The Girl at the End of the World (22 page)

When Dr. Sharma did return, it was with a small plastic case and her omnipresent clipboard. This time, she started with the old man, who seemed to cooperate readily, as though he’d been conditioned like an animal in an experiment. With her back blocking much of my view, I couldn’t tell what the doctor did, but it looked like she put something
inside
the drawer before leaning forward to put her hands in the gloves. After a few seconds, she withdrew her hands, punched buttons, and then took something back out of the drawer. She made notes on her clipboard and then moved on to Chad.

With him, she stayed a bit longer, but not much. I could see them talking. Then she repeated the same process. This time, from the different angle, I could definitely tell she took something out of her little case and dropped it inside the airlock chamber. She made a note on her clipboard, leaned forward to put her arms in the gloves, and then pulled her arms out to wait for the decontamination process to finish inside the drawer before she took the same thing out. A few more words exchanged with Chad, and she crossed the hall to Dolores.

There, the angle was all wrong; I couldn’t see much of anything, but assumed the doctor was going through the same routine. All I could do was wait for my turn.

It came soon enough.

“Good morning, Scarlett,” Dr. Sharma said when she pulled her stool up to my window.

That was odd. First, because she was never so friendly, and second because my internal clock had me convinced it was late afternoon.
Morning
, I thought, trying to reorient myself.

“Good morning,” I replied automatically.

“We’ve made some advancements and are ready for the next phase of our experiments.”

“Okay. What’s that going to involve?”

She didn’t answer directly, just opened her little case to reveal four syringes. Three looked empty; the fourth had about half an inch of yellow liquid in the tube. Taking the fourth syringe from her case, she looked at the label for a moment and then wrote something on her clipboard before setting it aside. Then she punched her code and placed the syringe in the decontamination drawer.

“What’s in that?” I asked.

“Just some neutral agents that we plan on suspending the vaccine in once it’s ready. We need to make sure the delivery system has no adverse effects.”

“Wait,” I said, drawing back from the glass. “What kind of adverse effects?”

She raised an eyebrow and said, “Nothing to worry about. If the vaccine is going to cause nausea or insomnia or euphoria, we’d like to know about it before we begin subjecting men with guns to it.”

I thought about it for a second before scooting back to the glass. Her reference to men with guns hadn’t been random. She wanted me remembering who had the power here. If I refused to participate in this portion of her experiment, she had ways of changing my mind. Now I imagined Muñoz as the one forcing me onto a table while the doctor strapped me down. I still didn’t like the idea of her shooting something experimental into my body, but I also knew I didn’t have much choice. My desire to escape this place increased by about a thousand-fold, however, as I sat there and let her swab the spot on my upper arm where she’d chosen to inject me. I glanced in Chad’s direction, hoping to find him watching so I could give him a meaningful stare, but he wasn’t anywhere in sight.

A few seconds later, the needle was in, and I felt a burning sensation spreading out from it as well as a quick feeling of intense pressure. Then the needle was out, and the gloved fingers were applying a little bandage, and that was it. The pain decreased but didn’t go away entirely.

“Are you all right?” the doctor asked.

I nodded. “Hurts, but it’s going away.”

“Good.” She pulled her hands out of the gloves and readied herself to go. “Thank you for cooperating,” she added.

“You’re welcome.” I felt like I had to say it, like I’d been bullied into it by her imitation of politeness.

Then she was gone, and I was left to rub my arm and fantasize about breaking through the glass and running away.

*****

I must have slept. Or maybe I just lay on the cot and stared at the ceiling, but I doubt I could have done that for long without dozing off. At any rate, I definitely had the feeling that some time had passed when I sat up and looked around. I felt a bit dizzy, and the room seemed elongated, distorted.

The shot
, I thought.
She lied.

My adrenaline started flowing then, the idea that Dr. Sharma had given me something more potent than “neutral agents” made me angry and scared at the same time—but mostly angry. I wanted to shout and hit things. I wanted her sitting across from me with her neat little clipboard and her stupid glasses and her smug look so I could tell her what I really thought of her and how I wished she’d just get it over with and die.

