The 5th Wave (The Fifth Wave #1)(42)

“They took them. In school buses.”

“School buses…?” He’s shaking his head. Aliens in school buses? He looks like he’s about to smile. I must have looked a little too long at his lips, because he rubs them self-consciously with the back of his hand. “Took them where?”

“I don’t know. They told us Wright-Patterson, but—”

“Wright-Patterson. The air force base? I heard it was abandoned.”

“Well, I’m not sure you can trust anything they tell you. They are the enemy.” I swallow. My throat’s parched.

Evan Walker must be one of those people who notices everything, because he says, “You want something to drink?”

“I’m not thirsty,” I lie. Now, why did I lie about something like that? To show him how tough I am? Or to keep him in that chair because he’s the first person I’ve talked to in weeks, if you didn’t count the bear, which you shouldn’t.

“Why did they take the kids?” His eyes are big and round now, like Bear’s. It’s hard to decide his best feature. Those soft, chocolaty eyes or the lean jaw? Maybe the thick hair, the way it falls over his forehead when he leans toward me.

“I don’t know the real reason, but I figure it’s a very good one to them and a very bad one to us.”

“Do you think…?” He can’t finish the question—or won’t, to spare me having to answer it. He’s looking at Sam’s bear leaning on the pillow beside me.

“What? That my little brother’s dead? No. I think he’s alive. Mostly because it doesn’t make sense that they’d pull out the kids, then kill everybody else. They blew up the whole camp with some kind of green bomb—”

“Wait a minute,” he says, holding up one of his large hands. “A green bomb?”

“I’m not making this up.”

“Why green, though?”

“Because green is the color of money, grass, oak leaves, and alien bombs. How the hell would I know why it was green?”

He’s laughing. A quiet, held-in kind of laugh. When he smiles, the right side of his mouth goes slightly higher than the left. Then I’m like, Cassie, why are you staring at his mouth anyway?

Somehow the fact that I was rescued by a very good-looking guy with a lopsided grin and large, strong hands is the most unnerving thing that has happened to me since the Others arrived.

Thinking about what happened at the camp is giving me the heebie-jeebies, so I decide to change the subject. I peer down at the quilt covering me. It looks homemade. The image of an old woman sewing it flashes through my mind and, for some reason, I suddenly feel like crying.

“How long have I been here?” I ask weakly.

“It’ll be a week tomorrow.”

“Did you have to cut…?” I don’t know how to put the question.

Thankfully, I don’t have to. “Amputate? No. The bullet just missed your knee, so I think you’ll be able to walk, but there could be nerve damage.”

“Oh,” I said. “I’m getting used to that.”

34

HE LEAVES ME for a little while and returns with some clear broth, not chicken- or beef-based, but some kind of meat, deer maybe, and while I clutch the edges of the quilt he helps me sit up so I can sip, holding the warm cup in both hands. He’s staring at me, not a creeper stare, but the way you look at a sick person, feeling a little sick yourself and not knowing how to make it better. Or maybe, I think, it is a creeper stare and the concerned look is just a clever cover. Are pervs only pervs if you don’t find them attractive? I called Crisco a sicko for trying to give me a corpse’s jewelry, and he said I wouldn’t think that if he were Ben Parish–hot.

Remembering Crisco kills my appetite. Evan sees me staring at the cup in my lap and gently pulls it from my hands and places it on the table.

“I could have done that,” I say, more sharply than I meant to.

“Tell me about these soldiers,” he says. “How do you know they weren’t…human?”

I tell him about them showing up not long after the drones, the way they loaded up the kids, then gathered everybody into the barracks and mowed them down. But the clincher was the Eye. Clearly extraterrestrial.

“They’re human,” he decides after I’m done. “They must be working with the visitors.”

“Oh God, please don’t call them that.” I hate that name for them. The talking heads used it before the 1st Wave—all the YouTubers, everyone in the Twitterverse, even the president during news briefings.

“What should I call them?” he asks. He’s smiling. I get the feeling he’d call them turnips if I wanted him to.

“Dad and I called them the Others, as in not us, not human.”

“That’s what I mean,” he says, nodding seriously. “The odds of their looking exactly like us are astronomically slim.”

He sounds just like my dad on one of his speculative rants, and suddenly I’m annoyed, I’m not sure why.

“Well, that’s terrific, isn’t it? A two-front war. Us-versus-them and us-versus-us-and-them.”

He shakes his head ruefully. “It wouldn’t be the first time people have changed sides once the victor is obvious.”

“So the traitors grab the kids out of the camp because they’re willing to help wipe out the human race, but they draw the line at anyone under eighteen?”