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.
Sometimes I think I might be the last human on Earth.
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.
The last time I saw him was through the back window of a school bus. His forehead pressing against the glass. Waving at me. And smiling. Like he was going on a field trip: excited, nervous, not scared at all. Being with all those other kids helped. And the school bus, which was so normal. What’s more everyday than a big, yellow school bus?
“And Cassie? If someone tries to take that rifle from you, you tell them to bring it up with me. And if they still try to take it, shoot them.”
Because if I am the last one, then I am humanity.
And if this is humanity’s last war, then I am the battlefield.
I’m dying. I know that. Seventeen years old and the party’s over.
Short party.
A moment comes in war when the last line must be crossed. The line that separates what you hold dear from what total war demands. If he couldn’t cross that line, the battle was over, and he was lost.
His heart, the war.
Her face, the battlefield.
With a cry only he could hear, the hunter turned.
And ran.
“You want to compare yourself to an insect, Cassie? If you’re an insect, then you’re a mayfly. Here for a day and then gone. That doesn’t have anything to do with the Others. It’s always been that way. We’re here, and then we’re gone, and it’s not about the time we’re here, but what we do with the time.”
Number forty-nine has been mapped.
Zombie was born on the morning I left the convalescent ward. Traded in my flimsy gown for a blue jumpsuit. Assigned a bunk in Barracks 10. Whipped back into shape by three squares a day and brutal physical training, but most of all by Reznik, the regiment’s senior drill instructor, the man who smashed Ben Parish into a million pieces, then reconstructed him into the merciless zombie killing machine that he is today.
“Can we pray? Is that against the rules?”
“Sure you can pray. Just not out loud.”
Tank’s body is stacked with the others by the hangar doors to be disposed. He’s loaded onto the transport for the final leg of his journey to the incinerators, where he will be consumed in fire, his ashes mixing with the gray smoke and carried aloft in a column of superheated air, eventually to settle over us in particles too fine to see or feel.
“It’s about connection,” she says. She motions for me to sit down. She sits in front of me, takes my hands.
“I had it all wrong,” he says. “Before I found you, I thought the only way to hold on was to find something to live for. It isn’t. To hold on, you have to find something you’re willing to die for.”
He whispers something. I bring my ear close to his mouth. “My name is Kenny.” Like it’s a terrible secret he’s been afraid to share.
His eyes roll toward the ceiling. Then he’s gone.
“Ben, we’re the 5th Wave.”
“You know we’re not coming back,” he says, and lights the match.
“I don’t want to be a shark,” I whisper.
He looks at me for a long, uncomfortable moment. He could have said, Shark? Who? What? Huh? Who said you were a shark? Instead, he begins to nod, like he totally gets it. “You aren’t.”
You, not we. I give his long look back to him.
You’re soft. You should have killed him. You can’t rely on luck and wishful thinking. The future of humanity belongs to the hardcore.
“I, um, I thought you might want this back.”
I pull out the battered old teddy bear and hold it toward him. He frowns and shakes his head and doesn’t reach for it, and I feel like he’s punched me in the gut.
Then my baby brother slaps that damned bear out of my hand and crushes his face against my chest, and beneath the odors of sweat and strong soap I can smell it, his smell, Sammy’s, my brother’s.
I level the silencer at his chest as his hand emerges from the pocket.
The hand that holds a gun.
But my hand holds an M16 assault rifle.
How long is one half of one half second?
Long enough for a little boy who doesn’t know the first rule to leap between the gun and the rifle.
That’s the flaw in Vosch’s master plan: If you don’t kill all of us all at once, those who remain will not be the weak.
It’s the strong who remain, the bent but unbroken, like the iron rods that used to give this concrete its strength.
Floods, fires, earthquakes, disease, starvation, betrayal, isolation, murder.
What doesn’t kill us sharpens us. Hardens us. Schools us.
And then, instead of jumping onto the Humvee like a normal person, Ben Parish turns and races back for me.
I wave him back. No time, no time, no time no time no time no time.
I’m shaking. He must notice, because he puts his arm around me and we sit like that for a while, my arms around Sammy, Ben’s arm around me, and together the three of us watch the sun break over the horizon, obliterating the dark in a burst of golden light.