The 5th Wave (The Fifth Wave #1)(16)

And then my mother died in a fury of jerks and gargled screams, her uninvited guests rocketing out of every orifice, because she was done, they’d used her up, time to turn off the lights and find 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 fist. 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 five 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 floor in his room, playing with his X-wing starfighter, 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.

12

I GUESS I have to talk about Sammy now.

I don’t know how else to get there.

There being that first inch in the open, where the sunlight kissed my scraped-up cheek when I slid out from under the Buick. That first inch was the hardest. The longest inch in the universe. The inch that stretched a thousand miles.

There being that place on the highway where I turned to face the enemy I couldn’t see.

There being the one thing that’s kept me from going completely crazy, the thing the Others haven’t been able to take from me after taking everything from me.

Sammy is the reason I didn’t give up. Why I didn’t stay beneath that car and wait for the end.

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? So ordinary, in fact, that the sight of them pulling into the refugee camp after the last four months of horror was shocking. It was like seeing a McDonald’s on the moon. Totally weird and crazy and something that just shouldn’t be.

We’d been in the camp only a couple of weeks. Of the fifty or so people there, ours was the only family. Everybody else was a widow, a widower, an orphan. The last ones standing in their family, strangers before coming to the camp. The oldest was probably in his sixties. Sammy was the youngest, but there were seven other kids, none except me older than fourteen.

The camp lay twenty miles east of where we lived, hacked out of the woods during the 3rd Wave to build a field hospital after the ones in town had reached full capacity. The buildings were slapped together, made out of hand-sawed lumber and salvaged tin, one main ward for the infected and a smaller shack for the two doctors who tended the dying before they, too, were sucked down by the Red Tsunami. There was a summer garden and a system that captured rainwater for washing and bathing and drinking.