9
“Not to ruin what may possibly be the only moment of male attention you enjoy in your life, Sarabeth, but the bloodthirsty fuckhead from outer space—you know, the one we littered with bullets?—is on the loose out there.” Teena, who’d been freaking out moments ago, suddenly looked pissed off. “We need to move. What if that guy is coming back with friends?”
Sarabeth nodded, all businesslike. Cute businesslike. “You’re right,” she said. “Let’s get to the police.”
Leo wondered how he and Evan had wound up sitting bitch in the backseat while Sarabeth steered them from danger and Teena rode shotgun—in the literal sense. All those studies about chicks being more academically successful than guys could be recalibrated to also include superior survival skills.
She turned out onto LaGrange, the street Leo had taken just hours before, when he’d thought tonight’s excitement would come from some Teena hate-sex. He looked out the window, and from the stillness outside, he knew what to expect. The world was eerily empty. And dark. The police station was on the left-hand side, a cobblestone brick building surrounded by thin white birch trees, designed to match the look of Teena’s subdivision. To Leo, it looked like a satellite office for Santa Claus, not a place for cops. He could see from the street there were no lights on, and no squad cars in the parking lot. Sarabeth turned into the entrance anyway, stopping the van alongside the handicapped ramp. The lampposts that ran up the walkway to the station were all out.
“We should check inside, right?” Evan asked. “Maybe the power’s just out.”
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Leo said. “It doesn’t look like anyone’s home.”
“Yeah, and there could be a trap inside,” Teena added, folding her arms over her chest and looking like she hated them all.
“Why would you say that?” Sarabeth looked sideways at her with an odd expression.
“There’s always a trap inside. See a movie.”
“Perfect, that’s just what we all need to feel supergreat about going up to the dark, spooky door,” Sarabeth said, but hopped out anyway. Leo was right behind her with Evan, and after a few seconds’ pause, and probably the realization she’d be all alone in the empty parking lot, Teena eventually hopped out, too.
Sarabeth marched up to the glass door and opened it. Leo felt like a jerk for letting her go in first. He could see her face grow pale even in the darkness. Beside him, Teena hugged her hoodie tighter, and Evan sucked in a sharp breath.
It was as empty as Leo had figured it would be. Nothing indicated there’d been a struggle. Papers were scattered on desks, and some phones were left off their receivers, like people just stopped what they were doing and left.
“This gives me the creeps,” Evan said.
“Yeah, it’s almost as bad as my house,” Teena seconded.
Leo watched Sarabeth’s face for signs of what she was feeling, but she gave nothing away. “Let’s go back to the van. Now.”
No one argued, and they all filed out quickly, not speaking again until they were safely in their seats.
“There was something wrong there, but I can’t put my finger on it,” Sarabeth said. “It was like I felt a presence, even if I didn’t see anything. See them.”
At the mention of them, the van’s metal bones creaked, and they all jumped.
Leo breathed through his teeth, to slow down his wild heartbeat. “What should we do next?”
“Maybe we should get supplies,” Evan said, nervous.
“Oh, like some chips and dip?” Teena shot back. Cruelly, Leo thought. Evan needed to work on his game, but he’d been nothing but nice to Teena. “What good will supplies do? Guns don’t even work.”
“And you hate us all and blah, blah, blah,” Sarabeth said through gritted teeth. Leo had never seen her angry before. “And the aliens should have killed us, not your friends and … ”
Smash!
The back passenger window rained glass onto the pavement.
Evan sat with his jaw set and his baseball bat hanging halfway out the window, which was now nothing more than a glass-shard frame.
“What happened?” Sarabeth sounded like she’d been holding her breath. “Did you bust the window, Evan?”
“I’m sorry,” Evan said sheepishly. “I just … I don’t think it’s good to be arguing.”
“Dude. You smashed a window. With a bat,” Leo said, shaking his head and wondering if Evan had more game than he’d thought. “I should give you props. Or kick your ass. Not sure which.”
“Evan, suppress rage much?” Teena eyeballed Evan with what Leo swore was a glimmer of interest. “You might as well just ask the aliens if they want fries with us.”
Sarabeth seemed to agree as she drove back onto LaGrange, keeping them moving.
“Sorry, I’m a little tense,” Evan croaked out, the bat now hanging limply in his hand. Teena spun around, Evan’s pussy-sounding answer probably putting an end to any tingling sensations she’d been experiencing.
