The End of the World As We Know It Read online

  And no one wants that, right?

  8

  PLEASE, BE A DEER

  Sarabeth Lewis, 11:47 P.M. Saturday, Diamond Peak Lane

  Sarabeth could start a new “never” topic in her journal: Things I Never Thought I’d Do But Did.

  Like smoke pot. Yesterday, the idea she might one day hold a joint to her lips had never occurred to her. Yet here she was, stepping out onto Teena’s demolished front lawn, her brain feeling like it was covered with a not-unpleasant layer of peach fuzz.

  Or hold a gun. Normally, just catching a glimpse of gun hilts in the Tinley Hills police officers’ holsters was enough to make her shudder. But somehow, she held a tiny Smith & Wesson .38 Special in her hand. A “lady gun,” as Leo termed it. She was suddenly a party-going, drug-doing, gun-toting teenager.

  She wished she could go back to being bored.

  Sarabeth, Leo, Evan, and Teena were standing on the remarkably still-intact front stoop of Teena’s house. The house may as well have been made of Play-Doh, the way it had smushed to one side, the contents spilling together like guts. Or, in the case of the dead people inside, actual guts. Sarabeth closed her eyes tight, shaking away images of her mauled classmates. She almost wanted to thank Leo for providing a means to take the edge off. Almost.

  Her eyes began to adjust to the total dark. The power was out as far as Sarabeth could see, but even without light, she could tell that the silhouettes of the massive houses on Diamond Peak Lane had changed. Roofs had been ripped off or whole top floors taken away, leaving black, shadowy structures standing against the sky like a row of jagged, uneven teeth. Some of the streetlamps had been snapped in half, while others stood dead and lightless, like extinguished birthday candles. Whole chunks of the street had been ripped or suctioned up from the surface, like pieces of an apocalyptic Whack-A-Mole game. Cars lay on their sides as if they were useless, broken toys. With all the houses on the street blacked out, there was no suburban light pollution, and every star in the sky strutted its stuff above, almost mockingly. The only source of movement in the cold air was their own visible breaths.

  “My whole street is gone,” Teena said, a quiver in her voice. She walked ahead of them, the first to step off her porch. When she’d discovered that most of her closet had fallen from the top floor into the first-floor living room, Teena had put on a tight-fitting USC hoodie and a pair of her Paige skinny jeans, but insisted on keeping her stiletto boots on. So she struck an incongruous pose amid the wreckage as she expertly tottered across the uneven ground that was formerly her front yard. Deck chairs, grills, and kids’ Big Wheels littered the area. Teena stood at the curb with her hands on her hips, looking out over the destroyed block.

  “What’s that thing?” Teena pointed to a huge dark gray metal orb with strips of lighter silver metal coiled around it. Bursts of steam rose from the hundreds of tiny holes that dotted the sphere, like a giant space-age golf ball. Teena approached it, stepping back quickly when she got close. “It’s giving off crazy heat.”

  Sarabeth went to stand next to her, careful not to trip over the debris. The hunk of metal didn’t look like a recognizable part of anything. She glanced sideways at Leo, who was crouching near the orb. He probably thought it was some alien artifact. He was so convinced that aliens had attacked that Sarabeth almost wanted to believe him. Almost. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t believe in life from other planets, it was that she never believed that life would want to do humankind harm. She’d watched E.T. one too many times.

  “Maybe it’s a piece of a satellite,” Sarabeth said. “One could have crashed to Earth.”

  Leo looked up at her. “I don’t think a satellite could wipe out the whole block like this.”

  “Or part of the space station,” Evan volunteered, seeming less panicked than when he proposed God as the perpetrator. “That’s still around, right?”

  “I think so,” Teena said, starting to back away from the thing as if a thought had crossed her mind. “Or it could be some kind of bomb.” She looked at them all with a serious expression, her hand on her gun like she half expected the culprits to emerge from behind the piles of debris. She toted a semi-automatic pistol and wore an Uzi submachine gun across her back.

  They all paused, considering her theory. A bomb seemed plausible, Sarabeth thought as she eyed the ragged, dormant houses left behind. Or maybe it really was a huge piece of space junk. From aliens, like Leo thought.

