Free The Girl at the End of the World by Richard Levesque

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.
    Infecting everyone but me.
    Or so it seemed as I stood there looking at the body of my best friend’s mom. Jen and her dad and her brother could be anywhere in the house, all in similar states. I didn’t want to have to see, but I couldn’t just leave either.
    Mr. Waverly was in the living room, absurdly planted in his recliner, the stalks that emerged from his face pointing at the ceiling. He’d been watching television, and it was still on, an enormous flat screen mounted to the wall.
    Trying to ignore the corpse, I picked up the remote from where it had fallen beside the recliner and began flipping through channels.
    The locals were what I really wanted, but they were all dead. None had been broadcasting their normal programming. Each channel was running the same thing, a simple static image of the station’s news desk. Chatty anchors and overly made-up weather girls should have been at the desks, but there was no one. On one channel, I could see a pair of stalks waving in the air on the other side of the desk, some poor broadcaster or station employee having died on camera. But the rest all looked abandoned, whether from massive panic in the studios, or sudden deaths, or the employees all leaving their posts to rush home to the illusion of safety.
    The emergency crawl was pretty much the same on all the channels: We Are In A State Of Emergency. All Citizens Are Urged To Stay Indoors. Do Not Call For Emergency Services. Resources For Survivors Will Be Allocated Once The Crisis Has Passed. Stay Tuned To This Channel For Updates And Instructions. We Are In A State Of Emergency. All Citizens Are Urged…
    It just looped like that.
    That was all they’d had to offer: stay inside and watch TV and don’t change the channel whatever you do. I wanted to laugh, but it would have been too cruel in front of Mr. Waverly’s corpse.
    The cable news channels offered a bit more. Things must not have been as bad yet in