The Girl at the End of the World by Richard Levesque

so after a minute or two of pondering I picked up a shiny handgun and hefted it for a few seconds. Not liking the feel of it, I set the gun down on top of the glass counter and then looked for a box of ammunition to match the caliber. Beneath the display shelf was a storage space with empty boxes for the guns, and I found one that matched the weapon I’d chosen, pulling the paperwork from the box and setting it along with the gun and bullets next to the pile of supplies I’d already gathered.
    There was plenty of food and drink for sale in the store—most of it geared toward camping—so I had no problem finding something to eat and drink. It was late, and I was tired, so I decided to take a sleeping bag and a foam mattress back to the manager’s office and call it a night, but not before locking the glass doors at the front of the store. Another survivor would have no problem smashing the glass to get inside, but I’d know about it if something like that happened. What I wanted to avoid was someone wandering inside the store while I slept unaware, either a survivor or someone infected and unstable. I wondered how many more people like that were still around; all I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to run into any of them.
    In the office, I set up a little nest, checked my phone one more time, and then got ready to turn out the manager’s light. I had a rough plan of going to look for a motorcycle shop the next day, but beyond that, I didn’t know where I’d go or what I’d do.
    I didn’t like how quiet it was even though I’d had some time to start getting used to it, but once I shut the lights off the quiet seemed so much worse. I lay there and tried not to think about it, tried to think of other things, but there were so many images in my head, so many terrible things I’d seen just since this morning when I’d woken up to find my neighborhood about to go up in flames.
    A quick succession of recent memories flew through my mind then, and I sat up, reaching for my phone to use it as a flashlight. The phone in one hand, I dug through the backpack, sifting through as though the things in it were in geological layers. Underneath the things I’d taken from Jen’s house were the few items I’d taken from home, and under all that was the photo of my mom and dad and me and Anna that I’d taken from the mantel.
    There we were—all four of us, happy, with the whole city spreading out behind us from our vantage point outside the Griffith Observatory. I looked at it not out of nostalgia, not because I was looking back at the world that wasn’t there anymore. No, this time I was looking forward.
    Holding onto the frame, I lay back down and turned off the phone’s light. I remember that I fell asleep almost right away then, exhausted but also relieved because at least now I had a plan.

Chapter Seven
     
    The road to the observatory twisted up the hillside, mostly free of abandoned cars or those occupied by the dead. With just a few clouds in the bright blue sky and a little breeze coming through the trees, it would have been easy to mistake the day for any other where cars filled with tourists and hikers and families out on picnics would have been threading their way along the road, a typical SoCal day in paradise.
    We had had it so good, and sometimes had even remembered to be grateful. But even when you didn’t take the time to appreciate what you had, it was still okay: short of a major earthquake, everyone knew that California would still be there the next day with its beaches and mountains, Mickey Mouse and all the beautiful people. There was always more time to be thankful, more time for everything.
    But the beautiful people were all gone now.
    And some of them had started to smell.
    I’d spent the last couple of days in Pasadena, finding a motorcycle shop and learning to ride after studying eHow and YouTube videos.
    I’d picked out a little Honda, not one of the big ones and nothing fancy. I just