There was a gun counter, but the idea of using a gun made me uneasy; plus I knew that to get good with a gun would mean lots of practice, and that would mean making lots of noise that might draw out other people like the “no no” man on the sidewalk. Still, I figured I should have one. The guns were locked up, though, and I guessed that there’d be an alarm set off if I broke the glass countertop to get to them. Even though there wouldn’t be any police to respond to the alarm, I still didn’t like the idea of listening to its braying and so left the guns for later.
The archery section appealed to me more. I could practice with a bow and arrows or crossbow and not make much noise at all.
I looked at all the camping equipment, too, considering different tents and sleeping bags and portable gas stoves.
The bicycle display made me think of pedal power to get myself around the city. I liked the idea, but then I started wondering: what about a little motorcycle? It would be just as maneuverable as a bike, and I could get a lot farther a lot faster. A motorcycle would be superior to a bicycle if I needed to get away from someone or something. The only problem was that I had even less experience with motorcycles than I did with cars. Still, I thought, now there was time to learn. No school on Monday.
At the back of the store, I passed through a door marked “Private,” opening it slowly. Relieved to find no one living or dead, I began exploring the manager’s office. I went straight to the controls for the store’s music, twisting the volume to zero. Right away, I felt more at ease, telling myself I’d be able to hear now if someone else entered the store. An old computer took up much of the desktop, and I pushed it to the edge to make room for my laptop. Flipping it open, I plugged it in, liking the feeling of keeping it fully charged as often as possible. Then I pulled open the drawers and was pleased to find a ring of keys in the center one. I would have bet that one of them would unlock the gun case.
The store had a secure Wi-Fi setup, but taped to a corner of the desk was a square of paper with the network’s name and password. Seconds later I was pleased to find myself online again. The websites for the major cable news networks were all down, just a blank screen with a crawl along the bottom advising viewers to gather at local police stations and city halls for disaster instructions.
I tried other searches but just got the same speculations and rumors I’d seen while sitting beside Jen’s pool. I decided to limit my search to posts from within the last hour and got things from Australia and New Zealand. If the disease had reached those places, then it hadn’t yet devastated them.
So I searched for an Australian television station that streamed its broadcast and found one in a few keystrokes. The stream had to buffer ever fifteen seconds or so, but I kept with it regardless. The image of the newscaster took up a quarter of my screen, a sandy-haired man wearing a high-tech respirator that covered his whole face.
I just looked at him, dumbstruck. His delivery was so muffled that I could barely understand a word he said. But from what I could piece together, Australia was one of the last places to be struck by the disease, and the Australians had been able to prepare themselves a bit because they’d known it was coming. The news station showed footage of people—very few people—walking the streets of Sydney wearing apparatuses similar to the newscaster’s.
“Citizens are advised to keep contact with others at a minimum,” the man said, “until further information on the outbreak becomes available. Scientists are scrambling to find a cure or an inoculation, while others examine the cause and the possibility that the disease will run its course and the infectious spores will lose their potency once they no longer have hosts to invade.”
He went on to report on measures the Australian government was taking to protect their people, but I began focusing more on the crawl when these words flashed by: “Reported survivors in Europe, Asia, and Africa indicate natural immunity among a small percentage of the population. Possibly these ‘survivors’ are hoaxes.”
Thank God, I thought. There were other people like me, other people who could go on without having to wear masks and filters and worry about dying if the respirator failed. People who would go on. I wasn’t the last person on earth, and I wasn’t going to be. The thought brought tears to my eyes.
“Okay,” I said and leaned forward to navigate around the website. They had a contact button that brought up an email form, and I filled it in, writing, “My name is Scarlett and I’m still alive in Los Angeles, California. I think I’m immune. I haven’t found anyone else yet who is.” I almost hit the send button, but then wrote one more thing: “What should I do?”
I clicked the button and waited. I imagined a room full of people monitoring email, hoping for further proof of survivors, imagined them erupting with applause when they got my message the way people in the space program used to go nuts when a probe sent back images from Mars. They’d write back immediately, of course.
But they didn’t.
I checked the webcast again to make sure it wasn’t just looping. I hated the thought that the man I’d been watching was really dead, his last words put on the web to play in a circle until the power went out. But it didn’t appear to be a loop as he read new stories and played new video.
And then I saw this in the crawl: “New survivor reported in United States.”
That’s it? I thought.
The email chimed and I checked it. A simple message had come back, but at least there was some humanity to it. “Good to hear from you, Scarlett. Take good care of yourself. Maybe you can check back in a few days to let us know you’re still there. I hope we’re here to get the news. Good luck to you.”
It wasn’t signed.
I wanted to write back, wanted to tell them everything I’d been through and to ask what they thought I should do next, wanted to tell them I was only 15 and could use a little help here. But then I thought of what they were going through, whoever this nameless, faceless person was on the other end of the email. This would be someone like me, trying to stay alive, trying to process all the death and loss, trying not to go crazy with grief and fear. They didn’t have time for a pen pal.
