The 5th Wave (26 page)

CASSIE, through the smudged window, shrinking.

Cassie, on the road, holding Bear.

Lifting his arm to help him wave good-bye.

Good-bye, Sammy.

Good-bye, Bear.

The road dust boiling up from the big black wheels of the bus, and Cassie shrinking
into the brown swirl.

Good-bye, Cassie.

Cassie and Bear getting smaller and smaller, and the hardness of the glass beneath
his fingers.

Good-bye, Cassie. Good-bye, Bear.

Until the dust swallows them, and he’s alone on the crowded bus, no Mommy no Daddy
no Cassie, and maybe he shouldn’t have left Bear, because Bear had been with him since
before he could remember anything. There had always been Bear. But there had always
been Mommy, too. Mommy and Nan-Nan and Grandpa and the rest of his family. And the
kids from Ms. Neyman’s class and Ms. Neyman and the Majewskis and the nice checkout
lady at Kroger who kept the strawberry suckers beneath her counter. They had always
been there, too, like Bear, since before he could remember, and now they weren’t.
Who had always been there wasn’t anymore, and Cassie said they weren’t coming back.

Not ever.

The glass remembers it when he takes his hand away. It holds
the memory of his hand. Not like a picture, more like a fuzzy shadow, the way his
mother’s face is fuzzy when he tries to remember it.

Except Daddy’s and Cassie’s, all the faces he’s known since he knew what faces were
are fading. Every face is new now, every face a stranger’s face.

A soldier walks down the aisle toward him. He’s taken off his black mask. His face
is round, his nose small and dotted with freckles. He doesn’t look much older than
Cassie. He’s passing out bags of gummy fruit snacks and juice boxes. Dirty fingers
claw for the treats. Some of the children haven’t had a meal in days. For some, the
soldiers are the first adults they’ve seen since their parents died. Some kids, the
quietest ones, were found along the outskirts of town, wandering among the piles of
blackened, half-burned bodies, and they stare at everything and everyone as if everything
and everyone were something they’ve never seen before. Others, like Sammy, were rescued
from refugee camps or small bands of survivors in search of rescue, and their clothes
aren’t quite as ragged and their faces not quite as thin and their eyes not quite
as vacant as the quiet ones’, the ones found wandering among the piles of the dead.

The soldier reaches the back row. He’s wearing a white band on his sleeve with a big
red cross on it.

“Hey, want a snack?” the soldier asks him.

The juice box and the chewy gooey treats in the shape of dinosaurs. The juice is cold.
Cold. He hasn’t had a cold drink in forever.

The soldier slides into the seat beside him and stretches his long legs into the aisle.
Sammy pushes the thin plastic straw into the juice box and sips, while his eyes fall
to the still form of a girl
huddled in the seat across from them. Her shorts are torn, her pink top is stained
with soot, her shoes caked with mud. She is smiling in her sleep. A good dream.

“Do you know her?” the soldier asks Sammy.

Sammy shakes his head. She had not been in the refugee camp with him.

“Why do you have that big red cross?”

“I’m a medic. I help sick people.”

“Why did you take off your mask?”

“Don’t need it now,” the medic answers. He pops a handful of gummies into his mouth.

“Why not?”

“The plague’s back there.” The soldier jerks his thumb toward the back window, where
the dust boiled up and Cassie shrunk to nothing, holding Bear.

“But Daddy said the plague is everywhere.”

The soldier shakes his head. “Not where we’re going,” he says.

“Where are we going?”

“Camp Haven.”

Against the grumbling engine and the whooshing wind through the open windows, it sounded
like the soldier said Camp Heaven.

“Where?” Sammy asks.

“You’re going to love it.” The soldier pats his leg. “We’ve got it all fixed up for
you.”

“For me?”

“For everyone.”

Cassie on the road, helping Bear wave good-bye.

“Then why didn’t you bring everyone?”

“We will.”

“When?”

“As soon as you guys are safe.” The soldier glances at the girl again. He stands up,
pulls off his green jacket, and gently lets it fall over her.

“You’re the most important thing,” the soldier says, and his boyish face is set and
serious. “You’re the future.”

The narrow dusty road becomes a wider paved road, and then the buses turn onto an
even wider road. Their engines rev up to a guttural roar, and they shoot toward the
sun on a highway cleared of wrecks and stalled cars. They’ve been dragged or pushed
onto the roadsides to clear the way for the busloads of children.

The freckle-nosed medic comes down the aisle again, and this time he’s handing out
bottles of water and telling them to close the windows because some of the children
are cold and some are scared by the rush of the wind that sounds like a monster roaring.
The air in the bus quickly grows stale and the temperature rises, making the children
sleepy.

But Sam gave Bear to Cassie to keep her company, and he’s never slept without Bear,
not ever, not since Bear came to him, anyway. He is tired, but he is also Bearless.
The more he tries to forget Bear, the more he remembers him, the more he misses him,
and the more he wishes he hadn’t left him behind.

The soldier offers him a bottle of water. He sees something is wrong, though Sammy
smiles and pretends he doesn’t feel so empty and Bearless. The soldier sits beside
him again, asks his name, and says his name is Parker.

“How much farther?” Sammy asks. It will be dark soon, and the dark is the worst time.
Nobody told him, but he just knows that when they finally come it will be in the dark
and it will be without warning, like the other waves, and there will be nothing you
can do
about it, it will just happen, like the TV winking out and the cars dying and the
planes falling and the plague, the Pesky Ants, Cassie and Daddy called it, and his
mommy wrapped in bloody sheets.

