The Last Star (10 page)

20

I SCOOP UP
my rifle—screw the pistol—and bolt from the room. Hall, stairs, bank lobby, street. Finally back at the coffee shop, I crawl behind the counter.
You better be alive, you big-eared son of a bitch.

He is. Fluttery pulse, shallow breath, ashy skin, but he’s alive.

So now what?

Go back to the safe house? The safest option, the option of minimal risk. The one Ringer would recommend, and she’s the expert on risk. Don’t know what I’ll find at the caverns, even if we manage to reach them: There’s another Silencer out there. The odds are that Ringer and Cup are already dead, which means that I’m not only marching to my own execution, but bringing Dumbo to his.

Unless I leave him here and pick him up on my way back, assuming I make it back. Better for him, better for me. He’s a burden now, a liability.

So I’ll leave him behind after all.
Hey, Dumbo, I know you took a bullet for me and everything, but you’re on your own, pal. I’m outta here.
Isn’t that how Ben Parish rolls?

Damn it, Zombie, decide already. Dumbo knew the risk and he came anyway. Taking that bullet for you was his call. Going back means he took the bullet for nothing. If he’s gonna die, at least give his death meaning.

I check the dressing for fresh bleeding. I gently lift his head and slide his rucksack beneath it for a pillow. I take the last syrette of morphine from the med kit and jab it into his forearm.

I lean down and whisper, “See, Bo, I came back.” Smoothing his hair with my hand. “I got her. The infested bitch who shot you. Popped her right between the eyes.” His forehead is blazing hot beneath my hand. “I can’t stay here right now, Bo. But I’m coming back for you. I’m coming back or I’ll die trying. Probably die, so don’t get your hopes up.”

I look away from him. But there’s nothing else to look at. I’m all jacked up, about to lose it. I’m bouncing from one brutal death to another. Eventually, something very important inside is going to crack.

I pull his hand into mine. “Now, listen to me, you elephant-eared motherfucker. I’m gonna find Teacup and Ringer, and then we’re picking you up on our way back and we’re all going home together, and everything’s gonna be
fine.
Because I’m the sarge and that’s how I say it’s gonna be. You got that? Are you listening to me, soldier? You are not allowed to die. Understand? That’s a direct order.
You are not allowed to die.
”

His eyes jitter behind the lids; maybe he’s dreaming. Maybe he’s sitting in his room, playing
Call of Duty
; I hope so.

Then I leave him lying in coffee grounds and wads of paper napkins and scattered coins.

Dumbo’s alone now and so am I, plunging into the black, dead heart of Urbana. Squad 53 is gone, broken apart, dead or missing or dying or running.

RIP, Squad 53.

21

CASSIE

I HAVE TO
get this straight. Now. Like, right now.

This
being my head.

Four
A.M.
Jazzed up on too much chocolate (thanks, Grace) and too much Evan Walker. Or not enough Evan Walker. That’s an inside joke, if you can make inside jokes in a private journal. I’ll get to the private parts later. Ha! Another joke. You know you’ve reached a very sad place when the only person who can make you laugh is yourself.

The house is quiet, not even a whisper of wind against the boarded-up window, the silence of the void, as if the world stopped breathing and I’m the last person on Earth.
Again.

Damn, I wish there was someone I could talk to.

Ben and Dumbo are gone. All I have left are Sam, Megan, and Evan. Two are asleep in their room. The other (
Other,
ha! it’s really pitiful) is awake and on watch and is someone with whom the more I talk, the more crooked my head gets. For over a month now he’s been fading away. Here and then not here. Talking, then saying nothing. Mr. Spaceman staring off into space.
Damn it, Evan, where have you gone?
I think I know, but knowing why doesn’t help my feelings of Evanlessness.

And somehow neither does the smell of his aftershave lingering in the room. After Ben left, Evan shaved. He washed his hair and scrubbed a week’s worth of grime from his body. He even
trimmed his nails and addressed his neglected cuticles. When he came into this room, he looked like the old Evan, the first Evan, the Evan I believed to be a fully human Evan.

I miss that Evan, the one who pulled me frozen from the ice pack and thawed me out and made me hamburgers and pretended to be something he wasn’t and hid the thing he was.

The calm, quiet, steady, reliable, strong Evan. Not this Other-Evan, the tortured, haunted, conflicted Evan who clips off his sentences as if he’s afraid he’ll say too much, the Evan who’s already gone, already
up there,
two hundred miles up with no way back down. Not
their
Evan.
My
Evan. The imperfectly perfect guy.

Why do we always get the Evan we deserve instead of the Evan we want?

22

I DON’T KNOW
why I bother writing this. No one will ever read it—and if you do, Evan,
I will murder you.

I suppose I could turn to Bear. It was always easy to talk to him. We had hours of conversation,
good
conversation, during those weeks when it was just me and him hiding in the woods. Bear’s an excellent listener. He never yawns or interrupts or walks away. Never disagrees, never plays games, never lies.
I go where you go, always,
that’s Bear’s jam.

Bear proves that true love doesn’t have to be complicated—or even reciprocated.

