Close.
I’d never fired it at anything bigger than a rabbit, and that was a kind of experiment, to see if I could actually use the thing without blowing off one of my own body parts. Once I shot over the heads of a pack of feral dogs that had gotten a little too interested in my campsite. Another time nearly straight up, sighting the tiny, glowering speck of greenish light that was their mothership sliding silently across the backdrop of the Milky Way. Okay, I admit that was stupid. I might as well have erected a billboard with a big arrow pointing at my head and the words YOO-HOO, HERE I AM!
After the rabbit experiment—it blew that poor damn bunny apart, turning Peter into this unrecognizable mass of shredded guts and bone—I gave up the idea of using the rifle to hunt. I didn’t even do target practice. In the silence that had slammed down after the 4th Wave struck, the report of the rounds sounded louder than an atomic blast.
Still, I considered the M16 my bestest of besties. Always by my side, even at night, burrowed into my sleeping bag with me, faithful and true. In the 4th Wave, you can’t trust that people are still people. But you can trust that your gun is still your gun.
Shhh, Cassie. It’s close.
Close.
I should have bailed. That little voice had my back. That little voice is older than I am. It’s older than the oldest person who ever lived.
I should have listened to that voice.
Instead, I listened to the silence of the abandoned store, listened hard. Something was close. I took a tiny step away from the door, and the broken glass crunched ever so softly under my foot.
And then the Something made a noise, somewhere between a cough and a moan. It came from the back room, behind the coolers, where my water was.
That’s the moment when I didn’t need a little old voice to tell me what to do. It was obvious, a no-brainer. Run.
But I didn’t run.
The first rule of surviving the 4th Wave is don’t trust anyone. It doesn’t matter what they look like. The Others are very smart about that—okay, they’re smart about everything. It doesn’t matter if they look the right way and say the right things and act exactly like you expect them to act. Didn’t my father’s death prove that? Even if the stranger is a little old lady sweeter than your great-aunt Tilly, hugging a helpless kitten, you can’t know for certain—you can never know—that she isn’t one of them, and that there isn’t a loaded .45 behind that kitten.
It isn’t unthinkable. And the more you think about it, the more thinkable it becomes. Little old lady has to go.
That’s the hard part, the part that, if I thought about it too much, would make me crawl into my sleeping bag, zip myself up, and die of slow starvation. If you can’t trust anyone, then you can trust no one. Better to take the chance that Aunty Tilly is one of them than play the odds that you’ve stumbled across a fellow survivor.
That’s friggin’ diabolical.
It tears us apart. It makes us that much easier to hunt down and eradicate. The 4th Wave forces us into solitude, where there’s no strength in numbers, where we slowly go crazy from the isolation and fear and terrible anticipation of the inevitable.
So I didn’t run. I couldn’t. Whether it was one of them or an Aunt Tilly, I had to defend my turf. The only way to stay alive is to stay alone. That’s rule number two.
I followed the sobbing coughs or coughing sobs or whatever you want to call them till I reached the door that opened to the back room. Hardly breathing, on the balls of my feet.
The door was ajar, the space just wide enough for me to slip through sideways. A metal rack on the wall directly in front of me and, to the right, the long narrow hallway that ran the length of the coolers. There were no windows back here. The only light was the sickly orange of the dying day behind me, still bright enough to hurl my shadow onto the sticky floor. I crouched down; my shadow crouched with me.
I couldn’t see around the edge of the cooler into the hall. But I could hear whoever—or whatever—it was at the far end, coughing, moaning, and that gurgling sob.
Either hurt badly or acting hurt badly, I thought. Either needs help or it’s a trap.
This is what life on Earth has become since the Arrival. It’s an either/or world.
Either it’s one of them and it knows you’re here or it’s not one of them and he needs your help.
Either way, I had to get up and turn that corner.
So I got up.
And I turned the corner.
4
He lay sprawled against the back wall twenty feet away, long legs spread out in front of him, clutching his stomach with one hand. He was wearing fatigues and black boots and he was covered in grime and shimmering with blood. There was blood everywhere. On the wall behind him. Pooling on the cold concrete beneath him. Coating his uniform. Matted in his hair. The blood glittered darkly, black as tar in the semidarkness.
In his other hand was a gun, and that gun was pointed at my head.
I mirrored him. His handgun to my rifle. Fingers flexing on the triggers: his, mine.
It didn’t prove anything, his pointing a gun at me. Maybe he really was a wounded soldier and thought I was one of them.
Or maybe not.
“Drop your weapon,” he sputtered at me.
Like hell.
“Drop your weapon!” he shouted, or tried to shout. The words came out all cracked and crumbly, beaten up by the blood rising from his gut. Blood dribbled over his bottom lip and hung quivering from his stubbly chin. His teeth shone with blood.
I shook my head. My back was to the light, and I prayed he couldn’t see how badly I was shaking or the fear in my eyes. This wasn’t some damn rabbit that was stupid enough to hop into my camp one sunny morning. This was a person. Or, if it wasn’t, it looked just like one.
