The Girl at the End of the World (21 page)

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, the 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.

Great
, I thought.
She’s human.

After a few seconds, she seemed to remember herself and continued with her patrol. When she got to my cell, I expected a friendly greeting as well, but her eyes barely shifted from dead center as she walked. The little wave I wanted to give died on my fingertips. Muñoz walked past and didn’t come back, disappearing through the door that the doctor and the guards always passed through just out of my line of sight.

*****

Dr. Sharma took more blood after two days had passed. I tried engaging her, too, to see if there was any progress with her research. She was uncommunicative, though, barely answering my questions with nods or not at all.

“You know,” I said when she’d finished and I was pressing the bandage against my flesh to stanch the bleeding, “I am cooperating voluntarily. You could at least be friendly in return.”

It was a stupid thing to say, childish really, but I was angry and annoyed, and the confines of my cell were beginning to get to me. All I wanted was a little glimpse of what my future looked like—how long she thought we’d be here, what was going to happen next. It didn’t seem like so much to ask for.

But Dr. Sharma didn’t see it the same way. Maybe she’d been having a bad day, or was frustrated by her research, or was going a little stir crazy herself even though she could move around in all the white spaces of the base. At any rate, she answered my insolence with a cold stare and said, “Your cooperation doesn’t have to be voluntary.”

That stopped me cold. My mind took me to a dark place, and I imagined myself on a surgical table, my arms and legs restrained and an IV drip hanging above me, feeding drugs into my veins to keep me sedated and compliant. They’d get their cooperation any way they could, and a few soldiers coming into my chamber with their guns drawn would be enough to get the job done. I pictured Muñoz behind a hazard mask, a little grin on her face as the doctor popped a needle into my arm and made the world melt away.

I said nothing. Sharma said nothing either. She just nailed me with her stare and then pulled her samples from the chamber once it was safe for her to open the little door.

*****

“WE NEED TO ESCAPE,” I wrote on the glass the first chance I got, my fingers making the letters as carefully as possible with Chad watching across the corridor.

Directly across from me, the old man had his blinds open and was simply staring at me. He did that a lot. At first, it gave me the creeps and I tried to avoid his gaze, but after a while I got used to it; his eyes didn’t seem to register, didn’t seem to be focusing on
me or anything at all. So I told myself he wasn’t really
looking
at me, just pointing his eyes in my direction without really seeing anything.

“BRILLIANT,” Chad wrote back. “WHEN DO WE LEAVE?”

It might have been meant as a joke, a way to take the edge off the tension I might have been revealing with my expression. But I didn’t think so. He didn’t look amused. In fact, he looked almost disgusted.

“WHAT’S UR PROBLEM?” I wrote.

“WON’T WORK. Y TRY?”

“HAS 2 B A WAY.”

“LIKE BEFORE?”

He shook his head then and stepped away from the window. Conversation over.

I was angry and crestfallen at the same time. I wanted to keep sending messages, was mad at myself for having started this line of talk and getting him mad in the first place. And I was also frustrated that it looked like I was the only one who wanted to get away or felt like it was worth looking for an opportunity to escape.

I knew why he was upset. I had been all about escape at Donovan’s, too, even roping him into my plan to find a way out. I’d gotten him to feel some hope. And it hadn’t gotten us anywhere. The helicopter and soldiers had seen to that; Donovan’s plan had overshadowed mine, even if it didn’t work out for Donovan.

It wasn’t my fault things had worked out this way, but maybe it was my fault that Chad had gotten back whatever sense of independence Donovan had scared out of him, only to have it squashed again when we got locked inside these cells. He didn’t want to hope anymore, and I suppose that made me sadder than anything else.

I was as likely to get cooperation from the old man who still stared at me. Absurdly, I waved at him and he, predictably, waved back—the only sign I ever got from him that he was actually aware that there was a person across the corridor.

