The Girl at the End of the World

by Richard Levesque

  It was still open. That was one lucky thing. Our captors had installed keypads only on the outside of the cell doors, so knowing the code wouldn’t have done me any good on the inside, which was why I hadn’t opted to get back into the gray zone through my own cell.

  Now I was in the gray zone again, in the same spot where we’d first met Dr. Sharma. To my right was the long corridor she’d escorted us along before depositing us in our cells. The door into Chad’s cell was maybe thirty feet away. I hesitated a second, thinking of how vehement he’d been about my staying away from him, and then I ran to his door anyway. I punched the code, and the door clicked open.

  “Chad?”

  “I told you to stay away!” He sounded scared, as scared as I had the night of my birthday.

  “I’m not coming in. I just wanted to unlock your door.” I paused, swallowing back a little sob. “In case I can’t come back. I don’t want you…trapped in there. The code for the doors is 53137. In case,” I repeated.

  He didn’t reply. I waited a second, and then turned to run back the way I’d just come.

  Past the door into the old man’s cell, I saw the doors that would lead to the elevator the soldiers had brought us down on our first night at the base, and one more door that I hadn’t noticed at the time. It was to the left of the elevator, and I’d had my back to it that night. It had a keypad mounted beside it and a sign prominently displayed in its center that read “Entering Sterile Zone.”

  Not so sterile anymore, I thought.

  For a moment or two, I considered hitting the elevator’s call button and getting away on my own. Dolores was as good as dead. I probably wouldn’t be able to keep Kayla alive even if I could cross the desert with her and get her back to the city. And Chad…he didn’t want me rescuing him, didn’t want me risking my life in case he was the next to fall ill with a new strain that might infect me, too. I imagined crossing the desert on my own, making my way back to the observatory…alone. And I left the elevator for later.

  53137 worked on the door into the sterile zone. The door was extremely heavy, and when it closed with a click and a hiss, I found myself in a small room, maybe six feet square. On one wall hung four hazard suits, looking almost like limp bodies hanging from their hooks. Along the opposite wall was a black metal box about two feet high and five feet long; mounted to the wall above that was a blank screen that looked like a computer monitor or a small television. Directly across from me was another door with the same sign about the sterile zone and another keypad like the ones I was used to seeing.

  I tried the same code on the second door, but it didn’t open. I tried it again with the same results.

  “It’s like Donovan’s airlock,” I said aloud, reasoning that if the base’s personnel could just pass from the gray zone to the white zone, it wouldn’t be very sterile. Looking up, I saw that the ceiling was almost completely made of metal vents.

  “Okay, then,” I said and turned to the control panel above the metal box. For the first time since I’d been at the base, I had real appreciation for military efficiency. It wasn’t enough to assume that all the personnel had been trained on using the airlock. No, the administration had seen it necessary to put redundant precautions in place to protect its people—and its investment as well.

  Seeing no controls, I touched the screen. It blinked to life with the words “Prepare to Enter Sterile Zone” printed in bright red across its center and two squares at the bottom marked “Cancel” and “Continue.” I continued, and the computer walked me through the whole process, directing me to the oxygen tanks stored in the metal box at me feet. These were precautions only in case of emergency or malfunction, the screen assured me, but I was strongly advised to utilize the equipment before proceeding.

  Knowing that the air on the other side of the door might be as compromised as it had been in the hallway with Chad, I opened the lid and saw four tanks in black harnesses with breathing masks attached. I pulled a tank out and closed the lid. The computer screen showed me how to check for airflow and supply, which I did, and then I slipped my arms into the harness, wearing the tank like a backpack.

  The program walked me through a few more screens, and then it was time to hit the “Initiate Sterilization” button. Immediately, machinery whirred in the ceiling, and the whole room seemed to vibrate. I felt the air rush upward as though a wind were blowing from below my feet. Then it stopped. All was still for a second. This was the point where a staff member who’d opted to ignore the warnings about oxygen may have second-guessed that decision. A loud click followed and then a hum; at the same time, I felt the air pressure in the room change. My ears began to hurt the same way they always had at the bottom of the deep end in Jen’s pool. I tried to get my ears to pop, but it was no good, and I began to feel panic rising up inside me.

  And then it was over. I felt air whoosh back into the chamber, and the air pressure returned to normal. I swallowed and felt my ears pop. A second or two later, I felt normal again. The computer screen now read “Sterilization Complete.” And it directed me back to the keypad I’d tried using before.

  Now the code worked, and with another loud click the door popped open. I was in the white zone, still wearing the oxygen mask. I took it off just to see if anything was different on this side of the chamber and then put it right back on. The air was so thin here I felt like I was drowning as I tried to breathe. Panic rose in me before I got the mask back on.

  After that, I just stood still for a few seconds, taking in big gulps of air and looking around to get my bearings. I was in a long white hallway. Like the space between the cells we’d been in, the walls and floor and ceiling were white and almost blindingly bright. Sterile, I thought. I could see several doors in either direction and prepared myself to start opening them one at a time.

