The 5th Wave

83

I WANT TO DRINK IN his sweet Sammy smell forever, but I can’t. The place is crawling with armed soldiers, some of them Silencers—or anyway, not teens, so I have to assume they’re Silencers. I lead Sammy over to a wall, putting a group of kids between us and the nearest guard. I scrunch down as low as possible and whisper, “Are you okay?”

He nods. “I knew you’d come, Cassie.”

“I promised, right?”

He’s wearing a heart-shaped locket around his neck. What the heck? I touch it, and he pulls back a little.

“Why are you dressed like that?” he asks.

“I’ll explain later.”

“You’re a soldier now, aren’t you? What squad are you in?”

Squad? “No squad,” I tell him. “I’m my own squad.”

He frowns. “You can’t be your own squad, Cassie.”

This isn’t really the time to get into the whole ridiculous squad thing. I glance around the room. “Sam, we’re getting out of here.”

“I know. Major Bob says we’re going on a big plane.” He nods toward Major Bob, starts to wave at him. I push his hand down.

“A big plane? When?”

He shrugs. “Soon.” He’s picked up Bear. Now he examines him, turning him over in his hands. “His ear’s ripped,” he points out accusingly, like I’ve shirked my duty.

“Tonight?” I ask. “Sam, this is important. You’re flying out tonight?”

“That’s what Major Bob said. He said they’re vaculating all nonessentials.”

“Vaculating? Oh. Okay, so they’re evacuating the kids.” My mind is racing, trying to work through it. Is that the way out? Just stroll on board with the others and take our chances when we land—wherever we land? God, why did I ditch the white jumpsuit? But even if I kept it and was able to sneak onto the plane, that wasn’t the plan.

There’s going to be escape pods somewhere on the base—probably near the command center or Vosch’s quarters. Basically they’re one-man rockets, preprogrammed to land you safely at some spot far from the base. Don’t ask me where. But the pods are your best bet—not human technology, but I’ll explain how you operate one. If you can find one, and if both of you can fit in one, and if you live long enough to find one to fit in.

That’s a lot of ifs. Maybe I should beat up a kid my size and take her jumpsuit.

“How long have you been here, Cassie?” Sam asks. I think he suspects I’ve been avoiding him, maybe because I let Bear’s ear get torn.

“Longer than I wanted to be,” I mutter, and that decides it: We’re not staying here a minute longer than we have to, and we’re not taking some one-way flight to Camp Haven II. I’m not trading one death camp for another.

He’s playing with Bear’s torn ear. Not his first injury by a long shot. I’ve lost count of how many times Mom had to patch him up. He has more stitches in him than Frankenstein. I lean over to get Sammy’s attention, and that’s when he looks right at me and asks, “Where’s Daddy?”

My mouth moves, but no sound comes out. I hadn’t even thought about telling him—or how to tell him.

“Dad? Oh, he’s…” No, Cassie. Don’t get complicated. I don’t want him having a meltdown right as we’re preparing to make our getaway. I decide to let Dad live a little longer.

“He’s waiting for us back at Camp Ashpit.”

His lower lip starts to quiver. “Daddy isn’t here?”

“Daddy is busy,” I say, hoping to shut him down, and I feel like crap doing it. “That’s why he sent me. To get you. And that’s what I’m doing, right now, getting you.”

I pull him to his feet. He goes, “But what about the plane?”

“You’ve been bumped.” He gives me a puzzled look: Bumped? “Let’s go.”

I grab his hand and head for the tunnel, keeping my shoulders back and my head up, because skulking toward the nearest exit like Shaggy and Scooby tinkle-toeing is sure to draw attention. I even bark at some kids to get out of the way. If someone tries to stop us, I won’t shoot them. I’ll explain that the kid is sick and I’m getting him to a doctor before he pukes all over himself and everybody else. If they don’t buy my story, then I shoot them.

And then we’re in the tunnel and, incredibly, there is a doctor walking straight at us, half his face hidden behind a surgical mask. His eyes widen when he sees us, and there goes my clever cover story, which means if he stops us I’ll have to shoot him. As we draw closer, I see him casually drop his hand into the pocket of his white coat, and the alarm sounds inside my head, the same alarm that went off in the convenience store behind the beer coolers right before I pumped an entire clip into a crucifix-holding soldier.

I have one half of one half second to decide.

This is the first rule of the last war: Trust no one.

I level the silencer at his chest as his hand emerges from the pocket.

The hand that holds a gun.

But my hand holds an M16 assault rifle.

How long is one half of one half second?

Long enough for a little boy who doesn’t know the first rule to leap between the gun and the rifle.

