But not before a lot of people had traveled.
The Mexican government was welcoming refugees.
The Mexican government had called out their military, and they were shooting anyone trying to cross the border from the US.
A thousand people had died in Los Angeles County alone.
Ten thousand had died.
A million.
Ten million worldwide.
No one had died. It was all an elaborate hoax.
It was the Chinese.
It was the anti-Christ.
It was the Earth taking its revenge on our species for all we had done wrong.
It was the latest in a series of mass extinctions dating back millions of years, part of a natural cycle. All that remained was to hug one another and say goodbye to the fantasy that humans had been the dominant species on this planet and would stay that way forever.
It couldn’t all be true. And yet some of it must have been. Which things were legitimate and which were the lies…I had no way to know.
I gave up, pulling the laptop’s lid closed and resting my head against the back of the chair. I closed my eyes and listened to the helicopters, the distant sirens, the dogs barking, and the faraway shouts and cries of people who would be dead soon.
Why not me?
I thought.
Why no headache, no nosebleed?
But then I asked myself why I was even wondering about these things. Did I wish myself dead? Did I want to go out the way all these others had?
No.
But did I want to be alone—no family, no friends, nothing left that I’d ever been able to count on?
No to that as well.
So where did that leave me?
Not wishing for death, but not sure how to live in this new world I’d woken up to.
After a while, I checked my phone. Jen hadn’t texted back yet. Thinking about why she’d remained silent made me nervous, and I got up from the table to wander around the backyard. Leaves and a few dead bugs floated in the pool, and I watched everything move on the current that the filter created, wondering if I should try calling Jen or just leave her be. She knew I was out here. If she needed me, she’d call. But what could I do in that case? Nothing.
The Waverlys had a changing room for the pool with a toilet and shower inside. I went in for a minute, used the toilet and then looked at myself in the mirror. I looked awful, no makeup, hair half pulled out of the ponytail I’d slept in, dirt smeared on my face from where I must have wiped at tears. If I’d smiled, my dimples still would have been there, about the only thing recognizable in the mirror, but I didn’t feel like smiling.
“Oh well,” I said to my reflection. “Forgot to pack makeup and a curling iron.”
Back outside, I decided I couldn’t wait any longer and sent Jen a text.
U still ok?
No reply.
I just looked at the screen and waited for some sign of life from inside the house.
None came.
I began texting other people, friends I hadn’t checked in on since the night before.
No replies at all.
Maybe later
, I told myself. Maybe their phones were off, or they were asleep, or had headed out to the desert or somewhere else with their families, somewhere without cell service.
Or maybe not.
By the early afternoon, I was telling myself I should go, that there had to be a better place, a proper place for kids without parents to look for shelter and be registered or gathered up by the authorities. Maybe there were places that were giving out vaccinations. Maybe someone would be interested in examining a girl who seemed to be immune. At any rate, hanging out in your best friend’s backyard, lazing around her pool and waiting for more people to die…that probably wasn’t what I was supposed to be doing. I wondered what my teachers would say, if any of them were still alive. And I couldn’t imagine a single thing that would come out of any of their mouths.
And still I stayed, practically frozen to the spot, scared to move, scared to leave, scared to stay. Eating another energy bar dipped in peanut butter and drinking a bottle of water and trying to stay off the Internet. Trying harder not to check my phone, wondering if a text had come in that I’d somehow not noticed.
But of course every time I looked at it, always telling myself I shouldn’t, there was nothing there.
Finally, I gave up and called Jen’s cell.
Straight to voicemail.
Her phone was off.
I called the home number.
Mrs. Waverly’s pleasant voice asking me to leave a message after four long, agonizing, empty rings, a muffled bit of which I could hear from outside by the pool.
“Hi, it’s…” I hesitated.
They’re all dead
, I thought and pictured my voice playing inside that house, calling out like a lost little child hoping someone would come and save her. And no one would hear. The dead didn’t listen.
But I talked anyway, probably out of a sense of hope that I didn’t think I still had, but it must have been there anyway, under the surface all the time like an instinct rather than something I could really have identified.
“It’s Scarlett,” I said. “I…I wanted to see if you were all okay still.” My voice cracked and a tear ran down my cheek. “I wanted…”
There was nothing else I could say. There were all sorts of things I wanted, but none of them came into my mind; none of the thoughts were strong enough to push past the idea that the house I sat here and looked at, the house I’d spent so much time in, laughing and just
being
…that it was now a house full of dead people.
I clicked off.
“Jen?” I called out, trying to aim my voice up toward her covered window. As loud as I could, “Jen? Are you still in there?”
Of course she was still in there. What a stupid thing to ask. It didn’t occur to me then.
“I’m still out here. Can you just let me know you’re okay?”
The tears that had started when I was on the phone kept coming now, and it was hard to choke out the words and get them loud enough to be audible to anyone still alive inside the house.
“Please?” I begged.
And then I dropped back into the chair.
And I cried, and I cried, and I cried, my head in my hands as though I was ashamed of my tears and trying to hide myself from anyone who might see or hear me.