Leo wondered why Brighton didn’t just man-up and tell Teena off. She’d go for that. But maybe it was better that Evan was crap with girls. Being one of two guys on the run with two very capable females put Leo under some pressure. Evan already had the athlete thing going. If he mastered chicks, too, what would Leo bring to the table?
“We should probably check on our families,” Evan said a little shakily, looking at the tree branches ripple by. “Make the rounds and stuff.”
“He’s right,” Sarabeth agreed. “Whose house is closest?”
“Mine, probably,” Leo said. Sarabeth looked at Leo, kind of incredulously, he thought. Like a guy who delivered pizzas couldn’t reside within a five-mile radius of Teena. “I’m in the Oaks,” he said. “It’s not We-Shit-Diamonds Land, but I’m sure we can find a car-window-sized piece of plastic wrap and some duct tape.”
Without a word, Sarabeth swung a sloppy U-turn. Taking Leo’s directions, she made a quick right at a street just a few blocks down from Teena’s. The Oaks were Tinley Hills’s first subdivision, but unlike Diamond Isle Estates, the Oaks dated back to post-World War II and hadn’t been built for the nouveau riche, or the nouveau anything. What were probably bright shiny homes back in the fifties were now shingled dens of pity.
The Oaks houses were unharmed, but as deathly quiet as the Diamond Isle homes had been. The always-on TV that flickered through the O’Malleys’ graying curtains was off. Old Smoking Man, a quiet guy who’d moved in onto Leo’s street, wasn’t out on his porch in his Hanes undershirt, ashing his cigarettes into an old Hills Bros. can. Even the Tower, a party house at the end of the street where Leo sometimes hung out with a bunch of junior-college dropouts, didn’t have its usual assortment of stoners on the porch.
The neighborhood was dead but without the bodies. Beyond the humble houses of the Oaks, a dust-and-smoke cloud still rose from Teena’s house at Diamond Isle. Had the aliens zapped it on purpose, or just made a destructive landing? Was the weird sphere thing a weapon or a piece of their ship? That Teena’s house was either a target or the first landmark the aliens saw made sense to Leo. He’d always believed aliens would go for the best real estate, not for the trailer parks, like all the Weekly World News types thought. Why would anyone travel, like, light-years to check out rows of double-wides and some rusty playground equipment, or in the case of the Oaks, rows of shoe-box houses, all without premium cable?
Leo instructed Sarabeth to park in front of his house at the end of the block, suddenly embarrassed to have people see where he lived. It was one thing to hint at a shitty existence so girls would think they could save you. It was another to confront them with direct evidence of that existence by pulling up in front of a house that actually looked too unhygienic even to cook meth in. The roof was patchy and bald, with graying shingles. The once-red front door hung like a bruised, lopsided mouth between the two battered eyes formed by windows with peeling wood frames. Even the remaining snow had survived in brown clumps, like tumor-like growths on the flattened dead lawn. All that was missing were a scrawny dog on a chain and a beater car up on blocks.
“Home sweet home,” Leo said. “Hope you brought your manners. Dad probably prepared some hors d’oeuvres.” He hopped out of the car casually but still looked sideways down the street for signs of alien life. It was a gesture more for everyone else’s benefit. He didn’t really think they were in danger. His dad would probably be sitting in the dark on the couch in his underwear.
Leo pulled his keys off his belt as the rest of the group clustered behind him on the front stoop. Maybe it would be better if his dad wasn’t inside. Introducing Sarabeth to Mr. Starnick was probably the surest way to guarantee a big romantic fail.
It was a cold thought, but Leo had gone through most of his life not one hundred percent certain he loved his dad. There was nothing lovable about Ed Starnick, as Leo’s mom had proven when she and her saggy tits and floppy ass took off for Reno ten years ago to marry a plastic surgeon she’d met in an AOL chat room.
The Starnick men heard from her once a year at Christmas, when she’d send photo cards of her new self. Now surgically enhanced and a deeper shade of orange each year, Denise Mancusi and her personal Dr. Frankenstein always posed in their desert paradise of a backyard. In the pictures, they’d each hold one of their pet tropical birds, which always seemed to be in mid-squawk, probably saying Fuck you! The cards accompanied wine-and-cheese gift baskets and said, HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO LEO AND ED STARNICK. GRATEFULLY YOURS, DENISE. Like Leo and his dad were some people she’d done lucrative business with. Which, in a way, Leo guessed she had. Her hate-worthy life in Tinley Hills led to her prosperous new arrangement.
