The Last Star Read online

  And the man with the rifle watches the stars as if waiting for them to shake loose from the black and tumble to the Earth. Why shouldn’t they?

  “My neighbors. My friends. My wife and kids. I knew that all of them wouldn’t die. How could all of them die? Some people will get sick, but most people won’t, and the rest will get better, right? That’s faith. That’s what we believed.”

  The man pulls a large hunting knife from his boot and begins to clean the dirt from beneath his nails with its tip.

  “This is faith: You grow up; you go to school. Find a job. Get married. Start a family.” Finishing the job on one hand, a nail for each rite of passage, then beginning on the other. “Your kids grow up. They go to school. They find a job. They get married. They start a family.” Scrape, scrape. Scrape, scrape, scrape. He pushes his hat back with the heel of the hand that wields the knife. “I was never what you’d call a religious person. Haven’t seen the inside of a church in twenty years. But I know what faith is, Father. I know what it is to believe in something. The lights go out, they come back on. The floodwaters roll in, they roll out again. Folks get sick, they get better. Life goes on. That’s true faith, isn’t it? Your mumbo-jumbo about heaven and hell, sin and salvation, throw it all out and you’re still left with that. Even your biggest church-bashing atheist has faith in that. Life will go on.”

  “Yes,” the priest says. “Life will go on.”

  The watchman bares his teeth. He jabs the knife toward the priest’s chest and snarls, “You haven’t heard a damn word I’ve said. See, this is why I can’t stand your kind. You light your candles and mumble your Latin spells and pray to a god who isn’t there, doesn’t care, or is just plain crazy or cruel or both. The world burns and you praise the asshole who either set it or let it.”

  The little priest has raised his hands, the same hands that consecrated the bread and wine, as if to show the man that they are empty, that he means no harm.

  “I don’t pretend to know the mind of God,” the priest begins, lowering his hands. Eyeing the knife, he quotes from the book of Job: “‘Therefore I have declared that which I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.’”

  The man stares at him for a very long, very uncomfortable moment, absolutely still except for his jaw working the already tasteless knob of gum.

  “I’m going to be honest with you, Father,” he says matter-of-factly. “I feel like killing you right now.”

  The priest nods somberly. “I’m afraid that may happen. When the truth hits home.”

  He eases the knife from the man’s shaking hand. The priest touches the man’s shoulder.

  The man flinches but doesn’t pull away. “What is the truth?” the man whispers.

  “This,” the little priest answers, and drives the knife deep into the man’s chest.

  The blade is very sharp—it slides through the man’s shirt easily, gliding between the ribs before sinking three inches into the heart.

  The priest pulls the man to his chest and kisses the top of his head. May God give you pardon and peace.

  It is over quickly. The gum drops from the man’s slackened lips, and the priest picks it up and tosses it through the cave’s mouth. He eases the man onto the cold stone floor and stands up. The wet knife glimmers in his hand. The blood of the new and everlasting covenant . . .

  The priest studies the dead man’s face, and his heart burns with rage and revulsion. The human face is hideous, unendurably grotesque. No need to hide his disgust anymore.

  The little priest returns to the Big Room, following a well-worn path into the main chamber, where the others twitch and turn in restless sleep. All except Agatha, who leans against the back wall of the chamber, a small woman lost in the fur-lined jacket the little priest had lent her, her frizz of unwashed hair a cyclone of gray and black. Grime nestles in the deep crevices of her withered face, around a mouth bereft of dentures long since lost and eyes buried in folds of sagging skin.

  This is humanity, the priest thinks. This is its face.

  “Father, is that you?” Her voice is barely audible, a mouse’s squeak, a rat’s high-pitched cry.

  And this, humanity’s voice.

  “Yes, Agatha. It’s me.”

  She squints into the human mask he has worn since infancy, obscured in shadow. “I can’t sleep, Father. Will you sit with me awhile?”

  “Yes, Agatha. I will sit with you.”

  2

  HE CARRIES THE REMAINS of his victims to the surface two at a time, one under each arm, and throws them into the pit, dropping them down without ceremony before descending for another load. After Agatha, he killed the rest as they slept. No one woke. The priest worked quietly, quickly, with sure, steady hands, and the only noise was the whisper of cloth tearing as the blade sank home into the hearts of all forty-six, until his was the only heart left beating.

  At dawn it begins to snow. He stands outside for a moment and lifts his face to a sky that is blank and gray. Snow settles on his pale cheeks. His last winter for a very long time: At the equinox, the pod will descend to return him to the mothership, where he’ll wait out the final cleansing of the human infestation by the ones they have trained for the task. Once on board the vessel, from the serenity of the void, he will watch as they launch the bombs that will obliterate every city on Earth, wiping clean the vestiges of human civilization. The apocalypse dreamed of by humankind since the dawn of its consciousness will finally be delivered—not by an angry god, but indifferently, as cold as the little priest when he plunged the knife into his victims’ hearts.

  The snow melts on his upturned face. Four months until winter’s end. One hundred and twenty days until the bombs fall, then the unleashing of the 5th Wave, the human pawns they have conditioned to kill their own kind. Until then, the priest will remain to slaughter any survivors who wander into his territory.

  Almost over. Almost there.

  The little priest descends into the Palace of the Gods and breaks his fast.

  3

  RINGER

  BESIDE ME, Razor whispered, “Run.”

  His sidearm exploded beside my ear. His target was the smallest thing that is the sum of all things, his bullet the sword that severed the chain that bound me to her.

