I looked at her. She looked back. Neither of us said anything. Then Zombie said, “Well, we have to take shelter somewhere, Ringer.” He hadn’t found the brochure for the caverns yet. “And we should give him the benefit of the doubt.”
“The benefit of what doubt?” I asked.
“That he is who he says he is.” Zombie looked at Sullivan, who was still glaring at me. “That he’ll keep his promise.”
“He promised he’d find me,” she explained.
“I saw the cargo plane,” I said. “I didn’t see an escape pod.”
Beneath the freckles, Sullivan was blushing. “Just because you didn’t see one . . .”
I turned to Zombie. “This doesn’t make sense. A being thousands of years more advanced than us turns on its own kind—for what?”
“I wasn’t filled in on the why part,” Zombie said, half smiling.
“His whole story is strange,” I said. “Pure consciousness occupying a human body—if they don’t need bodies, they don’t need a planet.”
“Maybe they need the planet for something else.” Zombie was trying hard.
“Like what? Raising livestock? A vacation getaway?” Something else was bothering me, a nagging little voice that said, Something doesn’t add up. But I couldn’t pin down what that something was. Every time I chased after it, it skittered away.
“There wasn’t time to go into all the details,” Sullivan snapped. “I was sort of focused on rescuing my baby brother from a death camp.”
I let it go. Her head looked like it was about to explode.
I can make out that same head now on my last look back, silhouetted in the second-story window of the hotel, and that’s bad, really bad: She’s an easy target for a sniper. The next Silencer Sullivan encounters might not be as love struck as the first one.
I duck into the thin line of trees that borders the road. Stiff with ice, the autumn ruins crunch beneath my boots. Leaves curled up like fists, trash and human bones scattered by scavengers. The cold wind carries the faint odor of smoke. The world will burn for a hundred years. Fire will consume the things we made from wood and plastic and rubber and cloth, then water and wind and time will chew the stone and steel into dust. How baffling it is that we imagined cities incinerated by alien bombs and death rays when all they needed was Mother Nature and time.
And human bodies, according to Sullivan, despite the fact that, also according to Sullivan, they don’t need bodies.
A virtual existence doesn’t require a physical planet.
When I’d first said that, Sullivan wouldn’t listen and Zombie acted like it didn’t matter. For whatever reason, he said, the bottom line is they want all of us dead. Everything else is just noise.
Maybe. But I don’t think so.
Because of the rats.
I forgot to tell Zombie about the rats.
3
BY SUNRISE, I reach the southern outskirts of Urbana. Halfway there, right on schedule.
Clouds have rolled in from the north; the sun rises beneath the canopy and paints its underbelly a glistening maroon. I’ll hole up in the trees until nightfall, then hit the open fields to the west of the city and pray the cloud cover hangs around for a while, at least until I pick up the highway again on the other side. Going around Urbana adds a few miles, but the only thing riskier than navigating a town during the day is trying it at night.
And it’s all about risk.
Mist rises from the frozen ground. The cold is intense. It squeezes my cheeks, makes my chest ache with each breath. I feel the ancient yearning for fire embedded deep in my genes. The taming of fire was our first great leap: Fire protected us, kept us warm, transformed our brains by changing our diets from nuts and berries to protein-rich meat. Now fire is another weapon in our enemy’s arsenal. As deep winter sets in, we’re crushed between two unacceptable risks: freezing to death or alerting the enemy to our location.
Sitting with my back against a tree, I pull out the brochure. Ohio’s Most Colorful Caverns! Zombie’s right. We won’t survive till spring without shelter, and the caves are our best—maybe only—bet. Maybe they’ve been taken or destroyed by the enemy. Maybe they’re occupied by survivors who will shoot strangers on sight. But every day we stay at that hotel, the risk grows tenfold.
We don’t have an alternative if the caves don’t pan out. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and the idea of fighting is ludicrous. The clock winds down.
When I pointed this out to him, Zombie told me I think too much. He was smiling. Then he stopped smiling and said, “Don’t let ’em get inside your head.” As if this were a football game and I needed a halftime pep talk. Ignore the fifty-six to nothing score. Play for pride! It’s moments like those that make me want to slap him, not that slapping him would do any good, but it would make me feel better.
The breeze dies. There’s an expectant hush in the air, the stillness before a storm. If it snows, we’ll be trapped. Me in these woods. Zombie in the hotel. I’m still twenty or so miles from the caverns—should I risk the open fields by day or risk the snow holding off at least till nightfall?
Back to the R word. It’s all about risk. Not just ours. Theirs, too: embedding themselves in human bodies, establishing death camps, training kids to finish the genocide, all of it crazy risky, stupid risky. Like Evan Walker, discordant, illogical, and just damn strange. The opening attacks were brutal in their efficiency, wiping out 98 percent of us, and even the 4th Wave made some sense: It’s hard to muster a meaningful resistance if you can’t trust one another. But after that, their brilliant strategy starts to unravel. Ten thousand years to plan the eradication of humans from Earth and this is the best they can come up with? That’s the question I can’t stop turning over and over in my head, and haven’t been able to, since Teacup and the night of the rats.