The 5th Wave Penguin Random House South Africa

Yancey, Rick

Information about the book

INTRUSION: 1995

THERE WILL BE NO AWAKENING.

The sleeping woman will feel nothing the next morning, only

a vague sense of unease and the unshakable feeling that someone

is watching her. Her anxiety will fade in less than a day and will

soon be forgotten.

The memory of the dream will linger a little longer.

In her dream, a large owl perches outside the window, staring

at her through the glass with huge, white-rimmed eyes.

She will not awaken. Neither will her husband beside her. The

shadow falling over them will not disturb their sleep. And what

the shadow has come for—the baby within the sleeping woman—

will feel nothing. The intrusion breaks no skin, violates not a single

cell of her or the baby’s body.

It is over in less than a minute. The shadow withdraws.

Now it is only the man, the woman, the baby inside her, and

the intruder inside the baby, sleeping.

The woman and man will awaken in the morning, the baby a

few months later when he is born.

The intruder inside him will sleep on and not wake for several

years, when the unease of the child’s mother and the memory of

that dream have long since faded.

Five years later, at a visit to the zoo with her child, the woman

will see an owl identical to the one in the dream. Seeing the owl is

unsettling for reasons she cannot understand.

She is not the fi rst to dream of owls in the dark.

She will not be the last.

ALIENS ARE STUPID.

I’m not talking about real aliens. The Others aren’t stupid. The

Others are so far ahead of us, it’s like comparing the dumbest

human to the smartest dog. No contest.

No, I’m talking about the aliens inside our own heads.

The ones we made up, the ones we’ve been making up since we

realized those glittering lights in the sky were suns like ours and

probably had planets like ours spinning around them. You know,

the aliens we imagine, the kind of aliens we’d like to attack us,

human aliens. You’ve seen them a million times. They swoop down

from the sky in their fl ying saucers to level New York and Tokyo

and London, or they march across the countryside in huge machines

that look like mechanical spiders, ray guns blasting away,

and always, always, humanity sets aside its differences and bands

together to defeat the alien horde. David slays Goliath, and everybody

(except Goliath) goes home happy.

What crap.

It’s like a cockroach working up a plan to defeat the shoe on

its way down to crush it.

There’s no way to know for sure, but I bet the Others knew

about the human aliens we’d imagined. And I bet they thought it

was funny as hell. They must have laughed their asses off. If they

have a sense of humor . . . or asses. They must have laughed the

way we laugh when a dog does something totally cute and dorky.

Oh, those cute, dorky humans! They think we think like they do!

Isn’t that adorable?

Forget about fl ying saucers and little green men and giant

mechanical spiders spitting out death rays. Forget about epic battles

with tanks and fi ghter jets and the fi nal victory of us scrappy, unbroken,

intrepid humans over the bug-eyed swarm. That’s about

as far from the truth as their dying planet was from our living one.

The truth is, once they found us, we were toast.

SOMETIMES I THINK I might be the last human on Earth.

Which means I’m the last human in the universe.

I know that’s dumb. They can’t have killed everyone . . . yet.

I see how it could happen, though, eventually. And then I think

that’s exactly what the Others want me to see.

Remember the dinosaurs? Well.

So I’m probably not the last human on Earth, but I’m one of

the last. Totally alone—and likely to stay that way—until the 4th

Wave rolls over me and carries me down.

That’s one of my night thoughts. You know, the three-in-themorning,

oh-my-God-I’m-screwed thoughts. When I curl into a

little ball, so scared I can’t close my eyes, drowning in fear so

intense I have to remind myself to breathe, will my heart to keep

beating. When my brain checks out and begins to skip like a

scratched CD. Alone, alone, alone, Cassie, you’re alone.

That’s my name. Cassie.

Not Cassie for Cassandra. Or Cassie for Cassidy. Cassie for

Cassiopeia, the constellation, the queen tied to her chair in the

northern sky, who was beautiful but vain, placed in the heavens

by the sea god Poseidon as a punishment for her boasting. In

Greek, her name means “she whose words excel.”

My parents didn’t know the fi rst thing about that myth. They

just thought the name was pretty.

Even when there were people around to call me anything, no

one ever called me Cassiopeia. Just my father, and only when he

was teasing me, and always in a very bad Italian accent: Cass-eeoh-

PEE-a. It drove me crazy. I didn’t think he was funny or cute,

and it made me hate my own name. “I’m Cassie!” I’d holler at

him. “Just Cassie!” Now I’d give anything to hear him say it just

one more time.

When I was turning twelve—four years before the Arrival—my

father gave me a telescope for my birthday. On a crisp, clear fall evening,

he set it up in the backyard and showed me the constellation.

“See how it looks like a W?” he asked.

“Why did they name it Cassiopeia if it’s shaped like a W?” I

replied. “W for what?”

“Well . . . I don’t know that it’s for anything,” he answered

with a smile. Mom always told him it was his best feature, so

he trotted it out a lot, especially after he started going bald. You

know, to drag the other person’s eyes downward. “So, it’s for anything

you like! How about wonderful? Or winsome? Or wise?”

He dropped his hand on my shoulder as I squinted through the

lens at the fi ve stars burning over fi fty light-years from the spot on

which we stood. I could feel my father’s breath against my cheek,

warm and moist in the cool, dry autumn air. His breath so close,

the stars of Cassiopeia so very far away.

The stars seem a lot closer now. Closer than the three hundred

trillion miles that separate us. Close enough to touch, for me to

touch them, for them to touch me. They’re as close to me as his

breath had been.

That sounds crazy. Am I crazy? Have I lost my mind? You can

only call someone crazy if there’s someone else who’s normal.

Like good and evil. If everything was good, then nothing would

be good.

Whoa. That sounds, well . . . crazy.

Crazy: the new normal.

I guess I could call myself crazy, since there is one other person

I can compare myself to: me. Not the me I am now, shivering in a

tent deep in the woods, too afraid to even poke her head from the

sleeping bag. Not this Cassie. No, I’m talking about the Cassie I

was before the Arrival, before the Others parked their alien butts

in high orbit. The twelve-year-old me, whose biggest problems

were the spray of tiny freckles on her nose and the curly hair she

couldn’t do anything with and the cute boy who saw her every

day and had no clue she existed. The Cassie who was coming to

terms with the painful fact that she was just okay. Okay in looks.

Okay in school. Okay at sports like karate and soccer. Basically

the only unique things about her were the weird name—Cassie for

Cassiopeia, which nobody knew about, anyway—and her ability

to touch her nose with the tip of her tongue, a skill that quickly

lost its impressiveness by the time she hit middle school.

I’m probably crazy by that Cassie’s standards.

And she sure is crazy by mine. I scream at her sometimes, that

twelve-year-old Cassie, moping over her hair or her weird name

or at being just okay. “What are you doing?” I yell. “Don’t you

know what’s coming?”

But that isn’t fair. The fact is she didn’t know, had no way of

knowing, and that was her blessing and why I miss her so much,

more than anyone, if I’m being honest. When I cry—when I let

myself cry—that’s who I cry for. I don’t cry for myself. I cry for

the Cassie that’s gone.

And I wonder what that Cassie would think of me.

The Cassie who kills.

