Free Blue World by Robert R. McCammon

already-decaying leaves fell from overhead--and then he saw the figure of the little girl, hesitantly approaching him through the fog on his right. She had blond hair done up in pigtails with pale blue ribbons, and her pallid face was streaked with tears and distorted by terror; she was maybe five or six years old, wearing pink pajamas and clasping a Smurf doll tightly in her arms. She stopped about fifteen feet away from him, her eyes red and swollen and maybe insane too.
    “Daddy?” she whispered.
    “Where’d you come from?” he asked, still shocked at hearing another voice and seeing someone else alive on this last day of the world. “What house?”
    “Our house,” she answered, her lower lip trembling. Her face looked like it was about to collapse. “Over there.” She pointed through the fog at a shape with a roof; then her eyes came back to Brad.
    “Anyone else alive? Your mother or father?”
    The little girl just stared.
    “What’s your name?”
    “Kelly Burch,” she answered dazedly. “My tel’phone number is… is… 555-6949. Could… you help me find… a p’liceman, please?”
    It would be so easy, Brad thought, to curl up in the leaves on Baylor Street and let himself lose his mind; but if there was one little girl still left alive, then there might be other people too. Maybe this awful thing had only happened on Baylor Street… or maybe only in this part of town; maybe it was a chemical spill, radiation, something unholy in the lightning, some kind of Army weapon that had backfired. Whatever it was, maybe its effects were only limited to a small part of town. Sure! he thought, and when he grinned, the child abruptly took two steps back. “We’re going to be all right,” he told her. “I won’t hurt you. I’m going to walk to Main Street. Do you want to go with me?”
    She didn’t reply, and Brad thought she’d truly gone over the edge, but then her lips moved and she said, “I’m looking for… for my mommy and daddy. They’re gone.” She caught back a sob, but new tears ran down her cheeks. “They just… they just… left bones in their bed and they’re gone.”
    “Come on.” He held out his hand to her. “Come with me, okay? Let’s see if we can find anybody else.”
    Kelly didn’t come any closer. Her little knuckles were white where she gripped the smiling blue Smurf. Brad heard thunder roaming somewhere to the south, and electric-blue lightning scrawled across the crimson sky like a crack in time. Brad couldn’t wait any longer; he started walking again, stopped, and looked back. Kelly stopped too, dead leaves snagged in her hair. “We’re going to be all right,” he told her again, and he heard how utterly ridiculous he sounded. Sarah was gone; beautiful Sarah was gone, and his life might as well be over. But no, no--he had to keep going, had to at least try to make some sense out of all this. He started off once more, east toward Main Street, and he didn’t look back, but he knew Kelly was following about fifteen or twenty feet behind.
    At the intersection of Baylor and Ashley streets, a police car had smashed into an oak tree. The windshield was layered with leaves, but Brad saw the hunched-over bony thing in the police uniform sitting behind the wheel. And the most terrible thing was that its skeletal hands were still gripping that wheel, trying to guide the car. Whatever had happened--radiation, chemicals, or the devil striding through the streets of his town--had taken place in an instant. These people had been stripped to bones in the blink of a cold eye, and again Brad felt himself balanced precariously on the edge of madness.
    “Ask the p’liceman to find Mommy and Daddy!” Kelly called from behind him.
    “There’s a police station on Main Street,” he told her. “That’s where we’re going to go. Okay?”
    She didn’t answer, and Brad set off.
    They passed silent houses. Near the intersection of Baylor and Hilliard, where the traffic light was