The elevator doors slid open a few seconds later.
“What if it gets stuck?” Chad said.
I hadn’t explored the whole floor out in the white zone, but I had been around the hallways of the gray zones enough to remember not having seen any doors marked “Stairs.” With very little breathable air out in the white zone, and a fire burning somewhere in the complex, I didn’t like the idea of rushing around this whole floor looking for another way out. I didn’t like the idea of being trapped in an elevator while the whole underground complex burned around us either, but I figured we had better odds if we got out now, when things were still just beginning to fall apart, rather than wait and search and hope for a way out of the maze as it collapsed around us.
A second later, the sprinkler system kicked in, water spraying down from the ceiling. That decided it for me. The chaos of locked doors and sprinklers raining down on us, of airlocks and fire in a building I didn’t know my way around—and where armed men might be showing up at any moment—was all too much.
“We take our chances,” I said and stepped inside.
Chad didn’t even hesitate. He and Kayla were there beside me, and the doors closed.
Chapter Fourteen
There were no choices for floors on the elevator panel. Just up and down. I reasoned this was because the floor we’d been on was the only floor that was part of the gray zone, the only floor with a direct connection to the outside world. There must have been other elevators in the compound, but they all would have needed to be part of the white zone, all with sterilization chambers and layers of security to keep the scientists safe.
No, I told myself. Not to keep them safe. To keep the rest of us safe from them and what they were making down here.
Nervous about it, I punched the Up button. With my right hand holding Chad’s, I kept my left on the elevator doors as we zipped up to ground level, hoping not to feel the metal grow hot. A few times on the ride up, I thought maybe it was heating up, but when I moved my hand the door felt cool again, and I decided it was just my imagination and paranoia.
The ride didn’t last long. The elevator slowed and stopped, and then the doors slid open. Chad held up a hand, cautioning me to wait. We both listened for any sign of trouble, any challenge to our presence here. Hearing nothing, we exchanged nods and then stepped out onto the roof.
I hadn’t really known what to expect from the top level, probably hadn’t consciously been expecting anything. But I remember feeling surprised to find it was light outside. The last time I’d been here, out in the fresh air on the roof of the building, it had been the middle of the night, and it had been cool out here in the desert. So it was kind of incongruous to find that the sun was out, dipping to the west and the distant mountains that separated the desert from the sprawling city on the other side.
The helipad was in front of us, two helicopters sitting there and reminding me of giant grasshoppers just waiting to spring away into the air. To our left and right stretched row upon row of solar panels; when we’d arrived in the dark, I hadn’t been able to make out the black panels, or if I had, my feelings of overload and confusion had kept me from comprehending the panels’ purpose. Now I knew how the whole complex had continued to have power even though all the power stations in the region had shut down. And now that I knew, I didn’t really care.
“Which way?” I asked.
Both of us looked around for a moment. We were atop a large low building, no hint that it spread deep into the ground. Across from us, on the other side of the helipad, was one edge of the building, and I scanned along it for a second.
“There,” I said, pointing at what looked like a metal handrail curving up from the building’s side. “Stairs, or a ladder. Something.”
“Okay.”
Chad led the way, walking past the first row of solar panels. I followed, wondering what we’d find when we got to the ground and where we’d go from there. We were maybe a dozen steps from the elevator when I heard something on our left—maybe a footstep, maybe the brushing of a hazard suit against the side of a solar panel.
I didn’t have time to process what I’d heard or to say anything to warn Chad that something was wrong. A soldier stepped out from the shadows between the panels, a hazard suit protecting him from the atmosphere. He held a rifle, and had it trained on Chad, who looked frozen to the spot. The littlest movement of the rifle’s barrel, and it would be pointed right at my chest.
“Stop right there,” he said, his voice muffled but clear enough to understand.
We had already stopped.
“Hands up.”
