Trying to keep my breath steady and not doing a very good job at it.
Then the owner of the good face says, “I know you’re awake.”
When I don’t say anything, he goes, “And I know you’re watching me, Cassie.”
“How do you know my name?” I croak. My throat feels like it’s lined with sandpaper. I open up my eyes. I can see him clearer now. I wasn’t wrong about the face. It’s good in a clean-cut, Clark Kent kind of way. I’m guessing eighteen or nineteen, broad through the shoulders, nice arms, and those hands with the perfect cuticles. Well, I tell myself, it could be worse. You could have been rescued by some fifty-year-old perv sporting a spare tire the size of a monster truck’s who keeps his dead mother in the attic.
“Driver’s license,” he says. He doesn’t get up. He stays in the chair with his elbows resting on his knees and his head lowered, which strikes me as more shy than menacing. I watch his dangling hands and imagine them running a warm, wet cloth over every inch of my body. My completely naked body.
“I’m Evan,” he says next. “Evan Walker.”
“Hi,” I say.
He gives a little laugh like I said something funny.
“Hi,” he says.
“Where the hell am I, Evan Walker?”
“My sister’s bedroom.” His deep-set eyes are a chocolate brown, like his hair, and a little mournful and questioning, like a puppy’s.
“Is she…?”
He nods. Rubbing his hands together slowly. “Whole family. How about you?”
“Everyone except my baby brother. That’s, um, his bear, not mine.”
He smiles. It’s a good smile, like his face. “It’s a very nice bear.”
“He’s looked better.”
“Like most things.”
I assume he’s talking about the world in general, not my body.
“How did you find me?” I ask.
He looks away. Looks back at me. Chocolate-colored, lost-puppy eyes. “The birds.”
“What birds?”
“Buzzards. When I see them circling, I always check it out. You know. In case—”
“Sure, okay.” I didn’t want him to elaborate. “So you brought me here to your house, stuck me with an IV—where’d you get the IV, anyway? And then you took off all my…and then you cleaned me up…”
“I honestly couldn’t believe you were alive, and then I couldn’t believe you’d stay alive.” He’s rubbing his hands together. Is he cold? Nervous? I’m both. “The IV was already here. It came in handy during the plague. I shouldn’t say this, I guess, but every day I came home I honestly expected you to be dead. You were in pretty bad shape.”
He reaches into his shirt pocket, and for some reason I flinch, which he notices, and then smiles reassuringly. He holds out a chunk of knotty-looking metal the size of a thimble.
“If this had hit you practically anyplace else, you would be dead.” He rolls the slug between his index finger and thumb. “Where’d it come from?”
I roll my eyes. Can’t help it. But I leave out the duh. “A rifle.”
He shakes his head. He thinks I don’t understand the question. Sarcasm doesn’t appear to work on him. If that’s true, I’m in trouble: It’s my normal mode of communication.
“Whose rifle?”
“I don’t know—the Others. A troop of them pretending to be soldiers wasted my father and everybody in our refugee camp. I was the only one who made it out alive. Well, not counting Sammy and the rest of the kids.”
He’s looking at me like I’m completely whacked. “What happened to the kids?”
“They took them. In school buses.”
“School buses…?” He’s shaking his head. Aliens in school buses? He looks like he’s about to smile. I must have looked a little too long at his lips, because he rubs them self-consciously with the back of his hand. “Took them where?”
“I don’t know. They told us Wright-Patterson, but—”
“Wright-Patterson. The air force base? I heard it was abandoned.”
“Well, I’m not sure you can trust anything they tell you. They are the enemy.” I swallow. My throat’s parched.
Evan Walker must be one of those people who notices everything, because he says, “You want something to drink?”
“I’m not thirsty,” I lie. Now, why did I lie about something like that? To show him how tough I am? Or to keep him in that chair because he’s the first person I’ve talked to in weeks, if you didn’t count the bear, which you shouldn’t.
“Why did they take the kids?” His eyes are big and round now, like Bear’s. It’s hard to decide his best feature. Those soft, chocolaty eyes or the lean jaw? Maybe the thick hair, the way it falls over his forehead when he leans toward me.
“I don’t know the real reason, but I figure it’s a very good one to them and a very bad one to us.”
“Do you think…?” He can’t finish the question—or won’t, to spare me having to answer it. He’s looking at Sam’s bear leaning on the pillow beside me.
“What? That my little brother’s dead? No. I think he’s alive. Mostly because it doesn’t make sense that they’d pull out the kids, then kill everybody else. They blew up the whole camp with some kind of green bomb—”
“Wait a minute,” he says, holding up one of his large hands. “A green bomb?”
“I’m not making this up.”
“Why green, though?”
“Because green is the color of money, grass, oak leaves, and alien bombs. How the hell would I know why it was green?”
He’s laughing. A quiet, held-in kind of laugh. When he smiles, the right side of his mouth goes slightly higher than the left. Then I’m like, Cassie, why are you staring at his mouth anyway?
Somehow the fact that I was rescued by a very good-looking guy with a lopsided grin and large, strong hands is the most unnerving thing that has happened to me since the Others arrived.
Thinking about what happened at the camp is giving me the heebie-jeebies, so I decide to change the subject. I peer down at the quilt covering me. It looks homemade. The image of an old woman sewing it flashes through my mind and, for some reason, I suddenly feel like crying.
“How long have I been here?” I ask weakly.
“It’ll be a week tomorrow.”
“Did you have to cut…?” I don’t know how to put the question.
Thankfully, I don’t have to. “Amputate? No. The bullet just missed your knee, so I think you’ll be able to walk, but there could be nerve damage.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m getting used to that.”
HE LEAVES ME for a little while and returns with some clear broth, not chicken- or beef-based, but some kind of meat, deer maybe, and while I clutch the edges of the quilt he helps me sit up so I can sip, holding the warm cup in both hands. He’s staring at me, not a creeper stare, but the way you look at a sick person, feeling a little sick yourself and not knowing how to make it better. Or maybe, I think, it is a creeper stare and the concerned look is just a clever cover. Are pervs only pervs if you don’t find them attractive? I called Crisco a sicko for trying to give me a corpse’s jewelry, and he said I wouldn’t think that if he were Ben Parish–hot.
Remembering Crisco kills my appetite. Evan sees me staring at the cup in my lap and gently pulls it from my hands and places it on the table.
“I could have done that,” I say, more sharply than I meant to.
“Tell me about these soldiers,” he says. “How do you know they weren’t…human?”
I tell him about them showing up not long after the drones, the way they loaded up the kids, then gathered everybody into the barracks and mowed them down. But the clincher was the Eye. Clearly extraterrestrial.
“They’re human,” he decides after I’m done. “They must be working with the visitors.”
“Oh God, please don’t call them that.” I hate that name for them. The talking heads used it before the 1st Wave—all the YouTubers, everyone in the Twitterverse, even the president during news briefings.