The Eighth Day

by Salerni, Dianne K.

Naomi, Ted, and the kids.

  In spite of the promise she’d made on the day Riley took him away, Naomi hadn’t fought for Jax very hard. The court hearing had been canceled with no explanation, and he heard from Naomi less and less frequently. Jax opened a chat box:

  Jaxattax: hi naomi can we chat?

  He heated some canned chili for dinner while waiting for a reply. Eventually a new message appeared.

  Naomi: hi jax. been meaning to call you.

  Jax threw himself into the chair and typed:

  Jaxattax: do you have news for me?

  Naomi: sorry it’s been hard since ted lost his job.

  lawyers are expensive.

  Jax ran his fingers over the keyboard, trying to think of a tactful way to remind her she’d get money from his father’s estate if she won his custody from Riley.

  Naomi: the case worker who met you last month

  reports you’re settling in and happy so i thought

  things were better.

  Jaxattax: she said what?!?!

  What Jax had told the case worker was that Riley had forgotten to pay the electric bill and almost missed the gas bill; that he only bought as many groceries as he could carry home on his motorcycle; that he could barely take care of himself and was in no way capable of taking care of Jax. Jax had thought, from the case worker’s thin-lipped expression, that she was ready to put Jax in her car and drive him back to Delaware herself. How had that turned into “settling in and happy”?

  Jaxattax: i told her what i told u. its awful here!

  Naomi: she doesnt think its a good idea to move u again so soon

  Jaxattax: no it IS. asap

  Naomi: honey you know i want whats best for you but i kind of agree with her

  Jax swallowed hard, his fingers hovering uselessly over the keyboard.

  Naomi: gotta make dinner for the kids. happy birthday jax.

  Before he could respond, Naomi left the chat.

  Jax slept poorly and woke up before his alarm the next morning. Flailing out an arm, he flipped the switch before the buzzer could go off and rolled out of bed without looking at the clock. He pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, glanced in a mirror long enough to run fingers through his tangled brown hair . . . and that was good enough.

  Once again, there was nothing in the house for breakfast. The refrigerator didn’t hum when Jax opened the door, and the lightbulb didn’t light. Had it finally died, or—? He reached out and flipped a switch on the wall. No lights, no electricity. Again. Heaving a sigh, Jax took cash out of the kitty and picked up his backpack. He’d have to buy a breakfast burrito from the corner convenience store before the bus came.

  The morning sky was strangely pink and purple when he left the house, like it might storm. Jax ran down the sidewalk, looked both ways before crossing the intersection . . . and then stopped and looked again.

  There were no cars on the road in either direction. Although this was the usual time for people to be driving to work, the street was empty, and there was only one car at the corner store, parked in the back by the Dumpster.

  Was the place closed? It never closed. He pushed open the door, and the lights were on, if a bit dim, but nobody was in sight. “Hello?” Jax hollered. He helped himself to a breakfast burrito and popped it into the microwave, but couldn’t get the oven to turn on. It figures. My life is a cold burrito.

  He took his unheated burrito to the counter and fished two dollars out of his back pocket. “Anyone here?” he yelled. Maybe the clerk was on the toilet. As for everybody else . . .

  Jax looked out the windows. There were still no cars passing by. No kids were gathered at the corner bus stop. At the Blum house, nobody was watering the precious sod. His eyes wandered up toward the bizarrely pink and purple sky.

  Oh, crap.

  It could be tornadoes. Had he missed a siren? Was everyone hunkered down in their basements waiting out the danger while Jax Aubrey bought a breakfast burrito in a store with walls of glass?

  He flung the money and the burrito down and pelted for home. Maybe he should have run for the nearest house and begged to be let inside, but he felt a weird responsibility for the one person dumber than himself. “Riley!” he hollered, bursting in the front door. “Riley, are you up there?” He took the stairs two at a time and threw open the door to his guardian’s room, only to find the bed empty. Dude, I ran back here for you, and if you went to the cellar without me . . .

