CASSIE
I’M GOING TO KILL Evan Walker.
The brooding, enigmatic, self-involved, secretive bastard. I’m going to put his poor, tortured, human-alien hybrid soul out of its misery. You’re the mayfly. You’re the thing worth dying for. I woke up when I saw myself in you. Oh, puke.
Last night I gave Sams a bath—the first in three weeks—and he damn near broke my nose, or I should say rebroke my nose, since Evan’s old girlfriend (or friend with benefits or whatever she was) broke it first by slamming my face into a door behind which was my little brother, the little shit I was trying to save and the same little shit who nearly broke it again. See the irony there? There’s probably some symbolism, too, but it’s late and I haven’t slept in, like, three days, so forget it.
Back to Evan and the reason I’m going to kill him.
Basically, it boils down to the alphabet.
After Sam hit me on the nose, I burst out of the bathroom, soaking wet, whereupon I smacked into Ben Parish’s chest. Ben was lurking in the hallway as if every little thing that has to do with Sam is his responsibility, the aforesaid little shit screaming obscenities at my back, the only dry part of my body after trying to wash his, and Ben Parish, the living reminder of my father’s favorite saying that it’s better to be lucky than smart, gave me that ridiculous what’s up? look, so stupidly cute that I was tempted to break his nose, thereby making him not so damn Ben Parish–y looking.
“You should be dead,” I said to him. I know I just wrote that I was going to kill Evan, but you need to understand—oh, screw it. No one is ever going to read this. By the time I’m gone, there won’t be anyone who can read. So this isn’t being written for you, future reader who won’t exist. It’s for me.
“Probably,” Ben said.
“What are the odds that someone I knew from before would still be here now?”
He thought about it. Or pretended to think about it: He’s a guy. “About seven billion to one?”
“I think that would be seven billion to two, Ben,” I said. “Or three point five billion to one.”
“Wow. That much?” He jerked his head toward the bathroom door. “What’s up with Nugget?”
“Sam. His name is Sam. Call him Nugget again and I’ll knee you in yours.”
He smiled. Then he either pretended to get what I said a beat later or he immediately understood what I said, but anyway, the smile morphed into a tight-lipped look of wounded pride. “They’re slightly larger than nuggets. Slightly.” Then click! the smile flashed back on. “Want me to talk to him?”
I told him I didn’t give a shit what he did; I had better things to do, like killing Evan Walker.
I stormed down the hallway, into the living room, still close enough—or not far enough away—to hear Sam yell, “I don’t care, Zombie. I don’t care, I don’t care. I hate her,” past Dumbo and Megan sitting on the sofa working on a jigsaw puzzle somebody found in the kids’ room, a scene from a Disney cartoon or something, and their eyes cut away as I barreled past, like Don’t mind us, we won’t stop you, you’re good, nobody saw nothin’.
Outside on the porch it’s cold as hell because spring
refuses to come. Spring is never coming because extinction events piss it off. Or the Others have engineered another Ice Age just because they can, because why settle for doomed humans when you can have cold, starving, and miserable doomed humans? So much more satisfying that way.
He was leaning on the railing to take the weight off his bad ankle, the rifle nestled in the crook of his arm, wearing his uniform of a wrinkled plaid shirt and skinny jeans. His face lit up when he saw me banging open the screen door. His eyes drank me in. Oh, the Evanness of it all, how he gulps down my presence like a guy stumbling upon an oasis in the desert.
I slapped him.
“Why did you just hit me?” he asked, after racking ten thousand years’ worth of alien wisdom for the answer.
“Do you know why I’m wet?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Why are you wet?”
“I was giving my baby brother a bath. Why was I giving him a bath?”
“Because he was dirty?”
“For the same reason I spent a week cleaning up this dump after we moved in.” She may have been a supercharged, technologically enhanced alien-human hybrid with the looks of a Norwegian ice princess and the heart to match, but Grace was a terrible housekeeper. Dust piled in every corner like snowdrifts, mold growing on top of mold, a kitchen that would make a hoarder blush. “Because that’s what human beings do, Evan. We don’t live in filth. We bathe. We wash our hair and we brush our teeth and we shave off unwanted hair—”
“Sam needs to shave?” Trying to be funny.
Dumb idea.
“Shut up! I’m talking. When I talk, you don’t talk. When you talk, I don’t talk. That’s another thing humans do. They treat each other with respect. Respect, Evan.”