Chad raised one hand, holding Kayla to his chest with the other. I raised both of mine, my mind racing to find a way to get us out of this. The handrail and freedom were just so close. Our bid for escape couldn’t end this way, I told myself. At the same time, I couldn’t think of a way around the gun.
“Down,” the soldier said. “On your knees.”
Chad complied, going down carefully and slowly with the baby held to him. I hesitated only a second and then followed suit.
The soldier approached. I couldn’t remember having seen him before. He might have been part of the crew that rescued us from Donovan, and he might not have been. At any rate, he didn’t look happy, and I felt sure that if Chad hadn’t been holding Kayla, he’d already have had the soldier’s rifle butt across his forehead.
“The building’s on fire,” I said. “We had to get out. We weren’t trying to escape, I promise.”
He seemed to consider this for a moment.
There’s no way to know what he would have done next. My hope was to play on his sympathies, to get him to let us stay here until he had more information on the fire. Maybe he’d relax his grip on the gun and one of us could make a move then. There had to be something.
But it didn’t go that way.
The soldier seemed to react to something behind me, and when I turned my head, there was Muñoz stepping out of the elevator doors. She had armed herself with a handgun, and now she pointed it at the soldier.
“Let ‘em go,” she said.
“You crazy?” he replied. “You’re gonna die out here Muñoz. Where’s your suit?”
She ignored the question. “The only one that’s gonna die out here is you, Darren. Let ‘em go. This place is gonna go up any minute. There’s no more military for us. You better make your peace with it.”
He seemed to consider this for a moment. Then he shook his head. “Drop your weapon, Muñoz. And get me some handcuffs for these two.”
She didn’t hesitate, just pulled the trigger without another word.
I think I screamed, and Chad and I both ducked. Kayla started wailing. The soldier with the gun went over backwards, his body when it hit the rooftop seeming heavier than it should have been. Dead weight.
My ears rang from the gunfire, and I turned to see Muñoz approaching us, a stupid smile on her face.
“Changed my mind,” she said. “Better odds with you guys.”
I began to get up off my knees. And then there was another gunshot. A little hole appeared in Muñoz’s forehead, and her body crumpled.
I couldn’t speak, couldn’t really even think for a few seconds. This couldn’t have just happened. I couldn’t have seen it. It was like everything got slowed down—the desert breeze on the rooftop, Kayla crying, Chad shouting, and Muñoz’s body bouncing just a little as it came to rest.
And then I was kneeling at her side. Her eyes were blank, no longer taking in the sky. Tears streaming down my face and rage ripping through me, I turned to see the soldier who’d killed her approaching across the helipad, his rifle pointed down, his gait relaxed—as though killing a fellow soldier was nothing to him, and as though the teenagers and baby with the body were no threat at all.
I didn’t even think, didn’t consider what awaited us back down in the gray zone where we were sure to end up, prodded along by the rifle’s tip. I picked up Muñoz’s handgun, swung it arou
nd, and emptied it into the soldier’s chest. He didn’t even have the chance to raise his weapon.
Kayla was screaming now. Chad looked at me in complete disbelief.
“You killed him!” he said, his voice coming to me from far away, somewhere past the ringing in my ears.
I didn’t say anything, just lowered the smoking gun. I gave myself a silent little pat on the back, remembering all the target practice I’d done in the observatory parking lot. You finally got something right, I told myself.
“We’d better go,” I said after a few more seconds. “More might be coming.”
Turning back to Muñoz’s body, I closed her eyes and whispered, “Thanks.”
I stood up, bent over the body, and then stooped to remove her belt, along with the gun’s holster and a little leather case with a box of ammunition inside. Then I untied her shoes.
“What are you doing?” Chad asked. He sounded scared, impatient.
“Set the baby down and open that guy’s suit,” I said.
“What?”
“Get his shoes. We need shoes.”
