The Last Place on Earth (11 page)

•
Dehydrated potatoes:
10 lbs.

•
Dry milk:
6 boxes

•
Velveeta cheese:
4 blocks

•
Canned fruits (peaches, pears, mandarins):
20 lbs.

•
Canned vegetables (peas, corn, green beans, broccoli):
20 lbs.

•
Jarred fruits and/or vegetables (unidentifiable):
14 jars

•
Canned tuna, chicken, sausages, Spam:
40 cans total

•
Peanut butter:
3 giant jars

•
Orange Tang:
3 canisters

•
Homemade beef jerky (I hoped it was beef):
6 large ziplock bags

•
Sriracha sauce:
1 bottle

•
Taco seasoning:
20 envelopes

•
Taco Bell salsa packets:
83

•
Garlic salt:
1 small jar

•
Instant coffee:
4 large jars

•
Tea:
71 bags

•
Honey:
10 jars

When I ran out of real stuff to inventory, I began a fantasy list of all the stuff I wished I had down here. Highlights included Frosted Flakes, chewing gum, glitter nail polish, and a kitten.

After inventory, I spent time doing sit-ups and push-ups before moving on to lunch. Making lunch meant opening the pouch I had chosen at breakfast, mixing it with the metallic-tasting water, and nuking it for sixty seconds. It was tempting to wolf down the food while standing at the counter, but I forced myself to use dishes and sit at the table.

After cleaning my lunch dishes, I'd read for a couple of hours. It was unlikely I'd find anything more entertaining than the zombie survival book (my favorite tip: “Avoid medical schools, which attract the undead”), but I was learning all kinds of stuff about how to forage in the forest, avoid bears, and use honey as an antibiotic—though maybe not when bears were around. Did bears really eat honey? Or was that just Winnie-the-Pooh?

Since the scrape on my arm was healing nicely, if itchily, I didn't need to put the honey thing to the test. My ankle was also getting better, though it hurt first thing in the morning. On the third day, I tried adding jumping jacks to my fitness routine, but that might have made things worse.

Instead of this wilderness survival stuff, I really needed to be reading about the Renaissance for AP Euro. Also, our English teacher had recently handed out a new novel, something set in Africa. The book was sitting on the coffee table at home. It had a red cover, and I was supposed to have read the first three chapters by Monday. And then there was chemistry. That textbook was intense—not something I could skim when I got back. I was going to be so far behind.

If I got back.

I won't allow myself to think that way.

After reading came arts and crafts, my favorite part of the day—as much as you can have a daily highlight when you are trapped fifteen feet under the earth. The summer before, I had volunteered at our town day camp, where I was quickly dubbed the Glue Guru. Beads, macaroni, yarn, poster paint: bring it on. Alongside the little kids, I'd made masks, necklaces, and flowerpots that served little purpose aside from being adorable—which, if you ask me, is purpose enough.

For underground arts and crafts, I started with my black knit clothing because the pants were too long and I kept tripping on them, while the sleeves kept coming unrolled. A hem and a drawstring (made with crocheted red dental floss) turned the bottoms into harem pants. I attacked the top with scissors, widening the neck and hacking off the sleeves.

When my clothing was as good as it was going to get, I moved on to mosaics. My mother had shown me how to smash glass and pottery in a pillowcase. I set aside a plate, a bowl, and a mug for my meals. The rest of the crockery I demolished with a hammer, gluing the resulting mosaic pieces to a chair. With flour, glue, cornmeal, and Tang, I concocted a grout, which I smeared over the shards.

The glass mosaic chair was super ugly—also kind of dangerous—but it kept me occupied, so when that project was complete, I moved on to food mosaics, which gave me new appreciation for all those beans I had inventoried: so many shapes, sizes, and colors! On the door to the bathroom, I fashioned a palm tree out of brown lentils and dried peas. Rice represented tropical sand, while cannellini beans formed clouds drifting above the palm fronds. On the other door, I went in an entirely different, more abstract direction, gluing the beans in squiggles and swirls, a style I refined while covering a patch of the ceiling.

