Текст книги "The Infinite Sea"

Автор книги: Rick Yancey

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

20

NIGHT HAD FALLEN by the time Grace returned, her arrival presaged by the glow of a lamp expanding in the hall outside. She set the lamp on the bedside table, and the light threw shadows that engulfed her face. He did not protest when she drew down the covers, unwrapped the bandages covering his wounds, and exposed his body to the frigid air.

“Did you miss me, Evan?” she murmured, fingertips slick with salve sliding over his skin. “I don’t mean today. How old were we then? Fifteen?”

“Sixteen,” he answered.

“Hmm. You asked me if I was afraid of the future. Do you remember?”

“Yes.”

“Such a . . . human question.”

The fingers of one hand massaging him while the fingers of the other slowly unbuttoned her shirt.

“Not as much as the other one I asked.”

She tilted her head inquisitively. Her hair fell over her shoulder. Her face lost in shadow and her shirt falling open like a curtain drawn back.

“What was that?” she whispered.

“If you’d not been, for a very long time, inexpressibly lonely.”

The coolness of her fingers. The heat of his seared flesh.

“Your heart is beating very fast,” she breathed.

She stood up. He closed his eyes. For the promise. Just outside the circle of light, Grace stepped out of the pants that pooled around her ankles. He did not watch.

“Not so lonely,” Grace said, her breath caressing his ear. “Being locked in these bodies does have its compensations.”

For the promise. And Cassie the island he swam toward, rising from a blood-filled sea.

“Not so lonely, Evan,” Grace said. She touched his lips with her fingers, his neck with her lips.

He had no choice. His promise afforded none. Grace would never let him go; she would not hesitate to kill him if he tried. There could be no outrunning her or hiding from her. No choice.

He opened his eyes, reached up with his right hand and ran his fingers through her hair. His left hand slid beneath the pillow. Above them, he could see the lonely sun stripped of its offspring, shining in the lamplight. He thought Grace might notice the planets were missing. He expected her to ask why he needed to remove them, though it wasn’t the planets he needed.

It was the wire.

But Grace hadn’t noticed. Her mind had been on other things. “Touch me, Evan,” she whispered.

He rolled hard to his right and smashed his left forearm into her jaw. She stumbled backward as he came off the bed, driving his shoulder into her midsection. She sank her nails deep into the burns on his back and ripped. The room went black for a moment, but he didn’t need to see—he just needed to be close.

She may have seen the makeshift garrote of broken wood and mobile wire in his hand, or she might have been just lucky, but her fist closed around the wire and pushed as he drew it tight. He swept her leg with the outside of his good ankle and took her to the floor, following her body down, crushing his knee into her lower back on impact.

No choice.

He summoned every ounce of augmented strength that remained into tightening the wire, until it sliced through her palm and hit bone.

She bucked against his weight. He swung his right knee around and ground it into her head. Tighter. Tighter. He smelled blood. His. Hers.

The room spun around.

Sinking deep into blood, his, hers, Evan Walker held still.

21

WHEN IT WAS DONE, he crawled to the bed and pulled out the broken slat. A little long for a crutch—he had to hold the board at a difficult angle—but it would have to do. He hobbled to the other bedroom, where he found men’s clothing: a pair of jeans, a plaid shirt, a hand-knit sweater, and a leather jacket with the name of the owner’s bowling team, The Urbana Pinheads, emblazoned on the back. The fabric scraped and rubbed against his raw skin, making every movement a study in pain. Then he shuffled into the living room, where he found Grace’s rucksack and rifle. He threw both over his shoulder.

Hours later, resting in the nestlike mangle of metal in the middle of an eight-car pileup on Highway 68, he opened the sack to take inventory and found dozens of plastic baggies labeled with black marker, each bag containing clippings of human hair. At first he was puzzled. Whose hair was this and why was it in baggies, each neatly marked with dates? Then he understood: Grace was taking trophies from her kills.

Where the body went, the mind followed.

He fashioned a splint for his ankle from two pieces of broken metal and the rest of the bandage roll. He drank a few sips of water. His body ached for sleep, but he would not sleep again until he kept his promise. He lifted his face to the pinpricks of pure light fixed above him in the limitless dark. Don’t I always find you?

