The Last Star (38 page)

BEN

THE LATE-AFTERNOON SUN
polishes the dusty windows of the superstore a lustrous gold. Inside, the light has faded to gray. We’ve got less than an hour to beat the dark back to the house. The day may belong to us, but the night belongs to the coyotes and the packs of wild dogs that roam the banks of the Colorado and wander the outskirts of Marble Falls. I’m well-armed, I’ve got no love for coyotes, but I hate shooting the dogs. The older ones were somebody’s pet once; it feels like giving up all hope of redemption.

And it isn’t just dogs and coyotes. A couple of weeks after we crossed the border into Texas, back in late summer, Marika spotted escapees from some zoo drinking a few miles upriver—a lioness and her two cubs. Ever since then, Sam has been itching for a safari. He wants to capture and tame an elephant so he can ride on it like Aladdin. Or catch a monkey to domesticate. He isn’t picky.

“Hey, Sam,” I call down the aisle. He’s wandered off again in search of treasure. Lately it’s been LEGOs. Before that it was Lincoln Logs. He’s developed a love for building things. He’s made a fort, a tree house, and started on an underground bunker in the backyard.

“What?” he shouts back from the toy section.

“It’s getting late. We have to make a decision here.”

“I told you I don’t care! You decide!” Something crashes off a shelf and he curses loudly.

“Hey, what’d I tell you about that?” I call over to him. “Watch your language.”

“Fuckety fuck fuck, shithole.”

I sigh. “Come on, Sam, we gotta haul this thing back three friggin’ miles, which I’d rather not do in the dark.”

“I’m
busy.
”

I turn back to the display. Well, the prelits are useless. That leaves either the six, eight, or ten foot. The tens are too tall for the ceiling. Either the six or eight, then. A six would be easier to transport, but it looks like crap. The Texas heat has done a number on it. Needles bent and soft, big bare spots in some places where they fell off. The eights don’t look much better, but they’re not quite as scrawny. But eight damn feet! Maybe their storeroom has new ones in boxes.

I’m still debating with myself when I hear an all-too-familiar, all-too-sickening sound: a bullet racking into the chamber of a pistol.

“Don’t move!” Sam shouts. “Lemme see your hands!
Hands!
”

I draw my own weapon and race down the aisle as fast as my bum leg will allow, slipping on the carpet of rat droppings and hopping over fallen shelving and ripped-open boxes, until I reach the toy section and the kid who’s got a downed man at gunpoint.

My age. Wearing fatigues. A 5th Wave eyepiece hangs around his scrawny neck. He’s leaning against the back wall beneath the board games, one arm pressing against his gut, the other on top of his head. My heart slows a little. I didn’t think it was a Silencer—Marika killed the one assigned to Marble Falls months ago—but you can never be sure.

“Other arm!” Sam shouts at him.

“I’m unarmed . . . ,” the guy gasps in a deep Texas drawl.

Sam says to me, “Search him, Zombie.”

“Where’s your squad?” I ask. I have a vision of being ambushed.

“No squad. Just me.”

“You’re hurt,” I say. I can see the blood, mostly dried but some fresh, on his shirtfront. “What happened?”

He shakes his head and coughs. A rattle in his chest. Pneumonia, maybe. “Sniper,” he manages after catching his breath.

“Where? Here in Marble Falls or . . . ?”

The arm pressing against his gut moves. I feel Sam tense beside me and I reach out and put my hand over the barrel of his Beretta. “Wait,” I murmur.

“I’m not telling you anything, you infested piece of shit.”

“Okay. Then I’ll tell you: We aren’t infested. Nobody is.” I’m wasting my breath. I might as well tell him that he’s actually a geranium having a very weird dream. “Hang on a second.”

I tug Sam to the opposite end of the aisle and whisper, “This is a problem.”

He shakes his head vehemently. “No, it isn’t. We have to kill him.”

“Nobody’s killing anybody, Sam. That’s done.”

“We can’t leave him here, Zombie. What if he’s lying about his squad? What if he’s faking being hurt? We have to kill
him
before he kills
us.
”

His face turned up to me, his eyes shining in the dying light, shining with hate and fear.
Kill him before he kills us.
Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, I wonder what Cassie died for. The tiger’s loosed from its cage and there’s no capturing it. How do we rebuild what’s been lost? In an abandoned convenience store, a terrified girl mows down an innocent man because her trust has been shattered. There’s no other way to be sure, no other option to be safe.

