“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?”

He shrugs. “What do you think?”

“I think we’re seriously screwed when the men with guns decide to help the bad guys.”

“I could be wrong,” he says, but he doesn’t sound like he thinks he is. “Maybe they are visi—Others, I don’t know, disguised as humans, or maybe even some kind of clones…”

I’m nodding. I’ve heard this before, too, during one of Dad’s endless ruminations about what the Others might look like.

It’s not a question of why couldn’t they, but why wouldn’t they? We’ve known about their existence for five months. They must have known about ours for years. Hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Plenty of time to extract DNA and “grow” as many copies as they needed. In fact, they might have to wage the ground war with copies of us. In a thousand ways, our planet might not be viable for their bodies. Remember War of the Worlds?

Maybe that’s the source of my current snippiness. Evan is going all-out Oliver Sullivan on me. And that puts Oliver Sullivan dying in the dirt right in front of me when all I want to do is look away.

“Or maybe they’re like cyborgs, Terminators,” I say, only half joking. I’ve seen a dead one up close, the soldier I shot point-blank at the ash pit. I didn’t check his pulse or anything, but he sure seemed dead to me, and the blood looked real enough.

Remembering the camp and what happened there never fails to freak me, so I start to freak.

“We can’t stay here,” I say urgently.

He looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “What do you mean?”

“They’ll find us!” I grab the kerosene lamp, yank off the glass top, and blow hard at the dancing flame. It hisses at me, stays lit. He pulls the glass out of my hand and slips it back over the base of the lamp.

“It’s thirty-seven degrees outside, and we’re miles from the nearest shelter,” he says. “If you burn down the house, we’re toast.” Toast? Maybe that’s an attempt at humor, but he isn’t smiling. “Besides, you’re not well enough to travel. Not for another three or four weeks, at least.”

Three or four weeks? Who does this teenage version of the Brawny paper-towel guy think he’s kidding? We won’t last three days with lights shining through the windows and smoke curling from the chimney.

He’s picked up on my growing distress. “Okay,” he says with a sigh. He extinguishes the lamp, and the room plunges into darkness. Can’t see him, can’t see anything. I can smell him, though, a mixture of wood smoke and something like baby powder, and after a few more minutes, I can feel his body displacing the air a few inches away from mine.

“Miles away from the nearest shelter?” I ask. “Where the hell do you live, Evan?”

“My family’s farm. About sixty miles from Cincinnati.”

“How far from Wright-Patterson?”

“I don’t know. Seventy, eighty miles? Why?”

“I told you. They took my baby brother.”

“You said that’s where they said they were taking him.”

Our voices, wrapping around each other’s, entwining, and then tugging free, in the pitch black.

“Well, I have to start somewhere,” I say.

“And if he isn’t there?”

“Then I go somewhere else.” I made a promise. That damned bear will never forgive me if I don’t keep it.

I can smell his breath. Chocolate. Chocolate! My mouth starts to water. I can actually feel my saliva glands pumping. I haven’t had solid food in weeks, and what does he bring me? Some greasy mystery meat–based broth. He’s been holding out on me, this farm boy bastard.

“You realize there’s a lot more of them than you, right?” he asks.

“And your point is?”

He doesn’t answer. So I say, “Do you believe in God, Evan?”

“Sure I do.”

“I don’t. I mean, I don’t know. I did before the Others came. Or thought I did, when I thought about it at all. And then they came and…” I have to stop for a second to collect myself. “Maybe there’s a God. Sammy thinks there is. But he also thinks there’s a Santa Claus. Still, every night I said his prayer with him, and it didn’t have anything to do with me. It was about Sammy and what he believed, and if you could have seen him take that fake soldier’s hand and follow him onto that bus…”

I’m losing it, and it doesn’t matter to me much. Crying is always easier in the dark. Suddenly my cold hand is blanketed by Evan’s warmer one, and his palm is as soft and smooth as the pillowcase beneath my cheek.

“It kills me,” I sob. “The way he trusted. Like the way we trusted before they came and blew the whole goddamned world apart. Trusted that when it got dark there would be light. Trusted that when you wanted a fucking strawberry Frappuccino you could plop your ass in the car, drive down the street, and get yourself a fucking strawberry Frappuccino! Trusted…”

His other hand finds my cheek, and he wipes away my tears with his thumb. The chocolate scent overwhelms me as he bends over and whispers in my ear, “No, Cassie. No, no, no.”

I throw my arm around his neck and press his dry cheek against my wet one. I’m shaking like an epileptic, and for the first time I can feel the weight of the quilts on the top of my toes because the blinding dark sharpens your other senses.

I’m a bubbling stew of random thoughts and feelings. I’m worried my hair might smell. I want some chocolate. This guy holding me—well, it’s more like I was holding him—has seen me in all my naked glory. What did he think about my body? What did I think about my body? Does God really care about promises? Do I really care about God? Are miracles something like the Red Sea parting or more like Evan Walker finding me locked in a block of ice in a wilderness of white?

“Cassie, it’s going to be okay,” he whispers into my ear, chocolate breath.

When I wake up the next morning, there’s a Hershey’s Kiss sitting on the table beside me.

35

HE LEAVES THE OLD FARMHOUSE every night to patrol the grounds and to hunt. He tells me he has plenty of dry goods and his mom was a devoted preserver and canner, but he likes fresh meat. So he leaves me to find edible creatures to kill, and on the fourth day he comes into the room with an honest-to-God hamburger on a hot, homemade bun and a side of roasted potatoes. It’s the first real food I’ve had since escaping Camp Ashpit. It’s also a freaking hamburger, which I haven’t tasted since the Arrival and which, I think I’ve pointed out, I was willing to kill for.

“Where’d you get the bread?” I ask midway through the burger, grease rolling down my chin. I haven’t had bread, either. It’s light and fluffy and slightly sweet.

He could give me any number of snarky replies, since there is only one way he could have gotten it. He doesn’t. “I baked it.”

After feeding me, he changes the dressing on my leg. I ask if I want to look. He says no, I most definitely do not want to look. I want to get out of bed, take a real bath, be like a person again. He says it’s too soon. I tell him I want to wash and comb out my hair. Too soon, he insists. I tell him if he won’t help me I’m going to smash the kerosene lamp over his head. So he sets a kitchen chair in the middle of the claw-foot tub in the little bathroom down the hall with its peeling flowery wallpaper and carries me to it, plops me down, leaves, and comes back with a big metal tub filled with steaming water.