The 5th Wave (9 page)

“And then what? What do they want?”

“I think the better question is what they need,” he said gently, as if he were breaking
some really bad news. “They’re being very careful, you know.”

“Careful?”

“To not damage it more than absolutely necessary. It’s the reason they’re here, Cassie.
They need the Earth.”

“But not us,” I whispered. I was about to lose it—again. For about the trillionth
time.

He put his hand on my shoulder—for about the trillionth time—and said, “Well, we had
our shot. And we weren’t handling our inheritance very well. I bet if we could somehow
go back and interview the dinosaurs before the asteroid struck…”

That’s when I punched him as hard as I could. Ran inside.

I don’t know which is worse, inside or outside. Outside you feel totally exposed,
constantly watched, naked beneath the naked sky. But inside it’s perpetual twilight.
Boarded-up windows that block out the sun during the day. Candles at night, but we’re
running low on candles, can’t spare more than one per room, and deep shadows lurk
in once-familiar corners.

“What is it, Cassie?” Sammy. Five. Adorable. Big brown teddy-bear eyes, clutching
the other member of the family with big brown eyes, the stuffed one I now have stowed
in the bottom of my backpack.

“Why are you crying?”

Seeing my tears got his started.

I brushed past him, headed for the room of the sixteen-year-old human dinosaur,
Cassiopeia Sullivanus extinctus
. Then I went back to him. I couldn’t leave him crying like that. We’d gotten pretty
tight since Mom got sick. Nearly every night bad dreams chased him into my room, and
he’d crawl in bed with me and press his face against my chest, and sometimes he forgot
and called me Mommy.

“Did you see them, Cassie? Are they coming?”

“No, kiddo,” I said, wiping away his tears. “No one’s coming.”

Not yet.

11

MOM DIED ON A TUESDAY.

Dad buried her in the backyard, in the rose bed. She had asked for that before she
died. At the height of the Pestilence, when hundreds were dying every day, most of
the bodies were hauled to the outskirts and burned. Dying towns were ringed by the
constantly smoldering bonfires of the dead.

He told me to stay with Sammy. Sammy, who’d gone zombielike on us, shuffling around,
mouth hanging open or sucking his thumb like he was two again, with this blankness
in his teddy-bear eyes. Just a few months ago, Mom was pushing him on a swing, taking
him to karate classes, washing his hair, dancing with him to his favorite song. Now
she was wrapped in a white sheet and riding on his daddy’s shoulder into the backyard.

I saw Dad through the kitchen window kneeling by the shallow grave. His head was down.
Shoulders jerking. I’d never seen him lose it, not once, since the Arrival. Things
kept getting worse, and just when you thought they couldn’t get any worse, they got
even worse, but Dad never freaked. Even when Mom started showing the first signs of
infection, he stayed calm, especially in front of her. He didn’t talk about what was
happening outside the barricaded doors and windows. He laid wet cloths over her forehead.
He bathed her, changed her, fed her. Not once did I see him cry in front of her. While
some people were shooting themselves and hanging themselves and swallowing handfuls
of pills and jumping from high places, Dad pushed back against the darkness.

He sang to her and repeated stupid jokes she’d heard a thousand times, and he lied.
He lied the way a parent lies to you, the good lie that helps you go to sleep.

“Heard another plane today. Sounded like a fighter. Means some of our stuff must have
made it through.”

“Your fever’s down a bit, and your eyes look clearer today. Maybe this isn’t it. Might
just be your garden-variety flu.”

In the final hours, wiping away her bloody tears.

Holding her while she barfed up the black, viral stew her stomach had become.

Bringing me and Sammy into the room to say good-bye.

“It’s all right,” she told Sammy. “Everything is going to be all right.”

To me she said, “He needs you now, Cassie. Take care of him. Take care of your father.”

I told her she was going to get better. Some people did. They got sick, and then suddenly
the virus let go. Nobody understood why. Maybe it decided it didn’t like the way you
tasted. And I didn’t say she was going to get better to ease her fear. I really believed
it. I had to believe it.

“You’re all they have,” Mom said. Her last words to me.

The mind was the last thing to go, washed away in the red waters of the Tsunami. The
virus took total control. Some people went into a frenzy as it boiled their brains.
They punched, clawed, kicked, bit. Like the virus that needed us also hated us and
couldn’t wait to get rid of us.

