The Girl at the End of the World

by Richard Levesque

  The wall panel controlled the blinds and lights, and these I could manipulate, dimming the lights for sleeping, opening and closing the blinds. When I punched the “Open” button, the slats shifted sideways, giving me a look out the windows.

  I looked out into another corridor, this one painted and tiled in bright white, almost blinding. Across from me was another set of windows and closed blinds, and above them was a red number 1. Who’s in there? I wondered. Someone else they caught?

  Diagonally across from my chamber, the blinds slid open below a red number 2, and Chad looked out at me. We smiled at each other and waved feebly. I felt so glad to see him there. It would have been awful to be completely alone. This wasn’t much better, but seeing him was a huge help. He touched a button on his panel, and I was afraid he was closing his blinds again, but his command sent the slats sliding down their rails to reveal a full view of his quarters, not one divided by all the slats. I looked again at my control panel and decided hitting “Open” a second time was my best option. It worked, the slats sliding away from me with a whish.

  The way the cells were arranged, I couldn’t see Dolores’ cell but when Chad shifted his gaze to look straight across the hall, I assumed the blinds in the third chamber had opened as well. Catching what must have been a questioning look from me, he mimicked rocking a baby and then gave the thumbs up sign.

  Now what? I wondered.

  Chad and Dolores may have been thinking the same thing, but none of us had an answer. Chad and I just stood at our windows, waiting, and I assumed Dolores was doing the same. It was late, sometime after midnight I was sure, but I had no thought of sleep. Too much had gone on, was still going on in my mind.

  It was maybe five minutes later that I caught sight of movement to my left, and then Dr. Sharma came into view. She didn’t wear her hazard suit anymore but was in clothes similar to what had been left for me—camo pants and a khaki shirt. She got to wear shoes, though, with laces. No worries about the doctor killing herself, I thought. She looked to be about 35 and had her black hair tied in a tight bun, probably all very regulation. Like before, she held a clipboard.

  Behind her came a thin man, mid-twenties, pushing a cart. He was dressed the same way as the doctor but had a gun holstered around his waist. Another soldier, not medical staff, but here to help the doctor, or at least be her back up if we gave her trouble. It was hard to imagine the kind of trouble we could give on the other side of this glass, though; it looked pretty thick.

  From the top of the cart, the doctor picked up what looked like a remote control. After pressing a button, she began to speak, and her voice came to me through the speakers hidden inside my cell the same way I’d heard the computerized voice giving me instructions earlier.

  “I see you’ve all had a chance to freshen up,” she began. “Thank you for cooperating so nicely. You’ll find we just want what’s best for you and are going to do our best to keep you comfortable.” She repeated this in Spanish, turning toward Dolores’ cell as she spoke. Then she continued in English, stopping every few sentences to repeat for Dolores. “Of course, you are still in a hospital and military environment in the middle of the greatest threat human beings have ever faced, so your comfort will likely be minimal. I’m sorry for that, but I’m sure you understand. We have to have some higher priorities.

  “My job is to determine what genetic or environmental factors have allowed you to be immune to the F2 outbreak. To do that, we will need blood and tissue samples and will also need to do some extensive interviews regarding your background, medical history, and your family’s medical history. I trust you will be cooperative?”

  She looked from Chad to me, and we both nodded. “Good.” Then she repeated the last bit for Dolores and probably got another nod. “Without your cooperation, those of us not lucky enough to be immune would be doomed. This facility can house us only for so long, and resources are finite, so the day will come when we have to go out into the contaminated zone and face it so we may begin rebuilding our society.”

  “Are there many other survivors?” I asked automatically, forgetting she wouldn’t be able to hear me through the glass. Those closed blinds across the corridor still had me curious.

  The doctor cocked her head and then said, “Use the intercom button.”

  I went to the panel, saw the button, and pressed it before repeating my question.

  She hesitated a second before answering. “We know of some, but all quite far from here, too far for us to have access. No doubt there are others nearby, but without the resources to contact us. We are searching, but resources are limited, as I said.”

  “What about Australia?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “There may be survivors in other parts of the world, yes. Isolated pockets spared by wind patterns from being exposed to F2. I don’t know anything specific about Australia.” She paused, giving me a sterner look than she had before. “Don’t plan on booking any flights, though.”

  I didn’t need that, but let it go.

  “If you will each pull a chair up to the metal box in the center of your chamber, we will begin.”

  She began with Chad, then moved on to Dolores and Kayla. Room 2, then 3. Going by the numbers, I thought. How military. I sat before the box and watched as Dr. Sharma pulled a wheeled stool up to each of the cells, opening a door in the wall below the windows and doing things I couldn’t see with her back to me. When she had finished with Chad, I made eye contact with him. He smiled and gave me another thumbs up; I nodded, not knowing what else to do.

  Finally, Dr. Sharma came to me.

  I watched as the metal box on my side of the windows popped open with a hiss and a click. Two red rubber gloves, long enough to reach past someone’s elbows, lay inert at the bottom of the box, their ends connected to the wall. The doctor leaned forward, and the gloves came to life as she snaked her hands into them. At the bottom of the box was a chrome handle; Sharma pulled it up to reveal a drawer full of medical supplies.