  “There’s my car,” Evan said, breaking the silence. He pointed a flashlight at half of a champagne-colored Ford Taurus that stuck up out of a chasm in the street. The license plate holder read, JOIN THE CRUISE-ADES! SOUL PURPOSE CHURCH CAR SHOW ’04. He had a small .45 shoved in the waistband of his jeans, but seemed more comfortable with the baseball bat he’d found on the lawn.

  They’d decided to go to the authorities, to report the deaths at Teena’s house. Oddly enough, going to the police had come up while they’d passed around Leo’s pipe. Now it looked like they had more to report. While the idea of talking to the police high on drugs made Sarabeth shakily paranoid, reporting the tragedy made sense.

  Leo hopped off the stoop and trod over the grayish-brown winter-crusted lawn. He peered around the side of the house, or where the side of the house had been.

  “My car’s too small for all of us,” Leo declared, looking at the mess. “And, actually, too small to find.”

  Teena crossed her arms over her chest. “Don’t look at me,” she said. “No way am I driving. I’ve been through enough.”

  Sarabeth couldn’t believe Teena would be a bitch even at a moment like this. “I can drive.” Sarabeth pointed into the distance.

  Two blocks away, exactly where Sarabeth had parked it, sat her mother’s Pepto-pink Gussy Me Up van, obnoxiously proud and pristine under a strip of moonlight that shone down through the trees. She wondered if it was a sign. The van had survived, and she had a feeling Cameron had, too. For the first time in her life, she had one of those twin-connection moments, and she just knew Cameron was okay. She still didn’t know what or who had done this, or how far the damage extended. But if her instincts were right and Cameron was alive, maybe there were other survivors, too.

  “That’s a badass vehicle, SB,” Leo said, knocking her lightly on the shoulder as he passed. Her nose wrinkled automatically at the “SB” nickname she hated, but her arm tingled from his touch. The effects of drugs and nerves, Sarabeth told herself. Leo Starnick making her tingle was most definitely on the “never” list.

  Leo started toward the van, motioning for everyone to follow. He carried an Uzi from Teena’s dad’s arsenal and had tucked a Glock pistol down the back of his jeans. It made his polo shirt ride up, exposing a smooth patch of olive skin.

  The group followed him in silence. Sarabeth imagined her mom’s social advice in this scenario: “Possibly being the last people on Earth is not an appropriate conversation topic in mixed company.”

  Sarabeth winced and tried not to think about her mom. She’d been so mad at having to take the embarrassing pink van to her first high school party, while Cameron had gotten the Ford Escape. Sarabeth’s last interaction with her mom had been a dirty look. And now they both might be …

  She pushed the thought away as they approached the van. Sarabeth pressed the UNLOCK button, and the doors responded as they always did, the little bullet-shaped locks popping up out of their slots. It was so bizarrely normal on a night that had been anything but. She pulled open the driver’s-side door.

  “I’ll drive,” Leo volunteered, stepping up next to her and reaching for the keys.

  Sarabeth yanked her hand away, surprising herself. “My van, I drive,” she said, even though she really didn’t want to. Her hands and fingers felt disconnected from her elbows, and those barely seemed to coordinate with her arms. She might as well have been a brain and a stomach bobbing along. But Leo’s cockiness brought her right back to the string ensemble room, where he exasperated her daily. So she brushed past him and
climbed into the driver’s seat.

  Teena automatically took the front passenger seat, while Evan and Leo slid across the bench seat in back. Leo moved fluidly, like he’d barely been affected by the pot. Evan, a fellow first-timer, tripped trying to climb into the backseat. Sarabeth opened the center console and offered the group Clif Bars, feeling self-conscious for being hungry at a time like this. But everyone greedily grabbed one.

  The van was quiet, save for the sound of wrappers crinkling. Biting into the chalky energy bar, Sarabeth shoved the keys into the ignition, and the van hummed to life. She pulled away from the curb slowly so the van wouldn’t slip into the gap that split the road in two.