  But not everything was white. The door I’d just come out of, for one thing. It was gray and had a big sign on it that read “Entering Contaminant Zone.” And it didn’t just have a keypad mounted next to its metal handle. There was also a card reader, a little machine with a slot running down the side. Extra security, I thought. Dr. Sharma and her team didn’t want just anyone entering the gray zone; you had to have clearance, probably a special card with a coded strip that needed to be run through the reader before the entry code would work.

  I looked at it, dumbfounded, telling myself I’d just locked myself out of the gray zone, out of the one part of this floor that still had air being pumped into it, out of the only access to the ground level that I knew of.

  Panic kicked in again, but only for a few seconds. I looked left and right, hoping I was wrong, and in looking saw the next door down, marked only with numbers above it, a sign reading “1-4.” It was the door I’d just tackled Dr. Sharma outside of, the door the soldier had forced me back through. I went to it. The same keypad I was used to seeing, no card reader. The same keypad I’d watched him enter 53137 into and it had opened. Nothing stopped me from doing it again, climbing through the old man’s window again, getting into the gray zone again. I walked to the door; Chad and Dolores were on the other side, and it would be nothing to open it again now and talk to Chad some more about what I’d found so far and what I should do next.

  But after a few seconds of standing there, I left the door and the keypad alone, opting to move along the hallway instead. I told myself it was because my air supply was limited and there wasn’t time to waste getting all tingly in my throat from talking to Chad. The real reason was that I was scared the key code wouldn’t work any more, that they’d done something to heighten security with the breach in the white zone’s sterilization. If that were true, then I was in trouble. I didn’t want to know that just yet.

  I saw doors marked “Medical Supplies” and “Janitorial Supplies” and some with the names of people whose offices were inside. None of these interested me. But then I came to another gray door with a card reader and the same sign about the contaminant zone. The door next to it had “5-8” above it.r />
  Four more, I thought. Four more survivors, four more guinea pigs being experimented on. Maybe four more dead people, victims of Dr. Sharma’s failings. Maybe Kayla.

  I passed the door with the card reader and, hesitating a second, entered 53137 into the keypad on the next door. It opened with a click. Relieved, I stepped through, a bit hesitantly, and looked around before letting the door close.

  I had tried to tell myself to be ready for anything—more mayhem like there’d been in our cells, more bloody victims, maybe even another broken window. I might not actually have been ready for those things, but I had steeled myself. Of course, there was nothing like that on this side of the door. What I did see, however, was about the last thing I would have expected.

  The chamber was the same horseshoe configuration as the one we’d been kept in—two windowed cells on either side and a white space in between where the doctor and staff could interact with patients. One of the chambers farthest from the door was dark, the other three lit. In the cell to my left was a crib, but the relief I felt upon seeing it was short circuited by the blood spattered across the windows of the cell to my right.

  I approached the window slowly, my oxygen mask still pressed to my face. On the other side of the glass, a soldier lay dead on the floor, face down in a pool of blood. Two stalks poked out from under him.

  Which one? I thought. He might have been one of our guards, or one of the soldiers who’d rescued us from Donovan’s. Or he might have been someone I hadn’t seen before.

  I’d been looking at him for only a second when a pounding noise from behind made me jump. Immediately, I turned, ready to run or fight if I needed to.

  In the last lit cell, Private Muñoz stood banging on the window with the palm of her hand. She looked angry and confused and scared all at the same time.

  But she was alive.

  Inside the gray zone.

  I approached her cell with caution, and she went straight to the intercom.

  “What the hell is going on?” she said.

  I just stared at her for a second, wondering what to make of her presence there—my former guard in a cell and me out here looking in. My feelings of animosity towards her hadn’t gone away, and they weren’t eased by the fact that I was in her position now: free to ignore her or not, free to leave when I wanted. Still, walking away wouldn’t do me any good. So I took a deep breath, pulled the oxygen mask from my face, and answered. “There’s been a breach in the sterile zone.”

  Her expression said Yeah, and I’m looking at it. But she didn’t say anything.

  I took another breath and continued, giving her the fewest details possible. “The old man went crazy and they shot him. Window broke. That’s how I got out.”

  “Where’s Sharma?”

  I shrugged. “Infected maybe. She was right there when the soldier blew the windows out.”

  “Which one?”

  I described him as best I could.

  “Anderson,” she said, looking thoughtful.

  “Is that bad?”

  She shook her head but didn’t answer me directly. “If Sharma’s got it, then we’re all screwed.”

  “Why?”

  She looked at me for a second, dumbfounded, as though she couldn’t see how I could be so stupid. Then it clicked for her that I wasn’t one of them, that I didn’t know everything she did, and she answered, “‘Cause she’s the only doctor left.”

  I raised my eyebrows. All this time, I’d imagined a team of scientists, all wearing hazard suits and bent over microscopes as they studied the samples they’d taken from us survivors. I had a hard time believing it had only been Dr. Sharma the whole time.

  “Serves us right, I guess,” Muñoz said.

  “What do you mean?”

  She shook her head, didn’t answer at all this time.

