“You are the human clay,” Vosch whispers fiercely in my ear. “And I am Michelangelo. I am the master builder, and you will be my masterpiece.” Pale blue fire in his eyes, burning to the bottom of my soul. “God doesn’t call the equipped, son. God equips the called. And you have been called.”
He leaves me with a promise. The words burn so hot in my mind, the promise follows me into the deepest hours of the night and into the days that follow.
I will teach you to love death. I will empty you of grief and guilt and self-pity and fill you up with hate and cunning and the spirit of vengeance. I will make my final stand here, Benjamin Thomas Parish.
Slapping my chest over and over until my skin burns, my heart on fire. And you will be my battlefield.
31
IT SHOULD have been easy. All he had to do was wait.
He was very good at waiting. He could crouch for hours, motionless, silent, he and his rifle one body, one mind, the line fuzzy between where he ended and the weapon began. Even the fired bullet seemed connected to him, bound by an invisible cord to his heart, until the bullet wedded bone.
The first shot dropped her, and he quickly fired again, missing entirely. A third shot as she dived to the ground beside the car, and the back window of the Buick exploded in a cloud of pulverized shatterproof glass.
She’d gone under the car. Her only option, really, which left him two: wait for her to come out or leave his position in the woods bordering the highway and end it. The option with the least risk was staying put. If she crawled out, he would kill her. If she didn’t, time would.
He reloaded slowly, with the deliberateness of someone who knows he has all the time in the world. After days of stalking her, he guessed she wasn’t going anywhere. She was too smart for that. Three shots had failed to take her down, but she understood the odds of a fourth missing. What had she written in her diary?
In the end it wouldn’t be the lucky ones left standing.
She would play the odds. Crawling out had zero chance of success. She couldn’t run, and even if she could, she didn’t know in which direction safety lay. Her only hope was for him to abandon his hiding place and force the issue. Then anything was possible. She might even get lucky and shoot him first.
If there was a confrontation, he didn’t doubt she would refuse to go down quietly. He had seen what she did to the soldier in the convenience store. She may have been terrified at the time, and killing him may have bothered her afterward, but her fear and guilt didn’t stop her from filling his body with lead. Fear didn’t paralyze Cassie Sullivan, like it did some humans. Fear crystallized her reason, hardened her will, clarified her options. Fear would keep her under the car, not because she was afraid of coming out, but because staying there was her only hope of staying alive.
So he would wait. He had hours before nightfall. By then, she would have either bled to death or be so weak from blood loss and dehydration that finishing her would be easy.
Finishing her. Finishing Cassie. Not Cassie for Cassandra. Or Cassie for Cassidy. Cassie for Cassiopeia, the girl in the woods who slept with a teddy bear in one hand and a rifle in the other. The girl with the strawberry blond curls who stood a little over five feet four in her bare feet, so young-looking he was surprised to learn she was sixteen. The girl who sobbed in the pitch black of the deep woods, terrified one moment, defiant the next, wondering if she was the last person on Earth, while he, the hunter, hunkered a dozen feet away, listening to her cry until exhaustion carried her down into a restless sleep. The perfect time to slip silently into her camp, put the gun to her head, and finish her. Because that’s what he did. That’s what he was: a finisher.
He had been finishing humans since the advent of the plague. For four years now, since he was fourteen, when he awakened inside the human body chosen for him, he had known what he was. Finisher. Hunter. Assassin. The name didn’t matter. Cassie’s name for him, Silencer, was as good as any. It described his purpose: to snuff out the human noise.
But he didn’t that night. Or the nights that followed. And each night, creeping a little closer to the tent, inching his way over the woodland blanket of decaying leaves and moist loamy soil until his shadow rose in the narrow opening of the tent and fell over her, and the tent was filled with her smell, and there would be the sleeping girl clutching the teddy bear and the hunter holding his gun, one dreaming of the life that was taken from her, the other thinking of the life he’d take. The girl sleeping and the finisher, willing himself to finish her.
Why didn’t he finish her?
Why couldn’t he finish her?
He told himself it was unwise. She couldn’t stay in these woods indefinitely. He could use her to lead him to others of her kind. Humans are social animals. They cluster like bees. The attacks relied on this critical adaptation. The evolutionary imperative that drove them to live in groups was the opportunity to kill them by the billions. What was the saying? Strength in numbers.
