The 5th Wave (3 page)

HE COULDN’T HAVE BEEN much older than me. Eighteen. Maybe nineteen. But hell, he could
have been seven
hundred
and nineteen for all I know. Five months into it and I’m still not sure if the 4th
Wave is human or some kind of hybrid or even the Others themselves, though I don’t
like to think that the Others look just like us and talk just like us and bleed just
like us. I like to think of the Others as being…well, other.

I was on my weekly foray for water. There’s a stream not far from my campsite, but
I’m worried it might be contaminated, either from chemicals or sewage or maybe a body
or two upstream. Or poisoned. Depriving us of clean water would be an excellent way
to wipe us out quickly.

So once a week I shoulder my trusty M16 and hike out of
the forest to the interstate. Two miles south, just off Exit 175, there’re a couple
of gas stations with convenience stores attached. I load up as much bottled water
as I can carry, which isn’t a lot because water is heavy, and get back to the highway
and the relative safety of the trees as quickly as I can, before night falls completely.
Dusk is the best time to travel. I’ve never seen a drone at dusk. Three or four during
the day and a lot more at night, but never at dusk.

From the moment I slipped through the gas station’s shattered front door, I knew something
was different. I didn’t
see
anything different—the store looked exactly like it had a week earlier, the same
graffiti-scrawled walls, overturned shelves, floor strewn with empty boxes and caked-in
rat feces, the busted-open cash registers and looted beer coolers. It was the same
disgusting, stinking mess I’d waded through every week for the past month to get to
the storage area behind the refrigerated display cases. Why people grabbed the beer
and soda, the cash from the registers and safe, the rolls of lottery tickets, but
left the two pallets of drinking water was beyond me. What were they thinking?
It’s an alien apocalypse! Quick, grab the beer!

The same disaster of spoilage, the same stench of rats and rotted food, the same fitful
swirl of dust in the murky light pushing through the smudged windows, every out-of-place
thing in its place, undisturbed.

Still.

Something was different.

I was standing in the little pool of broken glass just inside the doorway. I didn’t
see it. I didn’t hear it. I didn’t smell or feel it. But I knew it.

Something was different.

It’s been a long time since humans were prey animals. A hundred thousand years or
so. But buried deep in our genes the memory remains: the awareness of the gazelle,
the instinct of the antelope. The wind whispers through the grass. A shadow flits
between the trees. And up speaks the little voice that goes,
Shhhh, it’s close now. Close.

I don’t remember swinging the M16 from my shoulder. One minute it was hanging behind
my back, the next it was in my hands, muzzle down, safety off.

Close.

I’d never fired it at anything bigger than a rabbit, and that was a kind of experiment,
to see if I could actually use the thing without blowing off one of my own body parts.
Once I shot over the heads of a pack of feral dogs that had gotten a little too interested
in my campsite. Another time nearly straight up, sighting the tiny, glowering speck
of greenish light that was their mothership sliding silently across the backdrop of
the Milky Way. Okay, I admit that was stupid. I might as well have erected a billboard
with a big arrow pointing at my head and the words
YOO-HOO, HERE I AM!

After the rabbit experiment—it blew that poor damn bunny apart, turning Peter into
this unrecognizable mass of shredded guts and bone—I gave up the idea of using the
rifle to hunt. I didn’t even do target practice. In the silence that had slammed down
after the 4th Wave struck, the report of the rounds sounded louder than an atomic
blast.

Still, I considered the M16 my bestest of besties. Always by my side, even at night,
burrowed into my sleeping bag with me,
faithful and true. In the 4th Wave, you can’t trust that people are still people.
But you can trust that your gun is still your gun.

Shhh, Cassie. It’s close.

Close.

I should have bailed. That little voice had my back. That little voice is older than
I am. It’s older than the oldest person who ever lived.

I should have listened to that voice.

Instead, I listened to the silence of the abandoned store, listened hard. Something
was close. I took a tiny step away from the door, and the broken glass crunched ever
so softly under my foot.

And then the Something made a noise, somewhere between a cough and a moan. It came
from the back room, behind the coolers, where my water was.

That’s the moment when I didn’t need a little old voice to tell me what to do. It
was obvious, a no-brainer. Run.

But I didn’t run.

The first rule of surviving the 4th Wave is don’t trust anyone. It doesn’t matter
what they look like. The Others are very smart about that—okay, they’re smart about
everything. It doesn’t matter if they look the right way and say the right things
and act exactly like you expect them to act. Didn’t my father’s death prove that?
Even if the stranger is a little old lady sweeter than your great-aunt Tilly, hugging
a helpless kitten, you can’t know for certain—you can never know—that she isn’t one
of them, and that there isn’t a loaded .45 behind that kitten.

It isn’t unthinkable. And the more you think about it, the more thinkable it becomes.
Little old lady has to go.

That’s the hard part, the part that, if I thought about it too much,
would make me crawl into my sleeping bag, zip myself up, and die of slow starvation.
If you can’t trust anyone, then you can trust no one. Better to take the chance that
Aunty Tilly is one of them than play the odds that you’ve stumbled across a fellow
survivor.

That’s friggin’ diabolical.

