Instructions for the End of the World

by Jamie Kain

  “Nic! Wake up!”

  Her eyes pop open, and she startles when she sees me so close.

  “What?” she says, too loudly.

  “Shh! There’s someone downstairs!” I whisper.

  She pushes herself up on her elbows, frowning in the moonlight that shines through the window.

  “How do you know?”

  “I heard noises.”

  “It must be Dad getting back,” she says. “Or Mom.”

  “In the middle of the night? What if it’s not them?”

  She finally seems to register just how screwed we are, being here alone, and she sits up and reaches under the bed, where she now keeps her hunting rifle.

  I watch her check the barrel for ammunition, and for once I’m relieved my sister is a weirdo gun nut like our dad.

  Downstairs, there is only silence now, but I take this as a bad sign. Whoever is down there probably heard us up here and is now just waiting for us to come down so he can kill us.

  Nic stands up and crosses the room to the door, and I hurry along behind her.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to see what the noise was.”

  Before I can stop her, she flicks on the stairway light. “Who’s there?” she calls out, and I want to slap her.

  Silence.

  “Dad? Mom?”

  Then there is a sort of scratching, shuffling sound, barely audible.

  She takes a deep breath and exhales. “You stay here and find a place to hide. If there’s any trouble, go down the fire ladder in your room and run to Sadhana for help.”

  I look at her like she’s lost her mind, but I can’t think what to say. I don’t remember when I’ve ever been so scared before.

  “Stay here,” I finally whisper, but she is already headed downstairs.

  “Nic!” I call after her, and when she keeps going I edge closer to the hallway and peer down at her descending the stairs.

  She vanishes around the corner of the staircase. A few seconds later I hear a gunshot and I nearly piss myself. Mouth dry, adrenaline pumping through my veins, I forget the safety plan and hurry down the stairs, unable to leave my sister alone down there.

  What if Nicole is dead?

  But she isn’t. She’s standing in the kitchen doorway, holding the gun barrel down. She turns and looks at me.

  “Rats,” she says. “Eating our food. I got one but the noise scared the others away.”

  I guess the sensation that fills me is relief, and then disgust when I peer into the kitchen to see a dead rat splattered against the tiles above the kitchen counter.

  “Oh my god, I’m not cleaning that up.”

  She enters the kitchen and places the gun on the table before kneeling down to a dark hole below the cabinets. “This is how they’re getting in,” she says.

  I think of all the scuffling sounds we’ve heard at night in the ceiling, and I imagine them being not cute little mice now but rats, like this fat gray one with its head blown off. It’s nearly the size of a cat. Or was. The sight of it, and the scent of gunpowder in the air, makes me gag.

  “What if there are more of them in here?”

  “The other two ran back through this hole.”

  I cross my arms over my chest and scan the room and the hallway. I don’t want to live in a house with rats so big it takes a rifle to scare them away.

  “Why don’t you check all the cabinets and the other rooms while I try to seal up this hole?”

  I’m not going into the kitchen if there’s any chance of a rat lurking, but I say nothing. I just watch as she heads to the front door and unlocks it, then takes the flashlight off the door-side table and turns it on.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To get some wood from the barn.”

  “Right now?”

  “Would you rather I put out a little red carpet to welcome them in?”

  “Screw you.”

  She goes outside and I am left standing here like an idiot. I can see a trail of rat turds across the kitchen floor. I’ve swept them up in the past, not thinking about what they might be. But now that I know what they came out of, I feel like I need to throw up.

  My stomach gurgling, I find a pair of flip-flops to put on, and I search the kitchen and all the other rooms in the house. No sign of rats anywhere else, so I grab the broom and dustpan from the hall closet and sweep up all the turds I can find. Then I get the spray bottle of bleach water and start spraying down every surface. Nicole comes back in with a hammer, nails, and a piece of wood, and she starts covering the hole.

