The Girl at the End of the World

by Richard Levesque

  The deterrent didn’t work. I don’t know how many hours passed, but I know that I was deep in sleep when the booming woke me. I sat up and put my feet on the floor, completely disoriented for a few seconds, not knowing where I was or how I’d gotten there. For some reason, I was trying to figure out what day it was, even though days had stopped mattering on my birthday…how long ago now?

  But then the boom hit again, and I sat up straight, adrenaline kicking in and bringing me back to my weird, confined reality. It was loud but not incredibly so—more of a reverberating, distant boom rather than a sound that spelled immediate danger. Still, during all the time I’d spent at the base, it was the first sound that had penetrated my cell without passing through the intercom.

  Darting to the control panel, I opened my shades before turning on my lights. And when I saw what was happening, I dropped my hand from the panel, leaving the lights off, no longer caring about them.

  Across the hall, the old man had gone crazy. His beard was streaked with the blood that poured from his nose, and he had torn off most of his clothes. I could see that he was shouting, and every few seconds he picked up the metal chair he’d used in his interactions with Dr. Sharma and heaved it at the windows. They shook with each concussion, looking like they must burst outward with the next strike. But the windows held, and still the old man tried breaking them with all his might. The crashing booms must have been deafening on his side of the glass, but reached me only as the low reverberations that had awoken me.

  It didn’t seem possible. The blood, the aggression…I hadn’t seen anything like this since the first days of the outbreak. And now this? I knew the old man was going to die, that he’d pass out in a few minutes and sprout stalks and that would be it. But how? And why?

  Maybe he hadn’t been immune in the first place, I told myself. Or maybe something had gone wrong with…

  The thought just hung there at the forefront of my mind, like a hammer poised to strike a nail. At the same time, I watched the old man lift the chair again to run, seemingly in slow motion, at the window again, raising the chair as he went and swinging it with all his might as his mouth contorted in a scream I couldn’t hear. The chair hit the window in the same instant that the hammer fell in my mind.

  The injection! I thought.

  “The injection!” I shouted.

  And then I looked to Chad to see him standing at his window in a panic. He couldn’t see what was happening in the cell next to his, but he definitely understood that something had gone wrong. His face conveyed more fear than I’d ever seen him express, and I had to wonder if he was so upset because he couldn’t fathom the situation, or if it was something else.

  We had the injection, too! I realized. Was Chad next to go mad? Dr. Sharma had administered the shots in one-through-four order, with the old man first and me last. Was I going to have to watch Chad go crazy and then wait, knowing Dolores would follow before I lost my mind and died?

  I barely had time to process any of this before something else happened across the hallway. A soldier entered the old man’s cell from the back, from the gray corridor where Chad and Dolores and I had first met Dr. Sharma. He burst into the cell and stood there for a second, pointing his gun at the old man and probably shouting. In his hazard suit, I couldn’t tell for sure who he was, but I thought I could see dark skin behind the face mask and assumed it was the new guard. He’d only just been assigned this duty, and now he faced a trial by fire.

  Everything happened so fast then.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw more movement in the hallway. Dr. Sharma running in—no clipboard, no escort.

  In the cell across the hall, the old man dropped the chair, turned and lunged at the guard.

  I expect all the guards had been instructed not to use deadly force on their immune “guests” in the cells. It wouldn’t have done to reduce the number of immune human beings even by one, especially in a setting where doctors and scientists were studying the genetically lucky to find a cure for the rest of humanity. But training and instruction can only go so far; instinct kicks in at some point. The guard did what just about anyone else would have done with a crazy man coming at him like that, a crazy man who looked to be infected with the most deadly disease human beings had ever encountered.

  He fired his gun three times just as Dr. Sharma reached the edge of the cell. The first bullet caught the old man in the neck, jerking his head back and spraying blood across the window as the bullet passed clean through him. The second bullet missed, hitting the glass and sending a hundred cracks out in every direction. The third bullet hit the glass as well, just as the old man fell to the ground, shattering the window into thousands of little pieces. And it kept going, heading straight for the window of my cell, straight for me where I stood in the line of fire.

