The Girl at the End of the World (26 page)

“You okay?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yeah.” Then a nervous little laugh escaped me. To say that I was “okay” was a ridiculous understatement. I still didn’t know what was going to happen, didn’t know if one of us might still get sick, didn’t know how we’d get out of here alive. But now I knew we’d be going together, and that was really all that mattered. It was the only thing that had mattered for a long time now; I just hadn’t been ready to admit it to myself.

He shook his head, kind of in disbelief. “I’ve wanted to do that for a long time.”

“Well why didn’t you?”

“I could never get you alone.”

I almost laughed again at that, at the absurdity of it. In a world with almost no one left alive, he’d still had a tough time finding some privacy with me.

“Come on,” I said. “Enough worrying about who’s got what disease. I think we can get out of here now.”

He stood up with me. “You don’t think they’ll try and stop us?”

“They might. They haven’t yet, though. I don’t think there’s many soldiers left here. Muñoz said that Sharma was the only doctor.”

“Muñoz? You talked to her?”

I gave him a quick rundown of what had happened since I’d left him before.

“You really think she’s got immunity now?”

“That, or she always had it to begin with.”

We had shoved the remaining food rations into the backpack while I talked, and now we each took a bottle of water as we prepared to leave his cell. I looked away for a second when he peeled off his bloody shirt and took another one from the supply closet along the back wall.

“You want me to take her?” he asked once he popped his head through the clean shirt, and I handed Kayla over before slipping on the backpack. She only weighed maybe ten pounds, but I was glad to pass her off to Chad. Then we went into the hallway, only getting a few steps from the doorway before we stopped and exchanged a worried glance, each of us practically frozen mid-step.

“You smell it, too?” I asked. He nodded, and we both looked up.

I couldn’t see it at first against the gray paint, but when I’d looked at the ceiling long enough, I began to make out thin tendrils of smoke coming through the vents.

“They trying to gas us?” Chad asked.

I thought about it for a second and then shook my head. “The place is on fire,” I said.

“How?”

“Who knows? The fungus maybe…people going nuts already.
Maybe something else. We better go.”

We moved faster then and made it to the elevator doors. I punched the call button.

“You sure it’s safe?” Chad asked.

“No.”

I thought about all the times I’d ever been in elevators and how every single one of them had a sign outside warning you not to use it during a fire. There was always a little stick figure drawing of a person taking the stairs instead.

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 around, 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.