By the time I gave up on the ceiling—standing on the desk chair hurt my back, plus I was afraid I'd fall off—I'd been underground for six days. I'd given up my fantasy inventory and had tired of reading about leaves, bees, animals, and all the other above-ground things I might never see again.

I forced myself to eat, even as I recognized that the ready-made meals wouldn't last forever. Most days, I took a sponge bath, telling myself that cleanliness mattered. Reminding myself,
At least there is water.

Two or three times a day, I stood under a solar tube and screamed at the top of my lungs, hoping a search crew would hear me and investigate. But no one came.

I watched a few action movies because those were the only DVDs available. I quickly tired of explosions and tidy endings. The heroes made everything look so easy. Nothing was that easy, ever.

Where was everybody? Why hadn't they found me?

I examined every inch of the bunker, looking for a secret doorway, a ventilation window—anything. But there was no way out of here except for the way I'd come in, and that door, decorated now with beans, wouldn't budge unless I set off an explosion with the propane tanks. As muddled as my thinking was, I knew that kind of tactic only worked in the movies.

I couldn't take this much longer. The food wouldn't last forever, especially now that so much of it was stuck to the walls.

I screamed until my throat hurt and the sound coming out of my mouth was little more than a squawk.

And then, on day seven, to my fear and relief and astonishment, a rattling sound came from the anteroom. After some scratching and banging, the door flew open.

 

Sixteen

THEY WERE ALIENS.
Definitely. Shaped like humans but with big bug eyes and vents where their mouths should be. One of them rushed toward me, and I screamed because that is the natural reaction to an alien invasion, and besides, I had gotten really good at screaming lately.

The alien halted and whipped off his head. No, wait—it was a gas mask. And it wasn't an alien, after all. It was Henry.

Henry had saved me. Of course he had.

“It's
you
,” I said.

Behind him, a male voice commanded, “Get back in the decontamination room. And put the mask on!”

In addition to Henry, there were three others, all wearing gas masks.

“She's fine,” Henry said. “If she were infected, she'd be sick by now.” His dark eyes glistened.

“Henry? What's going on?” My voice cracked.

“He's right,” said a different voice. “Quarantine's over.” The man pulled off his mask. I didn't know him, yet something was familiar.

“I fell in a hole,” I babbled. “Out there. And I called for help and people came, and I thought they'd get me out, but instead they put something over the hole, and I found my way in here, and I thought I was going to die; I really thought I might die.”

Henry continued to look at me, eyes shiny, but he didn't say anything. Why wasn't he saying anything?

“I came to the mountains to look for you,” I said. “I thought you were here. And you are—now, I mean. But were you here before? How did you know to look for me? Are there search crews? Did you see Peter? I brought your guitar.”

“Daisy…” Henry's expression was odd. Unreadable. Behind him, the man who had mentioned the quarantine looked vaguely angry. Or maybe that was just his natural expression because his chin, under a scruffy blond beard, was so weirdly square.

Wait.

“It was you,” I said to the man with the square jaw.

“Daisy—” Henry said.

“It was him,” I told Henry, suddenly feeling cold. “He trapped me in the hole. He knew I was down here, and he just covered up the hole and walked away.”

“Daisy—”

“I was so frightened. I thought I was going to die.”

“Daisy…”

And then I knew. I held Henry's dark, shiny eyes. Waited for him to explain. But he didn't, so I filled the silence. “You were there. Weren't you? When they trapped me.”

The two other gas masks came off, revealing first an unfamiliar teenage boy and then the man who had scolded Henry, who had told him to stay away from me. Henry's father.

“Mr. Hawking.” My voice was hoarse. Henry's tall father had always intimidated me because he rarely spoke and because he looked like a skinny, cranky Mr. Clean.

“You have put us all in danger,” he said. It seemed an odd choice of words for someone who had imprisoned me underground for a week. “I hope we don't regret allowing you to come here.”