You’re safe here. Perfectly safe.
That phrase still haunts me. Haunts me because it’s always been a lie. It was a lie before they came and it’s still a lie. You’re never
perfectly
safe. No human being on Earth ever is or ever was. To live is to risk your life, your heart, everything. Otherwise, you’re just a walking corpse. You’re a zombie.

“He’s no different from us, Sam,” I tell him. “None of this will end until somebody decides to put down the guns.”

I don’t reach for the weapon, though. It should be his decision.

“Zombie . . .”

“What did I tell you about that? My name is Ben.”

Sam lowers the gun.

In the same moment, at the other end of the aisle, another silent battle is lost. The soldier lied; he was armed, and he used the time he had left to put the gun to his head and pull the trigger.

MARIKA

FIRST I TOLD HIM
it was a dumb idea. Then, when he insisted, I told him to wait till tomorrow. It was late afternoon and the store was over three miles away. They didn’t have time to get back before dark. He went anyway.

“Tomorrow’s Christmas,” Ben reminded me. “We missed last Christmas and that’s the last Christmas I’m going to miss.”

“What’s the big deal about Christmas?” I asked him.

“Everything.” And he smiled, like
that
had any power over me.

“Don’t take Sam.”

“Sam’s the reason I’m going.” He looked over my shoulder at
Megan playing by the fireplace. “And her.” Then he added, “And Cassie. Most of all.”

He promised they’d be back soon. I watched them from the porch that overlooked the river as they headed for the bridge, Sam pulling the empty wagon, Ben favoring his bad leg, and the sun cast down their shadows, one long and one short, like the hands of a clock.

The crying came with the dark. It always did. I sat in the rocker, holding her in my lap. She had just fed, so I knew she wasn’t hungry. I cupped her cheek and gently curled into her, discerning her need.
Ben.
She wanted Ben. “Don’t worry,” I told her. “He’s coming back. He promised.”

Why did he have to go all the way to that store? There had to be dozens of houses on this side of the river with Christmas trees in their attics. But no, he wanted a “new” tree and it had to be artificial. Nothing that will die, he insisted.

I drew the blanket tighter around her. The night was cloudy and the wind was cold off the river. The light from the fireplace flowed through the windows behind me and lay gleaming on the boards.

Evan Walker stepped onto the porch and leaned his rifle against the railing. His eyes followed mine into the dark, across the river, scanning the bridge and the buildings on the other side.

“Still not back?” he asked.

“No.”

He glanced at me and smiled. “They’ll come.”

He saw them first, approaching the bridge, pulling the little red wagon with its green cargo behind them. He smiled. “Looks like they hit pay dirt.”

He shouldered the weapon and went back inside. The wind
shifted. I could smell gunpowder.
Damn it, Ben.
When he came up the walk, grinning from ear to ear like a triumphant hunter dragging the kill back to the cave, I had an urge to slap him upside the head.
Stupid risk for a damn plastic Christmas tree.

I stood up. He saw the look on my face and stopped. Sam hovered behind him as if he were trying to hide.

“What?” Ben asked.

“Who fired their sidearm and why?”

“Did you hear it or did you smell it?” He sighed. “Sometimes I really hate the 12th System.”

“Straight answer, Parish.”

“I love it when you call me Parish. Did I ever tell you that? So sexy.” He kisses me, then says, “It wasn’t us, and the rest is a long story. Let’s go inside. It’s freezing out here.”

“It’s not freezing.”

“Well, it’s cold. Come on, Sullivan, let’s get this party started!”

I followed them into the house. Megan jumped up from her dolls and squealed with delight. That plastic tree touched something deep. Walker came out of the kitchen to help set it up. I stood by the door, bouncing the baby on my hip as she bawled. Ben finally noticed and abandoned the tree to take her from my arms.

“What’s up, little mayfly, huh? What’s the matter?”

She popped her tiny fist against the side of his nose, and Ben laughed. He always laughed when she swatted him or did anything that shouldn’t be encouraged, like demanding to be held every waking second. From the moment she was born, she had him wrapped around her inch-long finger.