  Jax pounded downstairs, grabbed his phone from his backpack, and ran outside to the wooden cellar door against the side of the house. It was heavy, and he had to hold it over his head with one hand while he clambered down the stairs. When he let go, it felt like the door missed his head by inches. “Riley, are you down here?” Jax called, trying to light up his phone screen. It wouldn’t turn on. Resigning himself to darkness, he sat on the dirt floor, faced a wall, and covered his head, just like he’d been taught in school.

  He waited more than an hour, he thought. But he heard no wind. No sirens. When he couldn’t stand it anymore, he climbed the cellar steps and pushed up on the door. Outside, the sky still looked weird, but it was more pink than purple. Jax heaved up the door, latched it open, and climbed into the yard. This time he really looked around.

  The neighbors’ cars were parked on the street and in their driveways, just as they normally were in the evenings. Jax checked the shed at the back of their yard, where Riley kept his motorcycle, and found the Honda 350 missing. Of all the people in the neighborhood, it looked like only Riley had gone to work this morning.

  Jax crossed the yard and banged on Mrs. Unger’s door. “Mrs. Unger, are you there?” He made his way around her house, peering in every window and through the kitchen door. When he backed away and looked up, he thought he saw a curtain rustle on the second floor, as if someone had just let go of it. “Mrs. Unger!” he hollered. He stared at the window, but there was no further movement and no answer, so he gave up and ran across the street to another house.

  He pounded on every door up and down the block, shouting for help and growing more frantic by the minute. He looked in his neighbors’ windows shamelessly, and at every house, it was the same. There were no signs of struggle, hurried packing, or anything out of the ordinary.

  But he didn’t see a single soul.

  Billy Ramirez lived a block down the street, and no one answered his desperate knocking there, either. Jax knew they kept a spare key shoved up the nose of a ceramic tiki head on the back porch, and he used it to let himself in. The house was eerily silent. Calling out again and receiving no answer, Jax tried to turn on the TV, but like his phone, it wouldn’t come on. The clocks on the microwave and the DVD player displayed 12:00, as if there’d been a power failure and they’d reset—except they didn’t blink.

  He almost didn’t go up to the second floor, afraid of what he might find there, but after two false starts and a long time standing by the front door with his hand on the knob, ready to chicken out, Jax heaved a deep breath and ran upstairs. He flinched every time he threw open a bedroom door, but there was nothing to see—no bloody horror scene out of a movie. The beds looked slept in, but Billy and his parents were missing.

  After leaving the Ramirez house, Jax retrieved his bike and rode into the center of town. The streets were empty. The traffic lights were on, but frozen green, red, or yellow.

  He thought about zombies.

  He thought about alien abduction.

  He thought about Spongebob Squarepants and the episode where everybody took a bus out of town to get away from Spongebob for a day.

  He thought about the old movie where Will Smith and his dog were the last creatures left on earth.

  “Oh, crap!” Jax yelled, braking.

  Will Smith and his dog had not been alone in that movie. There’d been other creatures that lurked in dark places and came out at night to kill.

  It took three tries for Jax to break through the glass doors of the Walmart with a concrete parking block. Inside, only
dim emergency lights were on. They provided illumination to see by but left enough of the store in shadow to make Jax skittish.

  He filled a shopping cart with supplies he’d seen people grab before snowstorms, hurricanes, and during zombie movies. With one hand on his bike and another on the shopping cart, he walked home, keeping an eye out for people and monsters. At home, he carried his stolen items upstairs, thinking that the second floor would be easier to defend. He bypassed the shed as too easy a target and hid his bike and the Walmart cart under a bush behind the house. In apocalyptic movies, there were always stray survivors who’d steal what you had.

  Hours passed while he watched out the windows. He would have been happy to see even A.J. Crandall, but he saw no people, no animals, no zombies—nothing.

  The day weighed heavily on him, time passing at a crawl. He wished they had a clock that ticked—or anything that made a sound. Oddly, he felt drawn to Riley’s room—as if he missed him, which was impossible. He poked through his guardian’s stuff, kicking dirty clothes across the floor, opening drawers, and peering at the photo of an unknown girl tucked into a mirror. But there were no answers here any more than there’d been at the Ramirez house.

