Dianne Salerni - The Eighth Day

“Oh, crap!” Jax yelled, braking.

Will Smith and his dog had not been alone in that movie. There’d been other creatures that lurked in dark places and came out at night to kill.

It took three tries for Jax to break through the glass doors of the Walmart with a concrete parking block. Inside, only dim emergency lights were on. They provided illumination to see by but left enough of the store in shadow to make Jax skittish.

He filled a shopping cart with supplies he’d seen people grab before snowstorms or hurricanes and during zombie movies. With one hand on his bike and another on the shopping cart, he walked home, keeping an eye out for people and monsters. At home, he carried his stolen items upstairs, thinking that the second floor would be easier to defend. He bypassed the shed as too easy a target and hid his bike and the Walmart cart under a bush behind the house. In apocalyptic movies, there were always stray survivors who’d steal what you had.

Hours passed while he watched out the windows. He would have been happy to see even A.J. Crandall, but he saw no people, no animals, no zombies—nothing.

The day weighed heavily on him, time passing at a crawl. He wished they had a clock that ticked—or anything that made a sound. Oddly, he felt drawn to Riley’s room—as if he missed him, which was impossible. He poked through his guardian’s stuff, kicking dirty clothes across the floor, opening drawers, and peering at the photo of an unknown girl tucked into a mirror. But there were no answers here any more than there’d been at the Ramirez house.

He had to force himself to eat a cold can of stew and drink a bottle of water. It was rare for Jax to have no appetite, although it had happened the day his dad never came home . . . and the day they’d found the car in the river . . . and the day Riley Pendare had brought him here .

When it grew too dark to see anything outside but the creepy glow of the streetlights, he pulled the curtains shut and curled up miserably on his bed to wait for dawn. In the morning, he’d risk going out to look for other survivors.

His final thought, as he drifted into a troubled sleep, was that he didn’t want to be the last human on earth.

“JAX, GET UP!You’re gonna miss the bus.”

The pounding on Jax’s bedroom door caused his heart to thump in panic for a reason he couldn’t remember. A bad dream?

“Jax! I gotta get to work. I can’t drive you in.”

“Okay, okay!” He rubbed his eyes and sat up. Across the room, his open closet door gave him a view of the water bottles and canned food stacked waist high inside.

Not a dream.

Outside, a motorcycle engine revved up.

“Riley!” Jax shouted. He leaped out of bed and stumbled down the stairs and out the door in time to see his guardian pull away from the house.

Jax stood on the stoop and stared at the neighborhood with his mouth hanging open.

Across the street, a woman stuffed a toddler into a car seat. An old man walked past the house with two dogs. Mr. Blum watered his sod, which had gone dangerously brown, while overhead a jet cut a white swath across the sky.

Holy crap, it was the Spongebob episode after all. They all left town for a Jax-free day and now they’re back.

He grabbed hold of the doorknob to steady himself.

I broke into a Walmart!

Jax scrambled upstairs. He pulled on clean clothes and closed the closet door. When he ran down to the kitchen, he found bread on the counter, along with new containers of peanut butter and jelly.

It figures Riley goes shopping when I’ve got a room full of stolen canned goods.

He made the bus by a hair. All the usual riders were on board and nobody was talking about mass disappearances. Billy was engrossed in reading The Fellowship of the Ring , and Jax sat down beside him.

Did it really happen?

Jax looked out the window as the bus passed through town. Walmart employees were nailing boards over the broken glass on their front door.

He sank lower in his seat. It happened.

In first-period science class, his hand shook as he wrote his name and the date on a lab paper.

“Is the party on?” Billy slid into the chair beside him.

“Riley said no,” Jax lied. He’d never asked.

“Dang it. Well, at least come to my house for dinner tomorrow after school.”

“Sure,” Jax mumbled. Then he lifted his head. “Tomorrow’s Saturday.”

“Tomorrow’s Friday.” Billy tapped the date on Jax’s paper. “Today’s Thursday, dude.”

Jax stared at Billy. Yesterday had been Thursday. He looked across the aisle. “Hey, Giana. Is today Thursday or Friday?”

Giana tossed a lock of wavy brown hair over her shoulder. “Thursday. All day.” She glanced at her friend Kacey, who rolled her eyes and laughed.

“O-kay.” Jax erased the date roughly, almost ripping the paper.

Today was Thursday, the day after his birthday. The day he’d broken into a Walmart hadn’t happened . Still, when the classroom door opened again, he flinched, expecting cops. But it was just the Donovans coming in late, which they did once or twice a week.

As Tegan walked past Jax’s desk, she stopped, and Thomas plowed into her. Jax looked up to find both twins staring at him. Tegan sniffed and glanced at her brother. “What?” Jax demanded. Maybe he hadn’t showered this morning—or on the day that no one else remembered—but he didn’t think he stank.

Tegan nudged her twin with an elbow, and Thomas nodded, then went to his seat by the window. Normally he pulled his hood up over his head and took a nap during first period, but today Jax was uncomfortably aware of Thomas’s gaze on him throughout class.

It matched the one he sensed on the back of his neck, coming from Tegan.

When Jax got home from school, he verified the date on his computer. They had electricity again, and the refrigerator worked, as did his phone. It really was Thursday, but his closet was full of Walmart goods. The alarm on his clock was switched off, which he’d done himself when he woke up yesterday.

Jax retrieved a plastic storage tub from the top shelf of his closet. Opening this was a last resort when he was miserable, because it was a toss-up whether it made him feel better or worse. Inside were his mother’s jewelry, a bottle of her perfume, and a scrapbook she used to keep, which contained photos of the Aubrey family until Jax was six. Neither he nor his dad had kept it up after she died. Four months ago, Jax had added his father’s Rolex watch to the sad little collection, along with a wooden box about twelve inches long and six inches wide. Since Jax had been living here, he’d opened the tub only once, to take out this wooden box and make sure Riley hadn’t stolen the contents.

Not long after moving in, Jax had come home from school and found Riley and A.J. talking intently in the kitchen. On the table between them lay something Jax recognized. “Hey!” He lunged across the room. “That’s my dad’s!”

Riley snatched the object off the table before Jax could reach it. “No, it’s mine.” Then he held the dagger out for Jax to see, hilt up, blade down—the way someone would hold a cross to stop a vampire.

Jax faltered. Riley was showing him the knife like he expected Jax to recognize it wasn’t his father’s. “My dad had one like that,” he said, half in accusation, half in his own defense.

“I know he did. But this one’s mine.” Then Riley slipped it into a sheath on his hip. It was an odd thing to be wearing, unless he was going hunting. And a decorative dagger like that would be a strange choice for skinning rabbits and gutting deer—or whatever hunters did.