The Girl at the End of the World

by Richard Levesque

  “As of now, all traffic in and out of Los Angeles International Airport has been grounded. Flights in the air that originated from this airport in the last several hours are being diverted from their schedules and landing as quickly as is safe. Anyone who has been to the airport today is urged to isolate him or herself completely and seek medical attention once it is determined that this is the best course of action. I can take a few questions.”

  I remember a moment’s chaos then as all the reporters fought for the man’s attention. The questions and answers that followed helped me fill in the details, all with Jen sobbing in my ear over the phone.

  The man who’d suffered the attack at Dodger Stadium had been named Harmon Kirby, and he’d been a baggage handler at LAX. The gray haired man insisted that it wasn’t accurate to describe Kirby as “patient zero,” but I didn’t quite know what that meant. Apparently, Kirby and other baggage handlers had been exposed to something coming off a plane—no one knew for sure what, or which plane, or how long ago. Kirby’s shift had ended early, but three other baggage handlers had died this evening, all the same way, all at the airport. Several planes had taken off before the Health Department had shut the airport down.

  I remember a reporter asking with some outrage if the gray haired man knew whether any planes had landed elsewhere without the passengers being notified, and the man in front of the microphones had just stared at him for a second before answering. “It is highly likely,” he said quietly. Then, amid the stir of voices and shouts from reporters that followed, he tried to calm everyone down, tried assuring them that every effort was being made to track every plane and every passenger that had passed through the airport that day and in the days before.

  I knew as well as those reporters and everyone else watching that it wasn’t likely to make a difference.

  “Have they said what it was?” I asked Jen. “What killed them?”

  She sniffled for a few seconds, and then I heard her catch her breath. “They don’t know for sure. They were talking before, before I called you, saying they think it might be a kind of fungus.”

  “Fungus?” I repeated, incredulous. I’d never heard of a fungus that could do something like this. Mushrooms were a kind of fungus. And athlete’s foot. Fungus didn’t kill you, didn’t make your head burst open. “How is that possible?”

  “I don’t know,” Jen said. “They’re just guessing, though. Said the spores were inhaled and then it grew in the sinus cavity and eventually built up so much pressure that…that…”

  And then she was sobbing again.

  I don’t know why I wasn’t. Too scared, maybe. All I could think of was the cloud of dust that had emerged at the stadium when those little pods had burst open at the ends of the stalks poking from the dead man’s face. Spores. Probably millions of them. Microscopic little seeds that would spread on the air. And be breathed in by anyone nearby. The woman with the blood-spattered blouse had probably thought herself infected with something when she’d been sprayed, but she’d really been fine at that point. But after the stalks popped up and the bulbs burst…

  “Scarlett?” Jen managed to choke out.

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t want you to die.”

  I said nothing. I had no words.

  “Get your mom to take you to the emergency room.”

  “They said to isolate yourself if you’ve been exposed.”

  “Don’t listen to them,” Jen said. “Go.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, my voice just above a whisper. “I don’t know.”

  All I could picture was my face breaking open and two white stalks popping out while my mom drove me to the hospital. And the car filling with dust as the bulbs burst open. And my mom breathing them in.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “To the hospital?”

  “I just have to go.”

  “Scarlett?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Just be okay. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said and clicked off. The phone’s screen went dark, its picture of Jen blinking into blankness.

  I watched the press conference for a few more seconds, and then dialed my dad’s number. It was late, but someone should have answered. The phone just rang and rang, each ring seeming to make my heart jump a little in my chest as I listened for that slight change in the silence that would precede someone saying hello. It never came, not even the answering machine. They were probably on the phone and ignoring their call waiting, maybe even trying to call me at the same time I was calling them. I hung up and waited a few seconds before trying my dad’s cell. Voice mail kicked in almost right away.