“Sammy!” I yell, pulling up the shot. My little brother hops onto his toes; his fingers tear at the doctor’s mask and yank it down.

I’d hate to see the look on my face when that mask came down and I saw the face behind it. Thinner than I remember. Paler. The eyes sunk deep into their sockets, kind of glazed over, like he’s sick or hurt, but I recognize it, I know whose face was hidden behind that mask. I just can’t process it.

Here, in this place. A thousand years later and a million miles from the halls of George Barnard High School. Here, in the belly of the beast at the bottom of the world, standing right in front of me.

Benjamin Thomas Parish.

And Cassiopeia Marie Sullivan, having a full-bore out-of-body experience, seeing herself seeing him. The last time she saw him was in their high school gymnasium after the lights went out, and then only the back of his head, and the only times that she’s seen him since happened in her mind, the rational part of which always knew Ben Parish was dead like everyone else.

“Zombie!” Sammy calls. “I knew it was you.”

Zombie?

“Where are you taking him?” Ben says to me in a deep voice. I don’t remember it being that deep. Is my memory bad or is he lowering it on purpose, to sound older?

“Zombie, that’s Cassie,” Sam chides him. “You know—Cassie.”

“Cassie?” Like he’s never heard the name before.

“Zombie?” I say, because I really haven’t heard that name before.

I pull off the cap, thinking it might help him recognize me, then immediately regret it. I know what my hair must look like.

“We go to the same high school,” I say, drawing my fingers hastily through my chopped-off locks. “I sit in front of you in Honors Chemistry.”

Ben shakes his head like he’s clearing out the cobwebs.

Sammy goes, “I told you she was coming.”

“Quiet, Sam,” I scold him.

“Sam?” Ben asks.

“My name is Nugget now, Cassie,” Sam informs me.

“Well, sure it is.” I turn to Ben. “You know my brother.”

Ben nods carefully. I still don’t get his attitude. Not that I expect him to throw his arms around me or even remember me from chemistry class, but his voice is tight, and he’s still holding the gun by his side.

“Why are you dressed like a doctor?” Sammy asks.

Ben like a doctor. Me like a soldier. Like two kids playing dress-up. A fake doctor and a fake soldier debating with themselves whether to blow the other one’s brains out.

Those first few moments between me and Ben Parish were very strange.

“I came to get you out of here,” Ben says to Sam, still looking at me.

Sam glances over at me. Isn’t that why I came? Now he’s really confused.

“You’re not taking my brother anywhere,” I say.

“It’s a lie,” Ben blurts out at me. “Vosch is one of them. They’re using us to kill off the survivors, to kill each other…”

“I know that,” I snap. “How do you know that, and what does that have to do with taking Sam?”

Ben seems stunned by my response to his bombshell. Then I get it. He thinks I’ve been indoctrinated like everybody else in the camp. It’s so ridiculous, I actually laugh. While I’m laughing like an idiot, I get something else: He hasn’t been brainwashed, either.

Which means I can trust him.

Unless he’s playing me, getting me to lower my guard—and my weapon—so he can waste me and take Sam.

Which means I can’t trust him.

I also can’t read his mind, but he must be thinking along the same lines when I burst out laughing. Why is this crazy girl with the helmet-hair laughing? Because he’s stated the obvious or because I think his story’s crap?

“I know,” Sammy says to broker the peace. “We can all go together!”

“Do you know a way out of here?” I ask Ben. Sammy’s more trusting than I am, but the idea’s worth exploring. Finding the escape pods—if they even exist—has always been the weakest part of my getaway plan.

He nods. “Do you?”

“I know a way—I just don’t know the way to the way.”

“The way to the way? Okay.” He grins. He looks like hell, but the smile hasn’t changed a bit. It lights up the tunnel like a thousand-watt bulb. “I know the way and the way to the way.”

He drops the gun into his pocket and holds out his empty hand.

“Let’s go together.”

The thing that gets me is whether I’d take that hand if it belonged to anyone other than Ben Parish.

84

SAMMY NOTICES THE BLOOD before I do.

“It’s nothing,” Ben grunts.

I don’t get that from the look on his face. From the look on his face, it’s a lot more than nothing.

“It’s a long story, Nugget,” Ben says. “I’ll tell you later.”

“Where are we going?” I ask. Not that we’re getting there—wherever there is—very fast. Ben is shuffling along the maze of corridors like an actual zombie. The face of the Ben I remember is still there, but it’s faded… or maybe not faded, but congealed into a leaner, sharper, harder version of his old face. Like someone cut away the parts that weren’t absolutely necessary for Ben to maintain his Ben essence.

“In general? The hell out of here. After this next tunnel coming up on the right. It leads to an air shaft that we can—”

“Wait!” I grab his arm. In my shock at seeing him again, I’d completely forgotten. “Sammy’s tracker.”