But his mom’s leaving hadn’t drummed up any emotive loyalty in Leo toward his sad-sack father. Often unemployed, unshaven, and wearing the same baggy-assed Levi’s until they started to turn yellow, Leo’s dad was the hangdog dad from Pretty in Pink, that eighties movie. And that made Leo Molly fucking Ringwald.
Leo’s house felt darker inside than out. He didn’t try the lights, since most nights he came in late anyway and knew his eyes would adjust quickly. The TV skulked, powerless, in a corner, and the overstuffed plaid couch across from it was empty in a way that gave it presence. Leo pushed through the saloon-style doors into the kitchen, seeing it was empty before his boots even had time to squeak against the puke-green linoleum. He gestured for everyone to wait while he felt his way through the mudroom and down the hallway. His father’s room was the usual mess: rumpled covers knotted in a ball on the concave queen mattress, old newspapers and issues of Car and Driver piled near the bed, small trash can overflowing with empty Old Style cans. For the heck of it, he poked his head into his own room, knowing that his father had no reason to be there but wanting to look anyway.
Everything was as he’d left it. The room would have surprised probably anyone who’d ever met Leo. He kept it neat and sparsely decorated, like someone who didn’t spend a lot of time at home or who wanted to be able to escape at a moment’s notice. The only objects to give anything away were a stack of library books on the windowsill next to his neatly made bed, an old photo, on the dresser, of his mom holding him at the hospital, and a little wooden box he’d made in woodshop where he kept his emergency weed. He opened this now and pulled out a baggie of his everyday weed, Amsterdam Indica, and the quarter-ounce of Waikiki Queen he’d been saving for a special occasion. The end of the world seemed special enough.
It occurred to him that all he’d brought to the table so far was weed. Maybe he should just hop out his window, get baked in the forest preserves, and see what happened when the aliens’ hostile takeover was further under way. He touched his window lock but let his hand drop. Taking a deep breath, he realized he wanted to figure this thing out.
As he revisited the kitchen, everyone stared at him expectantly. He looked back at them without really looking and said brightly, “Not here. But, you know, Dad enjoys an extended happy hour on Saturdays.” He opened the fridge and tossed a six-pack of Old Style to Evan. Then he pulled another can of beer out and cracked it open, taking a long swig.
“What’s wrong with you, Leo?” Teena said impatiently, with obvious discomfort at her surroundings. In all the time she’d been slumming it with him, she’d probably never realized how apt the term was. “We seriously don’t have time to sit around playing Breaking Bad.” Girl could fire an Uzi, but put her in a house where a maid didn’t clean up twice a week and she was as nervous as a Christian fundamentalist at a gay wedding.
“Really, Teena? Because it’s not like we’re on a schedule. If you hadn’t noticed, there’s no one here. It doesn’t look like there’s anyone anywhere, unless you count dead people.” Leo set his can down on the kitchen counter. “I really didn’t think it would be like this.”
Sarabeth caught his eye, and he could see sympathy there—exactly what he didn’t want.
“What did you think would happen?” She was serious, and he felt grateful to her.
“I don’t know,” he said, looking from Sarabeth’s concerned face to Evan’s nervous one to Teena’s annoyed one. “I guess I figured they’d colonize, take over the golf course, and start picking people to take back to their home planet. And everyone in town would choose sides and start a special town council subcommittee about what to do, blah, blah, blah. The usual Tinley Hills bullshit.”
Evan laughed. “That sort of makes sense.”
Leo shrugged. “Yeah, either that or they’d blow us all up at once. But it’s like they just vanished people or something. It’s freaky.”
“We don’t know that,” Teena said, but Leo could tell she wasn’t that sure of her statement. “Like you said, your dad could be out.”
“You’re right. So, where to next?” Leo asked, clapping his hands like they’d just finished mini golfing. “Brighton, should we drop in on your folks?”
Evan shook his head. “My mom and my stepdad are at a church fund-raiser just over the county line, so maybe we can wait until we see what’s going on in Tinley Hills. What about you, Sarabeth?”
Sarabeth’s eyes flicked over to Leo once more, their concern landing on Evan. “I’m not far from here,” she said. “My brother left just before me to pick up his girlfriend in Lawn Grove. But maybe my mom is still there.”