Neither pair of shoes fit us well, but we couldn’t cross the desert with Chad in socks and my feet still bare. In a few minutes, we had gathered our things along with the weapons and ammunition from the dead soldiers. Then it was across the helipad and down the metal stairs to the ground.
There was an open space maybe thirty feet across and then a high fence with razor wire along the top. The fence looked like it stretched all around the perimeter. There had to be a gate somewhere, but it might be guarded. The thing that really caught my attention, though, and Chad’s too, were a couple of Jeeps parked maybe fifty yards away.
We hurried, walking as quickly as the ill fitting shoes would allow, each of us glancing up at the roof of the building occasionally, worried that another soldier might be up there ready to pick us off. Then we heard a booming sound and felt the ground shake; something down in the complex had just exploded. Without saying a word, we started running toward the Jeeps, my backpack bouncing uncomfortably against my lower back, and Kayla crying in Chad’s arms.
Please let there be keys, please let there be keys, I thought as we ran.
Luck was with us. The first Jeep had a silver key resting in the ignition.
“You know how to drive, I hope,” I said as I piled my backpack and the rifles in the space behind the seats.
“Yeah,” he said. “How about you?”
“Motorcycle.” I took Kayla from him and tried to make a silly face to calm her down, but she wasn’t having it. “No baby seat, kiddo. We’re gonna get a ticket if we get pulled over.”
Chad smiled at that, and then he started the engine. The three of us pulling away from the little parking lot made me think of what Muñoz had said about us being like a little family once we escaped, and the weight of her death hit me harder than when I’d watched her fall. I knew I’d been wrong about her, wrong about how it would have been if she’d come with us: we could have made it work with her along.
I wiped a tear from my eye and held Kayla tight as Chad took us along the gravel road beside the massive building. The gate was ahead of us, a guard station next to it. Chad slowed the Jeep to a stop and reached behind us for one of the guns. We exchanged glances, and when I nodded at him, he put the Jeep back into gear and went forward slowly.
I was ready to duck and protect the baby if I heard gunfire, but there was nothing. The little kiosk was abandoned, its door hanging open in the breeze. Chad stopped the Jeep in front of it, and I passed Kayla over to him before getting out.
Inside the kiosk were a radio unit and three monitors showing the building from its other sides, a bodybuilding magazine, and a half empty bottle of water. All that interested me, though, was a small console with a big red button on it, the word “GATE” in white above it. I punched the button, and the gate began to slide open on its rollers.
Once we were outside, I wondered about closing the gate behind us, but I realized there wasn’t much point. If the soldiers inside the compound survived the outbreak and the fire, they’d know we had gone soon enough, and closing the gate to cover our tracks wouldn’t do any good. They might follow us, and they might not. The odds were that they wouldn’t, though. Sharma had been exposed and would be dead soon, if she wasn’t already. Without their chief scientist, the soldiers wouldn’t know what to do with survivors. I expected that any soldier who made it through the next few hours would spend the rest of his life in the white zone, radioing for help the way Donovan had before they starved to death or killed themselves.
Beyond the gate, a gravel road snaked across the desert, and we followed it for miles. I couldn’t help looking back at the compound as we drove. Smoke trailed into the sky from three different spots. No, I told myself, they’re not going to follow.
Kayla calmed down before too long, and Chad took us west toward the mountains and the setting sun. In spite of all the horrible things that had happened in the last several hours—to the old man, to Dolores, to Muñoz, and even to the soldier I’d killed and all the others who’d be dead soon, too—I felt really good with the sun on my skin and my hair whipping in the wind. I couldn’t help laughing. It had been the longest time since I’d laughed, and now there was nothing to stop me.
*****
Eventually, we found a paved road, followed it to a bigger one, and followed that to yet another. By dusk, we’d made it onto Highway 395, which Chad said was good; it would lead us to the Interstate, he said, and he was right. The closer we got to the main road, the more clogged it became with wrecked or abandoned vehicles, and when it seemed too dark to keep going safely, we just stopped in the middle of the road.
