The 5th Wave (5 page)

Well, that’s good,
we thought.
This silence is deafening. Why did they come billions of miles just to stare at us?
It’s rude.

On Day Three, I went out with a guy named Mitchell Phelps. Well, technically we went
out
side
. The date was in my backyard because of the curfew. He hit the drive-through at Starbucks
on his way over, and we sat on the back patio sipping our drinks and pretending we
didn’t see Dad’s shadow passing back and forth as he paced the living room. Mitchell
had moved into town a few days before the Arrival. He sat behind me in World Lit,
and I made the mistake of loaning him my highlighter. So the next thing I know he’s
asking me out, because if a girl loans you a highlighter she must think you’re hot.
I don’t know why I went out with him. He wasn’t that cute and he wasn’t that
interesting beyond the whole New Kid aura, and he definitely wasn’t Ben Parish. Nobody
was—except Ben Parish—and that was the whole problem.

By the third day, you either talked about the Others all the time or you tried not
to talk about them at all. I fell into the second category.

Mitchell was in the first.

“What if they’re us?” he asked.

It didn’t take long after the Arrival for all the conspiracy nuts to start buzzing
about classified government projects or the secret plan to manufacture an alien crisis
in order to take away our liberties. I thought that’s where he was going and groaned.

“What?” he said. “I don’t mean
us
us. I mean, what if they’re us from the future?”

“And it’s like
The Terminator
, right?” I said, rolling my eyes. “They’ve come to stop the uprising of the machines.
Or maybe they
are
the machines. Maybe it’s Skynet.”

“I don’t think so,” he said, acting like I was serious. “It’s the grandfather paradox.”

“What is? And what the hell is the grandfather paradox?” He said it like he assumed
I knew what the grandfather paradox was, because, if I didn’t know, then I was a moron.
I hate when people do that.

“They—I mean we—can’t go back in time and change anything. If you went back in time
and killed your grandfather before you were born, then you wouldn’t be able to go
back in time to kill your grandfather.”

“Why would you want to kill your grandfather?” I twisted the straw in my strawberry
Frappuccino to produce that unique straw-in-a-lid squeak.

“The point is that just showing up changes history,” he said. Like I was the one who
brought up time travel.

“Do we have to talk about this?”

“What else is there to talk about?” His eyebrows climbed toward his hairline. Mitchell
had very bushy eyebrows. It was one of the first things I noticed about him. He also
chewed his fingernails. That was the second thing I noticed. Cuticle care can tell
you a lot about a person.

I pulled out my phone and texted Lizbeth:

help me

“Are you scared?” he asked. Trying to get my attention. Or for some reassurance. He
was looking at me very intently.

I shook my head. “Just bored.” A lie. Of course I was scared. I knew I was being mean,
but I couldn’t help it. For some reason I can’t explain, I was mad at him. Maybe I
was really mad at myself for saying yes to a date with a guy I wasn’t actually interested
in. Or maybe I was mad at him for not being Ben Parish, which wasn’t his fault. But
still.

help u do wat?

“I don’t care what we talk about,” he said. He was looking toward the rose bed, swirling
the dregs of his coffee, his knee popping up and down so violently under the table
that my cup jiggled.

mitchell.
I didn’t think I needed to say any more.

“Who are you texting?”

told u not to go out w him

“Nobody you know,” I said.
dont know why i did

“We can go somewhere else,” he said. “You want to go to a movie?”

“There’s a curfew,” I reminded him. No one was allowed on the streets after nine except
military and emergency vehicles.

lol to make ben jealous

“Are you pissed or something?”

“No,” I said. “I told you what I was.”

He pursed his lips in frustration. He didn’t know what to say.

“I was just trying to figure out who they might be,” he said.

“You and everybody else on the planet,” I said. “Nobody actually knows, and they won’t
tell us, so everybody sits around guessing and theorizing, and it’s all kind of pointless.
Maybe they’re spacefaring micemen from Planet Cheese and they’ve come for our provolone.”

bp doesnt know i exist

“You know,” he said, “it’s kind of rude, texting while I’m trying to have a conversation
with you.”

He was right. I slipped the phone into my pocket.
What’s happening to me?
I wondered. The old Cassie never would have done that. Already the Others were changing
me into someone different, but I wanted to pretend nothing had changed, especially
me.

“Did you hear?” he asked, going right back to the topic that I said bored me. “They’re
building a landing site.”

I had heard. In Death Valley. That’s right: Death Valley.

“Personally, I don’t think it’s a very smart idea,” he said. “Rolling out the welcome
mat.”

“Why not?”

“It’s been three days. Three days and they’ve refused all contact. If they’re friendly,
why wouldn’t they say hello already?”

“Maybe they’re just shy.” Twisting my hair around my finger, tugging on it gently
to produce that semipleasant pain.

“Like being the new kid,” he said, the new kid.

That can’t be easy, being the new kid. I felt like I should apologize for being rude.
“I was kind of mean before,” I admitted. “I’m sorry.”

He gave me a confused look. He was talking about the aliens,
not himself, and then I said something about me, which was about neither.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I heard you don’t date much.”

Ouch.

“What else did you hear?” One of those questions you don’t want to know the answer
to, but still have to ask.

He sipped his latte through the little hole in the plastic lid.

“Not much. It’s not like I asked around.”

“You asked somebody and they told you I didn’t date much.”