He stares at me for a second, and then laughs ruefully. “I completely forgot.”

“Forgot what?” Sammy asks.

I go to one knee, take his hands in mine. We’re several corridors away from the safe room, but Major Bob’s megaphoned voice still bounces and skips along the tunnels. “Sams, there’s something we have to do. Something very important. The people here, they’re not who they say they are.”

“Who are they?” he whispers.

“Bad people, Sam. Very bad people.”

“Teds,” Ben puts in. “Dr. Pam, the soldiers, the commander… even the commander. They’re all infesteds. They tricked us, Nugget.”

Sammy’s eyes are big as pie plates. “The commander, too?”

“The commander, too,” Ben answers. “So we’re getting out of here and we’re going to meet up with Ringer.” He catches me staring at him. “That’s not her real name.”

“Really?” I shake my head. Zombie, Nugget, Ringer. Must be an army thing. I turn back to Sam. “They lied about a lot of things, Sam. About almost everything.” I let go of his hand and run my fingers up the back of his neck, finding the small lump beneath the skin. “This is one of their lies, this thing they put in you. They use it to track you—but they can also use it to hurt you.”

Ben squats down beside me. “So we have to get it out, Nugget.”

Sam nods, fat bottom lip quivering, big eyes filling up with tears. “Oh-kay-ay…”

“But you have to be very quiet and very still,” I caution him. “You can’t yell or cry or twist around. Think you can do that?”

He nods again, and a tear pops out and drops on my forearm. I stand up, and Ben and I step away for a brief preoperative conference.

“We’ll have to use this,” I say, showing him the ten-inch combat knife, which I’m careful not to let Sammy see.

Ben’s eyes widen. “If you say so, but I was going to use this.” And he pulls a scalpel from his lab coat pocket.

“That’s probably better.”

“You want to do it?”

“I should do it. He’s my brother.” But the thought of cutting into Sammy’s neck gives me the squishies.

“I can do it,” Ben offers. “You hold him, and I’ll cut.”

“So it’s not a disguise? You earned your MD here at E.T. University?”

He smiles grimly. “Just try to keep him as still as possible so I don’t slice into something important.”

We return to Sam, who’s sitting now with his back against the wall, pressing Bear into his chest and watching us, eyes flicking fearfully back and forth. I whisper to Ben, “If you hurt him, Parish, I’m sticking this knife into your heart.”

He looks at me, startled. “I would never hurt him.”

I ease Sam into my lap. Roll him over so he’s lying facedown across my legs, his chin hanging over the edge of my thigh. Ben kneels down. I look at the hand holding the scalpel. It’s shaking.

“I’m okay,” Ben whispers. “Really. I’m okay. Don’t let him move.”

“Cassie…!” Sammy whimpers.

“Shhhh. Shhhh. Stay very still. He’ll be quick,” I say. “Be quick,” I tell Ben.

I hold Sam’s head with both hands. As Ben’s hand approaches with the scalpel, it becomes rock steady.

“Hey, Nugget,” he says. “Okay if I take the locket back first?” Sammy nods, and Ben undoes the clasp. The metal clinks in his hand as he pulls it free.

“It’s yours?” I ask Ben, startled.

“My sister’s.” Ben drops the chain into his pocket. The way he says it, I know she’s dead.

I turn my head. Thirty minutes ago I’d blown a guy’s face off, and now I can’t watch someone make the tiniest of cuts. Sammy jerks when the blade breaks his skin. He bites down on my leg to keep from screaming. Bites hard. It takes everything in me to remain still. If I move, Ben’s hand might slip.

“Hurry,” I squeak, mouse-voiced.

“Got it!” The tracker adheres to the end of Ben’s bloody middle finger.

“Get rid of it.”

Ben shakes it off his hand and slaps a bandage over the wound. He came prepared. I came with a ten-inch combat knife.

“Okay, it’s over, Sam,” I moan. “You can stop biting me now.”

“It hurts, Cassie!”

“I know, I know.” I pull him up and give him a big hug. “And you were very brave.”

He nods seriously. “I know.”

Ben offers me his hand, helps me to my feet. His hand is tacky with my brother’s blood. He drops the scalpel into his pocket and then the gun is back in his hand.

“We better get moving,” he says calmly, like we might miss a bus.

Back into the main corridor, Sammy leaning hard against my side. We make the last turn, and Ben stops so suddenly, I run right into his back. The tunnel echoes with the sound of a dozen semiautomatics being racked, and I hear a familiar voice say, “You’re late, Ben. I expected you much sooner.”

A very deep voice, hard as steel.

