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word count: 3.8k
genre: the fifth wave au
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Dad always said they existed. You know, a greater life force. Something else besides the human race. At first, I thought he was crazy. We all did — me, my mom, and my little brother Jeongin.
But then the Others came and I believed everything he had said about aliens. But these weren't like the little green things from a cartoon. They were smart. Smarter than us. And at the time, we didn't know what they wanted.
The first thing they took from us was our electricity. Nothing worked. Cars, lights, phones — nothing. It was almost like they didn't want us to have a way to contact anyone. That was the first wave.
It took out millions of people. I mean, just imagine it. Everything that worked with electricity stopped working all at once. Airplanes and cars, they all just stopped. I couldn't even imagine what it would've felt like to be on one of those planes as they suddenly started to descend until they eventually crashed.
With the second wave, twice as many people died. I called it a worldwide tsunami. Every island and every coastal city was wiped out. Those who got to high enough ground survived. My family was one of those lucky ones.
But the luck didn't last long. The third wave hit us and took out the weak ones. Dad said that the first two waves took out at least three percent of the world's population, leaving about 3.8 billion people. And the third wave was designed to take out the weak of those people.
And just how exactly did the Others take out nearly four billion people? Birds. There's roughly three hundred billion birds in the world, which is seventy-five birds per person.
The birds carried a disease, a virus. It was like Ebola on steroids. In quarantine, there were many names for it. The Red Death. The Blood Plague. The Fourth Horseman. The Red Tsunami. The Pestilence. Whatever you wanted to call it, it didn't really matter. A virus was a virus.
But this one was like nothing anyone had ever seen. My mom, who had been a doctor for twenty years, had never seen anything like it. It started in your lungs and you get a bad cough. That cough turns into a fever and your head feels like someone is repeatedly beating it with a hammer. When you start coughing up blood, the virus takes over your entire body until blood is coming out of every opening.
Me and my brother were immune to it. We were lucky. But our parents weren't so lucky. Our dad was one of the first to get sick and mom tried everything she could to help him. But nothing worked. It only seemed to make him worse. He died four days after he got sick and then my mom ended up getting sick too. She was immune at first just like me and Jeongin, but she still ended up getting sick.