  He had to force himself to eat a cold can of stew and drink a bottle of water. It was rare for Jax to have no appetite, although it had happened the day his dad never came home . . . and the day they’d found the car in the river . . . and the day Riley Pendare had brought him here.

  When it grew too dark to see anything outside but the creepy glow of the streetlights, he pulled the curtains shut and curled up miserably on his bed to wait for dawn. In the morning, he’d risk going out to look for other survivors.

  His final thought, as he drifted into a troubled sleep, was that he didn’t want to be the last human on earth.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  3

  “JAX, GET UP! You’re gonna miss the bus.”

  The pounding on Jax’s bedroom door caused his heart to thump in panic for a reason he couldn’t remember. A bad dream?

  “Jax! I gotta get to work. I can’t drive you in.”

  “Okay, okay!” He rubbed his eyes and sat up. Across the room, his open closet door gave him a view of the water bottles and canned food stacked waist high inside.

  Not a dream.

  Outside, a motorcycle engine revved up.

  “Riley!” Jax shouted. He leaped out of bed and stumbled down the stairs and out the door in time to see his guardian pull away from the house.

  Jax stood on the stoop and stared at the neighborhood with his mouth hanging open.

  Across the street, a woman stuffed a toddler into a car seat. An old man walked past the house with two dogs. Mr. Blum watered his sod, which had gone dangerously brown, while overhead a jet cut a white swath across the sky.

  Holy crap, it was the Spongebob episode after all. They all left town for a Jax-free day and now they’re back.

  He grabbed hold of the doorknob to steady himself.

  I broke into a Walmart!

  Jax scrambled upstairs. He pulled on clean clothes and closed the closet door. When he ran down to the kitchen, he found bread on the counter, along with new containers of peanut butter and jelly.

  It figures Riley goes shopping when I’ve got a room full of stolen canned goods.

  He made the bus by a hair. All the usual riders were on board and nobody was talking about mass disappearances. Billy was engrossed in reading The Fellowship of the Ring, and Jax sat down beside him.

  Did it really happen?

  Jax looked out the window as the bus passed through town. Walmart employees were nailing boards over the broken glass on their front door.

  He sank lower in his seat. It happened.

  In first-period science class, his hand shook as he wrote his name and the date on a lab paper.

  “Is the party on?” Billy slid into the chair beside him.

  “Riley said no,” Jax lied. He’d never asked.

  “Dang it. Well, at least come to my house for dinner tomorrow after school.”

  “Sure,” Jax mumbled. Then he lifted his head. “Tomorrow’s Saturday.”

  “Tomorrow’s Friday.” Billy tapped the date on Jax’s paper. “Today’s Thursday, dude.”

  Jax stared at Billy. Yesterday had been Thursday. He looked across the aisle. “Hey, Giana. Is today Thursday or Friday?”

  Giana tossed a lock of wavy brown hair over her shoulder. “Thursday. All day.” She glanced at her friend Kacey, who rolled her eyes and laughed.

  “O-kay.” Jax erased the date roughly, almost ripping the paper.

  Today was Thursday, the day after his birthday. The day he’d broken into a Walmart hadn’t happened. Still, when the classroom door opened again, he flinched, expecting cops. But it was just the Donovans coming in late, which they did once or twice a week.

  As Tegan walked past Jax’s desk, she stopped, and Thomas plowed into her. Jax looked up to find both twins staring at him. Tegan sniffed and glanced at her brother. “What?” Jax demanded. Maybe he hadn’t showered this morning—or on the day that no one else remembered—but he didn’t think he stank.

  Tegan nudged her twin with an elbow, and Thomas nodded, then went to his seat by the window. Normally he pulled his hood up over his head and took a nap during first period, but today Jax was uncomfortably aware of Thomas’s gaze on him throughout class.

  It matched the one he sensed on the back of his neck, coming from Tegan.