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 graffi ti-scrawled walls, overturned shelves, fl oor 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 fi tful 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 fl its

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 fi red 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 rifl e 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 fi rst 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 fl oor. 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.

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 rifl e. Fingers fl exing 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 fl oor. 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 fi ghting 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 rifl e 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 refl ected light. “So you can either fi nish

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 crumpledup

body wiggled in my vision like an image in a fun-house mirror.

But I didn’t dare release my grip on the rifl e 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 fi ght 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 fl oor 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.

“If I show you,” he gasped, rocking back and forth against the

bloody concrete, “if I show you, will you help me?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t answer because I didn’t have an answer.

I was playing this one nanosecond at a time.

So he decided for me. He wasn’t going to let them win, that’s

what I think now. He wasn’t going to stop hoping. If it killed him,

at least he would die with a sliver of his humanity intact.

Grimacing, he slowly pulled out his left hand. Not much day

left now, hardly any light at all, and what light there was seemed

to be fl owing away from its source, from him, past me and out

the half-open door.

His hand was caked in half-dried blood. It looked like he was

wearing a crimson glove.

The stunted light kissed his bloody hand and fl icked along

the length of something long and thin and metallic, and my fi nger

yanked back on the trigger, and the rifl e kicked against my

shoulder hard, and the barrel bucked in my hand as I emptied the

clip, and from a great distance I heard someone screaming, but it

wasn’t him screaming, it was me screaming, me and everybody

else who was left, if there was anybody left, all of us helpless,

hopeless, stupid humans screaming, because we got it wrong, we

got it all wrong, there was no alien swarm descending from the

sky in their fl ying saucers or big metal walkers like something out

of Star Wars or cute little wrinkly E.T.s who just wanted to pluck

a couple of leaves, eat some Reese’s Pieces, and go home. That’s

not how it ends.

That’s not how it ends at all.

It ends with us killing each other behind rows of empty beer

coolers in the dying light of a late-summer day.

I went up to him before the last of the light was gone. Not to

see if he was dead. I knew he was dead. I wanted to see what he

was still holding in his bloody hand.

It was a crucifix.

THAT WAS THE LAST PERSON I’ve seen.

The leaves are falling heavy now, and the nights have turned

cold. I can’t stay in these woods. No leaves for cover from the

drones, can’t risk a campfi re—I gotta get out of here.

I know where I have to go. I’ve known for a long time. I made

a promise. The kind of promise you don’t break because, if you

break it, you’ve broken part of yourself, maybe the most important

part.

But you tell yourself things. Things like, I need to come up with

something fi rst. I can’t just walk into the lion’s den without a plan.

Or, It’s hopeless, there’s no point anymore. You’ve waited too long.

Whatever the reason I didn’t leave before, I should have left

the night I killed him. I don’t know how he was wounded; I didn’t

examine his body or anything, and I should have, no matter how

freaked out I was. I guess he could have gotten hurt in an accident,

but the odds were better that someone—or something—had shot

him. And if someone or something had shot him, that someone or

something was still out there . . . unless the Crucifi x Soldier had

offed her/him/them/it. Or he was one of them and the crucifi x was

a trick . . .

Another way the Others mess with your head: the uncertain

circumstances of your certain destruction. Maybe that will be the

5th Wave, attacking us from the inside, turning our own minds

into weapons.

Maybe the last human being on Earth won’t die of starvation

or exposure or as a meal for wild animals.

Maybe the last one to die will be killed by the last one alive.

Okay, that’s not someplace you want to go, Cassie.

Honestly, even though it’s suicide to stay here and I have a

promise to keep, I don’t want to leave. These woods have been

home for a long time. I know every path, every tree, every vine

and bush. I lived in the same house for sixteen years and I can’t

tell you exactly what my backyard looked like, but I can describe

in detail every leaf and twig in this stretch of forest. I have no clue

what’s out there beyond these woods and the two-mile stretch of

interstate I hike every week to forage for supplies. I’m guessing

a lot more of the same: abandoned towns reeking of sewage and

rotting corpses, burned-out shells of houses, feral dogs and cats,

pileups that stretch for miles on the highway. And bodies. Lots

and lots of bodies.

I pack up. This tent has been my home for a long time, but it’s

too bulky and I need to travel light. Just the essentials, with the

Luger, the M16, the ammo, and my trusty bowie knife topping the

list. Sleeping bag, fi rst aid kit, fi ve bottles of water, three boxes of

Slim Jims, and some tins of sardines. I hated sardines before the

Arrival. Now I’ve developed a real taste for them. First thing I

look for when I hit a grocery store? Sardines

Books? They’re heavy and take up room in my already bulging

backpack. But I have a thing about books. So did my father. Our

house was stacked fl oor to ceiling with every book he could fi nd

after the 3rd Wave took out more than 3.5 billion people. While

the rest of us scrounged for potable water and food and stocked

up on the weaponry for the last stand we were sure was coming,

Daddy was out with my little brother’s Radio Flyer carting home

the books.

The mind-blowing numbers didn’t faze him. The fact that we’d

gone from seven billion strong to a couple hundred thousand in four

months didn’t shake his confi dence that our race would survive.

“We have to think about the future,” he insisted. “When this

is over, we’ll have to rebuild nearly every aspect of civilization.”

Solar fl ashlight.

Toothbrush and paste. I’m determined, when the time comes,

to at least go out with clean teeth.

Gloves. Two pairs of socks, underwear, travel-size box of Tide,

deodorant, and shampoo. (Gonna go out clean. See above.)

Tampons. I’m constantly worrying about my stash and if I’ll be

able to fi nd more.

My plastic baggie stuffed with pictures. Dad. Mom. My little

brother, Sammy. My grandparents. Lizbeth, my best friend. One

of Ben You-Were-Some-Kind-of-Serious-Gorgeous Parish, clipped

from my yearbook, because Ben was my future boyfriend and/or/

maybe future husband—not that he knew it. He barely knew I

existed. I knew some of the same people he knew, but I was a girl

in the background, several degrees of separation removed. The

only thing wrong with Ben was his height: He was six inches taller

than me. Well, make that two things now: his height and the fact

that he’s dead.

My cell phone. It was fried in the 1st Wave, and there’s no way

to charge it. Cell towers don’t work, and there’s no one to call if

they did. But, you know, it’s my cell phone.

Nail clippers.

Matches. I don’t light fi res, but at some point I may need to

burn something or blow it up.

Two spiral-bound notebooks, college ruled, one with a purple

cover, the other red. My favorite colors, plus they’re my journals.

It’s part of the hope thing. But if I am the last and there’s no one left

to read them, maybe an alien will and they’ll know exactly what I

think of them. In case you’re an alien and you’re reading this:

BITE ME.

My Starburst, already culled of the orange. Three packs of

Wrigley’s Spearmint. My last two Tootsie Pops.

Mom’s wedding ring.

Sammy’s ratty old teddy bear. Not that it’s mine now. Not that

I ever cuddle with it or anything.

That’s everything I can stuff into the backpack. Weird. Seems

like too much and not enough.

Still room for a couple of paperbacks, barely. Huckleberry Finn

or The Grapes of Wrath? The poems of Sylvia Plath or Sammy’s

Shel Silverstein? Probably not a good idea to take the Plath. Depressing.

