The Girl at the End of the World (4 page)

I want to say I felt something as I said it, but I didn’t. Maybe I was still in shock, or filled with disbelief. I can’t really say. All I know for sure is I was numb to that woman’s suffering.

Seconds later, just like at the stadium, the little bulbs burst and the air around the dead woman shimmered for several seconds as though a cloud of glitter had been loosed, only to be captured by the dozens of cameras all trained on the spectacle. I heard more shouts from the crowd, and more people ran to get away from the little cloud, but it dispersed almost immediately, the dust from the bulbs so fine that even the motion of people running caused enough disturbance in the air to send the particles this way and that way until it wasn’t a cloud anymore, just a memory burned into my mind.

The image switched back to the newscaster, clearly as shaken by what he’d just shown as anybody would have been from watching it on TV. “I’m being told we have audio from a telephone interview conducted with a young man who was at the scene we have just shown you. He wishes to remain anonymous.”

A still image of the woman lying on the ground, her face still intact, filled the screen as the interview played over it. A man’s voice, high pitched, came from the television speakers. He sounded like he’d been crying.

“I don’t want to say her name, but I knew her. I was here with her and some friends. She seemed fine, and then she just started talking about her dog, how she had to get back to her dog, how it needed to be walked. We all thought she was just fooling around, but then…”

A woman’s voice, probably someone at the TV station, said, “Do you know if the deceased woman had any connection to Los Angeles International Airport, or to the baggage handlers there who have died under similar circumstances?”

“No. No, but…”

“Yes?”

“She was at the Dodger game today. She saw what happened. That’s why we took her out…to get her mind off it. I didn’t think…She never…” The man began to sob; then there was a click. The interview was over. The image of the dead woman stayed on the screen a second more and then cut back to the newscaster.

“Oh God,” my mom was saying, her voice shaky.

For myself, all I can say is that I sat there trembling, convinced I’d just watched a preview of my death. She’d been at Dodger Stadium today. So had I. Who knows how close to Harmon Kirby she’d been? But it didn’t matter. I’d been close. Two rows away. Close enough to see it all. Close enough to be infected. I didn’t need a news analyst or a doctor or some other expert to tell me the dust from the ends of the stalks was the source of the infection.

What sort of infection…whether fungal or something else…that I didn’t know. Or how many others would die. Or how long it would take. The details didn’t matter.

I was going to die.

The strangest part is I actually felt relieved, like a weight had been lifted off me, a weight I hadn’t even known I was carrying around. It had been holding me down since Dodger Stadium…fear of the unknown. And now it was known. And with that knowledge, the weight lifted. The feeling didn’t last, but for those first few minutes the unburdening was almost euphoric.

The same can’t be said of my mother. She began crying harder. “We have to get you to the ER right now!” she said through her sobs.

“No,” I said, my voice calm.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Scarlett!”

“I’m not being ridiculous, Mom. If I go to the hospital now, who knows when I’m going to…when it’s going to happen to me? I’m not going to get you or Anna sick, too. If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen.”

“We’ll call a taxi then!”

“No! Don’t you get it? I don’t want
anyone
to die because of me. Not you or Anna or some taxi driver or an EMT. No one.”

“But we can’t just sit here and…wait.”

“I know. And I don’t want you to.” Still calm, knowing I had to be. I wouldn’t get what I wanted by throwing a tantrum. “Mom…we don’t know what this is or how widespread. But I know there’s a good chance I’ve got it. Dad, too. And the boys.” It was hard not to get choked up as that realization hit. “And if we do…if any of us do, then anyone who’s around us when it happens is going to be sick, too.”

“I just want to help you.” She sounded so small, so frail as she said it.
Like a little girl. Like I was the parent all of a sudden, and I had to tell her she couldn’t have what she wanted.

“I know. But if I’m sick, I don’t think you can help.” Reasoning with her now, breaking it down the way you would with an upset child, letting her know the options and steering her toward the only obvious conclusion. “And if I’m not, then it’ll all be okay, right? We don’t know how many people are sick, though. I mean, all those people at the stadium, and whatever else happened before then at the airport.”

“So what are you saying?”

I took a deep breath. “I’m saying that you need to leave.”

“Scarlett, I won’t! I can’t!”

“You have to. And not just to a hotel like I said before. You have to get out of the city. You and Anna both.”

“That’s ridiculous! I’m not going anywhere without—”

“You have to!” I raised my voice to cut her off, then repeated more calmly. “You have to. Mom.
For me. You and Anna have to be okay. If something bad’s going to happen to me, the only thing that’s going to help me is if I know you guys are okay.”

Silence on the line for a moment.
Then she said, “But I can’t” in the same tiny voice as a moment before. The situation we faced and the things I was saying were all just incomprehensible to her, and it reduced her almost to nothing.