I think I cried for it all then…for my parents and sister and brothers, for all my friends, for Jen and her family, for the people who’d died in front of me and died on the news, and died, and died, and died. And I cried for myself, for all the things I’d hoped life would bring, for graduation and college and falling in love and getting married and having babies, for all the things I’d ever thought I’d see or do, none of which I could have articulated that afternoon, none of which was specific. It all just came pouring out of me in a deep gray wash of agony and loss and emptiness that I knew I’d never fill no matter what the people who survived were going to do with orphans like me, no matter what sort of life I could piece together out of what was left around me. And I cried because I was scared, really scared of being alone with nothing and no one to count on.
I cried because I didn’t want to die. By that point, I think I’d come to accept the possibility that I really might be immune to the disease, but that wasn’t the kind of death I feared. Instead, I think I was terrified of being just fifteen and not really knowing a thing about how to take care of myself. I knew I was going to have to figure everything out on my own, and with every decision I made about what to eat or where to sleep, I would run the risk of messing up, of poisoning myself or putting myself into a situation that wouldn’t have been dangerous in the old world, but in the new one, this one where I was on my own…who could say? There’d be a thousand ways to die every day, and as I sat there and cried, I worried that there was so much unknown.
After a while, I stopped. I’d cried myself out and just sat there with my head on my folded arms, completely drained. My face ached from sobbing, and tears and snot had run past my lips once I’d given up on wiping them away. Jen’s dad could have burst out of the house, yelling at me to leave, and I don’t think I would have lifted my head—not for him, not for Jen, not for anyone. I was done, spent.
Exhausted, I actually fell asleep then.
When I woke up, it was late afternoon. I wiped at my eyes and re-did my pony tail. Then I checked my phone for messages—nothing.
The same with email on the computer. None of my friends were active on Facebook, nor had they been for hours.
I pushed the chair back and took a deep breath.
I was hungry, and I didn’t want more peanut butter.
The
Waverlys’ back door was just across the yard with its plastic-covered window and shiny brass doorknob. I let out a sigh and said, “Brave new world.” Then I walked around the pool and began looking for something to break the window with.
I decided on a ceramic snail in one of the planters, hefting it for a moment before approaching the door. The snail was about ten inches long and weighed maybe a pound. I wondered if it would break before the window did, but decided to give it a try.
I knocked first, loudly. “Hello?” I called out, my mouth as close to the window as I could get it. “Jen? Mrs. Waverly?”
I put my ear to the glass. No signs of life came from inside the house.
I called out, knocked, and listened again, and then a third time. Then I looked up once more to Jen’s window, half expecting to see her waving down at me with the plastic pulled away from the glass.
“All gone,” I said. “Sorry, Jen.”
I drew back the snail and swung it at the window, remembering to close my eyes at the last second. There was a crash, and I felt my hand passing through the window, opening my eyes a second later to see that both the snail and the pane had been smashed. Carefully, I pulled my hand back, checking for cuts and relieved to find none.
Angry with myself, I realized I’d just run up against my first chance at serious injury, all my own fault. There had to have been a dozen different ways to break into the house, none of which would have had me running the risk of slicing open a vein in my arm. Fortunately for me, I’d been lucky, but I resolved not to make hasty decisions from now on.
I dug the Swiss Army knife out of my backpack and went back to the window, slicing away at the plastic on the other side of the broken glass. It already had little cuts in it from the glass and the shattered snail, but not enough for me to reach inside. Carefully, I cut at the plastic and moments later had cut a hole that would give me access to the locks on the other side.
There had been no reaction from inside the house when I’d broken the window, so I knew there was no point in calling out again. Instead, I reached inside, watching the edges of broken glass to make sure I didn’t cut my upper arm. Seconds later, I had the door unlocked.
Jen’s cat, Cisco, bolted past me as soon as I had the door opened a few inches. I turned to watch him run around the edge of the pool and then jump to the top of the block wall with no effort at all. He walked a few feet along the top of the wall and then jumped down the other side, not looking back once. “Good luck, Cisco,” I said, hoping for lots of mice and birds in his future. There’d be no more gourmet cat food for him.
I ventured inside, steeling myself for what I’d see. The
Waverlys’ kitchen had always been neat, like something out of a magazine. It looked mostly like normal now—with the exception of a few cupboard doors left open and some dishes in the sink. And a pair of legs on the floor, blocking the entryway into the dining room.
I knew it was Jen’s mom, her feet still in the casual sandals she wore all the time.
“Mrs. Waverly?” I said, just above a whisper as I slowly approached the body. I knew there was no point in whispering, no point in calling out at all, but I did it anyway.
When I got to the entryway, I just stood there for a moment and nodded. She’d gone like all the others and was lying there on her back, arms splayed, face a bloody mess, and two obscene stalks rising up from where her nose had been. The little pods at the tips had already popped, spreading their spores throughout the house and probably through unseen cracks in the walls and gaps in the plastic that covered the windows.
How were you exposed?
I thought. It certainly hadn’t been at the Dodger game or a nightclub or anything like that. I didn’t know at what point Jen’s dad had covered the windows with plastic, just that it had been too late.
I thought about how I’d seen the little cloud of dust that had burst free from the stalks on the “foul ball” man at the stadium. For the spores to have spread so far and so fast, and to have been able to slip inside houses sealed in plastic, to get past the masks I’d seen people wearing online and on TV, they must have been microscopic. And yet I’d seen them burst out of the pods after the stalks had sprouted out of the “foul ball” man at the stadium. For things so tiny to look like a cloud of dust…there must have been millions if not billions of spores in each pod. And within hours the infected had succumbed, and pods of their own had popped into the air, spreading billions more.