The Girl at the End of the World

by Richard Levesque

  “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.”

  “My God,” I said. “What is it?”

  “They don’t know. They’re still calling it a fungus, but no one really knows anything. There’s all these rumors and…”

  “And what?”

  “And stories about how it’s already spread to other cities. There are videos on YouTube showing people dying and they say they’re in San Francisco and Phoenix and one even says it’s in New York. I think they’re hoaxes, but…what if they’re not?”

  “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “What?”

  “If all this is happening, why am I not dead?”

  Silence for a few seconds and then, “Maybe you’re the cockroach who the pesticide doesn’t kill.”

  “Like in Biology?”

  “Maybe.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “There’s got to be a better explanation. These people can’t all be dying. The news has got it wrong.”

  “I don’t think so. You should watch for a minute and look online. It’s crazy, Scarlett. It’s…”

  “What?”

  Then she was crying again. “I’m so scared, Scarlett. I don’t want to die. I’m just fifteen. I don’t want to die. I don’t want my mom and dad to…”

  I let her sob. There was nothing I could do. Across the street, the neighbor had dropped to his knees and had his arms over his head, looking up at the sky like he was asking God or something else to save him. And then he fell forward onto his face.

  I turned
away from the window.

  It was unreal.

  Your neighbor who you didn’t really even know just collapses across the street, and your response is to turn around and not watch because you know he’s about to die and there’s nothing you can do for him.

  That wasn’t the world I lived in.

  At least that’s what I was telling myself.

  Well, it hadn’t been the world I lived in. Not the day before.

  But that had been a world where I had parents and a sister and step-brothers, a world where the police or fire department came when you called them, a world where the Dodgers played the Giants and the only thing people said about the game the next day was whether it had been any good or not.

  It wasn’t a world where people’s faces burst open from parasitic fungus that grew so fast you didn’t even have the chance to say goodbye, didn’t even have the chance to know you were sick.

  But the old world was gone now, and a new one had swooped in to take its place. And here it wasn’t just the fire department or the police who wouldn’t be able to help you. It was also your parents and your friends and your neighbors.

  I was on my own.

  Not even Jen could help me.

  She couldn’t help herself.

  But maybe I don’t need the help, I thought. Maybe I am the cockroach who survives the bug spray.

  “Jen?”

  She was still sobbing.

  “Jen, you need to pull yourself together, okay?”

  She tried, taking deep breaths. The sobbing grew a bit less intense.

  “Do you think you’ve been exposed?” I asked.

  “How can you tell?”

  “I don’t know. But you haven’t been outside since it started?”

  “No. On the news they said to seal the houses, so my dad tried.”

  “How?”

  “They said to put plastic and duct tape on all the windows and doors. He used trash bags. Everything looks so dark. I just want to see outside.”