85

I LOSE SAMMY for a second time. A Silencer-soldier takes him away, back to the safe room to be evacuated with the other kids, I guess. Another Silencer brings Ben and me to the execution room. The room with the mirror and the button. The room where innocent people are wired up and electrocuted. The room of blood and lies. Seems fitting.

“Do you know why we will win this war?” Vosch asks us after we’re locked inside. “Why we cannot lose? Because we know how you think. We’ve been watching you for six thousand years. When the pyramids rose in the Egyptian desert, we were watching you. When Caesar burned the library at Alexandria, we were watching you. When you crucified that first-century Jewish peasant, we were watching. When Columbus set foot in the New World… when you fought a war to free millions of your fellow humans from bondage… when you learned how to split the atom… when you first ventured beyond your atmosphere… What were we doing?”

Ben isn’t looking at him. Neither of us is. We’re both sitting in front of the mirror, looking straight ahead at our distorted reflections in the broken glass. The room on the other side is dark.

“You were watching us,” I say. Vosch is sitting in front of the monitor, about a foot away from me. On my other side, Ben, and behind us, a very well-built Silencer.

“We were learning how you think. That’s the secret to victory, as Sergeant Parish here already knows: understanding how your enemy thinks. The arrival of the mothership was not the beginning, but the beginning of the end. And now here you are, in a front-row seat for the finale, a special sneak peek into the future. Would you like to see the future? Your future? Would you like to stare all the way down to the bottom of the human cup?”

Vosch presses a button on the keyboard. The lights in the room on the other side of the mirror flicker on.

There is a chair, a Silencer standing beside it, and strapped to the chair is my brother, Sammy, thick wires attached to his head.

“This is the future,” Vosch whispers. “The human animal bound, its death at our fingertips. And when you have finished the work that we’ve given you, we will press the execute button and your deplorable stewardship of this planet will come to an end.”

“You don’t have to do this!” I shout. The Silencer behind me puts a hand on my shoulder and squeezes hard. But not hard enough to keep me from jumping out of the chair. “All you have to do is implant us and download us into Wonderland. Won’t that tell you everything you want to know? You don’t have to kill him…”

“Cassie,” Ben says softly. “He’s going to kill him anyway.”

“You shouldn’t listen to him, young lady,” Vosch says. “He’s weak. He’s always been weak. You’ve shown more pluck and determination in a few hours than he has in his miserable lifetime.”

He nods to the Silencer, who yanks me back into the chair.

“I am going to ‘download’ you,” Vosch tells me. “And I am going to kill Sergeant Parish. But you can save the child. If you tell me who helped you infiltrate this base.”

“Won’t downloading me tell you that?” I ask. While I’m thinking, Evan is alive! And then I think, No, maybe he isn’t. He could have been killed in the bombing, vaporized like everything else on the surface. It could be that Vosch, like me, doesn’t know whether Evan’s alive or dead.

“Because someone helped you,” Vosch says, ignoring my question. “And I suspect that someone is not someone like Mr. Parish here. He—or they—would be someone more like… well, me. Someone who would know how to defeat the Wonderland program by hiding your true memories, the same method we have used for centuries to hide ourselves from you.”

I’m shaking my head. I have no idea what he’s talking about. True memories?

“Birds are the most common,” Vosch says. He’s absently running his finger over the button marked EXECUTE. “Owls. During the initial phase, when we were inserting ourselves into you, we often used the screen memory of an owl to hide the fact from the expectant mother.”

“I hate birds,” I whisper.

Vosch smiles. “The most useful of this planet’s indigenous fauna. Diverse. Considered benign, for the most part. So ubiquitous they’re practically invisible. Did you know they’re descended from the dinosaurs? There’s a very satisfying irony in that. The dinosaurs made way for you, and now, with the help of their descendants, you will make way for us.”

“No one helped me!” I screech, cutting off the lecture. “I did it all myself!”

“Really? Then how is it, at the precise moment you were killing Dr. Pam in Hangar One, two of our sentries were shot, another eviscerated, and a fourth hurled a hundred feet down from his post on the south watchtower?”

“I don’t know anything about that. I just came to find my brother.”

His face darkens. “There really is no hope, you know. All your daydreams and childish fantasies about defeating us—useless.”

I open my mouth and the words come out. They just come out.

“Fuck you.”

And his finger comes down hard on the button, like he hates it, like the button has a face and its face is a human face, the face of the sentient cockroach, and his finger the boot, stomping down.