“I just said I was thinking about asking you out and they go, Cassie’s pretty cool.
And I said, what’s she like? And they said you were nice but don’t get my hopes up
because you had this thing for Ben Parish—”

“They told you that? Who told you that?”

He shrugged. “I don’t remember her name.”

“Was it Lizbeth Morgan?”
I’ll kill her.

“I don’t know her name,” he said.

“What did she look like?”

“Long brown hair. Glasses. I think her name is Carly or something.”

“I don’t know any…”

Oh God. Some Carly person I don’t even know knows about me and Ben Parish—or the lack
of any me and Ben Parish. And if Carly-or-something knew about it, then everybody
knew about it.

“Well, they’re wrong,” I sputtered. “I don’t have a thing for Ben Parish.”

“It doesn’t matter to me.”

“It matters to me.”

“Maybe this isn’t working out,” he said. “Everything I say, you either get bored or
mad.”

“I’m not mad,” I said angrily.

“Okay, I’m wrong.”

No, he was right. And I was wrong for not telling him the Cassie he knew wasn’t the
Cassie I used to be, the pre-Arrival Cassie who wouldn’t have been mean to a mosquito.
I wasn’t ready to admit the truth: It wasn’t just the world that had changed with
the coming of the Others. We changed. I changed. The moment the mothership appeared,
I started down a path that would end in the back of a convenience store behind some
empty beer coolers. That night with Mitchell was only the beginning of my evolution.

Mitchell was right about the Others not stopping by just to say howdy. On the eve
of the 1st Wave, the world’s leading theoretical physicist, one of the smartest guys
in the world (that’s what popped up on the screen under his talking head:
ONE OF THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE WORLD
), appeared on CNN and said, “I’m not encouraged by the silence. I can think of no
benign reason for it. I’m afraid we may expect something closer to Christopher Columbus’s
arrival in the Americas than a scene from
Close Encounters
, and we all know how that turned out for the Native Americans.”

I turned to my father and said, “We should nuke ’em.” I had to raise my voice to be
heard over the TV—Dad always jacked up the volume during the news so he could hear
it over Mom’s TV in the kitchen. She liked to watch TLC while she cooked. I called
it the War of the Remotes.

“Cassie!” He was so shocked, his toes began to curl inside his white athletic socks.
He grew up on
Close Encounters
and
E.T.
and
Star Trek
and totally bought into the idea that the Others had come to liberate us from ourselves.
No more hunger. No more
wars. The eradication of disease. The secrets of the cosmos unveiled. “Don’t you understand
this could be the next step in our evolution? A huge leap forward. Huge.” He gave
me a consoling hug. “We’re all very fortunate to be here to see it.”

Then he added casually, like he was talking about how to fix a toaster, “Besides,
a nuclear device can’t do much damage in the vacuum of space. There’s nothing to carry
the shock wave.”

“So this brainiac on TV is just full of shit?”

“Don’t use that language, Cassie,” he chided me. “He’s entitled to his opinion, but
that’s all it is. An opinion.”

“But what if he’s right? What if that thing up there is their version of a Death Star?”

“Travel halfway across the universe just to blow us up?” He patted my leg and smiled.
Mom turned up the kitchen TV. He pushed the volume in the family room to twenty-seven.

“Okay, but what about an intergalactic Mongol horde, like he was talking about?” I
demanded. “Maybe they’ve come to conquer us, shove us into reservations, enslave us…”

“Cassie,” he said. “Simply because something
could
happen doesn’t mean it
will
happen. Anyway, it’s all just speculation. This guy’s. Mine. Nobody knows why they’re
here. Isn’t it just as likely they’ve come all this way to save us?”

Four months after saying those words, my father was dead.

He was wrong about the Others. And I was wrong. And One of the Smartest Guys in the
World was wrong.

It wasn’t about saving us. And it wasn’t about enslaving us or herding us into reservations.

It was about killing us.

All of us.

6

I DEBATED WHETHER to travel by day or night for a long time. Darkness is best if you’re
worried about them. But daylight is preferable if you want to spot a drone before
it spots you.

The drones showed up at the tag end of the 3rd Wave. Cigar-shaped, dull gray in color,
gliding swiftly and silently thousands of feet up. Sometimes they streak across the
sky without stopping. Sometimes they circle overhead like buzzards. They can turn
on a dime and come to a sudden stop, from Mach 2 to zero in less than a second. That’s
how we knew the drones weren’t ours.

We knew they were unmanned (or un-Othered) because one of them crashed a couple miles
from our refugee camp. A
thu-whump!
when it broke the sound barrier, an ear-piercing shriek as it rocketed to earth,
the ground shuddering under our feet when it plowed into a fallow cornfield. A recon
team hiked to the crash site to check it out. Okay, it wasn’t really a team, just
Dad and Hutchfield, the guy in charge of the camp. They came back to report the thing
was empty. Were they sure? Maybe the pilot bailed before impact. Dad said it was packed
with instruments; there wasn’t any room for a pilot. “Unless they’re two inches tall.”
That got a big laugh. Somehow it made the horror less horrible, thinking of the Others
as being two-inch Borrower types.

I opted to travel by day. I could keep one eye on the sky and another on the ground.
What I ended up doing is rocking my head up and down, up and down, side to side, then
up again, like some groupie at a rock concert, until I was dizzy and a little sick
to my stomach.