The Last 8

by Laura Pohl

  I breathe in, breathe out, trying to remember how to function like a normal human being.

  Nothing about this feels real.

  Abuelo shakes his head. “I’m going to try again. But the best thing would be for me to head over there,” he says, his eyes landing on Abuela for a second.

  “Carlos,” Abuela says, her tone harsh. “You can’t fly right now. Those things just came from the sky.”

  Abuelo and I exchange a look. We know it’s dangerous, but we understand each other. Our place isn’t here—it’s up there, with the airplanes.

  “Okay.” I nod.

  Abuela turns to me, her eyebrows creased and her expression heated. “You can’t mean that you agree with him going?”

  “We have to do something,” I tell her.

  I don’t know how to react. Panic? Fear? I’m not sure I can handle these emotions right now, so I push everything back and focus on what is normal, on what is left.

  Yet here we are. More and more pictures and headlines pop up on the TV, but I’m no longer listening.

  Abuelo turns to me, knowing that I’m analyzing every piece of information we have. It’s the first rule of flying—keep your head level, even when everything is going to hell. And I’m trying. I’m trying hard.

  “They’ll have information,” I say. I shake my head a little, biting my lower lip. “It’s a military base. They’ll know what to do.”

  This is what I repeat to myself—the government should know what to do. They’ll figure out what is happening. They’ll have instructions.

  I breathe in. And out.

  “No.” Abuela shakes her head vehemently. “Carlos, you can’t be serious about this.”

  I meet Abuelo’s gaze. His expression is dark, unreadable, but we both know that our best chance of finding out what’s really happening is Malmstrom Air Force Base. Besides, it’s not like they’re going to turn away one of the best pilots in the country.

  “Miriam, it’s the only way,” he says, and his words are final.

  The TV is still endlessly playing images of the spaceships crossing the sky, slowing down as they land. Cell phone cameras, Snapchat, and Instagram all contribute to the images on the screen. Who could’ve imagined that an alien landing would be so well documented?

  “Let me talk to him,” I whisper to Abuela, and she glares at me, knowing that I’m not going to try to convince him not to go.

  She walks out of the room and heads down the hall to the kitchen, her features still stern. I turn to Abuelo, uneasiness settling in my stomach.

  “What do you think will happen?” I ask. For once, I want him to lie to me. To pretend that everything we’ve ever known isn’t about to change, that everything is going to be just fine.

  But then again, he wouldn’t be my abuelo if he did.

  “I don’t know, mi amor,” he says, his voice soft. He reaches out across the table and strokes my hair. “But we’ll get answers, I promise you that.”

  I give him a half-smile as he gets up and unlocks the cabinet in the corner. He grips his Winchester 9422 rifle, the reliable model that we always kept around the house. Abuelo never believed that it would actually bring us safety, but it was good for shooting at the crows when the scarecrow wasn’t doing its job. He lays it over his desk and piles up ammunition next to it.

  “Take it,” he says, looking at me firmly.

  “Let me go with you.”

  He shakes his head immediately. “No, Clover. I’m going there on my own. I’ll bring back whatever news I find out.”

  “You know I can fly better than half those guys at the base,” I say, my shoulders tense. “If I go with you—”

  “You’ll leave your abuela alone on the farm. Is that what you want?”

  I’m silent for a beat. “You know I can fly. You know I can fight.”

  “Clover, you don’t have a license. And your abuela would kill me if I put you in danger like that.”

  “I’m no use down here.”

  Down here. On the ground. He knows it as much as I do.

  I want to do something, to be of help, to get out there. The one thing I don’t want to do is sit back and wait for news. I can’t take that.

  “If something happens, I can help,” I argue.

  He smiles. “I know you want to. But you’re not even seventeen. They won’t let you, even if I would.” He shakes his head. “No. You stay here and watch over the farm and your abuela. I’ll be back with news.”

  He holds out the Winchester to me. After a moment, I take it.

  “Just in case,” he says, tapping one of my cheeks. “It won’t come to that.”

  I nod my head, gulping down hard. Whatever happens, I need to be prepared. I can’t let myself panic.

  “Ready?” he asks.

  I nod again. “Ready.”

  “I’ll be back before you miss me,” he says, kissing my forehead. “Te amo.”

  “Yo también.”

  He smiles one more time before heading down the hall to the kitchen. I take the rifle up to my room, sit down on my bed, and listen to the murmur of conversation downstairs, to Abuela’s angry whispers, all in vain. Finally, I hear the porch door bang closed, and a few minutes later, the motor of the Cessna 400 roars to life. I don’t bother to get up; I can hear when the plane takes off.

  Abuela climbs upstairs and pauses in the doorway.

  “At least he didn’t take the Beechcraft,” she states matter-of-factly.

  I almost manage a smile, but my lips are dry and cracked, and it feels like I’m forcing a muscle.

  She walks into the room and sits next to me on the bed. My room is simple, like the rest of our house. Everything we have goes into my college savings or the planes in the backyard, and we can’t afford extra luxuries. The best part of my room has always been the window, where the view stretches out over our own small corn field and the surrounding wheat fields. It ends at the faraway mountains, and where my telescope sits propped in front of it. At night, the city lights blink in the distance, but I can see the Milky Way.

