The 5th Wave (10 page)

The camp lay twenty miles east of where we lived, hacked out of the woods during the
3rd Wave to build a field hospital after the ones in town had reached full capacity.
The buildings were slapped together, made out of hand-sawed lumber and salvaged tin,
one main ward for the infected and a smaller shack for the two doctors who tended
the dying before they, too, were sucked down by the Red Tsunami. There was a summer
garden and a system that captured rainwater for washing and bathing and drinking.

We ate and slept in the big building. Between five and six hundred people had bled
out in there, but the floor and walls had been bleached and the cots they died on
had been burned. It still smelled faintly of the Pestilence (a little like soured
milk), and the bleach hadn’t removed all the bloodstains. There were patterns of tiny
spots covering the walls and long, sickle-shaped stains on the floor. It was like
living in a 3-D abstract painting.

The shack was a combination storehouse and weapons cache. Canned vegetables, packaged
meats, dry goods, and staples, like salt. Shotguns, pistols, semiautomatics, even
a couple of flare guns. Every man walked around armed to the teeth; it was the Wild
West all over again.

A shallow pit had been dug a few hundred yards into the woods behind the compound.
The pit was for burning bodies. We weren’t allowed to go back there, so of course
me and some of the older kids did. There was this one creep they called Crisco, I
guess because of his long, greased-back hair. Crisco was thirteen and a trophy hunter.
He’d actually wade into the ashes to scavenge for jewelry and coins and anything else
he might find
valuable or “interesting.” He swore he didn’t do it because he was a sicko.

“This is the difference now,” he would say, chortling, sorting through his latest
haul with crud-encrusted fingernails, his hands gloved in the gray dust of human remains.

The difference between what?

“Between being the Man or not. The barter system is back, baby!” Holding up a diamond
necklace. “And when it’s all over except for the shouting, the people with the good
stuff are going to call the shots.”

The idea that they wanted to kill
all
of us still wasn’t something that had occurred to anyone, even the adults. Crisco
saw himself as one of the Native Americans who sold Manhattan for a handful of beads,
not as a dodo bird, which was a lot closer to the truth.

Dad had heard about the camp a few weeks back, when Mom started showing early symptoms
of the Pestilence. He tried to get Mom to go, but she knew there was nothing anyone
could do. If she was going to die, she wanted to do it in her own home, not in some
bogus hospice in the middle of the woods. Then later, as she was entering the final
hours, the rumor came around that the hospital had been turned into a rendezvous point,
a kind of survivor safe house, far enough from town to be reasonably safe in the next
wave, whatever that was going to be (though the smart money was on some kind of aerial
bombardment), but close enough for the People in Charge to find when they came to
rescue us—if there were People in Charge and if they came.

The unofficial boss of the camp was a retired marine named Hutchfield. He was a human
LEGO person: square hands, square
head, square jaw. Wore the same muscle tee every day, stained with something that
might have been blood, though his black boots always sported a mirror finish. He shaved
his head (though not his chest or back, which he really should have considered). He
was covered in tattoos. And he liked guns. Two on his hip, one tucked behind his back,
another slung over his shoulder. No one carried more guns than Hutchfield. Maybe that
had something to do with his being the unofficial boss.

Sentries had spotted us coming, and when we reached the dirt road that led into the
woods to the camp, Hutchfield was there with another guy named Brogden. I’m pretty
sure we were supposed to notice the firepower draped all over their bodies. Hutchfield
ordered us to split up. He was going to talk to Dad; Brogden got me and Sams. I told
Hutchfield what I thought about that idea. You know, like where exactly on his tattooed
behind he could stick it.

I’d just lost one parent. I wasn’t too keen on the idea of losing another.

“It’s all right, Cassie,” my father said.

“We don’t know these guys,” I argued with him. “They could be just another bunch of
Twigs, Dad.”
Twigs
was street for “thugs with guns,” the murderers, rapists, black marketers, kidnappers,
and just your general punks who showed up midway through the 3rd Wave, the reason
people barricaded their houses and stockpiled food and weapons. It wasn’t the aliens
that first made us gear up for war; it was our fellow humans.

“They’re just being careful,” Dad argued back. “I’d do the same thing in their position.”
He patted me. I was like,
Damn it, old man, if you give me that g.d. condescending little pat one more time…
“It’ll be fine, Cassie.”

He went off with Hutchfield, out of earshot but still in sight.
That made me feel a little better. I hauled Sammy onto my hip and did my best to answer
Brogden’s questions without popping him with my free hand.

What were our names?

Where were we from?

Was anyone in our party infected?

Was there anything we could tell him about what was going on?

What had we seen?

What had we heard?

Why were we here?

“You mean here at this camp, or are you being existential?” I asked.

His eyebrows drew together into a single harsh line, and he said, “Huh?”

“If you’d asked me that before all this shit happened, I’d have said something like,
‘We’re here to serve our fellow man or contribute to society.’ If I wanted to be a
smartass, I’d say, ‘Because if we weren’t here, we’d be somewhere else.’ But since
all this shit has happened, I’m going to say it’s because we’re just dumb lucky.”

He squinted at me for a second before saying snarkily, “You are a smartass.”