  She used the gloves deftly, opening the supply drawer and taking out packages that contained a syringe, alcohol swabs, a rubber tube, and bandages.

  “Make a fist,” she said.

  I complied, and in seconds she had the tube tied around my arm and the swab spreading alcohol over my skin. She tapped the veins in the bend of my elbow and then popped the needle into my arm. There was another drawer in the side of the box; this one had its own keypad, and the doctor entered her code to pop the door open with another hiss. The full syringe went inside before she was back in the lower drawer for more supplies. She bandaged my arm and then swabbed inside my cheek, popped the sample into a test tube, and placed it in the same drawer as the syringe full of blood.

  “Any health problems before the outbreak?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Are you on any medications?”

  “No.”

  “Pregnant?”

  “No!”

  “All right. Keep the bandage on until morning. There’s food in the cabinet beside your bed. Try to get some sleep. We’re going to do our best to keep you comfortable here, but there are going to be some unavoidable inconveniences. I’m sure you’ll understand.”

  I nodded. “I’ll do my best.”

  She didn’t like that response, just gave me a cold smile. Then she closed the drawer where she’d put the samples, hit more buttons on the key pad, and pulled her hands back out of the gloves.

  “Close the lid, please.”

  I did, and then she was doing something else with the keypad on her side. I heard a whirring sound and felt the wall vibrate. When it stopped, Dr. Sharma hit more keys, and then I saw that she had a small, sealed box in her hand. It was the same gray as the walls inside my cell and had a bright yellow hexagon on each side with the word “Biohazard” printed in black in the center.

  It had my blood and saliva inside. The air in the chamber it had come out of must have been removed before the box could be taken out on the doctor’s side o
f the glass; otherwise she wouldn’t have exposed herself to it without a hazard suit, contaminated as it must be by everything on my side of the wall.

  I realized as she walked away that the colors meant something. Gray meant contaminated; white meant safe. Each of our chambers and the corridors where Sharma had first met us were all gray, all connected to the outside world through the elevator shaft, all dangerous places for anyone not immune or without a biohazard suit. On the other side of the glass, all was white and pure, clean and safe; the doctor and the soldiers and whoever else still lived in this installation could move around in the white zone without protection in what I now knew was a larger, far more sophisticated version of the underground chamber in Donovan’s bunker.

  When the doctor was gone, I glanced across the corridor to see Chad looking back. He gave a little wave, and I could see his arm had a bandage like mine. Using my index finger, I made a big U on the glass, then O and K and a question mark. Primitive texting, I told myself.

  Chad nodded, pointed at me, and drew a question mark on his window.

  I nodded my response before trying something more complicated, slowly making letters and checking in to be sure he was following along. It was hard remembering to make the letters backwards so they would make sense on Chad’s side of the glass, but I managed, writing, “THINK WE’RE SAFE?”

  He shrugged and wrote back, “DOES IT MATTER WHAT WE THINK?”

  He had a point. We were here, locked in, and no longer by just one crazy guy with guns. Now it was lots of people with guns and locks far tougher than the ones Donovan had held us with. If we were safe, if Dr. Sharma could be trusted, then we were probably in a good situation. And if the doctor had lied, if we were in danger, knowing about it wouldn’t do anything to make the guns and locks less of a problem. Still, there was something to be said for keeping one’s head in the game. I wanted to stay alert for any sign of trouble, and also for any opportunity to get out of what might be nothing more than a giant hamster cage.

  “MAYBE,” I wrote back. “KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN.”

  He nodded and then just looked at me, a little sadly I thought. He put his hand up onto the glass, his palm against it and his fingers spread out. I did the same and felt a little tingle as I did. After a few seconds, he smiled and nodded and then turned to his control panel, shutting his blinds a few seconds later.

  “Goodnight, Chad,” I said before closing my blinds as well.

  I didn’t turn the lights off but explored the rest of my supplies first. The food Dr. Sharma had mentioned consisted entirely of military rations, sealed packets of ready-to-eat meals. They didn’t look or sound appetizing, and I wasn’t hungry anyway. I was glad to see several bottles of water, and I drank half of one before telling myself I should conserve. After all, the doctor had said the resources in this place were finite.

  Then I had a terribly unpleasant thought: what would happen to us if the white zone outside the windows got contaminated? What if the equipment or one of the soldiers made a mistake and the F2 spores breached the barrier? Everyone not immune would die. And where would that leave the rest of us? Locked in, separated from each other, waiting to starve or suffocate or die of thirst.

  I wanted out. I wanted out badly. Panic began rising in me as I thought of how far down we’d come in the elevator. I paced my cell, looking again for a camera, for anything that connected me to the doctor and the soldiers, for any way to let them know I didn’t want to be here anymore and was done cooperating.

  But there was nothing, and I thought about the possibility that maybe they weren’t watching me after all. Impossible, I thought. We were too valuable to go unobserved.

