The Girl at the End of the World (17 page)

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. With 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.

So I kept quiet about it, trying to give Chad meaningful looks throughout the day just to confirm our solidarity. If I was going to fake being sick tonight and risk Donovan’s wrath, I wanted to be sure it was a risk worth taking, one that Chad was going to back me up on. But when I did catch his eye, he didn’t say or do anything to show that he knew what I was getting at, let alone that he was still onboard with the plan. He seemed distant throughout the whole day, and I wondered more than once if I’d made a mistake taking him into my confidence.

When I couldn’t take the worry any longer, I whispered, “Are you having second thoughts?”

“Sort of,” he admitted. “But only with part of it.”

We were sitting side by side on our mats. Dolores dozed on Chad’s other side, the baby asleep beside her in an empty dresser drawer that Donovan had brought in for us to use as a bassinet.

When I raised an eyebrow, Chad said, “I should be the one inside the outhouse. I can hit him harder with the door.”

I thought about it for a few seconds, weighing the differences in the plan.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think I could hit him pretty hard from inside. But if it was you inside, and he didn’t go down…I might have a tough time getting him off balance outside.”

“I don’t think you’d need to,” he said.

He sounded so sure of himself, almost cocky, not the way he usually sounded.

“That’s not what you’re worried about,” I said after a few more seconds.

Chad looked at me quickly, and then looked away.

“If it goes wrong,” I said, “and it’s you in the outhouse, then it’s you who’s going to get punished. Right? Even if it just looks like I’m following your lead outside? That’s what you’re worried about?”

His silence was answer enough.

I shook my head. “Don’t worry about me, Chad. If it goes wrong, it’s bound to get ugly for both of us. But chances are it won’t go wrong if it’s me inside and you out. Odds are way better that way than the other.”

“You think?”

“Don’t you? Who’s got a better shot at tackling Donovan once he’s off balance?”

He nodded. “I guess I do.”

I let that sink in for a few seconds. “We’re in this together. Right?”

He nodded again.

“If we’re worried about anything, then let’s worry about protecting Dolores and the baby, okay?”

“Okay.”

I wished we could shake on it to seal the deal, but it would have been completely stupid to do something like that with Donovan’s cameras trained on us. It would have been like shouting, “Hey! We’re conspiring here!” So instead, we traded nods, and that was that.

The rest of the afternoon and evening just crawled by. We didn’t talk any more about our plans, and we hadn’t talked at all about what we were going to do if we succeeded, so I filled the time by imagining the kinds of things we’d need to gather once we made it to Riverside and what we’d do after that. It was hard not to let my nerves get the better of me, hard not to feel jumpy and tense. I forced myself to eat the canned beans and fruit Donovan handed out, but my stomach felt like a tight little ball, so when I was done eating I just leaned my head back against the wall and closed my eyes, just willing the time to pass and steeling myself for the moment when I’d shut the outhouse door.

Finally, it was time. Donovan’s airlock hissed open, and he came out in his hazard suit with the gun that may as well have been joined surgically to his hand. Out we went, as always with the length of chain joining each of our manacles, passing between our legs to the person behind us. It was me in front, then Chad, then Dolores, who held Kayla. Donovan followed, always watching.

I let out a little cough as we crossed the tall, dry grass between the bunker and the outhouse, raising my hand to my mouth as I did. This pulled taut the chain between Chad and me, rubbing uncomfortably between my legs. I held it there for a second, and then gave it two quick tugs.

I waited for Chad to tug back, waited for anything, any signal from him that he was still with me and ready to go.

Nothing.

My heart sank, and I began lowering my hands, taking some of the tension out of the chain. And then it jerked, just the littlest bit. And again.