocean. It will happen here.” Popping me again. Hard.
And I’m totally gone by this point, giving in to everything I’ve bottled up inside since the night my sister died, sobbing like I’ve never cried before, like crying is something new to me and I like the way it feels.
“You are the human clay,” Vosch whispers fiercely in my ear. “And I am Michelangelo. I am the master builder, and you will be my masterpiece.” Pale blue fire in his eyes, burning to the bottom of my soul. “God doesn’t call the equipped, son. God equips the called. And you have been called.”
He leaves me with a promise. The words burn so hot in my mind, the promise follows me into the deepest hours of the night and into the days that follow.
Slapping my chest over and over until my skin burns, my heart on fire.
III: SILENCER
31
IT SHOULD have been easy. All he had to do was wait.
He was very good at waiting. He could crouch for hours, motionless, silent, he and his rifle one body, one mind, the line fuzzy between where he ended and the weapon began. Even the fired bullet seemed connected to him, bound by an invisible cord to his heart, until the bullet wedded bone.
The first shot dropped her, and he quickly fired again, missing entirely. A third shot as she dived to the ground beside the car, and the back window of the Buick exploded in a cloud of pulverized shatterproof glass.
She’d gone under the car. Her only option, really, which left him two: wait for her to come out or leave his position in the woods bordering the highway and end it. The option with the least risk was staying put. If she crawled out, he would kill her. If she didn’t, time would.
He reloaded slowly, with the deliberateness of someone who knows he has all the time in the world. After days of stalking her, he guessed she wasn’t going anywhere. She was too smart for that. Three shots had failed to take her down, but she understood the odds of a fourth missing. What had she written in her diary?
She would play the odds. Crawling out had zero chance of success. She couldn’t run, and even if she could, she didn’t know in which direction safety lay. Her only hope was for him to abandon his hiding place and force the issue. Then anything was possible. She might even get lucky and shoot him first.
If there was a confrontation, he didn’t doubt she would refuse to go down quietly. He had seen what she did to the soldier in the convenience store. She may have been terrified at the time, and killing him may have bothered her afterward, but her fear and guilt didn’t stop her from filling his body with lead. Fear didn’t paralyze Cassie Sullivan, like it did some humans. Fear crystallized her reason, hardened her will, clarified her options. Fear would keep her under the car, not because she was afraid of coming out, but because staying there was her only hope of staying alive.
So he would wait. He had hours before nightfall. By then, she would have either bled to death or be so weak from blood loss and dehydration that finishing her would be easy.
Finishing her. Finishing Cassie. Not Cassie for Cassandra. Or Cassie for Cassidy. Cassie for Cassiopeia, the girl in the woods who slept with a teddy bear in one hand and a rifle in the other. The girl with the strawberry blond curls who stood a little over five feet four in her bare feet, so young-looking he was surprised to learn she was sixteen. The girl who sobbed in the pitch black of the deep woods, terrified one moment, defiant the next, wondering if she was the last person on Earth, while he, the hunter, hunkered a dozen feet away, listening to her cry until exhaustion carried her down into a restless sleep. The perfect time to slip silently into her camp, put the gun to her head, and finish her. Because that’s what he did. That’s what he was: a finisher.
He had been finishing humans since the advent of the plague. For four years now, since he was fourteen, when he awakened inside the human body chosen for him, he had known what he was. Finisher. Hunter. Assassin. The name didn’t matter. Cassie’s name for him, Silencer, was as good as any. It described his purpose: to snuff out the human noise.
But he didn’t that night. Or the nights that followed. And each night, creeping a little closer to the tent, inching his way over the woodland blanket of decaying leaves and moist loamy soil until his shadow rose in the narrow opening of the tent and fell over her, and the tent was filled with her smell, and there would be the sleeping girl clutching the teddy bear and the hunter holding his gun, one dreaming of the life that was taken from her, the other thinking of the life he’d take. The girl sleeping and the finisher, willing himself to finish her.
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:
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
