The End of the World As We Know It

by Iva-Marie Palmer

  “Really, Teena? Because it’s not like we’re on a schedule. If you hadn’t noticed, there’s no one here. It doesn’t look like there’s anyone anywhere, unless you count dead people.” Leo set his can down on the kitchen counter. “I really didn’t think it would be like this.”

  Sarabeth caught his eye, and he could see sympathy there—exactly what he didn’t want.

  “What did you think would happen?” She was serious, and he felt grateful to her.

  “I don’t know,” he said, looking from Sarabeth’s concerned face to Evan’s nervous one to Teena’s annoyed one. “I guess I figured they’d colonize, take over the golf course, and start picking people to take back to their home planet. And everyone in town would choose sides and start a special town council subcommittee about what to do, blah, blah, blah. The usual Tinley Hills bullshit.”

  Evan laughed. “That sort of makes sense.”

  Leo shrugged. “Yeah, either that or they’d blow us all up at once. But it’s like they just vanished people or something. It’s freaky.”

  “We don’t know that,” Teena said, but Leo could tell she wasn’t that sure of her statement. “Like you said, your dad could be out.”

  “You’re right. So, where to next?” Leo asked, clapping his hands like they’d just finished mini golfing. “Brighton, should we drop in on your folks?”

  Evan shook his head. “My mom and my stepdad are at a church fund-raiser just over the county line, so maybe we can wait until we see what’s going on in Tinley Hills. What about you, Sarabeth?”

  Sarabeth’s eyes flicked over to Leo once more, their concern landing on Evan. “I’m not far from here,” she said. “My brother left just before me to pick up his girlfriend in Lawn Grove. But maybe my mom is still there.”

  Sarabeth lived a few miles from Leo in an old part of town, Tinley Town Center. It didn’t take long to get there. Traffic along Route 33, usually packed with cars, was a non-issue. The six-lane highway was wide open, without any signs of destruction. No bodies. No destroyed or abandoned cars. No debris. Like they were the first people ever to drive this route. Or the last, Leo amended.

  “I keep hoping everyone left without us,” Sarabeth said. “But you would think there’d be a few people who were just late or something. Did our town become the Bermuda Triangle of suburbs?”

  No one answered her, but no one had ignored her, either. They each looked out their windows—Evan’s was now covered with plastic bags and cardboard from Leo’s garage. Leo knew they were all thinking what he was: Were they the lucky ones or not?

  On either side of the road, the lights were out in places where the lights were never out. On the east side of the road, Best Buy, Target, Sports Authority, Chili’s, and even the twenty-four-hour Super Foodland stood dark and hulking. A seemingly endless gulf of empty parking spots surrounded each store. It was like someone had just swept all the cars and people away, leaving a neat, tidy, nondescript town behind.

  But then Sarabeth came to a stop at the corner of 33 and Harlem. She gasped like the wind went out of her. Tidy and nondescript didn’t apply here. Normally, the intersection was home to a Walmart Supercenter and a Kmart Super Center that had inexplicably been built right alongside each other. They were both open twenty-four hours, and you’d always see at least a couple dozen cars in the parking lot and people walking in and out of the automatic doors.

  Both of the giant stores were now missing their tops and stood like brick bowls with their contents strewn around them. Whole aisles had been torn from the stores, and merchandise lay scattered—kids’ tricycles and kitschy lawn ornaments and cleaning products and frozen food. And even from here, they could see human arms and legs, a shopping cart with hands still attached to the handle. Where the asphalt wasn’t split like a massive gash, there were still cars in the parking lot.

  “What happened?” Evan croaked, peering out the portion of his window where they’d used a clear plastic bag.

  “I think I prefer the Bermuda Triangle,” Teena said.

  “How many people do you think … died?” Sarabeth asked, her hands tight on the wheel. “Should we check?”

  “It’s not safe to do a body count,” Leo said.

  “I just wish I knew why the aliens chose here,” Sarabeth said. “What do we have that they want? And why have we only seen one of them, when it’s clear more than one did this?”

  “We can’t get answers until we figure out where they are, and where everyone else is,” Leo said. “Let’s keep going to check on your mom. Maybe she’s home.” He felt bad lying to Sarabeth, but he would have gladly been wrong.

