The Last Place on Earth (3 page)

“Join me for a swim?” he called.

I stared at him in horror. “That water is disgusting. There is duck crap and fish crap and algae and probably a million kinds of bacteria.”

“So that's a no?”

“I think you're going to need antibiotics. I'm serious, Henry.”

“Fine,” he said. But instead of slogging back through the muck, he turned and dove under the scum again. With choppy strokes, he splashed his way to the center of the pond, where he floated on his back and gazed up at the moon.

If it were anyone else, I would have walked away. But I stayed, of course. I would never desert Henry.

Finally, he backstroked to the shallows, where he stood up and made his way to shore, his feet making sucking sounds in the muck.

“I've always wanted to do that,” he said when he got to me. His breathing was heavy. Henry was not one for physical exertion.

“How was it?” My voice was flat.

“Not as fun as I expected. Plus I think I stepped on a turtle.” A cloud drifted in front of the moon.

I hugged myself, even though it wasn't cold. “I should get home. Do my math homework.”

“I'll walk you.”

“No, I'm fine. You should go shower.”

“Do I smell that bad?” He tried to smile.

I tried to smile back. And then I gave up and let my gaze fall to the ground. “I'll see you at school. Don't forget that chemistry thing is due tomorrow.”

“There's something else I always wanted to do,” he said.

I looked up just in time to see his face closing in on mine. “Henry, no!” I took a step backward and stumbled on a tree root, just managing to steady myself before falling.

“I'm sorry,” he whispered. “I never should have—”

“It's okay,” I said, though of course it was anything but. “I'm just tired. And you're wet. And a little…” I caught myself before I said
stinky
.

His eyes glistened. “You mean so much to me. I didn't mean to make things weird.”

“You didn't,” I lied. “Everything's the same as it always was. Let's just blame tonight on the full moon.” (The moon wasn't full.)

“Deal,” Henry said. “Things will never be weird between us. I promise.” He held my gaze for about two seconds more than was comfortable under the circumstances. “You sure you don't want me to walk you home?”

“Positive.” I forced a smile and gave him a quick wave. Then I made my way around the pond, to the trail, past the spiderwebs, through the gate, and into the safety of my house.

I never looked back. Not once.

 

Four

I KNEW THE
house was empty, but I rang the doorbell just in case. At this point, I'd even be happy to see Henry's parents. Well, relieved, anyway.

Ding-DONG. Ding-dong-DING.
Nothing.

I raised my eyes to the video camera painted the same ice white as the house. It stared back at me, unblinking. I stuck out my tongue. It did not react.

I rang the bell again because I didn't know what else to do. Finally I gave up and trudged back down the front walkway. Peeking through the narrow slot of the locked metal mailbox, I spied a pile of envelopes and circulars.

Justin Kim.
Just like that, I remembered the name of the boy who took in the mail and paper. Henry and I had run into him once while walking around the pond. Later, Henry had pointed out his house, three doors down.

As I hurried away from the Fortress, I prayed that Justin Kim had messed up. That the Hawkings had called him. That he just hadn't showed.

The Kim house also had a sign from A-1 Security planted in the front yard. Perhaps there was some kind of neighborhood discount. No video camera, though—at least that I could see—and unlike Henry's mother, who refused to open the door to strangers (UPS drivers were forced to show credentials beyond their big brown trucks), a petite Asian woman with perfect makeup answered my knocks. She wore a silk tunic, gray leggings, and terry-cloth flip-flops.

“I'm Daisy Cruz,” I said. “A friend of Henry's?”

“Henry. Yes. Nice boy.” She smiled. Piano notes drifted from farther back in the house.

I tried to keep my tone casual. “Henry and his parents have been gone a couple of days, but their newspapers and mail are still out there.” Saying it like that, it didn't seem so ominous. “Do you know if Justin was supposed to get them?”

In a flash, Mrs. Kim's smile transformed into a scowl. “Justin!” The piano music stopped.
“Justin!”

Justin Kim, a lanky eleven-year-old with a sharp gaze and black hair that stood up like feathers, padded into the front hall.

