The End of the World As We Know It

by Iva-Marie Palmer

  Evan shook his head and pointed at Leo. “If he doesn’t have one, then no one does.”

  Leo fumbled in his pocket for his Bic lighter, which he handed to the man. The man poked him once on the shoulder. “Well, come on, you can’t expect me to smoke out here in the cold. Let me sit down. That’s not a Winnebago, by the way.”

  “Well, that’s just what we call you,” Leo said. “It has a nice ring to it.”

  The old man shoved past Leo into the van and sat on the floor between Leo’s and Evan’s seats. “No smoking in the van,” said Sarabeth, who’d been staring incredulously. Then she rolled her eyes. “What do I care? Go ahead.”

  Teena looked at her, exasperated. “What is wrong with you guys? You can’t use an alien invasion as a reason to let a crazy drifter into the car.”

  The man puffed on his cigarette for a long time and then looked at Teena with twinkly, mischievous eyes. “Alien invasions? You got wacky tobacky? Wanna share?” He sniffed the air twice, his smile disturbingly new on the old face. “And I’m no drifter. I took up permanent residence over there.” He pointed at the Airstream. “Problem is, can’t find my lighter. Checked everywhere but my ass cheeks. Would use the stove, but last time, I almost took my beard off. You all still didn’t answer my question about why the IHOP’s closed.”

  “We’re under attack,” Evan said. “Everyone else is missing. We haven’t been caught yet. We think the aliens are taking people, but we don’t know where.”

  “Damn commies,” the man said, offering his cigarette to them.

  “Did you hear anything? Or see anything?” Leo asked, turning down the cigarette as he packed some weed into his bowl and lit it.

  “Seriously, Leo, you’re smoking up now?” Sarabeth said. “I mean, I got it before, but don’t we need our wits about us or whatever?”

  “Look, this dude has lived in that RV by the IHOP for fucking ever. I’ve never gotten to see him. The IHOP is void of any people, another first in its twenty-four-hours, seven-days-a-week history. Plus, we just realized that we’re probably all gonna die. So yeah, I’m smoking up, SB,” he said, inhaling deeply and holding the smoke in. “Why not enjoy what’s left?”

  “That’s my motto, and I’ve been enjoyin’ what was left since 1976,” the man said, folding his long legs up like a spry yogi. He was wearing bike shorts and big fuzzy brown slippers under the Ewok blanket. “That little spot, where my silver beauty sits, that spot is a piece of unincorporated land. And I occupy it. I even got a full bar in there. I’ll serve ya, too. Shots are a nickel. Bring your friends. I don’t card or nothing. Just ask for me, Abe.”

  Abe poked Evan lightly on the shoulder, and he couldn’t help but feel a little better. He’d always appreciated a harmless weirdo, since he was a little kid. In weekly White Sox games with his dad, sitting in the cheap seats, they’d met a homeless guy who believed he was part dragon and part Viking, an elderly lady with flame-red hair who claimed she could summon pigeons (it seemed to work), and an amateur magician who dabbled in portable pyrotechnics (he’d been thrown out of the game for shooting two fireballs out of his sleeve after a home run).

  “So the only bar in Tinley Hills is in the IHOP parking lot?” Evan asked. Tinley was a dry town, which was one of the reasons Godly Jim liked it so much.

  The man’s eyes twinkled happily. “Yup. Now, what are you kids talking about, aliens?”

  “Aliens. Big, slimy, purple, indestructible aliens,” Teena chimed in. “Aliens that puke puddles of green shit that turns into little, nasty, flying goblins … ”

  “Greenies,” Leo piped up. “I’m calling them greenies, and if we survive, I’m going to breed a strain of pot and name it Mean Greenies.”

  “Anyway,” Teena jumped back in, clearly annoyed with Leo’s interruption, “they killed about a hundred people at my house, and they’re kidnapping everyone else.”

  “Yup, does sound like we’re all gonna die. I should be getting back to my beauty,” Abe said. He flicked Leo’s lighter and waved it around, the flame shimmying. “Can I have this?”

  “Why don’t you come with us?” Evan asked. Teena and Sarabeth reeled around like they wanted to capture Evan’s brain as it ran away from his body. Leo looked at him with quizzical admiration, he thought.