  I can’t believe this is my stupid life now. While my friends from school last year are vacationing in Hawaii, doing swim team, hanging out at the beach, I’m scrubbing rat turd residue off the kitchen floor in the middle of the night. Even if I could talk to any of my friends now, I wouldn’t want to. I’d have to lie about every single thing that’s happened to me this summer.

  There is a jumbo box of Cheerios that the rats have dragged out of the cabinet and chewed a hole in the side of. Its contents are spilling onto the counter now. I pick it up to throw it away, but Nicole, standing up from having finished her hole-patching job, stops me.

  “We can still eat those,” she says, because she’s a lunatic.

  “You can still eat them. I’m not eating anything with rat saliva on it.”

  “The rats didn’t lick every Cheerio that’s still in the box. We don’t have that much food left.”

  I watch her open the junk drawer and repair the hole in the box with a piece of silver duct tape.

  “Oh my god. That’s disgusting.”

  She ignores me and puts the box back into the cabinet. On the floor there’s a saltshaker that has rolled under the kitchen table. Its falling from the counter must have been the noise that woke me.

  I go back to wiping down the counters, but I am so sick of living this way I want to scream.

  “This is child abuse,” I say. “Maybe those guys at Sadhana will let us live there until our parents come back.”

  “We’re staying here. That’s what Dad told us to do.”

  “He’s not here! And he’s not the perfect daddy you always act like he is, either,” I blurt out.

  I’ve never told Nic about the stuff I overheard our parents arguing about before we moved. I liked knowing something she didn’t. But seriously, if she’s going to let Dad ruin our lives, I want her to know what kind of asshole she’s being so loyal to.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  I put down the cloth and the bottle of bleach spray and leave the room. I’m too mad to think straight, so I go upstairs and lie down with the lamp on next to my bed. It’s still, like, a hundred degrees up here, even with the window open and the fan on, so I just lie there in the faintly smoky air and sweat, trying to think.

  What do I tell her? What do I leave out? Is now really the right time?

  I thought she’d gotten over her weird brainwashed state when it came to our dad. She’s been acting so much cooler lately. But I guess when she gets freaked out or doesn’t know what else to do she reverts to being Daddy’s Little Robot.

  I hear her footsteps on the stairs, and I brace myself for the talk where I set her straight about our father, but she doesn’t come in. She just goes to her own room and closes the door hard behind her.

  Fourteen

  NICOLE

  Doing the laundry is a major ordeal with no running water to work the washing machine. I try to wear my clothes until they are really and truly dirty, and I try to make Izzy do the same. If she wants something washed before it’s dirty, she has to do it herself is the rule.

  So, before going down to the barely flowing creek to wash stuff, I sort through the clothes in the basket and take out anything that’s still wearable. Then I go down early, before it gets too hot, and I scrub each piece of clothing or towel by hand in the cold water, using only a tiny bit of castile soap that’s probably no good for the ecosystem, but when I tried doi
ng it with no soap, everything started to stink too badly.

  Then I bring them back up to the house to hang them on a line, where they dry stiff and scratchy.

  When I get to the front of the house, Izzy is sitting in the shade on the front porch, a T-shirt wrapped around her head like a turban, bent over her toenails as she paints them scarlet red.

  I haven’t talked to her since the rat incident last night, and I can tell she’s in a worse mood than usual, but I can’t help it. She’s being lazy while I’m scrubbing her dirty clothes. I drop the basket of wet laundry next to her.

  “You need to hang these on the line before they start to mildew.”

  She doesn’t bother to look up. “I’m busy.”

  “Your toenails can wait.”

  “Maybe I’ll get to it when I’m done here.”

  I’m hungry, and my shirt is soaked through from sweating and washing clothes, and I don’t want to fire up the stove to cook the endless supply of oatmeal we have. Nor do I want to eat the rat-tinged Cheerios any more than Izzy does. Not that I would ever tell her that.

