The Infinite Sea (14 page)

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.

28

A LIFETIME LATER,
from his hiding place beneath the highway overpass, Evan watched the dark-haired girl sprint across the hotel parking lot, cross the interstate access ramp, trot a few hundred yards north on Highway 68, then pause beside an SUV to look back at the building. He followed her gaze to a second-story window, where a shadow flitted for an instant, then was gone.

Mayfly.

The dark-haired girl vanished into the trees bordering the highway. Why she had left and where she was going were unknown. Perhaps the group was splitting up—it would increase the chance of survival a little—or perhaps she was scouting a more secure hiding place to ride out the winter. Whichever the case, he had the sense he’d found them just in time.

The dark-haired girl was one, leaving at least four inside, the ones he had seen manning the windows. He did not know if any of them had survived the explosion. He wasn’t even sure it had been Cassie’s shadow in the window.

Not that it mattered. He’d made a promise. He had to go in.

He couldn’t approach openly. The situation was complicated by too many unknowns. What if it wasn’t Cassie but a squad of 5th Wave soldiers cut off when the base blew—like the squad he’d left in Grace’s care? He’d be dead before he crossed a dozen feet. The risk was nearly as great even if it was Cassie and a group of survivors: They might drop him before they realized who he was.

Going in now, though, posed its own set of risks. He didn’t know how many there were inside. Didn’t know if he could manage two, much less four, heavily armed trigger-happy kids jacked up on adrenaline, ready to blow away anything that moved. The system that augmented his body had crashed.
I’m fully human,
he’d told Cassie. Now that was literally true.

He was still weighing the options when a tiny figure appeared in the parking lot. A child wearing 5th Wave fatigues. Not Sam—Sam had been dressed in the white jumpsuit of the underaged and newly processed—but young. Six or seven, he guessed. Following the same route as the dark-haired girl, even pausing by the same SUV to look back at the hotel. This time he saw no shadow in the window; whoever had been there was gone.

That made two. Were they abandoning the hotel one at a time? Tactically, it made some sense. Shouldn’t he simply wait, then, for Cassie to come out, rather than risk his life going in?

And the stars spun overhead, marking the time winding down.

He started to get up, then sank back. Another one exited the hotel, much larger than the one before, a big kid with a large head, toting a rifle. Three now, none of them Cassie or Sam or the friend from Cassie’s high school—what was his name? Ken? With each exodus, the odds of Cassie not being in this group increased. Should he even attempt entry?

His instinct said
go.
No answers, no weapons, and hardly any strength. Instinct was all he had left.

He went.

29

FOR OVER FIVE YEARS
he’d relied on the gifts that made him superior to humans in almost every way. Hearing. Eyesight. Reflexes. Agility. Strength. The gifts had spoiled him. He’d forgotten what normal felt like.

He was getting a crash course now.

He slipped into a ground-floor room through a broken-out window. Hobbled to the door and pressed his ear against it, but all he could hear was the thundering of his heart. Easing the door open, sliding into the hall, listening, waiting in vain for his eyes to adjust to the dark. Down the hall and into the lobby. His own breath, frosting in the frigid air, otherwise silence. Apparently the ground floor was deserted. He knew someone was standing at the small hallway window upstairs; he caught a glimpse of him as he maneuvered his way into the building.

Stairwell. Two flights. By the time he reached the second landing, he was dizzy from the pain and out of breath from the effort. He tasted blood. There was no light. He was entombed in utter darkness.

If there was only one person on the other side of this door, he had seconds. More than one and time didn’t matter; he was dead. Every instinct said wait.

He went.

In the hall on the other side of the door was a small kid with extraordinarily large ears and a mouth flying open in astonishment the moment before Evan locked him in the chokehold, pressing his forearm hard against the kid’s carotid, cutting off the blood supply to his brain. He dragged his squirming catch back into the black pit of the stairwell. The kid went limp before the door clicked shut again.

Evan waited for a few seconds on the other side. The hall had been empty, the snatch quick and relatively quiet. It could be a while before the others—if there were others—realized their sentry was gone. He dragged the kid to the bottom of the stairs and tucked his unconscious body into the small space between the steps and the wall. Went back up. Cracked open the door. Halfway down the hall, another door opened and two shadowy figures emerged. He watched them cross the hall and enter another room. They reappeared a moment later and went to another door.

They were checking each room. The stairs would be next. Or the elevator; he’d forgotten about the elevator. Would they drop down the shaft and take the stairs from below?

No. If there’re only two, they’ll split up. One for the stairs, one down the shaft, and meet up in the lobby.

He watched them come out of the last room, then go to the elevator, where one held the doors while the other dropped out of sight into the shaft. The one who remained had trouble standing, holding his stomach and grunting softly from the effort, favoring one side as he limped toward Evan.

He waited. Twenty feet. Ten. Five. Holding the rifle in his right hand, his gut with his left. Standing on the other side of the door, Evan smiled.
Ben. Not Ken. Ben.

Found you.

Too dangerous to trust that Ben would recognize him and not shoot him on the spot. He burst through the door and rammed his fist as hard as he could into Ben’s wounded stomach. The blow knocked the breath out of him, but Ben refused to go down. Rocking back, he brought his rifle up. Evan slung it to one side and hit him again, same spot, and this time Ben went down, dropping to his knees at Evan’s feet. His head fell back. Their eyes met.

“I knew you weren’t for real,” Ben gasped.

“Where’s Cassie?”

He knelt, grabbed two fistfuls of the yellow hoodie Ben was wearing, and brought their faces close.

“Where’s Cassie?”

If he had been his old self, if the system hadn’t crashed, he would have seen the blur of the blade as it came around, heard the infinitesimally small whistle of it cutting through the air. Instead, he wasn’t aware of the knife until Ben had buried it in his thigh.

He fell back, dragging Ben with him. Hurled him to one side as Ben ripped the knife free. Evan slammed his knee down on Ben’s wrist to neutralize the threat and clamped both hands over Ben’s face, covering his nose and mouth and pushing hard. Time spun out. Beneath him, Ben thrashed and kicked, whipped his head from side to side, his free hand clawing for the rifle less than an inch from his fingertips, and time froze.

Then Ben went still and Evan fell away, gulping air, drenched in blood and sweat and feeling as if his body might burst into flames. No time to recover, though: Down the hall, through a crack in the door, a small, heart-shaped face turned his way.

Sam.

He pushed himself to his feet, lost his balance, careened into the wall, fell. Back up again, convinced now it was Cassie who had dropped into the shaft, but he had to secure Sam first, except the kid had slammed the door and was now screaming obscenities through it, and then, as Evan dropped his hand on the knob, he opened fire.

He threw himself against the wall next to the door while Sam emptied the magazine. When the pause came, he didn’t hesitate. Sam had to be neutralized before he could reload.

Evan had a choice: kick open the door with the bad foot or put all his weight on it while he kicked with the other. Neither option was good. He chose to kick with the broken one; he couldn’t risk losing his balance.

Three hard, sharp kicks. Three kicks that produced pain as he’d never experienced it before. But the lock broke with a loud wallop and the door slammed into the wall on the other side. He fell into the room and there was Cassie’s brother crab-crawling toward the window and somehow Evan remained upright, something held him up and propelled him toward the child, hand outstretched,
I’m here, remember me? I saved you before; I’ll save you again . . .

And then, behind him, the last one, the final star, the one he carried across an infinite sea of white, the one thing he’d found worth dying for, opened fire.

And the bullet connected them when it wedded bone, binding them together as if by a silver cord.