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It was 7:43 in the morning on the most ordinary Saturday there had ever been, and Ollie Pemberton was fast asleep with his mouth open and one leg hanging off the bed, when his alarm clock went off like an angry wasp. He groaned, rolled over, and shouted the only thing a nine-year-old ever shouts at that hour."Mum! Five more minutes!" Nobody answered. Ollie lay there for a second, waiting. Usually by now his mum would have shouted something back about breakfast, or his little sister Poppy would have come thundering down the hallway to jump on his bed. But the house was quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that made the back of his neck feel funny. He got up.
Downstairs, the kitchen was empty. A single bowl of cereal sat on the table, the spoon still in it, the milk untouched, as if someone had simply vanished mid-breakfast. "Mum? Dad?" Ollie called. "Is anyone making toast, or am I doing this myself again?" No reply.
He checked behind the sofa, where Poppy liked to hide when she was meant to be getting dressed. Nobody was there — just the cat, sitting very still, looking extremely smug about something. "Where is everyone?" Ollie asked her. The cat said nothing because she was a cat.
He opened the front door in his pajamas and slippers and stepped out onto the pavement. The street stretched out in both directions, empty. No cars. No dog walkers. No, Mrs. Ahmed is doing her morning power-walk in her bright pink tracksuit. Every curtain on the street was drawn, as if the whole world had decided to sleep in at the same time. "Hello?" Ollie called. His voice sounded very small in the big, quiet street.
By the bins, he spotted a familiar face — well, a familiar football, anyway. Gerald. Half- deflated, with two googly eyes drawn on in permanent marker, Gerald had been Ollie's best friend since the great World Cup Final of the back garden, three summers ago.Ollie scooped him up. "Gerald. Thank goodness. Have you seen anyone?" Gerald, being a football, said nothing at all. But Ollie felt better just holding him.
Standing in the middle of the empty street, hugging a football to his chest, Ollie began to put the pieces together — the way you do when you are nine and have watched a great many films you probably weren't supposed to watch. "This is it, Gerald," he said gravely. "Something has happened. Something big." In his mind, he pictured it clearly: a silver spaceship hovering silently over the rooftops in the dead of night, a beam of light sweeping down the street, sucking up mums and dads and little sisters and grumpy neighbours one by one while everyone else slept on, none the wiser. "Aliens," Ollie whispered. "They've taken everyone. Mum. Dad. Poppy. Even Mr. Kowalski next door, and he never leaves his shed."
He looked down the long, empty road and felt the full and terrible weight of it settle onto his shoulders. "I'm the last kid on Earth."
For about four seconds, Ollie allowed himself to feel very sorry for himself indeed. Then he squared his shoulders, because he had, after all, seen the films, and he knew exactly what a person in his position ought to do. "Okay," he said, counting on his fingers. "One: secure a base. Two: find supplies. Three: defend the perimeter. Four: ration snacks." He looked seriously at Gerald. "Four is the most important one." And with that, Last Kid on Earth Ollie Pemberton marched off toward the back garden, football tucked under one arm like a soldier's kit bag, ready to survive.
The treehouse in the old oak tree had been built by his dad two summers ago, and it leaned very slightly to the left, in a way that everyone pretended not to notice. It would do perfectly as a base of operations. Ollie climbed up with an armful of important supplies: a torch, a garden trowel, a colander he'd taken from the kitchen to wear as a helmet, and a family-size bag of crisps he'd found at the back of the cupboard.
He laid it all out with great ceremony. "Torch — for signalling. Trowel — for digging and self-defence if it comes to that. Colander — helmet. Crisps — survival rations, approximately four hours' worth, if I'm strict about it." He put the colander on his head. It was several sizes too big and slid straight down over his eyes with a soft doink. He decided not to be strict about the crisps.
The morning passed in a blur of very important survival work. At quarter past eight, he tied a tea towel to the treehouse roof as a flag, claiming the garden formally for himself and Gerald. At twenty to nine, he dug a moat around the flowerbed with the trowel, working with the fierce concentration of a general planning a great battle, and only briefly wondering how cross his mum was going to be about the flowerbed once she got back from wherever the aliens had taken her. By five past nine, he was sitting in the treehouse writing in a notebook by torchlight — even though it was broad daylight outside, because it felt more dramatic that way. MY WILL, he wrote, in big, wobbly, extremely serious handwriting. If you are reading this I am probubly gone. Please give my Nintendo to my best friend Dylan and NOT my sister. She is not aloud my Nintendo. Also feed the cat. Her name is Cat. He read it back to himself and nodded, satisfied. "Very moving," he told Gerald. "Very brave." Gerald, propped against the treehouse wall, agreed by saying absolutely nothing, which Ollie found very restful.
