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It’s hard to plan for what co you planned for

Try to spot them first, I decided Take cover No shons No ht and windless but cold The sky cloudless Walking along, bobbingit froainst one shoulder blade, the rifle against the other, walking on the outside edge of the median that separates the southbound fro every few strides to whip around and scan the terrain behind me An hour Two And I’ve traveled no , creepier than the abandoned cars and the snarl of cru in the October sunlight, creepier than all the trash and discarded crap littering the rass so the strip of land looks lu is the silence

The Huone

You rerew up on top of a mountain or lived in a cave your whole life, the Hum was always around you That’s what life was It was the sea as we built toThe electronic sys and all of us Gone

This is the sound of the Earth before we conquered it

Soht, I think I can hear the stars scraping against the sky That’s how quiet it is After a while it’s almost s I want to sing, shout, sta to declare my presence My conversation with the soldier had been the first words I’d said aloud in weeks

The Hu in third period texting Lizbeth the last text I will ever send I don’t remember exactly what it said

Eleven AM A war and wishing you were anywhere but Ms Paulson’s calculus class

The 1st Wave rolled in without much fanfare It wasn’t drahts just winked out

Ms Paulson’s overhead died

The screen on my phone went black

Somebody in the back of the room squealed Classic It doesn’t oes out, and so

Ms Paulson told us to stay in our seats That’s the other thing people do when the power goes out They jump up to…To what? It’s weird We’re so used to electricity, when it’s gone, we don’t knohat to do So we ju like idiots We panic It’s like soh Ten days on pins and needles waiting for soon us, we freaked a littleat once When I announced that my phone had died, out ca in the back of the roo to his iPod while Ms Paulson lectured, pulled the buds from his ears and wondered aloud why theyou do when the plug’s pulled, after panicking, is run to the nearestYou don’t knohy exactly It’s that better-see-what’s-going-on feeling The world works froo off, you look outside

And Ms Paulson, rando in front of the s: "Quiet! Back to your seats I’m sure there’ll be an announcement…"

There was one, about a h, and not from Mr Faulks, the vice principal It ca end over end to the Earth from ten thousand feet until it disappeared behind a line of trees and exploded, sending up a fireball that reminded me of the s! Let’s get this party started!

You’d think seeing so under our desks It didn’t We crowded against theand scanned the cloudless sky for the flying saucer thatsaucer, right? We kne a top-notch alien invasion was run Flying saucers zipping through the atmosphere, squadrons of F-16s hot on their heels, surface-to-airfrom the bunkers In an unreal and ad like that It would make this a perfectly normal alien invasion

For a half hour aited by the s Nobody said nored her Thirty minutes into the 1st Wave and already social order was breaking down People kept checking their phones We couldn’t connect it: the plane crashing, the lights going out, our phones dying, the clock on the ith the big hand frozen on the twelve, little hand on the eleven

Then the door flew open and Mr Faulks told us to head over to the gyht that was really smart Get all of us in one place so the aliens didn’t have to waste a lot of aym and sat in the bleachers in near total darkness while the principal paced back and forth, stopping every now and then to yell at us to be quiet and wait for our parents to get there

What about the students whose cars were at school? Couldn’t they leave?

"Your cars won’t work"

WTF? What does he mean, our cars won’t work?

An hour passed Then two I sat next to Lizbeth We didn’t talk much, and e did, hispered We weren’t afraid of the principal; ere listening I’ for, but it was like that quiet before the clouds open up and the thunder smashes down

"This could be it," Lizbeth whispered She rubbed her nose nervously Dug her lacquered nails into her dyed blond hair Tapped her foot Rolled the pad of her finger over her eyelid: She had just started wearing contacts and they bugged her constantly

"It’s definitely so," I whispered back

"I mean, this could be it Like it it The end"

She kept slipping the battery out of her phone and putting it back in It was better than doing nothing, I guess

She started to cry I took her phone away and held her hand Looked around She wasn’t the only one crying Other kids were praying And others were doing both, crying and praying The teachers were huddled up by the gy a human shield in case the creatures from outer space decided to storm the floor