Chad found blankets in an SUV; then he cleared the corpses from a Cadillac and gave Kayla and me the back seat to sleep in while he reclined in the driver’s seat. It was a short night with not much sleep, and before dawn we were on the road again, opting for a big pick-up truck that Chad had outfitted with a baby seat. I didn’t ask where he’d found it.
Outside Victorville, we broke into a convenience store, loaded up on salt and sugar, and gathered up one of each map they’d had for sale in a rack by the register. Then we got back on the road again after talking about our options.
We had to stay off the Interstate because it was completely jammed with cars and dried out bodies, but the maps we’d found showed the back roads that got us into the mountains and eventually onto the highway that led to Big Bear Lake, the mountain resort where my family had a cabin, where my mom and Anna had headed when they left me the night I turned fifteen.
For a variety of reasons, Big Bear seemed like a better choice than going back down into the city: there would be abundant water from the lake and the sources that fed it; there were plenty of stores and homes and resorts that we could scavenge enough supplies from to last us for years; there was less likely to be another Donovan in the mountains, or any other survivors who might mean us harm. The winters would be hard, but we’d have plenty of firewood.
I didn’t say it out loud, but it was hard not to fantasize that my mom and Anna had made it, that they shared my immunity and had fought their way through all the madness of those first days of the disease to reach the cabin and set themselves up nicely. I imagined a perfect homecoming with my mom and Anna opening the door of the cabin to welcome Chad and me and Kayla, the scent of a turkey dinner wafting through the air as they took us in with hugs and tears.
But of course that didn’t happen. Big Bear was a ghost town. Deer had gotten used to wandering the streets, and they looked at us with insulted surprise when the pickup truck rolled through town, raccoons and squirrels scattering, too.
When we got to the cabin, I walked up first, knowing I’d find no one there but needing to see for myself. It felt silly knocking on the door, but I did it anyway. When there was no answer, I tried not to sigh. Giving Chad a brave smile, I walked past him to the lone black rock among all the white and gray ones that lined the walkway.
The spare key my mom had hidden a long time ago still sat there in the wet earth, undisturbed for ages. I picked it up and squeezed it, knowing my mom had been the last one to touch it, telling myself it was our last little connection and making myself believe the key gave me a little of her spirit.
Chad followed me in, Kayla sleeping in his arms. The cabin smelled musty; it had been closed up for a long time and would take some airing out. It felt strange for it to be so silent and dark, so empty and cold. Summer was long gone, and autumn had already begun to grow chilly in the mountains. I knew the lights wouldn’t work, but the fireplace would. I crossed to the hearth and squatted before it while Chad laid Kayla on the couch and began unpacking a few things from our bags. Using the iron poker, I pushed aside the ashes and charred bits of wood around the grate.
“Welcome home,” Chad said behind me.
I gave him a little smile and stood up to hug him. He kissed me and then said, “Here.”
I stepped back, and he handed me the little framed photo from my old house.
“Thanks,” I whispered and set it on the mantle, placing it between two empty candleholders. Then I took his hand and leaned into him before the hearth, letting him hold me there for a long time.
Epilogue
That was three years ago.
We spent the rest of that fall getting ready for winter, realizing pretty quickly that there were better, nicer, less drafty places for us to live. After a few days in my family’s cabin, we moved into a place with solar panels on the roof, finding a crib and baby furniture in a store in downtown Big Bear.
There were bodies to dispose of—mostly the suicides and accident victims. The people who’d died from the fungus had all been consumed, their bodies transformed by the F2 into barely recognizable lumps, but we gathered as many of those as we could and burned them in a vacant lot. They were just too unpleasant to leave lying around.
When we weren’t working at storing food and supplies and planning for our survival and taking care of Kayla, we both read as much as we could—raiding the library for books on agriculture and medicine and childcare.
The Girl at the End of the World Page 23