So instead of pouring my heart out, I just wrote, “Thanks. I’ll check in when I can. Good luck to you, too.”
I closed the screen and left the computer to charge again. Then I tried a few phone numbers just to torture myself: my mom, Anna, my dad, a few friends. No one picked up.
I spent the next hour or more gathering supplies, selecting some nasty looking hunting knives and testing different backpacks and sleeping bags. I tried out my archery skills on a mannequin and found that I was going to need a lot of practice.
Then I used the keys I’d found to open the gun case. I squatted before the display, just looking. I didn’t know the first thing about guns or ammunition, and hoped more than anything that I’d never need to use one. Still, I knew it would be foolish to let this opportunity go, so after a minute or two of pondering I picked up a shiny handgun and hefted it for a few seconds. Not liking the feel of it, I set the gun down on top of the glass counter and then looked for a box of ammunition to match the caliber. Beneath the display shelf was a storage space with empty boxes for the guns, and I found one that matched the weapon I’d chosen, pulling the paperwork from the box and setting it along with the gun and bullets next to the pile of supplies I’d already gathered.
There was plenty of food and drink for sale in the store—most of it geared toward camping—so I had no problem finding something to eat and drink. It was late, and I was tired, so I decided to take a sleeping bag and a foam mattress back to the manager’s office and call it a night, but not before locking the glass doors at the front of the store. Another survivor would have no problem smashing the glass to get inside, but I’d know about it if something like that happened. What I wanted to avoid was someone wandering inside the store while I slept unaware, either a survivor or someone infected and unstable. I wondered how many more people like that were still around; all I knew f
or sure was that I didn’t want to run into any of them.
In the office, I set up a little nest, checked my phone one more time, and then got ready to turn out the manager’s light. I had a rough plan of going to look for a motorcycle shop the next day, but beyond that, I didn’t know where I’d go or what I’d do.
I didn’t like how quiet it was even though I’d had some time to start getting used to it, but once I shut the lights off the quiet seemed so much worse. I lay there and tried not to think about it, tried to think of other things, but there were so many images in my head, so many terrible things I’d seen just since this morning when I’d woken up to find my neighborhood about to go up in flames.
A quick succession of recent memories flew through my mind then, and I sat up, reaching for my phone to use it as a flashlight. The phone in one hand, I dug through the backpack, sifting through as though the things in it were in geological layers. Underneath the things I’d taken from Jen’s house were the few items I’d taken from home, and under all that was the photo of my mom and dad and me and Anna that I’d taken from the mantel.
There we were—all four of us, happy, with the whole city spreading out behind us from our vantage point outside the Griffith Observatory. I looked at it not out of nostalgia, not because I was looking back at the world that wasn’t there anymore. No, this time I was looking forward.
Holding onto the frame, I lay back down and turned off the phone’s light. I remember that I fell asleep almost right away then, exhausted but also relieved because at least now I had a plan.
Chapter Seven
The road to the observatory twisted up the hillside, mostly free of abandoned cars or those occupied by the dead. With just a few clouds in the bright blue sky and a little breeze coming through the trees, it would have been easy to mistake the day for any other where cars filled with tourists and hikers and families out on picnics would have been threading their way along the road, a typical SoCal day in paradise.
We had had it so good, and sometimes had even remembered to be grateful. But even when you didn’t take the time to appreciate what you had, it was still okay: short of a major earthquake, everyone knew that California would still be there the next day with its beaches and mountains, Mickey Mouse and all the beautiful people. There was always more time to be thankful, more time for everything.
But the beautiful people were all gone now.
And some of them had started to smell.
I’d spent the last couple of days in Pasadena, finding a motorcycle shop and learning to ride after studying eHow and YouTube videos.
I’d picked out a little Honda, not one of the big ones and nothing fancy. I just wanted something that could maneuver through the jammed streets and get me out of trouble if any found me. It hadn’t been too difficult learning how to ride; figuring out how to time the clutch had been the hardest part. Before long I’d mastered the motorcycle shop’s parking lot and the alley behind it, working out a little obstacle course of abandoned cars and bodies on the ground. I even picked out a helmet, letting myself go the silly route by opting for gaudy purple with big pink flowers.
When not practicing on the bike, I’d spent time gathering and organizing supplies in the sporting goods store, working on my archery skills, and planning my move to the observatory. It wouldn’t be possible to bring everything I’d need in one trip, so I loaded a backpack with the essentials, and then loaded three more with all the rest of my gear in order of descending importance. After some thought, I packed the gun and ammunition into the high priority pack even though I hadn’t yet found the nerve to fire the thing. Then, telling myself I’d be back as soon as possible, I headed out one morning and actually felt a little sorry to go. The store had come to be like my new home, the manager’s office my new room.
I had studied the maps in the store and brought one with me, having memorized several possible routes to get me from Pasadena to Griffith Park but expecting that I’d need to make adjustments to my plan along the way. I must have looked a sight on that little bike with my oversized backpack and flowery helmet, a bow and arrows bound to the back fender with bungee cord, and a respirator strapped to my face. The mask had nothing to do with spores but rather with the smell that had begun on my second full day alone.