Silverstein is for kids, but it still makes me smile. I decide

to take Huckleberry (seems appropriate) and Where the Sidewalk

Ends. See you there soon, Shel. Climb aboard, Jim.

I heave the backpack over one shoulder, sling the rifl e over

the other, and head down the trail toward the highway. I don’t

look back.

I pause inside the last line of trees. A twenty-foot embankment

runs down to the southbound lanes, littered with disabled cars,

piles of clothing, shredded plastic garbage bags, the burned-out

hulks of tractor trailers carrying everything from gasoline to milk.

There are wrecks everywhere, some no worse than fender benders,

some pileups that snake along the interstate for miles, and the

morning sunlight sparkles on all the broken glass.

There are no bodies. These cars have been here since the 1st

Wave, long abandoned by their owners.

Not many people died in the 1st Wave, the massive electromagnetic

pulse that ripped through the atmosphere at precisely eleven

A.M. on the tenth day. Only around half a million, Dad guessed.

Okay, half a million sounds like a lot of people, but really it’s just

a drop in the population bucket. World War II killed over a hundred

times that number.

And we did have some time to prepare for it, though we weren’t

exactly sure what we were preparing for. Ten days from the fi rst

satellite pictures of the mothership passing Mars to the launch of

the 1st Wave. Ten days of mayhem. Martial law, sit-ins at the UN,

parades, rooftop parties, endless Internet chatter, and 24/7 coverage

of the Arrival over every medium. The president addressed the nation—

and then disappeared into his bunker. The Security Council

went into a locked-down, closed-to-the-press emergency session.

A lot of people just split, like our neighbors, the Majewskis.

Packed up their camper on the afternoon of the sixth day with

everything they could fi t and hit the road, joining a mass exodus

to somewhere else, because anywhere else seemed safer for some

reason. Thousands of people took off for the mountains . . . or the

desert . . . or the swamps. You know, somewhere else.

The Majewskis’ somewhere else was Disney World. They

weren’t the only ones. Disney set attendance records during those

ten days before the EMP strike.

Daddy asked Mr. Majewski, “So why Disney World?”

And Mr. Majewski said, “Well, the kids have never been.”

His kids were both in college.

Catherine, who had come home from her freshman year at

Baylor the day before, asked, “Where are you guys going?”

“Nowhere,” I said. And I didn’t want to go anywhere. I was

still living in denial, pretending all this crazy alien stuff would

work out, I didn’t know how, maybe with the signing of some

intergalactic peace treaty. Or maybe they’d dropped by to take a

couple of soil samples and go home. Or maybe they were here on

vacation, like the Majewskis going to Disney World.

“You need to get out,” she said. “They’ll hit the cities fi rst.”

“You’re probably right,” I said. “They’d never dream of taking

out the Magic Kingdom.”

“How would you rather die?” she snapped. “Hiding under

your bed or riding Thunder Mountain?”

Good question.

Daddy said the world was dividing into two camps: runners

and nesters. Runners headed for the hills—or Thunder Mountain.

Nesters boarded up the windows, stocked up on the canned goods

and ammunition, and kept the TV tuned to CNN 24/7.

There were no messages from our galactic party crashers during

those fi rst ten days. No light shows. No landing on the South

Lawn or bug-eyed, butt-headed dudes in silver jumpsuits demanding

to be taken to our leader. No bright, spinning tops blaring the

universal language of music. And no answer when we sent our

message. Something like, “Hello, welcome to Earth. Hope you enjoy

your stay. Please don’t kill us.”

Nobody knew what to do. We fi gured the government sort of

did. The government had a plan for everything, so we assumed

they had a plan for E.T. showing up uninvited and unannounced,

like the weird cousin nobody in the family likes to talk about.

Some people nested. Some people ran. Some got married. Some

got divorced. Some made babies. Some killed themselves. We

walked around like zombies, blank-faced and robotic, unable to

absorb the magnitude of what was happening.

It’s hard to believe now, but my family, like the vast majority

of people, went about our daily lives as if the most monumentally

mind-blowing thing in human history wasn’t happening right over

our heads. Mom and Dad went to work, Sammy went to day care,

and I went to school and soccer practice. It was so normal, it was

damn weird. By the end of Day One, everybody over the age of two

had seen the mothership up close a thousand times, this big grayishgreen

glowing hulk about the size of Manhattan circling 250 miles

above the Earth. NASA announced its plan to pull a space shuttle

out of mothballs to attempt contact.

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 outside. 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 defi nitely

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 fi rst.

“What if they’re us?” he asked.

It didn’t take long after the Arrival for all the conspiracy nuts

to start buzzing about classifi ed 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 fi rst things I noticed about him. He also chewed his fi ngernails.

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 fi gure 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 fi nger,

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 fi x

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.

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. Cigarshaped,

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 thuwhump!

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 cornfi eld. A recon team hiked to the crash

site to check it out. Okay, it wasn’t really a team, just Dad and

Hutchfi eld, 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.Plus there are other things at night to worry about besides

drones. Wild dogs, coyotes, bears, and wolves coming down from

Canada, maybe even an escaped lion or tiger from a zoo. I know,

I know, there’s a Wizard of Oz joke buried in there. Shoot me.

And though it wouldn’t be much better, I do think I’d have a

better chance against one of them in the daylight. Or even against

one of my own, if I’m not the last one. What if I stumble onto

another survivor who decides the best course of action is to go all

Crucifi x Soldier on anyone they come across?

That brings up the problem of my best course of action. Do I

shoot on sight? Do I wait for them to make the fi rst move and risk

it being a deadly one? I wonder, not for the fi rst time, why the hell

we didn’t come up with some kind of code or secret handshake or

something before they showed up—something that would identify

us as the good guys. We had no way of knowing they would

show up, but we were pretty sure something would sooner or

later.

It’s hard to plan for what comes next when what comes next is

not something you planned for.

Try to spot them fi rst, I decided. Take cover. No showdowns.

No more Crucifi x Soldiers!

The day is bright and windless but cold. The sky cloudless.

Walking along, bobbing my head up and down, swinging it from

side to side, backpack popping against one shoulder blade, the

rifl e against the other, walking on the outside edge of the median

that separates the southbound from the northbound lanes, stopping

every few strides to whip around and scan the terrain behind

me. An hour. Two. And I’ve traveled no more than a mile.

The creepiest thing, creepier than the abandoned cars and the

snarl of crumpled metal and the broken glass sparkling in the

October sunlight, creepier than all the trash and discarded crap

littering the median, most of it hidden by the knee-high grass so

the strip of land looks lumpy, covered in boils, the creepiest thing

is the silence.

The Hum is gone.

You remember the Hum.

Unless you grew up on top of a mountain or lived in a cave

your whole life, the Hum was always around you. That’s what

life was. It was the sea we swam in. The constant sound of all

the things we built to make life easy and a little less boring. The

mechanical song. The electronic symphony. The Hum of all our

things and all of us. Gone.

This is the sound of the Earth before we conquered it.