  She gripped the wheel tightly and her eyes trained on the path of light cut by her brights. She maneuvered the van through the obstacle course formed by the detritus of Teena’s subdivision. A flat-screen TV was impaled on a front yard flagpole. A red washing machine half-embedded in the pavement looked like a jagged, bloody tooth. A three-foot-high plastic Santa—a Christmas leftover someone had been too lazy to take off their lawn—looked at Sarabeth with dead eyes. She shuddered. One less thing on that family’s to-do list.

  Sarabeth turned right onto Emerald Cove Drive, where the street was barely disrupted. The lights were out, and all the homes seemed asleep, like it was much later at night and no one had heard a thing. But aside from that eerieness, the street looked almost normal. It was hard to believe that she’d come this way just hours ago, when her worst fear was saying something stupid or being one of the only people at the party not drinking. Sarabeth gave the van a little gas, now eager to get to the police.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a flicker. She focused in on it but could see only shadows in the intruding dark.

  “Sarabeth, do you brake for animals?” Teena said next to her.

  The question came out of nowhere, just like the deer that had stepped out in front of the car. Deer had always looked alien to Sarabeth, with their triangular, expressionless faces and deep, hollow eyes. Now, as the animal walked out into the middle of the road on its skinny, wobbly legs, Sarabeth felt like it was her kindred spirit.

  Sarabeth pressed down on what she thought was the brake. The van picked up speed instantly.

  She’d hit the gas.

  “What are you doing?” Teena screamed, clutching her armrests in terror.

  “I don’t know!” Sarabeth screamed back, her foot fumbling to find the brake. By accident, she floored the gas again. A wail escaped from her just as Leo reached up from the backseat and put his hands on the wheel, wrenching the van to the right. It sped up onto the curb at sixty miles per hour.

  The deer sprinted away into the darkness. It was safe. She didn’t have to see anything else die tonight.

  Relief flooding her, Sarabeth felt her foot finally close in on the brake, pushing as hard as she could. Sarabeth and Teena slammed against their seats. Leo’s grip didn’t hold, and he was wrenched into the backseat again, sliding sideways and pushing Evan into the window.

  But then a sickeningly loud thud sounded throughout the van, shaking it from side to side as it abruptly stopped. There must have been another deer, Sarabeth thought.

  Tears sprang to her eyes. Automatically, she jumped out of the car to see if there was any hope for the animal. Or what if she’d hit a person? A sob choked its way from the back of her throat.

  “Sarabeth, don’t,” Leo said, sliding open his door and following her to the front of the van. “You don’t know what’s out there.”

  She skidded to a stop inches from a thing she couldn’t bring herself to call by name. Her toes curled in her shoes to avoid contact with the thing collapsed against the van’s grill. The thing had grayish-purple wrinkly flesh under a violet membrane of slime, some of which stretched from the bumper like gum that had been stepped in. Giant, cookie-sized eyes, black and pupil-less, and netted like a fly’s. Flared, cavernous nostrils, but no mouth. Legs and arms that had to be four feet long, and wrinkly hands that bore six knotty fingers tipped with pointed, daggerlike claws. And on the hands, if you could call them that, humanoid opposable thumbs—gray, long, and clawless.

  Leo had been right. And there was no way this thing was pals with E.T. The only comforting thing about the creature was that it was dead.

  Leo exhaled heavily, reminding Sarabeth he was standing there, too. She looked up to find him studying her. “Okay, is it just me, or does this thing smell like really good coffee?” Leo said. His lips went up in a half smirk, but Sarabeth noted the anxiety in his eyes.

  She allowed herself to inhale. It did kind of smell like her mom’s favorite Kona blend.

  The others had emerged from the van, gathering behind them. Teena got as close as she could without touching any of the goo trail coming off the thing’s scary, muscular form. She stared at the being, her brown eyes wide, stopping just short of poking the alien with a stick.

  “That’s not a little green man,” Evan said flatly. He took a deep breath. “And it probably hasn’t been working alone.”

  “Yeah, which makes me wonder why we’re all standing here and not driving away as fast as we can,” Teena said.

  “Sarabeth killed it,” Leo said. “We’re safe.”

  “Killed and safe might be stretching it,” Teena said, pointing to the creature on the ground. The alien’s arms and legs made squishy sounds as they lifted off the pavement.

