The Girl at the End of the World (8 page)

“Are you an angel?” she asked again.

“I think so,” I said.

She smiled broadly. “I knew it,” she gasped. “I knew it.” Tears rolled from her eyes now. “I didn’t want to be alone. I knew you’d come.”

I squeezed her hand back. “You’re not alone,” I said.

Her tears kept falling.

“Does it hurt?” I asked.

“Some.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Can you make it stop?”

“I’ll try.”

“Okay,” she said. Then her eyes opened wider. “Oh! Oh! It’s working.”

Her head dropped forward and her hand went slack.

“Sorry, Debbie,” I whispered.

I opened the door and scooted across the seat, leaning over toward Debbie and then pulling her so she could lie on her back. Then I folded her hands across her stomach and got out of the car, turning back to pull the torn shirt so it covered her as much as it could.

I took out my backpack and closed the door, leaning against it with my back and waiting for the popping sound. I didn’t want to see it. But I didn’t want to leave Debbie, either. I’d told her she wasn’t alone, after all.

When it was over, I took a deep breath and walked away from the car, trying not to think about it.

*****

The whole time I’d been sitting there with Debbie, I’d been listening for any sign of her attacker. There’d been nothing. With luck, he was already dead. The way he’d kept repeating “No, no,” told me he’d been fixated on something, just as Debbie had been with angels or the man at the stadium with foul balls. Physically, he’d been attacking Debbie, but with the growth pressing up on his brain, who knows what he’d been imagining as he wrestled the poor woman to the ground? It certainly hadn’t seemed like any kind of sexual attack. At any rate, I wasn’t about to let the possibility that he might still be lurking on the street keep me from the treasure trove that was the sporting goods store.

The sun had set and streetlights were coming on, but it wasn’t dark yet. I looked in my backpack and pulled out a flashlight, shoving it into my back pocket. Then I selected the Swiss Army knife and pulled out the biggest blade. It might not be as lethal as one of the kitchen knives, but it was more easily manageable. Besides, I didn’t really think I’d need to use it.

I headed back along the sidewalk, reaching for the flashlight pretty quickly and shining it into every shadow I approached. If the man was still alive and still functioning well enough to stalk me, he wasn’t going to be so easy to spot, and more likely would be somewhere out on the street skulking among the cars and waiting for the opportunity to strike at me. But he might just as well have been in the last stages of the disease and holed up in one of the shadowy spots along the sidewalk, not really a danger to me, but not something I wanted to be surprised by.

A little farther along, I saw him. I just stood there for a few seconds, barely letting myself breathe. My grip on the knife relaxed just a bit.

He lay on his stomach, his arms stretched out in front of him. The stalks poked out from under his face, reaching along the sidewalk toward his hand like another set of limbs. Seeing him dead like that, I felt sorry I’d kicked him, sorry his last moments had been spent hurting because of me while I’d helped make Debbie’s at least a bit peaceful. I knew my regret didn’t make any sense. I’d had to kick him, had to get him off Debbie. In the end, they’d have ended up the same way regardless of my presence here on the street. But I hadn’t known that then. I’d thought I was saving a fellow survivor, starting on a new path in this new world. Now it was just the same as it had been—terribly quiet with death all around me.

I walked past him, not bothering to prod him to make sure he was dead. There wouldn’t have been any point. Then I walked into the store, still holding the knife but shoving the flashlight back into my pocket.

It was weird, like I had walked into a different world. Outside, all was chaos and silence. Inside was the world as it had been. Florescent lights still burned, music still played over hidden speakers, and the smell of new things just about overwhelmed me along with all the bright colors of the shirts and helmets and kayaks on a rack along one wall. Maybe the weirdest part were the advertisements and promo posters—huge images of smiling, energized faces peering out at me from high up on the walls and atop just about every rack of clothing, people biking and swimming and playing soccer, doing all the vibrant, exciting things the store promoted and living the happy, active lifestyle all the images and products promised. And now they were all gone, their smiling faces on the posters and signs like gaudy memorials for nameless people who’d go unremembered now and forever.

I looked around at all the survivor gear: water-purifying tablets, hand-cranked flashlights, thermal blankets. There were maps of all the local hiking areas and others of Yosemite and the John Muir Trail. There were also more energy bars and supplements than I could even consider. The teenager in me liked the gadget displays—the GPS systems and all the gear for phones and tablets; there was even a little satellite system so you could get a signal out in the middle of nowhere. It had cost thousands of dollars the day before, but it was free now. Everything was.

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 for 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.