Sarabeth lived a few miles from Leo in an old part of town, Tinley Town Center. It didn’t take long to get there. Traffic along Route 33, usually packed with cars, was a non-issue. The six-lane highway was wide open, without any signs of destruction. No bodies. No destroyed or abandoned cars. No debris. Like they were the first people ever to drive this route. Or the last, Leo amended.
“I keep hoping everyone left without us,” Sarabeth said. “But you would think there’d be a few people who were just late or something. Did our town become the Bermuda Triangle of suburbs?”
No one answered her, but no one had ignored her, either. They each looked out their windows—Evan’s was now covered with plastic bags and cardboard from Leo’s garage. Leo knew they were all thinking what he was: Were they the lucky ones or not?
On either side of the road, the lights were out in places where the lights were never out. On the east side of the road, Best Buy, Target, Sports Authority, Chili’s, and even the twenty-four-hour Super Foodland stood dark and hulking. A seemingly endless gulf of empty parking spots surrounded each store. It was like someone had just swept all the cars and people away, leaving a neat, tidy, nondescript town behind.
But then Sarabeth came to a stop at the corner of 33 and Harlem. She gasped like the wind went out of her. Tidy and nondescript didn’t apply here. Normally, the intersection was home to a Walmart Supercenter and a Kmart Super Center that had inexplicably been built right alongside each other. They were both open twenty-four hours, and you’d always see at least a couple dozen cars in the parking lot and people walking in and out of the automatic doors.
Both of the giant stores were now missing their tops and stood like brick bowls with their contents strewn around them. Whole aisles had been torn from the stores, and merchandise lay scattered—kids’ tricycles and kitschy lawn ornaments and cleaning products and frozen food. And even from here, they could see human arms and legs, a shopping cart with hands still attached to the handle. Where the asphalt wasn’t split like a massive gash, there were still cars in the parking lot.
“What happened?” Evan croaked, peering out the portion of his window where they’d used a clear plastic bag.
“I think I prefer the Bermuda Triangle,” Teena said.
“How many people do you think … died?” Sarabeth asked, her hands tight on the wheel. “Should we check?”
“It’s not safe to do a body count,” Leo said.
“I just wish I knew why the aliens chose here,” Sarabeth said. “What do we have that they want? And why have we only seen one of them, when it’s clear more than one did this?”
“We can’t get answers until we figure out where they are, and where everyone else is,” Leo said. “Let’s keep going to check on your mom. Maybe she’s home.” He felt bad lying to Sarabeth, but he would have gladly been wrong.
Sarabeth lifted her foot off the brake and passed the end of the strip-mallage and maulage. The destruction had been limited to the two big stores.
Now Route 33 shrank down to a two-lane road, along which Old Tinley Hills sprouted up. Town Center comprised five or six straight blocks of Veterans Park, Village Hall, the Tinley Hills Public Library, Wilbur Ross Elementary School (Tinley’s first school building, dating back to 1919), and the fire department building, all disturbingly as dark as the rest of the town. Just beyond all this civic pride lay homes, including Sarabeth’s.
As they pulled up in front of a two-story, yellow-brick Georgian with actual character, Leo felt a little thrill. This was where Sarabeth lived. If it wasn’t so dark, I might be able to figure out which set of windows is hers, he thought, chiding himself for being a sappy asshole.
Sarabeth put the van into park and gave a heavy sigh as she swung the driver’s door open. Leo noticed her hand shaking as it felt for the small gun still tucked in her waistband. She looked into the rearview mirror at Leo and Evan, and then at Teena in the passenger seat. “You guys are coming, right?” Her voice was a tiny delicate object Leo wanted to protect against the night.
In a weird twist of naming irony, there were more trees in Town Center than in the Oaks, so darkness blanketed them. Sarabeth reached behind her, grabbing Leo’s hand. Her cool skin against his was a pleasant surprise, but Sarabeth was no-nonsense. “Make a chain so we don’t lose each other.”
He reached behind him to take Teena’s small, warm hand, and with an almost audible eye roll, Teena reached back for Evan’s.
“I won’t be able to shoot anything if my hands are tied up,” Teena said.
“That’s not what I heard,” Leo joked. Teena pinched his hand, hard. “Ow!” he yelped, feeling like a wuss.