  “Daddy, it’s me. I just wanted to make sure you were all right…you and the boys and…everybody. I’m okay. Just scared. There’s a lot of stuff on TV about what happened. It’s… Just call me back. Okay? Love you.”

  I stared at the phone for a few seconds, willing it to ring, but it stayed silent in my hand. So I clicked it back into life and called my mom’s phone downstairs. It rang twice before she picked up, and as it rang I walked to my bedroom door to twist the lock.

  “Scarlett?” my mom said, panic in her voice.

  “I’m okay, Mom.” I tried desperately to sound calm, and I think I pulled it off. “Are you still up?”

  “Yes. Why?” She sounded like she’d been crying and may still have been when the phone rang. Now she was pulling it together for me, but just barely.

  “You saw the press conference?”

  “We did.”

  “You should leave.”

  “What? No!” Now the panic rose again, and the tears, too.

  “Mom, you should leave,” I insisted. “You and Anna need to get in the car and go somewhere…go to a hotel or something.”

  “Absolutely not! We’re not leaving you alone. Not now.”

  “But they said anyone who’s been exposed should—”

  “I don’t care what they said! I’m not leaving you. We’re taking you to the doctor in the…no, we should take you now. Are you still dressed?”

  “I’m not going to the emergency room, Mom. I’m not. I don’t want you and Anna in danger.”

  “We’re not going to be in danger. Anna can stay here. Or…or I’ll call the paramedics! They’ll take you. You’ll be safe at the hospital.” Her every word was a plea, and I had a hard time listening to her sound so desperate. But I knew I was right, and wasn’t about to be talked out of it.

  I took a breath. “I’m not going, Mom. If I’ve…if I’ve got it…” Bravery could hold out only so long. My voice cracked. “If I’ve got it, then I’ve got it, and I don’t want anyone else to get it. Not you or Anna or some poor paramedic or doctor who never even met me.”

  We argued back and forth for a while. I expected at any moment to hear her pounding on my door, but she never did. I also worried that she might be writing instructions for my sister to use the other phone to call an ambulance, and I paced back and forth from the door to my window to listen for sirens or look for flashing lights, but none came.

  On my television, the news conference had ended, and the harried looking anchors at the news desk were re-stating what had already been said. Then I noticed a pause in what they were saying and stopped listening to my mom for a few seconds as I focused on the screen. Behind the newscaster, the words “Mystery Illness” had been displayed in bold red letters. Now they were replaced with “Another Death.”

  “Someone else died,” I said, cutting my mother off in mid-sentence.

  “What? Who?”

  “Just…just watch the news for a second, okay?”

  She remained silent as I turned up the volume.

  “—not yet confirmed, but this appears to be similar to the deaths of Harmon Kirby and the other baggage handlers. We do not yet have an ID on this victim, but there is video from the scene.” The newscaster was a middle-aged man with perfect hair and a perfect voice, but right now he looked like he’d just bitten into a clove of garlic or a w
hole lemon. His face lost that measured composure he and others like him always had. Now he paused for a beat and then said, “I’m told this is raw video just received in our newsroom and is extremely graphic. But we’re going to show you the scene.”

  Video filled the screen, showing a familiar enough scene for LA. Several people jostled against each other outside of a nightclub for a second or two, smiles on their faces. Then a commotion began at the edges of the crowd. Some people screamed; others just looked confused and alarmed. Within seconds, people scattered. The person holding the cell phone camera took a few steps backward and stopped as others ran past. And then the camera focused on a woman lying on the sidewalk just outside the velvet rope that had kept would-be clubbers on the street.

  I knew what was going to happen to her but still winced at the image.

  No one approached the woman as she lay there twitching.

  They know, I thought. Everyone’s been watching the video from the stadium. They know what’s going to happen as well as I do.

  And then it did. The woman’s face, far from the camera and not clearly focused, suddenly turned into a red blotch. People in the crowd screamed, and the man holding the camera swore loudly.

  My mother gasped. I’d forgotten for a second that she was still on the phone.