“
Allowing
me?”

The guy with the square jaw strode into the cylindrical room. He was wearing army fatigues, the desert camouflage kind. “There is something stuck to the doors. And the ceiling. Are those … beans?”

The teenage boy—also wearing desert camo and also with a square jaw—loped across the room to the mosaic chair. “What are these white bits? Like pottery or something. Was this the … dishes?”

“I was just trying to protect you,” Henry said, his eyes pleading.

“From who?”

He shook his head. “Not a
who
. An
it
.”

Now Square Jaw was at the far door, examining the palm tree mosaic. “She glued food to the door!”

The boy with the matching chin and pants laughed. “Mama said to bring her some of those beans. Said she was gonna use them for supper.”

“You are welcome to lick them off,” I snapped. “I'm out of here.”

I grabbed my shorts and T-shirt from the floor and slipped on my pink sneakers. Henry could carry his own damn guitar. I pushed my way past the teenage boy, half expecting him to stop me, but he just gave me a creepy half smile and let me pass.

I was halfway through the anteroom when I stopped short. It was too bright in here. Too warm. The second door, the one that led to the hole I'd initially fallen into, was closed. Instead, a rope ladder ran up the concrete wall to an escape hatch at the top. Daylight streamed down from above.

I scrambled up the rope ladder and hauled myself out onto the ground and into the hot, dry sunshine. As I pushed myself to my feet, I tried to remember where the road was so I could run toward it.

Something moved in the corner of my vision. I spun around and found myself facing a pack of children armed with slingshots and arrows.

Clearly, that was the moment to say,
Don't shoot!
But the whole situation was so bizarre, I had no words.

“Don't come any closer.” A little girl held her bow steady. She was young—maybe eight, nine years old. Like the rest of the kids, she wore army pants, which she had paired with a dingy white tank top.

An older girl, about my age, slapped at the bow. “Kadence, put that down!”

I don't know much about archery, but smacking any kind of loaded weapon didn't seem like an especially good idea.

“I don't wanner to gemme sick,” Kadence whined.

“She made it through quarantine,” the older girl said. “She's fine.”

“She don't look fine,” said a screechy-voiced boy of maybe eleven. “Her hair is a funny red color and her clothes is weird.”

“My clothes
are
weird,” I corrected. “Subject-verb agreement”—then, glancing at the black harem pants cinched with red dental floss—“I didn't have much to work with.”

There were six in all. Two girls were teenagers, and the younger kids were between maybe five and twelve, two boys, two girls. Collectively, they had a
Children of the Corn
vibe, with pale eyes and pale hair, along with that weird square chin.

Something clattered behind me. I turned to see the others climbing out of the hole. Henry was last. He hauled his guitar case and gas mask over the edge and scrambled out after them. Then he crossed over to me.

“I want to go home,” I said.

Henry shook his head. “It's not safe.” He put the gas mask down and dusted dirt off his jeans—not because he is especially fastidious, but because he didn't want to look at me.

“Peter and my mother must be freaking out. I need to call them. Now.”

Henry straightened but still refused to look at me. “I told Peter this was a nature program, and you'd get school credit. I said that my parents had agreed to supervise you, and we'd bring you home in a couple of weeks when the program was over.”

“So you … saw Peter? And told him I was fine?” All this time, I'd assumed Peter would be out looking for me. That whole crews would be out looking for me.

He picked up his guitar case and looped the strap over his shoulder. “Yes.”

“But this isn't a nature program.”

He hesitated. “No.”

After three weeks away, Henry looked different. His hair was shaggier. Sunburn colored his cheeks and nose. But it was more than that. He held himself straighter, with more tension, like he could spring at any moment. And the way he wouldn't hold my eyes: That wasn't Henry, at least not the Henry I knew.

“Why did you cover the hole?” I demanded.

“I didn't. Mr. Dunkle did.”

Mr. Dunkle.
That would be the man with the square jaw. Which would make the children Dunkles as well. Dunklings?