  “Your abuelo is impulsive, Clover,” she says, pulling my hair away from my shoulders and letting it fall down my back. “Sometimes that’s not the best way to deal with things.”

  “He’s right about going there,” I respond defensively.

  “He would also have been right if he had stayed here.”

  I meet her eyes, which are a softer shade of brown than mine. My mother has her eyes, based on the few pictures I’ve seen. She left me on her parents’ porch and never bothered to come back.

  I bite the inside of my cheek as a strange feeling of breathlessness fills my chest. Nothing feels real anymore. It’s like the ground has been taken from beneath my feet, and I’m not sure how to adjust to a place with no gravity.

  It feels pointless to ask the question on my mind, but I do anyway. “Do you think something big will happen?”

  “It’s very likely.”

  “Good or bad?”

  Abuela doesn’t answer for a while, but finally, she sighs. “It’s not up to us, amor. It’s up to them.”

  Them. Whatever they were. Whatever they came here for.

  “And if it’s bad?”

  Abuela shrugs slightly, her fingers tangling in my hair. “Then we do what we always do.” She smiles and pushes her rosary into my hands. The beads are heavy and made of wood. Her fingers always reached for them when she needed comfort. And in a way, that’s what I need now. I clutch them tightly, looking up at her.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “Survive.”

  She kisses my brow lightly, and we stare out the window, looking at a horizon that will never be the same again.

  Chapter 3

  For the first few hours, I’m tense, my muscles brimming with adrenaline, waiting to be put into acti
on. But then night falls, and I’m forced to go to sleep, even though I’m restless and shaking in bed.

  When I wake up the next day, it’s as if everything is normal, except that we can’t leave the house. Little by little, Abuela and I settle into a new routine. I check the news on my phone and on television, but even with the president’s statement, there isn’t much. Everyone is telling us to stay calm while they investigate and to stay inside while everything is sorted out. Abuela cooks and I do the dishes, and we feed the chickens in the morning. We count the items in our pantry, organizing them by type. I help her vacuum the living room, and the afternoon goes by in a daze, with no sign of gleaming silver in the sky.

  Every night, we talk to Abuelo through the satellite phone. He tells us what he can, which isn’t much. But it’s better than nothing. At least they’re doing something. They’re investigating. But, like us, they’re also waiting for something bigger to happen.

  Slowly, a whole week trickles by since the spaceships first arrived, and I miss going to school. I wonder if I should email the MIT guy, but I’m sure that they have bigger things to worry about there, too.

  That night, when it’s time to call Abuelo, I realize that the batteries to the satellite phone are dead.

  “Abuela!” I shout from the kitchen. “Where are the batteries?”

  “Third drawer!” she yells back. “And don’t shout at your elders!”

  I ignore the jab, rummaging through the kitchen, but there’s no sign of any batteries. I try turning on the phone again, but it’s no use. I head to the living room, where Abuela is watching a telenovela. The world is ending, but they still manage to air a telenovela. I guess everyone needs comfort, in one way or another.

  “No new batteries,” I tell her.

  She looks up from the television, frowning. “Are you sure?” she asks. “If I get up and find them, Dios ayúdame—”

  “I just looked,” I answer. “I could try to get them from town, but…”

  I can’t go into town during a full lockdown, when everyone is being told to stay in their houses. But if I don’t go, we can’t talk to Abuelo. We won’t have him on call if something happens.

  “I could go get them tomorrow,” I finish lamely. “It’ll be a quick trip.”

  “I don’t like this, Clover.”

  “I don’t like it, either,” I answer. “But getting batteries would be good. We can make a list of other supplies that I could try to find.”

  Slowly, she nods and goes back to the television. She’s mulling it over. I’ll probably get an answer tomorrow.

  * * *

  It’s the middle of the night when a noise at my window wakes me. I jump from my bed, my palms sweaty.

  The noise comes again, and I realize it’s a rock. I go over to the window, gripping the rifle, and poke my head out, only to find a boy standing in the yard.

  Noah smiles when he sees me.

  “What are you doing here?” I hiss, shoving the rifle aside. “Abuela will kill you!”

  “You aren’t answering your phone!” he replies in the same whispered tone. “I wanted to see if you’re okay.”

  “I am. Now leave.”

  Noah shakes his head. The moon shines on him and his red pickup truck, parked next to the house. He has chocolate in one hand, a six pack of beer in the other. A peace offering.

  “Do you have a death wish?” I demand. “We’re both dead if Abuela finds you here.”

  “I just want to talk.”

  I purse my lips, shaking my head, but then he raises the box of chocolates.

  “Fine.”

  Noah grins. I climb out of the window and onto the roof, wrapping my shirt tighter around me. He climbs onto his truck and manages to pass me the chocolate and the beer before he hauls himself up next to me. The house is silent beneath us, the sky clear and the stars bright above us.

