Instructions for the End of the World (2 page)

There are woods on all sides, in a landscape of rolling hills that get higher to the west, as foothills turn into steep mountains. And even though this is a family home, I've never been here before because my dad wasn't close to my grandparents, or his grandparents, and no one has lived here full time since I don't know when. He's the only child, so he inherited the house last year when my grandfather died.

I tried to picture the place before we got here, but it's so remote that I could barely find the area on a map.

And Dad isn't exactly interested in the same details the rest of the world is. He told us only that it had a cellar for canned goods and a big detached garage added in the sixties, where Dad would keep all his interminable supplies that he stocks away like a crazed squirrel preparing for the world's longest winter. He said it was twenty acres in the Sierra foothills, mostly wooded but with a good clear area for a two-acre garden and some livestock, with its own underground well, a year-round stream, and a septic system.

So there is what I pictured, with my sad lack of useful information, and there is reality.

Our home for the foreseeable future is the most broken-down house I have ever seen outside of a horror movie. I can only hope the plumbing works, which occurs to me because Dad is big on lecturing us about living without plumbing—how we take running water and flushing toilets for granted, how we'd all be better off using an outhouse because it would toughen us up.

Mom will not, even for a night, use an outhouse.

She was born in Cambodia in the seventies, her earliest memories of starvation and hiding in the jungle. Once, in a rare moment of willingness to talk about herself, she told me how she saw her older brother shot in the back as they were escaping the massacre of her village by the Khmer Rouge. When she was six years old her parents were able to immigrate with her and her remaining siblings to the US, to Southern California, where they went on to have what must have felt like a shockingly normal suburban life when contrasted with what came before.

So it kind of makes sense to me that she will not consider accepting anything but middle-class living conditions. Even with Dad's plans to renovate this house to its former glory, it doesn't come anywhere near meeting her standards.

I think of our pristine ranch house in the desert, and I don't miss it, but I know my mother does. Our neighborhood always seemed to me like a place without a soul, like where zombies would choose to live if they had jobs and bank accounts. Yet I think Mom sees the suburbs as the kind of place murderous dictators never take over and slaughter millions of people. She kept our house spotlessly clean and free of clutter. And she is a fan of all things new and improved—two categories this house does not fall into.

Our arrival at our new home was preceded by ten hours of driving through the desert and the Central Valley. We left at oh four hundred hours, which means early morning, before daylight, in case you don't know military time speak. Mom drove her Honda with Izzy in the passenger seat, and I rode with Dad in his truck, which was towing the camper trailer full of the last of our household stuff. A moving company will be delivering the rest of it.

We got a five-minute tour of the house, during which I was relieved to see it does have an old, funky bathroom, along with a bedroom for each of us. There is even a decrepit sort of charm about the place, if you consider haunted houses charming. Then we were given our jobs—Izzy and Dad unloading the trailer, me finding dinner, Mom standing in the kitchen looking appalled.

She is so angry I'm not even sure she knows the words to express her rage. This is not a good sign, but Dad is a pro at ignoring female emotions. He's been doing it for years.

Finding dinner, to most people, might mean opening up the refrigerator or picking up a take-out menu. Not in my family. In the Reed household, we find dinner the old-fashioned way whenever possible. Or at least my dad and I do.

My mother and little sister have not signed on for this particular survivalist lifestyle. They have not learned to assimilate.

For my mother, survival mode isn't a lifestyle choice. It's what her family came to America to escape. And they did escape. From age six onward she grew up in Long Beach and learned to love all things American and middle class. She has no romantic notions about roughing it—which these days for her means skipping a weekly pedicure.

So I am the girl with the hunting rifle, forever traipsing into the woods hoping to take down something more impressive (and better tasting) than a squirrel. But this is not the right time of day for hunting, in the glaring heat of the late afternoon. This is when animals lie low, waiting for the heat to pass. After the sun dips below the ridgeline, there will surely be deer, rabbit, and other game, though early in the morning is best, when animals are first venturing out to find food for the day.

But Dad likes to make things hard for me. He wants to know I will survive no matter what happens. Without the son he always hoped for, he's forced to pass on his knowledge to me, since Izzy mostly refuses to participate in anything remotely outdoorsy.

I, on the other hand, am happiest surrounded by trees and sky.

Picking my way along a trail mostly overgrown with brush, I feel the cool metal weight of the barrel and stock in my hands. There are two emotions I waver between. One is reluctance to fire a gun, killing some poor animal that's just trying to live its life. In my head, I don't comply with every order just to please my dad.

In real life, though, I am my father's daughter, and the other feeling is pride. I am really good at hunting. I can shoot a duck out of the air with one quick shot, then clean the carcass and fry it up for dinner over an open fire, if I have to. As much as I sometimes get tired of my dad's constant prepping, I do like knowing I can take care of myself. I've never liked confronting the death of an animal, but I understand that it's how we get food to eat.

“Let's go find dinner,” he will say at the start of every hunting trip, and I go.

There is always that moment when I contemplate my options, consider saying no. Maybe declare myself vegetarian, just to see his reaction. But I never do. I am only a rebel in my mind.

The heat sears my skin and sends rivulets of sweat trickling down my back and my rib cage. My tank top sticks to me and I wish I had something cooler than jeans and boots on, though I know stinging nettle is all around and they are protecting me from the pain of that horrible weed, at least.

In the woods, my senses sharpen. Here on the edge of field and woods is my best chance to find game. I choose a tree trunk to lean against and grow still and quiet, slow my breathing, and wait. Gnats fly at my face, but I don't swat them away.

Soon enough, I get lucky and hear a rustling near a fallen tree. Easing closer, I see a lean brown hare, and I lift the rifle.

I have the hare in my sight when I hear a voice yell, “Stop!”

