The 5th Wave

came and blew the whole goddamned world apart. Trusted that when it got dark there would be light. Trusted that when you wanted a fucking strawberry Frappuccino you could plop your ass in the car, drive down the street, and get yourself a fucking strawberry Frappuccino! Trusted…”

His other hand finds my cheek, and he wipes away my tears with his thumb. The chocolate scent overwhelms me as he bends over and whispers in my ear, “No, Cassie. No, no, no.”

I throw my arm around his neck and press his dry cheek against my wet one. I’m shaking like an epileptic, and for the first time I can feel the weight of the quilts on the top of my toes because the blinding dark sharpens your other senses.

I’m a bubbling stew of random thoughts and feelings. I’m worried my hair might smell. I want some chocolate. This guy holding me—well, it’s more like I was holding him—has seen me in all my naked glory. What did he think about my body? What did I think about my body? Does God really care about promises? Do I really care about God? Are miracles something like the Red Sea parting or more like Evan Walker finding me locked in a block of ice in a wilderness of white?

“Cassie, it’s going to be okay,” he whispers into my ear, chocolate breath.

When I wake up the next morning, there’s a Hershey’s Kiss sitting on the table beside me.

35

HE LEAVES THE OLD FARMHOUSE every night to patrol the grounds and to hunt. He tells me he has plenty of dry goods and his mom was a devoted preserver and canner, but he likes fresh meat. So he leaves me to find edible creatures to kill, and on the fourth day he comes into the room with an honest-to-God hamburger on a hot, homemade bun and a side of roasted potatoes. It’s the first real food I’ve had since escaping Camp Ashpit. It’s also a freaking hamburger, which I haven’t tasted since the Arrival and which, I think I’ve pointed out, I was willing to kill for.

“Where’d you get the bread?” I ask midway through the burger, grease rolling down my chin. I haven’t had bread, either. It’s light and fluffy and slightly sweet.

He could give me any number of snarky replies, since there is only one way he could have gotten it. He doesn’t. “I baked it.”

After feeding me, he changes the dressing on my leg. I ask if I want to look. He says no, I most definitely do not want to look. I want to get out of bed, take a real bath, be like a person again. He says it’s too soon. I tell him I want to wash and comb out my hair. Too soon, he insists. I tell him if he won’t help me I’m going to smash the kerosene lamp over his head. So he sets a kitchen chair in the middle of the claw-foot tub in the little bathroom down the hall with its peeling flowery wallpaper and carries me to it, plops me down, leaves, and comes back with a big metal tub filled with steaming water.

The tub must be very heavy. His biceps strain against his sleeves, like he’s Bruce Banner mid-Hulkifying, and the veins stand out on his neck. The water smells faintly of rose petals. He uses a lemonade pitcher decorated with smiley-faced suns as a ladle, and I lean my head back for him. He starts to work in the shampoo, and I push his hands away. This part I can do myself.

The water courses from my hair into the gown, plastering the cotton to my body. Evan clears his throat, and when he turns his head his thick hair does this swooshy thing across his dark brow and I’m a little disturbed, but in a pleasant way. I ask for the widest-toothed comb he has, and he digs in the cupboard beneath the sink while I watch him out of the corner of my eye, barely noticing the way his powerful shoulders roll beneath his flannel shirt, or his faded jeans with the frayed back pockets, definitely paying no attention to the roundness of his butt inside those jeans, totally ignoring the way my earlobes burn like fire beneath the lukewarm water dripping from my hair. After a couple eternities, he finds a comb, asks if I need anything before he leaves, and I mumble no when what I really want to do is laugh and cry at the same time.

Alone, I force myself to concentrate on my hair, which is a horrible mess. Knots and tangles and bits of leaf and little wads of dirt. I work on the knots until the water goes cold and I start to shiver in my wet nightie. I pause once in the chore when I hear a tiny sound just outside the door.

“Are you standing out there?” I ask. The small, tiled bathroom magnifies sound like an echo chamber.

There’s a pause, and then a soft answer: “Yes.”

“Why are you standing out there?”

“I’m waiting to rinse your hair.”

“This is going to take a while,” I say.

“That’s okay.”

“Why don’t you go bake a pie or something and come back in about fifteen minutes.”

I don’t hear an answer. But I don’t hear him leave.

“Are you still there?”

The floorboards in the hall creak. “Yes.”

I give up after another ten minutes of teasing and pulling. Evan comes back in, sits on the edge of the tub. I rest my head in the palm of his hand while he rinses the suds from my hair.

“I’m surprised you’re here,” I tell him.

“I live here.”

“That you stayed here.” A lot of young guys left for the nearest police station, National Guard armory, or military base after news of the 2nd Wave started trickling in from survivors fleeing inland. Like after 9/11, only times ten.

“There were eight of us, counting Mom and Dad,” he says. “I’m the oldest. After they died, I took care of the kids.”

“Slower, Evan,” I say as he empties half the pitcher onto my head. “I feel like I’m being waterboarded.”

“Sorry.” He presses the edge of his hand against my forehead to act as a dam. The water is deliciously warm and tickly. I close my eyes.

“Did you get sick?” I ask.

“Yeah. Then I got better.” He ladles more water from the metal tub into the pitcher, and I hold my breath, anticipating the tickly warmth. “My youngest sister, Val, she died two months ago. That’s her bedroom you’re in. Since then I’ve been trying to figure out what to do. I know I can’t stay here forever, but I’ve hiked all the way to Cincinnati, and maybe I don’t need to explain why I’m never going back.”

One hand pours while the other presses the wet hair against my scalp to wring out the excess water. Firmly, not too hard, just right. Like I’m not the first girl whose hair he’s washed. A little, hysterical voice inside my head is screaming, What do you think you’re doing? You don’t even know this guy! but that same voice is going, Great hands; ask him for a scalp massage while he’s at it.

While outside my head, his deep, calm voice is saying, “Now I’m thinking it doesn’t make sense to leave until it gets warmer. Maybe Wright-Patterson or Kentucky. Fort Knox is only a hundred and forty miles from here.”

“Fort Knox? What, you’re going on a heist?”

“It’s a fort, as in heavily fortified. A logical rallying point.” Gathering the ends of my hair in his fist and squeezing, and the plop-plops of the water spattering in the claw- foot tub.

“If it were me, I wouldn’t go anyplace that’s a logical rallying point,” I say. “Logically those’ll be the first points they wipe off the map.”

“From what you’ve told me about the Silencers, it’s not logical to rally anywhere.”

“Or stay anywhere longer than a few days. Keep your numbers small and keep moving.”

“Until…?”

“There is no until,” I snap at him. “There’s just unless.”

He dries my hair with a fluffy white towel. There’s a fresh nightie lying on the closed toilet seat. I look up into those chocolate-colored eyes and say, “Turn around.” He turns around. I reach past the frayed back pockets of the jeans that conform to the butt that I’m not looking at and pick up the dry nightie. “If you try to peek in that mirror, I’ll know,” I warn the guy who’s already seen me naked, but that was