A fleck of dull gray against the backdrop of dazzling autumnal blue.
Motionless.
Hello, Cassie. My name is Mr. Drone. Nice to meet you!
I stand up, and when I stand up—the moment I stand up; if I had stayed frozen there a millisecond longer, Mr. Bengals and I would be sporting matching holes—something slams into my leg, a hot punch just above my knee that knocks me off balance, sending me sprawling backward onto my butt.
I didn’t hear the shot. There was the cool wind in the grass and my own hot breath under the rag and the blood rushing in my ears—that’s all there was before the bullet struck.
Silencer.
That makes sense. Of course they’d use silencers. And now I have the perfect name for them: Silencers. A name that fits the job description.
Something takes over when you’re facing death. The front part of your brain lets go, gives up control to the oldest part of you, the part that takes care of your heartbeat and breathing and the blinking of your eyes. The part nature built first to keep your ass alive. The part that stretches time like a gigantic piece of toffee, making a second seem like an hour and a minute longer than a summer afternoon.
I lunge forward for my rifle—I had dropped the M16 when the round punched home—and the ground in front of me explodes, showering me with shredded grass and hunks of dirt and gravel.
Okay, forget the M16.
I yank the Luger from my waistband and do a sort of running hop—or a hopping run—toward the closest car. There isn’t much pain—although my guess is that we’re going to get very intimate later—but I can feel the blood soaking into my jeans by the time I reach the car, an older model Buick sedan.
The rear windshield shatters as I dive down. I scoot on my back till I’m all the way under the car. I’m not a big girl by any stretch, but it’s a tight fit, no room to roll over, no way to turn if he shows up on the left side.
Cornered.
Smart, Cassie, real smart. Straight As last semester? Honor roll? Riiiiiight.
You should have stayed in your little stretch of woods in your little tent with your little books and your cute little mementos. At least when they came for you, there’d be room to run.
The minutes spin out. I lie on my back and bleed onto the cold concrete. Rolling my head to the right, to the left, raising it a half inch to look past my feet toward the back of the car. Where the hell is he? What’s taking so long? Then it hits me:
He’s using a high-powered sniper rifle. Has to be. Which means he could have been over a half mile away when he shot me.
Which also means I have more time than I first thought. Time to come up with something besides a blubbery, desperate, disjointed prayer.
Make him go away. Make him be quick. Let me live. Let him end it…
Shaking uncontrollably. I’m sweating; I’m freezing cold.
You’re going into shock. Think, Cassie.
Think.
It’s what we’re made for. It’s what got us here. It’s the reason I have this car to hide under. We are human.
And humans think. They plan. They dream, and then they make 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.
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 speeding bullet.
It hits the surface with a force one billion times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Bye-bye, New York. Bye, Sydney. Good-bye, California, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, British Columbia. So long, Eastern Seaboard.
Japan, Hong Kong, London, Rome, Rio.
Nice to know you. Hope you enjoyed your stay!
The 1st Wave was over in seconds.
The 2nd Wave lasted a little longer. About a day.
The 3rd Wave? That took a little longer—twelve weeks. Twelve weeks to kill…well, Dad figured 97 percent of those of us unlucky enough to have survived the first two waves.