I don’t know how Dad answered that question, but apparently it passed inspection,
because we were allowed into camp with full privileges, which meant Dad (not me, though)
was allowed to have his pick of weapons from the cache. Dad had a thing about guns.
Never liked them. Said guns might not kill people, but they sure made it easier. Now
he didn’t think they were dangerous so much as he thought they were ridiculously lame.

“How effective do you think our guns are going to be against
a technology thousands, if not millions, of years ahead of ours?” he asked Hutchfield.
“It’s like using a club and stones against a tactical missile.”

The argument was lost on Hutchfield. He was a marine, for God’s sake. His rifle was
his best friend, his most trusted companion, the answer to every possible question.

I didn’t get that back then. I get it now.

13

IN GOOD WEATHER, everyone stayed outside until it was time to go to bed. That ramshackle
building had a bad vibe. Because of why it was built. Why it existed. What had brought
it—and us—into these woods. Some nights the mood was light, almost like a summer camp
where by some miracle everybody liked one another. Someone would say they heard the
sound of a helicopter that afternoon, which would set off a round of hopeful speculation
that the People in Charge were getting their acts together and preparing for the counterpunch.

Other times the mood was darker and angst was heavy in the twilight air. We were the
lucky ones. We’d survived the EMP attack, the obliteration of the coasts, the plague
that wasted everyone we knew and loved. We’d beaten the odds. We’d stared into the
face of Death, and Death blinked first. You’d think that would make us feel brave
and invincible. It didn’t.

We were like the Japanese who survived the initial blast of the
Hiroshima bomb. We didn’t understand why we were still here, and we weren’t completely
sure we wanted to be.

We told the stories of our lives before the Arrival. We cried openly over the ones
we lost. We wept secretly for our smartphones, our cars, our microwave ovens, and
the Internet.

We watched the night sky. The mothership would stare down at us, a pale green, malevolent
eye.

There were debates about where we should go. It was pretty much understood we couldn’t
squat in these woods indefinitely. Even if the Others weren’t coming anytime soon,
winter was. We had to find better shelter. We had several months’ worth of supplies—or
less, depending upon how many more refugees wandered into camp. Did we wait for rescue
or hit the road to find it? Dad was all for the latter. He still wanted to check out
Wright-Patterson. If there were People in Charge, the odds were a lot better we’d
find them there.

I got sick of it after a while. Talking about the problem had replaced actually doing
something about it. I was ready to tell Dad we should tell these douchebags to stuff
it, take off for Wright-Patterson with whoever wanted to go with us and screw the
rest.

Sometimes, I thought, strength in numbers was a highly overrated concept.

I brought Sammy inside and put him to bed. Said his prayer with him. “‘Now I lay me
down to sleep…’” To me, just random noise. Gibberish. I wasn’t sure exactly what it
was, but I felt that, when it came to God, there was a broken promise in there somewhere.

It was a clear night. The moon was full. I felt comfortable enough to take a walk
in the woods.

Somebody in camp had picked up a guitar. The melody skipped along the trail, following
me into the woods. It was the first music I’d heard since the 1st Wave.

“And, in the end, we lie awake

And we dream of making our escape.”

Suddenly I just wanted to curl into a little ball and cry. I wanted to take off through
those woods and keep running until my legs fell off. I wanted to puke. I wanted to
scream until my throat bled. I wanted to see my mother again, and Lizbeth and all
my friends, even the friends I didn’t like, and Ben Parish, just to tell him I loved
him and wanted to have his baby more than I wanted to live.

The song faded, was drowned out by the definitely less melodic song of the crickets.

A twig snapped.

And a voice came out of the woods behind me.

“Cassie! Wait up!”

I kept walking. I recognized that voice. Maybe I’d jinxed myself, thinking about Ben.
Like when you’re craving chocolate and the only thing in your backpack is a half-crushed
bag of Skittles.

“Cassie!”

Now he was running. I didn’t feel like running, so I let him catch up to me.

That was one thing that hadn’t changed: The one sure way of not being alone was wanting
to be alone.

“Whatcha doing?” Crisco asked. He was pulling hard for air. Bright red cheeks. Shiny
temples, maybe from all the hair grease.

“Isn’t it obvious?” I shot back. “I’m building a nuclear device to take out the mothership.”

“Nukes won’t do it,” he said, squaring his shoulders. “We should build Fermi’s steam
cannon.”

“Fermi?”

“The guy who invented the bomb.”

“I thought that was Oppenheimer.”

He seemed impressed I knew something about history.

“Well, maybe he didn’t invent it, but he was the godfather.”

“Crisco, you’re a freak,” I said. That sounded harsh, so I added, “But I didn’t know
you before the invasion.”

“You dig this big hole. Put a warhead at the bottom. Fill the hole with water and
cap it off with a few hundred tons of steel. The explosion turns the water instantly
into steam, which shoots the steel into space at six times the speed of sound.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Somebody should definitely do that. Is that why you’re stalking me?
You want me to help you build a nuclear steam cannon?”

“Can I ask you something?”

“No.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

“If you had twenty minutes to live, what would you do?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “But it wouldn’t have anything to do with you.”

“How come?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He probably figured it wasn’t something
he wanted to hear. “What if I was the last person on Earth?”