The Girl at the End of the World (16 page)

I exhaled, feeling relieved, like I’d actually done something. “Okay,” I echoed.

Alex pushed on the next contraction, straining the muscles in her neck and squeezing my hand, holding her breath and pushing as long as she could before gasping in more air to push again.

And then baby was out. All I saw was Dolores leaning in quickly and then backing away again, and she held the tiny pink baby in her hands, all covered in fluids that matted its hair and stuck to its skin. Already, Dolores was wiping at the baby’s skin with one of the towels she’d kept nearby, and then it started to cry.

Alex was crying, too, and still breathing hard.

And I won’t say I wasn’t a teary mess myself. It was one of the most amazing things I’d ever seen, following a time when all I’d seen were horrible things, when I thought I’d never see anything amazing again.

“
Una niña
,” Dolores said. “Girl.”

“It’s a girl,” I repeated through my tears.

“
Ayúdame
,” Dolores said, tipping her head to indicate I should come closer. She handed me a towel and then put the little baby in my arms. She wiggled a bit, and her arms and legs twitched.

Dolores grabbed scissors, poured alcohol over them, and cut the cord. She held it for a moment to stop the flow of blood and then turned back to Alex.

I moved closer to Alex, thinking I’d hand her the baby. But then there was one more contraction, and the placenta came out. And with it a lot of blood.

“Dios
mio
,” Dolores said, grabbing for cotton pads and pushing them up against Alex. I looked at her face, and saw fear there. She looked pale, like someone about to throw up from motion sickness.

“
Ayúdame! Ayúdame!
” Dolores shouted.

“What do I do?” I yelled back.

Alex moaned, and the baby cried.

I felt everything coming apart.

And I got a look at how much blood was pouring out of Alex. If she’d been in a hospital with doctors and nurses and all the right equipment…if she’d just had the baby a month before, she would have been fine. But with just me and Dolores there to help her on the floor of an abandoned drugstore, with no more doctors or nurses alive anywhere, and with all that blood…

Dolores tried. I can’t imagine anything she could have done differently or better with the limited resources she had. But after an endless minute or two, Alex was gone. She never even got to hold her baby.

I couldn’t believe it.

Dolores and I just sat there, both of us weeping along with the little orphan baby in my arms. I tried not to look at Alex’s face, her eyes open and staring up into the dark ceiling of the store. I knew that image would haunt me, and it did. I’d seen so much death in the last month, had reached a point where it had stopped bothering me. But this was something new, and it took me a long time to shake it.

After a few minutes, Dolores covered Alex with a blanket and got up from the floor. Then she put out a hand to help me up and took the baby from my arms.

“Kayla,” I said, glad Alex had thought to tell me, wondering if the poor woman had really known something was going to go wrong or if it had just been worry.

Dolores barely nodded. There was a package of diapers for newborns and she put one on the baby; then she used some medical tape on the end of the umbilical cord before beginning to wrap Kayla in a towel.

“
La leche
,” she said.

Milk. Without her mother, the baby was going to need formula, bottles,
all sorts of things. I nodded, took a lantern, and found a shopping cart, wiping at my tears with the back of my hand and moving into the dark of the store in total disbelief.

*****

The rain had stopped by the time Dolores and I walked outside with the baby and our cart full of supplies. I don’t think I considered running from Donovan for even a second the whole time we were in the store. Yes, I still wanted to get away from him, and I still wouldn’t have minded seeing him dead or hurt in the process, but for now we needed him, needed his bus and his resources and whatever else he had in Riverside that had allowed him to beat the fungus for as long as he had.

When he saw just Dolores and me coming out of the store, he stood up inside the bus, opening the door and coming down the steps. He still held his gun and waved it at us now. I could hear him mumbling something inside his suit and guessed at what he was saying. But I didn’t feel like putting forth the effort it would take to yell an answer across the parking lot.

“She’s dead,” I said simply and directly when we got closer. “No thanks to you.”

Then I walked past him and let Dolores hand the baby to me once I was halfway up the steps into the bus. We ignored Donovan, loading the supplies from the shopping cart once I’d handed Chad the baby and told him unceremoniously to be careful. My tone must have told him everything he needed to know, because he didn’t ask a single question, just took the little bundle from me and watched in silence as I helped Dolores.

Donovan waited outside, also watching, not doing anything to help. When we had everything inside, he followed us in and got Dolores and me locked in to our restraints again with Dolores holding the baby.