Sometimes in my tent, late at night, I think I can hear the stars

scraping against the sky. That’s how quiet it is. After a while it’s

almost more than I can stand. I want to scream at the top of my

lungs. I want to sing, shout, stamp my feet, clap my hands, anything

to declare my presence. My conversation with the soldier

had been the fi rst words I’d said aloud in weeks.

The Hum died on the tenth day after the Arrival. I was sitting

in third period texting Lizbeth the last text I will ever send. I don’t

remember exactly what it said.

Eleven A.M. A warm, sunny day in early spring. A day for doodling

and dreaming and wishing you were anywhere but Ms.

Paulson’s calculus class.

The 1st Wave rolled in without much fanfare. It wasn’t dramatic.

There was no shock and awe.

The lights just winked out.

Ms. Paulson’s overhead died.

The screen on my phone went black.

Somebody in the back of the room squealed. Classic. It doesn’t

matter what time of day it happens—the power goes out, and

somebody yelps like the building’s collapsing.

Ms. Paulson told us to stay in our seats. That’s the other thing

people do when the power goes out. They jump up to . . . To what?

It’s weird. We’re so used to electricity, when it’s gone, we don’t know

what to do. So we jump up or squeal or start jabbering like idiots.

We panic. It’s like someone cut off our oxygen. The Arrival had

made it worse, though. Ten days on pins and needles waiting for

something to happen while nothing is happening makes you jumpy.

So when they pulled the plug on us, we freaked a little more

than normal.

Everybody started talking at once. When I announced that my

phone had died, out came everyone’s dead phone. Neal Croskey,

who was sitting in the back of the room listening to his iPod while

Ms. Paulson lectured, pulled the buds from his ears and wondered

aloud why the music had died.

The next thing you do when the plug’s pulled, after panicking,

is run to the nearest window. You don’t know why exactly. It’s

that better-see-what’s-going-on feeling. The world works from the

outside in. So if the lights go off, you look outside.

And Ms. Paulson, randomly moving around the mob milling in

front of the windows: “Quiet! Back to your seats. I’m sure there’ll

be an announcement . . .”

There was one, about a minute later. Not over the intercom,

though, and not from Mr. Faulks, the vice principal. It came from

the sky, from them. In the form of a 727 tumbling end over end

to the Earth from ten thousand feet until it disappeared behind a

line of trees and exploded, sending up a fi reball that reminded me

of the mushroom cloud of an atomic blast.

Hey, Earthlings! Let’s get this party started!

You’d think seeing something like that would send us diving

under our desks. It didn’t. We crowded against the window and

scanned the cloudless sky for the fl ying saucer that must have

taken the plane down. It had to be a fl ying saucer, right? We knew

how a top-notch alien invasion was run. Flying saucers zipping

through the atmosphere, squadrons of F-16s hot on their heels,

surface-to-air missiles and tracers screaming from the bunkers. In

an unreal and admittedly sick way, we wanted to see something

like that. It would make this a perfectly normal alien invasion.

For a half hour we waited by the windows. Nobody said much.

Ms. Paulson told us to go back to our seats. We ignored her. Thirty

minutes into the 1st Wave and already social order was breaking

down. People kept checking their phones. We couldn’t connect

it: the plane crashing, the lights going out, our phones dying, the

clock on the wall with the big hand frozen on the twelve, little

hand on the eleven.

Then the door fl ew open and Mr. Faulks told us to head over to

the gym. I thought that was really smart. Get all of us in one place

so the aliens didn’t have to waste a lot of ammunition.

So we trooped over to the gym and sat in the bleachers in near

total darkness while the principal paced back and forth, stopping

every now and then to yell at us to be quiet and wait for our parents

to get there.

What about the students whose cars were at school? Couldn’t

they leave?

“Your cars won’t work.”

WTF? What does he mean, our cars won’t work?

An hour passed. Then two. I sat next to Lizbeth. We didn’t talk

much, and when we did, we whispered. We weren’t afraid of the

principal; we were listening. I’m not sure what we were listening

for, but it was like that quiet before the clouds open up and the

thunder smashes down.

“This could be it,” Lizbeth whispered. She rubbed her nose nervously.

Dug her lacquered nails into her dyed blond hair. Tapped

her foot. Rolled the pad of her fi nger over her eyelid: She had just

started wearing contacts and they bugged her constantly.

“It’s defi nitely something,” I whispered back.

“I mean, this could be it. Like it it. The end.”

She kept slipping the battery out of her phone and putting it

back in. It was better than doing nothing, I guess.

She started to cry. I took her phone away and held her hand.

Looked around. She wasn’t the only one crying. Other kids were

praying. And others were doing both, crying and praying. The teachers

were huddled up by the gym doors, forming a human shield in

case the creatures from outer space decided to storm the fl oor.

“There’s so much I wanted to do,” Lizbeth said. “I’ve never

even . . .” She choked back a sob. “You know.”

“I’ve got a feeling a lot of ‘you know’ is going on right now,” I

said. “Probably right underneath these bleachers.”

“You think?” She wiped her cheeks with the palm of her hand.

“What about you?”

“About ‘you know’?” I had no problem with talking about sex.

My problem was talking about sex as it related to me.

“Oh, I know you haven’t ‘you know.’ God! I’m not talking

about that.”

“I thought we were.”

“I’m talking about our lives, Cassie! Jesus, this could be the end

of the freakin’ world, and all you want to do is talk about sex!”

She pulled her phone out of my hand and fumbled with the

battery cover.

“Which is why you should just tell him,” she said, fi ddling with

the drawstrings of her hoodie.

“Tell who what?” I knew exactly what she meant; I was just

buying time.

“Ben! You should tell him how you feel. How you’ve felt since

the third grade.”

“This is a joke, right?” I felt my face getting hot.

“And then you should have sex with him.”

“Lizbeth, shut up.”

“It’s the truth.”

“I haven’t wanted to have sex with Ben Parish since the third

grade,” I whispered. The third grade? I glanced over at her to see

if she was really listening. Apparently, she wasn’t.

“If I were you, I’d go right up to him and say, ‘I think this is it.

This is it, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to die in this school gymnasium

without ever having sex with you.’ And then you know

what I’d do?”

“What?” I was fi ghting back a laugh, picturing the look on his face.

“I’d take him outside to the fl ower garden and have sex with him.”

“In the fl ower garden?”

“Or the locker room.” She waved her hand around frantically to

include the entire school—or maybe the whole world. “It doesn’t

matter where.”

“The locker room smells.” I looked two rows down at the outline

of Ben Parish’s gorgeous head. “That kind of thing only happens

in the movies,” I said.

“Yeah, totally unrealistic, not like what’s happening right now.”

She was right. It was totally unrealistic. Both scenarios, an alien

invasion of the Earth and a Ben Parish invasion of me.

“At least you could tell him how you feel,” she said, reading

my mind.

Could, yes. Ever would, well . . .

And I never did. That was the last time I saw Ben Parish, sitting

in that dark, stuffy gymnasium (Home of the Hawks!) two rows

down from me, and only the back part of him. He probably died

in the 3rd Wave like almost everybody else, and I never told him

how I felt. I could have. He knew who I was; he sat behind me in

a couple of classes.

