And cut back to Cassie, who is now completely on her own. Before you can bounce a laser beam off the moon, all the adults in that mess hall have been gunned down and the bus is racing away with all the kids.Ĭue ominous music. It’s the best and worst thing she’s ever done. (Alien invasion or no, Sammy isn’t going anywhere without his teddy.) So Cassie, dutiful big sister that she is, runs back into the camp to get it. But a panicked Sam realizes he’s left his bear behind. Vosch and his soldierly workmates quickly corral all the adults in the mess hall for a quick briefing while putting the kids on a bus bound for a nearby base-the safest place around, he says. Because really, what alien in his right tentacled mind would dare take on the United States Army? Vosch introduces himself at the head of a line of military Humvees, it seems as though their problems are over-or, if not over, at least alleviated a little. In fact, they’ve found a place of relative safety-a refugee village deep in the Ohio woods where there’s food, clean water and lots of company.Īnd when Col. Those three “waves,” as they came to be called, put the kibosh on most of humanity.īut not everyone terminally vacated the premises.Ĭassie’s mom died in the bird flu epidemic, but Cassie, her dad and her teddy-bear-toting brother, Sammy, are still ticking along. Then a particularly nasty strain of bird flu. All the cool things we’ve gotten used to in modern society-motorized transportation, electricity, running water, Facebook updates-were gone.
And then they started trashing the place.įirst came the electromagnetic pulse. And while that’s all well and good-who couldn’t use a spot of extra shade now and then?-it became pretty obvious that, like all bad guests, they showed no intention of leaving. At first, they were like awkward 6th graders at a middle school dance-simply circling around the place in their gigantic spiky spaceship. Take the extraterrestrial visitors that drop in on Earth in The 5th Wave.