On the other side of the room, Evan Walker flinched.
Mayfly.
A word that resonated, a word that would never be just a word. Sometimes I wondered if we should have left him in Canada, if
returning his memories wasn’t a particular cruelty, a kind of psychological torture. The alternatives were unthinkable, though: Kill him, or empty him completely, leaving him a human shell with no memory of her at all. Both of those possibilities were painless; we opted for the pain.

Pain is necessary. Pain is life. Without pain, there can be no joy. Cassie Sullivan taught me that.

The crying went on. Even Ben with all his special Parish powers couldn’t calm her down.

“What’s wrong?” he asked me, as if I knew.

I took a stab at it anyway. “You left. Broke her routine. She hates that.”

So much like her namesake: crying, punching, demanding,
needing.
Maybe there is something to the idea of reincarnation. Restless, never satisfied, quick to anger, stubborn, and ruthlessly curious. Cassie called it. She labeled herself long ago.
I am humanity.

Sam scampered down the hall to his bedroom. I guessed he couldn’t take the wailing anymore. I was wrong. He returned with something behind his back.

“I was going to wait till tomorrow, but . . .” He shrugged.

That bear had seen better days. Missing an ear, fur that had gone from brown to a splotchy gray, patched and repatched and patched again, more sutures than Frankenstein’s monster. Messed up, beaten up, but still hanging around. Still here.

Ben took the bear from him and made it dance for Cassie. Stubby bear arms flapped. Uneven bear legs—one was shorter than the other—twisted and twirled. The baby cried for a couple more minutes, clinging to the rage and discomfort until they slipped through her fingers, as insubstantial as the wind. She reached for the toy.
Gimme, gimme, I wanna, I wanna.

“Well, what do you know?” Ben said. He looked over at me, and his smile was so genuine—no calculation, no vanity, desiring nothing but expressing everything—that I couldn’t help myself and really didn’t want to.

I smiled.

EVAN WALKER

EACH NIGHT
from dusk to dawn he kept watch from the porch that overlooked the river. On the half hour, he left the porch to patrol the block. Then back to the porch to watch while the others slept. His sleep was rare, usually an hour or two in the afternoons, and afterward always jerking awake, disoriented, panicky, like a drowning man breaking the surface of the water that would bear him down, the remorseless medium that would kill him.

If he had dreams, he could not remember them.

Alone in the darkness, awake while everyone else slept, he felt the most at peace. He supposed it was in his nature, passed down from his father and his father’s father, farmers who tended the land and cared for their livestock. Nurturers, guardians, watchmen for the harvest. That was to be Evan Walker’s inheritance. Instead, he became the opposite. The silent hunter in the woods. The deadly assassin stalking human prey. How many did he kill before he found her hiding in the woods that autumn afternoon? He couldn’t remember. He felt no absolution in knowing he’d been used, no redemption in understanding he was as much a victim as the people he killed—from a distance, always from a distance.
Forgiveness is not born out of innocence or ignorance. Forgiveness is born of love.

At dawn, he left the porch and went inside to his room. The time had come. He’d lingered here too long already. He was stuffing an extra jacket into the duffel bag—the bowling jacket he’d taken from Grace’s house that Cassie had hated so much—when Ben appeared in the doorway, shirtless, bleary-eyed, scruffy-chinned.

“You’re leaving,” he said.

“I’m leaving.”

“Marika said you would. I didn’t believe her.”

“Why not?”

Ben shrugged. “She isn’t always right. One half of one percent of the time, she’s only half right.” He rubbed his eyes and yawned. “And you’re not coming back,” Ben went on. “Ever. Is she right about that, too?”

Evan nodded. “Yes.”

“Well.” Ben looked away, scratching his shoulder slowly. “Where are you going?”

“To look for lights in the dark.”

“Lights,” Ben echoed. “Like, literal lights, or . . . ?”

“I mean bases. Military compounds. The closest one is about a hundred miles away. I’ll start there.”

“And do what?”

“What I’ve been gifted to do.”

“You’re going to blow up every military base in North America?”

“South America, too, if I live that long.”

“That’s ambitious.”

“I don’t think I’ll be working alone.”

Ben took a moment to think. “The Silencers.”

“Where else would they go? They know where their enemies are. They know each base has an arsenal of alien ordnance like Camp Haven’s. They believe there’s no choice now that the mothership’s gone but to blow up the 5th Wave bases. Well, I
believe
that’s what they believe. It’s what I would believe if I still believed. We’ll see.”