The Girl at the End of the World

by Richard Levesque

  “Sit,” Donovan said, pointing to a spot on the other side of Chad. As always, he had a gun in his hand, so there wasn’t much point in arguing with him. A minute later, my ankles were bound to Chad’s just like Dolores’ were. We couldn’t walk, not without cutting off Chad’s feet first, but we were free to pass the baby back and forth by reaching across Chad’s chest.

  There was another door at the back of the building; this one looked bigger, more heavy duty, almost like the kind of thing you’d expect to see in a bank vault. It had an electronic lock that must have only just recently come back to life with the generator firing up. Now Donovan went to it and punched numbers on the keypad with his back to us. Seconds later, I heard a hiss and the door popped open.

  I watched as Donovan pulled it open and then glanced back at us. He pointed up, to where the corners of the building met the roof; cameras were mounted in each corner.

  “I’ll be watching,” he said. Then he stepped through the door and pulled it shut behind him with a loud click. A hiss followed and the sound of motors and other machinery. I could only guess that Donovan had built a chamber that would keep him safe from all sorts of contaminants. Other people had worried about energy pulses and weather catastrophes, earthquake clusters and even zombies. Donovan had worried about disease, and it looked as though he’d won the paranoia lottery, building a sealed chamber with enough filters and air purifiers to keep even the microscopic fungus spores from reaching in and claiming his miserable life.

  I’d wondered on the bus how long Donovan could get by in his sealed suit. He’d have to run out of food or water sometime, would have to empty his bowels or—I hated the thought—change the diaper he must have been wearing. Now I saw he had his chance; he’d made it back to his lair and was now going to enact the next phase of his plan, whatever that might be. Collecting his little group of survivors had been the first step. I still couldn’t guess what was next, but was determined not to find out if I could possibly help it.

  It was hard to argue with the chains, though. And now the idea that I might somehow get away without Chad’s help was entirely unimaginable. I’d have to take him into my confidence even if I didn’t trust him entirely and doubted I ever would.

  “We need to get out of here,” I said, my voice just above a whisper.

  “How?” He didn’t hesitate in his response, didn’t have to process what I’d said. That was good.

  “I don’t know. But we have to be on the lookout for anything.”

  Then he said something that made me wonder if I’d been reading him wrong, if it had been unfair not to trust him, to think such bad thoughts about him and his role in getting me captured. “If one goes, we all go. Agreed?”

  Now it was me that hesitated. What he said made sense. It was what I would have wanted him to say. But could I really agree? If there was some total fluke, some once-in-a-lifetime breach in Donovan’s plan, a person would be a fool not to take advantage of it even though the others might not be able to. I couldn’t imagine what the chance might be, but I wondered if I’d be able to let it slip past if it turned out to be a chance for me alone.

  “Agreed,” I said regardless of my qualms.

  The airlock on the vault door began hissing again, and then it clicked open. Donovan came into the room wearing a different suit than the one he’d had on our trip from Los Angeles, this one not quite as bulky. He wouldn’t need to have all his food and water contained in the suit now that he was home; the new suit let him move around more freely.

  “We may be here a while,” he said, his voice muffled behind his mask. “And we may not. Here’s the rules. There’s an outhouse. You go when I say you go. We all go out there together, and then you’re inside one at a time. There’s food to last, and water. But you eat what I say, when I say. No arguments.”

  I hadn’t eaten since being captured, so I was glad when he stopped talking and broke out a box of energy bars, giving two to each of us along with a small bottle of water.

  He went out after that without another word.

  *****

  All that really happened over the next few days was that Chad and I got the chance to talk. And I got the chance to trust him a little more. Donovan spent a lot of time down in his chamber, and after a while we couldn’t help starting conversations even if we did worry that Donovan had the room bugged and was listening to our every word.