86

I DON’T KNOW what I did first. I think I screamed. I know I also ripped free from the Silencer’s grip and lunged at Vosch with the intention of tearing his eyeballs out. But I don’t remember which came first, the scream or the lunge. Ben throwing his arms around me to hold me back, I know that came after the scream and the lunge. He threw his arms around me and pulled me back because I was focused on Vosch, on my hate. I didn’t even look through the mirror at my brother, but Ben had been looking at the monitor and the word that popped up when Vosch hit the execute button:

OOPS.

I whip around to the mirror. Sammy is still alive—crying buckets, but alive. Beside me, Vosch stands up so fast, the chair flies across the room and smacks against the wall.

“He’s hacked into the mainframe and overwritten the program,” he snarls at the Silencer. “He’ll cut the power next. Hold them here.” He yells at the man standing beside Sammy. “Secure that door! No one leaves until I get back.”

He slams out of the room. The lock clicks. No way out now. Or there is a way, the way I took the first time I was trapped in this room. I glance up at the grating. Forget it, Cassie. It’s you and Ben against two Silencers, and Ben’s hurt. Don’t even think about it.

No. It’s me and Ben and Evan against the Silencers. Evan is alive. And if Evan’s alive, we haven’t reached the end—the bottom of the human cup. The boot hasn’t crushed the roach. Not yet.

And that’s when I see it drop between the slats and tumble onto the floor, the body of a real cockroach, freshly squashed. I watch it fall in slow motion, so slow I can see the tiny bounce when it hits the floor.

You want to compare yourself to an insect, Cassie?

My eyes fly back to the grate, where a shadow flickers, like the flurry of a mayfly’s wings.

And I whisper to Ben Parish, “The one with Sammy—he’s mine.”

Startled, Ben whispers back to me, “What?”

I drive my shoulder into our Silencer’s gut, catching him off guard, and he stumbles backward beneath the grate, his arms flailing for balance, and Evan’s bullet tears into his fully human brain, killing him instantly. I have his gun before he hits the floor, and I have one chance, one shot through the hole I had made earlier. If I miss, Sammy is dead—his Silencer is turning on him even as I turn on him.

But I had an excellent instructor. One of the best marksmen in the world—even when there were seven billion people in it.

It isn’t exactly like shooting a can from a fence post.

It’s actually a lot easier: His head is closer and a heck of a lot bigger.

Sammy is halfway to me before the guy’s body hits the floor. I pull him through the hole. Ben is looking at us, at the dead Silencer, at the other dead Silencer, at the gun in my hand. He doesn’t know what to look at. I’m looking up at the grate.

“We’re clear!” I call up to him.

He knocks once against the side. I don’t get it at first, and then I laugh.

Let’s establish a code for when you want to go all creeper on me. One knock means you’d like to come in.

“Yes, Evan.” I’m laughing so hard, it’s starting to hurt. “You can come in.” I’m about to pee myself with relief that we’re all alive, but mostly because he is.

He drops into the room, landing on the balls of his feet like a cat. I’m in his arms in the time it takes to say “I love you,” which he does, stroking my hair, whispering my name and the words, “My mayfly.”

“How did you find us?” I ask him. He’s so completely with me, so there, it’s like I’m seeing his yummy chocolate eyes for the first time, feeling his strong arms and his soft lips for the first time.

“Easy. Somebody was up there ahead of me and left a blood trail.”

“Cassie?”

It’s Sammy, holding on to Ben, because he’s feeling the Ben thing a little more than he is the Cassie one at the moment. Who’s this guy falling from the ductwork, and what’s he doing with my sister?

“This must be Sammy,” Evan says.

“This is Sammy,” I say. “Oh! And this is—”

“Ben Parish,” Ben says.

“Ben Parish?” Evan looks at me. That Ben Parish?

“Ben,” I say, my face on fire. I want to laugh and crawl under the counter at the same time. “This is Evan Walker.”

“Is he your boyfriend?” Sammy asks.

I don’t know what to say. Ben looks totally lost, Evan completely amused, and Sammy just damned curious. It’s my first truly awkward moment in the alien lair, and I’d been through my share of moments.

“He’s a friend from high school,” I mutter.

And Evan corrects me, since it’s clear I’ve lost my mind. “Actually, Sam, Ben is Cassie’s friend from high school.”

“She’s not my friend,” Ben says. “I mean, I guess I kind of remember her…” Then Evan’s words sink in. “How do you know who I am?”

“He doesn’t!” I fairly shout.

“Cassie told me about you,” Evan says. I elbow him in the ribs, and he gives me a look like What?

“Maybe we can chat about how everybody knows one another later,” I plead with Evan. “Right now don’t you think it would be a good idea for us to leave?”

“Right.” Evan nods. “Let’s go.” He looks at Ben. “You’re injured.”

Ben shrugs. “A couple of torn stitches. I’m okay.”