It was like she was beaten, hit by waves from all sides until she couldn’t stand anymore and had only a feeble “I can’t” left as her defense.

“You can,” I said, my voice quiet and calm. It killed me to have to talk to her like that, to hear my mom so scared and to be the one to offer comfort instead of the other way around, the way she’d done with me when I’d been little. “You can,” I repeated. “It’s not going to be easy, but I need you to do this for me, Mom. I need you to be okay. It’s the only thing I can hold onto here. Please?”

A long pause followed, during which I could still hear her breathing and every now and then sucking back a sob. Finally, she said, “Where should we go? Where, if it’s as bad as you say?”

Tears of relief welled up in my eyes, and I had to choke back my own sobs before I could answer. “Go to the cabin.”

“Big Bear?”

We’d had the cabin in the mountains since I was little. My mom had gotten possession of it in the divorce, but we’d been up only three or four times since my dad had left.

“You should be safe there.”

“I can’t. It’s too far.”

But I knew she didn’t mean that. From the second she’d asked where I thought she should go, I’d known she was resigned to it, if only to save one of her daughters.

“You can. You’ll be fine,” I said, still feeling like I’d become the parent. “But you should go now. Other people are going to start getting the same idea. People are going to run. You’ll be in traffic all night if you don’t start now.”

“Oh, Scarlett!” More tears then.

“There’ll be time for that later. Call me when you’re driving. Just go. Now.”

Another long pause.
“Okay. Okay, baby. Okay.”

I hung up, and then I went to the door to listen for sounds of her and Anna leaving, maybe packing a few things. It didn’t take long for her to knock on my door.

“Are you ready?” I asked.

“Mm-hmm.”
Barely audible through the door.

“I can’t hear you, Mom.”

“I said we’re ready.” Her voice quavered, like she’d spent the last several minutes crying while she gathered everything she needed and had only just now pulled herself together. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, Mom. You have to go.” I paused. “And I have to stay.”

“I don’t think I can do it, Scarlett. You’re my baby.”

“I’ll always be your baby, Mom. Maybe I’ll be okay. But you can’t help me if you stay. You know? If you go…that’ll help. That’s all that’ll help. Please?”

Another long pause from her, and then, “I love you, sweetie.”

“I love you, too. Is Anna there?”

“Right here.”

My sister sounded strong, together, resigned but not falling apart like our mother. I knew Anna would drive when they left, my mom sitting in the passenger seat with her arms folded tightly across her stomach. She’d spend most of the miles between home and Big Bear just looking out the passenger side window and trying not to cry.

“Take care of Mom, okay?” I said.

“I will. I wish…”

“I know. Me too. Maybe it’ll be okay, though.”

A pause. Then, “Maybe.”

“I love you.”

“Love you, too,” she said.

I couldn’t remember the last time we’d said that to each other. It wasn’t like we weren’t close. We didn’t fight much. We just didn’t feel the need to talk about how we felt about each other. I’ve felt sorry about that ever since that night.

“Bye, Scarlett,” my sister said.

“Bye.”

“I won’t say goodbye,” my mom said. “I won’t. This isn’t goodbye.”

“All right, Mom. That’s fine. Be safe.”

“You too, baby. You too.” She was about to lose it again, and I could picture Anna having to lead her away from my bedroom door and toward the stairs.

I listened for the door into the garage closing but never heard it. I only heard the garage door rolling up and went to my window to look out and watch the car back out into the driveway. In the dark, I couldn’t tell if I’d been right about Anna driving, but I thought I could see someone waving from the passenger seat and so waved back. I didn’t cry, didn’t want them to see me cry, to have that be their last memory of me.

It turned out that my mom was wrong.

It really was goodbye.

Chapter Four

I’d thought myself terribly brave as the car pulled away. So it kind of surprised me how hard I began to cry when the taillights passed out of my line of sight. It wasn’t fear of what was to come that got to me. It was just missing my mom and sister and knowing I’d probably never see them again.

I hadn’t completely calmed down yet when I tried my dad again. Just thinking about being able to talk to him made me feel a little better. This time I got the answering machine and left another message. His cell went to voicemail right away, so I knew it was turned off. I hung up and the tears came back.

The rest of the night passed slowly. Once I stopped crying, I went back to the TV, then the computer, and finally back to my phone.
I texted and called and emailed. None of my friends were asleep. We spent all our time being horrified by what we were seeing and then slowly, oddly becoming desensitized to it.

After a couple of hours I had watched enough video of people’s faces exploding to feel as though it was nothing more than special effects in a movie or TV show. There was more
video from the airport, from Dodger Stadium, from the nightclub, and other reports from all over the city where people had died without having cameras pointed at them. There were reports from hospitals, police headquarters, and city hall.