  “I like that idea even better,” Abe said, scrambling up from the floor to sit between Leo and Evan.

  “And you can have this book of matches. I’m hoping this lighter is lucky,” Leo said. He pulled some Phat Phil’s matches from his jacket pocket.

  Still grinning, the man took the matches and raised them over his head like a trophy. He lit another cigarette and leaned back in the seat between Evan and Leo. Leo hit his pipe hard and tried to pass it to Evan.

  “Not right now, man,” Evan said. “But thanks.” He didn’t function as well as Leo did when he was high. Maybe because he’d done it only once.

  “Okay, so now that we’ve all admitted we’re terrified and we picked up a drifter, we need a plan,” Sarabeth said. She was right, Evan knew, and he wanted to be the one to send them on the right path, not a deathly one. But he didn’t know what that was. If only he could be on the mound. On the pitcher’s mound, everything always became so much clearer. On the mound, he felt like he could see in front of him and behind him and into the past and into the future. There was a stillness on the mound. Wisdom. Perspective.

  It came to him then, how they could get some perspective.

  “What’s the highest point in Tinley Hills?” Evan asked, getting excited to finally have an answer to something. “That’s where we need to go. We could figure out where the aliens are taking people.”

  “Yahoo! An adventure!” the old man yelled. He pointed out the window at the mobile home. “But if we’re really under attack, I’m not leaving Janie here. She comes with.”

  Leo nodded as he hit his pipe, again, for a long time. “Evan, I like your thinking. And, believe it or not, I know just the place.” He exhaled slowly and dramatically, keeping everyone in suspense like he was the hookah-smoking caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland. “We go to High Point. And we bring Janie.”

  “You hear that, girl?” Abe hollered out the window to his vehicle. “We got a plan!”

  Evan grinned for what felt like the first time in forever. Leo might have been very, very, very high, and Abe might have been very, very crazy, but they were just the votes of confidence Evan needed.

  12

  LET’S GET HIGH

  Sarabeth Lewis, 6:15 A.M. Sunday, Lagrange Road

  “It’s too funny,” Teena said, half chidingly and half knowingly. “Leo, you predictably horny asshole. Of course you think instantly of High Point.”

  Sarabeth sighed. Teena and Leo had probably been there together. Of course, they were more experienced. And of course, Sarabeth and Evan sat there uncomfortably, like when you watched an R-rated movie with your mom and the characters started getting naked and you tried to pretend like you didn’t care and like you didn’t ever think about sex, but you squirmed in your seat uncomfortably so your mom knew you did think about sex and were in fact thinking about it at that very moment. It was like that, but possibly worse.

  “It is the right spot,” Evan said, a little shakily, the tone of someone who hadn’t been there.

  “It’s always the right spot,” giggled Abe gleefully.

  There were, however, bigger fish to broil, or sauté, or grill (frying wasn’t Sarabeth’s thing) than her own awkwardness. Sarabeth was driving up LaGrange to Archer Avenue, headed for the first time in her life to High Point, the best known and most uncreatively named make-out spot in all of Tinley Hills. These were not the circumstances she’d expected for her inaugural High Point visit. No, scratch that, she thought, it would take an alien invasion before any guy invited me to High Point. Even more laughably, she now had to lug around the silver motor home that Abe claimed he couldn’t drive himself because of an expired driver’s license. She thought he, like the rest of them, just didn
’t want to be alone.

  She hated that as soon as the words High Point were out, her mind went to an image of her and Leo alone, in a much different situation. It was probably a contact high or something, since Leo kept flicking his purple Bic for another hit, but her lips tingled, and she wondered what it would feel like to be up at High Point, just her and Leo. Sitting shoulder to shoulder. He’d offer her his pipe, and she’d take it, and the smoke would crackle its way down into her lungs, and she’d hold her breath and then melt down into her seat. As she exhaled, all her Sarabeth-ness would peel away to something new underneath. Something new, but there all along.

  A two-lane highway shrouded by thick evergreen trees, Archer Avenue was dark and empty, dark and empty being the cliché theme for this whole night, post-alien landing. Everything was starting to feel pointless. Even if they got up to High Point and saw something, what were they going to do about it? They were four random classmates with mediocre—and, it turned out, probably detrimental—gun abilities, a pink van with a missing window, no strategy whatsoever, and now a weird old man who was romantically entwined with his silver camper.