  Teacup.

  As Razor died, he lifted his soft, soulful eyes to mine and whispered, “You’re free. Run.”

  I ran.

  4

  I SMASH THROUGH the watchtower window, the ground rushing up to meet me.

  When I land on the tarmac, not a single bone will break. I will feel no pain. I have been enhanced by the enemy to withstand greater falls than this. My last fall began at five thousand feet. This one is cake.

  I land, roll to my feet, and sprint around the tower, then down the runway toward the concrete barrier and the fence topped in razor wire. The wind screams in my ears. I am faster now than the fastest animal on Earth. The cheetah is a tortoise compared to me.

  The sentries on the perimeter must see me, and the man in the watchtower, too, but no shots are fired, no order is given to take me down. I barrel toward the end of the runway like a bullet singing down the muzzle of a gun.

  They can’t catch you. How can they ever catch you?

  The processor embedded in my brain made the calculations before I even hit the ground, and has already relayed the information to the thousands of microscopic drones assigned to my muscular system; I don’t have to think about speed or timing or point of attack. The hub does it for me.

  End of the runway: I leap. The ball of my foot lands on top of the concrete barrier for an instant, then pushes off to launch me toward the fence. The razor wire rushes toward my face. My fingers slip into the two-inch-wide gap between the coils and the top bar to execute a backward roll over the top. I fly over it feetfirst, back arched, arms outstretched.

 
I stick the landing and accelerate again to full speed, covering the hundred yards of open ground between the fence and the woods in less than four seconds. No bullets chase me. No chopper revs to life to follow me. The trees close behind me like a curtain being drawn, and my footing is sure on the slick, uneven ground. I reach the river, its water swift and black. My feet seem to barely break the surface as I cross.

  On the other side, the woods give way to open tundra, unmarred miles stretching toward the northern horizon, a boundless wilderness in which I’ll be lost, undetected, unmolested.

  Free.

  I run for hours. The 12th System sustains me. It reinforces my joints and bones. It bolsters my muscles, gives me strength, endurance, nullifies my pain. All I have to do is surrender. All I have to do is trust, and I will endure.

  VQP. By the light of a hundred bodies burning, Razor carved those three letters into his arm. VQP. He conquers who endures.

  Some things, he told me the night before he died, down to the smallest of things, are worth the sum of all things.

  Razor understood that I would never leave Teacup to suffer while I escaped. I should have known he was going to save me by betraying me: He’d been doing it from the beginning. He killed Teacup so I could live.

  The featureless landscape extends in every direction. The sun falls toward the edge of the cloudless sky. In the bitter wind biting my face, my tears freeze as they fall. The 12th System can protect you from the pain that afflicts your body, but it’s helpless against the pain that crushes your soul.

  Hours later, I’m still running as the last light leeches from the sky and the first stars appear. And there is the mothership hovering on the horizon, like a lidless green eye staring down. No running from it. No hiding. It is unreachable, unassailable. Long after the last human being crumbles to a handful of dust, it will be there, implacable, impenetrable, unknowable: God has been dethroned.

  And I run on. Through a primordial landscape unscarred by any human thing, the world as it was before trust and cooperation unleashed the beast of progress. The world is circling back now to what it was before we knew it. Paradise lost. Paradise returned. I remember Vosch’s smile, sad and bitter. A savior. Is that what I am?

  Running toward nothing, running away from nothing, running across an empty landscape of flawless white beneath the immensity of the indifferent sky, I see it now. I think I understand.

  Reduce the human population to a sustainable number, then crush the humanity out of it, since trust and cooperation are the real threats to the delicate balance of nature, the unacceptable sins that drove the world to the edge of a cliff. The Others concluded that the only way to save the world was to annihilate civilization. Not from without, but from within. The only way to annihilate human civilization was to change human nature.

  5

  I CONTINUED RUNNING into the wilderness. There was still no pursuit. As the days passed, I worried less about choppers swooping in and strike teams dropping down and more about staying warm and finding the fresh water and protein I needed to sustain the fragile host of the 12th System. I dug holes to hide in, built lean-tos to sleep under. I honed tree branches into spears and hunted rabbit and moose and ate their meat raw. I didn’t dare make a fire, even though I knew how; at Camp Haven the enemy had taught me. The enemy had taught me everything I needed to know about survival in the wilderness, then gave me alien technology that helped my body adapt to it. He taught me how to kill and how to avoid being killed. He taught me what human beings had forgotten after ten centuries of cooperation and trust. He taught me about fear.

  Life is a circle bound by fear. The fear of the predator. The fear of the prey. Without fear, life would not exist. I tried to explain that to Zombie once, but I don’t think he understood.

  I lasted forty days in the wilderness. And, no, the symbolism wasn’t lost on me.

  I could have lasted longer. The 12th System would have sustained me well past a hundred years. Queen Marika, the lone, ancient huntress, a soulless husk gnawing on the dried bones of dead animals, uncontested sovereign of a meaningless domain, until the system finally collapsed and her body fell apart or was devoured by scavengers, her bones scattered like unread runes in an abandoned landscape.

  I went back. By that point, I realized why they weren’t coming.

  Vosch was two moves ahead of me; he always had been. Teacup was dead now, but I was still bound to a promise I never made to a person who was probably dead, too. But probability had become meaningless.

  He knew I couldn’t abandon Zombie, not when there was a chance I could save him.

  And there was only one way to save him; Vosch knew that, too.

  I had to kill Evan Walker.

  6

  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.”