The 5th Wave (The Fifth Wave 1)

I hear a high-pitched screaming from above, and a drone slams into the earth a dozen yards away. The impact blows it apart, turns it into a grenade the size of a Prius, and a thousand pieces of razor-sharp shrapnel from the blast shred my khaki T-shirt and tear into my exposed skin.

There’s a rhythm to this rain of drones. First the banshee scream. Then the explosion when they meet the rock-hard ground. Then the blast of debris. And we dodge between these raindrops of death, zigzagging across the lifeless landscape as that landscape is consumed by the hungry black hole chasing us.

I have another problem, too. My knee. The old injury where a Silencer in the woods cut me down. Every time my foot strikes the hard ground, a stabbing pain shoots down my leg, throwing off my stride, slowing me down. I’m falling farther and farther behind, and that’s what it feels like, not running so much as falling forward while someone smashes a sledgehammer against my knee, over and over.

A scar appears in the perfect nothingness ahead. Grows larger. It’s coming on fast, barreling straight toward us.

“Ben!” I yell, but he can’t hear me over the screaming and booms and the ear-shattering implosion of two hundred tons of rock collapsing into the vacuum created by the Eyes.

The fuzzy shadow coming toward us hardens into a shape, and then the shape becomes a Humvee, bristling with gun turrets, bearing down.

Determined little bastards.

Ben sees it now but we have no choice, we can’t stop, we can’t turn back. At least it will suck them down, too, I think.

And then I fall.

I’m not sure why. I don’t remember the fall itself. One minute I’m up, the next my face is against hard stone and I’m like, Where did this wall come from? Maybe my knee locked up. Maybe I slipped. But I’m down and I feel the earth beneath me crying and screaming as the hole tears it apart, like a living creature being eaten alive by a hungry predator.

I try to push myself up, but the ground is not cooperating. It buckles beneath me, and I fall again. There’s Ben and Sam several yards ahead, still on their feet, and there’s the Humvee, cutting in front of them at the last second, burning rubber. It barely slows down. The door flies open and a skinny kid leans out, his hand reaching for Ben.

Ben hurls Sammy toward the kid, who hauls my brother inside and then bangs his hand hard against the side of the vehicle like he’s saying, Let’s go, Parish, let’s go!

And then, instead of jumping onto the Humvee like a normal person, Ben Parish turns and races back for me.

I wave him back. No time, no time, no time no time no time no time.

I can feel the breath of the beast on my bare legs—hot, dusty, pulverized stone and dirt—and then the ground splits open between Ben and me as the chunk I’m lying on breaks free and starts to slide into its lightless mouth.

Which makes me start to slide backward, away from Ben, who’s wisely thrown himself on his stomach at the edge of the fissure to avoid riding the chunk with me straight into the black hole. Our fingertips touch, flirt with one another, his pinky hooks around mine—Save me, Parish, pinky swear, okay?—but he can’t pull me up by my pinky, so in the half second he has to decide, he decides, flicks my finger free, and takes his one and only shot to grab my wrist.

I see his mouth open but hear nothing come out as he throws himself backward, hauling me up and over, and he doesn’t let go, he hangs on to my wrist with both hands and spins around like a shot-putter, launching me toward the Humvee. I think my feet actually leave the ground.

Another hand catches my arm and pulls me inside. I end up straddling the skinny guy’s legs, only now up close I see it isn’t a guy but a dark-eyed girl with shiny, straight black hair. Over her shoulder I see Ben leap for the back of the Humvee, but I can’t see if he makes it. Then I’m slammed against the door as the driver whips the wheel hard to the left to avoid a falling drone. He floors the gas.

The hole has gobbled up all the lights by this point, but it’s a clear night and I have no trouble watching the edge of the pit rocketing toward the Humvee, the mouth of the beast opening wide. The driver, who is way too young to have even a permit, whips the wheel back and forth to avoid the torrent of drones exploding all around us. One hits a car length in front of us, no time to swerve around it, so we barrel through the blast. The windshield disintegrates, showering us with glass.

The back wheels slip, we jounce, then leap forward, inches ahead of the hole now. I can’t look at it anymore, so I look up.

Where the mothership sails serenely across the sky.

And beneath it, dropping fast toward the horizon, another drone.

No, not a drone, I think. It’s glowing.