  When Jax got home from school, he verified the date on his computer. They had electricity again, and the refrigerator worked, as did his phone. It really was Thursday, but his closet was full of Walmart goods. The alarm on his clock was switched off, which he’d done himself when he woke up yesterday.

  Jax retrieved a plastic storage tub from the top shelf of his closet. Opening this was a last resort when he was miserable, because it was a toss-up whether it made him feel better or worse. Inside were his mother’s jewelry, a bottle of her perfume, and a scrapbook she used to keep, which contained photos of the Aubrey family until Jax was six. Neither he nor his dad had kept it up after she died. Four months ago, Jax had added his father’s Rolex watch to the sad little collection, along with a wooden box about twelve inches long and six inches wide. Since Jax had been living here, he’d opened the tub only once, to take out this wooden box and make sure Riley hadn’t stolen the contents.

  Not long after moving in, Jax had come home from school and found Riley and A.J. talking intently in the kitchen. On the table between them lay something Jax had recognized. “Hey!” He lunged across the room. “That’s my dad’s!”

  Riley snatched the object off the table before Jax could reach it. “No, it’s mine.” Then he held the dagger out for Jax to see, hilt up, blade down—the way someone would hold a cross to stop a vampire.

  Jax faltered. Riley was showing him the knife like he expected Jax to recognize it wasn’t his father’s. “My dad had one like that,” he said, half in accusation, half in his own defense.

  “I know he did. But this one’s mine.” Then Riley slipped it into a sheath on his hip. It was an odd thing to be wearing, unless he was going hunting. And a decorative dagger like that would be a strange choice for skinning rabbits and gutting deer—or whatever hunters did.

  Jax immediately ran upstairs to check the storage tub in his room. His father’s dagger was still in its box, where it belonged. It had a five-inch blade and a cast metal handle engraved with the Aubrey family crest. The carving on Riley’s knife was different, but the weapons themselves were very similar.

  Seeing the two daggers, Jax had to accept that his father and Riley really had known one another. His dad had often shown this dagger to Jax, implying that it represented membership in a club. Jax assumed he meant something like the Masons or the Elks. He couldn’t imagine Riley as a member of one of
those clubs, but clearly he and Jax’s father had shared some secret.

  Today, Jax closed the case with a snap. He had his own secrets now. Briskly, he returned everything to the storage tub—except his father’s Rolex, which he wound up and strapped to his own wrist.

  He didn’t intend to lose track of time again.

  Jax consulted the watch frequently. Days went by with no hiccup in time, and if it hadn’t been for the items in his closet, he might have convinced himself it had never happened.

  Monday after school, Riley dumped a stack of books on the desk while Jax was working on his computer. “Are you going to the library?” Riley asked him.

  Jax picked up the book on top. It had a girly cover—flowers and a sunset and a woman in a fancy dress. “What, are you dying to read the sequel?” He looked up at Riley. “I didn’t even know you could read.”

  Riley crossed his arms. “Did you tell Mrs. Unger you were going to the library this weekend?”

  Yes, he had. Jax looked at his dad’s watch. He hadn’t skipped over time; he’d just been so worried about his secret day that he’d forgotten his promise. He didn’t like letting the old lady down, but he liked Riley pointing it out even less. “Is her ghost complaining?” he asked crankily, slapping the book back down on the pile.

  “Her ghost?” Riley asked sharply.

  “Mrs. Unger is a little . . .” Jax made a twirly finger next to his head.

  Riley glared at him. “Are you going to exchange the books or not?”

  Why do you care? Jax wanted to say—or better yet, You do it. But Jax didn’t want to see Riley doing good deeds for Mrs. Unger. He preferred to think of Riley as a jerk. “Yeah, I’ll go tonight.”

  “Make sure you do,” Riley said gruffly, which made Jax wonder why he did care.

  Unless he counted Riley’s interest in Mrs. Unger’s reading habits, nothing weird at all happened for the better part of the week. But on Thursday morning, when Jax’s alarm clock didn’t wake him and the watch on his wrist didn’t tick, he sat up, alert. He guessed what he was going to see even before he pulled back the curtains on his window.