The headlamp of the car beside him exploded in a shower of pulverized glass and plastic. He dove beneath the nearest vehicle, dragging the rifle behind him.

Grace. It had to be. Grace was alive.

He left too quickly. He assumed too much, hoped too much. And now he was trapped, pinned down with no way out, and Evan realized in that moment how promises can be kept in the most unexpected of ways: He’d found Cassie by becoming her.

Wounded, trapped beneath a car, unable to run, unable to rise, at the mercy of a faceless, merciless hunter, a Silencer engineered to snuff out the human noise.

22

HE MET—found would be more accurate—Grace the summer they both turned sixteen, at the Hamilton County Fair. Evan was standing outside the exotic petting zoo tent with his little sister, Val, who had been demanding to see the white tiger since they arrived early that morning. It was August. The line was long. Val was tired and grouchy and sticky with sweat. He’d put her off. He didn’t like to see animals in captivity. When he looked into their eyes, something in their eyes looked back at him.

He found Grace first, standing beside the funnel cake trailer, a dripping wedge of watermelon in her hand. Blond hair that fell to the middle of her back, cool, nearly arctic features, especially the ice-blue eyes, and the cynical turn of her mouth, glistening with juice. She turned toward him and he quickly looked away, to the face of his baby sister, who would be dead in less than two years. A fact he carried within him, locked away in a different kind of hidden room. Sometimes it was hard to shake—the knowledge that every face he saw was the face of a corpse-to-be. His world was peopled with living ghosts.

“What?” Val asked.

He shook his head. Nothing. He took a deep breath and glanced toward the trailer again. The tall blond girl was gone.

Inside the tent, behind a steel mesh fence, the white tiger panted in the heat. Small children crowded in front. Behind them, cameras and smartphones clicked. The tiger remained regally indifferent to the attention.

“Beautiful,” a husky voice murmured in Evan’s ear. He did not turn. He knew, without looking, it was the girl with the long blond hair and lips that glistened with watermelon juice. The exhibit was packed; her bare arm brushed against his.

“And sad,” Evan said.

“No,” Grace said. “He could tear through that fence in two seconds. Rip off a kid’s face in three. He’s choosing to be there. That’s the beautiful thing.”

He looked at her. Her eyes were even more startling up close. They bored into his, and in a knee-weakening instant, he knew the entity hiding inside Grace’s body.

“We should talk,” Grace whispered.

23

AT DUSK, the lights of the Ferris wheel were switched on and the tinny music was turned up and the crowd swelled along the midway, cutoff shorts and flip-flops and the smell of coconut-scented sunscreen and the waddle of big-bellied men in John Deere caps with deeply callused hands and wallets attached to belt loops bulging in back pockets. He handed Val off to their mother, then headed for the Ferris wheel to wait nervously for Grace. She materialized out of the crowd, holding a large stuffed animal: a white Bengal tiger, plastic bright blue eyes only slightly darker than hers.

“I’m Evan,” he said.

“I’m Grace.”

They watched the giant wheel turn against the purple sky.

“Do you think we’ll miss it when it’s gone?” he asked.

“I won’t.” Her nose crinkled. “The smell of them is horrible. I can’t get used to it.”

“You’re the first I’ve met since . . .”

She nodded. “Me too. Do you think it’s an accident?”

“No.”

“I wasn’t coming today, but this morning when I woke up, there was this little voice. Go. Did you hear it?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“Good.” She sounded relieved. “For three years I’ve been wondering if I’m crazy.”

“You’re not.”

“You don’t wonder?”

“Not anymore.”

She smiled archly. “Do you want to go for a walk?”

They wandered over to the deserted show grounds and sat on the bleachers. The first stars appeared. The night was warm, the air moist. Grace wore a pair of shorts and a sleeveless white blouse with a lace collar. Sitting close to her, Evan could smell licorice.

“This is it,” he said, nodding at the empty corral with its mangled floor of sawdust and manure.

“What?”

“The future.”

She laughed as if he’d made a joke. “The world ends. The world ends and the world begins again. It’s always been that way.”