  Teena backed away slowly, crawling into the van. Evan crept toward the doors, too. But Sarabeth couldn’t move. Chocolate chip Clif Bar dust whirled in her throat.

  No sudden movements, Sarabeth thought. She stepped backward, her hands shaking.

  Suddenly, the alien extended one arm, swiping the air with its claws.

  “Kill it!” Teena screeched from inside the van. But Sarabeth was still frozen. Leo fumbled with his Uzi, consternation and fear on his face.

  Leo pulled on the trigger, but nothing happened. The tall alien was rising to its feet just steps away from them. Its hammer-shaped head stood atop a long neck where—instead of the grayish-purple wrinkled skin—the alien had smooth silvery panels, almost like a fish’s scales. It was like they’d woken an uglier, less cuddly grizzly bear.

  “There must be a safety or something. I don’t know how to shoot a fucking Uzi!” he yelped nervously. “Where’s your gun?”

  With shaky hands, Sarabeth pulled the .38 from the waistband of her jeans and pointed it at the beast. Then she froze, completely unable to pull the trigger. She looked at Leo, panicked.

  The alien reached out for her, its claws coming centimeters from her stomach. Sarabeth screamed.

  Leo came up behind her and pressed his chest to her back. He took her hand under his, his index finger over hers on the trigger, like he was teaching her how to play pool. He cocked the hammer of the gun and then pulled the trigger, shooting the alien in the chest. Together, they shot a second time, the bullet hitting right next to the first wound.

  The moment replayed itself for Sarabeth even as it was happening. Making full-body contact with Leo Starnick. Firing a gun. At an alien she’d hit with her mother’s pink van. All worthy entries for the Never Thought I’d list.

  They might have been her last entries. The bullets didn’t seem to be penetrating very far, and the alien just seemed angry.

  They cocked the hammer back a third time, but Teena jumped from the van and pushed them out of the way.

  “You’re too slow,” she said, and efficiently unloaded five straight shots into the alien’s head and another right into its chest, where the bullet made a satisfying splat. Its body drooped and fell to the ground, hard. Sarabeth and Leo stared at Teena, shocked.

  She glared at them. “What?” she said. “So I know how to fire a gun. And I don’t need a boy to help me.” Evan, who’d emerged from the van during the skirmish and was holding his baseball bat aloft, like he was guarding Teena, backed away.

  Sarabeth realized that Leo’s hand was still wrapped around hers, and that she
was leaning into his back. They sprang apart.

  She looked at Teena admiringly, suddenly grateful to her, bitch or not. “Thank you.”

  “Yeah, what Sarabeth said.” Leo picked up his Uzi, which had fallen to the ground.

  “It’s like you’re the only guy in the world who’s never played a video game.” Teena loaded another clip into her gun with a definitive click.

  “Should we take the alien’s body with us?” Evan said. “To show the police?”

  “Dude,” Leo said, “I don’t want to ride with that thing.”

  “Maybe we can drag it,” Evan suggested.

  “Evan’s probably right,” Sarabeth said. “The police will never believe us without proof.”

  “Fine, you guys tie it to the hood. There’s not enough Purell in the world,” Teena said.

  Evan took a few tentative steps onto the property of a two-story Tudor-style home and peered down the long driveway. A boat wearing its winter tarp stood outside the garage. “There might be an easier way to do this.”

  “We’re going to steal a boat?” Leo said. “Seriously, Evan?”

  “Well, it seems easier than getting him on top of the van,” Evan said nervously.

  “Man, that’s awesome. I’m in!” Leo happily ran down the driveway, with Evan following. Teena rolled her eyes.

  “Boys,” she muttered to herself, tucking her gun back into her jeans. To Sarabeth, she said, “Back up the van to the boat so we can pull up to the alien. Like I said, not touching this.”

  Relieved to have something to do besides tremor in fear, Sarabeth got in the driver’s seat and reversed the van as Teena stood off to the side, directing her.

  “You’re up on the curb again,” she scolded. Sarabeth turned the wheel. “Now you’re going to kill the mailbox. Did they just let you pass driver’s ed because you’re good at math?”