  Her mom was either dead or captured. Somehow, she felt confident her brother, Cameron, was still alive, thanks to her twin-dar. Knowing Cameron, he’d befriended the aliens and was now negotiating an intergalactic peace treaty.

  “SB, think much?” Leo’s voice from the backseat jolted her from the alternate reality Sarabeth was crafting in her head. She turned around to look at Leo, whose eyebrows were raised cockily, his lips up in a half grin, and she couldn’t decide if she thought he was cute in spite of being totally irritating or totally irritating because she found him cute.

  “Yeah, you’ve been sitting at this stop sign for, like, thirty seconds,” Teena said, looking at her nails like someone who couldn’t be more bored. Sarabeth had to hand it to her: Teena was admirably cool for someone who’d only recently nearly been de-skinned by flying green goblins.

  “Don’t be scared, Legs,” Abe said, pulling out a little black gun. “I’m packing heat.” She turned, feeling her eyes go wide in her head as he stuck the gun in his mouth.

  Sarabeth shrieked, hurling herself toward him in an effort to pull the gun away from him. Leo, Evan, and Teena all did the same. Their heads collided with a painful thunk! in the open space between the front and back seats.

  “Hold on, I’ll share.” Abe pressed the trigger, and the gun shot a stream of clear liquid. Sarabeth looked closer and saw it was one of those water guns that Tinley Hills had banned years ago because they looked too realistic. “Gin. Made it myself.” He pulled another squirt gun, this one a more obvious pastel blue, from his other pocket. “Orange juice in here. Wanna drink?” Abe aimed both barrels into his mouth and squirted out his oddball cocktail.

  As Abe tilted his head back and swallowed, rubbing his belly beneath the Ewok blanket, they all burst out laughing.

  “You all sure you don’t want a drink?” Abe asked, pulling out a flask to refill the gin gun. “I don’t trust no one who can’t hold their alcohol.”

  “Dude, you’re, like, my spirit animal.” Leo laughed.

  The sun was still hidden, but pink was seeping into the dark blue sky. Feeling embarrassed, like Teena and Leo had read her High Point thoughts—and grateful that Evan was silent and probably thinking weird High Point thoughts himself—Sarabeth drove along the winding road that led gradually to the precipice of High Point. To call it a precipice was akin to calling the brown brick slab known as Tinley Hills Village Hall a notable landmark. High Point was only a precipice at all because it rose a couple of stories above the rest of pancake-flat Tinley Hills. (It should have been called Tinley Hill, since High Point was the only thing close to an elevation it had.) Making High Point seem like a bigger deal than it was were the signs that appeared along the road, alerting drivers to TAKE CAUTION ON INCLINE, even though they really should have read SERIOUSLY, JUST DRIVE LIKE YOU NORMALLY WOULD.

  Near the top of the peak, the road widened, and Sarabeth pulled to the side and put the van in park. She’d walk the couple hundred feet uphill, to get a good view of everything.

  Sarabeth jumped from the van before the rest of them, not out of eagerness to see the aliens again, but more because she needed a break from everyone. As someone used to spending her Saturday nights alone in her room, she wasn’t quite ready to be part of this messed-up Breakfast Club. But even as she traipsed a bit ahead, her long strides didn’t put everyone else very far behind her. Their ragtag group was filled to the brim with bravery, apparently. Either that, or the idea of remaining in the van with Abe, who was still drinking out of his squirt gun, scared them.

  Evan had been right. Gaining some elevation did provide the best vantage point. Sarabeth could see the spaceship before she even reached the rim of High Point. Everyone else saw it, too, judging by the chorus of low gasps behind her.

  The ship was huge and had landed just beyond Orland Ridge Mall, on an empty parcel of land that was going to be the future Shoppoplex. A purple glow emanated faintly around the ship’s behemoth hulking darkness. It was shaped like a giant Frisbee with a massive diamond pushed through its middle. Purple and green lights pulsed within it.