Startled, I nearly fire the gun, but my father's training kicks in. I force my fingers to ease off the trigger, lower the gun halfway as the hare disappears into the brush, and turn toward the sound of the voice.

A guy my age, wavy brown, too-long hair, is descending a tree. The way he's dressed—all faded brown and green—I might never have spotted him if he hadn't spoken up.

“That hare has babies,” he calls as he reaches the ground.

He looks at the rifle and hesitates, so I lower it all the way.

“That was my dinner,” I say under my breath, but with no feeling.

He comes closer and I tense, wondering who he is and why he's here on our property.

In a tree.

Watching me, apparently.

But as he nears, I see there is something about him that's wide open, honest, not the least bit threatening. He has gold-brown eyes that glow like his skin, as if he's somehow lit from within, a lantern shaped like a teenage boy. He is almost pretty, but with features that are a little too hard to be feminine. I watch him, my mouth dry and dumb, until he stops a few feet away and holds out his hand a little awkwardly, as if he's never done it before.

“I'm Wolf,” he says.

I look down at the extended hand, the incongruity of it, as if we are conducting a business deal in the woods. He does not look like the kind of guy who worries about formalities.

When I don't extend my hand to his, he turns his palm up and smiles.

“I bear no weapons,” he says. “Isn't that what the handshake was originally meant to communicate?”

I lower the gun until it points straight at the ground. “I'm hunting,” I reply.

Stupidly.

What kind of sixteen-year-old girl hunts for her dinner? is the question that forms in my head when I see myself through this Wolf's eyes. I normally don't worry much about such things, since I am strictly forbidden from dating or even contemplating the existence of boys (and what does it say about me, that I am willing to comply with such rules?), but this guy is like no one I've ever seen before.

“Right,” he says, one eyebrow arching as if this is some kind of joke I don't get. “What's your name?”

“Nicole. What were you doing in our tree?” I say.

“Nice to meet you, Nicole.” He looks up at the tree then, as if the answer to my question might be found in its branches. “I didn't realize it was your tree.”

My face burns and I have no idea what to say. I have accidentally become a bizarre caricature of a hick, standing here with my gun, bickering over property lines.

“You didn't answer my question.”

“I was just enjoying the quiet. It gets kind of crowded where I live sometimes.”

“Which is where?”

“Sadhana Village,” he says, his head tilting east. “You know it?”

I guess my blank look answers for me, because when I say nothing, he goes on. “It's adjacent to your property—a spiritual retreat center.”

“You mean that yoga place? We passed a sign for it. I didn't realize people live there.”

“Yeah, it's a self-sufficient village. There are about a hundred of us that live there full time.”

I blink at this, recalling my father's comments about the sign when we passed it on the road. He muttered about hippies and told me to stay the hell away from “those people.”

From this guy.

“Oh,” I say, as understanding dawns that I'm talking to a hippie. A real live one, not a character from a movie or a person in a Woodstock photo in my history textbook.

My stomach does a stupid little flip-flop and I feel, suddenly, like the uncoolest girl on the planet.

I become conscious, in an awkwardly sweaty way, that I'm alone with this disheveled guy in the middle of the woods. I've been around guys—normal guys who wear logo T-shirts and jeans and talk about football—but I've never been alone with one. Not really alone.

This guy Wolf has a gaze that makes me feel like he sees into my soul or something. He stares straight into my eyes without blinking, and there is an unnerving stillness about him. I've never been looked at quite like this.

I blink first, look down at the ground, then look back up to find him still staring. It's like no one has ever told him staring is rude.

“I have to go,” I say.

He nods, and his gaze finally drops to the rifle. “Right, your dinner.”

I don't say bye. I just head in the direction the hare ran. I won't find it, I know. I wouldn't have the heart to shoot it now even if I did.

Sometimes I think there is no uglier power than the kind that exists when I have a loaded gun in my hands—the power to destroy, with the pull of a trigger, all the complicated and miraculous work of creation.

It's the way of the world, my father would say, and our job is to come out on top in the game of survival.

But what if he's wrong?

What if he's wrong about everything?

It's the question that nags at me more and more these days.

 

Two

ISABEL

I am not going to live in this haunted old roach motel. I am not, I am not, I am
not.

My dad is the king of Crazyland.

He wears a Crazy hat and talks his Crazy talk, and for as long as I can remember, my dumb sister has believed him. I saw how crazy he was before I was even old enough to ride a bike, but Nic? She's brainwashed.

I remember him talking about how we're going to run out of food and water, back when I was a little kid, and I was like, Duh. We can just go to the store and buy more. Have you even seen Safeway? It's got enough food in it to last us forever. I was even sure that was the problem—that he'd never been inside a grocery store, because Mom does all the food shopping and cooking, or at least she used to.

So as I am glaring at the disgusting old craphole that Dad claims is going to be my new bedroom, I know he's gone from his old kind of crazy to a whole new level, complete with delusions that involve me. It started sometime soon after 9/11. When the whole world was freaking out, my dad was having a total mental break. This house, and this bedroom, are the final straw for me.

First off?

There is this dark brown wood paneling and the green shaggy carpet that smells like a dog's been smoking a pack a day in here, and I'm like, seriously?

No, really.

Seriously?

I can't say a word, because if I talk back I'll get an hour-long lecture and some horrible list of chores that will involve chopping wood and scrubbing the mangy toilet with a toothbrush. So I pop my gum, as my sole protest to this retarded situation.

I mean, seriously.

My hair is getting all puffy and weird from the heat in here, the land of no air-conditioning, and I want to find the nearest mirror to try to save it from oblivion, but I have already caught a glimpse of the bathroom, which I will not ever, ever, ever be using. It's got a green tub, a green sink, and … are you ready for this?