“Human breath isn’t the only source of CO2,” I pointed out to the National Merit Finalist.
“Coke!” Dumbo fairly shouted.
“Good luck finding one of those,” Ben said. It was true. Along with anything alcoholic, soft drinks were one of the first casualties of the invasion.
“A can or a bottle, yes,” Evan said. “Cassie, didn’t you tell me there was a diner next door?”
“The CO2 canisters for the fountain drinks,” I started.
“Are probably still there,” he finished.
“Attach the bomb to the canister . . .”
“Rig the canister to dispense the CO2 . . .”
“A slow leak . . .”
“In a confined space . . .”
“The elevator!” we said in unison.
“Wow,” Ben breathed. “Brilliant. But I’m a little unclear on how this solves the problem.”
“They’ll think we’re dead, Zombie,” Sam said. The five-year-old understood, but he lacked Ben’s burden of experience in outwitting Vosch and company.
“Then they check it out, they find no bodies, they know,” Ben said.
“But it will buy us time,” Evan pointed out. “And my guess is by the time they realize the truth, it’ll be too late.”
“Because obviously we’re just too darn clever for them?” Ben asked.
Evan smiled grimly. “Because we’re going to the last place they’d think to look.”
THERE WAS NO TIME for more debate; we had to pull the trigger on Operation Early Checkout before the 5th Wave pulled the trigger on us. Ben and Poundcake left to fetch a CO2 canister from the diner. Dumbo took hall patrol. I told Sam he had to watch Megan, her being a pal from the old days on the school bus. He asked for the gun back. I reminded him that having the gun didn’t help so much the last time: He’d emptied the magazine without even nicking the target. I tried to give him Bear. He rolled his eyes. Bear was so six months ago.
Then Evan and I were alone. Just him, me, and a little green bomb made three.
“Spill it,” I ordered him.
“Spill what?” Eyes all big and innocent as Bear’s.
“Your guts, Walker. You’re holding back.”
“Why do you—?”
“Because that’s your style. Your modus operandi. Like an iceberg, three-quarters under the surface, but there’s no way I’m letting you turn this hotel into the Titanic.”
He sighed, avoiding my glare. “Pen and paper?”
“What? Time for a tender love poem?” That was his style, too: Every time I edged too close to something, he deflected by telling me how much he loved me or how I saved him or some other swoony, pseudo-profound observation about the nature of my magnificence. But I grabbed the pad and pen from the desk and handed them over because, at the end of the day, who minds getting a tender love poem?
Instead he drew a map.
“Single-story, white—or used to be white—wood frame, I don’t remember the address, but it’s right on Highway 68. Next to a service station. Has one of those old metal signs hanging out front, Havoline Oil or something like that.”
He tore off the sheet and pressed it into my hand.
“And why is this the last place they’d look for us?” I was falling for the deflecting technique again, not that Havoline Oil had anything cloyingly poetical about it. “And why are you drawing me a map when you’re coming with us?”
“In case something happens.”
“To you. What if something happens to both of us?”
“You’re right. I’ll make five more.”
He started on the next one. I watched for two seconds, then grabbed the pad out of his hand and threw it at his head.
“You son of a bitch. I know what you’re doing.”
“I was drawing a map, Cassie.”
“Rigging a detonator from a soda fountain Mission: Impossible style, really? While we all run like hell for the Havoline sign with you in the lead on your broken ankle and stabbed leg, sporting a hundred-and-six-degree temperature . . .”
“If I had a hundred-and-six-degree temperature, I’d be dead,” he pointed out.
“No, and you want to know why? Because dead people have no temperature!”
He was nodding thoughtfully. “God, I’ve missed you.”
“There! There it is, right there! Just like the Walker homestead, just like Camp Ashpit, just like Vosch’s death camp. Whenever I’ve got you cornered . . .”
“You had me cornered the minute I laid—”
“Stop it.”
He stopped. I sat on the bed next to him. Maybe I was going about this all wrong. You catch more flies with honey, my grandmother always said. The problem was that womanly wiles weren’t something I carried in my wheelhouse. I took his hand. I looked deeply into his eyes. I considered unbuttoning my shirt a bit, but decided he might see through that little ploy. Not that my ploys were that little.
“I’m not letting you pull another Camp Haven on me,” I said, adding what I hoped to be an alluring purr to the timbre. “That isn’t going to happen. You’re coming with us. Poundcake and Dumbo can carry you.”
He reached up with his other hand and touched my cheek. I knew that touch. I’d missed it. “I know,” he said. The expression in his chocolatey (gah) eyes was infinitely sad. I knew that look, too. I’d seen it before, in the woods when he confessed who he really was. “But you don’t know everything. You don’t know about Grace.”
“Grace,” I echoed, pushing his hand from my cheek, forgetting all about the honey. I liked his touch too much, I decided. I needed to work on not liking it so much. And also work on not liking the way he looked at me as if I were the last person on Earth, which I actually thought I was before he found me. That’s a terrible thing, an awful burden to put on someone. You make your whole existence dependent on another human being and you’re asking for a world of trouble. Think of every tragic love story ever written. And I didn’t want to play Juliet to anybody’s Romeo, not if I could help it. Even if the only candidate available was willing to die for me and sitting right beside me holding my hand and looking deeply into my eyes with the not-so-gah-now eyes the color of melted chocolate. Plus being practically naked under those covers and possessing the body of a Hollister dude . . . but I’m not getting into all that.
“Grace again. You kept mentioning grace after I shot you,” I told him.
“You don’t know Grace.”
Well, that stung. I never knew he was so religious—or judgmental. The two usually go hand in hand, still . . .
“Cassie, I have to tell you something.”
“You’re a Baptist?”
“That day on the highway after I—let you get away, I was very afraid. I didn’t understand what happened, why I couldn’t . . . do what I came to do. Do what I was born to do. It didn’t make sense to me. And in a lot of ways, it still doesn’t make sense. You think you know yourself. You think you know the person you see in the mirror. I found you, but in finding you, I lost myself. Nothing was clear anymore. Nothing was simple.”
I nodded. “I remember that. I remember simple.”
“In the beginning, after I brought you back, I really didn’t know if you were going to make it. And I would sit there with you and I’d think, Maybe she shouldn’t.”
“Gee, Evan. That’s so romantic.”
“I knew what was coming,” he said, and that sure was something clear and simple. He grabbed both my hands and pulled me close, and I fell a thousand miles into those damn eyes, which is why the honey technique doesn’t fit me: I’m more the fly when I’m around him. “I know what’s coming, Cassie, and until now I thought the dead were the lucky ones. But I see it now. I see it.”