  On the first afternoon, I was holding Kayla after she’d been fed and changed, and she was upset, just crying and crying. I rocked her a bit in my arms and tried humming a little tune, but it did no good. I didn’t want to say anything, but I wondered if this was the first sign that she was sick, that her mother’s fears had been well founded and that the baby hadn’t inherited Alex’s immunity to the fungus.

  Chad may have been worrying about the same thing, but if he was it didn’t show. “Try sticking your pinky in her mouth,” he said.

  I thought he was joking, like he was saying we should shove something in her mouth to force her to be quiet. I just gave him a weird look.

  “Seriously. Try it,” he said.

  I shrugged, considered my finger for a moment, and hoping it wasn’t too dirty, popped it in between Kayla’s lips. She latched on instantly, and the feeling of those little lips and gums and her tongue on the tip of my finger made me want to laugh. But she’d stopped crying.

  Giving Chad a look of amazement, I said, “How’d you know?”

  He shrugged. “My girlfriend used to babysit a lot. She would do that when there wasn’t a pacifier around. They just want something to suck on even if they’re not hungry. Must make them feel secure or something.”

  I watched the baby going to work on my finger. “What was her name?” I asked.

  He looked at the floor. “Becca.”

  I let the silence hang between us for a second or two, not sure if I should say more. “I’m sorry,” I finally ventured. “Were you together a long time?”

  “Six months. Before…you know.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about you?” he asked. “Boyfriend?”

  I shook my head. “No one serious.”

  There’d been little things, going to the movies, some kisses at parties, but no boy had really gotten to me. Jen and I used to talk endlessly about it, but it was really just something to giggle about. Not that my mother would have let me have a boyfriend at fourteen. Fifteen might have been a different thing. But my mom was gone, and the idea of boyfriends now…another silly thing from the gone world that we had spent so much time thinking about, using up our time on, when in the end it just didn’t matter.

  “It’s hard to think about everyone who’s gone,” I said.

  He just nodded and looked at the ground again. “I try not to. It was easier before, in the city.”

  I knew what he meant. “You had to keep busy,” I said.

  And then, at the same time, we both said, “No time to think.”

  Grim as the topic of our conversation was, we both smiled at that.

  In another minute, the baby had fallen asleep, and I eased my finger from between her lips. “Thanks,” I whispered, and he just nodded. I remember feeling glad that Kayla was out for a while, but also a little sad that Chad and I couldn’t keep talking then, not wanting to wake her. It had been the first conversation where I’d really let my guard down, not worrying about whether I could trust him or not, and I wanted it to go on. Instead, I just leaned my head back against the wall and closed my eyes, wishing sleep would come as easily for me as it did for the newborn.

  *****

  With Chad’s and my bad Spanish and Dolores’ bad English, we were able to figure out that she was from Oaxaca in Mexico. She and her husband had made several trips across the border over the years, sometimes going back to Mexico on their own when the work here dried up, and sometimes getting caught and sent back. She had lived in a tiny town in Mexico and had had three children, all boys. They’d all been delivered at home, from what I could t
ell, by a midwife, which probably accounted for Dolores knowing what to do when Alex was giving birth. She and her husband had both been working in a Hollywood hotel when the fungus hit; she’d been expecting to die like her husband and everyone else and still didn’t know what was keeping her alive.

  Arranged side by side the way we were, it soon became impossible not to begin feeling close to Chad and Dolores. Donovan had brought in thin mats before the end of the first day, and the three of us had eventually gone to sleep chained together. More than once, I woke up with my head half on Chad’s arm, like it was a pillow, and I remember lying awake at night, my face inches from his as he slept, his steady breaths blowing on my cheek.

  After the first day, Donovan let Chad have his hands loose like Dolores and I did, but he never tried anything, never let his hands slip or wander, never even suggested that there should be something between us. I think about that now, but at the time I wasn’t even worried about it. Romance was off the radar; the idea of getting free again crowded everything else out of my mind.

