The 5th Wave

plague over the past three months to know what’s coming: total system meltdown, starting with your brain. The Red Death turns your brain to mashed potatoes before your other organs liquefy. You don’t know where you are, who you are, what you are. You become a zombie, the walking dead—if you had the strength to walk, which you don’t.

I’m dying. I know that. Seventeen years old and the party’s over.

Short party.

Six months ago my biggest worries were passing AP Chemistry and finding a summer job that paid enough for me to finish rebuilding the engine on my ’69 Corvette. And when the mothership first appeared, sure, that took up some of my thoughts, but after a while it faded to a distant fourth. I watched the news like everybody else and spent way too much time sharing funny YouTube videos about it, but I never thought it would affect me personally. Seeing all the demonstrations and marches and riots on TV leading up to the first attack was like watching a movie or news footage from a foreign country. It didn’t seem like any of it was happening to me.

Dying isn’t so different from that. You don’t feel like it’s going to happen to you…until it happens to you.

I know I’m dying. Nobody has to tell me.

Chris, the guy who shared this tent with me before I got sick, tells me anyway: “Dude, I think you’re dying,” he says, squatting outside the tent’s opening, his eyes wide and unblinking above the filthy rag that he presses against his nose.

Chris has come by to check up on me. He’s about ten years older, and I think he looks at me like a little brother. Or maybe he’s come to see if I’m still alive; he’s in charge of disposal for this part of the camp. The fires burn day and night. By day the refugee camp ringing Wright-Patterson swims in a dense, choking fog. At night the firelight turns the smoke a deep crimson, like the air itself is bleeding.

I ignore his remark and ask him what he’s heard from Wright-Patterson. The base has been on full lockdown since the tent city sprang up after the attack on the coasts. No one allowed in or out. They’re trying to contain the Red Death, that’s what they tell us. Occasionally some well-armed soldiers well-wrapped in hazmat suits roll out the main gates with water and rations, tell us everything will be okay, and then hightail it back inside, leaving us to fend for ourselves. We need medicine. They tell us there’s no cure for the plague. We need sanitation. They give us shovels to dig a trench. We need information. What the hell is going on? They tell us they don’t know.

“They don’t know anything,” Chris says to me. He’s on the thin side, balding, an accountant before the attacks made accounting obsolete. “Nobody knows anything. Just a bunch of rumors that everybody treats like news.” He cuts his eyes at me, then looks away. Like looking at me hurts. “You want to hear the latest?”

Not really. “Sure.” To keep him there. I’ve only known the guy for a month, but he’s the only guy left who I know. I lie here on this old camping bed with a sliver of sky for a view. Vague, people-shaped forms drift by in the smoke, like figures out of a horror movie, and sometimes I can hear screaming or crying, but I haven’t spoken to another person in days.

“The plague isn’t theirs, it’s ours,” Chris says. “Escaped from some top-secret government facility after the power failed.”

I cough. He flinches, but he doesn’t leave. He waits for the fit to subside. Somewhere along the way he lost one of the lenses to his glasses. His left eye is stuck in a perpetual squint. He rocks from foot to foot in the muddy ground. He wants to leave; he doesn’t want to leave. I know the feeling.

“Wouldn’t that be ironic?” I gasp. I can taste blood.

He shrugs. Irony? There is no irony anymore. Or maybe there’s just so much of it that you can’t call it irony. “It’s not ours. Think about it. The first two attacks drive the survivors inland to take shelter in camps just like this one. That concentrates the population, creating the perfect breeding ground for the virus. Millions of pounds of fresh meat all conveniently located in one spot. It’s genius.”

“Gotta hand it to ’em,” I say, trying to be ironic. I don’t want him to leave, but I also don’t want him to talk. He has a habit of going off on rants, one of those guys who has an opinion about everything. But something happens when every person you meet dies within days of your meeting them: You start being a lot less picky about who you hang out with. You can overlook a lot of flaws. And you let go of a lot of personal hang-ups, like the big lie that having your insides turn to soup doesn’t scare the living shit out of you.

“They know how we think,” he says.

“How the hell do you know what they know?” I’m getting pissed. I’m not sure why. Maybe I’m jealous. We shared the tent, same water, same food, and I’m the one who’s dying. What makes him so special?

“I don’t,” he answers quickly. “The only thing I know is I don’t know anything anymore.”

In the distance, a gun fires. Chris barely reacts. Gunfire is pretty common in the camp. Potshots at birds. Warning shots at the gangs coming for your stash. Some shots signal a suicide, a person in the final stages who decides to show the plague who’s boss. When I first came to the camp, I heard a story about a mom who took out her three kids and then did herself rather than face the Fourth Horseman. I couldn’t decide whether she was brave or stupid. And then I stopped worrying about it. Who cares what she was when what she is now is dead?

He doesn’t have much more to say, so he says it quickly to get the hell away. Like a lot of the uninfected, Chris has a bad case of the twitchies, always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Scratchy throat—from the smoke or…? Headache—from lack of sleep or hunger or…? It’s the moment you’re passed the ball and out of the corner of your eye you see the two-hundred-and-fifty-pound linebacker bearing down at full speed—only the moment never ends.

“I’ll come back tomorrow,” he says. “You need anything?”

“Water.” Though I can’t keep it down.

“You got it, dude.”

He stands up. All I can see now is his mud-stained pants and mud-caked boots. I don’t know how I know, but I know it’s the last I’ll see of Chris. He won’t come back, or if he does, I won’t realize it. We don’t say good-bye. Nobody says good-bye anymore. The word has taken on a whole new meaning since the Big Green Eye in the Sky showed up.

I watch the smoke swirl in his passing. Then I pull out the silver chain from beneath the blanket. I run my thumb over the smooth surface of the heart-shaped locket, holding it close to my eyes in the fading light. The clasp broke on the night I yanked it free from her neck, but I managed to fix it using a pair of fingernail clippers.

I look toward the tent opening and see her standing there, and I know it isn’t really her, it’s the virus showing her to me, because she’s wearing the same locket I’m holding in my hand. The bug has been showing me all kinds of things. Things I want to see and things I don’t. The little girl in the opening is both.

Bubby, why did you leave me?

I open my mouth. I taste blood. “Go away.”

Her image begins to shimmer. I rub my eyes, and my knuckles come away wet with blood.

You ran away. Bubby, why did you run?

And then the smoke pulls her apart, splinters her, smashes her body into nothing. I call out to her. Crueler than seeing her is the not seeing her. I’m clutching the silver chain so tight that the links cut into my palm.

Reaching for her. Running from her.

Reaching. Running.

Outside the tent, the red smoke of funeral pyres. Inside, the red fog of plague.

You’re the lucky one, I tell Sissy. You left before things got really messy.

Gunfire erupts in the distance. Only this time it’s not the sporadic pop-pop of some desperate refugee firing at shadows, but big guns that go off with an eardrum-thumping puh- DOOM. The high-pitched screeching of tracer fire. The rapid reports of automatic weapons.

Wright-Patterson is under attack.

Part of me is relieved. It’s like a release, the final cracking open of the storm after the long wait. The other part of me, the one that still thinks I might survive the plague, is ready to wet his pants. Too weak to move off the cot and too scared to do it even if I wasn’t. I close my eyes and whisper a prayer for the men and women of Wright-Patterson to waste an invader or two for me and Sissy. But mostly for Sissy.

Explosions now. Big explosions. Explosions that make the ground tremble, that vibrate against your skin, that press hard against your temples and push on your chest and squeeze. It sounds as if the world is being ripped