My mother looked at my dad and didn’t know him. Didn’t know where she was. Who she
was. What was happening to her. There was this, like, permanent, creepy smile, cracked
lips pulled back from bleeding gums, her teeth stained with blood. Sounds came out
of her mouth, but they weren’t words. The place in her brain that made words was packed
with virus, and the virus didn’t know language—it knew only how to make more of itself.

And then my mother died in a fury of jerks and gargled screams, her uninvited guests
rocketing out of every orifice, because she was done, they’d used her up, time to
turn off the lights and find a new home.

Dad bathed her one last time. Combed her hair. Scrubbed the dried blood from her teeth.
When he came to tell me she was gone, he was calm. He didn’t lose it. He held me while
I lost it.

Now I was watching him through the kitchen window. Kneeling
beside her in the rose bed, thinking no one could see him, my father let go of the
rope he’d been clinging to, loosened the line that had kept him steady all that time
while everyone around him went into free fall.

I made sure Sammy was okay and went outside. I sat next to him. Put my hand on his
shoulder. The last time I’d touched my father, it was a lot harder and with my fist.
I didn’t say anything, and he didn’t, either, not for a long time.

He slipped something into my hand. Mom’s wedding ring. He said she’d want me to have
it.

“We’re leaving, Cassie. Tomorrow morning.”

I nodded. I knew she was the only reason we hadn’t left yet. The delicate stems on
the roses bobbed and swayed, as if echoing my nod. “Where are we going?”

“Away.” He looked around, and his eyes were wide and frightened. “It isn’t safe anymore.”

Duh,
I thought.
When was it ever?

“Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is just over a hundred miles from here. If we push
and the weather stays good, we can be there in five or six days.”

“And then what?” The Others had conditioned us to think this way:
Okay, this, and then what?
I looked to my father to tell me. He was the smartest man I knew. If he didn’t have
an answer, there was no one who did. I sure didn’t. And I sure wanted him to. I needed
him to.

He shook his head like he didn’t understand the question.

“What’s at Wright-Patterson?” I asked.

“I don’t know that anything’s there.” He tried out a smile and grimaced, like smiling
hurt.

“Then why are we going?”

“Because we can’t stay here,” he said through gritted teeth. “And if we can’t stay
here, we have to go somewhere. If there’s anything like a government left at all…”

He shook his head. He hadn’t come outside for this. He had come outside to bury his
wife.

“Go inside, Cassie.”

“I’ll help you.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“She’s my mother. I loved her, too. Please let me help.” I was crying again. He didn’t
see. He wasn’t looking at me, and he wasn’t looking at Mom. He wasn’t looking at anything,
really. There was, like, this black hole where the world used to be, and we were both
falling toward it. What could we hold on to? I pulled his hand off Mom’s body and
pressed it against my cheek and told him I loved him and that Mom loved him and that
everything would be okay, and the black hole lost a little of its strength.

“Go inside, Cassie,” he said gently. “Sammy needs you more than she does.”

I went inside. Sammy was sitting on the floor in his room, playing with his X-wing
starfighter, destroying the Death Star. “Shroooooom, shroooooom. I’m going in, Red
One!”

And outside, my father knelt in the freshly turned earth. Brown dirt, red rose, gray
sky, white sheet.

12

I GUESS I have to talk about Sammy now.

I don’t know how else to get there.

There
being that first inch in the open, where the sunlight kissed my scraped-up cheek
when I slid out from under the Buick. That first inch was the hardest. The longest
inch in the universe. The inch that stretched a thousand miles.

There
being that place on the highway where I turned to face the enemy I couldn’t see.

There
being the one thing that’s kept me from going completely crazy, the thing the Others
haven’t been able to take from me after taking everything from me.

Sammy is the reason I didn’t give up. Why I didn’t stay beneath that car and wait
for the end.

The last time I saw him was through the back window of a school bus. His forehead
pressing against the glass. Waving at me. And smiling. Like he was going on a field
trip: excited, nervous, not scared at all. Being with all those other kids helped.
And the school bus, which was so normal. What’s more everyday than a big, yellow school
bus? So ordinary, in fact, that the sight of them pulling into the refugee camp after
the last four months of horror was shocking. It was like seeing a McDonald’s on the
moon. Totally weird and crazy and something that just shouldn’t
be
.

We’d been in the camp only a couple of weeks. Of the fifty or so people there, ours
was the only family. Everybody else was a widow, a widower, an orphan. The last ones
standing in their family, strangers before coming to the camp. The oldest was probably
in his sixties. Sammy was the youngest, but there were seven other kids, none except
me older than fourteen.