The Last Place on Earth (16 page)

“You shouldn't push it then.”

“Wouldn't want to hold the others back.” Linens in his arms, he led me downstairs and to the back door. He paused before going outside. “I can work on my parents. You shouldn't have to sleep in the dorm.”

“It's not that big a deal.”

“It kind of is.”

*   *   *

The girls' dorm was housed—for lack of a better word—in the school bus, right next to the chickens and goats and geese. At the moment, the sheep seemed to be hiding. Unless it really had been killed for the stew? No, no—I was going with hiding.

I climbed the steps into the bus. An acrid smell cut through the dense heat and made me gag. The bus was empty except for one of the younger Dunkle girls, who was spraying a window with an unmarked bottle.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.” I shielded my nose with an edge of the blanket and took little sips of air. “Which one are you?”

“Kelli-Lynn. I'm seven.” With a dirty-looking rag, she wiped the window a few times and moved on to the next, holding up the bottle for a big, stinky spritz.

The bus was rigged much like the underground bunker had been, with four sets of bunk beds along the walls and overstuffed shelves everywhere else. At least the bus was aboveground.

“This is where you all sleep?” I asked.

“The boys get to stay in the RV with my parents.” Kelli-Lynn crawled on a bottom bunk and sprayed a window. “It's not fair.”

Kelli-Lynn wore her pale hair in two tight French braids. Long pants and a
Toy Story
sweatshirt were probably intended to protect her from bug bites and poison oak, but right now, heatstroke seemed like a more immediate danger. The little girl's face was bright red and sweaty.

The windows were cracked open, but it didn't help much. The hot, acrid air stung my nose. “What's that stuff that smells like vinegar?”

“Vinegar.” She moved on to the next window, spritzed, and rubbed. Then she tilted her square chin at the upper bunk, one of only two not buried in clothes. “You'll want to sleep up there. 'Cause otherwise you're stuck next to Kadence, and she cries in her sleep.”

When Kelli-Lynn finished with that window, I hauled myself to the edge of the upper bunk and proceeded to make up the remarkably thin mattress. Sweat trickled down my forehead.

“Where do you sleep?” I asked.

“There.” She pointed to a bottom bunk covered in a Dora the Explorer quilt.

“Does Gwendolyn sleep out here?”

Kelli-Lynn snorted. “Gwendolyn sleeps in the big house. She got a room bigger'n this whole bus.”

I looked around. “This bus isn't that big.”

Kelli-Lynn shrugged. “Better'n the last one.” Before I could process that, she added, “Gwendolyn has her own bathroom, too.”

Bathroom. Wait. I looked at the front of the bus. I looked at the back of the bus. Nothing.

“Where is our bathroom?” I asked.

“We're supposed to use the Porta-Potty, but sometimes they'll let you use the one in the big house, near the kitchen. Or if it's the middle of the night, just use a jar.”

First Mad Plague … now sleep criers and pee jars. This was a lot to take in.

“Where did you live before here?” I asked, thinking,
Idaho? Montana? The moon?
But no.

“Anaheim.”

“Anaheim?”

“That's where Disneyland is,” she said.

“I know. I live nearby.”

Kelli-Lynn sat down on a bottom bunk. “We went to Disneyland once. I got to meet Minnie and Mickey and Goofy, and then I got my picture taken with Belle. Daddy said we couldn't buy the photo 'cause it cost too much money, but at least I got to meet Belle. And then Killer went on Space Mountain, and that made him throw up, so we had to leave.”

Kelli-Lynn turned to the closest window, sprayed, and rubbed extra hard.

*   *   *

Back in the yard, assaulted by the midday heat and animal stench, I realized that gardening was not a pleasant duty after all. Also, that there were worse smells than vinegar.

Kadence, the little girl who had earlier threatened to impale me with an arrow, crouched by the vegetable beds, rubber boots pulled over her camouflage pants. “I like your hair,” she said, which was a big step up from
Don't come any closer
.

I pulled my ponytail around to the front and gave my cherry-red ends an affectionate tug. “Thanks.”

“Could you do that to mine?”