His mother glared at him. “You forgot to do your job for the Hawkings!”

“No, I didn't.”

“You go over this morning?”

“No, but—”

“Then you forgot!”

“They may not have called him,” I said.

“They didn't call me!” Justin's voice cracked. He turned from his mother to look at me with something stronger than dislike.

Disappointment clenched my stomach. “Sorry, I was just checking. Mr. and Mrs. Hawking must have forgotten to tell Justin they were going away.” My words sounded less than convincing, and not just to me.

Mrs. Kim raised her eyebrows. “Mr. and Mrs. Hawking forget nothing.”

I left the Kims' house feeling even more panicked than before, and not just because Justin looked like he might hunt me down and strangle me in my sleep. Even if the Hawkings had neglected to call Justin before they left town—something they would never do—they could have called him from their car on their way to … wherever they were.

Unless they didn't drive away at all? Maybe they'd been kidnapped. Or murdered in their sleep (though probably not by Justin Kim; he was saving his strength for me). There was one way to find out.

On the right side of the Hawkings' garage, a keypad glowed like a telephone handset that had lost its way.

“My parents made me promise I'd never tell anyone our security codes,” Henry had said one day after school, when we were standing right here, about to go inside. “Yeah? So what are they?” I'd asked.

“What do you want to know—the garage code or the alarm system?”

“Both,” I'd said. “I want you to tell me both.”

My hands shook as I punched in the numbers. A green light flashed twice. The door lurched and lifted. The family had two cars: a Mini Cooper for Mr. Hawking, who, since he worked on the far side of Los Angeles, needed something with good gas mileage, and a giant black SUV with tinted windows for Mrs. Hawking. The SUV was roomy enough for camping gear. Also intimidating enough for doing drug deals, though Henry's mom didn't seem the type.

I didn't even realize I'd been holding my breath until I saw the Mini, alone in the vast garage, and let out a huge sigh of relief. They had taken Henry's mom's car, that big, bad wilderness machine. Up in the mountains or down in a valley, cell phone reception would be so sketchy, they wouldn't even know that Henry's phone wasn't working. And they couldn't call to check on whoever they had hired to take in their mail and paper. Justin Kim had obviously been fired without notice.

Nothing to worry about.

I was still worried. The Hawking family did not take off in the middle of the week on a whim. The Hawking family did not do anything on a whim.

The garage was huge, with enough space for three large vehicles if not for the deep floor-to-ceiling cabinets that lined the walls. Around here, pretty much everyone used the garage for storage. My mother's and brother's cars hadn't seen the inside of our garage since … ever. But these cabinets were enormous. How could they need to store that much stuff, especially when their house was already too big for three people?

My eyes flicked around the space: no video cameras. Behind me, the garage door remained open like a giant, screaming mouth. I peered around the corner; the street was empty. I pushed the garage door button, and the door lurched back down, sealing me in with the car.

It was hot in here. Blood rushed in my ears. I grabbed the nearest cabinet handle, took a deep breath, and pulled, half expecting to find a weapons arsenal or a body stashed inside.

Toilet paper.
I couldn't believe it. The rolls were jammed into the cabinets four deep and six across, stacked all the way to the top. The next cabinet was the same. The Hawkings, family of three, had several hundred rolls of toilet paper sitting in their garage, while in my house we couldn't even keep a spare in the bathroom. I broke into laughter, the sounds echoing around me.

“My parents are gearing up for the Big One,” Henry had said whenever the topic of earthquakes came up. I'd assumed he meant stocking jugs of water and some granola bars—enough to get through a few days without power. But this! This was bizarre.

I pulled open the next cabinet, expecting to find yet more toilet paper, but no. This space was jammed with cleaning supplies: dish soap, sponges, window cleaner. The next cabinet was filled with bleach. Just bleach.

I worked my way around the walls, uncovering sacks of rice, bags of beans, canned vegetables, canned meat, canned fish, bouillon cubes, salt, pepper, sugar, more salt. There were flashlights and flares, no-drip candles, and an entire cabinet of batteries, in every imaginable size.