When the Others first came, his father told him the world had changed and nothing
would be like before, and maybe they’d take him inside the mothership, maybe even
take him on adventures in outer space. And Sammy couldn’t wait to go inside the mothership
and blast off into space just like Luke Skywalker in his X-wing starfighter. It made
every night feel like Christmas Eve. When morning came, he thought he would wake up
and all the wonderful presents the Others had brought would be there.

But the only thing the Others brought was death.

They hadn’t come to give him anything. They had come to take everything away.

When would it—when would
they
—stop? Maybe never. Maybe the aliens wouldn’t stop until they had taken everything
away, until the whole world was like Sammy, empty and alone and Bearless.

So he asks the soldier, “How much farther?”

“Not far at all,” the soldier called Parker answers. “You want me to stay here with
you?”

“I’m not afraid,” Sammy says.
You have to be brave now,
Cassie told him the day his mother died. When he saw the empty bed and knew without
asking that she was gone with Nan-Nan and all the others, the ones he knew and the
ones he didn’t know, the ones they piled up and burned at the edge of town.

“You shouldn’t be,” the soldier says. “You’re perfectly safe now.”

That’s exactly what Daddy said on a night after the power died, after he boarded the
windows and blocked off the doors, when the bad men with guns came out to steal things.

You’re perfectly safe.

After Mommy got sick and Daddy slipped the white paper mask over Cassie’s and his
faces.

Just to be sure, Sam. I think you’re perfectly safe.

“And you’re gonna love Camp Haven,” the soldier says. “Wait till you see it. We fixed
it up just for kids like you.”

“And they can’t find us there?”

Parker smiles. “Well, I don’t know about that. But it’s probably the most secure place
in North America right now. There’s even an invisible force field, in case the visitors
try anything.”

“Force fields aren’t real.”

“Well, people used to say the same thing about aliens.”

“Have you seen one, Parker?”

“Not yet,” Parker answers. “Nobody has, at least not in my company, but we’re looking
forward to it.” He smiles a hard soldiery smile, and Sammy’s heart quickens. He wishes
he were old enough to be a soldier like Parker.

“Who knows?” Parker says. “Maybe they look just like us. Maybe you’re looking at one
right now.” A different kind of smile now. Teasing.

The soldier stands up, and Sammy reaches for his hand. He doesn’t want Parker to leave.

“Does Camp Heaven really have a force field?”

“Yep. And manned watchtowers and twenty-four/seven video surveillance and twenty-foot
fencing topped with razor wire and big, mean guard dogs that can smell a nonhuman
five miles away.”

Sammy’s nose crinkles. “That doesn’t sound like heaven! That sounds like prison!”

“Except a prison keeps the bad guys in and our camp keeps ’em out.”

38

NIGHT.

The stars above, bright and cold, and the dark road below, and the humming of the
wheels on the dark road beneath the cold stars. The headlamps stabbing the thick dark.
The swaying of the bus and the stale warm air.

The girl across the aisle is sitting up now, dark hair matted to the side of her head,
cheeks hollow and skin drawn tight across her skull, making her eyes seem owly huge.

Sammy smiles hesitantly at her. She doesn’t smile back. Her stare is fixed on the
water bottle leaning against his leg. He holds out the bottle. “Want some?” A bony
arm shoots across the space between them, and she pulls the bottle from his hand,
gulps down the rest of the water in four swallows, then tosses the empty bottle onto
the seat beside her.

“I think they have more, if you’re still thirsty,” Sammy says.

The girl doesn’t say anything. She stares at him, hardly blinking.

“And they have gummies, too, if you’re hungry.”

She just looks at him, not speaking. Legs curled up beneath Parker’s green jacket,
round eyes unblinking.

“My name’s Sam, but everybody calls me Sammy. Except Cassie. Cassie calls me Sams.
What’s your name?”

The girl raises her voice over the hum of the wheels and the growl of the engine.

“Megan.”

Her thin fingers pluck at the green material of the army jacket. “Where did this come
from?” she wonders aloud, her voice barely
conquering the humming and growling in the background. Sammy gets up and slides into
the empty space beside her. She flinches, drawing her legs back as far as she can.

“From Parker,” Sammy tells her. “That’s him sitting up there by the driver. He’s a
medic. That means he takes care of sick people. He’s really nice.”

The thin girl named Megan shakes her head. “I’m not sick.”

Eyes cupped in dark circles, lips cracked and peeling, hair matted and entangled with
twigs and dead leaves. Her forehead is shiny, and her cheeks are flushed.

“Where are we going?” she wants to know.

“Camp Heaven.”

“Camp…what?”

“It’s a fort,” Sammy says. “And not just any fort. The biggest, best, safest fort
in the whole world. It even has a force field!”

It’s very warm and stuffy on the bus, but Megan can’t stop shivering. Sammy tucks
Parker’s jacket under her chin. She stares at his face with her huge, owly eyes. “Who’s
Cassie?”

“My sister. She’s coming, too. The soldiers are going back for her. For her and Daddy
and all the others.”

“You mean she’s alive?”

Sammy nods, puzzled. Why wouldn’t Cassie be alive?

“Your father and your sister are alive?” Her bottom lip quivers. A tear cuts a trail
through the soot on her face. The soot from the smoke from the fires from the bodies
burning.