the 5th wave by rick yancey

Author:rick yancey
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: dystopia, apocalypse
ISBN: 9780399162411
Publisher: Putnam Juvenile
Published: 2013-05-07T08:00:00+00:00

46

EVERY NIGHT NOW Nugget crawls into my bunk after lights-out to say his prayer, and I let him stay until he falls asleep. Then I carry him back to his bunk. Tank threatens to turn me in, usually after I give him an order he doesn’t like. But he doesn’t. I think he secretly looks forward to prayer time.

It amazes me how quickly Nugget has adjusted to camp life. Kids are like that, though. They can get used to practically anything. He can’t lift a rifle to his shoulder, but he does everything else, and sometimes better than the older kids. He’s faster than Oompa on the obstacle course and a quicker study than Flintstone. The one squad member who can’t stand him is Teacup. I guess it’s jealousy: Before Nugget came, Teacup was the baby of the family.

Nugget did have a mini freakout during his first air raid drill. Like the rest of us, he had no idea it was coming, but unlike the rest of us, he had no idea what the hell was going on.

It happens once a month and always in the middle of the night. The sirens scream so loud, you can feel the floor shaking under your bare feet as you stumble around in the dark, yanking on jumpsuit and boots, grabbing your M16, racing outside as all the barracks empty out, hundreds of recruits pouring across the yard toward the access tunnels that lead underground.

I was a couple of minutes behind the squad because Nugget was hollering his head off and clinging to me like a monkey to his momma, thinking any minute the alien warships would start dropping their payloads.

I shouted at him to calm down and follow my lead. It was a waste of breath. Finally I just picked him up and slung him over my shoulder, rifle clutched in one hand, Nugget’s butt in the other. As I sprinted outside, I thought of another night and another screaming kid. The memory made me run harder.

Into the stairwell, down the four flights of stairs awash in yellow emergency light, Nugget’s head popping against my back, then through the steel-reinforced door at the bottom, down a short passageway, through the second reinforced door, and into the complex. The heavy door clanged shut behind us, sealing us inside. By now he had decided he might not be vaporized after all, and I could set him down.

The shelter is a confusing maze of dimly lit intersecting corridors, but we’ve been drilled so much, I could find my way to our station with my eyes closed. I yelled over the siren for Nugget to follow me and I took off. A squad heading in the opposite direction thundered past us.

Right, left, right, right, left, into the final passageway, my free hand gripping the back of Nugget’s neck to keep him from falling back. I could see my squad kneeling twenty yards from the back wall of the dead-end tunnel, their rifles trained at the metal grate that covers the airshaft leading to the surface.

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