Evan, in case you’re reading this: I’m dumping you for a teddy bear.

Not that you and I were ever a couple.

I was never one of those girls who daydreamed about her wedding day or meeting the perfect guy or raising 3.2 kids in the ’burbs. When I thought about the future, it usually involved a big city and a career or living in a cabin somewhere leafy, like Vermont, writing books and taking long walks with a dog I’d name Pericles or some other random Greek name to show people how educated and cultured I was. Or maybe I’d be a doctor treating sick kids in Africa. Something meaningful. Something worthwhile that maybe somebody someday would notice and then give me a plaque or an award or name a street after me.
Sullivan Avenue.
Cassiopeia Way.
Guys didn’t enter into my daydreams much.

In college, I was going to have sex. Not drunken sex or sex with the first guy who asked or sex just to say
Hey, I had sex
the way people try exotic food, like,
Hey, I had fried grasshopper.
It would be with someone I cared about. Love wasn’t necessary, but mutual respect and curiosity and tenderness would be nice. And he would also be someone I found attractive. Too much sex is wasted on people who aren’t. Why would you sleep with someone who didn’t turn you on? But people do. Or they used to. No, they probably still do.

Why am I thinking about sex?

Okay, that’s insincere. That’s a lie. Dear God, Cass, if you can’t be honest in your own private journal, where can you be? Instead of saying what’s true, you make inside jokes and sly references like one day a million years from now somebody will read this and embarrass the hell out of you.

Seriously.

At least when he showed up tonight, he knocked first. Evan always had an issue with boundaries. He rapped on the door, then entered in stages: head, shoulders, torso, legs. Stood there in the doorway for a minute:
Is it okay?
I noticed the change immediately: newly shaven, hair still wet, wearing a fresh pair of jeans and an Ohio State T-shirt. I can’t remember the last time—or really the first time—I saw Evan exercise his Second Amendment right to bare arms.

Evan Walker has biceps. It’s not important to mention this fact, as biceps are muscles most people have. I just thought I’d mention it.

I was kind of hoping for an
aw-shucks
look—I’d seen it often enough in the old farmhouse back in the day, when that was his go-to expression. Instead, I got the furrowed brow and the slightly downturned mouth and the dark, troubled eyes of a poet contemplating the void, which I guess he was—not a poet but a contemplator of the void.

I made a space for him on the bed. There was nowhere else to sit. Though we’d never done the deed, it felt like we were old lovers forced into an awkward post-split negotiation over who gets the silverware and how the souvenirs from all their trips together are going to be divvied up.

Then I smelled the Ralph Lauren aftershave.

I don’t know why Grace kept a stash of men’s grooming products. Maybe they belonged to the former owners of the house and she never bothered to get rid of them. Or maybe she had sex with her victims before chopping off their heads or ripping out their hearts or eating them alive like a black widow spider.

He’d nicked his chin shaving; there was a dab of white styptic stuff on the cut, a tiny mar in his otherwise otherworldly beautiful face. Which was a relief. Flawlessly beautiful people annoy the hell out of me.

“I checked on the kids,” he said, as if I’d asked if he’d checked on the kids.

“And?”

“They’re okay. Sleeping.”

“Who’s on the watch?”

He stared at me for a couple of uncomfortable seconds. Then he looked down at his hands. I looked, too. He was so perfectly put together when we met that I thought I’d lucked into the most narcissistic person left on the planet.
It makes me feel more human,
he told me, meaning grooming. Later, when I found out he wasn’t quite human, I thought I understood what he was getting at. Even later—and by
even later
I mean
now
—I realized cleanliness isn’t necessarily next to godliness, but it is damn near indistinguishable from humanness.

“It’ll be okay,” he said softly.

“No, it won’t,” I shot back. “Ben and Dumbo are going to die.
You’re
going to die.”

“I’m not going to die.” Leaving out Ben and Dumbo.

“How are you getting out of the mothership once you set the bombs?”

“The same way I got in.”

“The last time you took a ride in one of your little pods, you broke several bones and nearly died.”

“It’s a hobby,” he said with a crooked smile. “Nearly dying.”

I looked away from his hands. The hands that lifted me when
I fell, held me when I was cold, fed me when I was hungry, healed me when I was hurt, washed me when I was covered in forest filth and blood.
You’re going to destroy your entire civilization, and for what? For a girl.
You would think a sacrifice like that would make me feel just a little bit special. It didn’t. It felt
weird.
Like one of us was batshit crazy and that person wasn’t me.

I couldn’t see a single romantic element in genocide, but maybe that’s just my lack of insight into the nature of love, having never been in love. Would I wipe out humanity to save Evan? Not likely.

Of course, there’s more than one kind of love. Would I kill everyone in the world to save Sam? That’s not an easy question to answer.

“Those times you nearly died, you were sort of protected, though, right?” I asked. “The technology that made you superhuman—which you said crashed on the way to the hotel. You won’t have that this time.”

He shrugged.
There’s
the
aw-shucks
thing I thought I missed. Seeing it again reminded me how far we’d traveled from the farmhouse, and I fought the urge to slap it off his face.

