Seriously.
At least when he showed up tonight, he knocked first. Evan always had an issue with boundaries. He rapped on the door, then entered in stages: head, shoulders, torso, legs. Stood there in the doorway for a minute: Is it okay? I noticed the change immediately: newly shaven, hair still wet, wearing a fresh pair of jeans and an Ohio State T-shirt. I can’t remember the last time—or really the first time—I saw Evan exercise his Second Amendment right to bare arms.
Evan Walker has biceps. It’s not important to mention this fact, as biceps are muscles most people have. I just thought I’d mention it.
I was kind of hoping for an aw-shucks look—I’d seen it often enough in the old farmhouse back in the day, when that was his go-to expression. Instead, I got the furrowed brow and the slightly downturned mouth and the dark, troubled eyes of a poet contemplating the void, which I guess he was—not a poet but a contemplator of the void.
I made a space for him on the bed. There was nowhere else to sit. Though we’d never done the deed, it felt like we were old lovers forced into an awkward post-split negotiation over who gets the silverware and how the souvenirs from all their trips together are going to be divvied up.
Then I smelled the Ralph Lauren aftershave.
I don’t know why Grace kept a stash of men’s grooming products. Maybe they belonged to the former owners of the house and she never bothered to get rid of them. Or maybe she had sex with her victims before chopping off their heads or ripping out their hearts or eating them alive like a black widow spider.
He’d nicked his chin shaving; there was a dab of white styptic stuff on the cut, a tiny mar in his otherwise otherworldly beautiful face. Which was a relief. Flawlessly beautiful people annoy the hell out of me.
“I checked on the kids,” he said, as if I’d asked if he’d checked on the kids.
“And?”
“They’re okay. Sleeping.”
“Who’s on the watch?”
He stared at me for a couple of uncomfortable seconds. Then he looked down at his hands. I looked, too. He was so perfectly put together when we met that I thought I’d lucked into the most narcissistic person left on the planet. It makes me feel more human, he told me, meaning grooming. Later, when I found out he wasn’t quite human, I thought I understood what he was getting at. Even later—and by even later I mean now—I realized cleanliness isn’t necessarily next to godliness, but it is damn near indistinguishable from humanness.
“It’ll be okay,” he said softly.
“No, it won’t,” I shot back. “Ben and Dumbo are going to die. You’re going to die.”
“I’m not going to die.” Leaving out Ben and Dumbo.
“How are you getting out of the mothership once you set the bombs?”
“The same way I got in.”
“The last time you took a ride in one of your little pods, you broke several bones and nearly died.”
“It’s a hobby,” he said with a crooked smile. “Nearly dying.”
I looked away from his hands. The hands that lifted me when I fell, held me when I was cold, fed me when I was hungry, healed me when I was hurt, washed me when I was covered in forest filth and blood. You’re going to destroy your entire civilization, and for what? For a girl. You would think a sacrifice like that would make me feel just a little bit special. It didn’t. It felt weird. Like one of us was batshit crazy and that person wasn’t me.
I couldn’t see a single romantic element in genocide, but maybe that’s just my lack of insight into the nature of love, having never been in love. Would I wipe out humanity to save Evan? Not likely.
Of course, there’s more than one kind of love. Would I kill everyone in the world to save Sam? That’s not an easy question to answer.
“Those times you nearly died, you were sort of protected, though, right?” I asked. “The technology that made you superhuman—which you said crashed on the way to the hotel. You won’t have that this time.”
He shrugged. There’s the aw-shucks thing I thought I missed. Seeing it again reminded me how far we’d traveled from the farmhouse, and I fought the urge to slap it off his face.
“What you’re going to do—it isn’t for me, or . . . it isn’t just for me, you get that, right?”
“There’s no other way to stop it, Cassie,” he said. Slingshotting back to his tormented-poet look.
“What about the way you mentioned right before the last time you almost died? Remember? Rigging Megan’s throat-bomb to blow it up.”
“Hard to do without the bomb,” he said.
“Grace didn’t have a stash hidden in the house somewhere?” Instead, she kept the place well-stocked with men’s aftershave. Postapocalyptic priorities.
“Grace’s assignment wasn’t to blow things up. It was to kill people.”