The Girl at the End of the World by Richard Levesque Page A

wanted something that could maneuver through the jammed streets and get me out of trouble if any found me. It hadn’t been too difficult learning how to ride; figuring out how to time the clutch had been the hardest part. Before long I’d mastered the motorcycle shop’s parking lot and the alley behind it, working out a little obstacle course of abandoned cars and bodies on the ground. I even picked out a helmet, letting myself go the silly route by opting for gaudy purple with big pink flowers.
    When not practicing on the bike, I’d spent time gathering and organizing supplies in the sporting goods store, working on my archery skills, and planning my move to the observatory. It wouldn’t be possible to bring everything I’d need in one trip, so I loaded a backpack with the essentials, and then loaded three more with all the rest of my gear in order of descending importance. After some thought, I packed the gun and ammunition into the high priority pack even though I hadn’t yet found the nerve to fire the thing. Then, telling myself I’d be back as soon as possible, I headed out one morning and actually felt a little sorry to go. The store had come to be like my new home, the manager’s office my new room.
    I had studied the maps in the store and brought one with me, having memorized several possible routes to get me from Pasadena to Griffith Park but expecting that I’d need to make adjustments to my plan along the way. I must have looked a sight on that little bike with my oversized backpack and flowery helmet, a bow and arrows bound to the back fender with bungee cord, and a respirator strapped to my face. The mask had nothing to do with spores but rather with the smell that had begun on my second full day alone.
    The people who’d died from the fungal infection weren’t so much the issue. I’d had the chance to observe quite a few bodies in various stages of decay, and it looked like the fungus didn’t just stop when the host was dead and the spores scattered on the wind. The host bodies began to shrivel and dry out, like the fungus was taking all the moisture from them, and they didn’t seem to smell at all. I realized soon enough that the bodies were being eaten, and by the time I set out on the motorcycle, it wasn’t unusual to see some of the dead people’s limbs reduced to bone and more stalks sprouting randomly from the bodies as the fungus reproduced and reproduced again.
    The fungus made short work of its victims. It was the other people who were a problem, though. The ones who’d died in accidents or were the victims of infected people who’d turned violent before dying—those were the bodies that stank. Them and the people who’d died naturally from heart attacks and other ailments in the hours of crisis when emergency services had been unable to help everyone. And, of course, the suicides.
    I’d gone into a restaurant in Pasadena after practicing on the motorcycle for most of one morning, hoping to find something canned that I could eat quickly and then head back to the sporting goods store. A man had hanged himself in the main dining room, a belt around his neck and the other end tied to a ceiling fan. Flies buzzed around the body, and the smell made me gag. I turned and ran, no longer thinking about food.
    After that, I noticed the suicides more readily, having seen them previously but not having noticed the difference between them and the corpses that the fungus feasted on. The first several, I contemplated for some moments, wondering about what these people’s last minutes had been like, how lonely or scared they must have been. That their corpses hadn’t sprouted stalks told me they hadn’t been infected before taking their own lives, and I wondered at the possibility that some of them could have been like me, immune. If so, they’d just given up before learning they could have survived. Or maybe they’d already figured that out and had opted to die rather than go on alone in a