  Sarabeth lifted her foot off the brake and passed the end of the strip-mallage and maulage. The destruction had been limited to the two big stores.

  Now Route 33 shrank down to a two-lane road, along which Old Tinley Hills sprouted up. Town Center comprised five or six straight blocks of Veterans Park, Village Hall, the Tinley Hills Public Library, Wilbur Ross Elementary School (Tinley’s first school building, dating back to 1919), and the fire department building, all disturbingly as dark as the rest of the town. Just beyond all this civic pride lay homes, including Sarabeth’s.

  As they pulled up in front of a two-story, yellow-brick Georgian with actual character, Leo felt a little thrill. This was where Sarabeth lived. If it wasn’t so dark, I might be able to figure out which set of windows is hers, he thought, chiding himself for being a sappy asshole.

  Sarabeth put the van into park and gave a heavy sigh as she swung the driver’s door open. Leo noticed her hand shaking as it felt for the small gun still tucked in her waistband. She looked into the rearview mirror at Leo and Evan, and then at Teena in the passenger seat. “You guys are coming, right?” Her voice was a tiny delicate object Leo wanted to protect against the night.

  In a weird twist of naming irony, there were more trees in Town Center than in the Oaks, so darkness blanketed them. Sarabeth reached behind her, grabbing Leo’s hand. Her cool skin against his was a pleasant surprise, but Sarabeth was no-nonsense. “Make a chain so we don’t lose each other.”

  He reached behind him to take Teena’s small, warm hand, and with an almost audible eye roll, Teena reached back for Evan’s.

  “I won’t be able to shoot anything if my hands are tied up,” Teena said.

  “That’s not what I heard,” Leo joked. Teena pinched his hand, hard. “Ow!” he yelped, feeling like a wuss.

  Sarabeth maneuvered up the path, lined with rosebushes in all their winter nakedness, and gasped a little when her front door clicked open before she could put the key in the lock. She reached into the hall closet and grabbed a flashlight, turning it on. She shone it up the staircase, gesturing for the group to follow. At the landing, she ducked her head first into the master bedroom. “Mom?” Her voice sounded small and scared. The beam of light flicked over a floral bedspread, a massive dresser, and a closet left open and filled with row after row of shoes. Seeing nothing, she ducked out and did the same cursory check of her brother’s room—the kind of messy guy’s room Leo’s wasn’t—and what Leo presumed was her own room. The only detail he could make out was that Sarabeth’s room was pink, since she opened her door just a crack so they couldn’t see very far into the space. Her secretiveness just made Leo more curious.

  Sarabeth led them back downstairs and through a living room and dining room both cluttered with glass figurines in cases. Most of them were creepy little girls with too much makeup on. So many fragile things usually gave Leo the urge to break something, but tonight he just hoped all the baby beauty-queen statues didn’t belong to Sarabeth.

  “Is someone brewing coffee?” Evan asked, smelling the air as they stepped into the kitchen. But the room was empty, and more pink than Sarabeth’s room. Where did someone even get a pink refrigerator and stove? It was like Barbie’s grandmother’s house. Even the knives had pink handles. As the flashlight scanned over the kitchen island, Leo instantly caught a detail that didn’t belong.

  “W
hat’s that purple stuff?” he asked, already knowing. Dreading. Sarabeth focused the beam of light onto the island. There, sure enough, lay a film of purple slime coating the surface. The coffee smell in the kitchen grew stronger.

  “That’s the stuff … from them,” Evan said, a layer of disaster in his voice.

  “So they were here, then,” Teena said, deftly pulling her Uzi from her jeans and pointing it around.

  “Why are you pulling out a gun?” Sarabeth asked her. “They don’t work.”

  “They still work better than nothing,” Teena said. “And they … the aliens … might have a weak spot.”

  Evan and Leo stepped back and out of the line of fire. Sarabeth didn’t move. She slouched against one of the cabinets and slid to the floor, putting her head in her hands.

  “Don’t be a chicken,” Teena said sharply. “The safety is on.”

  “I don’t think that’s the problem,” Evan said.

  “I didn’t even say good-bye,” Sarabeth said, more to herself than anyone in the room. She pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged them. “I just left. And I even thought, Someday, I won’t have to live with you anymore.”

