The 5th Wave Read Online Free PDF

in the Americas than a scene from
Close Encounters
, and we all know how that turned out for the Native Americans.”
    I turned to my father and said, “We should nuke ’em.” I had to raise my voice to be
     heard over the TV—Dad always jacked up the volume during the news so he could hear
     it over Mom’s TV in the kitchen. She liked to watch TLC while she cooked. I called
     it the War of the Remotes.
    “Cassie!” He was so shocked, his toes began to curl inside his white athletic socks.
     He grew up on
Close Encounters
and
E.T.
and
Star Trek
and totally bought into the idea that the Others had come to liberate us from ourselves.
     No more hunger. No morewars. The eradication of disease. The secrets of the cosmos unveiled. “Don’t you understand
     this could be the next step in our evolution? A huge leap forward. Huge.” He gave
     me a consoling hug. “We’re all very fortunate to be here to see it.”
    Then he added casually, like he was talking about how to fix a toaster, “Besides,
     a nuclear device can’t do much damage in the vacuum of space. There’s nothing to carry
     the shock wave.”
    “So this brainiac on TV is just full of shit?”
    “Don’t use that language, Cassie,” he chided me. “He’s entitled to his opinion, but
     that’s all it is. An opinion.”
    “But what if he’s right? What if that thing up there is their version of a Death Star?”
    “Travel halfway across the universe just to blow us up?” He patted my leg and smiled.
     Mom turned up the kitchen TV. He pushed the volume in the family room to twenty-seven.
    “Okay, but what about an intergalactic Mongol horde, like he was talking about?” I
     demanded. “Maybe they’ve come to conquer us, shove us into reservations, enslave us…”
    “Cassie,” he said. “Simply because something
could
happen doesn’t mean it
will
happen. Anyway, it’s all just speculation. This guy’s. Mine. Nobody knows why they’re
     here. Isn’t it just as likely they’ve come all this way to save us?”
    Four months after saying those words, my father was dead.
    He was wrong about the Others. And I was wrong. And One of the Smartest Guys in the
     World was wrong.
    It wasn’t about saving us. And it wasn’t about enslaving us or herding us into reservations.
    It was about killing us.
    All of us.

6
    I DEBATED WHETHER to travel by day or night for a long time. Darkness is best if you’re
     worried about them. But daylight is preferable if you want to spot a drone before
     it spots you.
    The drones showed up at the tag end of the 3rd Wave. Cigar-shaped, dull gray in color,
     gliding swiftly and silently thousands of feet up. Sometimes they streak across the
     sky without stopping. Sometimes they circle overhead like buzzards. They can turn
     on a dime and come to a sudden stop, from Mach 2 to zero in less than a second. That’s
     how we knew the drones weren’t ours.
    We knew they were unmanned (or un-Othered) because one of them crashed a couple miles
     from our refugee camp. A
thu-whump!
when it broke the sound barrier, an ear-piercing shriek as it rocketed to earth,
     the ground shuddering under our feet when it plowed into a fallow cornfield. A recon
     team hiked to the crash site to check it out. Okay, it wasn’t really a team, just
     Dad and Hutchfield, the guy in charge of the camp. They came back to report the thing
     was empty. Were they sure? Maybe the pilot bailed before impact. Dad said it was packed
     with instruments; there wasn’t any room for a pilot. “Unless they’re two inches tall.”
     That got a big laugh. Somehow it made the horror less horrible, thinking of the Others
     as being two-inch Borrower types.
    I opted to travel by day. I could keep one eye on the sky and another on the ground.
     What I ended up doing is rocking my head up and down, up and down, side to side, then
     up again, like some groupie at a rock concert, until I was dizzy and a little sick
     to my stomach.
    Plus there are other things at