  “Now the stalks,” I said.

  As though on cue, the white stalks popped out of the red mass that was the woman’s face, curling up into the air and looking like stop-action film of flowers growing. Up they shot, extraordinarily fast, and when they stopped I knew the little bulbs would be at the top.

  “She’s dead?” Mom asked, her voice trembling.

  “Yes.”

  I want to say I felt something as I said it, but I didn’t. Maybe I was still in shock, or filled with disbelief. I can’t really say. All I know for sure is I was numb to that woman’s suffering.

  Seconds later, just like at the stadium, the little bulbs burst and the air around the dead woman shimmered for several seconds as though a cloud of glitter had been loosed, only to be captured by the dozens of cameras all trained on the spectacle. I heard more shouts from the crowd, and more people ran to get away from the little cloud, but it dispersed almost immediately, the dust from the bulbs so fine that even the motion of people running caused enough disturbance in the air to send the particles this way and that way until it wasn’t a cloud anymore, just a memory burned into my mind.

  The image switched back to the newscaster, clearly as shaken by what he’d just shown as anybody would have been from watching it on TV. “I’m being told we have audio from a telephone interview conducted with a young man who was at the scene we have just shown you. He wishes to remain anonymous.”

  A still image of the woman lying on the ground, her face still intact, filled the screen as the interview played over it. A man’s voice, high pitched, came from the television speakers. He sounded like he’d been crying.

  “I don’t want to say her name, but I knew her. I was here with her and some friends. She seemed fine, and then she just started talking about her dog, how she had to get back to her dog, how it needed to be walked. We all thought she was just fooling around, but then…”

  A woman’s voice, probably someone at the TV station, said, “Do you know if the deceased woman had any connection to Los Angeles International Airport, or to the baggage handlers there who have died under similar circumstances?”

  “No. No, but…”

  “Yes?”

  “She was at the Dodger game today. She saw what happened. That’s why we took her out…to get her mind off it. I didn’t think…She never…” The man began to sob; then there was a click. The interview was over. The image of the dead woman stayed on the screen a second more and then cut back to the newscaster.

  “Oh God,” my mom was saying, her voice shaky.

  For myself, all I can say is that I sat there trembling, convinced I’d just watched a preview of my death. She’d been at Dodger Stadium today. So had I. Who knows how close to Harmon Kirby she’d been? But it didn’t matter. I’d been close. Two rows away. Close enough to see it all. Close enough to be infected. I didn’t need a news analyst or a doctor or some other expert to tell me the dust from the ends of the stalks was the source of the infection.

  What sort of infection…whether fungal or something else…that I didn’t know. Or how many others would die. Or how long it would take. The details didn’t matter.

  I was going to die.

  The strangest part is I actually felt relieved, like a weight had been lifted off me, a weight I hadn’t even known I was carrying around. It had been holding me down since Dodger Stadium…fear of the unknown. And now it was known. And with that knowledge, the weight lifted. The feeling didn’t last, but for those first few minutes the unburdening was almost euphoric.

  The same can’t be said of my mother. She began crying harder. “We have to get you to the ER right now!” she said through her sobs.

  “No,” I said, my voice calm.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Scarlett!”

  “I’m not being ridiculous, Mom. If I go to the hospital now, who knows when I’m going to…when it’s going to happen to me? I’m not going to get you or Anna sick, too. If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen.”

  “We’ll call a taxi then!”

  “No! Don’t you get it? I don’t want anyone to die because of me. Not you or Anna or some taxi driver or an EMT. No one.”

  “But we can’t just sit here and…wait.”

  “I know. And I don’t want you to.” Still calm, knowing I had to be. I wouldn’t get what I wanted by throwing a tantrum. “Mom…we don’t know what this is or how widespread. But I know there’s a good chance I’ve got it. Dad, too. And the boys.” It was hard not to get choked up as that realization hit. “And if we do…if any of us do, then anyone who’s around us when it happens is going to be sick, too.”

