Free The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey Page B

badges for everything.”
    Actually, it was seven years of karate classes. I dropped karate last year. Don’t
     remember my reasons now. They seemed like good ones at the time.
    “I’m one, too,” he said.
    “What?”
    He spat a wad of blood and mucus into the dirt. “A virgin.”
    What a shock.
    “What makes you think I’m a virgin?” I asked.
    “You wouldn’t have hit me if you weren’t.”

14
    ON OUR SIXTH DAY in camp, I saw a drone for the first time.
    Glittering gray in the bright afternoon sky.
    There was a lot of shouting and running around, people grabbing guns, waving their
     hats and shirts or just spazzing in general: crying, jumping, hugging, high-fiving
     one another. They thought they were rescued. Hutchfield and Brogden tried to calmeverybody down, but weren’t very successful. The drone zipped across the sky, disappeared
     behind the trees, then came back, slower this time. From the ground, it looked like
     a blimp. Hutchfield and Dad huddled in the doorway of the barracks, watching it, swapping
     a pair of binoculars back and forth.
    “No wings. No markings. And did you see that first pass? Mach 2 at least. Unless we’ve
     launched some kind of classified aircraft, no way this thing is terrestrial.” As he
     spoke, Hutchfield was popping his fist up and down in the dirt, beating out a rhythm
     to match the words.
    Dad agreed. We were herded into the barracks. Dad and Hutchfield hovered in the doorway,
     still swapping the binoculars back and forth.
    “Is it the aliens?” Sammy asked. “Are they coming, Cassie?”
    “Shhh.”
    I looked over and saw Crisco watching me.
Twenty minutes,
he mouthed.
    “If they come, I’m going to beat them up,” Sammy whispered. “I’m going to karate kick
     them and I’m going to kill them all!”
    “That’s right,” I said, nervously running my hand over his hair.
    “I’m not going to run,” he said. “I’m going to kill them for killing Mommy.”
    The drone vanished—straight up, Dad told me later. If you blinked, you missed it.
    We reacted to the drone the way anyone would react.
    We freaked.
    Some people ran. Grabbed whatever they could carry and raced into the woods. Some
     just took off with the clothes on their backs and the fear in their guts. Nothing
     Hutchfield said could stop them.
    The rest of us huddled in the barracks until night came on, then wetook the freakout party to the next level. Had they spotted us? Were the Stormtroopers
     or clone army or robot walkers next? Were we about to be fried by laser cannons? It
     was pitch-black. We couldn’t see a foot in front of our noses, because we didn’t dare
     light the kerosene lamps. Frantic whispers. Muffled crying. Huddled on our cots, jumping
     at every little sound. Hutchfield assigned the best marksmen to the night watch. If
     it moved, shoot it. No one was allowed outside without permission. And Hutchfield
     never gave permission.
    That night lasted a thousand years.
    Dad came up to me in the dark and pressed something into my hands.
    A loaded semiautomatic Luger.
    “You don’t believe in guns,” I whispered.
    “I used to not believe in a lot of things.”
    A lady started to recite the Lord’s Prayer. We called her Mother Teresa. Big legs.
     Skinny arms. A faded blue dress. Wispy gray hair. Somewhere along the way she had
     lost her dentures. She was always working her beads and talking to Jesus. A few others
     joined her. Then some more. “‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass
     against us.’” At which point her arch nemesis, the sole atheist in Camp Ashpit’s foxhole,
     a college professor named Dawkins, shouted out, “Particularly those of extraterrestrial
     origin!”
    “You’re going to hell!” a voice yelled at him in the dark.
    “How will I know the difference?” Dawkins hollered back.
    “Quiet!” Hutchfield called softly from his spot in the doorway. “Stow that praying,
     people!”
    “His judgment has come upon us,”