  After a while, I calmed down, telling myself that even though things might go bad, they hadn’t gone bad yet. We were safe for now, probably safer than we’d been with Donovan. Yes, men with guns still had us locked up, but I didn’t think they were crazy or angry or bitter because we were immune while they weren’t. Isolation and shock might start chipping away at the soldiers’ discipline, but it would probably take a while, and until then I’d do what I could to figure out a way to protect myself should the time come and the neat barrier between gray and white, between health and illness, become blurred or break down altogether.

  Eventually, I turned out the lights, slipped off the stiff pants, and got into bed—nothing more than a cot with a pillow and a single blanket. The lights in the corridor stayed on, and enough came through the edges of the window shades to keep my cell from being pitch dark.

  I lay there, looking at the slivers of light, and waited for sleep to come. At least this was more comfortable than the floor of Donovan’s bunker, which already seemed a long time ago and very far away. In comparison, it felt like an eternity since I’d lived in the observatory. And my old life, my old home, my neighborhood and family…all of that felt somehow unreal now, like it had been a dream or a long and wonderful movie about some other girl name Scarlett that I’d been caught up in. Somewhere along the way, the credits had rolled, and the lights had come up, leaving me to find my way in this other world. And now I was alone in the dark again, but with no movie running and nothing to distract me but the hope of better dreams.

  Chapter Twelve

  In the end, the worst part of my time at the base was the boredom. There was nothing to read, nothing to do. Chad and I tried writing messages back and forth, but that got old, and it was hard to sustain a conversation of any substance writing backwards letters with our fingers on the windows.

  Dr. Sharma came frequently the first couple of days, taking more samples and interviewing us as she’d promised. I decided to be truthful with her, reasoning that if I actually did help her learn about our immunity, it might mean freedom from the cell.

  If she decides there’s no way we can help them, I wondered, will they just let us go?

  The thought kept me on edge, looking for any sign of the doctor’s intentions, but I couldn’t tell what was going on behind those glasses she wore.

  Sometime during our first full day there, the blinds across the corridor opened, and I saw the occupant of room 1. It was an old man, probably in his seventies. He had gray hair and a scraggly beard, and he looked awfully skinny. When he saw there were other people in the chambers across from him, he just stood at the window and stared, looking from my windows to Dolores’ and back. He had piercing little eyes and a wild look about him. The man made me nervous.

  I tried writing a message on the window as I had done with Chad, asking if he was all right. The man gave no sign of comprehension; he didn’t even seem to notice I was writing anything. After I tried a second time, he moved his fingers on the glass, too, but didn’t make any letters, and I realized he was mimicking me.

  Like an ape in the zoo, I thought.

  I wanted to know who he was and how long he’d been here, how the military had found him and what they’d done to him since. It would have been such a help to know even a little something. But his mind seemed gone, which made me feel incredibly frustrated. Had the doctor done something to make him like this? Or had he been this way before coming here? I guessed that the latter was more likely. Anybody could be immune to the fungus, even crazy people. I didn’t see how there could be any real purpose to Dr. Sharma doing something to this man that would result in him being this way. What would be the advantage? No, I decided, he was probably someone who’d already been on the fringes before the disease struck, maybe even a hermit or something, someone who wandered the desert, someone easy to spot from a helicopter when the soldiers had been out searching for survivors.

  I did my best to explain to Chad who his neighbor was and what I thought of him, but it wasn’t easy to get big ideas spelled out across the glass. Still, I was pretty sure he understood. For his part, he did his best to keep me updated on what he could observe of Dolores and the baby. It seemed like they were doing okay.

  A guard patrolled the corridor between the cells once every fifteen minutes or so. Every eight hours, t
he guards changed, but I noticed there were only three all together. The first was stocky with a thick neck and thick fingers. He walked up and down the corridor without really looking at any of us, and he struck me as nervous and scared. The second was older, taller, and more professional in his demeanor, probably a career soldier as opposed to the first guard, who I guessed was in his early twenties. The older guard smiled and nodded when he first came on shift but had no other real interactions with us.

  The third guard, though, was different. She didn’t look old enough to be a soldier, but I suppose she had to have been at least eighteen. It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that she’d been in high school just six months before, had probably graduated in June and gone straight to boot camp. The military recruiters who came to all the high schools had sold her on this as her future, her career, her ticket to the world and a college education after a few years of service. And here she was with the world all fallen apart around her, no such thing as college anymore, and maybe no such thing as a future. She was Latina, and I could see the name “Muñoz” on her uniform.

  The first few times Muñoz patrolled the corridor, she looked pretty neutral, giving us little nods as she went, but not smiling. She didn’t seem angry or scared or pleased or hopeful or much of anything, really—just did her job and moved on. With her being so close to me in age, I felt like she might be able to relate a little, might be willing to make things a little easier on us.

  My feelings were affirmed a couple of days later when I noticed she had stopped in front of Dolores’ cell, and when I pressed my face to the glass and turned my head the right way, I saw that she was speaking, her hand on the keypad below Dolores’ windows. Muñoz nodded and even smiled. Then she made a little waving motion with her fingers, and I could tell she was trying to get Kayla’s attention.