“You’re never afraid of what’s coming? Never?”

“Never.” Hugging the stuffed tiger in her lap. Her eyes seemed to take on the color of whatever she looked at. Now she was looking up at the darkening sky, and her eyes were a bottomless black.

They spoke for a few minutes in their native language, but it was difficult and they gave up quickly. Too many words were unpronounceable. He noticed that she was much calmer afterward, and he realized it wasn’t the future that frightened her; it was the past, the fact that she feared the entity inside her body was a figment of a young human girl’s shattered mind. Meeting Evan validated her existence.

“You’re not alone,” he told her. He looked down and discovered her hand in his. One hand for him, the other for the tiger.

“That’s been the worst part,” she agreed. “Feeling as if you’re the only person in the universe. That the whole thing is here,” touching her chest, “and nowhere else.”

Years later, he would read something quite similar in the diary of another sixteen-year-old girl, the one he found and lost, found, then lost again:

Sometimes I think I might be the last human on Earth.

24

THE CAR’S UNDERCARRIAGE against his back. The cold asphalt against his cheek. The useless rifle clutched in his hand. He was trapped.

Grace had several options. He had two.

No. If there was any hope of keeping his promise, he had just one:

Cassie’s choice.

She had made a promise, too. A hopeless, suicidal promise to the one person on Earth who still mattered to her—mattered to her more than her own life. She stood up that day to face the faceless hunter because her death was nothing compared to the death of that promise. If there was any hope left, it lay in love’s hopeless promises.

He crawled forward, past the front bumper, into the open air, and then, like Cassie Sullivan, Evan Walker stood up.

He tensed, waiting for the finishing round. When Cassie stood up that cloudless autumn afternoon, her Silencer had run. He did not think Grace would run. Grace would finish what she began.

But no finish came. No silencing bullet, connecting Grace to him as if by a silver cord. He knew she was there. Knew she could see him standing crookedly in front of the car. And he realized there was no escaping the past, no dodging inevitable consequences: Cassie’s terror, her uncertainty and pain, they belonged to him now.

Overhead, the stars. Straight ahead, the road that shone in the stars’ light. The tight grip of the freezing air and the medicinal smell of the ointment Grace had spread over his burns. Your heart is beating very fast.

She’s not going to kill you, he told himself. Not the goal. If killing you was the goal, she wouldn’t have missed that shot.

There could be only one answer: Grace intended to follow him. He was a riddle to her and following him was the way to solve the riddle. He had escaped the trap only to sink deeper into the pit. Keeping his promise now was not being faithful; it was an act of betrayal.

He couldn’t outrun her, not with the bad ankle. He couldn’t reason with her—he could barely articulate his own reasons anymore. He could wait her out. Stay here, do nothing . . . and risk Cassie being discovered by soldiers of the 5th Wave or abandoning the hotel before his stalemate with Grace ended. He could force a confrontation, but he’d failed once and the odds were he would again. He was too weak, too hurt. He needed time to heal and there was no time.

He leaned against the hood of the car and looked up at the star-encrusted sky, undimmed by human lights, scrubbed clean of contaminants, and these the same stars that shone on the world before humankind walked upon it. For billions of years, these same stars, and what was time to them?

“Mayfly,” Evan whispered. “Mayfly.”

He shouldered the rifle and wormed his way through the pileup back to the backpack of supplies, which he threw over the other shoulder. Tucked the makeshift crutch beneath his arm. The going would be slow, painfully slow, but he would force Grace to choose between letting him go and following him, deserting her assigned territory at the moment when desertion could mean a serious setback in the carefully constructed timetable. He would swing north of the hotel—north toward the nearest base. North where the enemy had fled and retrenched and waited for spring to launch the final, finishing assault.

That’s where hope lay—where all hope had been from the beginning—on the shoulders of the brainwashed child-soldiers of the 5th Wave.