He probably doesn’t remember, but in middle school we rode

the same bus, and there was an afternoon when I overheard him

talking about his little sister being born the day before and I

turned around and said, “My brother was born last week!” And

he said, “Really?” Not sarcastic, but like he thought it was a cool

coincidence, and for about a month I went around thinking we

had this special connection based on babies. Then we were in high

school and he became the star wide receiver for the team and I

became just another girl watching him score from the stands. I

would see him in class or in the hallway, and sometimes I had to

fi ght the urge to run up to him and say, “Hi, I’m Cassie, the girl

from the bus. Do you remember the babies?”

The funny thing is, he probably would have. Ben Parish

couldn’t be satisfi ed with being the most gorgeous guy in school.

Just to torment me with his perfection, he also insisted on being

one of the smartest. And have I mentioned he was kind to small

animals and children? His little sister was on the sidelines at

every game, and when we took the district title, Ben ran straight to

the sidelines, hoisted her onto his shoulders, and led the parade

around the track with her waving to the crowd like a homecoming

queen.

Oh, and one more thing: his killer smile. Don’t get me started.

After another hour in the dark and stuffy gym, I saw my dad

appear in the doorway. He gave a little wave, like he showed up at

my school every day to take me home after alien attacks. I hugged

Lizbeth and told her I’d call as soon as the phones started working

again. I was still practicing pre-invasion thinking. You know,

the power goes out, but it always comes back on. So I just gave

her a hug and I don’t remember telling her that I loved her.

We went outside and I said, “Where’s the car?”

And Dad said the car wasn’t working. No cars were working.

The streets were littered with stalled-out cars and buses and

motorcycles and trucks, smashups and clusters of wrecks on every

block, cars folded around light poles and sticking out of buildings.

A lot of people were trapped when the EMP hit; the automatic

locks on the doors didn’t work, and they had to break out

of their own cars or sit there and wait for someone to rescue them.

The injured people who could still move crawled onto the roadside

and sidewalks to wait for the paramedics, but no paramedics

came because the ambulances and the fi re trucks and the cop cars

didn’t work, either. Everything that ran on batteries or electricity

or had an engine died at eleven A.M.

Dad walked as he talked, keeping a tight grip on my wrist, like

he was afraid something might swoop down out of the sky and

snatch me away.

“Nothing’s working. No electricity, no phones, no plumbing . . .”

“We saw a plane crash.”

He nodded. “I’m sure they all did. Anything and everything in

the sky when it hit. Fighter jets, helicopters, troop transports . . .”

“When what hit?”

“EMP,” he said. “Electromagnetic pulse. Generate one large

enough and you knock out the entire grid. Power. Communications.

Transportation. Anything that fl ies or drives is zapped out.”

It was a mile and a half from my school to our house. The

longest mile and a half I’ve ever walked. It felt as if a curtain had

fallen over everything, a curtain painted to look exactly like what

it was hiding. There were glimpses, though, little peeks behind the

curtain that told you something had gone very wrong. Like all the

people standing on their front porches holding their dead phones,

looking up at the sky, or bending over the open hoods of their

cars, fi ddling with wires, because that’s what you do when your

car dies—you fi ddle with wires.

“But it’s okay,” he said, squeezing my wrist. “It’s okay. There’s

a good chance our backup systems weren’t crippled, and I’m sure

the government has a contingency plan, protected bases, that sort

of thing.”

“And how does pulling our plug fi t into their plan to help us

along in the next stage of our evolution, Dad?”

I regretted the words the instant I said them. But I was freaking

out. He didn’t take it the wrong way. He looked at me and smiled

reassuringly and said, “Everything’s going to be okay,” because

that’s what I wanted him to say and it’s what he wanted to say

and that’s what you do when the curtain is falling—you give the

line that the audience wants to hear.

AROUND NOON on my mission to keep my promise, I stop for

a water break and a Slim Jim. Every time I eat a Slim Jim or a can

of sardines or anything prepackaged, I think, Well, there’s one less

of that in the world. Whittling away the evidence of our having

been here one bite at a time.

One of these days, I’ve decided, I’m going to work up the nerve

to catch a chicken and wring its delicious neck. I would kill for

a cheeseburger. Honestly. If I stumbled across someone eating a

cheeseburger, I would kill them for it.

There are plenty of cows around. I could shoot one and carve

it up with my bowie knife. I’m pretty sure I’d have no problem

slaughtering a cow. The hard part would be cooking it. Having

a fi re, even in daylight, was the surest way to invite them to the

cookout.

A shadow shoots across the grass a dozen yards in front of me.

I jerk my head back, knocking it hard against the side of a Honda

Civic I was leaning against while I enjoyed my snack. It wasn’t a

drone. It was a bird, a seagull of all things, skimming along with

barely a fl ick of its outstretched wings. A shiver of revulsion goes

down my spine. I hate birds. I didn’t before the Arrival. I didn’t

after the 1st Wave. I didn’t after the 2nd Wave, which really didn’t

affect me that much.

But after the 3rd Wave, I hated them. It wasn’t their fault, I

knew that. It was like a man in front of a fi ring squad hating the

bullets, but I couldn’t help it.

Birds suck.

AFTER THREE DAYS on the road, I’ve determined that cars are

pack animals.

They prowl in groups. They die in clumps. Clumps of smashups.

Clumps of stalls. They glimmer in the distance like jewels.

And suddenly the clumps stop. The road is empty for miles.

There’s just me and the asphalt river cutting through a defi le of

half-naked trees, their leaves crinkled and clinging desperately to

their dark branches. There’s the road and the naked sky and the

tall, brown grass and me.

These empty stretches are the worst. Cars provide cover. And

shelter. I sleep in the undamaged ones (I haven’t found a locked

one yet). If you can call it sleep. Stale, stuffy air; you can’t crack

the windows, and leaving the door open is out of the question.

The gnaw of hunger. And the night thoughts. Alone, alone, alone.

And the baddest of the bad night thoughts:

I’m no alien drone designer, but if I were going to make one,

I’d make sure that its detection device was sensitive enough

to pick up a body’s heat signature through a car roof. It never

failed: The moment I started to drift off, I imagined all four

doors fl ying open and dozens of hands reaching for me, hands

attached to arms attached to whatever they are. And then I’m

up, fumbling with my M16, peeking over the backseat, then doing

a 360, feeling trapped and more than a little blind behind the

fogged-up windows.

Dawn comes. I wait for the morning fog to burn off, then sip

some water, brush my teeth, double-check my weapons, inventory

my supplies, and hit the road again. Look up, look down, look all

around. Don’t pause at the exits. Water’s fi ne for now. No way am

I going anywhere near a town unless I have to.

For a lot of reasons.

You know how you can tell when you’re getting close to one?

The smell. You can smell a town from miles away.

It smells like smoke. And raw sewage. And death.

In the city it’s hard to take two steps without stumbling over a

corpse. Funny thing: People die in clumps, too.

I begin to smell Cincinnati about a mile before spotting the

exit sign. A thick column of smoke rises lazily toward the cloudless

sky.

Cincinnati is burning.

I’m not surprised. After the 3rd Wave, the second most common

thing you found in cities, after the bodies, were fi res. A single

lightning strike could take out ten city blocks. There was no one

left to put the fi res out.

