The Girl at the End of the World (3 page)

Almost.

Chapter Three

After a while, I stepped away from the door. Downstairs, my mom had suggested I get some rest, but I wasn’t tired. That hadn’t been my reason for leaving the living room. My real reason had been to get away from them, to put some distance
between myself and the people I might hurt if I really did go berserk like the man at Dodger Stadium.

So instead of undressing and getting into bed, I pulled my phone from my back pocket. How many times in the past had I pulled the phone out the second I closed the bedroom door, walking across my cluttered floor without noticing where my feet fell, my eyes not drifting from the screen? For a few seconds that night, it was like old times. The unanswered texts were in the double digits, and I started thumbing through them as I made my way to the bed. I sat cross-legged and began reading and responding.

The texts were all from friends asking if I was all right. Some sounded scared for me. Others tried to be macabre and joke about it, but I knew they didn’t really find any of it funny. They’d all seen me on TV or YouTube. Most of the videos had gone viral, none of them edited the way they’d been on TV. People sent me links by the dozen as the night wore on. I didn’t want to click on any of them.

The later it got, the more surreal it all seemed. I almost could have convinced myself that everything that had happened at the stadium had been a dream and that all the texts and Facebook messages were just part of it. But even though my friends helped take the edge off of what had happened, there was still a part of me—a big part, I guess—that was terrified and in denial and wanting desperately for the distraction to work just a little bit better.

My phone had been chirping at me every time I got a new text, so when it actually rang around 11:00, I jumped.

Jen was my closest friend. We had three classes together that year and had known each other well since eighth grade. Of all the people who were texting and messaging me, Jen was the one whose words helped the most that night, the one person who didn’t joke at all about what had happened and who seemed to get just how serious the whole thing might have been. She was the one who I knew really meant it when she said she was worried about me.

Now a silly picture I’d taken of Jen filled my phone’s screen and a clip from her favorite song played as her ringtone. Anyone else’s call I might have ignored. Not Jen, though.

“Scarlett?” she sounded scared, about to cry.

“I’m okay, Jen,” I said. It seemed a bit odd that I was the one having to comfort her, but I gave it only a second’s thought. “Don’t get so upset.”

“Scarlett, you have to turn on channel seven. Right now.”

“Why? What is—”

“Just turn it on! Oh my God!” Then she was sobbing on the line.

I had a TV in my room but hadn’t turned it on in months. You’d normally have found me on the computer or the phone if you’d come into my room those days—that or doing my homework or maybe reading a book. So of course I couldn’t find the remote.

“Jen, come on. You have to calm down,” I said while turning over magazines and looking in my nightstand drawer. Jen gave only sniffles in response.

I finally found the remote on a shelf above the television and turned it on to channel seven. A press conference was in progress, a gray haired man in a rumpled suit talking before a bank of microphones.

“There is no way to tell what Mr. Kirby or his co-workers came in contact with, but the other deaths do point to the airport as the source of initial contact.”

Other deaths?
I thought, my heart pounding.
This can’t be real.

“As of now, all traffic in and out of Los Angeles International Airport has been grounded. Flights in the air that originated from this airport in the last several hours are being diverted from their schedules and landing as quickly as is safe. Anyone who has been to the airport today is urged to isolate him or herself completely and seek medical attention once it is determined that this is the best course of action. I can take a few questions.”

I remember a moment’s chaos then as all the reporters fought for the man’s attention. The questions and answers that followed helped me fill in the details, all with Jen sobbing in my ear over the phone.

The man who’d suffered the attack at Dodger Stadium had been named Harmon Kirby, and he’d been a baggage handler at LAX. The gray haired man insisted that it wasn’t accurate to describe Kirby as “patient zero,” but I didn’t quite know what that meant. Apparently, Kirby and other baggage handlers had been exposed to something coming off a plane—no one knew for sure what, or which plane, or how long ago. Kirby’s shift had ended early, but three other baggage handlers had died this evening, all the same way, all at the airport. Several planes had taken off before the Health Department had shut the airport down.

I remember a reporter asking with some outrage if the gray haired man knew whether any planes had landed elsewhere without the passengers being notified, and the man in front of the microphones had just stared at him for a second before answering. “It is highly likely,” he said quietly. Then, amid the stir of voices and shouts from reporters that followed, he tried to calm everyone down, tried assuring them that every effort was being made to track every plane and every passenger that had passed through the airport that day and in the days before.

I knew as well as those reporters and everyone else watching that it wasn’t likely to make a difference.

“Have they said what it was?” I asked Jen. “What killed them?”

She sniffled for a few seconds, and then I heard her catch her breath. “They don’t know for sure. They were talking before, before I called you, saying they think it might be a kind of fungus.”

“Fungus?” I repeated, incredulous. I’d never heard of a fungus that could do something like this. Mushrooms were a kind of fungus. And athlete’s foot. Fungus didn’t kill you, didn’t make your head burst open. “How is that possible?”

“I don’t know,” Jen said. “They’re just guessing, though. Said the spores were inhaled and then it grew in the sinus cavity and eventually built up so much pressure that…that…”

And then she was sobbing again.

I don’t know why I wasn’t. Too scared, maybe. All I could think of was the cloud of dust that had emerged at the stadium when those little pods had burst open at the ends of the stalks poking from the dead man’s face. Spores.
Probably millions of them. Microscopic little seeds that would spread on the air. And be breathed in by anyone nearby. The woman with the blood-spattered blouse had probably thought herself infected with something when she’d been sprayed, but she’d really been fine at that point. But after the stalks popped up and the bulbs burst…

“Scarlett?” Jen managed to choke out.