  Actually, the possibility of escaping was just about all we talked about, and when we weren’t whispering our way through some ridiculous and unworkable plan, I worked at the puzzle of our freedom on my own, hoping for an opportunity but not seeing any, not anywhere. I kept thinking about the generator and how Donovan must have been stockpiling gasoline to keep it running. If we could find where he stored it, we might be able to start a fire. Or if we could come up with another way to destroy the generator, then Donovan would only be able to last so long. We would just need to convince him we didn’t deserve to die in the mean time. And then there was the question of how we could get to the gas or the generator in the first place, chained together and watched the way we were.

  Chad and I also spent time talking about Donovan’s plans for us, whether or not he was really crazy, and what he’d do once he realized his plans weren’t going to come to anything. On the one hand, it seemed possible that he’d get tired of keeping us and just let us go, but then again it wasn’t hard to imagine him making good on his threats and just shooting us all out of frustration before killing himself. His filters wouldn’t last forever; the time would come when he’d be exposed to whatever spores were still around, and that would be it. Would he be content to just let us outlive him? I doubted it. He still seemed too angry for that.

  On the third day, he came out of his chamber with an iPhone in his hand, and for a second I had the absurd thought that he’d gotten a call. He walked up to me and leaned over.

  “I want to record your voice. Say your name and a few details about yourself. Say you’re a survivor of the plague, that you’re immune, and that I’ve got you, that I’ll kill you if someone doesn’t come and make a deal with me. Got it?”

  I didn’t get it, but I nodded anyway.

  He pushed a button on the app he had open and held the phone out to me. I could see it was recording. I swallowed and said, “My name is Scarlett Fisher. I’m fifteen. I lived in Pasadena before…before the plague, the fungus, whatever it was. I’m immune. Everyone I know died. Now I’m here, with Donovan. He’s got me and three other people, including a newborn baby.” I hesitated, looked at the cold eyes behind the clear plastic shield of Donovan’s suit, and said, “He’s going to kill us if someone doesn’t make a deal with him.”

  He clicked off the recording, held the phone close to his head, and played it back. Then he went to Chad and had him do the same thing. He didn’t bother with Dolores, had really made no effort to communicate with her the whole time we’d been held here. He just played Chad’s recording back and then turned back to the door into his chamber. I heard him say something that sounded like, “Now they’ll believe me.” And then he was gone again.

  “He’s crazy,” I said to Chad when the airlock had shut again with its ominous hiss.

  “I know. But what do we do about it? He’s always got his gun. And we’re always chained up.”

  The rest of that day, I forced myself to think about escape and nothing else. When my mind wandered, taking me into memories or thoughts of other places, I forced it back to the problem at hand. By nighttime, I had gotten nowhere. Every possibility seemed like a dead end. Convinced that Donovan was bound to lose what was left of his mind, though, I didn’t let myself give up, not wanting to be around when the shooting started.

  Our nightly trip to the outhouse came around. Donovan let us go maybe four times a day, with the last trip being sometime after the sun had gone down. As always, he got us on our feet, fastened manacles on our wrists, and then linked the chains to others that went between our legs to connect to the wrists of the person behind us. The chains were slack, so whoever held Kayla wouldn’t have a problem and also so we’d be able to take care of our business in the blue plastic outhouse. Out we marched in a little line with Donovan at our backs, a black handgun pointed at us as we crossed the tall dry grass. I remember how we’d hear crickets chirping and toads distantly croaking when we’d come out of the bunker and how they’d all stop when we started tromping through the grass, one or two starting up again by the time we had all finished.

  I held Kayla as we walked this time. Fixated as I was on escape, I kept looking this way and that as we made our way to the outhouse. It was dark, but the moon was up, and Donovan’s property at night seemed bigger than in the light of day, the fence more distant, the ground we’d need to cover more imposing. And yet, I told myself, if we were going to get away, it was most likely going to be at night. And that meant escaping during one of these evening outhouse runs. So I tried keeping an eye out for any details, anything Donovan might have missed in setting up his little prison for us, any weakness in his plan. None came to me.

