ANDERE SEMPER | FIFTH WAVE

1.5

There she was, debating whether to travel by day or night. Darkness always seemed like the best choice once too occupied by worry of the Others. However daylight was the preferable once in need to spot a drone or a ground occupier before they spotted the human.

The drones had made their appearance as soon as the third wave had been making its way towards the end. Cigar-shaped, dull gray in color, gliding swiftly and silently thousands of feet up. Sometimes they streak across the sky without stopping, on other times they circled overhead like a bee in need of nectar. 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 humanity knew the drones weren't theirs. One of them had crashed down a couple miles from their camp. After it had broken a sound barrier, an ear-piercing shriek as it rocketed to earth, the ground shuddering beneath the young woman's feet when it plowed down and disappeared behind the green curtains of leafs.

So now, there the ash brunette was once again. Deciding whether to travel by day, the excellent way to keep an eye on the ground and on the sky. But then again in the end, she would be rocking her head from the left to the right, up and down and back up again like some lunatic during the full moon. At night there were other things to worry about besides the drones. Coyotes, bears, wild dogs and wolves even, there was a chance to stumble across an unfortunate survivor or an Other that will shoot a bullet straight through the youngest her brains before taking notice. 

Reconsidering that she'd definitely be better of against one of them during daylight rather then when she couldn't see her own hands at night. Which takes her back to the best course of action. Does she shoot on sight or does she wait for them to make the first move and risk it being a deadly one for herself. 

Wouldn't it be handy if us idiotic humans not come up with some kind of code if we happened to run into another other, to identify ourselves as the good guys and not randomly kill each other. So she had decided, take cover and no showdowns. There was no need for another round of getting get choked to death, being slammed into hard concrete and break more bones than you had broken last time Aurora.

The day was bright and cloudless, however it was so cold her bones hurt. With every step she had taken, her head shot up from the left to the right, then bobbing it up and down then back up. Her backpack was bounching against one of shoulder blade, the rifle against the other, walking on the outside edge of the median that separated the southbound from the northbound lanes, stopping every few strides whipping around and scanning the terrain behind her. Five hours passed and she supposed she had covered a rough fifty miles.

The most disturbing thing, even more disturbing than the abandoned cars, the snarl of crumbled metal and the sparkling broken glass in the October sunlight. More disturbing than the trash littering the median, most of it hidden by the knee-high grass so the strip of land looks lumpy, the most disturbing thing is the silence.

Everyone remembers the hum. The hum had gone. Unless those who had grown up on the mountains, lived in a cave the eternity of living creatures, supposedly lived under a rock, the hum was always around. It was the sea humankind swam in, a constant sound of all the things they had built to make their lives somewhat easier and a little less boring. The daily electronic symphony was around them twenty-four seven.  The hum of all their privileges, vanished. The silence of nature used to be the sound of Planet Earth before humanity destroyed it. 

At times when Aurora would return to her camp, after night had fallen, she thought she could hear the sound of trees cracking in the dead of the silent, windless nights. Perhaps that was how silent days were. It made her want to scream at the top of her lungs. It made the ocean blue eyed girl want to scream, shout, stamp her  feet, snap with her fingers or clap her hands. Anything to declare her oblivious presence, a clearancethat would snap her out of that painful soundless trance that slowly began to break her. The unpleasant conversation back at the store had been the first words she had said aloud she her brother had passed, she had forgotten when that previous last were as she began to forget about the day she suspected her brother to have died.