25

LATER THAT EVENING on the day they met, Evan and Grace walked along the midway beneath the lights that beat back the dark, weaving their way through the crowd, past the ring toss and balloon dart game and basketball free throw. Music blared from speakers mounted on the light poles, and bubbling beneath the music was the sound of a thousand conversations, like an undercurrent, and the flow of the crowd was like a river, too, eddying and swirling, swift here, languid there. Tall and lissome and striking in their good looks, Evan and Grace drew attention from the passersby, which made him uncomfortable. He never liked crowds, preferring the solitude of the woods and the fields of the family farm, an inclination that would serve him well when the time of cleansing arrived.

Time. Above them, the stars turned like the points of light on the Ferris wheel that loomed above the fairgrounds, though too slowly for the human eye to register, the hands of the universal clock that was winding down, that had been winding down from the beginning, and the faces that passed marking the time, like the stars themselves, prisoners to it. Evan and Grace were not. They had conquered the unconquerable, denied the undeniable. The last star would die, the universe itself would pass away, but they would go on and on.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“‘My spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal.’”

“What?” She was smiling.

“It’s from the Bible.”

She shifted the stuffed tiger to her other hand so she could take his. “Don’t be morbid. It’s a beautiful night and we won’t see each other again until it’s over. Your problem is you don’t know how to live in the moment.”

She tugged him from the main concourse into the shadows between two tents, where she kissed him, pressing her body tightly against his, and something opened inside him. She entered into him and the terrible loneliness he’d felt since his awakening eased.

Grace pulled away. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes burning with a pale fire. “I think about it sometimes. The first kill. What it will be like.”

He nodded. “I think about it, too. Mostly, though, I think about the last one.”

26

HE LEFT THE HIGHWAY, cutting through open fields, crossing lonely country lanes, pausing to refill his canteen with water from an icy stream, navigating as the ancients did, by the North Star. His injuries forced him to rest often, and each time he saw Grace in the distance. She didn’t bother to hide. She wanted him to know she was there, just outside the range of the rifle. By dawn he had reached Highway 68, the major artery connecting Huber Heights and Urbana. In a small stand of trees bordering the road, he gathered wood for a fire. His hands were shaking. He felt feverish. He worried the burns had become infected. His bodily systems had been augmented, but an enhanced body could reach a tipping point from which there was no return. His ankle was swollen to twice its normal size, the skin hot to the touch, and the wound throbbed with each beat of his heart. He decided to spend a day here, maybe two, and keep the fire burning.

A beacon to draw them into the trap. If they were out there. If they could be drawn.

The road before him. The woods behind him. He would remain in the open. Grace would stay in the woods. She would wait with him. Out of her assigned territory, fully committed now, no going back.

He warmed himself by the fire. Grace made no fire. His the light and warmth. Hers the dark and cold. He shrugged out of the jacket, pulled off the sweater, slipped off the shirt. Already the burns were scabbing over, but they had begun to itch horribly. To distract himself, he whittled a new crutch from a tree branch salvaged from the woods.

He wondered if Grace would risk sleep. She knew his strength grew with each passing hour and every hour she delayed, her chances of success waned.

He saw her at midafternoon on the second day, a shadow among shadows, as he gathered more wood for the fire. Fifty yards into the trees, holding a high-powered sniper’s rifle, a bloody bandage wrapped around her hand, another around her neck. In the subzero air, her voice seemed to carry into the infinite.

“Why didn’t you finish me, Evan?”

He didn’t answer at first. He continued gathering kindling for the beacon. Then he said, “I thought I did.”

“No. You couldn’t have thought that.”

“Maybe I’m sick of murder.”

“What does that mean?”

He shook his head. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Who is Cassiopeia?”

He rose to his full height. The light was weak in the trees beneath a sheet of iron-gray clouds. Even so, he could see the cynical set of her lips and the pale blue fire of her eyes.

“The one who stood up when anyone else would have stayed down,” Evan said. “The one I couldn’t stop thinking about before I even knew her. The last one, Grace. The last human being on Earth.”

She didn’t say anything for a long time. He remained. She remained.

“You’re in love with a human.” Her voice was full of wonder. And then the obvious: “That’s not possible.”

“We used to think the same about immortality.”

“It would be like one of them falling in love with a sea slug.” Smiling now. “You’re mad. You’ve gone insane.”