I imagined dipping her flaxen braids into steaming hot Kool-Aid. Grape, maybe. And then I pictured her mother's face when she saw the purple hair. Actually, I pictured her mother's hands around my neck.

“Probably not a good idea.”

There were four raised vegetable beds. I could see several kinds of squash, basil, corn, tomatoes, peppers, and a bunch of different greens. The garden was organic, by which I mean there were a bunch of bugs around the tomatoes. There were bees, too, doing their work before heading back to their hives.

“So, are we … picking vegetables? Or weeding?” I asked. Wow, it smelled bad.

“Fertilizing.” Kadence held a shovel that was much too big for her to manage.

My stomach dropped. “With…?”

“Poop.”

“From…?”

“Goats.” She pointed to the animal pen. “I got stuck with this job because I talked back to Mama. What did you do?”

“I was born. I think that's what I did wrong.” I knelt down next to her, trying not to think too much about what I was doing. Or smelling.

“Who's Martin?” I asked. “Isn't he supposed to be here?”

She snorted. “Martin don't do nothin' he don't wanna do.”

“But who is he?”

“Gwendolyn's brother. He's in the house. In his own room. Mama says he's spoiled.”

I couldn't believe I was living in a world where not sleeping in a bus counted as spoiled. I tried to remember what day it was. Sunday? Monday?

“So tomorrow you have home school?” I asked.

“Nah, we don't do schoolwork, not since we moved up here. Mama and Dad say book learning won't do us no good when the world ends. There's more important things we gotta know.”

“Like … how to fertilize with goat poop?”

Kadence dug at the earth. “I shouldn'ta talked back to Mama.”

 

Twenty-Three

THE NEXT THREE
hours were unpleasant. That's all I'm prepared to say about “organic fertilizer.” Well, okay, the last hour, spent weeding and picking tomatoes (Kadence had to show me how to do it properly because I am stupider than an eight-year-old) might have been pleasant if only it weren't so daggone hot out there.

Kadence also taught me to say
daggone
.

Afterward, I had time for a short shower in the downstairs bathroom that had been set aside for the Dunkles' use. I would have made it a long shower, but I was fifth in the line and the hot water ran out after maybe three minutes. Still, after my sponge baths in the underground bunker, I was grateful to have hot water to run out—and clean clothes, to boot. Thanks to Mrs. Waxweiler, who did laundry for the entire compound, I got to change back into my own T-shirt and cutoff shorts. The air-conditioning in the house was up so high that I was actually cold.

Upstairs, it was warmer. Like, slow-roast warmer. The last door on the left was closed. I knocked, half hoping no one would answer, but in an instant I was face-to-face with Mrs. Waxweiler.

“Daisy—good! We were just talking about you. Come in.”

What Mrs. Waxweiler had called a suite was really just a huge, L-shaped bedroom. A door at the far end of the room presumably led to a bathroom. In one branch of the L, a flowered comforter covered a big blow-up mattress. Astonishingly, Mrs. Waxweiler had accessorized it with throw pillows. In the other, closer branch of the L, Gwendolyn sat at a long folding table, hunched over our AP Euro textbook.

I took a few steps into the room, but there was nowhere to sit except on the bed, so I just stood there.

Mrs. Waxweiler asked, “What did you get on the last AP Euro test? Not the Middle Ages one—Gwennie is studying for that right now—but the one before it.”

“I don't remember,” I lied. Actually, I'd gotten a 78. It was a really hard test! Even Henry got a question wrong! But there was no way I was going to admit that to Mrs. Waxweiler.

“Gwennie said that most of the class failed.”

“I didn't fail,” I said.

“Gwennie got a sixty-nine. That's a D!”

At that, Gwendolyn looked up, scowling. “D-plus. And it's weighted, which makes it a C-plus, practically a B-minus.”

“Mr. Vasquez gives a lot of chances for extra credit,” I assured Mrs. Waxweiler, even as I couldn't believe we were having this conversation. When I'd left town, Mr. Vasquez had been hospitalized. Gwendolyn's history grade was probably not his biggest concern right now.

“The test after that, the one Gwennie missed. Do you remember what was on it?”

“There were a lot of questions about the plague,” I said.