My eyes start to water. The stench of Cincinnati makes me gag.

I stop long enough to tie a rag around my mouth and nose and

then quicken my pace. I pull the rifl e off my shoulder and cradle it

as I quickstep. I have a bad feeling about Cincinnati. The old voice

inside my head is awake.

Hurry, Cassie. Hurry.

And then, somewhere between Exits 17 and 18, I fi nd the bodies.

THERE ARE THREE OF THEM, not in a clump like city folk,

but spaced out in the median strip. The fi rst one is an older guy,

around my dad’s age, I guess. Wearing blue jeans and a Bengals

warm-up. Facedown, arms outstretched. He was shot in the back

of the head.

The second, about a dozen feet away, is a young woman, a

little older than I am and dressed in a pair of men’s pajama pants

and Victoria’s Secret tee. A streak of purple in her short-cropped

hair. A skull ring on her left index fi nger. Black nail polish, badly

chipped. And a bullet hole in the back of her head.

Another few feet and there’s the third. A kid around eleven or

twelve. Brand-new white basketball high-tops. Black sweatshirt.

Hard to tell what his face used to look like.

I leave the kid and go back to the woman. Kneel in the tall

brown grass beside her. Touch her pale neck. Still warm.

Oh no. No, no, no.

I trot back to the fi rst guy. Kneel. Touch the palm of his outstretched

hand. Look over at the bloody hole between his ears.

Shiny. Still wet.

I freeze. Behind me, the road. In front of me, more road. To my

right, trees. To my left, more trees. Clumps of cars on the southbound

lane, the nearest grouping about a hundred feet away.

Something tells me to look up. Straight up.

A fl eck of dull gray against the backdrop of dazzling autumnal

blue.

Motionless.

Hello, Cassie. My name is Mr. Drone. Nice to meet you!

I stand up, and when I stand up—the moment I stand up; if I

had stayed frozen there a millisecond longer, Mr. Bengals and I

would be sporting matching holes—something slams into my leg,

a hot punch just above my knee that knocks me off balance, sending

me sprawling backward onto my butt.

I didn’t hear the shot. There was the cool wind in the grass and

my own hot breath under the rag and the blood rushing in my

ears—that’s all there was before the bullet struck.

Silencer.

That makes sense. Of course they’d use silencers. And now I

have the perfect name for them: Silencers. A name that fi ts the job

description.

Something takes over when you’re facing death. The front part of

your brain lets go, gives up control to the oldest part of you, the part

that takes care of your heartbeat and breathing and the blinking of

your eyes. The part nature built fi rst to keep your ass alive. The part

that stretches time like a gigantic piece of toffee, making a second

seem like an hour and a minute longer than a summer afternoon.

I lunge forward for my rifl e—I had dropped the M16 when the

round punched home—and the ground in front of me explodes,

showering me with shredded grass and hunks of dirt and gravel.

Okay, forget the M16.

I yank the Luger from my waistband and do a sort of running

hop—or a hopping run—toward the closest car. There isn’t much

pain—although my guess is that we’re going to get very intimate

later—but I can feel the blood soaking into my jeans by the time I

reach the car, an older model Buick sedan.

The rear windshield shatters as I dive down. I scoot on my

back till I’m all the way under the car. I’m not a big girl by any

stretch, but it’s a tight fi t, no room to roll over, no way to turn if

he shows up on the left side.

Cornered.

Smart, Cassie, real smart. Straight As last semester? Honor

roll? Riiiiiight.

You should have stayed in your little stretch of woods in your

little tent with your little books and your cute little mementos. At

least when they came for you, there’d be room to run.

The minutes spin out. I lie on my back and bleed onto the cold

concrete. Rolling my head to the right, to the left, raising it a half

inch to look past my feet toward the back of the car. Where the

hell is he? What’s taking so long? Then it hits me:

He’s using a high-powered sniper rifl e. Has to be. Which means

he could have been over a half mile away when he shot me.

Which also means I have more time than I fi rst thought. Time

to come up with something besides a blubbery, desperate, disjointed

prayer.

Make him go away. Make him be quick. Let me live. Let him

end it . . .

Shaking uncontrollably. I’m sweating; I’m freezing cold.

You’re going into shock. Think, Cassie.

Think.

It’s what we’re made for. It’s what got us here. It’s the reason I

have this car to hide under. We are human.

And humans think. They plan. They dream, and then they

make the dream real.

Make it real, Cassie.

Unless he drops down, he won’t be able to get to me. And when

he drops down . . . when he dips his head to look at me . . . when

he reaches in to grab my ankle and drag me out . . .

No. He’s too smart for that. He’s going to assume I’m armed.

He wouldn’t risk it. Not that Silencers care whether they live or

die . . . or do they care? Do Silencers know fear? They don’t love

life—I’ve seen enough to prove that. But do they love their own

lives more than they love taking someone else’s?

Time stretches out. A minute’s longer than a season. What’s

taking him so damn long?

It’s an either/or world now. Either he’s coming to fi nish it or he

isn’t. But he has to fi nish it, doesn’t he? Isn’t that the reason he’s

here? Isn’t that the whole friggin’ point?

Either/or: Either I run—or hop or crawl or roll—or I stay under

this car and bleed to death. If I risk escape, it’s a turkey shoot.

I won’t make it two feet. If I stay, same result, only more painful,

more fearful, and much, much slower.

Black stars blossom and dance in front of my eyes. I can’t get

enough air into my lungs.

I reach up with my left hand and yank the cloth from my face.

The cloth.

Cassie, you’re an idiot.

I set the gun down beside me. That’s the hardest part—making

myself let go of the gun.

I lift my leg, slide the rag beneath it. I can’t lift my head to see

what I’m doing. I stare past the black, blossoming stars at the grimy

guts of the Buick as I pull the two ends together, cinch them tight, as

tight as I can, and fumble with the knot. I reach down and explore

the wound with my fi ngertips. It’s still bleeding, but a trickle compared

to the bubbling gusher I had before tying off the tourniquet.

I pick up the gun. Better. My eyesight clears a little, and I don’t

feel quite so cold. I shift a couple of inches to the left; I don’t like

lying in my own blood.

Where is he? He’s had plenty of time to fi nish this . . .

Unless he is fi nished.

That brings me up short. For a few seconds, I totally forget to

breathe.

He’s not coming. He’s not coming because he doesn’t need to

come. He knows you won’t dare come out, and if you don’t come

out and run, you won’t make it. He knows you’ll starve or bleed

to death or die of dehydration.

He knows what you know: Run = die. Stay = die.

Time for him to move on to the next one.

If there is a next one.

If I’m not the last one.

Come on, Cassie! From seven billion to just one in fi ve months?

You’re not the last, and even if you are the last human being on

Earth—especially if you are—you can’t let it end this way. Trapped

under a goddamned Buick, bleeding until all the blood is gone—is

this how humanity waves good-bye?

Hell no.

THE 1ST WAVE took out half a million people.

The 2nd Wave put that number to shame.

In case you don’t know, we live on a restless planet. The continents

sit on slabs of rock, called tectonic plates, and those plates

fl oat on a sea of molten lava. They’re constantly scraping and rubbing

and pushing against one another, creating enormous pressure.

