How far? Ten miles? Twenty? He wouldn’t be able to maintain this pace, but as long as he kept moving, he should be close to the hotel by dawn the next day.
He could hear the firefight behind him. Sporadic pops, not continuous fire, which meant that Grace was being methodical. The soldiers would be wearing the eyepieces, evening the playing field a bit. Not much, but a bit.
He abandoned any attempt at stealth and hit the highway, loping down the center of the road, a solitary figure under the immensity of a leaden sky. A murder of crows a thousand strong whipped and wheeled over him, heading north. He kept moving, grunting with pain, every stride a lesson, every jolting footfall a reminder. His temperature soared, his lungs burned, his heart slammed in his chest. The friction from the clothes tore open the delicate scabs and soon he was bleeding. Blood plastered his shirt to his back, soaked through the jeans. He was pushing it, he knew. The system installed to maintain his life past all human endurance could crash.
He collapsed when the sun did beneath the dome of the sky, a slow-motion stumbling kind of fall, hitting shoulder first and rolling to the edge of the road, where he came to rest flat on his back, arms spread wide, numb from the waist down, shaking uncontrollably, burning hot in the bitter air. Darkness rolled over the face of the Earth, and Evan Walker tumbled down to the lightless bottom, to a hidden room that danced in light and her face the source of that light, and he had no explanation for it, how her face illumed the lightless place inside. You’re mad. You’ve gone insane. He’d thought so, too. He fought to keep her alive while every night he left her to kill the rest. Why should one live though the world itself will perish? She illumined the lightless—her life the lamp, the last star in a dying universe.
I am humanity, she had written. Self-centered, stubborn, sentimental, childish, vain. I am humanity. Cynical, na?ve, kind, cruel, soft as down, hard as tungsten steel.
He must get up. If he can’t, the light will go out. The world will be consumed by the crushing dark. But the totality of the atmosphere pushed him down and held him under, five quadrillion tons of bone-breaking force.
The system had crashed. Taxed past its limits, the alien technology installed inside his human body when he was thirteen had shut down. There was nothing to sustain or protect him now. Burned and broken, his human body was no different from his former prey’s. Fragile. Delicate. Vulnerable. Alone.
He was not one of them. He was completely one of them. Wholly Other. Fully human.
He rolled onto his side. His back spasmed. Blood rushed into his mouth. He spat it out.
Onto his stomach. Then knees. Then hands. His elbows quivered, his wrists threatened to buckle under his own weight. Self-centered, stubborn, sentimental, childish, vain. I am humanity. Cynical, na?ve, kind, cruel, soft as down, hard as tungsten steel.
I am humanity.
He crawled.
I am humanity.
He fell.
I am humanity.
He got up.
28
A LIFETIME LATER, from his hiding place beneath the highway overpass, Evan watched the dark-haired girl sprint across the hotel parking lot, cross the interstate access ramp, trot a few hundred yards north on Highway 68, then pause beside an SUV to look back at the building. He followed her gaze to a second-story window, where a shadow flitted for an instant, then was gone.
Mayfly.
The dark-haired girl vanished into the trees bordering the highway. Why she had left and where she was going were unknown. Perhaps the group was splitting up—it would increase the chance of survival a little—or perhaps she was scouting a more secure hiding place to ride out the winter. Whichever the case, he had the sense he’d found them just in time.
The dark-haired girl was one, leaving at least four inside, the ones he had seen manning the windows. He did not know if any of them had survived the explosion. He wasn’t even sure it had been Cassie’s shadow in the window.
Not that it mattered. He’d made a promise. He had to go in.
He couldn’t approach openly. The situation was complicated by too many unknowns. What if it wasn’t Cassie but a squad of 5th Wave soldiers cut off when the base blew—like the squad he’d left in Grace’s care? He’d be dead before he crossed a dozen feet. The risk was nearly as great even if it was Cassie and a group of survivors: They might drop him before they realized who he was.