The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey Read Free Book Online Page B

the dream real.
    Make it real, Cassie.
    Unless he drops down, he won’t be able to get to me. And when he drops down…when he
     dips his head to look at me…when he reaches in to grab my ankle and drag me out…
    No. He’s too smart for that. He’s going to assume I’m armed. He wouldn’t risk it.
     Not that Silencers care whether they live or die…or
do
they care? Do Silencers know fear? They don’t love life—I’ve seen enough to prove
     that. But do they love their own lives more than they love taking someone else’s?
    Time stretches out. A minute’s longer than a season. What’s taking him so damn long?
    It’s an either/or world now. Either he’s coming to finish it or he isn’t. But he has
     to finish it, doesn’t he? Isn’t that the reason he’s here? Isn’t that the whole friggin’
     point?
    Either/or: Either I run—or hop or crawl or roll—or I stay under this car and bleed
     to death. If I risk escape, it’s a turkey shoot. I won’t make it two feet. If I stay,
     same result, only more painful, more fearful, and much, much slower.
    Black stars blossom and dance in front of my eyes. I can’t get enough air into my
     lungs.
    I reach up with my left hand and yank the cloth from my face.
    The cloth.
    Cassie, you’re an idiot.
    I set the gun down beside me. That’s the hardest part—making myself let go of the
     gun.
    I lift my leg, slide the rag beneath it. I can’t lift my head to see what I’m doing.
     I stare past the black, blossoming stars at the grimy guts of the Buick as I pull
     the two ends together, cinch them tight, as tight as I can, and fumble with the knot.
     I reach down and explore the wound with my fingertips. It’s still bleeding, but a
     trickle compared to the bubbling gusher I had before tying off the tourniquet.
    I pick up the gun. Better. My eyesight clears a little, and I don’t feel quite so
     cold. I shift a couple of inches to the left; I don’t like lying in my own blood.
    Where is he? He’s had plenty of time to finish this…
    Unless he is finished.
    That brings me up short. For a few seconds, I totally forget to breathe.
    He’s not coming. He’s not coming because he doesn’t need to come. He knows you won’t
     dare come out, and if you don’t come out and run, you won’t make it. He knows you’ll
     starve or bleed to death or die of dehydration.
    He knows what you know: Run = die. Stay = die.
    Time for him to move on to the next one.
    If there is a next one.
    If I’m not the last one.
    Come on, Cassie! From seven billion to just one in five months? You’re not the last,
     and even if you are the last human being on Earth—
especially
if you are—you can’t let it end this way. Trapped under a goddamned Buick, bleeding
     until all the blood is gone—is this how humanity waves good-bye?
    Hell no.

10
    THE 1ST WAVE took out half a million people.
    The 2nd Wave put that number to shame.
    In case you don’t know, we live on a restless planet. The continents sit on slabs
     of rock, called tectonic plates, and those plates float on a sea of molten lava. They’re
     constantly scraping and rubbing and pushing against one another, creating enormous
     pressure.Over time the pressure builds and builds, until the plates slip, releasing huge amounts
     of energy in the form of earthquakes. If one of those quakes happens along one of
     the fault lines that ring every continent, the shock wave produces a superwave called
     a tsunami.
    Over 40 percent of the world’s population lives within sixty miles of a coastline.
     That’s three billion people.
    All the Others had to do was make it rain.
    Take a metal rod twice as tall as the Empire State Building and three times as heavy.
     Position it over one of these fault lines. Drop it from the upper atmosphere. You
     don’t need any propulsion or guidance system; just let it fall. Thanks to gravity,
     by the time it reaches the surface, it’s traveling twelve miles per second, twenty
     times faster than a