  The bullet hit the window with another boom, and I just stood there watching as it struck the thick glass, peppering my shirt with a fine spray of glass dust. I looked down to see the light from the corridor reflecting off the miniscule shards, expecting blood to start darkening the fabric.

  But I wasn’t hurt. The bullet didn’t pass through, but was right there in front of me, lodged in the glass, a smashed little cylinder at the center of a spider web of cracks that spread out to the window’s metal frame.

  In the hallway, my view of her distorted by all the cracks in the glass, Dr. Sharma had turned from the wreckage of the old man’s cell to look at me inside mine. She looked panicked, and held her ground for only a second before turning away to start running from the chaos around her.

  If I hadn’t just been watching the old man, it might have taken me a few seconds to think of what to do, but as it was, I acted immediately, grabbing the chair where I’d sat with the doctor and swinging it at the glass with all my strength. The window exploded outward with a crash and a thunderous pop and a rush of air. Instantly, I could hear alarms sounding; they’d probably been triggered with the first broken window across the hall, but I hadn’t been able to hear them with my glass intact.

  I raked the chair along the lower window frame, brushing the last bits of glass aside. Then I set the chair on the floor, stepped onto it, and hopped into the hallway. For the first time now, I saw double doors at the end of the hallway, and Dr. Sharma desperately punching her code into the keypad. She glanced over her shoulder toward me as I ran in her direction, paying no attention to the glass on the tile floor even though I almost slipped on it twice. I ignored Chad, ignored Dolores, ignored the blaring alarm, ignored the soldier still in the old man’s cell; nothing mattered any more, nothing but getting to the double doors before they closed after the fleeing doctor.

  At the last second, I leapt at the doorway, my arms wrapping around Sharma’s ankles as she cleared the threshold. She went down in front of me, and I struggled to hold onto her as I hit the ground hard. The doctor turned under me and struggled to kick free, but I wasn’t about to let go. All the anger I’d felt in the weeks since the world had ended—anger at the people I’d lost, anger at Chad and anger at Donovan, anger at Dr. Sharma and Private Muñoz and everyone else in this compound who had conspired to hold me here against my will—all of it came out now in a rage directed at the doctor, the full extent of which she did not deserve.

  But it served me well. In seconds, I was straddling her chest and hitting her in the face. Her glasses flew off, cutting the bridge of her nose.

  “What did you do? What did you do?!” I shouted. “What did you give us?”

  She didn’t answer, just struggled to fend off my blows. Finally, she shouted, “Just let me go!”

  “Why the hell should I let you go? Why?” I yelled, holding her down by the shoulders.

  A look of absolute defeat came over her then. “Because I’m already dead,” she said, her voice just louder than a whisper. “I’m already dead.”

  I couldn’t hurt her any more than I already had. From the moment the old man’s window had shattered with Dr. Sharma right there, her li
fe had been over. Running away from me had just been automatic, if entirely futile.

  “What did you give us?” I said, more calmly.

  “Different solutions. We developed several possibilities. You didn’t all get the same ones.”

  “And one of them made him sick? You gave him the disease?” I shook my head in disbelief. “How could you?”

  “We didn’t intend it to go that way.”

  “But you knew it might.”

  She didn’t respond, just shifted her eyes away.

  I was filled with disgust.

  But I couldn’t do anything about it.

  A door opened to my right, and the soldier who’d shot the old man stepped into the corridor. He still wore his hazard suit and still held his gun. Now he pointed it at me.

  “Let her go,” came the muffled command.

  I hesitated for a second and then lifted myself off of Dr. Sharma. Maybe it was just training from my past life, but I immediately felt sorry for having attacked her, felt like I was in trouble now and had to atone. Even though she didn’t deserve an apology, I wanted to give one.