“What happened?” he finally said once the last lock had clicked into place.

“She bled to death,” I answered.

He just stood there for a moment, thinking about it, probably trying to ferret out any trickery that Dolores and
I or maybe even Alex had cooked up. He must not have thought of any, just nodded. Then he went to check for himself, or at least that was what I assumed. He left the bus and walked away only to come back a few minutes later and climb the steps to the driver’s seat without saying a word.

And then we were off again, continuing east, with one more survivor as part of Donovan’s herd.

Chapter Ten

Donovan drove the bus straight through the night, but with stops along the way. He let us out of the bus to relieve ourselves behind cars, always with the threat that he’d start shooting the others if one of us didn’t come back.

I could only guess that he was taking care of his own business inside that suit he wore, probably wearing an adult diaper. During the breaks in driving, I watched him, seeing that his protective suit fit loosely enough to enable him to pull an arm out of his sleeve and move it around inside the suit. He must have had inner pockets with supplies of some kind inside, as I saw him drinking something from a straw, maybe a protein drink or something else to keep him hydrated and energized. If he’d been on just liquids since he’d started his trip from Riverside, there might have been some way he’d been urinating into a bag or something. Even so, he was probably ready to get out of that suit, as his impatience with our stops suggested.

The first time the baby needed feeding, it was quite a production with all the packaging that needed to be opened and instructions that needed to be read. And then the baby needed changing and cleaning and swaddling, and Dolores couldn’t do it all with her hands chained. Finally Donovan gave up in disgust and let her ride unbound, probably reasoning that she wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize the baby while we were driving. That meant she handed Kayla to me several times while she got up and rummaged through the supplies we’d brought onboard. I remember holding her that night, worried that the swaddling cloth was too tight, amazed at this warm little package on my lap, and haunted by the image of her dead mother and the fear that the baby wouldn’t have inherited Alex’s immunity. I kept looking at her nose for signs of bleeding; finding none, I’d relax for a minute and then be forced to look again.

We reached Donovan’s compound just after sunrise. A large, open piece of land off the beaten track, it didn’t look like much. I could see only a bit of it through the bus’s windshield: dry grass and old cars and an older house on the other side of a chain link fence.

Donovan opened the gate with a remote control, and the bus rolled into the compound, driving past the house to stop in front of a small outbuilding made entirely of gray cinder blocks. It had a single door and no windows that I could see; from its roof a huge antenna sprouted, the kind I’d seen before on the homes of ham radio operators. When I saw it, I immediately thought of the Australian TV station I’d been so desperate to reach when I’d gone to the solar house.

Donovan killed the engine and turned in his seat. “You’re going in one at a time. I’m telling you right now, this was a good trip for me. I got more of you than I needed, so if I need to hurt one of you, or worse, it’s still good for me. I don’t want to have to, but don’t push me.”

I tried to figure out what he meant, but there wasn’t much point. What he claimed to have needed was beyond me, and how he could now have more than he needed was also confusing. I was convinced that he was his own kind of crazy, had been before the fungus hit and now had found a way to bend what was left of the world to fit his twisted vision.

He said nothing more, just exited the bus, closing the door behind him. I moved as far forward in my seat as I could so I could watch him go.

He disappeared from my line of sight for several minutes. If I’d been fully able to trust Chad, I would have used this time to talk about escape or working together to trap or trick Donovan, maybe even hurt or kill him, so we could escape with Dolores and the baby. But I couldn’t be sure of him. Not after what he’d done to me at the observatory. So I just sat still and waited.

Craning my neck, I felt relieved to see Donovan finally returning. He approached the metal door of the block building. With his back between the bus and the door, I couldn’t see how he opened it, but seconds later the door swung inward, and he disappeared inside.

This time, he wasn’t gone long. He came back and pulled us out of the bus one at a time, Dolores and the baby first, me last. Getting out of the bus, the first thing I noticed was the rumble of a motor, a generator I realized, guessing that Donovan had fired it up when he’d first gotten out of the bus. When he shoved me through the doorway into the little building, I saw it was lit with fluorescent bulbs hanging from the ceiling. Chad and Dolores sat against the wall—Chad with his arms bound behind him, Dolores connected to Chad with leg shackles but with her hands still free so she could hold Kayla.

“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 tell, 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.