  Around it was the town of Tinley Hills, neat and tidy, like a diorama of suburbia. Little square houses lined straight rectangular blocks, separated by even black strips of road. Nothing moved. It was like the whole town had stopped breathing. Or was bleeding, in the case of the sections of Tinley where the ship had laid waste to everything.

  “There it is,” Leo said, right behind Sarabeth. “Puts the fucking Death Star to shame.”

  “It makes the Death Star look like a koala bear,” Evan said, absentmindedly drawing circles in the dirt with his bat, his jaw hanging open and, Sarabeth noticed, quivering slightly. “How do they even get it off the ground?”

  “I think it’s getting it back on the ground that’s the hard part,” Leo said. “Look at what got destroyed. See? They didn’t mean to demolish Teena’s or Walmart or anything. It was a shitty landing.”

  He was right. The chaotic areas of Tinley Hills fell in a straight, diagonal line, and the ship’s trajectory was readily apparent from up here. Teena’s house was the first bump, then the ship must have lifted back up, crashed down again over Walmart and Kmart, and then bounced one last time over the Orland Hills Mall and onto the vacant Shoppoplex property.

  “Don’t get me wrong, but my house being collateral damage doesn’t make me feel that much better. I still don’t get why the space station from hell had to land here,” Teena said, no longer as calm and collected as she’d been in the van. She paced back and forth, her steps sinking into soggy piles of dead leaves—the winter thaw took away fall’s satisfying crunch. “Or why we want to stand up here, looking at it and wetting our pants.”

  “It helps because we found it, you know? We found it,” Leo said, getting excited, the way he sometimes did when he played something on the cello that he’d just made up. “We know where these douchebags are taking people. Friends and family are probably down there, at the worst welcome wagon ever. We at least know what our mission is, should we choose to accept it.”

  As they stood in a circle, Sarabeth looked around, at Leo, and Evan, and Teena. They’d made it this far. That was big, wasn’t it? “Good work, everyone,” she said, feeling like maybe there was a reason she was here and part of this group.

  Leo held up his hand for a high-five. Evan took him up on it first, then Teena, and then Sarabeth. Then Evan high-fived Sarabeth and Teena, too. Teena turned to Sarabeth, high-fiving Sarabeth in one of the most awkward uses of the gesture ever witnessed, and not just because of their height difference. As Sarabeth’s and Teena’s hands touched, Leo enveloped them in a hug and guided them toward Evan, who joined the hug, too. It felt nice. Calming. Warm. Safe. My first group hug, Sarabeth thought.

  Proving to herself that she could ruin any moment, Sarabeth couldn’t resist looking over Leo’s shoulder to th
e ship beyond, and the quiet landscape around it. Why was everything so still? She understood the Tinley Hills abductions—she’d witnessed one, with that family. But up here, it felt like the whole world had gone silent and still. What if no one was anywhere? Something like this would normally merit some military helicopters, tanks, the Army evacuating people, or at least it did in the movies.

  It was with that thought that her eyes landed on something just beyond the ship. Hundreds of cars, stacked one on top of the other on tall metal spears, like olives for a cocktail.

  Sarabeth drew back from the group hug, suddenly cold. She pointed at the sickening sculpture. “Guys, look,” she said as everyone took a few steps away from each other and stared at the scene.

  “Do you think people were in their cars when they were … skewered?” Evan asked.

  Leo grimaced. “For their sake, I hope they were captured,” he said. “Unless being captured by them is worse than being killed by them.”

  Sarabeth shuddered as another chill zigzagged down her body.

  “Guys, do you think anyone is left?” she asked softly. “Like, anywhere?”

  “Well, Abe is in the van,” Leo said, but even he didn’t have the energy to give the line the usual joking edge.

  “I thought we’d see someone from up here,” Sarabeth said. “But we’re it.”

  She could almost hear Leo, Evan, and Teena’s spirits deflating, and felt bad for being the cause. No wonder you don’t have any friends, Sarabeth, she told herself. What was the point of being hopeless in a hopeless situation? She wanted the high-fives back, silly as they seemed.

  “Wait, I have an idea. Aren’t there stand-up binoculars up here?” she asked, directing the question toward the High Point experts, Teena and Leo.

  “Binoculars? Why would anyone need binoculars when they’re getting busy?” Teena said, rolling her eyes. The bitchiness was reassuring.