“What you’re going to do—it isn’t for me, or . . . it isn’t
just
for me, you get that, right?”

“There’s no other way to stop it, Cassie,” he said. Slingshotting back to his tormented-poet look.

“What about the way you mentioned right before the last time you almost died? Remember? Rigging Megan’s throat-bomb to blow it up.”

“Hard to do without the bomb,” he said.

“Grace didn’t have a stash hidden in the house somewhere?”
Instead, she kept the place well-stocked with men’s aftershave. Postapocalyptic priorities.

“Grace’s assignment wasn’t to blow things up. It was to kill people.”

“And have sex with them.” I didn’t mean for that to come out—but I don’t mean to say about 80 percent of what I say.

Really, though, who cares if they had sex? It’s a silly thing to worry about when the fate of the planet hangs in the balance. Trivial. Unimportant. The hands that held me holding Grace. The body that warmed me warming hers. The lips that touched mine touching hers. It doesn’t matter, I don’t care, Grace is dead. I plucked at the sheets and wished I hadn’t said it.

“Grace lied. We never—”

“I don’t care, Evan,” I told him. “It’s not important. Anyway, Grace was a fantastically good-looking homicidal killing machine. Who could say no?”

He placed a hand over mine to still my plucking fingers. “I would tell you if we had.”

What a liar. I could fill the Grand Canyon with all the things he’s refused to tell me. I pulled my hand away and looked right into those chocolate-fondue-fountain eyes. “You’re a liar,” I said.

He surprised me by nodding. “I am. But not about that.”

I am
? “What have you lied about?”

He shook his head.
Silly human girl!
“About who I really was.”

“And who is that exactly? You’ve told me
what
you were, but you’ve never said
who
you are. Who are you, Evan Walker? Where do you come from? What did you look like before you looked like nothing? What was your planet like? Did it look like ours? Were there plants and trees and rocks and did you live in cities and
what did you do for fun and was there music? Music is universal like mathematics. Can you sing me a song? Sing me an alien song, Evan. Tell me what it was like growing up. Did you go to school or was knowledge just downloaded into your brain? What were your parents like? Did they have jobs like human parents? Brothers and sisters? Sports. Start anywhere.”

“We had sports.” With a tiny, indulgent smile.

“I don’t like sports. Start with music.”

“We had music, too.”

“I’m listening.” I folded my arms over my chest and waited.

His mouth opened. His mouth closed. I couldn’t tell if he was about to laugh or cry. “It isn’t that simple, Cassie.”

“I’m not expecting performance quality. I can’t carry a tune, either, but that never kept me from lighting up a little Beyoncé.”

“Who?”

“Oh, come on. You gotta know who she was.”

He shook his head. Maybe he didn’t grow up on a farm but under a rock. Then I thought it would be a little odd for a ten-thousand-year-old superbeing to have his finger on the pulse of pop culture. Still, we’re talking about Beyoncé!

He’s even weirder than I thought.

“Everything is different. Structurally, I mean.” He pointed at his mouth, stuck out his tongue. “I can’t even pronounce my own name.” For a moment, the pathos was so thick, it almost snuffed out the lamp.

“Then hum something. Or whistle. Could you whistle or didn’t you have lips?”

“None of that matters anymore, Cassie.”

“You’re wrong. It matters a lot. Your past is what you are, Evan.”

Tears welled in his eyes. It was like watching chocolate melt. “God, Cassie, I hope not.” He lifted his freshly scrubbed hands, with their trimmed and buffed nails, toward me. The hands that held the gun that slaughtered innocent people before he almost murdered me. “If the past is what we are . . .”

I might have pointed out that we’ve all done things we aren’t proud of, but that was too flippant. Even for me.

Damn it, Cassie. Why were you forcing him to think about that?
I was so obsessed with the past I didn’t know about that I forgot the one I did: To save the ones he had come to destroy, Evan Walker the Silencer was planning to silence an entire civilization—
his
civilization—forever.

No, Ben Parish,
I thought.
Not for a girl. For the past he can’t escape. For the seven billion. Your little sister, too.

Before I knew what was happening or even how it happened, I was holding him with hands that had never comforted him, never lifted him up, never found him when he was lost. I was the taker, the recipient, always; from the moment he pulled me from that snowbank, I have been his charge, his mission, his cross. Cassie’s pain, Cassie’s fear, Cassie’s anger, Cassie’s despair. These have been the nails that impaled him.

I stroked his damp hair. I rubbed his arched back. I pressed his smooth, sweet-smelling face into my neck, and his tears were warm against my skin. He whispered something that sounded like
Mayfly.

Heartless bitch
would have been more accurate.

“I’m sorry, Evan,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

I bowed my head; he raised his. I kissed his wet cheek.
Your pain, your fear, your anger, your despair. Give them to me, Evan. I’ll carry them for a while.

He reached up and ran his fingertips lightly over my lips, moist with his tears.

“‘The last person on Earth,’” he murmured. “Do you remember when you wrote that?”

I nodded. “Stupid.”

He shook his head. “I think that’s what did it. When I read that. ‘The last person on Earth’—because I felt the same way.”