All the news was bad.

Some of the victims did horrible things before they died. Some attacked other people with guns or knives or fists. Some could be linked directly to one of the baggage handlers. And some couldn’t.

After a while, I realized that most of the friends who were connecting with me through the phone or the computer were hanging on my words, trying to engage me, commenting just to comment though they had nothing to say. At first, I thought it was
sympathy, that they just wanted me to know I wasn’t alone, that they still cared. But then I realized it was morbid curiosity. They were expecting me to start freaking out over the phone, to lose my mind and die. As simple as that.

I started saying and sending my goodbyes and then stopped replying to everyone but Jen. She didn’t seem like the others. She commented on what we were seeing or asked me questions no different than she would have asked me the day before, and that was it.
Same old Jen.

A little after four, the call waiting beeped.

“I have to go, Jen. It’s my dad,” I said after checking the number on the screen.

“Okay. Call me back later if…you know, you need to.”

“I will.”

I expected my dad’s voice. I expected wrong.

“You little brat, Scarlett!” my step-mom shouted as soon as I said hello.

My heart instantly racing, I said, “Angie? What are—”

But that was as far as I got.

“You always hated me! Always! And I knew you were trying to get him to go back to your mother! You never gave me a chance!” She was yelling as loudly as she could, and I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to yell back, to argue, to defend myself, but the words wouldn’t come—partly because there was the littlest sliver of truth in what she accused me of.

But then her voice grew quiet, and through her tears she said, “I’m not so bad, Scarlett. I’m really not.”

“I know, Angie,” I ventured. “I know. You’re not bad at all. You’re a great mom.”

I was going to go on, telling her how awesome she was with my brothers. She cut me off, though, venom in her voice.

“A great mom? You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. A great mom! Would a great mom…” A whimper then, almost a giggle, before she went on. “Would a great mom do what I did tonight?”

I thought of all the terrible things I’d seen on TV in the last few hours.

“I want to talk to my dad,” I said, willing the tears back.

She laughed, horribly.

“Angie, I want—”

The phone went dead.

And I knew that along with all the other people who had died tonight, my dad was dead, too.

My brothers also.

Angie had done something to them. Something terrible. She’d gone crazy like the others and would be dead herself any minute.

I felt numb.

Absently, I clicked on my phone and dialed 911. It rang and rang and rang. Finally, a recording came on, apologizing about all the operators being busy and to please hold or try back later.

I clicked off the phone. Then I turned off the TV and the computer and the lights and fell onto my bed. I don’t know why I didn’t cry. I don’t know why I didn’t scream or break things. Shock, I guess. I just lay there, hugging a pillow. Looking up at the darkness of my room, I told myself it would be my turn soon, and there’d be no one here to see me lose my mind under the pressure of the stalks growing inside me.

In the quiet of those early morning hours, with all the electronics off and no one left to talk to, I noticed that things really weren’t quiet, not outside, not like it should be. I could hear sirens, lots of them—some far away and some getting closer. And shouts, raised voices reaching through the walls and windows. Maybe people panicking. And maybe people losing their minds before the pop of the stalks.

I put my pillow over my head to drown out the sounds and imagined holding it down so hard that I could smother myself, do myself in before the inevitable. But it was just a stupid, desperate fantasy. I knew that if I could actually manage to make myself pass out, my arms would relax right away and I’d start breathing again.

There were other ways. My mom had some pills, or there was always a knife from the kitchen. But then I thought of my mom finding me like that…if she ever made it back here again. For some reason, the idea of her discovering me dead by my own hand seemed so much worse to me than her coming across my body with those stalks growing out of my skull.

Maybe in the morning, I’d change my mind.

If I lived that long.

For now, I was satisfied with using the pillow to block the rest of it all away.

*****

I wouldn’t have thought it possible to sleep under those circumstances, but I must have. I woke up with the gray light of dawn coming through my window and the smell of smoke in my nostrils. In seconds I was up and stumbling to my window, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and absently reaching for my phone as I went.

I remember thinking I’d gotten a better room than Anna’s since mine faced the street while Anna’s window opened onto the back yard. I could always see what was going on in the neighborhood or know who was pulling up to our house before anyone else in the family.

That morning, my first full day of being fifteen, I looked out the window not with anticipation or curiosity, but with dread. My phone gave off a series of chimes to let me know I had messages, but I didn’t even look down at it.

A house on the next street over was fully engulfed in flames. It was a house I’d only been able to see the back of, as it butted up against the neighbors directly across the street from us.  Orange flames and black smoke poured from the house, from the windows on the second floor and even from a hole in the roof that the fire had already burned through.