She let out a grim laugh. “That should be easy, then.”

*   *   *

In the kitchen, Kirsten stood at the black granite counter, a huge mound of potatoes in front of her. When she saw my shirt, her eyes lit up. “You like My Little Pony?” At fourteen, Kirsten was the second-oldest Dunkle girl, but though she was slighter than Karessa, she seemed older—probably because she wore earrings and makeup and because her hair, falling in loose waves around her shoulders, seemed more suited to modern-day high school than, say, a covered wagon train.

I examined the rainbow horse on my shirt. “It's meant to be ironic. But, well—yeah. Actually, I kind of do. So does Henry, though he'll never admit it.”

“We've got some of the DVDs here.”

“You mean, there's a television?”

“Oh yeah. Runs off a stair stepper. The other two families get first dibs since it's their house, but sometimes we all get to sit down for a show after dinner.” She handed me a peeler. “Here you go.”

“Thanks.” I took a potato from the pile and ran the peeler over it. Nothing happened.

Kirsten finished up her potato, chucked it into a big bowl, and started on a second. I tried again with my peeler, pushing a little harder this time. Still nothing.

“I think my peeler's broken.”

Brow furrowed, she put down her (identical) peeler and took mine. And then she proceeded to peel a potato without any trouble.

“Huh,” I said.

She handed the peeler back to me. “Maybe you were doing it in the wrong direction?”

“Maybe.” I tried again. And failed again.

“Yeah, you're holding it backward.” She demonstrated the correct method.

“Got it.”

“Haven't you ever peeled a potato before?” she asked.

“Of course.” I tried to look nonchalant, but I'm a terrible faker. “No. Never. I don't think we even own a peeler.”

By the time we'd worked through the pile, my peeling skills had improved considerably. But when Mrs. Dunkle came into the room and put me in charge of making mashed potatoes, I had to admit that I didn't know how.

Mrs. Dunkle rolled her eyes. “Well, first you boil them. You can do that, can't you?”

“Sure,” I said. Because any idiot can boil water, and I've been making ramen noodles since I was small.

But it turns out that potatoes are different, because when I filled a pot halfway with water and stuck it on the stove, Mrs. Dunkle said, “Is there something wrong with you in the head?”

When I didn't answer (because I couldn't speak without crying), she put another big pot on the stove and dumped in the potatoes. She covered them with some of the water from the first pot; the rest of the water she saved for later use.

“When it starts to boil, turn the heat down,” she said.

“Okay.” My voice quavered.

“Then cook 'em for a half an hour.”

“Okay.”

“Then mash 'em with milk and butter and salt and pepper.”

Kirsten piped in, “She has to drain the water before she adds the other stuff.”

“I'm assuming she'd figure that out.”

I shot Kirsten a look of profound gratitude. I would have dumped the milk and butter right into the boiling water. Absolutely.

“When you drain the potatoes, save the water so we can use it again. We reuse all our water, even from the toilets.”

I didn't ask what the recycled toilet water was used for. Some things are best left unknown.

*   *   *

By the time dinner was ready, I had not only learned how to make mashed potatoes, but I also knew how to treat a scald (immediately run the burned hand under cold water). I had mastered (sort of) the art of peeling carrots, which is much like peeling potatoes, though you have to cut off the top and bottom when you're done. Who knew? Finally, I'd gotten out of chopping onions, probably forever, because nobody wants human blood in their meat loaf.

When everything was ready, Mrs. Dunkle handed me a plate heaped with meat loaf, mashed potatoes, carrots, and peas.

“Take these up to his highness.”

I was confused. As usual. “Your husband?”

She looked at me the way she generally did, which is to say, like a moron. “No, Martin.”

I was about to say that I didn't know where Martin's room was, but the house, while vast, only had two floors. How hard could it be to find him?

Pretty hard.

“Martin? Hello?” I wandered down the hall, calling, but there was no answer.

Then I wandered down the hall again, knocking on each door in turn. Still no answer. There was no way I was going to take the plate back down to Mrs. Dunkle. I made my way down the hall one last time, knocking on each door loudly and then opening it up a crack.

“Hello…? Anybody here?”