Sarabeth maneuvered up the path, lined with rosebushes in all their winter nakedness, and gasped a little when her front door clicked open before she could put the key in the lock. She reached into the hall closet and grabbed a flashlight, turning it on. She shone it up the staircase, gesturing for the group to follow. At the landing, she ducked her head first into the master bedroom. “Mom?” Her voice sounded small and scared. The beam of light flicked over a floral bedspread, a massive dresser, and a closet left open and filled with row after row of shoes. Seeing nothing, she ducked out and did the same cursory check of her brother’s room—the kind of messy guy’s room Leo’s wasn’t—and what Leo presumed was her own room. The only detail he could make out was that Sarabeth’s room was pink, since she opened her door just a crack so they couldn’t see very far into the space. Her secretiveness just made Leo more curious.
Sarabeth led them back downstairs and through a living room and dining room both cluttered with glass figurines in cases. Most of them were creepy little girls with too much makeup on. So many fragile things usually gave Leo the urge to break something, but tonight he just hoped all the baby beauty-queen statues didn’t belong to Sarabeth.
“Is someone brewing coffee?” Evan asked, smelling the air as they stepped into the kitchen. But the room was empty, and more pink than Sarabeth’s room. Where did someone even get a pink refrigerator and stove? It was like Barbie’s grandmother’s house. Even the knives had pink handles. As the flashlight scanned over the kitchen island, Leo instantly caught a detail that didn’t belong.
“What’s that purple stuff?” he asked, already knowing. Dreading. Sarabeth focused the beam of light onto the island. There, sure enough, lay a film of purple slime coating the surface. The coffee smell in the kitchen grew stronger.
“That’s the stuff … from them,” Evan said, a layer of disaster in his voice.
“So they were here, then,” Teena said, deftly pulling her Uzi from her jeans and pointing it around.
“Why are you pulling out a gun?” Sarabeth asked her. “They don’t work.”
“They still work better than nothing,” Teena said. “And they … the aliens … might have a weak spot.”
Evan and Leo stepped back and out of the line of fire. Sarabeth didn’t move. She slouched against one of the cabinets and slid to the floor, putting her head in her hands.
“Don’t be a chicken,” Teena said sharply. “The safety is on.”
“I don’t think that’s the problem,” Evan said.
“I didn’t even say good-bye,” Sarabeth said, more to herself than anyone in the room. She pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged them. “I just left. And I even thought, Someday, I won’t have to live with you anymore.”
No one knew how to react to this. As Sarabeth rubbed a tear from her eye, retort-happy Teena looked at Leo and Evan with a face that said, “What do we do?”
“I want to get out of here,” Sarabeth said, looking up at them. Right at Leo. He wanted to stroke her hair and tell her it was okay. “I don’t want to see any more. I don’t want to see. Not her body.”
“I don’t think there is a body,” Leo heard himself saying. The theory had started to form in his head when they had seen no people anywhere except where there was clearly destruction. These aliens weren’t neat killers. So in order for the town to be so empty of everything, they had to be doing more than killing. “They took her. I think the aliens are abducting people,” he explained, not sure if this would make her feel better, much as he wanted it to.
Three pairs of eyes regarded him with something bigger than skepticism but not as big as utter disbelief. Sarabeth fumbled to her feet and stared at the gelatinous substance on the counter. She looked from him to the purple liquid and back at him again. As her juniper eyes rested on him, he couldn’t take the look anymore. His dream girl thought he was crazy.
He broke the eye contact and went to the fridge. “Do you have anything to eat? I’m starving.” It was a good distraction technique. Plus, he really was hungry.
Sarabeth waved at the shelves, laden with Tupperware containers filled with different, labeled entrees. “Go for it. No one else eats anything I make,” she said, pulling an empty plastic container out of a cabinet and scraping some of the purple goo into it without touching it. Once again, Leo was impressed with her brain, and just wished she’d say what she thought of the abduction theory. “The coq au vin is really good, even cold.”
Leo and Evan dug into the chicken, still hungry despite the nastiness of the evening. Teena just scowled at them. Like they weren’t even there, Sarabeth set her goo-container on the counter, then stepped back into the creepy doll room.
“This is going to seem weird, but there’s something I’ve always wanted to do. And if we’re definitely sure aliens attacked, it doesn’t matter … ” Then, she swept her arm across a shelf of the dolls, sending dozens to the floor, where they shattered. The little broken glass limbs were chilling after what he’d seen tonight. “Okay, we’re done here.”
Leo looked on admiringly. Sarabeth, breaking things. She was even cooler than he’d thought. Or at least weirder. He’d always thought she was a challenge because she was too perfect. Now, he was realizing she was something better than perfect. Clearly, this girl was complex.
Hopefully, she was just as crazy as he was.