I could see no firefighters, had heard no sirens. The man who lived across the street—I remember his name was Jennings, or Jenkins—had climbed onto his garage roof with a garden hose to try and fight the fire and keep it from spreading to his house. He must have been seventy and had no business up on the roof, but there he was in boxer shorts and nothing else, trying to do the right thing.

No one else was helping, not from where I could see anyway. I thought of going out myself, but again the thought of spreading the disease I’d been exposed to kept me planted right there at the window. It surprised me, though, that no one was doing anything to save the house or to help the old man with the garden hose.

And then a car drove by, and I understood. It was a small sedan with a family inside it, a child’s face pressed to the back window. The trunk was halfway open, held secure with bungee cords to keep everything from falling out. Suitcases and boxes had been crammed inside the trunk, and a baby stroller was strapped to the roof, all folded up the way it would have been if the family inside had packed it for a trip to the zoo or the beach.

They weren’t going anywhere like that, though.

They were just going.

The same way I’d told my mother and sister to go the night before.

A few more seconds passed, and then another car followed, similarly overloaded. This one practically flew where the other had simply been driven with purpose.

Not long after, a dog loped down the street, barking desperately. Which of the two cars it followed, I couldn’t have guessed.

The man across the street was having a terrible time with the fire and his ridiculous garden hose. I could hear him yelling, though at whom I didn’t know.
Maybe his wife. Maybe the people who lived in the burning house.

I thought of calling for help, but remembered what had happened during the night when I had dialed 911. It would be more of the same, I knew. I could hear sirens now, though none seemed to be approaching, and when I looked to the horizon the air seemed gray. This wasn’t the only fire burning.

Thinking about calling for help drew my attention back to my phone, and I thumbed through the texts I’d received during the last few hours. They were goodbyes. My friends all thought I was dead.

Scarlett?
Plez text back

Goodbye Scarlett I’ll never forget u

RIP Scarlett

U always made me laugh. Wish u still could

RIP

Ur lucky in a way.
This is all gonna b so much worse soon

Dont
b gone Scarlett plez plez plez

The first and last were from Jen. I almost dialed her number but stopped. Something else was wrong.

There should have been a text from my mother or sister. They would have checked in on me. Even with a traffic nightmare, they would be at the cabin by now. My mom would have called, would at least have left a message to let me know they’d made it.

But there were no missed calls from her or Anna.

I tried both their phones. Nothing. We hadn’t kept a landline at the cabin, not since we’d stopped going regularly.

I told myself they just didn’t have service where they were, maybe wouldn’t have it till they came back down from the mountains.

There were other possibilities, of course, all of them terrible, and though I told myself not to think of them, the images flooded my mind regardless: my mom and Anna in a terrible accident, in some psycho-filled traffic jam trying to make it out of the city, or dead in the front seat of the car, white stalks poking through their faces.

I thought of the way my mom had hugged me when my dad had brought me home. I was bound to have had the spores on me. And my dad had hugged her, too. That had been it; that had been enough. Others had already died from less direct contact with the infected. I couldn’t get the hug out of my mind, and for several seconds I thought I was going to throw up again.

Tears in my eyes, I called Jen.

It took her only seconds to answer, and then a full minute to stop crying.

“I thought you were dead,” she kept repeating through the sobs. “I thought you were dead.”

“I’m not dead,” I said through my own tears. For some reason, it made me want to laugh, and I giggled while I cried. For a second, I thought I was finally going crazy, that this was the end, but then the feeling passed, and I just cried with Jen on the phone for a few minutes.

“Are you okay?” I finally managed.

“For now.”

“What do you mean?”

“Haven’t you been watching the news?” she asked.

“I was asleep. I…think my dad’s dead. I mean, I’m sure he is. Probably my mom and Anna, too. I just had to…shut down for a while. You know?”

“I know. I’m sorry, Scarlett.”

“What have they been saying?”

Jen took a breath and seemed to hold it for a few seconds. “It’s bad. The whole city’s been quarantined. They’ve shut down every freeway out of the whole LA area. The airports are closed, the trains. Everything. People are going crazy to get out.”

“So what are people supposed to do if they think they’ve been exposed?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows. It seems like anyone who’s exposed is dying. I thought
you
were dead, Scarlett. All our friends did, too. The hospitals are filled with people who were at that game last night. They’re all dying. Or already dead.”

I just sat there on my bed and tried to make sense of what she’d just said. Across the street, Mr. Jennings or Jenkins had given up on fighting the fire and climbed down a ladder in his boxer shorts. He was running around his front yard now, looking like he was shouting as he waved his arms in the air.

“What do you mean by
all
, Jen? How many?”

“Different channels are saying different things. But it’s thousands, Scarlett. They don’t know where to put the bodies. And now there are doctors and nurses dropping dead with those things popping out of their skulls. And just…people. People who didn’t seem to have any connection to the Dodger game.”