  But the “Sorry I hit you” that was rising to my lips never got there. The second I was off the doctor, she was scrambling to her feet, groping for her glasses, and then running as fast as she could. She never looked back. I was death to her, I realized. I was pestilence and plague and every horrible thing from every nightmare she’d ever had. And she wanted away from me. A few seconds later, she rounded a corner, dashing away like a scared rabbit, and was gone.

  I turned to the soldier. He looked unsure of himself, but also agitated and maybe even angry.

  He waved his gun toward the double doors, which had closed after the doctor and I had tumbled through them. “Back in there,” he said.

  “It won’t do any good,” I began. “The whole area’s contaminated now.”

  It was true. The white zone had become the gray zone, and his expression told me he knew it as well as I did. His frustration and fear rose to the surface now, and he shoved me against the door, slamming my shoulder and elbow into it. I think I cried out in shock and fear more than pain.

  “Get back in there!” he shouted now. Looking into his face, seeing the fear and anger barely controlled, I felt lucky he hadn’t already opted for his weapon. That would be next.

  “You have to open it,” I said meekly, hoping to calm him. I stepped away and watched him punch the code. 53137. The door clicked open.

  “In,” he said.

  I stepped through and half turned, expecting him to follow, expecting him to do something to subdue or punish me, to lock me up or restrain me—to contain me and the threat I represented outside my cell. But he didn’t do anything. He just stood there for a second; fear and anger and frustration had overridden his training, and he looked at me in complete disbelief, like he’d just watched the world end all over again. Then he let the door shut between us, content, I suppose, to have the little barrier between us before he ran to find the doctor, maybe hoping to save her or at least to save himself.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Back in the corridor between the glassed-in cells, the alarm still sounded, a short, sharp tone that grated with each repetition. I tried to ignore it, tried to think about what was next, but the alarm wasn’t any help in getting my racing, colliding thoughts to line up. It also didn’t help that my most persistent thought was of the injections we’d received and the possibility that Chad and Dolores and I were about to go as crazy as the old man had.

  So as the door clicked shut and I stood in the bright white corridor with the litter of broken glass upon the floor, I didn’t really stop to think—just ran to Chad’s window and his intercom button.

  He was right there, his hands pressed against the glass as though he were trying to part it like water and reach me on the other side. I didn’t bother putting my hands on the glass opposite his. There wasn’t time for little gestures like that. Instead, I hit the intercom button on the panel beside the window.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, trying not to sound scared.

  “Yeah,” he said. He sounded surprised that I had asked, confused. “What’s happening?”

  I shook my head. “The shots they gave us…they might have taken away our immunity.”

  “What?” he shouted.

  I repeated what Dr. Sharma had told me about the experiment they’d been running on us, and ended by saying, “You’re not feeling any symptoms?”

  He hesitated a second. His silence made me nervous. “No,” he said. “Nothing. What happened in the other cell?”

  “The old man went nuts. They shot him.”

  “He’s dead?”

  I nodded. “The bullet cracked my window. That’s how I got out.”

  “I thought you just used your chair. Thought you got super strength or something.”

  I smiled briefly.

  “What now?” Chad asked.

  “I get you out. And Dolores. Then we find Kayla and get out of here.”

  His face fell.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You can’t get me out of here.”

  “I can,” I said. “I saw the guard put the code in. I can go through the old man’s cell and open your door from the back corridor. We’ll—”

  “No!”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “You can’t,” he said. “I might be sick. You said it yourself.”

  “Well I might be sick, too!” I countered. “But at least we’ll be out of here.”

  “Scarlett, listen! If I’m sick and you’re not…who knows what this new strain is? Sharma said they gave us different formulas?”

  I nodded.

  “Scarlett, I could get you sick. If they gave you something that had no effect and me something…that did. I don’t want to do anything to hurt you.” He looked down at the floor; it seemed like he couldn’t face me as he said it.