  When it was my turn in the outhouse, I passed Kayla to Dolores and let Donovan take my chain out of the loop that held us together. Then I went in and sat down, locking the door out of habit. No one was going to walk in on me, so there wasn’t much point in twisting the little lock that made the sign on the outside switch from “Vacant” to “Occupied.” Still, I did it anyway and then thought about that as I’d thought about everything else related to our captivity that day. The locking mechanism on the door was just about the only metal part of the outhouse, and it was secure in its fashion, having been meant to provide a little bit of privacy at carnivals and construction sites, but not high security at any rate. Still, it got me thinking.

  When we were finished and back in the bunker, Donovan turned the lights out, and we lay down on our mats, still chained together at the ankles as we’d been since the first day.

  “I think I have an idea,” I whispered to Chad once the door had sealed on Donovan’s airlock.

  “What is it?”

  “Do you think he’ll really shoot one of us if there’s trouble?”

  “That’s your idea?”

  “No! Just…do you think he means it?”

  “He went to a lot of trouble to catch us. I don’t think he’d kill one of us if another one got away. But that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t hurt us.”

  “Yeah.” The more unstable Donovan really was, the more bent he was on controlling and using us, the riskier my plan seemed. Still, it was all I had come up with. “I think we can use the outhouse,” I said after a moment’s thought.

  “How?”

  “I’ll say I’m sick, can’t come out when he says it’s time. He’ll probably threaten to shoot somebody like he did when we were on the bus.”

  “What then?”

  “Que pasa?” Dolores whispered.

  I didn’t know how to explain to her what we were talking about. “Nada,” I lied. “Hablar mañana.” I was pretty sure that wasn’t correct, but I wanted her to understand I’d tell her about it tomorrow. She must have gotten the message, as she didn’t press the issue.

  “You watch Donovan,” I continued to Chad. “He’ll get up close to the door, maybe even try pulling at the handle. When he gets close, you signal me, and I’ll push the door open hard. Wi
th luck, I can knock him off balance, maybe even get him in the face with it. You have to be ready to jump on him. We get the gun away, knock him out, get the keys, and we’re gone.”

  Silence lay between us for several seconds. “You’re counting on luck an awful lot,” Chad finally whispered.

  “It can work.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “Then he probably smacks me in the face and maybe leaves me tied up alone somewhere, but that’s it.”

  “And we’re screwed,” he said.

  “And we’re screwed if we don’t try something. You got a better idea?”

  “Wait for him to make a mistake.”

  “Does he seem like the kind of guy who’s going to make a mistake?” I asked.

  “Everybody makes mistakes.”

  He was right about that; I knew that too well.

  “Even so,” I said, “I don’t think we can afford to wait. Whatever his scheme is, it’s not going to work out. I don’t think we should still be here when he figures that out.”

  Another long silence followed. Finally, he said, “So how do I signal you to hit him with the door?”

  I wanted to sit up and say, “You’ll do it?” but I restrained myself, just pausing for a breath before whispering, “What if you just shout my name? Like you’re trying to get me to cooperate with him?”

  He thought about it. “Could work,” he said after a few seconds.

  “Tell me if you think of something better.”

  *****

  I found it difficult the next day not to keep checking in with Chad to go over the plan a few more times before nightfall. But I didn’t want Donovan to get suspicious; even if he was just watching us on the monitors inside his sealed chamber, there was a good chance he’d know we weren’t just making small talk. Even Dolores had known something was up just from the tone of our whispers. I imagined Donovan getting suspicious from our body language or facial expressions. I also wanted to keep Dolores in the dark as I knew I couldn’t adequately explain the plan in my lousy Spanish, nor could I persuade her to go along with it if she did understand and tried to talk me out of it. Her agitation would be another red flag for Donovan.