The Last Place on Earth (25 page)

“That's cheating.” Kirsten scooped some sandy soil from the bottom of the brook and showed me how to scour the bowls.

“Why suffer if you don't have to?” I crouched down next to her and dipped a bowl into the stream.

She shrugged. “Being out here with nature, that's not suffering. You get to be a part of something bigger than you. If there's too much man-made stuff around, you might as well be back in town.”

Down the bank, Kelli-Lynn pulled off her shoes, rolled up her camo pants, and waded into the water.

“Watch out you don't get leeches,” Kirsten said. (And just when I was beginning to seriously consider her majestic nature argument.)

“I thought you liked towns,” I said. My hands were numb from the cold water, but I was having a terrible time getting some of the oatmeal clumps off.

“I like nice towns. And malls.” She scoured some more, thinking. “I really, really like malls, to be honest. But most of the towns we've lived in, they're not that nice. It wouldn't be so bad if they just disappeared.”

I shuddered. “Even if people get sick, even if they die … the towns themselves won't disappear.”

“Looters gonna loot!” Kelli-Lynn proclaimed with glee, splashing cold mountain water with her pale feet.

“The stores will all shut down,” Kirsten explained. “So people will get desperate and break the store windows and steal stuff. And the power grid will go down, and the gas lines will break. But there won't be any more firefighters—either they'll be dead or they'll have left—so there will be no one to put out the fire. And that will be the end of the towns and cities.”

She lost me somewhere between the power grid and the fires, but I decided not to dwell on her lapses in logic. Instead: “Doesn't this upset you?”

Her pale hair shone in the early sunlight. “No. Because we've got each other, and Daddy taught us how to be safe and how to protect ourselves from the Golden Horde.”

“What is the Golden Horde, again?”

“The people that will try to take our stuff!” Kelli-Lynn chimed.

I didn't point out the obvious—that the Dunkles had precious little stuff to take.

Kirsten said, “The Golden Horde are all the people who aren't ready for when TSHTF. When it happens, they'll all flee the cities and head for the country, just trying to survive.”

“But they'll all die because they don't have skills!” Kelli-Lynn added with a little—no, a lot of—pleasure. The words were jarring coming from such a sweet kid. But I guess if your parents make themselves your whole world, you'll believe anything they tell you—even if they tell you that other people don't matter.

Kelli-Lynn climbed out of the stream on the far side and wandered over to a bush. She returned with a palmful of purple berries. “What're these? I forget.”

Kirsten peered at them. “Don't eat them. They won't kill you, but they'll give you a tummy ache. They're good for dying clothes, but not for eating.”

“My mother is out there,” I said. “And my brother.”

“Isn't he just your half brother?” Kirsten asked.

“He is
my brother
,” I said. “It doesn't matter who our fathers are; it just matters what we are to each other. And he's kind of—he can be a jerk sometimes. Well, not a jerk, really, just lazy. But he's my brother, and I love him.” My voice cracked.

I took a breath to calm myself and continued. “My father is out there, too, not that we're close, but I still care about him. And all my teachers and my neighbors and my school friends and … people I don't know. Just because I've never met them doesn't mean I don't care what happens to them. They're not a bunch of ants that you stomp on.”

“Daddy says family first, family second, family third!” Kelli-Lynn chirped.

Kirsten quickly scoured and rinsed the remaining bowls. “We better get back.”

*   *   *

So much for getting out of babysitting. I was setting the clean(ish) bowls and spoons down on the cave floor when Mrs. Dunkle tried to thrust Tuck into my arms without bothering to notice that my hands were already full. That made me drop the bowls and spoons, which made them clatter. Which made Tuck cry.

“Now look what you've done,” Mrs. Dunkle said, passing off her son successfully this time. (It was much easier now that I wasn't holding anything.)

Tuck kicked and punched me, which I took as a request to be put down. So I dropped him (not on purpose, I swear), which set off a whole new round of hysterics, and … well, you get the picture.