“Yes.”

He turned his back to her, inviting the bullet. He was mad, after all, and madness came with its own armor.

“It can’t be that!” she shouted after him. “Why won’t you tell me what’s really going on?”

He stopped. The kindling clattered to the frozen ground. The crutch toppled from his side. He turned his head but did not turn around.

“Take cover, Grace,” he said softly.

Her finger twitched on the trigger. Normal human eyes might have missed it. Evan’s did not. “Or—what?” she demanded. “You’ll attack me again?”

He shook his head. “I’m not going to attack you, Grace. They are.”

She cocked her head at him, like the bird in the tree when he awakened in her camp.

“They’re here,” Evan said.

The first bullet struck her upper thigh. She rocked backward but remained upright. The next round punched into her left shoulder and the rifle slipped from her hand. The third round, most likely from a second shooter, exploded in the tree directly beside him, missing his head by millimeters.

Grace dove to the ground.

Evan ran.

27

RAN WAS AN EXAGGERATION. More like a frantic hop, swinging his bad leg wide to keep most of his weight on the good one, and each time his heel hit the ground, pinwheels of bright light exploded in his vision. Past the smoldering campfire, the beacon that had burned for two days, the sign he’d hung in the woods, Here we are! Snatching the rifle from the ground in stride; he had no intention of standing his ground. Grace would draw their fire—a patrol of at least two recruits, perhaps more. He hoped more. More would keep Grace busy for a while.

How far? Ten miles? Twenty? He wouldn’t be able to maintain this pace, but as long as he kept moving, he should be close to the hotel by dawn the next day.

He could hear the firefight behind him. Sporadic pops, not continuous fire, which meant that Grace was being methodical. The soldiers would be wearing the eyepieces, evening the playing field a bit. Not much, but a bit.

He abandoned any attempt at stealth and hit the highway, loping down the center of the road, a solitary figure under the immensity of a leaden sky. A murder of crows a thousand strong whipped and wheeled over him, heading north. He kept moving, grunting with pain, every stride a lesson, every jolting footfall a reminder. His temperature soared, his lungs burned, his heart slammed in his chest. The friction from the clothes tore open the delicate scabs and soon he was bleeding. Blood plastered his shirt to his back, soaked through the jeans. He was pushing it, he knew. The system installed to maintain his life past all human endurance could crash.

He collapsed when the sun did beneath the dome of the sky, a slow-motion stumbling kind of fall, hitting shoulder first and rolling to the edge of the road, where he came to rest flat on his back, arms spread wide, numb from the waist down, shaking uncontrollably, burning hot in the bitter air. Darkness rolled over the face of the Earth, and Evan Walker tumbled down to the lightless bottom, to a hidden room that danced in light and her face the source of that light, and he had no explanation for it, how her face illumed the lightless place inside. You’re mad. You’ve gone insane. He’d thought so, too. He fought to keep her alive while every night he left her to kill the rest. Why should one live though the world itself will perish? She illumined the lightless—her life the lamp, the last star in a dying universe.

I am humanity, she had written. Self-centered, stubborn, sentimental, childish, vain. I am humanity. Cynical, naïve, kind, cruel, soft as down, hard as tungsten steel.

He must get up. If he can’t, the light will go out. The world will be consumed by the crushing dark. But the totality of the atmosphere pushed him down and held him under, five quadrillion tons of bone-breaking force.

The system had crashed. Taxed past its limits, the alien technology installed inside his human body when he was thirteen had shut down. There was nothing to sustain or protect him now. Burned and broken, his human body was no different from his former prey’s. Fragile. Delicate. Vulnerable. Alone.

He was not one of them. He was completely one of them. Wholly Other. Fully human.

He rolled onto his side. His back spasmed. Blood rushed into his mouth. He spat it out.

Onto his stomach. Then knees. Then hands. His elbows quivered, his wrists threatened to buckle under his own weight. Self-centered, stubborn, sentimental, childish, vain. I am humanity. Cynical, naïve, kind, cruel, soft as down, hard as tungsten steel.

I am humanity.

He crawled.

I am humanity.

He fell.

I am humanity.

He got up.