He surveyed his small kingdom from the treehouse window, hands on his hips, a colander sliding down over one eye. "A leader must be brave," he announced to the empty garden. "A leader must be strong. A leader must." His stomach let out an enormous, echoing growl. "Have a snack?" he admitted, deflating slightly. He opened the crisp bag to find it was mostly crumbs. He tipped them straight into his mouth anyway, because a true survivor does not waste rations, even sad, crumby ones.
"A true survivor scavenges," Ollie told Gerald, climbing back down the tree with crisp dust on his pajamas. "Come on." He crept along the garden fence in an exaggerated crouch that was entirely unnecessary, seeing as there was no one around to hide from, but it felt appropriately dramatic. At the fence, he peered cautiously into the Kowalskis' garden next door. A washing line of socks flapped gently in the breeze — which, from a certain angle, in a certain light, looked exactly like pale, floating ghosts. "...Ghosts," Ollie breathed. He turned and ran, colander flying off his head, screaming the whole way back to his own garden.
He arrived at his own gate breathless and windswept. "Okay," he panted. "New plan. Fewer ghosts. More snacks." He crept into the kitchen through the back door like a spy on an important mission and opened the biscuit tin — the good one, the one that was usually strictly off-limits until after dinner. "Desperate times," he said solemnly, and took a biscuit. He sat on the kitchen floor with the whole tin balanced on his knees, and Gerald propped up on a chair beside him like a dinner guest, eating with the intense seriousness of someone in a war film. "For the survivors who came before me," he said, and took another bite.
"You know what I'll miss most, Gerald?" Ollie said, after a while, his voice a bit quieter now. "Sunday roasts. Poppy is stealing my roast potatoes. Mum shouting about mud on the carpet." On the fridge, held up by a magnet shaped like a strawberry, was a photo from last summer — Mum, Dad, Poppy, and Ollie, all squinting into the sun at the beach, all laughing at something nobody could remember anymore. Ollie looked at it for a long moment. The dramatic, adventurous feeling of the morning had quietly slipped away, and something else had crept in to take its place — something that felt a lot less fun. "I hope they're okay," he said, very small. "Wherever they are." He hugged Gerald a little tighter than necessary for a football.
That was when he heard it. A sound, faint and far away, drifting in through the open window. "...three... two..." Ollie's head snapped up. "Gerald. Did you hear that?" He scrambled to the window. There was nothing to see yet, but the sound was getting clearer, closer, unmistakable now. "ONE! READY OR NOT, HERE WE COME!" Ollie stood very still, his brow furrowed in confusion. "...That sounds a lot like—"
He burst out through the front door — and stopped dead. The entire street, which had been so empty and silent all morning, was suddenly full. His mum. His dad. Poppy. Mr. Kowalski from next door. Neighbours. Kids from school. All of them popping out from behind bins and hedges and parked cars, party poppers cracking in the air. "SURPRISE!" Ollie stood frozen on the doorstep, colander still crooked on his head, crumbs all down his pajamas. "Happy Birthday, love!" his mum called, laughing. "We've all been hiding since seven o'clock this morning for your surprise scavenger hunt!"
Poppy came skipping up, waving something in the air — his notebook. "Found your will in the treehouse," she said, grinning wickedly. "'Feed the cat, her name is Cat.' I'm framing this. Forever." "That was private, Poppy—" Ollie reached for it, going bright red, while everyone around him laughed until they cried.
By the afternoon, the whole street had turned into a proper party. A banner reading HAPPY 10TH, OLLIE hung between two lampposts, a long table groaned under sausage rolls and crisps (real ones, from a real packet, thank goodness), and everyone was laughing and chatting in the sunshine. Ollie stood in the middle of it all with a party hat balanced on top of his colander, Gerald tucked under one arm.
"So," his dad said, grinning, "last kid on Earth, was it?" Ollie thought about it for a second — the moat, the flag, the biscuit tin, the ghosts that turned out to be socks — and then he shrugged, completely unbothered, and grinned right back. "I mean. I built a base. Dug a moat. Wrote a will. Honestly?" He took an enormous bite of birthday cake. "Ten out of ten survival morning." And as the whole street laughed together in the sun, with Gerald propped beside him and the cat curled up napping in a nearby flowerbed, Ollie realised something. The world hadn't ended after all. It had just been throwing him a party the whole time.