But then I realized that the dizziness was gone. Maybe my anger had counteracted it, made it go away. Even so, I still felt angry, but also a bit less scared.

A bit tentatively, I got off the cot. Still feeling fine, I went to the window. And there I saw Chad at his window, waiting for me.

I had never seen him look like this, and I was alarmed immediately, more adrenaline coursing into my system. He looked scared and agitated and was rocking back and forth behind the glass. When he saw me, his expression changed a bit, adding relief to the mix. How someone could look relieved and scared at the same time, I don’t know, but Chad pulled it off that day.

“KAYLA,” he wrote on the window, his fingers flying so I could barely get the letters.

“?”

“THEY TOOK HER.”

Now my heart started beating even more rapidly. At first, I’d guessed he was feeling side effects from the injection, too. Probably worse side effects than I was having. But now I knew otherwise.

“Y?” I wrote.

He shrugged and held his arms up in a sign of bewilderment.

“DID SHE GET A SHOT 2?”

“COULDN’T SEE. CAN’T ASK DOLORES.”

Chad’s Spanish was far worse than mine, and I didn’t have the slightest idea of how to ask, “Did the baby get an injection?” in anything but English.

“IS SHE UPSET?” I asked.

Chad nodded vehemently. Dolores was probably freaking out in the cell next to mine, and there was nothing I could do to help her.

“WHEN DID THEY TAKE HER?”

“A WHILE. NOT LONG AFTER SHARMA CAME.”

“U SAW?”

He nodded.

“WAS IT SHARMA?”

“THINK SO.”

“AND SOLDIERS?”

He nodded again.

I could picture it—the doctor and the soldiers all in hazard suits, the soldiers with their guns drawn in case Dolores put up a fight, and Dolores probably crying and begging them not to take the baby.

If I’d hated Sharma before, it was nothing compared to what I felt now.

“WHAT DO WE DO?” Chad wrote.

I thought about it for a few seconds, wanting to write
ESCAPE
on the glass, but now wasn’t the time for I-told-you-so. Even if he had been willing to conspire with me, I didn’t think we’d have found an opportunity before this new kink in our situation.

“TALK 2 MUÑOZ,” I finally wrote. Maybe there was something there. Maybe the young guard had a little crush on Chad or was just sympathetic to our plight. That she didn’t seem to care for me wouldn’t matter: it was Chad and Dolores she seemed to like, and if those two were upset over what had happened to Kayla, they might find a sympathetic listener in Private Muñoz.
And maybe some information that we could work with to get ourselves out of this bind.

Chad didn’t even need to think about it, just nodded right away. He must have seen the possibilities of talking to the guard even as I was thinking them.

But Muñoz didn’t come. It was the middle of the mean-looking young guard’s shift when Chad and I messaged each other. Then the thin, older guard had his turn. Muñoz should have been next, but no. The third guard was one we’d never seen before, an African-American soldier in his thirties who made no eye contact with us as he patrolled, just got out of the corridor as quickly as he could.

Chad and I gave each other quizzical looks and shrugged. “SHOULD GET SOME SLEEP,” Chad wrote.

He was right. I’d been fighting sleep for a while now, waiting for Muñoz. Now that she hadn’t shown, the idea of staying awake until this guard’s shift was over seemed an impossibility.

“WHAT ABOUT MUÑOZ?” I wrote.

“WE’LL CATCH HER AS SOON AS WE CAN.”

I nodded, not wanting him to be right but seeing no way around the situation. We needed sleep; Muñoz wasn’t here; if we slept through her shift, one of us was bound to be awake during another shift. I was determined that I’d get her to talk to me if Chad was asleep and I wasn’t.

I closed my blinds, dimmed my lights, and lay down. Telling myself this was just a catnap, I didn’t take off my clothes and didn’t cover myself with the blanket. I didn’t want to get too comfortable, didn’t want to fall too deeply asleep. It wouldn’t do to crash out for six or seven hours, not when so many odd things were going on.

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.