I slip the Silencer’s gun into my empty holster, realize Ben will need a weapon, and pop through the hole in the mirror to fetch it. They’re all still just standing around when I get back, Ben and Evan smiling at each other—knowingly, in my opinion.

“What are we standing around for?” I ask, my voice harsher than I’d intended. I scoot the chair beside the Silencer’s body and motion toward the grate. “Evan, you should take point.”

“We’re not going that way,” Evan says back. He takes a key card from the Silencer’s pouch and swipes it through the door lock. The light flashes green.

“We’re walking out?” I ask. “Just like that?”

“Just like that,” Evan answers.

He checks out the corridor first, then motions for us to follow, and we step out of the execution room. The door locks behind us. The hallway is eerily quiet, feels deserted.

“He said you were going to cut the power,” I whisper, pulling the gun from my holster.

Evan holds up a silver object that looks like a flip phone.

“I am. Right now.”

He hits a button, and the corridor plunges into darkness. I can’t see anything. My free hand shoots into the dark, searching for Sammy’s. I find Ben’s instead. He grips my hand hard before letting it go. Little fingers tug at my pant leg and I pull them up, hook one through my belt loop.

“Ben, hold on to me,” Evan says softly. “Cassie, hold on to Ben. It isn’t far.”

I expect a slow shuffle of this rumba line through the pitch dark, but we take off fast, nearly tripping over one another’s heels. He must be able to see in the dark, another catlike quality. We don’t go very far before we’re clustered around a door. At least I think it’s a door. It’s smooth, not like the textured cinder-block walls. Someone—it has to be Evan—pushes against the smooth surface and there’s a puff of fresh, cold air.

“Stairs?” I whisper. I’m completely blind and disoriented, but I think these might be the same stairs I came down when I first got here.

“Halfway up you’re going to hit some debris,” Evan says. “But you should be able to squeeze through. Be careful; it might be a little unstable. When you get to the top, head due north. Do you know which way is north?”

Ben says, “I do. Or at least I know how to figure it out.”

“What do you mean, when we get to the top?” I demand. “Aren’t you coming with us?”

I feel his hand on my cheek. I know what this means and I slap his hand away.

“You’re coming with us, Evan,” I say.

“There’s something I have to do.”

“That’s right.” My hand flails for his in the dark. I find it and pull hard. “You have to come with us.”

“I’ll find you, Cassie. Don’t I always find you? I—”

“Don’t, Evan. You don’t know you’ll be able to find me.”

“Cassie.” I don’t like the way he says my name. His voice is too soft, too sad, too much like a good-bye voice. “I was wrong when I said I was both and neither. I can’t be; I know that now. I have to choose.”

“Wait a minute,” Ben says. “Cassie, this guy is one of them?”

“It’s complicated,” I answer. “We’ll go over it later.” I grab Evan’s hand in both of mine and press it against my chest. “Don’t leave me again.”

“You left me, remember?” He spreads his fingers over my heart, like he’s holding it, like it belongs to him, the hard-fought-for territory he’s won fair and square.

I give in. What am I going to do, put a gun to his head? He’s gotten this far, I tell myself. He’ll get the rest of the way.

“What’s due north?” I ask, pushing against his fingers.

“I don’t know. But it’s the shortest path to the farthest spot.”

“The farthest spot from what?”

“From here. Wait for the plane. When the plane takes off, run. Ben, do you think you can run?”

“I think so.”

“Run fast?”

“Yes.” He doesn’t sound too confident about it, though.

“Wait for the plane,” Evan whispers. “Don’t forget.”

He kisses me hard on the mouth, and then the stairwell goes all Evanless. I can feel Ben’s breath on my neck, hot in the cool air.

“I don’t understand what’s happening here,” Ben says. “Who is that guy? He’s a… What is he? Where’d he come from? And where’s he going now?”

“I’m not sure, but I think he’s found the armory.”

Somebody was up there ahead of me and left a blood trail.

Oh God, Evan. No wonder you didn’t tell me.

“He’s going to blow this whole place to hell.”

87

IT’S NOT A RACE up the stairs to freedom. We practically crawl up, hanging on to one another as we climb, me in the lead, Ben at the rear, and Sammy between us. The closed space is choked with fine particles of dust, and soon we’re all coughing and wheezing loud enough, it seems to me, to be heard by every Silencer in a two-mile radius. I move with one hand extended in front of me in the blackness and call out our progress softly.

“First landing!”

A hundred years later we reach the second landing. Almost halfway to the top, but we haven’t hit the debris Evan warned us about.

I have to choose.

Now that he’s gone and it’s too late, I’ve come up with about a dozen good arguments for why he shouldn’t leave us. My best argument is this:

You won’t have time.