“Yeah?”

“I don’t want you to die.”

I said nothing. I had no words.

“Get your mom to take you to the emergency room.”

“They said to isolate yourself if you’ve been exposed.”

“Don’t listen to them,” Jen said. “Go.”

“I don’t know,” I said, my voice just above a whisper. “I don’t know.”

All I could picture was my face breaking open and two white stalks popping out while my mom drove me to the hospital. And the car filling with dust as the bulbs burst open. And
my mom breathing them in.

“I have to go,” I said.

“To the hospital?”

“I just have to go.”

“Scarlett?”

“Yeah?”

“Just be okay. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said and clicked off. The phone’s screen went dark, its picture of Jen blinking into blankness.

I watched the press conference for a few more seconds, and then dialed my dad’s number. It was late, but someone should have answered. The phone just rang and rang, each ring seeming to make my heart jump a little in my chest as I listened for that slight change in the silence that would precede someone saying hello. It never came, not even the answering machine. They were probably on the phone and ignoring their call waiting, maybe even trying to call me at the same time I was calling them. I hung up and waited a few seconds before trying my dad’s cell. Voice mail kicked in almost right away.

“Daddy, it’s me. I just wanted to make sure you were all right…you and the boys and…everybody. I’m okay. Just scared. There’s a lot of stuff on TV about what happened. It’s… Just call me back. Okay? Love you.”

I stared at the phone for a few seconds, willing it to ring, but it stayed silent in my hand. So I clicked it back into life and called my mom’s phone downstairs. It rang twice before she picked up, and as it rang I walked to my bedroom door to twist the lock.

“Scarlett?” my mom said, panic in her voice.

“I’m okay, Mom.” I tried desperately to sound calm, and I think I pulled it off. “Are you still up?”

“Yes. Why?” She sounded like she’d been crying and may still have been when the phone rang. Now she was pulling it together for me, but just barely.

“You saw the press conference?”

“We did.”

“You should leave.”

“What? No!” Now the panic rose again, and the tears, too.

“Mom, you should leave,” I insisted. “You and Anna need to get in the car and go somewhere…go to a hotel or something.”

“Absolutely not! We’re not leaving you alone. Not now.”

“But they said anyone who’s been exposed should—”

“I don’t care what they said! I’m not leaving you. We’re taking you to the doctor in the…no, we should take you now. Are you still dressed?”

“I’m not going to the emergency room, Mom. I’m not. I don’t want you and Anna in danger.”

“We’re not going to be in danger. Anna can stay here. Or…or I’ll call the paramedics! They’ll take you. You’ll be safe at the hospital.” Her every word was a plea, and I had a hard time listening to her sound so desperate. But I knew I was right, and wasn’t about to be talked out of it.

I took a breath. “I’m not going, Mom. If I’ve…if I’ve got it…” Bravery could hold out only so long. My voice cracked. “If I’ve got it, then I’ve got it, and I don’t want anyone else to get it. Not you or Anna or some poor paramedic or doctor who never even met me.”

We argued back and forth for a while. I expected at any moment to hear her pounding on my door, but she never did. I also worried that she might be writing instructions for my sister to use the other phone to call an ambulance, and I paced back and forth from the door to my window to listen for sirens or look for flashing lights, but none came.

On my television, the news conference had ended, and the harried looking anchors at the news desk were re-stating what had already been said. Then I noticed a pause in what they were saying and stopped listening to my mom for a few seconds as I focused on the screen. Behind the newscaster, the words “Mystery Illness” had been displayed in bold red letters. Now they were replaced with “Another Death.”

“Someone else died,” I said, cutting my mother off in mid-sentence.

“What? Who?”

“Just…just watch the news for a second, okay?”

She remained silent as I turned up the volume.

“—not yet confirmed, but this appears to be similar to the deaths of Harmon Kirby and the other baggage handlers. We do not yet have an ID on this victim, but there is video from the scene.” The newscaster was a middle-aged man with perfect hair and a perfect voice, but right now he looked like he’d just bitten into a clove of garlic or a whole lemon. His face lost that measured composure he and others like him always had. Now he paused for a beat and then said, “I’m told this is raw video just received in our newsroom and is extremely graphic. But we’re going to show you the scene.”

Video filled the screen, showing a familiar enough scene for LA. Several people jostled against each other outside of a nightclub for a second or two, smiles on their faces. Then a commotion began at the edges of the crowd. Some people screamed; others just looked confused and alarmed. Within seconds, people scattered. The person holding the cell phone camera took a few steps backward and stopped as others ran past. And then the camera focused on a woman lying on the sidewalk just outside the velvet rope that had kept would-be clubbers on the street.

I knew what was going to happen to her but still winced at the image.

No one approached the woman as she lay there twitching.

They know
, I thought.
Everyone’s been watching the video from the stadium. They know what’s going to happen as well as I do.

And then it did. The woman’s face, far from the camera and not clearly focused, suddenly turned into a red blotch. People in the crowd screamed, and the man holding the camera swore loudly.

My mother gasped. I’d forgotten for a second that she was still on the phone.

“Now the stalks,” I said.

As though on cue, the white stalks popped out of the red mass that was the woman’s face, curling up into the air and looking like stop-action film of flowers growing. Up they shot, extraordinarily fast, and when they stopped I knew the little bulbs would be at the top.

“She’s dead?” Mom asked, her voice trembling.

“Yes.”