  It was almost the exact same argument I’d used on my mom the night of the Dodger game when I’d insisted she and Anna leave before I made them sick. Coming out of Chad’s mouth, now that everything had changed so much, it sounded absurd, and yet I understood exactly how he felt and why he was saying it. My mom had resisted the argument, but eventually I’d gotten her to see the wisdom of it. That wasn’t going to happen now, though. Chad wasn’t going to talk me into leaving.

  “I’m not leaving without you,” I said, trying to sound as adult and determined as I possibly could.

  He looked up then, his eyes taking me in. He smiled for a second and then looked past me. His face changed, the smile fading into a dead stare.

  “You get out,” he said. “Get out while you can.”

  I turned to look over my shoulder. In her cell, Dolores stood before the glass, her hands in the air and her eyes aimed at the ceiling. I could see her mouth moving. She looked like she was praying. But that wasn’t what I focused on, wasn’t what had brought the change in Chad’s expression. No, it was the blood streaming from her nose and running down the front of her khaki t-shirt.

  “Oh my God,” I said.

  “Get out of here, Scarlett.” He said it calmly, but I knew he was scared, as scared as me.

  I didn’t want to go; I didn’t think he was right. He wasn’t having any symptoms, and neither was I.

  Standing there, looking from Chad to Dolores and back again, I hadn’t really been paying attention to the airflow in the corridor. But that was before it stopped. There were vents high in the ceiling, one just behind me, and cool air had been blowing down on me. Then the whole place seemed to shudder for a second and I heard a distant popping sound.

  My first thought was that we were having an earthquake, just a little one. But I also felt the airflow cease, the cool air no longer hitting the backs of my arms.

  I must have looked alarmed, as Chad said, “What happened?”

  “They shut off the air conditioning.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Is that a problem?”

  I lo
oked up at the vent. Being a few floors underground like this, in a building designed for the study and control of disease, air conditioning might very well be a problem, perhaps not right away and with only a small group of people breathing the limited air supply. Still, it was another reason to think about getting out of here as quickly as possible.

  But then there was another shudder, and the airflow started again, this time in the wrong direction. I could hear the ventilation system working now, and if I stood still and concentrated, I definitely felt air passing by me, but flowing upward now toward the vent.

  “They’re sucking the air out,” I said at the moment of understanding. “They’re trying to control the contamination.”

  “What contamination?” Chad asked.

  “When the windows broke. The gray zone crossed into the white zone. They’re trying to keep it from spreading to the rest of the base.”

  Chad looked up and put a hand in the air. There would have been a vent in his ceiling, too. “Nothing’s happening in here. Still cool air coming out.”

  “Then it’s just the white zone.”

  I couldn’t feel any difference in the air yet, had no difficulty breathing. But I guessed that wouldn’t be the case for long.

  “I gotta go,” I said. This time I did put my hand on the glass, and he put his up to match it. “I’ll come back for you.”

  “Don’t.”

  He meant it, but so did I.

  Then I was gone. Taking only a moment to glance at Dolores and wish I could do something for her suffering, I ran to the broken window of the old man’s cell, hoping the soldier had left the door open after he’d shot the old man and seen what was happening in the corridor. Shards of glass stuck up from the window frame, so I darted across the corridor, reached into my cell, and pulled my chair into the white zone. Placing it on the floor next to the old man’s cell, I stepped up and then found a spot on the window frame where I could put my foot without getting cut. Then I was up and in.

  The old man lay dead at my feet, a hole in his throat and blood everywhere. There was no avoiding it. If I tried hopping over the pool of blood, I might slip when I landed, and I didn’t want to fall in it. So I stepped gingerly in the puddle, my military-issued socks soaking it up right away, and got past the old man’s body as quickly as I could. I couldn’t stand the feeling of his blood on my feet, so I peeled off the socks as soon as I had crossed the cell and went barefoot to the door at the back.