It tears us apart. It makes us that much easier to hunt down and eradicate. The 4th
Wave forces us into solitude, where there’s no strength in numbers, where we slowly
go crazy from the isolation and fear and terrible anticipation of the inevitable.

So I didn’t run. I couldn’t. Whether it was one of them or an Aunt Tilly, I had to
defend my turf. The only way to stay alive is to stay alone. That’s rule number two.

I followed the sobbing coughs or coughing sobs or whatever you want to call them till
I reached the door that opened to the back room. Hardly breathing, on the balls of
my feet.

The door was ajar, the space just wide enough for me to slip through sideways. A metal
rack on the wall directly in front of me and, to the right, the long narrow hallway
that ran the length of the coolers. There were no windows back here. The only light
was the sickly orange of the dying day behind me, still bright enough to hurl my shadow
onto the sticky floor. I crouched down; my shadow crouched with me.

I couldn’t see around the edge of the cooler into the hall. But I could hear whoever—or
whatever—it was at the far end, coughing, moaning, and that gurgling sob.

Either hurt badly or acting hurt badly,
I thought.
Either needs help or it’s a trap.

This is what life on Earth has become since the Arrival. It’s an either/or world.

Either it’s one of them and it knows you’re here or it’s not one of them and he needs
your help.

Either way, I had to get up and turn that corner.

So I got up.

And I turned the corner.

4

HE LAY SPRAWLED against the back wall twenty feet away, long legs spread out in front
of him, clutching his stomach with one hand. He was wearing fatigues and black boots
and he was covered in grime and shimmering with blood. There was blood everywhere.
On the wall behind him. Pooling on the cold concrete beneath him. Coating his uniform.
Matted in his hair. The blood glittered darkly, black as tar in the semidarkness.

In his other hand was a gun, and that gun was pointed at my head.

I mirrored him. His handgun to my rifle. Fingers flexing on the triggers: his, mine.

It didn’t prove anything, his pointing a gun at me. Maybe he really was a wounded
soldier and thought I was one of them.

Or maybe not.

“Drop your weapon,” he sputtered at me.

Like hell.

“Drop your weapon!” he shouted, or tried to shout. The words came out all cracked
and crumbly, beaten up by the blood rising
from his gut. Blood dribbled over his bottom lip and hung quivering from his stubbly
chin. His teeth shone with blood.

I shook my head. My back was to the light, and I prayed he couldn’t see how badly
I was shaking or the fear in my eyes. This wasn’t some damn rabbit that was stupid
enough to hop into my camp one sunny morning. This was a person. Or, if it wasn’t,
it looked just like one.

The thing about killing is you don’t know if you can actually do it until you actually
do it.

He said it a third time, not as loud as the second. It came out like a plea.

“Drop your weapon.”

The hand holding his gun twitched. The muzzle dipped toward the floor. Not much, but
my eyes had adjusted to the light by this point, and I saw a speck of blood run down
the barrel.

And then he dropped the gun.

It fell between his legs with a sharp
cling
. He brought up his empty hand and held it, palm outward, over his shoulder.

“Okay,” he said with a bloody half smile. “Your turn.”

I shook my head. “Other hand,” I said. I hoped my voice sounded stronger than I felt.
My knees had begun to shake and my arms ached and my head was spinning. I was also
fighting the urge to hurl. You don’t know if you can do it until you do it.

“I can’t,” he said.

“Other hand.”

“If I move this hand, I’m afraid my stomach will fall out.”

I adjusted the butt of the rifle against my shoulder. I was sweating, shaking, trying
to think.
Either/or, Cassie. What are you going to do, either/or?

“I’m dying,” he said matter-of-factly. From this distance, his eyes were just pinpricks
of reflected light. “So you can either finish me off or help me. I know you’re human—”

“How do you know?” I asked quickly, before he could die on me. If he was a real soldier,
he might know how to tell the difference. It would be an extremely useful bit of information.

“Because if you weren’t, you would have shot me already.” He smiled again, his cheeks
dimpled, and that’s when it hit me how young he was. Only a couple years older than
me.

“See?” he said softly. “That’s how you know, too.”

“How I know what?” My eyes were tearing up. His crumpled-up body wiggled in my vision
like an image in a fun-house mirror. But I didn’t dare release my grip on the rifle
to rub my eyes.

“That I’m human. If I wasn’t, I would have shot you.”

That made sense. Or did it make sense because I wanted it to make sense? Maybe he
dropped the gun to get me to drop mine, and once I did, the second gun he was hiding
under his fatigues would come out and the bullet would say hello to my brain.

This is what the Others have done to us. You can’t band together to fight without
trust. And without trust, there was no hope.

How do you rid the Earth of humans? Rid the humans of their humanity.

“I have to see your other hand,” I said.

“I told you—”

“I have to see your other hand!” My voice cracked then. Couldn’t help it.

He lost it. “Then you’re just going to have to shoot me, bitch! Just shoot me and
get it over with!”

His head fell back against the wall, his mouth came open, and a terrible howl of anguish
tumbled out and bounced from wall
to wall and floor to ceiling and pounded against my ears. I didn’t know if he was
screaming from the pain or the realization that I wasn’t going to save him. He had
given in to hope, and that will kill you. It kills you before you die. Long before
you die.