Mrs. Dunkle also left Sassy behind, but she was napping, at least for now. Everyone else took off into the woods. There were the hunters, the gatherers, the wood and stone collectors. And maybe some other categories. With Tuck screaming in my ear (and at my feet after I dropped him), it was hard to follow the conversation.

Tuck didn't stop screaming until everyone had left—at which point, looking panicked, he took off into the woods to find them.

“No, Tuck!” That kid was going to think his name was No-Tuck.

I caught up with him, but only after he had tripped over a rock and banged his chin on the hard ground. That set off a new round of tears, but to my surprise, when I picked him up, he didn't kick me. Instead, he wrapped his arms around my neck and sobbed, leaving blood and snot on my mended My Little Pony shirt. But I didn't mind at all because Tuck's feelings were all that mattered.

(Totally kidding. Unless you counted the black knit thing from the bunker, that was my
only shirt
. Of course I minded!)

Eventually, I managed to calm him down by singing an old My Chemical Romance song, which I am guessing he had never heard before. Also, I made various animal noises and danced a little. Let's just say I was thankful that being off the grid meant my performance could never end up on YouTube.

“Tirsty,” he said at last, with a sniffle.

He was thirsty. Right. Good. I'd just grab him a Capri Sun or an orange juice from the fridge. Or maybe a nice bottle of Dasani.

“We'll get you some water,” I said, without any idea how I was going to accomplish such a thing. The water Kyle had boiled for coffee was long gone. There were tablets and filtration pitchers somewhere, but I wouldn't dare go through anyone's stuff.

“Cuppy,” he said.

“You have water in your sippy cuppy? In the … cave-y?”

He nodded.

That was way too easy.

I put him down. He took my hand, and we strolled into the cave. His apocalypse-approved sippy cup was right next to his sleeping bag, and miracle of miracles, it still had water left from the night before. He plopped onto the sleeping bag and held the cup with both hands, a satisfied baby
mmm
sound accompanying each swallow.

I sat down on Sassy's empty sleeping bag, took a deep breath, and exhaled with relief. Maybe this morning wouldn't be so awful, after all. The one good thing about babysitting was that it took all my attention. I couldn't worry about my mother and brother when I was so focused on keeping Tuck out of trouble. And Sassy, too, of course.

Oh my God.

I sprang up. “Sassy? Sassy!”

Tuck took a break from drinking. “Sah-zee.” He went back to his water and his contented little swallowing sounds.

“Tuck! We have to go. We have to find Sassy.”

He held tight to his water. No way was I messing with the cup.

“Stand up, Tuck, c'mon. We gotta go!”

“Mrrm.” He scowled over his cup.

I reached down, grabbed him under the arms, and hauled him over my shoulder. He screamed with fury and whacked me over the head with his sippy cup. So much for our beautiful friendship.

I rushed out of the cave, Tuck tight in my arms, my terror giving me strength to resist the urge to drop him even though he was kicking me in some organ that shouldn't be kicked. Kidney? Liver? Spleen? Who knows? Anyway, it hurt.

“SASSY!” My voice drifted out through the seemingly endless forest. I took a few steps in the direction of the creek and then stopped. There was no reason to think she would go that way. She didn't know where the creek was. She could have headed anywhere at all.

“SASSY!” I hurried around the side of the rock wall, in the direction from which we had arrived the day before. Maybe she would try to head back to the compound? I yelled a couple more times, and when she didn't answer, I rounded the other side of the cave and yelled again.

My mind was buzzing and my arms ached from hauling Tuck. I had to alert the others. We had to start searching. I adjusted my grip on Tuck and took a few steps in the direction I had seen the gatherers heading when Kyle appeared through the leaves. Sassy was on his back, her arms around his neck.

“Gid-yap!” she said.

“Lose something?” Kyle asked.

Relief flooded through me so fast, I thought I would collapse.

“I thought … I thought…” I burst into tears.

“Mama loses her all the time, don't she, Sassy?” Kyle said.

“Gid-yap!”

“I'm not your dang horse.”

“Gid-yap!”

I followed them back to the clearing. “Does your mother ever lose her in the wilderness?”

“Not real often, no.” He laughed. “She'd be PO'd if she knew what happened.”