  I want to slap her, I’m so angry.

  When I don’t move, she finally looks up at me. “What?”

  “Do it now. I have to make breakfast.”

  “I’m not eating anything from that rat-infested kitchen, so don’t worry about cooking for me.”

  “You’re being a spoiled brat.”

  Her face, so much like our mother’s with its wide cheekbones and dark slashes for eyebrows, tightens with anger the same way Mom’s does. Makes her look like a balloon about to burst.

  “I’m not the spoiled brat—you are. You’re the one who goes around acting like Dad appointed you to rule the universe.”

  I roll my eyes and turn to walk away.

  To my back she says, “You have no idea what he’s really like. You want to know the truth about Dad? He’s a cheater, and a liar, and probably a criminal.”

  I blink. I can feel a drip of sweat trickling down the center of my back, and the feel of it is so infuriating I can hardly stand it.

  “What are you talking about?” I spin around and ask as calmly as I can.

  Izzy finishes putting a last stroke of red on her little toe, then caps the bottle. She looks at me carefully. “Dad didn’t just retire from the army. He was forced to retire, because someone accused him of having an affair with one of his subordinate officers, and he could have been court-martialed.”

  “Just because someone says something happened—”

  “It did happen. I know. It was true, and he only got to retire instead of going to trial because the JAG office didn’t have enough proof.”

  “How do you know any of this?”

  “It doesn’t matter how I know.”

  “Then I don’t believe you. You’re just making it up to mess with me.”

  “Mom and Dad have been fighting over it for months, you idiot. If you didn’t walk around with your head up Dad’s ass, you might have noticed that our good old dad is a pervy creep.”

  I feel, suddenly, like all the blood has been drained out of me.

  “I don’t believe you,” I say again. But really I don’t believe myself.

  “That’s because you’re an idiot. The only reason Mom was willing to move up here was to get away from that whole scandal. And then she got here and saw what a dump this place is and she flipped out.”

  “Stop it! I don’t want to hear your lies.”

  I have to get out of the heat and away from Izzy. I go up the stairs, past where she is sitting, and inside the front door, but she follows. And when I pour a glass of water from the jug in the fridge, I turn around to find her standing there, waiting for me to respond.

  “Dad’s not even here to defend himself,” I say. “We shouldn’t be talking about this. If it’s true, then you can bring it up with him when he gets back.”

  “He’s a liar, Nic! Don’t you get it? He’s not just going to admit everything he did wrong, because that’s not part of the big lie he wants us to believe.”

  Tears are welling up in my eyes, but I refuse to cry in front of Izzy. I drink the water and put the glass beside the sink.

  I want to believe my dad is not the kind of person she’s describing. I want to believe he wouldn’t lie to us and he’s not a cheater. This is what I tell myself, but I’m starting to think Izzy is the only one here not lying to herself.

  After all, what about the fact that he wanted kids and Mom didn’t. Maybe that, and Mom’s abortion, created a divide between them that never did heal. Maybe all kinds of things have gone on in their past that we don’t know about, that we could never have imagined.

  I think of the letter Mom sent that Izzy still hasn’t seen. What Izzy is saying seems weirdly connected to it. Was this thing she’s talking about the reason Mom wants a divorce?

  I’ve kept the letter tucked into a cookbook that’s sitting on a shelf next to the refrigerator, so I go get it and bring it to her.

  She looks at the envelope with Mom’s handwriting.

  “What is this?”

  “A letter from Mom.”

  She gives me a suspicious look but opens it and starts reading. I can’t guess what she’s thinking by her blank expression as her gaze moves from line to line, but I know she has to be at least as upset by it as I was.

  Before I can stop her, she crumples the letter in her hand and throws it across the room. I don’t know why I think of going after it. I already know what it says, and it’s not like some treasured keepsake I’m going to read again and again.