The Eye takes—what?—about a minute or two from activation to detonation. Barely enough time to get to the armory doors. Okay, so you’re going to go all noble and sacrifice yourself to save us, but then don’t say things like I’ll find you, which implies there’ll be an I to find me after you unleash the green fireball from hell.

Unless… Maybe the Eyes can be detonated remotely. Maybe that little silver thing he’s carrying around…

No. If that was a possibility, he would have come with us and set them off once we were a safe distance away.

Damn it. Every time I think I’m starting to understand Evan Walker, he slips away. It’s like I’m blind from birth, trying to visualize a rainbow. If what I think is about to happen actually happens, will I feel his passing like he felt Lauren’s, like a punch in the heart?

We’re halfway to the third landing when my hand smacks into stone. I turn to Ben and whisper, “I’m going to see if I can climb it—there might be room to squeeze through at the top.”

I hand my rifle to him and get a good grip with both hands. I’ve never done much rock climbing—okay, my experience is zero—but how hard could it be, really?

I’m maybe three feet up when a rock slips beneath my foot and I come back down, smacking my chin hard on the way.

“I’ll try,” Ben says.

“Don’t be stupid. You’re hurt.”

“I’d have to try if you made it, Cassie,” he points out.

He’s right, of course. I hold on to Sammy while Ben scales the mass of broken concrete and shattered reinforcement rods. I can hear him grunting every time he reaches up for the next handhold. Something wet drops onto my nose. Blood.

“Are you okay?” I call up to him.

“Um. Define okay.”

“Okay means you’re not bleeding to death.”

“I’m okay.”

He’s weak, Vosch said. I remember the way Ben used to stroll down the hallways at school, his broad shoulders rolling, zapping people with his death-ray smile, the master of his universe. I never would have called him weak then. But the Ben Parish I knew then is very different from the Ben Parish who now pulls himself up a jagged wall of broken stone and twisted metal. The new Ben Parish has the eyes of a wounded animal. I don’t know everything that’s happened to him between that day in the gym and now, but I do know the Others have succeeded in winnowing the weak from the strong.

The weak have been swept away.

That’s the flaw in Vosch’s master plan: If you don’t kill all of us all at once, those who remain will not be the weak.

It’s the strong who remain, the bent but unbroken, like the iron rods that used to give this concrete its strength.

Floods, fires, earthquakes, disease, starvation, betrayal, isolation, murder.

What doesn’t kill us sharpens us. Hardens us. Schools us.

You’re beating plowshares into swords, Vosch. You are remaking us.

We are the clay, and you are Michelangelo.

And we will be your masterpiece.

88

“WELL?” I SAY after several minutes pass and Ben doesn’t come down—the slow way or the fast way.

“Just… enough… room. I think.” His voice sounds tiny. “It goes back pretty far. But I can see light up ahead.”

“Light?”

“Bright light. Like floodlights. And…”

“And? And what?”

“And it’s not very stable. I can feel it slipping underneath me.”

I squat down in front of Sammy, tell him to climb aboard, and wrap his arms around my neck.

“Hold on tight, Sam.” He puts me in a choke hold. “Ahhh,” I gasp. “Not that tight.”

“Don’t let me fall, Cassie,” he whispers into my ear as I start up.

“I won’t let you fall, Sam.”

He presses his face against my back, completely trusting I won’t let him fall. He’s been through four alien attacks, suffered God knows what in Vosch’s death factory, and my brother still trusts that somehow everything will be okay.

There really is no hope, you know, Vosch said. I’ve heard those words before, in another voice, my voice, in the tent in the woods, under the car on the highway. Hopeless. Useless. Pointless.

What Vosch spoke, I believed.

In the safe room I saw an infinite sea of upturned faces. If they had asked, would I have told them there was no hope, that it was pointless? Or would I have told them, Climb onto my shoulders, I will not let you fall?

Reach. Grab. Pull. Step. Rest.

Reach. Grab. Pull. Step. Rest.

Climb onto my shoulders. I will not let you fall.

89

BEN GRABS MY WRISTS when I near the top of the debris, but I gasp for him to pull Sammy up first. I’ve got nothing left for that final foot. I just hang there, waiting for Ben to grab me again. He heaves me into the narrow gap, a sliver of space between the ceiling and the top of the slide. The darkness up here is not as dense, and I can see his gaunt face dusted in concrete, bleeding from fresh scratches.

“Straight ahead,” he whispers. “Maybe a hundred feet.” No room to stand or sit up: We’re lying on our stomachs nearly nose to nose. “Cassie, there’s… nothing. The entire camp’s gone. Just… gone.”