“I don't even care. I'm just glad Sassy is okay.” I set Tuck on the ground and rubbed my aching arms.

Sassy, unscathed by the incident, bobbed from side to side and patted her bottom. “Stinky.”

“Okay. I'll change you. Somehow.”

“What happened to Tuck's chin?” Kyle asked.

“What? Oh. That.” I'd been so panicked about having misplaced one child that I forgot about the other's injury. It looked pretty bad actually: open and raw. “Are there bandages around somewhere? Maybe some Neosporin?”

“Got something better.” Kyle loped off into the cave and came back with a jar.

“Honey?”

He unscrewed the lid of the jar and smeared a big glop on Tuck's chin.

“Shouldn't you clean out the cut first?” I asked.

“Yeah, probably. Guess I'll leave that to the person in charge of child care. Catch ya later.” He turned and loped back into the woods. And just when I was starting to think maybe he wasn't such a huge jerk, after all.

The twins and I managed to make it through the morning without any more crises and surprisingly few tears—though I almost cried when just after I finished changing Sassy's diaper without wipes or running water, Tuck announced that he, too, had made a big stinky in his pants.

When the sun was high and bright, the others began returning, carting stream-cleaned clothes, wild greens, berries, and game.

By
game
, I mean dead animals. Dead cute animals: three bunnies and a dove.

“Don't suppose they taught you how to skin a rabbit in French class,” Mr. Dunkle said.

Since I was too traumatized to tell him I took Spanish, not French, I said, “If Karessa can watch the kids, I'll help Kirsten with the salad.” I grabbed a jug and headed to the brook with Kirsten. Once the water boiled and cooled, we could use it to wash wild greens. (One more thing I missed from the outside world: bagged lettuce.)

Kyle was near the brook, yanking up some vegetation.

“That's not edible,” Kirsten said.

“No sewage, Miss Smarty-Pants.” (This is what happens when you don't allow kids access to their peers. They say stuff like “no sewage.”) “Daisy needs a blanket, but she don't know how to make one.”

Kirsten squinted at me. “Seriously?” She wasn't even being snotty. She just couldn't imagine a world in which a family holiday meant something other than killing small mammals, sleeping in caves, and making blankets out of weeds.

Part of me wanted to list off all the things I
did
know how to do: use a self-checkout machine at the CVS, design a PowerPoint presentation, send a text message without looking at my hands. But Kirsten was the closest thing to a friend I had among the Dunkles, and besides, if things really did … hit the fan, my skills for living in a civilized world weren't going to do me any good.

But I couldn't let myself think about that. No, it was far better to just pretend we were camping.

Kyle yanked a few more handfuls of long grass and headed back to the campsite.

Kirsten pointed to the bush across the trickling water. “Think those berries would work on my hair?”

“Probably.”

We finished filling the jugs and made our way back to the flat area outside the cave, where a fire was blazing with far greater intensity than I'd seen before.

“Dad musta used lighter fluid,” Kirsten observed.

“That doesn't sound very natural,” I said.

Kristen shrugged. “I think it's from Home Depot.”

We put our water in several pots to boil. I tried not to look at the rabbits, red and naked, which lay, paws up, on a bed of leaves. Next to the carcasses, Kadence merrily plucked the dead dove's feathers.

My stomach growled, and I was filled with disgust at my carnivorous instincts.

In the end I ate salad, which sounds better than “bitter weeds with flecks of dirt,” which is what it really was. (We should have boiled more water for washing.) There were some dark berries, too, but only enough for, like, three per person, so I didn't take any because I am generous, and also because I was afraid I might die.

“You like fish?” Kyle asked, sitting down beside me to gnaw on what I guessed was a grilled rabbit leg. A leg that mere hours before had been hopping.

“Only if it's not fishy,” I said, thinking,
and if it's battered and fried and served with ketchup and french fries
.

“Fish that goes straight from the stream to the fire—that ain't never fishy. I'll catch you some later.”

“Okay.” I picked up a bushy weed from the slab of bark I was using as a plate. With a few miserable chews, it was down my throat.