It's the End of the World as I Know It

by Matthew Landis

  But there’s a glitch—something’s wrong—something is really not right—because Her hair was brown and always shorter because of the military, but this lady has lots of red hair that’s like a waterfall on fire. But it’s definitely my dad sitting there and that is definitely Her table and now I’m out of the car walking toward the road and Claudia says Dee and then starts shouting.

  Derrick!

  Stop!

  I don’t look both ways.

  I don’t go to a crosswalk.

  I rage.

  There’s some traffic, but I don’t care because I cannot be contained. I am the Great Red Spot. No one knows how long I have been raging or when I will stop.

  A car screeches to a halt and that gets my dad’s attention. His eHarmony lunch date swings her head too and her red hair hits him in the face. He pulls his hand back from her. They watch me as I cross the grass. I walk up to the gridiron fence that runs around the outdoor eating area and I’m climbing over.

  “Derrick,” he says, and his face is like Just wait just wait. I think about him walking to the guest room. The empty master. The picture of Her on his nightstand that he never sees. My arms are shaking and my hands are fists, but I actually listen to him—I stop. I wait because maybe he has some explanation for this. Maybe this lady with the red hair is some work friend or a second cousin he never told us about. Maybe she’s his therapist and she’s really busy, so they’re meeting over lunch.

  But then she grabs his hand. Holds it like a friend or second cousin or therapist never would. He squeezes back.

  And then the Great Red Spot explodes out of me.

  I rush him and my fists go thud-thud-thud into his chest and neck and face. There’s blood and my hands are maybe broken—something’s definitely wrong with my right one—but I keep hitting because I am the longest-raging storm in the universe and my fury will be felt. The red-haired lady is screaming and Claudia is here screaming too and somebody tries to pull me off. I’m roaring from the eye of the storm I hate you I hate you I hate you and he’s not even trying to fight back. He’s just turning his face away and taking the hits. I yell and stand over him, wanting him to get up so I can rage for a hundred more years. For a thousand.

  Claudia and the eHarmony lunch date kneel next to him. People are spilling out of the restaurant and some waiter is yelling for somebody to call the cops. I look at my hands, and then close my right fist and scream ’cause it hurts so bad.

  And then I’m floating away, the road and cars melting into the background. I’m watching myself sprint across the street, through the McDonald’s parking lot toward my neighborhood, getting farther and farther away in my head. Back to where I don’t need to remember anything, where I should have been all along.

  To the shed.

  1

  The Humvees are going so fast and I’m waving my arms yelling stop but they can’t hear me. They just keep coming and they’ll be here any second and I know what happens when they reach me. A giant black hole is opening up in the sky. It’s sucking us all up like a vacuum—me and the Humvees and the people in them. I can see some of their faces. They’re blank. They don’t get that this is The End. I yell louder.

  Bang.

  I open my eyes. A tiny streak of light cuts across the room right above me. I lift my hand up to it and see the white gauze I put on last night. I try to make a fist and wince.

  Bang.

  “What?” I say, sitting up. My head pounds. So sweaty. I need water.

  “Just making sure Pete wasn’t trying to eat you,” Misty says. “You were yelling.”

  “Go away.”

  She walks around outside the shed to where the cot is and says, “You’re kind of freaking everybody out.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Nope. That is not true.”

  I switch on my headlamp and unwrap the bandage. My knuckles look like golf balls. I douse my hand with hydrogen peroxide and rewrap it, looser this time. My Survival Guide Handbook didn’t have a chapter on treating punching-your-dad wounds. I guess the swelling has to go down on its own.

  This is not good.

  My hand is busted.

  I can’t do a pushup.

  I can’t defend myself if Killroy or anybody else tries to break in.

  All I can do is lie here and listen to the mice scratching as they wait for Pete to inhale them.

  “You should have put in an air conditioner,” Misty says. “Turn this thing into a doomsday spa. Getaway at the end of the world.”

  I guzzle half a bottle of water. “Go. Away.”

  “Let me in.”

  “There is zero chance of that happening.”

  She sits down on the other side of the wall. The plywood creaks as she leans against it. “You hurt him pretty good. His face is all bruised.”

  “He deserved it. Just leave, okay?”

  It’s quiet for a while. “Did you use the toilet yet?”

  “Seriously, leave.”

  “Did you?”

  Ugh. “No. Kind of.”

  “I can’t hear you.”

  I scoot closer to the wall. “I went, but I didn’t flush it yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “Trying to save the battery.”

  Misty shifts, and I can feel it through the planks. “Claudia told me what happened. About seeing your dad with his girlfriend. I’m sorry.”

  Girlfriend.

  I make a fist by accident. It hurts so bad I don’t say anything for a minute. “Just get out of here. You don’t even want to be here.”

  I hear her stand up and then walk away. Good. But then she’s yanking on the steel door, trying to lift it up.

  “Stop,” I say.

  “Worth a shot.” She comes back to her wall spot. “Did you watch those videos I told you about? The people seeing color?”

