More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Not Cassie for Cassandra. Or Cassie for Cassidy. Cassie for Cassiopeia, the constellation, the queen tied to her chair in the northern sky, who was beautiful but vain, placed in the heavens by the sea god Poseidon as a punishment for her boasting. In Greek, her name means “she whose words excel.”
That sounds crazy. Am I crazy? Have I lost my mind? You can only call someone crazy if there’s someone else who’s normal. Like good and evil. If everything was good, then nothing would be good. Whoa. That sounds, well…crazy. Crazy: the new normal.
The only way to stay alive is to stay alone. That’s rule number two.
The only thing wrong with Ben was his height: He was six inches taller than me. Well, make that two things now: his height and the fact that he’s dead.
Not many people died in the 1st Wave, the massive electromagnetic pulse that ripped through the atmosphere at precisely eleven A.M. on the tenth day. Only around half a million, Dad guessed. Okay, half a million sounds like a lot of people, but really it’s just a drop in the population bucket. World War II killed over a hundred times that number.
“How would you rather die?” she snapped. “Hiding under your bed or riding Thunder Mountain?”
Daddy said the world was dividing into two camps: runners and nesters. Runners headed for the hills—or Thunder Mountain. Nesters boarded up the windows, stocked up on the canned goods and ammunition, and kept the TV tuned to CNN 24/7.
Nobody knew what to do. We figured the government sort of did. The government had a plan for everything, so we assumed they had a plan for E.T. showing up uninvited and unannounced, like the weird cousin nobody in the family likes to talk about.
On Day Three, I went out with a guy named Mitchell Phelps. Well, technically we went outside. The date was in my backyard because of the curfew.
By the third day, you either talked about the Others all the time or you tried not to talk about them at all. I fell into the second category.
“It’s the grandfather paradox.”
“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.
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.
The Hum died on the tenth day after the Arrival. I was sitting in third period texting Lizbeth the last text I will ever send. I don’t remember exactly what it said.
The 1st Wave rolled in without much fanfare. It wasn’t dramatic. There was no shock and awe. The lights just winked out. Ms. Paulson’s overhead died. The screen on my phone went black.
“EMP,” he said. “Electromagnetic pulse. Generate one large enough and you knock out the entire grid. Power. Communications. Transportation. Anything that flies or drives is zapped out.”
He looked at me and smiled reassuringly and said, “Everything’s going to be okay,” because that’s what I wanted him to say and it’s what he wanted to say and that’s what you do when the curtain is falling—you give the line that the audience wants to hear.