  I stare at it stupidly, unable to think sensible thoughts. Some mean part of me wanted to hurt my sister, and I’ve succeeded. I know that much.

  “Fuck you,” she says, maybe to me, maybe to the letter, maybe to no one in particular, and leaves the house with a slammed door.

  After she is gone, the old house seems to shudder in the silence, and I’m left alone with all my questions and doubts.

  All the lectures Dad delivered to us over the years about honesty, all the preaching about honor and family and morality and right and wrong, and he cheated on Mom?

  A wave of nausea hits me.

  It can’t be true, I think.

  It can’t be true.

  Maybe he was framed, or the subordinate officer lied, or—

  No.

  I think about the past year or so and I can see how everything changed. The tension between my parents growing, my dad’s sudden retirement, his crazy idea to move us here to save us from Armageddon. It all makes sense when viewed with this additional piece of information. The puzzle takes shape, and it doesn’t form a pretty picture.

  Everything about my life that I thought was true is turning out to be a lie.

  ISABEL

  I don’t know where I thought I was going when I left the house. I just wanted to get the hell away.

  I want that stupid house to just disappear. I want to hit fast-forward on my life until I’m as far as I can get away from here.

  Mom not coming back makes no sense. That letter made no sense.

  I trudge through the woods on the shortcut trail to Sadhana Village, anger burning through me. How could she leave me here? How could she ever think that would be okay?

  I have the world’s stupidest parents, and I’m completely finished giving a crap what either of them thinks or wants. I go to the door where I know Kiva lives, but he’s not there. Some guy with a weird braided blond beard tells me I can find Kiva at the barn, so I head in the direction he points.

  Kiva is hauling a bale of hay into the field next to the barn for some goats when I find him. The goats stink, but I guess they’re kind of cute with their weird eyes and fat, round bellies. When he puts the hay down, one of the smaller goats immediately jumps on top of it and bleats.

  “Hey,” he says when he spots me.

  I’m on the other side of the fence, but a little black and white goat comes over to check me out.

  “Hey yourself. No p
un intended.”

  “You’ve got great timing. I just finished my barn duties.”

  “Cool. You have time to hang out?”

  He smiles. “Definitely. Come in here and I’ll show you my secret hideaway.”

  I follow him through the open barn door. He climbs a ladder that goes up into a loft area, so I follow him. There, we’re alone in the shadowy space, and it’s all set up for lounging. A mattress, blankets, an electric fan, a radio.…

  He crawls across the loft, flicks on the fan, and turns the radio on to some station that’s playing what sounds like old-time rock. From behind the radio, Kiva pulls out a fat, clear bottle of something.

  “Meet my friend Don Julio,” he says. “He’s here to help us celebrate the end of a hard day’s work.”

  He takes the big, round cork out of the bottle and produces two shot glasses, then fills each with tequila.

  I crawl over onto the edge of the mattress and get the exhilarated feeling that I’m finally entering a world I’ve chosen for myself, a world my parents can’t touch, a world where I make all the rules.

  When he offers me a shot glass, I know better than to admit I’ve never really gotten drunk before—that I’ve never even tasted tequila. I just know it’s what I want to do, so I drink it down fast, forcing myself not to react to the sharp, burning flavor.

  When he sees the face I make involuntarily, Kiva smiles.

  “It’s good stuff, right?”

  “Yeah,” I lie.

  He drinks his in one swallow and then pours us each another glass. Then another, when those are empty.

  I am listening to him talk about a trip he took to Mexico, where he first tasted tequila, when a fuzzy blanket starts to descend over my thoughts and I feel a giddy sense of not caring what happens next.

  When I try to tell him about how both of my parents are gone, that Nic and I are living alone—I don’t know how many shots I’ve had—four?—my words seem to get stuck on my thick tongue, and I start to laugh.

  “What did you say?” he says, laughing with me.

  “My parents. They’re gone,” I finally get out.

  “Gone where?”

  “I don’t know.”