  I unzip my hazmat suit to the waist with my left hand. Super-clumsy and not good. “Yeah.”

  “What did you think?”

  “They were okay.”

  “Just okay?”

  I finish the rest of the water bottle. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”

  “I’m boycotting.”

  “Great.”

  Her phone dings.

  “I’ll be back.” Then she whispers, “Don’t go anywhere.”

  2

  I eat an MRE for lunch. It’s just like all the blogs said: not horrible, not amazing, but enough to keep me alive. Watery chicken mixture is the main meal, and some pound cake, plus some weird candy. I’m not even hungry, but I’ll need my energy real soon.

  I try to do a one-handed pushup, but fall and bang my knee pretty bad. On my phone I check the Apocalypse Soon! message boards for updates on the supervolcano. Nothing. I reread the texts from my dad and Claudia all saying pretty much the same thing.

  Derrick I’m so sorry.

  Derrick please come out.

  Derrick I love you.

  I try to nap, but it’s too hot. Pete must be loving it, that cold-blooded creep, just slithering around in the dark. He probably thinks Tommy sent him to a fancy snake hotel.

  I’m dozing off when Misty comes back and says, “I’ve decided that the world is ending tomorrow.” She sits back down where she was before. I hear a plastic bag swish and smell something amazing. “I want in.”

  “No.” I check my watch. 3:43 p.m. Just over eight hours to go.

  “I’ve been reading about this volcano. Pretty scary stuff. If it happens, I want to be in there. Open up.”

  “Never going to happen.”

  “Okay, fine.” She sighs. More plastic bag sounds like she’s digging around. The smell is getting stronger now, like it’s in the shed with me. Meat something. She starts eating and says, “Mmmm.”

  “What is that?”

  “Oh. Th
is? Nothing.”

  “Nice try. I have plenty of food.”

  “Maybe.” More eating. Lots of loud chewing and mmmmmm sounds. “But you don’t have tacos.”

  My stomach grumbles. “You made tacos?”

  “Nope,” she says. “I had my mom drive me to that place up in Quakertown. The one next to that Rita’s that closed. You know that place?”

  “Ugh,” I say because of course I know that place. “Fiesta Habanero.”

  “Did you know that means ‘pepper party’?” Misty says. “Great name, because there is a party happening in my mouth with all these amazing flavors.”

  It’s like the whole shed is filled with tacos. My mouth is watering. “I was supposed to go there with Claudia last night.”

  “I think I heard something about that.” She says it with her mouth full. “I got a bunch of tamales too. And some empanadas, but I ate most of those on the ride home.”

  “So you’re having a taco party outside my shed,” I say. “That’s what’s happening.”

  “Could be happening inside your shed. If you let me in.”

  I get up and dig through my food bin and find some candy bars I packed for when I got sick of eating MREs. I take a bite and chew really hard, but everything still smells like tacos.

  “Don’t you want your last meal before the world ends to be incredible?” Misty asks. “I can make that happen. Just open up.”

  “This is a trick.”

  “What are you taco-ing about?”

  “Ugh.”

  “Okay, that was bad,” she says. “But it’s not a trick.”

  “Is anybody else with you?” I can totally see my dad or Brock trying to body-snatch me away or something as soon as I open up. “Who else is out there?”

  “They’re all in the kitchen, watching us.”

  “You swear?”

  “I swear on these tacos that nobody is out here with me.”

  I think about it for another five seconds and then unlock the door. I roll it up and blink in the blinding light. Misty is holding a plastic bag packed with takeout containers. She’s got a board game under her other arm. Monopoly?

  I look past her to my deck and see a tiny crowd all crammed against the inside of the back slider, watching.

  Claudia.

  My dad.

  Misty’s mom.

  Misty’s sister.

  Brock.

  Tommy.

  “They’re worried about you,” Misty says. “Brock called his mom to bring a camping tent over.”

  I shake my head. “Brock thinks I’m a Real Jerk. Probably one hundred percent Real Jerk.”

  “So maybe he does. But he’s not leaving.”

  I keep my hand on the door in case anybody sneaks out of the house and rushes the shed. “Gimme the tacos.”

  Misty backs up a step. “This is a package deal.”

  “What?”

  “I am a part of the taco party. Let me hang out with you until midnight. Like a countdown to The End.”

  “No way.”

  She turns around. “Have a good night not eating tacos.”

  “Wait.” Ugh. “Why are you doing this? Jeez, Misty—I don’t even really know you.”

  She whips back around and yells, “Stop saying that. It’s not true.” She swings the bag of tacos at me. “And some great neighbor you are, anyway. I almost died last year and you didn’t remember it.”

  That actually stings. “Yeah, well—I was sort of out of it. Sorry.”

  “I’m sorry too, okay?” Misty shrugs it off.

  I start to shake my head. But then I smell tacos. “Fine. But you’re leaving at 11:59.”

  Misty waves to the people inside. I see my dad lean over to her mom and say something and then she nods and says something back to him. His face looks a little puffy and there’s definitely some dark circles near his eyes.