The people who’d died from the fungal infection weren’t so much the issue. I’d had the chance to observe quite a few bodies in various stages of decay, and it looked like the fungus didn’t just stop when the host was dead and the spores scattered on the wind. The host bodies began to shrivel and dry out, like the fungus was taking all the moisture from them, and they didn’t seem to smell at all. I realized soon enough that the bodies were being eaten, and by the time I set out on the motorcycle, it wasn’t unusual to see some of the dead people’s limbs reduced to bone and more stalks sprouting randomly from the bodies as the fungus reproduced and reproduced again.
The fungus made short work of its victims. It was the other people who were a problem, though. The ones who’d died in accidents or were the victims of infected people who’d turned violent before dying—those were the bodies that stank. Them and the people who’d died naturally from heart attacks and other ailments in the hours of crisis when emergency services had been unable to help everyone. And, of course, the suicides.
I’d gone into a restaurant in Pasadena after practicing on the motorcycle for most of one morning, hoping to find something canned that I could eat quickly and then head back to the sporting goods store. A man had hanged himself in the main dining room, a belt around his neck and the other end tied to a ceiling fan. Flies buzzed around the body, and the smell made me gag. I turned and ran, no longer thinking about food.
After that, I noticed the suicides more readily, having seen them previously but not having noticed the difference between them and the corpses that the fungus feasted on. The first several, I contemplated for some moments, wondering about what these people’s last minutes had been like, how lonely or scared they must have been. That their corpses hadn’t sprouted stalks told me they hadn’t been infected before taking their own lives, and I wondered at the possibility that some of them could have been like me, immune. If so, they’d just given up before learning they could have survived. Or maybe they’d already figured that out and had opted to die rather than go on alone in a world without friends and family.
Which made me wonder why I hadn’t killed myself, too.
Honestly, the thought hadn’t occurred to me once since I’d left my house. I’d been too busy trying to figure out what I was going to do to stay alive to start pondering the possibility of bringing it all to an end.
The suicides made me angry. The odds were that one of them, at least one of them, could have survived like I had, given me someone to talk to and make plans with. I know I was thinking just about myself then, not about the suffering or fear all these people had gone through before making their final decisions. But I’d had fear and suffering, too. My decisions had just been different.
At any rate, they all smelled, and by the day I left the sporting goods store, I needed a respirator to keep it from getting to me. I suppose I would have gotten used to it before long, but I also worried about disease. I didn’t know what sorts of illnesses I could pick up from being around so many dead and decaying bodies, and I didn’t want to find out. That was another reason to get to the observatory. I’d still be around millions of dead people, thousands upon thousands of whom had died from things other than the fungus, but at least I’d be above most of them and maybe able to breathe a little easier. Still, I knew I couldn’t stay in the city forever; the observatory would just be my next step, one of many I’d have to make along the way, and all of them made on my own without any help or supervision.
When I’d come here before with my family, the road had been lined with parked cars and mini-vans and SUVs. Now it was just about empty, a narrow strip of pavement winding its way up the hill with views of the city spreading about below me when I’d round s
ome of the turns. There were a few cars to navigate around, and I told myself I could come back later and move them out of the road. At the top of the hill, the parking lot was also mostly empty—but only mostly, and I put on the brakes as soon as I hit the flat expanse of asphalt.
I hadn’t been the only one to think of getting up above all the chaos. There were five cars parked here—all looking random and nothing to worry about. And there was also a medium-sized motor home, an old Winnebago, all angular and oxidized with no hubcaps but still the big “W” logo on the striped sides. It sat at the edge of the parking lot, not in any of the marked spots but rather blocking the road, its front tires up against the curb. Someone had parked it there with no regard for anyone else coming up the hill, and I knew that meant they’d been assuming no one would be coming—either because the occupants had gone a little crazy from the fungus pressing into their brains, or because they were immune like me and had set up their base camp here in the hills.
I killed the little Honda’s engine and flipped down the kickstand. Climbing off, I slipped the straps of my backpack over the handlebars and carefully unfastened the bungee cord that held the bow and arrows to the fender. I wasn’t ready to shoot anyone with it, doubted I had good enough aim to even hit the side of the motor home if it came to that, but I was counting on anyone still inside the Winnebago not being willing to take a chance on my accuracy.
Notching an arrow, I walked slowly toward the old camper, listening intently for any sign of life. Up here, all was silent, but a cool breeze blew up from the city, and it made enough noise to mask any sounds that might be coming from the motor home. I was approaching with the wind at my back, so if I made a noise, the breeze would carry the sound to anyone inside, but if they made a move I wouldn’t be likely to hear it. I should have stopped, backed away, and approached from the other side of the parking lot. But I was here now, and there were no signs of life yet, so I kept on, maybe a bit foolishly.
The Girl at the End of the World Page 8
