smile. Alex never smiles. He says “please” and “thank you” and “may I,” but he never smiles.
I wonder if he used to before.
We went back to the house, told Mom where we were going, got bags and bikes, and rode off, leaving Syl and Julie to clean and polish. Alex may not have smiled, but I sure did.
“I’ve been going to houses closer to town,” I told him as we began. “More suburby places, lots of houses near each other. I’ve been doing pretty well there.”
“Let’s try more isolated,” Alex said. “Farmhouses. Cabins in the woods.”
That annoyed me. He asked me along since I know the area. Then he rejected my suggestion about where to look.
I have a big brother, thank you. I don’t need the last living boy in America to treat me like a dumb kid sister.
“We’ll do better in the suburbs,” I said.
“How do you know?” he asked. “If you haven’t tried the country?”
For a moment I considered turning around and going back to Mrs. Nesbitt’s. Let Alex get lost on his own, since he was so determined to bike vast distances for no good reason whatsoever.
But it’s the middle of June, the temperature had to be close to sixty, and if you really concentrated, you could kind of make out the sun. And even if Alex was the most annoying, last living boy in America, he still was the last living boy in America. (I should come up with initials for that: LLBA or something.)
“All right,” I said. “You want country, we’ll try country.” I began biking a little faster than him, taking the lead. We rode along at a steady pace while I tried to decide how far we should go to satisfy him.
I’d like to say I didn’t know where we were going, but that wouldn’t be true. I had a flash of “I’ll show him” when I turned onto Hadder’s Road, and then made the left onto Murray, the back road to the high school.
We were there in fifteen minutes. The mound of bodies. Only in the month since I’d been there, the temperature’s gone above freezing, the snow has melted, and the bodies have started to decompose.
It was awful. The stench was unbearable, even outdoors. The bodies were bloated, the faces unrecognizable. As bad as my nightmares have been, the reality is far worse. And it had been my choice to go there, to punish Alex for going against my advice.
“I wondered where all the bodies were,” he said like he wondered where Mom hid the Christmas presents.
“I know people there,” I said. “Friends of mine are in that pile.”
Alex stopped his bike and bowed his head in prayer, which made me feel even worse. Especially since the sight and the smell sickened me and all I wanted to do was get as far away as possible.
“It’s hard to lose friends,” he said.
I figured that meant we could start biking again. “Have you lost friends, too?” I asked.
“Everyone has,” he said.
I thought that was a pretty lousy answer. He could have consoled me for my losses or he could have told me about his, but to point out the whole world is a rotten stinking mass of death didn’t make me feel any better.
And I resent being told the whole world is a rotten stinking mass of death. Every night Mom turns on the radio and gets stations from Pittsburgh and Nashville and Atlanta, and we get to hear, every single night, about their rotten stinking masses of death.
So I didn’t need Alex to point out that everyone on earth has lost friends.
The one good thing about getting mad was it made me bike even faster. This time, though, I paid attention to where we made our turns and what roads we were on. I had no desire to get lost with this particular LLBA.
One of us would spot a farmhouse, and we’d check it for signs of life—more carefully than I had in the past because it’s warmer and there’s a chance people inside weren’t using their woodstoves. But the first three we went to were empty. The only problem was they were empty inside as well. We took half a bar of soap and a quarter tube of toothpaste and not much more.
I considered resisting saying “I told you so” but gave in to the temptation. “I didn’t think we’d do so well out here,” I said. “People in the country stayed on longer, so they used up all their stuff.”
“You never know,” he said, which I took to mean “Shut up, you stupid girl.”
I wonder what Cinderella would have done with a wicked stepbrother.
We did better with house number four: a summer cabin you couldn’t see from the road. Most likely no one had used it the year before, so whatever was there was two years old. But that doesn’t matter when it comes to soap and paper towels. And because it was a summer house, there was lots of summer house reading. I grabbed a dozen paperback mysteries for Mom and some romances for Lisa and Syl.
“I’m sorry there are no Latin books for you,” I said.
“I’m sorry we can’t eat books,” he said.
If Alex knew how to smile, maybe he would have smiled then, and I would have known it was a joke and smiled back. But he doesn’t and he didn’t and I didn’t.
We kept biking up that road, stopping at a couple more cabins, but mostly finding more of the same. One house, miraculously, had a half box of disposable diapers. Syl and I have been the diaper service since Gabriel’s arrival, and even a dozen disposables looked like treasure.
Our trash bags still looked empty, so we kept on. The houses were getting more isolated, and I was glad to have Alex by my side as we searched.
I can’t say the last house we went to was going to be the last one of the day. Alex hadn’t said we should stop looking, and every half roll of toilet paper will make our lives a little bit better. Maybe we would have kept on for another hour or two.
And neither one of us noticed anything particularly different about the final house we went to. I could tell right away it wasn’t a summer house, but that didn’t mean anything.
We used Alex’s trick of throwing a few pebbles against a door and then running for cover in case anybody started shooting. No one did, so we got closer and looked through the windows for signs of life. When we thought it was safe, we tried the doors, which were locked, and threw a stone through the living room window.
The sound of shattering glass has replaced doorbells in my life.
It was Alex’s turn to stick his hand through the window and unlock it. I love breaking in, but that’s my least favorite part, since there’s a part of me that’s sure whoever owns the house is waiting to chop off my hand. I’ve had lots of nightmares about that.
But no one came at us with an ax, so we climbed in.
We both smelled death right away. It was like the mound of bodies only worse because the house was all closed up and the smell had intensified.
“Please,” I said. “Let’s go.”
“Wait outside if you want,” Alex said.
But I knew what I didn’t see would frighten me more than what I did. “I’ll be okay,” I said. I’ve told bigger lies.
Alex took my hand. I could see his was bleeding. “You cut yourself,” I said to hide the fact that I was shaking from fear and excitement at the touch of a boy’s hand.
“Just a scratch,” he said, but he pulled his hand from mine. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get blood on you.”
I nodded. Alex began walking toward the smell and I followed him.
The body was in the kitchen. Once it had been human, sitting in the chair next to where we found it. Or what remained of it, some torn clothing, a belt, some flesh and muscle, hair, bones, an eyeball. By its side was a shotgun, and lying a few feet away was a dead pit bull.
I screamed.
“Don’t look,” Alex said, but I couldn’t avert my eyes. He walked around the corpse, took a red plaid vinyl tablecloth and flung it on top. Then he held me until I stopped shaking.
“I think we’re in luck,” he said. “The dog died recently, maybe even today. It’s been eating its owner for a while now, but it finally starved to death. There’s probably dog food if we look.”
“I don’t know if Horton will eat dog food,” I said.
“Not for Horton,” Alex said. “For us.” He began searching through the kitchen cabinets. Sure enough, there were a couple of cans. Dinner, I thought, grateful that Alex hadn’t suggested we eat the dog.