  “One more thing.” Misty walks in and looks around. “Don’t lock the door. I’m claustrophobic and it freaks me out.”

  3

  We eat on the floor with the overhead lamp on. Maybe these are the best tacos I’ve ever had. There’s only one empanada left because Misty really did eat most of them on the way home. She lets me have it.

  “Is your hand okay?” she asks.

  “It’s fine.”

  “Infection would really not be good right now.”

  “I know.”

  We put the empty containers back in the plastic bags. Misty sits on Pete’s box. I’m on the cot opposite her.

  “What’s the smell?” she asks.

  “Pete.”

  “He really stinks.”

  “Yeah.”

  She looks around. “So this is surviving.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Pretty boring.”

  “Mmhm.”

  She taps the Monopoly box on the floor between us. “Wanna play?”

  “That game takes forever.”

  “Not with me.”

  “Why? Do you cheat or something?”

  “Play me and you’ll find out.”

  “Fine.”

  She sits on the ground and takes out the pieces. “No, you can’t have the car. I am always the car.”

  We play, and it’s like Misty went to college for Monopoly. She knows the spaces by heart, so every time I roll she’s saying “Oh you should buy that,” or “Wow that’s bad luck,” or “I’m going to have hotels on that next time around.” She trades anything and everything to get sets and soon I can’t roll without landing on her stuff. Then I’m broke and have to sell my properties just to keep playing—but she won’t pay the price on the card. She keeps saying “It’s only worth what I’ll pay for it,” and the game ends in me forking over all the railroads for twenty bucks total.

  “Holy crap,” I say. “You destroyed me.”

  She’s counting her money. “Again?”

  It’s not as bad the second time, but still pretty bad. I last a couple more times around the board, but that only gives her more time to stack up hotels. Two bad rolls in a row blow things up for me and I surrender.

  “You should be in Monopoly competitions,” I say.

  “Wait—is that a thing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m gonna find out.”

  We start cleaning up the board and I say, “How’d you get so good?”

  “Because being in the hospital is really boring. You don’t even know.” Misty shivers, like she’s shaking off the memory. “I mean, people visit, but most of the time you just lie there. Playing Monopoly against myself helped.”

  I picture it, see her moving pieces around the board, making crazy bad trades with one part of her brain to destroy the other. See her waiting for a kidney. Or The End. “Was it scary? Waiting for It to maybe happen?”

  “Yeah. It was.”

  I’m looking where the black knot is. I can’t even see it ’cause of all the shadows and bins, but I know it’s there. I want to take a sledgehammer to it. “Like is it still scary, when you think about it?”

  She thinks about it and says, “Yeah, but different.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s like those color-blind people, getting their special glasses. I mean, I can really see now—all the stuff there is to do. And it’s freaking me out.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Think about it.” Misty waves her arms around in a big circle. “You can’t do it all, and if you do one thing, that means you’re not doing something else. And what if that other thing is better? And while you’re thinking about that, fifty other things are popping up, and you want to do those too. But they all take time, and there’s not enough of it.”

  “Yeah.”

  Misty fiddles with the car piece. “I’m really sorry I ditched y
ou to watch the Princess Diaries. That was a Real Jerk move.”

  “It’s okay.”

  We put Monopoly away and open an MRE to eat the dessert part. It’s pound cake and Misty eats most of it. I sip water and wonder if she’ll still be here when I have to go to the bathroom.

  “It’s funny,” she says. “You keep saying we never hung out, but we’ve been hanging out a lot where we used to hang out. When we’d hang out.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Wait—what?”

  “The shed.” Misty dumps the packet into her mouth to get the last crumbs. “Mostly I’d come find you here because of my dad. Remember? He ran out of gas like every week for his mower and you’d give me some.”

  Gas.

  Her mom said that to me, didn’t she?

  Stealing your gasoline.

  And then I’d spotted the red wagon. Black-and-white tires. The one Misty was always pulling. The kind of wagon you’d carry heavy stuff in.

  Like a big gasoline container.

  It’s dead quiet in the shed—just us breathing. Sweat is dripping off me and I smell something in the air, just barely. Left over from what the shed used to be.

  A place we kept the lawn mower.

  Gasoline.

  I’m remembering. I see Misty walking across the Mitchells’ yard toward the shed. She waves and I wave back and then I say something and she laughs, then she’s right at the door and talking about her dad.

  “You needed gas,” I say. “You came over because . . . your dad ran out. You had an empty can. In the wagon.”

  Misty doesn’t move. She’s like a statue.

  I look over at the steel door, right where we were back then, and say, “You were here?” She’s totally still, like she’s frozen. Is time freezing? “Oh man. Oh man.”

  Things are tilting. I slide to the ground and Misty grabs my shoulders, saying Derrick it’s okay but it is definitely not okay—it’s the exact opposite of okay and I hear myself say, “We were here when they came.” Hot lines of water fall out of my eyes. Misty keeps saying Derrick it’s okay it’s okay Derrick and I hear myself make this weird moaning sound. “You were here,” I say, and she’s nodding and then I say, “You saw them—did you see them?”