The thing about killing is you don’t know if you can actually do it until you actually do it.
He said it a third time, not as loud as the second. It came out like a plea.
“Drop your weapon.”
The hand holding his gun twitched. The muzzle dipped toward the floor. Not much, but my eyes had adjusted to the light by this point, and I saw a speck of blood run down the barrel.
And then he dropped the gun.
It fell between his legs with a sharp cling. He brought up his empty hand and held it, palm outward, over his shoulder. “Okay,” he said with a bloody half smile. “Your turn.”
I shook my head. “Other hand,” I said. I hoped my voice sounded stronger than I felt. My knees had begun to shake and my arms ached and my head was spinning. I was also fighting the urge to hurl. You don’t know if you can do it until you do it.
“I can’t,” he said.
“Other hand.”
“If I move this hand, I’m afraid my stomach will fall out.” I adjusted the butt of the rifle against my shoulder. I was sweating, shaking, trying to think. Either/or, Cassie. What are you going to do, either/or?
“I’m dying,” he said matter-of-factly. From this distance, his eyes were just pinpricks of reflected light. “So you can either finish me off or help me. I know you’re human—”
“How do you know?” I asked quickly, before he could die on me. If he was a real soldier, he might know how to tell the difference. It would be an extremely useful bit of information.
“Because if you weren’t, you would have shot me already.” He smiled again, his cheeks dimpled, and that’s when it hit me how young he was. Only a couple years older than me.
“See?” he said softly. “That’s how you know, too.”
“How I know what?” My eyes were tearing up. His crumpled-up body wiggled in my vision like an image in a fun-house mirror. But I didn’t dare release my grip on the rifle to rub my eyes.
“That I’m human. If I wasn’t, I would have shot you.”
That made sense. Or did it make sense because I wanted it to make sense? Maybe he dropped the gun to get me to drop mine, and once I did, the second gun he was hiding under his fatigues
would come out and the bullet would say hello to my brain.
This is what the Others have done to us. You can’t band together to fight without trust. And without trust, there was no hope.
How do you rid the Earth of humans? Rid the humans of their humanity.
“I have to see your other hand,” I said.
“I told you—”
“I have to see your other hand!” My voice cracked then. Couldn’t help it.
He lost it. “Then you’re just going to have to shoot me, bitch! Just shoot me and get it over with!”
His head fell back against the wall, his mouth came open, and a terrible howl of anguish tumbled out and bounced from wall to wall and floor to ceiling and pounded against my ears. I didn’t know if he was screaming from the pain or the realization that I wasn’t going to save him. He had given in to hope, and that will kill you. It kills you before you die. Long before you die.
“If I show you,” he gasped, rocking back and forth against the bloody concrete, “if I show you, will you help me?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t answer because I didn’t have an answer. I was playing this one nanosecond at a time.
So he decided for me. He wasn’t going to let them win, that’s what I think now. He wasn’t going to stop hoping. If it killed him, at least he would die with a sliver of his humanity intact.
Grimacing, he slowly pulled out his left hand. Not much day left now, hardly any light at all, and what light there was seemed to be flowing away from its source, from him, past me and out the half-open door.
His hand was caked in half-dried blood. It looked like he was wearing a crimson glove.
The stunted light kissed his bloody hand and flicked along the length of something long and thin and metallic, and my finger yanked back on the trigger, and the rifle kicked against my shoulder hard, and the barrel bucked in my hand as I emptied the clip, and from a great distance I heard someone screaming, but it wasn’t him screaming, it was me screaming, me and everybody else who was left, if there was anybody left, all of us helpless, hopeless, stupid humans screaming, because we got it wrong, we got it all wrong, there was no alien swarm descending from the sky in their flying saucers or big metal walkers like something out of Star Wars or cute little wrinkly E.T.s who just wanted to pluck a couple of leaves, eat some Reese’s Pieces, and go home. That’s not how it ends.
That’s not how it ends at all.
It ends with us killing each other behind rows of empty beer coolers in the dying light of a late-summer day.
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.
[End Excerpt]
© 2013 by Rick Yancey.
From The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey.
Published by arrangement with G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
All rights reserved.
Rick Yancey is the author of several adult novels and the memoir Confessions of a Tax Collector. His first young-adult novel, The Extradorindary Adventures of Alfred Kropp, was a finalist for the Carnegie Medal. In 2010, his novel The Monstrumologist received a Michael L. Printz Honor, and the sequel, The Curse of the Wendigo, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Learn more at rickyancey.com.
Interview: Karen Russell
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy
Karen Russell is the author of the story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and the novel Swamplandia!, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and one of the New York Times’ Top 5 Fiction Books of 2011. Her new story collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, was released by Knopf in February 2013.
This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the hosts discuss various geeky topics.
First of all, your first novel, Swamplandia!, was optioned by HBO, so what’s the current status of that project?
