The 5th Wave (2 page)

THERE WILL BE NO AWAKENING.

The sleeping woman will feel nothing the next morning, only a vague sense of unease
and the unshakable feeling that someone is watching her. Her anxiety will fade in
less than a day and will soon be forgotten.

The memory of the dream will linger a little longer.

In her dream, a large owl perches outside the window, staring at her through the glass
with huge, white-rimmed eyes.

She will not awaken. Neither will her husband beside her. The shadow falling over
them will not disturb their sleep. And what the shadow has come for—the baby within
the sleeping woman—will feel nothing. The intrusion breaks no skin, violates not a
single cell of her or the baby’s body.

It is over in less than a minute. The shadow withdraws.

Now it is only the man, the woman, the baby inside her, and the intruder inside the
baby, sleeping.

The woman and man will awaken in the morning, the baby a few months later when he
is born.

The intruder inside him will sleep on and not wake for several years, when the unease
of the child’s mother and the memory of that dream have long since faded.

Five years later, at a visit to the zoo with her child, the woman will see an owl
identical to the one in the dream. Seeing the owl is unsettling for reasons she cannot
understand.

She is not the first to dream of owls in the dark.

She will not be the last.

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ALIENS ARE STUPID.

I’m not talking about real aliens. The Others aren’t stupid. The Others are so far
ahead of us, it’s like comparing the dumbest human to the smartest dog. No contest.

No, I’m talking about the aliens inside our own heads.

The ones we made up, the ones we’ve been making up since we realized those glittering
lights in the sky were suns like ours and probably had planets like ours spinning
around them. You know, the aliens we imagine, the kind of aliens we’d
like
to attack us, human aliens. You’ve seen them a million times. They swoop down from
the sky in their flying saucers to level New York and Tokyo and London, or they march
across the countryside in huge machines that look like mechanical spiders, ray guns
blasting away, and always, always, humanity sets aside its differences and bands together
to defeat the alien horde. David slays Goliath, and everybody (except Goliath) goes
home happy.

What crap.

It’s like a cockroach working up a plan to defeat the shoe on its way down to crush
it.

There’s no way to know for sure, but I bet the Others knew about the human aliens
we’d imagined. And I bet they thought it was funny as hell. They must have laughed
their asses off. If they have a sense of humor…or asses. They must have laughed the
way we laugh when a dog does something totally cute and dorky.
Oh, those cute, dorky humans! They think we think like they do! Isn’t that adorable?

Forget about flying saucers and little green men and giant mechanical spiders spitting
out death rays. Forget about epic battles with tanks and fighter jets and the final
victory of us scrappy, unbroken, intrepid humans over the bug-eyed swarm. That’s about
as far from the truth as their dying planet was from our living one.

The truth is, once they found us, we were toast.

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SOMETIMES I THINK I might be the last human on Earth.

Which means I’m the last human in the universe.

I know that’s dumb. They can’t have killed everyone…yet. I see how it could happen,
though, eventually. And then I think that’s exactly what the Others want me to see.

Remember the dinosaurs? Well.

So I’m probably not the last human on Earth, but I’m one of the last. Totally alone—and
likely to stay that way—until the 4th Wave rolls over me and carries me down.

That’s one of my night thoughts. You know, the three-in-the-morning, oh-my-God-I’m-screwed
thoughts. When I curl into a little ball, so scared I can’t close my eyes, drowning
in fear so intense I have to remind myself to breathe, will my heart to keep beating.
When my brain checks out and begins to skip like a scratched CD.
Alone, alone, alone, Cassie, you’re alone.

That’s my name. Cassie.

Not Cassie for Cassandra. Or Cassie for Cassidy. Cassie for Cassiopeia, the constellation,
the queen tied to her chair in the northern sky, who was beautiful but vain, placed
in the heavens by the sea god Poseidon as a punishment for her boasting. In Greek,
her name means “she whose words excel.”

My parents didn’t know the first thing about that myth. They just thought the name
was pretty.

Even when there were people around to call me anything, no one ever called me Cassiopeia.
Just my father, and only when he was teasing me, and always in a very bad Italian
accent:
Cass-ee-oh-PEE-a
. It drove me crazy. I didn’t think he was funny or cute, and it made me hate my own
name. “I’m Cassie!” I’d holler at him. “Just Cassie!” Now I’d give anything to hear
him say it just one more time.

When I was turning twelve—four years before the Arrival—my father gave me a telescope
for my birthday. On a crisp, clear fall evening, he set it up in the backyard and
showed me the constellation.

“See how it looks like a
W
?” he asked.

“Why did they name it Cassiopeia if it’s shaped like a
W
?” I replied. “
W
for what?”

“Well…I don’t know that it’s for anything,” he answered with a smile. Mom always told
him it was his best feature, so he trotted it out a lot, especially after he started
going bald. You know, to drag the other person’s eyes downward. “So, it’s for anything
you like! How about
wonderful
? Or
winsome
? Or
wise
?” He dropped his hand on my shoulder as I squinted through the lens at the five stars
burning over fifty light-years from the spot on which we stood. I could feel my father’s
breath against my cheek,
warm and moist in the cool, dry autumn air. His breath so close, the stars of Cassiopeia
so very far away.

The stars seem a lot closer now. Closer than the three hundred trillion miles that
separate us. Close enough to touch, for me to touch them, for them to touch me. They’re
as close to me as his breath had been.

That sounds crazy. Am I crazy? Have I lost my mind? You can only call someone crazy
if there’s someone else who’s normal. Like good and evil. If everything was good,
then nothing would be good.

Whoa. That sounds, well…crazy.

Crazy: the new normal.

I guess I could call myself crazy, since there is one other person I can compare myself
to: me. Not the me I am now, shivering in a tent deep in the woods, too afraid to
even poke her head from the sleeping bag. Not this Cassie. No, I’m talking about the
Cassie I was before the Arrival, before the Others parked their alien butts in high
orbit. The twelve-year-old me, whose biggest problems were the spray of tiny freckles
on her nose and the curly hair she couldn’t do anything with and the cute boy who
saw her every day and had no clue she existed. The Cassie who was coming to terms
with the painful fact that she was just okay. Okay in looks. Okay in school. Okay
at sports like karate and soccer. Basically the only unique things about her were
the weird name—Cassie for Cassiopeia, which nobody knew about, anyway—and her ability
to touch her nose with the tip of her tongue, a skill that quickly lost its impressiveness
by the time she hit middle school.

I’m probably crazy by that Cassie’s standards.

And she sure is crazy by mine. I scream at her sometimes, that
twelve-year-old Cassie, moping over her hair or her weird name or at being just okay.
“What are you doing?” I yell. “Don’t you know what’s coming?”

But that isn’t fair. The fact is she didn’t know, had no way of knowing, and that
was her blessing and why I miss her so much, more than anyone, if I’m being honest.
When I cry—when I let myself cry—that’s who I cry for. I don’t cry for myself. I cry
for the Cassie that’s gone.

And I wonder what that Cassie would think of me.

The Cassie who kills.

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