  No one knew how to react to this. As Sarabeth rubbed a tear from her eye, retort-happy Teena looked at Leo and Evan with a face that said, “What do we do?”

  “I want to get out of here,” Sarabeth said, looking up at them. Right at Leo. He wanted to stroke her hair and tell her it was okay. “I don’t want to see any more. I don’t want to see. Not her body.”

  “I don’t think there is a body,” Leo heard himself saying. The theory had started to form in his head when they had seen no people anywhere except where there was clearly destruction. These aliens weren’t neat killers. So in order for the town to be so empty of everything, they had to be doing more than killing. “They took her. I think the aliens are abducting people,” he explained, not sure if this would make her feel better, much as he wanted it to.

  Three pairs of eyes regarded him with something bigger than skepticism but not as big as utter disbelief. Sarabeth fumbled to her feet and stared at the gelatinous substance on the counter. She looked from him to the purple liquid and back at him again. As her juniper eyes rested on him, he couldn’t take the look anymore. His dream girl thought he was crazy.

  He broke the eye contact and went to the fridge. “Do you have anything to eat? I’m starving.” It was a good distraction technique. Plus, he really was hungry.

  Sarabeth waved at the shelves, laden with Tupperware containers filled with different, labeled entrees. “Go for it. No one else eats anything I make,” she said, pulling an empty plastic container out of a cabinet and scraping some of the purple goo into it without touching it. Once again, Leo was impressed with her brain, and just wished she’d say what she thought of the abduction theory. “The coq au vin is really good, even cold.”

  Leo and Evan dug into the chicken, still hungry despite the nastiness of the evening. Teena just scowled at them. Like they weren’t even there, Sarabeth set her goo-container on the counter, then stepped back into the creepy doll room.

  “This is going to seem weird, but there’s something I’ve always wanted to do. And if we’re definitely sure aliens attacked, it doesn’t matter … ” Then, she swept her arm across a shelf of the dolls, sending dozens to the floor, where they shattered. The little broken glass limbs were chilling after what he’d seen tonight. “Okay, we’re done here.”

  Leo looked on admiringly. Sarabeth, breaking things. She was even cooler than he’d thought. Or at least weirder. He’d always thought she was a challenge because she was too perfect. Now, he was realizing she was something better than perfect. Clearly, this girl was complex.

  Hopefully, she was just as crazy as he was.

  10

  GOING GREEN

  Teena McAuley, 2:17 A.M. Sunday, Sarabeth’s Kitchen

  “Aren’t we going to talk about Leo’s theory? I think he’s right about the abductions,” Teena said as the Gussy Me Up doll shattered to pieces under their feet. Maybe it was the pot they’d smoked. Maybe it was seeing half her hometown empty and half of it destroyed. Maybe it was standing in Cameron and Sarabeth’s kitchen with a sense of messed-up déjà vu. It looked almost the same as the last time she’d been here, in fifth grade, when Teena and Sarabeth had tried giving each other makeovers and Cameron had walked in to find them sitting at the pink counter with gross avocado masks on their faces. Or maybe it was because Teena saw the way Leo was looking at Sarabeth, and she wasn’t about to be any guy’s second choice out of the last two girls on Earth.

  Deep down, she knew Leo was probably right. Even when he’d first said aliens were responsible for the destruction at her house and she’d rolled her eyes, she’d had a hunch. Burnout or not, Leo wasn’t dumb. Stupid guys, no matter how cute, typically didn’t know much about working a female’s erogenous zones. And Leo definitely did.

  “So, you think the aliens are taking people somewhere to experiment on them?” Sarabeth said, picking up a creepy Gussy Me Up doll head from the floor and examining it. Teena hoped Sarabeth hadn’t had some kind of mental breakdown that would work her into a murderous frenzy. It was bad enough to be on the run from aliens. Teena didn’t need to be on the run from a homicidal nerd, too. “But what do they want that Tinley Hills has?”

  “I haven’t gotten that far yet,” Leo said. “But everyone needs something. I’m sure we’d invade a planet if it had a ton of untapped oil or, like, endless milk shakes. Maybe their planet needs white people. Tinley Hills has tons of those.”

  “So they’re killing people, like at Teena’s and Walmart, and taking people. Why both? And where would they even be taking them to?”