Over time the pressure builds and builds, until the plates slip, releasing

huge amounts of energy in the form of earthquakes. If one

of those quakes happens along one of the fault lines that ring every

continent, the shock wave produces a superwave called a tsunami.

Over 40 percent of the world’s population lives within sixty

miles of a coastline. That’s three billion people.

All the Others had to do was make it rain.

Take a metal rod twice as tall as the Empire State Building and

three times as heavy. Position it over one of these fault lines. Drop

it from the upper atmosphere. You don’t need any propulsion or

guidance system; just let it fall. Thanks to gravity, by the time it

reaches the surface, it’s traveling twelve miles per second, twenty

times faster than a speeding bullet.

It hits the surface with a force one billion times greater than the

bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Bye-bye, New York. Bye, Sydney. Good-bye, California, Washington,

Oregon, Alaska, British Columbia. So long, Eastern Seaboard.

Japan, Hong Kong, London, Rome, Rio.

Nice to know you. Hope you enjoyed your stay!

The 1st Wave was over in seconds.

The 2nd Wave lasted a little longer. About a day.

The 3rd Wave? That took a little longer—twelve weeks. Twelve

weeks to kill . . . well, Dad fi gured 97 percent of those of us unlucky

enough to have survived the fi rst two waves.

Ninety-seven percent of four billion? You do the math.

That’s when the Alien Empire descended in their fl ying saucers

and started blasting away, right? When the peoples of the Earth

united under one banner to play David versus Goliath. Our tanks

against your ray guns. Bring it on!

We weren’t that lucky.

And they weren’t that stupid.

How do you waste nearly four billion people in three months?

Birds.

How many birds are there in the world? Wanna guess? A million?

A billion? How about over three hundred billion? That’s

about seventy-fi ve birds for each man, woman, and child still alive

after the fi rst two waves.

There are thousands of species of bird on every continent. And

birds don’t recognize borders. They also crap a lot. They crap fi ve

or six times a day. That’s over a trillion little missiles raining down

each day, every day.

You couldn’t invent a more effi cient delivery system for a virus

that has a 97 percent kill rate.

My father thought they must have taken something like Ebola

Zaire and genetically altered it. Ebola can’t spread through the

air. But change a single protein and you can make it airborne, like

the fl u. The virus takes up residence in your lungs. You get a bad

cough. Fever. Your head starts to hurt. Hurt bad. You start spitting

up little drops of virus-laden blood. The bug moves into your

liver, your kidneys, your brain. You’re packing a billion of them

now. You’ve become a viral bomb. And when you explode, you

blast everyone around you with the virus. They call it bleeding

out. Like rats fl eeing a sinking ship, the virus erupts out of every

opening. Your mouth, your nose, your ears, your ass, even your

eyes. You literally cry tears of blood.

We had different names for it. The Red Death or the Blood

Plague. The Pestilence. The Red Tsunami. The Fourth Horseman.

Whatever you wanted to call it, after three months, ninety-seven

out of every hundred people were dead.

That’s a lot of bloody tears.

Time was fl owing in reverse. The 1st Wave knocked us back

to the eighteenth century. The next two slammed us into the

Neolithic.

We were hunter-gatherers again. Nomads. Bottom of the pyramid.

But we weren’t ready to give up hope. Not yet.

There were still enough of us left to fi ght back.

We couldn’t take them head-on, but we could fi ght a guerilla

war. We could go all asymmetrical on their alien asses. We had

enough guns and ammo and even some transport that survived

the 1st Wave. Our militaries had been decimated, but there were

still functional units on every continent. There were bunkers and

caves and underground bases where we could hide for years. You

be America, alien invaders, and we’ll be Vietnam.

And the Others go, Yeah, okay, right.

We thought they had thrown everything at us—or at least the

worst, because it was hard to imagine anything worse than the

Red Death. Those of us who survived the 3rd Wave—the ones

with a natural immunity to the disease—hunkered down and

stocked up and waited for the People in Charge to tell us what

to do. We knew somebody had to be in charge, because occasionally

a fi ghter jet would scream across the sky and we heard what

sounded like gun battles in the distance and the rumble of troop

carriers just over the horizon.

I guess my family was luckier than most. The Fourth Horseman

rode off with my mom, but Dad, Sammy, and I survived. Dad

boasted about our superior genes. Not something you’d normally

do, brag on top of an Everest of nearly seven billion dead people.

Dad was just being Dad, trying to put the best spin he could on

the eve of human extinction.

Most cities and towns were abandoned in the wake of the Red

Tsunami. There was no electricity, no plumbing, the shops and

stores had long since been looted of anything valuable. Raw sewage

was an inch deep on some streets. Fires from summer lightning

storms were common.

Then there was the problem of the bodies.

As in, they were everywhere. Houses, shelters, hospitals, apartments,

offi ce buildings, schools, churches and synagogues, and

warehouses.

There’s a tipping point when the sheer volume of death overwhelms

you. You can’t bury or burn the bodies fast enough. That

summer of the Pestilence was brutally hot, and the stench of rotting

fl esh hung in the air like an invisible, noxious fog. We soaked

strips of cloth in perfume and tied them over our mouths and

noses, and by the end of the day the reek had soaked into the material

and all you could do was sit there and gag.

Until—funny thing—you got used to it.

We waited out the 3rd Wave barricaded inside our house. Partly

because there was a quarantine. Partly because some pretty whackedout

people roamed the streets, breaking into houses and setting fi res,

the whole murder, rape, and pillaging thing. Partly because we were

scared out of our minds waiting for what might come next.

But mostly because Dad didn’t want to leave Mom. She was

too sick to travel, and he couldn’t bring himself to abandon her.

She told him to go. Leave her behind. She was going to die anyway.

It wasn’t about her anymore. It was about me and Sammy.

About keeping us safe. About the future and hanging on to the

hope that tomorrow would be better than today.

Dad didn’t argue. But he didn’t leave her, either. He waited

for the inevitable, keeping her as comfortable as possible, and

looked at maps and made lists and gathered supplies. This was

around the time the whole book-hoarding, we-have-to-rebuildcivilization

kick started. On nights when the sky wasn’t totally

blanketed in smoke, we went into the backyard and took turns

with my old telescope, watching the mothership sail majestically

across the backdrop of the Milky Way. The stars were brighter

now, brilliantly bright, without our man-made lights to dim them.

“What are they waiting for?” I would ask him. I was still expecting—

like everybody else—the saucers and the mechanical walkers

and the laser cannons. “Why don’t they just get it over with?”

And Daddy would shake his head. “I don’t know, pumpkin,”

he would say. “Maybe it is over. Maybe the goal isn’t to kill all of

us, just wean us down to a manageable number.”

“And then what? What do they want?”

“I think the better question is what they need,” he said gently,

as if he were breaking some really bad news. “They’re being very

careful, you know.”

“Careful?”

“To not damage it more than absolutely necessary. It’s the reason

they’re here, Cassie. They need the Earth.”

“But not us,” I whispered. I was about to lose it—again. For

about the trillionth time.

