The 5th Wave (7 page)

“But it’s okay,” he said, squeezing my wrist. “It’s okay. There’s a good chance our
backup systems weren’t crippled, and I’m sure the government has a contingency plan,
protected bases, that sort of thing.”

“And how does pulling our plug fit into their plan to help us along in the next stage
of our evolution, Dad?”

I regretted the words the instant I said them. But I was freaking out. He didn’t take
it the wrong way. He looked at me and smiled reassuringly and said, “Everything’s
going to be okay,” because that’s what I wanted him to say and it’s what he wanted
to say and that’s what you do when the curtain is falling—you give the line that the
audience wants to hear.

7

AROUND NOON on my mission to keep my promise, I stop for a water break and a Slim
Jim. Every time I eat a Slim Jim or a can of sardines or anything prepackaged, I think,
Well, there’s one less of that in the world.
Whittling away the evidence of our having been here one bite at a time.

One of these days, I’ve decided, I’m going to work up the nerve to catch a chicken
and wring its delicious neck. I would kill for a cheeseburger. Honestly. If I stumbled
across someone eating a cheeseburger, I would kill them for it.

There are plenty of cows around. I could shoot one and carve it up with my bowie knife.
I’m pretty sure I’d have no problem slaughtering a cow. The hard part would be cooking
it. Having a fire, even in daylight, was the surest way to invite them to the cookout.

A shadow shoots across the grass a dozen yards in front of me. I jerk my head back,
knocking it hard against the side of a Honda Civic I was leaning against while I enjoyed
my snack. It wasn’t a drone. It was a bird, a seagull of all things, skimming along
with barely a flick of its outstretched wings. A shiver of revulsion goes down my
spine. I hate birds. I didn’t before the Arrival. I didn’t after the 1st Wave. I didn’t
after the 2nd Wave, which really didn’t affect me that much.

But after the 3rd Wave, I hated them. It wasn’t their fault, I knew that. It was like
a man in front of a firing squad hating the bullets, but I couldn’t help it.

Birds suck.

8

AFTER THREE DAYS on the road, I’ve determined that cars are pack animals.

They prowl in groups. They die in clumps. Clumps of smashups. Clumps of stalls. They
glimmer in the distance like jewels. And suddenly the clumps stop. The road is empty
for miles. There’s just me and the asphalt river cutting through a defile of half-naked
trees, their leaves crinkled and clinging desperately to their dark branches. There’s
the road and the naked sky and the tall, brown grass and me.

These empty stretches are the worst. Cars provide cover. And shelter. I sleep in the
undamaged ones (I haven’t found a locked one yet). If you can call it sleep. Stale,
stuffy air; you can’t crack the windows, and leaving the door open is out of the question.
The gnaw of hunger. And the night thoughts.
Alone, alone, alone.

And the baddest of the bad night thoughts:

I’m no alien drone designer, but if I were going to make one, I’d make sure that its
detection device was sensitive enough to pick up a body’s heat signature through a
car roof. It never failed: The moment I started to drift off, I imagined all four
doors flying open and dozens of hands reaching for me, hands attached to arms attached
to whatever they are. And then I’m up, fumbling with my M16, peeking over the backseat,
then doing a 360, feeling trapped and more than a little blind behind the fogged-up
windows.

Dawn comes. I wait for the morning fog to burn off, then sip some water, brush my
teeth, double-check my weapons, inventory
my supplies, and hit the road again. Look up, look down, look all around. Don’t pause
at the exits. Water’s fine for now. No way am I going anywhere near a town unless
I have to.

For a lot of reasons.

You know how you can tell when you’re getting close to one? The smell. You can smell
a town from miles away.

It smells like smoke. And raw sewage. And death.

In the city it’s hard to take two steps without stumbling over a corpse. Funny thing:
People die in clumps, too.

I begin to smell Cincinnati about a mile before spotting the exit sign. A thick column
of smoke rises lazily toward the cloudless sky.

Cincinnati is burning.

I’m not surprised. After the 3rd Wave, the second most common thing you found in cities,
after the bodies, were fires. A single lightning strike could take out ten city blocks.
There was no one left to put the fires out.

My eyes start to water. The stench of Cincinnati makes me gag. I stop long enough
to tie a rag around my mouth and nose and then quicken my pace. I pull the rifle off
my shoulder and cradle it as I quickstep. I have a bad feeling about Cincinnati. The
old voice inside my head is awake.

Hurry, Cassie. Hurry.

And then, somewhere between Exits 17 and 18, I find the bodies.

9

THERE ARE THREE OF THEM, not in a clump like city folk, but spaced out in the median
strip. The first one is an older guy, around my dad’s age, I guess. Wearing blue jeans
and a Bengals warm-up. Facedown, arms outstretched. He was shot in the back of the
head.

The second, about a dozen feet away, is a young woman, a little older than I am and
dressed in a pair of men’s pajama pants and Victoria’s Secret tee. A streak of purple
in her short-cropped hair. A skull ring on her left index finger. Black nail polish,
badly chipped. And a bullet hole in the back of her head.

Another few feet and there’s the third. A kid around eleven or twelve. Brand-new white
basketball high-tops. Black sweatshirt. Hard to tell what his face used to look like.

I leave the kid and go back to the woman. Kneel in the tall brown grass beside her.
Touch her pale neck. Still warm.

Oh no. No, no, no.

I trot back to the first guy. Kneel. Touch the palm of his outstretched hand. Look
over at the bloody hole between his ears. Shiny. Still wet.

I freeze. Behind me, the road. In front of me, more road. To my right, trees. To my
left, more trees. Clumps of cars on the southbound lane, the nearest grouping about
a hundred feet away. Something tells me to look up. Straight up.

A fleck of dull gray against the backdrop of dazzling autumnal blue.

Motionless.

Hello, Cassie. My name is Mr. Drone. Nice to meet you!

I stand up, and when I stand up—the moment I stand up; if I had stayed frozen there
a millisecond longer, Mr. Bengals and I would be sporting matching holes—something
slams into my leg, a hot punch just above my knee that knocks me off balance, sending
me sprawling backward onto my butt.

I didn’t hear the shot. There was the cool wind in the grass and my own hot breath
under the rag and the blood rushing in my ears—that’s all there was before the bullet
struck.

Silencer.

That makes sense. Of course they’d use silencers. And now I have the perfect name
for them: Silencers. A name that fits the job description.

Something takes over when you’re facing death. The front part of your brain lets go,
gives up control to the oldest part of you, the part that takes care of your heartbeat
and breathing and the blinking of your eyes. The part nature built first to keep your
ass alive. The part that stretches time like a gigantic piece of toffee, making a
second seem like an hour and a minute longer than a summer afternoon.

I lunge forward for my rifle—I had dropped the M16 when the round punched home—and
the ground in front of me explodes, showering me with shredded grass and hunks of
dirt and gravel.

Okay, forget the M16.

I yank the Luger from my waistband and do a sort of running hop—or a hopping run—toward
the closest car. There isn’t much pain—although my guess is that we’re going to get
very intimate later—but I can feel the blood soaking into my jeans by the time I reach
the car, an older model Buick sedan.

The rear windshield shatters as I dive down. I scoot on my back till I’m all the way
under the car. I’m not a big girl by any
stretch, but it’s a tight fit, no room to roll over, no way to turn if he shows up
on the left side.