  I needed to move on, needed to figure out how I was going to get Kayla out of her cell and then get back to Chad. But seeing Muñoz inside the cell was just too strange, and had filled my head with too many questions. It got the better of me, so I took another breath and asked, “So what are you doing in there?”

  She hesitated before answering, sizing me up, I realized, seeing if I was worthy of being told anything more.

  “I volunteered,” she finally said. When I raised an eyebrow and cocked my head to show I didn’t understand, she went on. “The doctor needed control subjects—someone without immunity to see how the formulas would work on the rest of us.”

  I nodded my head to indicate the soldier behind me.

  “He volunteer, too?”

  She gave me a mean little smile. “He was voluntold.”

  I grimaced at that and then said, “So he’s dead and you’re alive. Does that mean you’re cured?”

  “Maybe. There were two serums. I might’ve got lucky.”

  “Unless you were immune the whole time,” I said.

  She gave me a look then—anger and amazement and incredulity. I could see her working through the possibilities, how she thought she’d been lucky to be in the white zone when the plague had struck, but maybe she’d just been lucky the whole time and would have survived anyway, anywhere. Finally, the thought made her smile ironically. “Guess we’ll never know.”

  “Why would…” I began, looking for the words that seemed so impossible to put together. “Why would Sharma make another version that caused it though?”

  Anger in her voice, she blurted out, “‘Cause that’s what she—” And then she stopped herself, looking at me to see how much I understood. Then she swallowed and said, “What do you mean, ‘caused it’?”

  “The old man,” I said, my mind racing. “He went crazy before the soldier shot him. He was immune and then he got sick after the serum.” I hesitated and then added, “Dolores, too.”

  Her face turned stony.

  “She dead?”

  I shrugged.

  “The other serum must have neutralized their immunity,” she said. “Any spores they had on them from outside or had already breathed in before the serum…they took off after the injections.”

  I thought about it, remembering when Dr. Sharma had given the injections—the case that held the four syringes, the notes she’d taken while administering the shots. It had been random. Dolores and the old man had lost out. I hadn’t. And Chad…as long as there really were only two versions of the serum, then he was safe, too. If there had been three or four variants…then he might already be dead.

  I couldn’t let myself think that. Something else nagged at me. When I’d asked about Sharma’s formula causing the disease, Muñoz had misunderstood me, letting something slip before catching herself and answering the question the way I’d meant it.

  “Before the outbreak,” I began, not wanting to say the words but making myself anyway, “they didn’t just study diseases here, did they?”

  She gave me a hard stare through the glass. It may as well have been a loud, bold, “No.”

  “So this is where it started?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Could’ve been. If not here, then somewhere like it. There were a lot of facilities working on biological weapons. Something got out, somewhere. It was just a matter of time before someone screwed up. Even soldiers and doctors are human, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” I said quietly, my heart pounding. “That’s what you meant before…when you said we got what we deserved.”

  Again she shrugged.

  “So you got a plan?” she asked.

  “Get the baby and go.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “You can take care of her?”

  “Enough.”

  I don’t know what she’d been thinking in regard to Kayla, maybe that it would have been more merciful to let her die now, when she was too little to understand what had happened to the world and hadn’t yet had much chance to suffer in it.

  “Did they give the baby any of the injections?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Beats me. I doubt it, though. Even Sharma has her li
mits. I don’t think she’d be so messed up to give a little baby any of that stuff.” She gave me a long look then before she said, “And Chad? He going, too?”

  I hesitated. “I don’t know. He doesn’t want to. Says he’s scared of making me and the baby sick. You know…if he got a different serum?”

  She looked thoughtful.

  “Too bad,” she said. “You could make a little family.”

  I couldn’t tell if that was supposed to be sympathetic or sarcastic.

  Without thinking, I said, “You in love with him or something?”

  She gave me another angry look before saying, “No. All of you…survivors. Just made me feel good to talk, like you were people from my old world.”

  I told myself that might have been true, maybe especially about Dolores. But I also knew she was lying. There’d been something about the way she’d talked to Chad, something more to it than a connection to life before the F2 plague.

  Breathing in first, I said, “I thought you hated me.”

  Again came the angry expression. Then she shook her head. “Just jealous.”

  Of me and Chad, I thought.

  But then she went on. “Why you? You know? You and me, we’re practically the same age. You look like girls I knew in high school. It just…made me angry you were gonna make it, and me…I was gonna die in here with Sharma and all these soldiers.”

  I nodded. “Is that why you volunteered for the serum?”

  “I guess.”

  “Looks like it paid off,” I said.

  She smiled. “I guess it did. Wasn’t sure till you showed up.”

  “You coming with us?” I asked.

  Honestly, I didn’t want her along, not really. I didn’t want Chad to get to choose between us. I liked the idea of me and Chad and Kayla being a little family like Muñoz had said. Having her with us just wouldn’t fit. But then again, I didn’t know that Chad would be coming, didn’t even know that he was still waiting back in his cell, alive. On top of that, it would just be stupid to leave Muñoz behind; her training, her know-how, her experience…she could probably save us in ways I couldn’t even imagine. If that meant losing Chad to her, so be it, I thought.