  “I have another theory. Those deaths weren’t intentional. They landed on us. The giant sphere thing at Teena’s fell off their ship.” Leo had found a bowl of cold pumpkin gnocchi in the fridge and was plopping the little dumplings into his mouth. “Where did this come from? Enrico’s? It’s really fucking good.”

  He swallowed his food and grinned at Sarabeth. Teena wanted to puke. Here she was, backing Leo up, and Sarabeth still got all the love. That bullshit about the way to a man’s heart being through his stomach must have been true.

  “I made it,” Sarabeth said shyly. Speak up, already, Betty Crocker, Teena thought, annoyed by the sweet, doe-eyed-ness she herself would never have. Deep down, she knew Sarabeth wasn’t doing anything to deserve her wrath. Deeper down, she knew that what was really bothering her were the feelings she was still having for Leo. When he’d shown up with the pizzas tonight, she’d realized she wanted more than revenge; she wanted him.

  “This? And the chicken?” Leo tossed a piece in the air and caught it in his mouth. “Marry me.”

  Teena wanted to dump the bowl over Leo’s head. “Leo, can you stop eating? Sarabeth, can you stop playing Dexter with that doll head? And Evan can you stop … just stop. They have to have a ship. We just haven’t found it yet. You can’t expect them to set up District Nine in a few hours.” She took a few steps toward Leo, to show she was one hundred percent behind him.

  Evan looked at Teena hopefully. “Maybe Teena’s right, and we just need to find where they’re taking people.” Teena should have been grateful for the support but was disappointed instead. Sarabeth got sexy Leo and she got virginal Evan Brighton? Whoopee!

  Teena rapped her Uzi on the countertop. Everyone jumped. “That’s the first right thing you’ve said, Evan.” Then, in her most damsel-y voice, which was tougher than she’d wanted it to be, she added, “We don’t want to wait for the aliens to sniff us out, or whatever it is they do.” She fixed her eyes on Leo and stared until she got him to look back. Then she smirked like she was thinking something dirty. Which she was, a little. Bingo. Leo put down Sarabeth’s puke-worthy gnocchi and grinned back.

  “But the one thing is, if they’ve already been here, maybe we’re safe,” Evan said, looking at Teena like he wanted her support for staying at Sarabeth
’s. As if she’d waste her remaining time on Earth at Sarabeth’s house, especially if Cameron wasn’t home.

  “Dude, no one is going to be safe until the aliens are gone,” Leo said, looking cute as he strode to the center of the kitchen. “Here’s the thing: They’ll find us and take us. You have to believe me on this: Teena’s house and all those dead people on Route 33 are collateral damage from landing. But if they were here for an intergalactic killing spree, there’d be dead people everywhere. They’re taking people somewhere. That’s why things are so empty. And if we’re the only people they haven’t found yet, then we need to hightail it the hell out of this house before they do.”

  Teena’s eyes flicked from Leo to a photo of Cameron on a shelf over the breakfast table. He was wearing his football uniform and gazing into the distance, like a model for men’s cologne. What if he’d been abducted en route to picking up that slut-fest girlfriend of his? She imagined Cameron, tied up and alone, sitting next to Nina’s devoured remains. Teena would burst in and gun down the alien. (Once she found that weak spot she knew they had.) Grateful, Cameron would confess he’d wanted to be with her all along, and she’d finally have him where she wanted him. Grateful and vulnerable. When he finally kissed her, maybe she could put Leo out of her head once and for all.

  “I agree,” she said, and without thinking, she grabbed Leo’s upper arm, and a little fizz swelled beneath her skin. She hated that his touch still had so much power over her. She hated how it was dawning on her that the reason she’d been so determined to hook up with Cameron tonight was because she wanted Leo out of her head. “We’re not safe here. Plus, all the pink is giving me a headache. No offense, Sarabeth.”

  “None taken,” Sarabeth said, and Teena could swear she saw Sarabeth looking possessively at Leo’s arm. “Though I remember you felt differently in fifth grade. I quote, ‘I wish I could live in your kitchen. I love pink.’”

  Teena rolled her eyes and looked at Evan, knowing she’d have his buy-in, no problem. He was such a puppy dog, she almost felt bad. Almost. But he’d live. Maybe.