And then he found the notebooks and discovered there was no plan, no real goal except to survive to the next day. She had nowhere to go and no one left to go to. She was alone. Or thought she was.
He didn’t return to her camp that night. He waited until the afternoon of the following day, not telling himself he was giving her time to pack up and leave. Not letting himself think about her silent, desperate cry: Sometimes I think I might be the last human on Earth.
Now, as the last human’s last minutes spun out beneath the car on the highway, the tension in his shoulders began to fade. She wasn’t going anywhere. He lowered the rifle and squatted at the base of the tree, rolling his head from side to side to ease the stiffness in his neck. He was tired. Hadn’t been sleeping well lately. Or eating. He’d dropped some pounds since the 4th Wave rolled out. He wasn’t too concerned. They’d anticipated some psychological and physical blowback at the beginning of the 4th Wave. The first kill would be the hardest, but the next would be easier, and the one after that easier still, because it’s true: Even the most sensitive person can get used to even the most insensitive thing.
Cruelty isn’t a personality trait. Cruelty is a habit.
He pushed that thought away. To call what he was doing cruel implied he had a choice. Choosing between your kind and another species wasn’t cruel. It was necessary. Not easy, especially when you’ve lived the last four years of your life pretending to be no different from them, but necessary.
Which raised the troubling question: Why didn’t he finish her that first day? When he heard the shots inside the convenience store and followed her back to the campsite, why didn’t he finish her then, while she lay crying in the dark?
He could explain away the three missed shots on the highway. Fatigue, lack of sleep, the shock of seeing her again. He had assumed she would head north, if she ever left her camp at all, not head back south. He had felt a sudden rush of adrenaline, as if he’d turned a street corner and run into a long-lost friend. That must have been what threw off that first shot. The second and third he could chalk up to luck—her luck, not his.
But what about all those days that he followed her, sneaking into her camp while she was away foraging, doing a bit of foraging himself through her belongings, including the diary in which she had written, Sometimes in my tent, late at night, I think I can hear the stars scraping against the sky? What about those predawn mornings when he slid silently through the woods to where she slept, determined to finish it this time, to do what he had prepared all his life to do? She wasn’t his first kill. She wouldn’t be his last.
It should have been easy.
He rubbed his slick palms against his thighs. It was cool in the trees, but he was dripping with sweat. He scrubbed his sleeve across his eyes. The wind on the highway: a lonely sound. A squirrel scampered down the tree next to him, unconcerned by his presence. Below him, the highway disappeared over the horizon in both directions, and nothing moved except the trash and the grass bowing in the lonely wind. The buzzards had found the three bodies lying in the median; three fat birds waddled in for a closer look while the rest of the flock circled in the updrafts high overhead. The buzzards and other scavengers were enjoying a population explosion. Buzzards, crows, feral cats, packs of hungry dogs. He’d stumbled upon more than one desiccated corpse that had clearly been someone’s dinner.
Buzzards. Crows. Aunt Millie’s tabby. Uncle Herman’s Chihuahua. Blowflies and other insects. Worms. Time and the elements clean up the rest. If she didn’t come out, Cassie would die beneath the car. Within minutes of her last breath, the first fly would arrive to lay eggs in her.
He pushed the distasteful image away. It was a human thought. It had been only four years since his Awakening, and he still fought against seeing the world through human eyes. On the day of his Awakening, when he saw the face of his human mother for the first time, he burst into tears: He had never seen anything so beautiful—or so ugly.
It had been a painful integration for him. Not seamless or quick, like some Awakenings he’d heard of. He supposed his had been more difficult than others because the childhood of his host body had been a happy one. A well-adjusted, healthy human psyche was the hardest to absorb. It had been—still was—a daily struggle. His host body wasn’t something apart from him that he manipulated like a puppet on a string. It was him. The eyes he used to see the world, they were his eyes. This brain he used to interpret, analyze, sense, and remember the world, it was his brain, wired by thousands of years of evolution. Human evolution. He wasn’t trapped inside it and didn’t ride about in it, guiding it like a jockey on a horse. He was this human body, and it was him. And if something should happen to it—if, for example, it died—he would perish with it.