Then I turned from the window and went to my normal spot—my cot, where I lay on my back and looked at the ceiling and replayed the night we’d arrived at the base, convincing myself that there must be some flaw in the compound’s security, some little thing they’d missed, something I could exploit to get myself out of here. They were the same questions I’d asked at Donovan’s, and escape had seemed just as impossible then; the outhouse plan would have worked, I was certain. Now I just needed to come up with something similar…and win Chad over to my way of thinking once more.

Of course, I’d take the others with me; more than ever, escaping alone wasn’t an option now. The thought of going on alone out there in the gone world was too much to consider. Even if Chad was being kind of a jerk right now, one of the things that helped me get through the long days and nights in my cell was the thought not just of being out of here, but being out of here with him, of running through the desert sand and toward the city and the ocean beyond, his hand in mine the way it had been on the helicopter.

*****

A week must have passed before Dr. Sharma came back.

Since I could shut off the lights in my cell whenever I wanted, I’d been sleeping a little more than normal. Sleeping and dreaming helped keep the boredom and despair at bay, but also caused me to lose track of the days. The lights in the corridor were always on, so the only way of really telling the passage of time was with the changing of the guards, but every now and then they switched the order of their shifts, so I could never really be sure when I woke up and waited for the next patrol whether I had been out for one hour or ten.

When I could, I sent messages to Chad. The subject of escape hadn’t come up again, which was just as well since I didn’t have any new ideas. We tried playing 20 Questions on the glass and other things to pass the time. At times, I felt like we were actually having a conversation, but the feeling would never last; the glass and space between us was too complete, too unbreakable for the fantasy to really get a strong enough hold to make me forget my reality.

Around three days into Sharma’s absence, I noticed someone else conversing with Chad. Apparently, Private Muñoz had decided not to limit her friendliness to Dolores. Though she kept refraining from making eye contact with me, she did stop every now and then to look in on Chad. The first time I saw her stop and hit the intercom on Cell 2’s control panel, I thought there might be something wrong with Chad.

He wasn’t in my line of sight when Muñoz stopped in front of his windows, and I imagined him lying on his cot, maybe sick. But then he came to the window and pushed the button to respond to her. They talked for less than a minute before she moved on.

“WHAT WAS THAT ABOUT?” I wrote once she was gone.

“JUST BEING FRIENDLY,” he replied.

“HOW NICE 4 U,” I wrote back, crossing my eyes to show him I wasn’t mad or anything. And I wasn’t. Chad couldn’t help it if the guard wanted to talk to him and not me.

On her next shift, Muñoz stayed longer. I could see Chad smiling as they talked, and when Muñoz turned away from the control panel to finish her rounds, she looked amused as well.

I just put up a big question mark on the glass once she had left.

Chad shrugged. “SMALL TALK,” he wrote.

“ABOUT?”

“LIFE BEFORE F2.”

I nodded. “TELL HER I DON’T HAVE COOTIES IF SHE WANTS SOMEONE ELSE 2 TALK 2.”

He laughed. “K.”

After that, it was every shift. She’d ignore the old man, linger at Chad’s cell for a few minutes, chat with Dolores, and then pass by my cell on her way out of the chamber. I’ll admit to some feelings of jealousy. I mean, who wouldn’t feel kind of weird in that situation? Muñoz’s attentions also made me realize how much I’d come to think of Chad. Had we not been thrown together into this situation, had we met each other in the times before the F2, those feelings might never have developed, but we weren’t in those old times, and my mind kept turning to thoughts of Chad now, probably as often as it lingered on thoughts of escape and memories of my old life.

Absurd as it was, I wished we were back at Donovan’s, able to talk to each other and sleep side by side. I remembered the feeling of his breath on my cheek when I’d lay awake next to him in the night and longed to be that close to him again. In truth, I longed to be that close to
anyone
again, but Chad became the focus of my longing during all those days in the gray cell. Strangely enough, I felt lonelier there than I had at the observatory when I’d been convinced I was the last person left in all of California.