A falling star, it must be, its fiery tail like a silver cord connecting it to the heavens.

91

BY THE TIME dawn approaches, we’re miles away, hunkering beneath a highway overpass, where the kid with the very big ears they call Dumbo kneels beside Ben, applying a fresh dressing to the wound in his side. He’s already worked on me and Sammy, pulling out pieces of shrapnel, swabbing, stitching, bandaging.

He asked what happened to my leg. I told him I was shot by a shark. He doesn’t react. Doesn’t seem confused or amused or anything. Like getting shot by a shark is a perfectly natural thing in the aftermath of the Arrival. Like changing your name to Dumbo. When I asked him what his real name was, he said it was…Dumbo.

Ben is Zombie, Sammy is Nugget, Dumbo is Dumbo. Then there’s Poundcake, a sweet-faced kid who doesn’t talk, whether he can’t or won’t, I don’t know. Teacup, a little girl not much older than Sams, who might be seriously messed up, and that worries me, because she holds and strokes and cuddles with an M16 that appears to be carrying a full clip.

Finally the pretty dark-haired girl called Ringer, who’s about my age, who not only has very shiny and very straight black hair, but also has the flawless complexion of an airbrushed model, the kind you see on the covers of fashion magazines smiling arrogantly at you in the checkout line. Except Ringer never smiles, like Poundcake never talks. So I’ve decided to cling to the possibility that she’s missing some teeth.

There’s also something between her and Ben. Something as in they appear to be tight. They spent a long time talking when we first got here. Not that I was spying on them or anything, but I was close enough to overhear the words chess, circle, and smile.

Then I heard Ben ask, “Where’d you get the Humvee?”

“Got lucky,” she said. “They moved a bunch of equipment and supplies to a staging area about two klicks due west of the camp, I guess in anticipation of the bombing. Guarded, but Poundcake and I had the advantage.”

“You shouldn’t have come back, Ringer.”

“If I hadn’t, we wouldn’t be talking right now.”

“That’s not what I mean. Once you saw the camp blow, you should have fallen back to Dayton. We might be the only ones who know the truth about the 5th Wave. This is bigger than me.”

“You went back for Nugget.”

“That’s different.”

“Zombie, you’re not that stupid.” Like Ben is only a little bit stupid. “Don’t you get it yet? The minute we decide that one person doesn’t matter anymore, they’ve won.”

I have to agree with Li’l Miss Microscopic Pores on that point. While I hold my little brother in my lap to keep him warm. On the rise of ground that overlooks the abandoned highway. Beneath a sky crowded with a billion stars. I don’t care what the stars say about how small we are. One, even the smallest, weakest, most insignificant one, matters.

It’s almost dawn. You can feel it coming. The world holds its breath, because there’s really no guarantee that the sun will rise. That there was a yesterday doesn’t mean there will be a tomorrow.

What did Evan say?

We’re here, and then we’re gone, and it’s not about the time we’re here, but what we do with the time.

And I whisper, “Mayfly.” His name for me.

He had been in me. He had been in me and I had been in him, together in an infinite space, and there had been no spot where he ended and I began.

Sammy stirs in my lap. He dozed off; now he’s awake again. “Cassie, why are you crying?”

“I’m not. Shush and go back to sleep.”

He brushes his knuckles across my cheek. “You are crying.”

Someone is coming toward us. It’s Ben. I hurriedly wipe the tears away. He sits beside me, very carefully, with a soft grunt of pain. We don’t look at each other. We watch the fiery hiccups of the fallen drones in the distance. We listen to the lonely wind whistling through dry tree branches. We feel the coldness of the frozen ground seeping up through the soles of our shoes.

“I wanted to thank you,” he says.

“For what?” I ask.

“You saved my life.”

I shrug. “You picked me up when I fell,” I say. “So we’re even.”

My face is covered in bandages, my hair looks like a bird nested in it, I’m dressed up like one of Sammy’s toy soldiers, and Ben Parish leans over and kisses me anyway. A light little peck, half cheek, half mouth.

“What’s that for?” I ask, my voice coming out in a tiny squeak, the little girl’s from long ago, the freckle-faced Cassie-I-was with the fuzzy hair and knobby knees, an ordinary girl who shared an ordinary yellow school bus with him for an ordinary day.