“Shooter?” she echoes. Her gray hair is stuffed into a knit cap, but a few wispy strands have escaped and fall on either side of her pale face. She’s wearing black sweatpants, her upper half encased in several layers of sweaters. I step toward her, and she shrinks farther into the corner, clutching the spoon to her chest. Cat hair flits and dances in the smoky, golden light, and I sneeze.
“Bless you,” she says automatically.
“You had to hear it,” I tell her, meaning the shot that took down Dumbo. “You have to know he’s here.”
“There’s no one here,” she squeaks. “Just me and my babies. Please don’t hurt my babies!”
It takes me a second to understand she’s talking about the cats. I move around the room, along the narrow paths that wind through the stacks of old magazines, one eye on her, the other looking for weapons. There’re a hundred places to hide a gun in this clutter. I poke through the mound of blankets on the sofa. I check under the desk, pulling open a couple of drawers, then behind the plastic plant. A cat dashes between my legs, hissing. I weave my way over to her corner and order her to stand up.
“Are you going to kill me?” she whispers.
I should. I know I should. The risk is in letting her live. The shot that Dumbo took for me came from somewhere in this building. I sling the rifle over my shoulder, draw my sidearm, and order her up again. It’s a struggle for both of us—her physical battle to get her legs beneath her, my psychological one to resist the instinct to help her. Upright, she sways, hands to her chest, worrying with that damn spoon.
“Drop the spoon.”
“You want me to drop my spoon?”
“Drop it.”
“It’s just a spoon . . .”
“Drop the damn spoon!”
She drops the damn spoon. I tell her to face the wall and put her hands on top of her head. She swallows back a sob. I step up behind her, place one hand on top of hers—they’re cold as a corpse’s—and pat her down. Okay, Zombie, she’s clean. Now what? Time to fish or cut bait.
Maybe she didn’t hear the shot. Her hearing may be bad. She is an old lady, after all. Maybe the shooter knows she’s here but doesn’t bother with her because, after all, she’s an old cat lady, what threat can she really pose?
“Who else is here?” I say to the back of her head.
“No one, no one, I swear, no one. I haven’t seen a living soul in months. Just me and my babies. Just me and my babies . . . !”
“Turn around. Keep your hands on top of your head.”
She executes a one-eighty, and now I’m looking down into a pair of bright green eyes nearly lost in folds of withered skin. The mounds of clothes hide how thin she is, but you can see the signs of slow starvation in her face, the cheekbones poking out, the hollows at her temples, the eyes sunken and ringed in black. Her mouth hangs open a little—she has no teeth.
Oh Christ. The last human generation has been forged into killing machines by false hope and lies, and come spring, the 5th Wave will roll across the world, slaughtering everyone in its path, including the wounded boys who hide in coolers holding their crucifixes and old cat ladies clutching their wooden spoons.
Pull the trigger, Zombie. Everybody’s luck runs out. If you don’t kill her, someone else will.
I raise my pistol to the level of her eyes.
17
SHE FALLS TO her knees at my feet, and she raises her empty hands toward me, and she doesn’t say anything because there isn’t anything to say: She’s sure she’s going to die.
They trained me to do this, prepared me for it, emptied me and filled me up again with hate, but I’ve never shot anyone—not in all this time. Cassie Sullivan’s hands are bloodier than mine.
The first time’s the hardest, she told me. By the time I shot that last soldier at Camp Haven, I felt nothing. I can’t even remember what he looked like.
“My friend’s been shot.” My voice breaks. “Either you shot him or someone you know did. Play straight with me.”
“I don’t leave this room. I haven’t in weeks. It isn’t safe out there,” she whispers back. “I stay in here with my babies and wait . . .”
“Wait? Wait for what?”
She’s stalling. And I’m stalling, too. I don’t want to be wrong— or right. I don’t want to step over that line and be the person the Others have made me. I don’t want to kill another human being—innocent or not.
“The Lamb of God,” she answers. “He’s coming, you know. Any day now, and the wheat shall be separated from the chaff, the goats from the sheep, and he will come in his glory to judge the living and the dead.”
“Oh, sure,” I choke out. “Everybody knows that.”
She senses it before I do: I’m not pulling the trigger. I can’t. A sweet, childlike smile spreads across the furrowed landscape of her face like the morning sun breaking over the horizon.