Survival and Perseverance Theme Analysis

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.

“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.

“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.”

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.

“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.”

“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.

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.