He put his hand on my shoulder—for about the trillionth

time—and said, “Well, we had our shot. And we weren’t handling

our inheritance very well. I bet if we could somehow go back and

interview the dinosaurs before the asteroid struck . . .”

That’s when I punched him as hard as I could. Ran inside.

I don’t know which is worse, inside or outside. Outside you

feel totally exposed, constantly watched, naked beneath the naked

sky. But inside it’s perpetual twilight. Boarded-up windows

that block out the sun during the day. Candles at night, but we’re

running low on candles, can’t spare more than one per room, and

deep shadows lurk in once-familiar corners.

“What is it, Cassie?” Sammy. Five. Adorable. Big brown teddybear

eyes, clutching the other member of the family with big

brown eyes, the stuffed one I now have stowed in the bottom of

my backpack.

“Why are you crying?”

Seeing my tears got his started.

I brushed past him, headed for the room of the sixteen-yearold

human dinosaur, Cassiopeia Sullivanus extinctus. Then I went

back to him. I couldn’t leave him crying like that. We’d gotten

pretty tight since Mom got sick. Nearly every night bad dreams

chased him into my room, and he’d crawl in bed with me and

press his face against my chest, and sometimes he forgot and

called me Mommy.

“Did you see them, Cassie? Are they coming?”

“No, kiddo,” I said, wiping away his tears. “No one’s coming.”

Not yet.

MOM DIED ON A TUESDAY.

Dad buried her in the backyard, in the rose bed. She had asked

for that before she died. At the height of the Pestilence, when hundreds

were dying every day, most of the bodies were hauled to the

outskirts and burned. Dying towns were ringed by the constantly

smoldering bonfi res of the dead.

He told me to stay with Sammy. Sammy, who’d gone zombielike

on us, shuffl ing around, mouth hanging open or sucking his

thumb like he was two again, with this blankness in his teddybear

eyes. Just a few months ago, Mom was pushing him on a

swing, taking him to karate classes, washing his hair, dancing with

him to his favorite song. Now she was wrapped in a white sheet

and riding on his daddy’s shoulder into the backyard.

I saw Dad through the kitchen window kneeling by the shallow

grave. His head was down. Shoulders jerking. I’d never seen him

lose it, not once, since the Arrival. Things kept getting worse, and

just when you thought they couldn’t get any worse, they got even

worse, but Dad never freaked. Even when Mom started showing

the fi rst signs of infection, he stayed calm, especially in front of

her. He didn’t talk about what was happening outside the barricaded

doors and windows. He laid wet cloths over her forehead.

He bathed her, changed her, fed her. Not once did I see him cry

in front of her. While some people were shooting themselves and

hanging themselves and swallowing handfuls of pills and jumping

from high places, Dad pushed back against the darkness.

He sang to her and repeated stupid jokes she’d heard a thousand

times, and he lied. He lied the way a parent lies to you, the

good lie that helps you go to sleep.

“Heard another plane today. Sounded like a fi ghter. Means

some of our stuff must have made it through.”

“Your fever’s down a bit, and your eyes look clearer today.

Maybe this isn’t it. Might just be your garden-variety fl u.”

In the fi nal hours, wiping away her bloody tears.

Holding her while she barfed up the black, viral stew her stomach

had become.

Bringing me and Sammy into the room to say good-bye.

“It’s all right,” she told Sammy. “Everything is going to be all

right.”

To me she said, “He needs you now, Cassie. Take care of him.

Take care of your father.”

I told her she was going to get better. Some people did. They

got sick, and then suddenly the virus let go. Nobody understood

why. Maybe it decided it didn’t like the way you tasted. And I

didn’t say she was going to get better to ease her fear. I really believed

it. I had to believe it.

“You’re all they have,” Mom said. Her last words to me.

The mind was the last thing to go, washed away in the red

waters of the Tsunami. The virus took total control. Some people

went into a frenzy as it boiled their brains. They punched,

clawed, kicked, bit. Like the virus that needed us also hated us

and couldn’t wait to get rid of us.

My mother looked at my dad and didn’t know him. Didn’t

know where she was. Who she was. What was happening to her.

There was this, like, permanent, creepy smile, cracked lips pulled

back from bleeding gums, her teeth stained with blood. Sounds

came out of her mouth, but they weren’t words. The place in her

brain that made words was packed with virus, and the virus didn’t

know language—it knew only how to make more of itself.

And then my mother died in a fury of jerks and gargled screams,

her uninvited guests rocketing out of every orifi ce, because she

was done, they’d used her up, time to turn off the lights and fi nd

a new home.

Dad bathed her one last time. Combed her hair. Scrubbed the

dried blood from her teeth. When he came to tell me she was

gone, he was calm. He didn’t lose it. He held me while I lost it.

Now I was watching him through the kitchen window. Kneeling

beside her in the rose bed, thinking no one could see him, my father

let go of the rope he’d been clinging to, loosened the line

that had kept him steady all that time while everyone around him

went into free fall.

I made sure Sammy was okay and went outside. I sat next to

him. Put my hand on his shoulder. The last time I’d touched my

father, it was a lot harder and with my fi st. I didn’t say anything,

and he didn’t, either, not for a long time.

He slipped something into my hand. Mom’s wedding ring. He

said she’d want me to have it.

“We’re leaving, Cassie. Tomorrow morning.”

I nodded. I knew she was the only reason we hadn’t left yet.

The delicate stems on the roses bobbed and swayed, as if echoing

my nod. “Where are we going?”

“Away.” He looked around, and his eyes were wide and frightened.

“It isn’t safe anymore.”

Duh, I thought. When was it ever?

“Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is just over a hundred miles

from here. If we push and the weather stays good, we can be there

in fi ve or six days.”

“And then what?” The Others had conditioned us to think this

way: Okay, this, and then what? I looked to my father to tell me.

He was the smartest man I knew. If he didn’t have an answer,

there was no one who did. I sure didn’t. And I sure wanted him

to. I needed him to.

He shook his head like he didn’t understand the question.

“What’s at Wright-Patterson?” I asked.

“I don’t know that anything’s there.” He tried out a smile and

grimaced, like smiling hurt.

“Then why are we going?”

“Because we can’t stay here,” he said through gritted teeth.

“And if we can’t stay here, we have to go somewhere. If there’s

anything like a government left at all . . .”

He shook his head. He hadn’t come outside for this. He had

come outside to bury his wife.

“Go inside, Cassie.”

“I’ll help you.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“She’s my mother. I loved her, too. Please let me help.” I was crying

again. He didn’t see. He wasn’t looking at me, and he wasn’t

looking at Mom. He wasn’t looking at anything, really. There was,

like, this black hole where the world used to be, and we were both

falling toward it. What could we hold on to? I pulled his hand off

Mom’s body and pressed it against my cheek and told him I loved

him and that Mom loved him and that everything would be okay,

and the black hole lost a little of its strength.

“Go inside, Cassie,” he said gently. “Sammy needs you more

than she does.”

I went inside. Sammy was sitting on the fl oor in his room,

playing with his X-wing starfi ghter, destroying the Death Star.

“Shroooooom, shroooooom. I’m going in, Red One!”

And outside, my father knelt in the freshly turned earth. Brown

dirt, red rose, gray sky, white sheet.

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