  “I just want to help you.” She sounded so small, so frail as she said it. Like a little girl. Like I was the parent all of a sudden, and I had to tell her she couldn’t have what she wanted.

  “I know. But if I’m sick, I don’t think you can help.” Reasoning with her now, breaking it down the way you would with an upset child, letting her know the options and steering her toward the only obvious conclusion. “And if I’m not, then it’ll all be okay, right? We don’t know how many people are sick, though. I mean, all those people at the stadium, and whatever else happened before then at the airport.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  I took a deep breath. “I’m saying that you need to leave.”

  “Scarlett, I won’t! I can’t!”

  “You have to. And not just to a hotel like I said before. You have to get out of the city. You and Anna both.”

  “That’s ridiculous! I’m not going anywhere without—”

  “You have to!” I raised my voice to cut her off, then repeated more calmly. “You have to. Mom. For me. You and Anna have to be okay. If something bad’s going to happen to me, the only thing that’s going to help me is if I know you guys are okay.”

  Silence on the line for a moment. Then she said, “But I can’t” in the same tiny voice as a moment before. The situation we faced and the things I was saying were all just incomprehensible to her, and it reduced her almost to nothing.

  It was like she was beaten, hit by waves from all sides until she couldn’t stand anymore and had only a feeble “I can’t” left as her defense.

  “You can,” I said, my voice quiet and calm. It killed me to have to talk to her like that, to hear my mom so scared and to be the one to offer comfort instead of the other way around, the way she’d done with me when I’d been little. “You can,” I repeated. “It’s not going to be easy, but I need you to do this for me, Mom. I need you to be okay. It’s the only thing I can hold onto here. Please?”

  A long pause followed, during which I could still hear her breathing and every now and then sucking back a s
ob. Finally, she said, “Where should we go? Where, if it’s as bad as you say?”

  Tears of relief welled up in my eyes, and I had to choke back my own sobs before I could answer. “Go to the cabin.”

  “Big Bear?”

  We’d had the cabin in the mountains since I was little. My mom had gotten possession of it in the divorce, but we’d been up only three or four times since my dad had left.

  “You should be safe there.”

  “I can’t. It’s too far.”

  But I knew she didn’t mean that. From the second she’d asked where I thought she should go, I’d known she was resigned to it, if only to save one of her daughters.

  “You can. You’ll be fine,” I said, still feeling like I’d become the parent. “But you should go now. Other people are going to start getting the same idea. People are going to run. You’ll be in traffic all night if you don’t start now.”

  “Oh, Scarlett!” More tears then.

  “There’ll be time for that later. Call me when you’re driving. Just go. Now.”

  Another long pause. “Okay. Okay, baby. Okay.”

  I hung up, and then I went to the door to listen for sounds of her and Anna leaving, maybe packing a few things. It didn’t take long for her to knock on my door.

  “Are you ready?” I asked.

  “Mm-hmm.” Barely audible through the door.

  “I can’t hear you, Mom.”

  “I said we’re ready.” Her voice quavered, like she’d spent the last several minutes crying while she gathered everything she needed and had only just now pulled herself together. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, Mom. You have to go.” I paused. “And I have to stay.”

  “I don’t think I can do it, Scarlett. You’re my baby.”

  “I’ll always be your baby, Mom. Maybe I’ll be okay. But you can’t help me if you stay. You know? If you go…that’ll help. That’s all that’ll help. Please?”

  Another long pause from her, and then, “I love you, sweetie.”

  “I love you, too. Is Anna there?”

  “Right here.”

  My sister sounded strong, together, resigned but not falling apart like our mother. I knew Anna would drive when they left, my mom sitting in the passenger seat with her arms folded tightly across her stomach. She’d spend most of the miles between home and Big Bear just looking out the passenger side window and trying not to cry.