Clearly, the Hawkings expected the Big One to be very big indeed. Of course, if an earthquake was severe enough to merit all these emergency supplies, the odds of the family surviving it were pretty slim.

Unless the universe looked after them. That could happen.

I'd seen enough. I opened the garage and slipped back out into the dazzling sunshine. Hands trembling, I keyed in the code, and the door slid back into place. I took a deep breath and exhaled with a sigh of something approaching relief.

I had just reached the street when a huge white pickup truck pulled up to the curb. The back door opened, and Gwendolyn climbed out. “Did you see Henry? Is he here?”

A minute earlier, and they would have caught me coming out of the garage. Yikes.

I shook my head and tried not to look freaked out. “I just stopped by to give him his homework, but no one answered the door.”

Gwendolyn's gaze flicked down to my hands, which were not holding homework. Before she could interrogate me further, her parents got out of the car. Both of them were fair skinned and light eyed, like Gwendolyn, but Mrs. Waxweiler was short and plump, while her husband was a great big bear of a man. And not a cute bear, like a panda. More like a big scary one that comes out during the spring thaw to maul hikers nibbling sunflower seeds. He had brown hair and bushy red eyebrows that looked so much like caterpillars, I half expected them to crawl across his face.

Mrs. Waxweiler, on the other hand, was a blond bubble: one of those moms who look so stereotypically mom-ish that she could be on a commercial for laundry detergent. She wore a pink T-shirt and flowered capris and a superfake smile.

“You are Daisy Cruz,” Mr. Waxweiler said, which would have been helpful had I forgotten my name. His voice was surprisingly high for such a large man.

“Yes,” I said.

“And you are unaware of Henry's whereabouts.”

“Yes.”

He appraised the cherry-red ends of my hair, the four earrings, the T-shirt I'd hand-decorated with Sharpies. Though we'd only been acquainted for thirty seconds, I instinctively knew that Mr. Waxweiler was not the kind of man to appreciate a custom T-shirt.

And then, suddenly, it was like I wasn't even there.

“We'll try the front door,” he told his womenfolk. They headed for the walkway.

“They're not there,” I said. “I rang the bell twice. And—” I caught myself before I said,
their SUV is missing
.

Mr. and Mrs. Waxweiler didn't even pause, but Gwendolyn spun around and shot me a look as if to say … something. But what?
Be quiet? Go away? Watch out?

Something bad. Her look definitely conveyed something bad.

She spun back around (I'm not just saying that; as a member of the school drill team, Gwendolyn can spin with the best of them) and followed her parents to the front door. Mr. Waxweiler pushed the doorbell and waited, hands on hips.

As if she sensed my eyes on her family, Mrs. Waxweiler turned around and stared at me, her fake smile gone.

Face hot, I gave her a limp wave and hurried away. But after a few paces, something made me glance back. The three of them were still standing side by side on the front stoop, but now Gwendolyn was pointing off to the right. There was something in the landscaping or … no. She was pointing at the window.

Her parents stepped up to the very edge of the rosebushes and peered at whatever it was that Gwendolyn had spotted. There was no way they could look into the house. The blinds were shut. There was nothing to see except …

The shooting star sun-catcher. That was it. They were staring at that little bit of stained glass, dangling from a suction cup, as if its blue and yellow rays could reveal the secret of life.

 

Five

“HENRY'S STILL OUT?”
Mr. Vasquez, our history teacher, asked.

“Yeah.”

It was Friday: test day. Mr. Vasquez put a sheet facedown on my desk.

“Whatever Henry has, it must be catching.” He nodded at the empty desk on the far side of Henry's. Gwendolyn was absent, too.

“Must be.” I shivered.

Friday was the worst day to miss school because so many teachers gave tests. Besides, there was a football game tonight, which meant that Gwendolyn would have to forgo a halftime performance. Almost as bad, she didn't get to walk around all day wearing tiny blue shorts and a bright yellow T-shirt that said
DRILL
.

“‘Drill,'” Henry had said, the previous Friday, when a girl wearing the shirt had passed us in the hall. “You think that's meant to be a noun or a verb?”