ANDERE SEMPER | FIFTH WAVE

1.6

The pair hadn't spoken on their walk home, the elder Wright brother had just simply been grasping onto the youngest her wrist, as if afraid something would come appearing from the skies and snatch er away. Halfway the five mile track, it had felt like their longest couple of mile they had ever walked. People stood like emotionless figures on their frontporches, holding their dead phones, bending over the hoods of their cars, fiddling with wires or looking at the sky. Nothing seemed to help.

The second the two stepped around the corner of the previous street, a block from theirs, the eldest spoke up, "Nothing's working. No electricity, engines, running water. Not anything."

Aurora tugged her wrist away from his grip, her ocean blue eyes bouncing around the area. "I get what you mean, we saw a plane crash and all we could do was stare."

He nodded unfortunate, a hurtful look crossing his features, "The Electromagnetic Pulse," Alex had begun, eyeing his younger sister. "Electromagnetic pulse.  Generate one large enough and you knock the entire grid down. Everything just zapps out, and that has been their plan it seems." 

The blonde had grown silent while proceding to unlocked the door, quietly stepped inside of the Wright house to listen if their mother had come home already, but everything stayed dead silent. A deep breath of relief had escaped the youngest her mouth. Silence was good.

"But it's okay," The ocean blue eyed young man had said as he continued while locking the door in its lock. "There's a chance the governments have a back-up system and a contingency plan. At least that was what my professor had informed us with." 

The ash brunette had blankly stared at the elder, mentally laughing at the words. Even if the Military University said we would be prepared for an alien invasion like this, likewise the entire government. 

"Alright, easy there now Private Wright." She had spoken up jokely, wrapping her arms around her fragile core. "How do they know how to help us along in a new stage of alien evolution?"

Alex had stared down at her from the stairs he had begun to climb, sending a reassuring smile at the girl, she knew the look on his face that had meant her voice broke somewhere along the sentence, "Cas, everything's going to be fine."  And that's exactly what she wanted him to say.

After  another roughly three hour track, the sun marking it as early noon, she had tactfully stopped for a water break and Slim Jim. Simple bites and only one at a time, was something she had learned over time. Whenever another water bottle would run out of its water or whenever she had emptied another package of Slim Jims, she knew it would be another less of in the would. Some day, one that may would come soon, she would be in the urgence to shoot a wild dog and most likely eat it raw. Shooting one just to get a for the norm of a present day kind of meal.

The odds to hunt one down were enormous, there were plenty of wild dogs around at the nights, ones she could easily shoot and arve it up with her knife. Here's the thing, the difference between killing a man and an animal, as long as they lived it meant Aurora could live, that it meant there was still a hand full of time. The hard thing seemed cooking it, there would be no way to fire some wood up, at day anyone could see the smoke, at night anyone could see the light. 

Right when she turned her head to take another glance over her right shoulder, a shadow shot across the grass few jards ahead of the ash browned haired young woman. She had jerked her head back so fast she had hit it against the side of a Ford Mercury. Unfortunate for her head and the pain shooting from up her broken nose, it wasn't a drone, it was a pigeon skipping among the long grass.Shivers had run down her frozen spine. Her hatred for birds had grown after the third wave, they had caused the Plague to spread faster than she had seen zombies in the movies. 

As four days of tracking had passed and multiple useless fearful sessions, she had determined the cars around the youngest as pack animals. They prowled in groups and died in clumpses, glimmering in the distance like jewelery. Once those clumpses would stop the youngest Wright would be in the full open on the empty roads miles. Aurora, the asphalt lined with half-naked trees, tall brown grass, leafs crinkling and clinging in desperate need to the dark branches. It had been the road, a cloudless sunny blue sky, tall brown grass and Aurora. Those empty stretches were the worst out of it all, the cars had provided some cover and shelter. She had slept in the undamaged ones the last several days, however she wouldn't call it sleep. The stale and stuffy air made her want to crack the windows and even considered her to leave the door open, but she knew she couldn't. Then again, the thought filled silent nights were the worst thing out of it all, worse than the empty stretches ahead of her.

There was no need to near the cities for the time being, but she could tell whenever she neared one of them. A rotting smell would reek along the highway; it would reek that tremendously her ocean blue eyes would burn, the pair of lungs would sting and she had to breathe through he nose to keep herself from vomitting on the asphalt. It could be sensed from miles. People died in clumpses too, in fact.

The Cincinnati smell began about two miles before spotting the official exit signs, smoke arising  toward the cloudless skies. After the third wave had made its passage, the most common thing to have come stumbling across were not only the bodies, but also the old fires. The old fires and fires for single lightning strikes that would take out around then blocks who their fired would keep raging on as no one would come to put them to rest. She pulled her shirt up around the nose and mouth few feet further, the stench of death becoming too much. Aurora's ocean blue eyes had begun watering not long after as she pulled the rifle from her shoulder and cradled it with her uninjured hand, quickstepping.

Around a rough thirty minute track, she found the bodies, somewhere between the exits twenty-nine and twenty-six. There's two of them, messily spaced out on their stomachs with their arms outstretched in horrific ways on the median strip. Both corpses had been laying face down to the asphalt, one male as the other had been female. The male had been wearing mud covered trousers and a light brownish winter coat, a red spotch soaking it higher up his spine. The female had been dressed in a simple pair of sweatpants and a think navy green sweatshirt, her strawberry blonde hair laying around her as a crown, she couldn't find a visable bullet trace.

Aurora had kneeled beside the feminine figure, kneeling in the brown grass as she pressed her icy finger against her pale neck. Her fingers came in contact with a warm and sticky skin, as soon as she retracted her hand it had been covered in red and shining crimson. Crawling from the bodies she turned around, glancing over her shoulder to check the highway she had left behind, then infront of her, many more miles of endless and empty highway asphalt. Ocean blue eyes shot towards the left where trees stood in silence watching the scene, on the southerbound lane to her right clumps of cars, the nearest group about two hundred meters seperated from the teenager. It wasn't until then she had glanced up, a fleck of dull gray had been painted against the backdrop of a dazzeling blue sky, motionless hovering up above her.

Fear shot through her entire being; every bone, vein, muscle and tissue had felt it. She scrambled onto her feet, however the full chance was something she had never gotten. Something rammed into her side, a hot punch right above her hip, knocking her back into the groud as she not only screamed in pain for the bullet wound tearing her skin, she screamed at every broken bone and bruise from the weeks she had gone through before. Aurora lay sprawled on the asphalt, an iron taste filling her mouth, hearing the hot breaths beneath the blood rushing their way through her vains near her ears, the thump of her heart trying to beat its way through her chest. 

When facing death, something else takes over. No longer the brain controlled your actions, and as your hearthbeat and breathing quickend, your reflexes fasten and the blinking of your eyes becomes so rapidly it becomes a difficulty. It was the part of nature built within mankind to keep themselves up and alive, a part that seemed to make every second seem like an hour.

{Published January 31. 2016}

{Edited June 6, 2017}