  I open the box of chocolates and start eating. Noah opens a beer and looks at me like I’m a problem he can’t solve.

  “Why didn’t you pick up your phone?” he finally asks. “I called like six times.”

  “The signal keeps going in and out,” I tell him. “Abuelo gave us the satellite phone before he went to the air base, but the batteries died.”

  Noah sits beside me, drinking, but doesn’t say anything.

  “Why did you come here?” I ask.

  He takes another gulp of his beer. Even in the dark, it’s easy to see why so many girls think he’s one of the hottest guys at school. He has strong arms, blond hair, and gray-blue eyes that remind me of the lake on winter days.

  “I wanted to talk to someone who makes sense,” he finally says, shaking his head a little. “I’ve watched the news, but Dad won’t stop pretending that nothing’s wrong. And then Mark decided that he was going to throw an alien welcoming party tonight.”

  I snort, and he grins.

  “All I could think of was to call you. And that you’d know exactly what to say in this situation.”

  “That you have shitty friends?”

  Noah laughs, and I touch his arm to remind him not to make too much noise.

  “That too.” Noah sighs, looking at the crops and the lonely scarecrow near our house. “It’s just absurd. I wanted to be with someone who would be reasonable when the rest of the world was going haywire.”

  “I was holding a rifle when you scared the shit out of me with your rock throwing.”

  He laughs again. “There you go.”

  I turn back to the box of chocolates, eating another, tasting the sweetness on my tongue.

  “Nothing makes sense.” I shake my head. “You know that, right? Something bad is going to happen.”

  “Such an optimist.”

  “That’s why I don’t have any friends.”

  “You don’t have any friends because you’re an asshole.”

  I laugh harder than I should. And it’s strange, sitting up here with Noah, because he might be the only person in the world, with the exception of my grandparents, who knows me for who I am.

  “I always saw past that anyway,” he says.

  “I thought we weren’t going to talk about this.”

  He glances sideways at me. It’s barely been a month since we broke up. It’s not that I don’t miss him. It’s just that I always liked him better as a friend than a boyfriend.

  Noah isn’t a bad person. But he demanded too much, all the time. The attention, the gestures, the feelings that, for me, weren’t really there. In the end, I never had romantic feelings for him. I’ve never had romantic feelings for anyone.

  Noah chews on the inside of his cheek, his gaze lost in the cornfields. We sit together in silence for a while, as I look at the stars. Pegasus is bright above us, and Ursa Major stretches out until I almost can’t see it anymore.

  “I just…” Noah starts, but he doesn’t seem able to find the right words to finish his sentence. I meet his eyes in the semidarkness. “I kind of knew it was coming. I just didn’t think it would be so soon.”

  I turn to him sharply, not wanting to hear anything else. But he’s a little too drunk, and it feels a little too much like the end of the world, so I don’t stop him.

  “It’s the reason I fell for you,” he says quietly. “We’re small here. Everyone goes to college and comes back, gets married, has their kids. It’s never bigger than that. But you, Clover, you’re big. You cut through the skies and talk about going to Mars. And I knew you were going to leave one day to do these big things, and I kind of hoped you’d take me with you.”

  His confession comes out in a half-drunk drawl, his voice quiet and breaking.

  “I should go,” he says, putting down his second bottle of beer.

  “You’re drunk. You can’t drive home.”

  “You think I might crash into one of the aliens?” He laughs a little. “I
shouldn’t have come here.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He looks at me, and our eyes meet again. “Sorry” is never going to fix the mess our relationship is. In a way, Noah is right—I’ll never fit in here. Not because I’m the only Latina in our little town in northern Montana, and not because I’ve always liked stars more than I like people, but maybe because I’ve never truly found a place that would welcome me exactly as I am.

  “I know,” he says.

  “Don’t mope. You look pathetic.”

  That gets another laugh from him. “I love you.”

  I let the words fall into the silence of the stars. I can’t lie to him again.

  He reaches out and pushes back a strand of my dark hair, looking at me as if there were nothing else in the entire world. He leans in, but I quickly turn away.

  He freezes, wincing. “I really should go.”

  “You’re drunk, and there’s no way you’re driving.” I glare at him and get up. The roof tiles are shaky beneath my feet. “Go sleep on the couch.”

  He looks surprised.

  “But I’m talking to Abuela first.”

  “I’d rather face the aliens,” he mutters.

  Carefully, we climb down from the roof and into my room. Noah heads downstairs, and I make my way to Abuela’s room. She’s not asleep. She must have heard us talking.

  “Noah is here,” I say quietly.

  In the darkness, I see her nod. “I thought he would try to talk to you again.”

  “We’re friends, Abuela.”

  “Not to him,” she says, and it’s like a stab of pain. “He can sleep on the couch.”

  “Thank you.”

  She nods again, and I close the door. This feels like a special kindness from her. Usually, she’d happily chase Noah out the door. I try not to let myself think that it really does feel like the world is ending.

  Noah is already on the couch when I go downstairs, his head leaning against a crocheted pillow, his eyes closed. There’s just enough moonlight coming through the curtains that I can discern his features.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper to him.