Stephenie Meyer - The Host

Her unexpected fear caught me midlaugh. I choked on the hot air, my chest throbbing from my fit of morbid hysteria. By the time I could breathe again, all trace of my black humor was gone. Instinctively, my eyes swept the desert void, looking for some evidence that I was not the first to waste my life this way. The plain was impossibly vast, but I couldn’t halt my frantic search for… remains.

No, of course not. Melanie was already comforting herself. Jared’s too smart. He would never come out here unprepared like we did. He’d never put Jamie in danger.

I’m sure you’re right, I told her, wanting to believe it as much as she did. I’m sure no one else in the whole universe could be this stupid. Besides, he probably never came to look. He probably never figured it out. Wish you hadn’t.

My feet kept moving. I was barely aware of the action. It meant so little in the face of the distance ahead. And even if we were magically transported to the very base of the mesa, what then? I was absolutely positive there was nothing there. No one waited at the mesa to save us.

“We’re going to die,” I said. I was surprised that there was no fear in my rasping voice. This was just a fact like any other. The sun is hot. The desert is dry. We are going to die.

Yes. She was calm, too. This, death, was easier to accept than that our efforts had been guided by insanity.

“That doesn’t bother you?”

She thought for a moment before answering.

At least I died trying. And I won. I never gave them away. I never hurt them. I did my best to find them. I tried to keep my promise… I die for them.

I counted nineteen steps before I could respond. Nineteen sluggish, futile crunches across the sand.

“Then what am I dying for?” I wondered, the pricking feeling returning in my desiccated tear ducts. “I guess it’s because I lost, then, right? Is that why?”

I counted thirty-four crunches before she had an answer to my question.

No, she thought slowly. It doesn’t feel that way to me. I think… Well, I think that maybe… you’re dying to be human. There was almost a smile in her thought as she heard the silly double meaning to the phrase. After all the planets and all the hosts you’ve left behind, you’ve finally found the place and the body you’d die for. I think you’ve found your home, Wanderer.

Ten crunches.

I didn’t have the energy to open my lips anymore. Too bad I didn’t get to stay here longer, then.

I wasn’t sure about her answer. Maybe she was trying to make me feel better. A sop for dragging her out here to die. She had won; she had never disappeared.

My steps began to falter. My muscles screamed out to me for mercy, as if I had any means to soothe them. I think I would have stopped right there, but Melanie was, as always, tougher than I.

I could feel her now, not just in my head but in my limbs. My stride lengthened; the path I made was straighter. By sheer force of will, she dragged my half-dead carcass toward the impossible goal.

There was an unexpected joy to the pointless struggle. Just as I could feel her, she could feel my body. Our body, now; my weakness ceded control to her. She gloried in the freedom of moving our arms and legs forward, no matter how useless such a motion was. It was bliss simply because she could again. Even the pain of the slow death we had begun dimmed in comparison.

What do you think is out there? she asked me as we marched on toward the end. What will you see, after we’re dead?

Nothing. The word was empty and hard and sure. There’s a reason we call it the final death.

The souls have no belief in an afterlife?

We have so many lives. Anything more would be… too much to expect. We die a little death every time we leave a host. We live again in another. When I die here, that will be the end.

There was a long pause while our feet moved more and more slowly.

What about you? I finally asked. Do you still believe in something more, even after all of this? My thoughts raked over her memories of the end of the human world.

It seems like there are some things that can’t die.

In our mind, their faces were close and clear. The love we felt for Jared and Jamie did feel very permanent. In that moment, I wondered if death was strong enough to dissolve something so vital and sharp. Perhaps this love would live on with her, in some fairytale place with pearly gates. Not with me.

Would it be a relief to be free of it? I wasn’t sure. It felt like it was part of who I was now.

We only lasted a few hours. Even Melanie’s tremendous strength of mind could ask no more than that of our failing body. We could barely see. We couldn’t seem to find the oxygen in the dry air we sucked in and spit back out. The pain brought rough whimpers breaking through our lips.

You’ve never had it this bad, I teased her feebly as we staggered toward a dried stick of a tree standing a few feet taller than the low brush. We wanted to get to the thin streaks of shade before we fell.

No, she agreed. Never this bad.

We attained our purpose. The dead tree threw its cobwebby shadow over us, and our legs fell out from under us. We sprawled forward, never wanting the sun on our face again. Our head turned to the side on its own, searching for the burning air. We stared at the dust inches from our nose and listened to the gasping of our breath.

After a time, long or short we didn’t know, we closed our eyes. Our lids were red and bright inside. We couldn’t feel the faint web of shade; maybe it no longer touched us.

How long? I asked her.

I don’t know, I’ve never died before.

An hour? More?

Your guess is as good as mine.

Where’s a coyote when you really need one?

Maybe we’ll get lucky… escaped claw beast or something… Her thought trailed off incoherently.

That was our last conversation. It was too hard to concentrate enough to form words. There was more pain than we thought there should be. All the muscles in our body rioted, cramping and spasming as they fought death.

We didn’t fight. We drifted and waited, our thoughts dipping in and out of memories without a pattern. While we were still lucid, we hummed ourselves a lullaby in our head. It was the one we’d used to comfort Jamie when the ground was too hard, or the air was too cold, or the fear was too great to sleep. We felt his head press into the hollow just below our shoulder and the shape of his back under our arm. And then it seemed that it was our head cradled against a broader shoulder, and a new lullaby comforted us.

Our lids turned black, but not with death. Night had fallen, and this made us sad. Without the heat of day, we would probably last longer.

It was dark and silent for a timeless space. Then there was a sound.

It barely roused us. We weren’t sure if we imagined it. Maybe it was a coyote, after all. Did we want that? We didn’t know. We lost our train of thought and forgot the sound.

Something shook us, pulled our numb arms, dragged at them. We couldn’t form the words to wish that it would be quick now, but that was our hope. We waited for the cut of teeth. Instead, the dragging turned to pushing, and we felt our face roll toward the sky.

It poured over our face-wet, cool, and impossible. It dribbled over our eyes, washing the grit from them. Our eyes fluttered, blinking against the dripping.

We did not care about the grit in our eyes. Our chin arched up, desperately searching, our mouth opening and closing with blind, pathetic weakness, like a newly hatched bird.