I nod. I’ve seen what the Eyes can do up close and personal. “Have to rest,” I pant, and for some reason I’m worried about the quality of my breath. When was the last time I brushed my teeth? “Sams, you okay?”

“Yes.”

“Are you?” Ben asks.

“Define okay.”

“That’s a definition that keeps changing,” he says. “They’ve lit the place up out there.”

“The plane?”

“It’s there. Big, one of those huge cargo planes.”

“There’s a lot of kids.”

We crawl toward the bar of light seeping through the crack between the ruins and the surface. It’s hard going. Sammy starts to whimper. His hands are scraped raw, his body bruised from the rough stone. We squeeze through spots so narrow, our backs scrape against the ceiling. Once I get stuck and it takes Ben several minutes to work me free. The light pushes back the dark, grows bright, so bright I can see individual particles of dust spinning against the inky backdrop.

“I’m thirsty,” Sammy whines.

“Almost there,” I assure him. “See the light?”

At the opening I can see across Death Valley East, the same barren landscape of Camp Ashpit times ten, thanks to the floodlights swinging from hastily erected poles anchored in the shafts that funneled air into the complex below.

And above us, the night sky peppered with drones. Hundreds of them, hovering a thousand feet up, motionless, their gray underbellies glimmering in the light. On the ground below them, and far to my right, an enormous plane sits perpendicular to our position: When it takes off, it’ll pass right by us.

“Have they loaded the—” I start. Ben cuts me off with a hiss.

“They’ve started the engines.”

“Which way is north?”

“About two o’clock.” He points. His face has no color. None. His mouth hangs open a little, like a dog panting. When he leans forward to look at the plane, I can see his entire shirtfront is wet.

“Can you run?” I ask.

“I have to. So, yes.”

I turn to Sam. “Once we get out in the open, climb back on, okay?”

“I can run, Cassie,” Sammy protests. “I’m fast.”

“I’ll carry him,” Ben offers.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I say.

“I’m not as weak as I look.” He must be thinking about Vosch.

“Of course not,” I say back. “But if you go down with him, we’re all dead.”

“Same with you.”

“He’s my brother. I’m carrying him. Besides, you’re hurt and—”

That’s all I get out. The rest is buried under the roar of the huge plane coming toward us, picking up speed.

“This is it!” Ben shouts, but I can’t hear him. I have to read his lips.

90

WE CROUCH AT THE OPENING, tips of our fingers, balls of our feet. The cold air vibrates in sympathy for the deafening thunder of the big plane screaming over the hard-packed ground. It’s even with us when the front wheel rises, and that’s when the first blast hits.

And I think, Um, a little early there, Evan.

The ground heaves and we take off, Sammy bouncing up and down on my back, and behind us the stairwell seems to collapse soundlessly, because all sound is buried beneath the roar of the plane. The blowback of the engines slams against my left side, and I stumble sideways and nearly slip. Ben catches me and hurls me forward.

Then I go airborne. The earth bulges like a balloon inflating and then snaps back, the ground splitting apart with such force, I’m afraid my eardrums have shattered. Luckily for Sam, I land on my chest, but that’s unlucky for me, because the impact knocks every cubic inch of breath out of my lungs. I feel Sammy’s weight disappear and see Ben sling him over his shoulder, and then I’m up but falling behind and thinking, Like hell weak, like hell.

Before us the ground seems to stretch to infinity. Behind us, it’s being sucked into a black hole, and the hole chases us as it expands, devouring everything in its path. One slip and we’ll be sucked in, our bodies ground into microscopic pieces.

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.

In all my fantasies about our first kiss—and there’d been about six hundred thousand of them—I never once imagined it would be like that one. Our dream kiss usually involved moonlight, or fog, or moonlight and fog, a very mysterious and romantic combination, at least in the right locale. Moonlit fog beside a lake or a lazy river: romantic. Moonlit fog in almost any other place, like a narrow alleyway: Jack the Ripper.

Do you remember the babies? I asked in my fantasies. And Ben always goes, Oh yes. Sure I do. The babies!

“Hey, Ben, I was wondering if you remember… We rode the bus together in middle school, and you were talking about your little sister, and I told you Sammy was just born, too, and I was wondering if you remembered that. About them being born together. Not together, that would make them twins, ha-ha—I mean at the same time. Not the exact same time, but about a week apart. Sammy and your sister. The babies.”

“I’m sorry… Babies?”

“Never mind. It’s not important.”

“Nothing is not important anymore.”

I’m shaking. He must notice, because he puts his arm around me and we sit like that for a while, my arms around Sammy, Ben’s arm around me, and together the three of us watch the sun break over the horizon, obliterating the dark in a burst of golden light.