In development, still in development. And I’m not even sure if that’s the industry lingo. I think they have a writer who’s working on it. The writer’s not me. I’m a consultant. And what those duties are are kind of fuzzy to me. So I think we’ll just have to see. I’m trying to be guardedly optimistic. I think a lot has to go right for something that gets optioned to actually make it on-screen, so I’m not promising my out-of-work friends jobs on the set holding the boom, or whatever, just yet.
So what sort of changes do you expect them to make to the story?
One of the big ones, I think, is just the idea of having a world vast enough to sustain seasons of TV, you know? Right now I think it’s the microcosm of this family in the novel they really focus on. And I think the novel turns pretty tragic. There’s sort of a funnier storyline with the brother, but the heart of the story for me was this little girl Ava who gets really lost in a very literal kind of a hell, the swamps. Somehow I think that will be, maybe, less of a focus of a TV series, and I think the show will shift, I think it will be weighted more toward comedy than tragedy.
So what sort of consulting have you done? Have you seen any scripts?
I have not even seen any scripts yet. I was in Berlin for ten months last year, so I was completely out of the loop. We had a couple of conversations about the palette of the show and the format and the degree to which South Florida would be, kind of, would it be more fictionalized? Would there be some kind of way to retain a couple different kinds of worlds, you know? Osceola sort of has this very dreamy surreal quality of those sections of the novel, so is there a way to juxtapose that with the grittier, tackier, goofier parts of South Florida? So that was the sort of consulting I did, sort of about tone and about how we might broaden some of the story lines and character arcs so that you could really sustain drama over time.
What were you doing in Berlin?
I was at the American Academy in Berlin, which is this sort of fabulous place. I was their lone fiction writer. It tends to be, they have fellows come—you apply for these fellowships to do your project. They consider your projects and they sort of wine and dine you and you get to live in this kind of academic hostel, I guess. It’s this beautiful house on the Wannsee. It almost felt too good. It felt a little Hansel and Gretel, they were taking such good care of us. There’s a composer, we had a visual artist, a social scientist, historians of science, you know, political scientists. It was good, it was a little like being in college again, or something, you know, a multi-generational college.
What was the literary scene there like, particularly as regards sort of surreal kind of fiction?
I think they were into it! I felt, I don’t know what it is in the water. I think there are a couple of precedents. You know, the Grimm Brothers come from that country. So they’re steeped in some pretty … they seemed receptive to some fairy tale-infused surreal tales. I felt pretty surprisingly, happily understood. And you know, that’s not a given. I feel like the stuff I write is pretty whacked out. I felt like, for whatever historical and cultural reason, that there was a good reception for that kind of thing there.
What do you guys say about that? When people ask about spec fiction and bring up fairy tales, how do you guys class that? I never know.
I would certainly consider fairy tales to be fantasy stories. A lot of fantasy is actually just appropriating the elements of fairy tales, but treating them in a more modern context.
Right. Right. I completely agree. And I’ve been reading Dune, which, I love that book so much, and I had forgotten that they had, as epigraphs scattered throughout the book, there are these kind of like a child’s history, you know, these fairy tales for kids about the contemporary history of this imaginary planet. Which, to route a fictional history of an imaginary place into a future, it’s sort of like he’s imagining a fairy tale of the future that is contending with something that has already passed
from history into myth, but it’s all in this imaginary world. It’s just so exciting to see that kind of mirror of the function that fairy tales play here.
What inspired you to go back and re-read Dune?
You know you go on the road with books and then everyone wants to know about your influences and I was just thinking about how much I love that book. Something, too, it’s such an ecological novel and I feel like I’ve been reading so much about climate change and oil, energy crisis and this and that. And all of that is in Dune. It’s a really prescient book in that way.
Do you ever think you might write a big, sprawling futuristic epic like Dune?
Man, I just think that’s the dream. It’s sort of like, you have to be extra brilliant to write a book about that. To set up an entire, you know, sociopolitical, to do the work of reinventing all of these human systems in the future on a different planet. I would love to be able to, I mean, you see the scale I’m working at would be short stories, and that takes me forever. And so, I’m not sure the way my imagination works is quite matched by the scope of something like Dune. But it would be exciting to try.
You know, John and I, the first time we met you was at the New York Review science fiction reading series.
Right.
At that time you said that you were working on this novel about a family of alligator wrestlers and that it was a total mess, you didn’t know if you would ever finish it. So I thought it was funny to see what a massive success that book has gone on to be, given how despondent you were.
How despondent I was at that moment! Oh my god, I’m so glad, so glad that you guys remember that, because I would say that was probably—when was that, 2007 or something?—that would have been my valley of the shadow with Swamplandia!. I was like, whatever, the subway ads were looking really tempting where you can be a masseuse in six months. I was like, six months is soon and then I’ll have a career! I was having a hard time making the story-to-novel transition. Novels are scary, I think, because there’s just no guarantee that you’ll ever get to the end, and they’re just so demanding. I’m trying to work on a second one now and I’m horrified that it seems even harder. That doesn’t seem just.
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