Rick Yancey - The 5th Wave

One hand pours while the other presses the wet hair against my scalp to wring out the excess water. Firmly, not too hard, just right. Like I’m not the first girl whose hair he’s washed. A little, hysterical voice inside my head is screaming, What do you think you’re doing? You don’t even know this guy! but that same voice is going, Great hands; ask him for a scalp massage while he’s at it.

While outside my head, his deep, calm voice is saying, “Now I’m thinking it doesn’t make sense to leave until it gets warmer. Maybe Wright-Patterson or Kentucky. Fort Knox is only a hundred and forty miles from here.”

“Fort Knox? What, you’re going on a heist?”

“It’s a fort, as in heavily fort ified. A logical rallying point.” Gathering the ends of my hair in his fist and squeezing, and the plop-plops of the water spattering in the claw-foot tub.

“If it were me , I wouldn’t go anyplace that’s a logical rallying point,” I say. “Logically those’ll be the first points they wipe off the map.”

“From what you’ve told me about the Silencers, it’s not logical to rally anywhere.”

“Or stay anywhere longer than a few days. Keep your numbers small and keep moving.”

“Until…?”

“There is no until ,” I snap at him. “There’s just unless .”

He dries my hair with a fluffy white towel. There’s a fresh nightie lying on the closed toilet seat. I look up into those chocolate-colored eyes and say, “Turn around.” He turns around. I reach past the frayed back pockets of the jeans that conform to the butt that I’m not looking at and pick up the dry nightie. “If you try to peek in that mirror, I’ll know,” I warn the guy who’s already seen me naked, but that was unconsciously naked, which is not the same thing. He nods, lowers his head, and pinches his lower lip like he’s sealing off a smile.

I wiggle out of the wet nightie, slip the dry one over my head, and tell him it’s okay to turn around.

He lifts me from the chair and carries me back to his dead sister’s bed, and I have one arm around his shoulders, and his arm is tight—though not too tight—across my waist. His body feels about twenty degrees warmer than mine. He eases me onto the mattress and pulls the quilts over my bare legs. His cheeks are very smooth, his hair neatly groomed, and his cuticles, as I’ve pointed out, are impeccable. Which means grooming is very high on his list of priorities in the postapocalyptic era. Why? Who’s around to see him?

“So how long has it been since you’ve seen another person?” I ask. “Besides me.”

“I see people practically every day,” he says. “The last living one before you was Val. Before her, it was Lauren.”

“Lauren?”

“My girlfriend.” He looks away. “She’s dead, too.”

I don’t know what to say. So I say, “The plague sucks.”

“It wasn’t the plague,” he says. “Well, she had it, but it wasn’t the plague that killed her. She did that herself, before it could.”

He’s standing awkwardly beside the bed. Doesn’t want to leave, doesn’t have an excuse to stay.

“I just couldn’t help but notice how nice…” No, not a good intro. “I guess it’s hard, when it’s just you, to really care about…” Nuh-uh.

“Care about what?” he asks. “One person when almost every person is gone?”

“I wasn’t talking about me.” And then I give up trying to come up with a polite way to say it. “You take a lot of pride in how you look.”

“It isn’t pride.”

“I wasn’t accusing you of being stuck-up—”

“I know; you’re thinking what’s the point now?”

Well, actually, I was hoping the point was me . But I don’t say anything.

“I’m not sure,” he says. “But it’s something I can control. It gives structure to my day. It makes me feel more…” He shrugs. “More human, I guess.”

“And you need help with that? Feeling human?”

He looks at me funny, then gives me something to think about for a long time after he leaves:

“Don’t you ?”

HE’S GONE MOST of the nights. During the days he waits on me hand and foot, so I don’t know when the guy sleeps. By the second week, I was about to go nuts cooped up in the little upstairs bedroom, and on a day when the temperature climbed above freezing, he helped me into some of Val’s clothes, averting his eyes at the appropriate moments, and carried me downstairs to sit on the front porch, throwing a big wool blanket over my lap. He left me there and came back with two steaming mugs of hot chocolate. I can’t say much about the view. Brown, lifeless, undulating earth, bare trees, a gray, featureless sky. But the cold air felt good against my cheeks, and the hot chocolate was the perfect temperature.

We don’t talk about the Others. We talk about our lives before the Others. He was going to study engineering at Kent State after graduating. He had offered to stay on the farm for a couple years, but his father insisted that he go to college. He had known Lauren since the fourth grade, started dating her in their sophomore year. There was talk of marriage. He noticed I got quiet when Lauren came up. Like I said, Evan is a noticer.

“How about you?” he asked. “Did you have a boyfriend?”

“No. Well, kind of. His name was Ben Parish. I guess you could say he had this thing for me. We dated a couple of times. You know, casually.”

I wonder what made me lie to him. He doesn’t know Ben Parish from a hole in the ground. Which is kind of the same way Ben knew me . I swirled the remains of my hot chocolate and avoided his eyes.

The next morning he showed up at my bedside with a crutch carved from a single piece of wood. Sanded to a glossy finish, lightweight, the perfect height. I took one look at it and demanded that he name three things he isn’t good at.

“Roller skating, singing, and talking to girls.”

“You left out stalking,” I told him as he helped me out of the bed. “I can always tell when you’re lurking around corners.”

“You only asked for three.”

I’m not going to lie: My rehab sucked. Every time I put weight on my leg, pain shot up the left side of my body, my knee buckled, and the only things that kept me from falling flat on my ass were Evan’s strong arms.

But I kept at it during that long day and the long days that followed. I was determined to get strong. Stronger than before the Silencer cut me down and abandoned me to die. Stronger than I was in my little hideout in the woods, rolled up in my sleeping bag, feeling sorry for myself while Sammy was suffering God knows what. Stronger than the days at Camp Ashpit, where I walked around with a huge chip on my shoulder, angry at the world for being what the world was, for what it had always been: a dangerous place that our human noise had made seem a whole lot safer.

Three hours of rehab in the morning. Thirty-minute break for lunch. Then three more hours of rehab in the afternoon. Working on rebuilding my muscles until I felt them melt into a sweaty, jellylike mass.

But I still wasn’t done for the day. I asked Evan what happened to my Luger. I had to get over my fear of guns. And my accuracy sucked. He showed me the proper grip, how to use the sight. He set up empty gallon-size paint cans on the fence posts for targets, replacing those with smaller cans as my aim improved. I ask him to take me hunting with him—I need to get used to hitting a moving, breathing target—but he refuses. I’m still pretty weak, I can’t even run yet, and what happens if a Silencer spots us?