And then Evan Walker kisses me.
Holding my hand against his chest, his other hand sliding across my neck, his touch feathery soft, sending a shiver that travels down my spine into my legs, which are having a hard time keeping me upright. I can feel his heart slamming against my palm and I can smell his breath and feel the stubble on his upper lip, a sandpapery contrast to the softness of his lips, and Evan is looking at me and I’m looking back at him.
I pull back just enough to speak. “Don’t kiss me.”
He lifts me into his arms. I seem to float upward forever, like when I was a little girl and Daddy flung me into the air, feeling as if I’d just keep going up until I reached the edge of the galaxy.
He lays me on the bed. I say, right before he kisses me again, “If you kiss me again, I’m going to knee you in the balls.”
His hands are incredibly soft, like a cloud touching me.
“I won’t let you just…” He searches for the right word. “…fly away from me, Cassie Sullivan.”
He blows out the candle beside the bed.
I feel his kiss more intensely now, in the darkness of the room where his sister died. In the quiet of the house where his family died. In the stillness of the world where the life we knew before the Arrival died. He tastes my tears before I can feel them. Where there would be tears, his kiss.
“I didn’t save you,” he whispers, lips tickling my eyelashes. “You saved me.”
He repeats it over and over, until we fall asleep pressed against each other, his voice in my ear, my tears in his mouth.
“You saved me.”
37
CASSIE, through the smudged window, shrinking.
Cassie, on the road, holding Bear.
Lifting his arm to help him wave good-bye.
Good-bye, Sammy.
Good-bye, Bear.
The road dust boiling up from the big black wheels of the bus, and Cassie shrinking into the brown swirl.
Good-bye, Cassie.
Cassie and Bear getting smaller and smaller, and the hardness of the glass beneath his fingers.
Good-bye, Cassie. Good-bye, Bear.
Until the dust swallows them, and he’s alone on the crowded bus, no Mommy no Daddy no Cassie, and maybe he shouldn’t have left Bear, because Bear had been with him since before he could remember anything. There had always been Bear. But there had always been Mommy, too. Mommy and Nan-Nan and Grandpa and the rest of his family. And the kids from Ms. Neyman’s class and Ms. Neyman and the Majewskis and the nice checkout lady at Kroger who kept the strawberry suckers beneath her counter. They had always been there, too, like Bear, since before he could remember, and now they weren’t. Who had always been there wasn’t anymore, and Cassie said they weren’t coming back.
Not ever.
The glass remembers it when he takes his hand away. It holds the memory of his hand. Not like a picture, more like a fuzzy shadow, the way his mother’s face is fuzzy when he tries to remember it.
Except Daddy’s and Cassie’s, all the faces he’s known since he knew what faces were are fading. Every face is new now, every face a stranger’s face.
A soldier walks down the aisle toward him. He’s taken off his black mask. His face is round, his nose small and dotted with freckles. He doesn’t look much older than Cassie. He’s passing out bags of gummy fruit snacks and juice boxes. Dirty fingers claw for the treats. Some of the children haven’t had a meal in days. For some, the soldiers are the first adults they’ve seen since their parents died. Some kids, the quietest ones, were found along the outskirts of town, wandering among the piles of blackened, half-burned bodies, and they stare at everything and everyone as if everything and everyone were something they’ve never seen before. Others, like Sammy, were rescued from refugee camps or small bands of survivors in search of rescue, and their clothes aren’t quite as ragged and their faces not quite as thin and their eyes not quite as vacant as the quiet ones’, the ones found wandering among the piles of the dead.
The soldier reaches the back row. He’s wearing a white band on his sleeve with a big red cross on it.
“Hey, want a snack?” the soldier asks him.
The juice box and the chewy gooey treats in the shape of dinosaurs. The juice is cold. Cold. He hasn’t had a cold drink in forever.
The soldier slides into the seat beside him and stretches his long legs into the aisle. Sammy pushes the thin plastic straw into the juice box and sips, while his eyes fall to the still form of a girl huddled in the seat across from them. Her shorts are torn, her pink top is stained with soot, her shoes caked with mud. She is smiling in her sleep. A good dream.
