The 5th Wave Read Free Page 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 wallto 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