“Do you know her?” the soldier asks Sammy.
Sammy shakes his head. She had not been in the refugee camp with him.
“Why do you have that big red cross?”
“I’m a medic. I help sick people.”
“Why did you take off your mask?”
“Don’t need it now,” the medic answers. He pops a handful of gummies into his mouth.
“Why not?”
“The plague’s back there.” The soldier jerks his thumb toward the back window, where the dust boiled up and Cassie shrunk to nothing, holding Bear.
“But Daddy said the plague is everywhere.”
The soldier shakes his head. “Not where we’re going,” he says.
“Where are we going?”
“Camp Haven.”
Against the grumbling engine and the whooshing wind through the open windows, it sounded like the soldier said Camp Heaven.
“Where?” Sammy asks.
“You’re going to love it.” The soldier pats his leg. “We’ve got it all fixed up for you.”
“For me?”
“For everyone.”
Cassie on the road, helping Bear wave good-bye.
“Then why didn’t you bring everyone?”
“We will.”
“When?”
“As soon as you guys are safe.” The soldier glances at the girl again. He stands up, pulls off his green jacket, and gently lets it fall over her.
“You’re the most important thing,” the soldier says, and his boyish face is set and serious. “You’re the future.”
The narrow dusty road becomes a wider paved road, and then the buses turn onto an even wider road. Their engines rev up to a guttural roar, and they shoot toward the sun on a highway cleared of wrecks and stalled cars. They’ve been dragged or pushed onto the roadsides to clear the way for the busloads of children.
The freckle-nosed medic comes down the aisle again, and this time he’s handing out bottles of water and telling them to close the windows because some of the children are cold and some are scared by the rush of the wind that sounds like a monster roaring. The air in the bus quickly grows stale and the temperature rises, making the children sleepy.
But Sam gave Bear to Cassie to keep her company, and he’s never slept without Bear, not ever, not since Bear came to him, anyway. He is tired, but he is also Bearless. The more he tries to forget Bear, the more he remembers him, the more he misses him, and the more he wishes he hadn’t left him behind.
The soldier offers him a bottle of water. He sees something is wrong, though Sammy smiles and pretends he doesn’t feel so empty and Bearless. The soldier sits beside him again, asks his name, and says his name is Parker.
“How much farther?” Sammy asks. It will be dark soon, and the dark is the worst time. Nobody told him, but he just knows that when they finally come it will be in the dark and it will be without warning, like the other waves, and there will be nothing you can do about it, it will just happen, like the TV winking out and the cars dying and the planes falling and the plague, the Pesky Ants, Cassie and Daddy called it, and his mommy wrapped in bloody sheets.
When the Others first came, his father told him the world had changed and nothing would be like before, and maybe they’d take him inside the mothership, maybe even take him on adventures in outer space. And Sammy couldn’t wait to go inside the mothership and blast off into space just like Luke Skywalker in his X-wing starfighter. It made every night feel like Christmas Eve. When morning came, he thought he would wake up and all the wonderful presents the Others had brought would be there.
But the only thing the Others brought was death.
They hadn’t come to give him anything. They had come to take everything away.
When would it—when would they—stop? Maybe never. Maybe the aliens wouldn’t stop until they had taken everything away, until the whole world was like Sammy, empty and alone and Bearless.
So he asks the soldier, “How much farther?”
“Not far at all,” the soldier called Parker answers. “You want me to stay here with you?”
“I’m not afraid,” Sammy says. You have to be brave now, Cassie told him the day his mother died. When he saw the empty bed and knew without asking that she was gone with Nan-Nan and all the others, the ones he knew and the ones he didn’t know, the ones they piled up and burned at the edge of town.
“You shouldn’t be,” the soldier says. “You’re perfectly safe now.”
That’s exactly what Daddy said on a night after the power died, after he boarded the windows and blocked off the doors, when the bad men with guns came out to steal things.
You’re perfectly safe.