The Girl in Red

“I asked him if all white people liked country music and NASCAR,” Mama said. “I shouldn’t have, because he got embarrassed and squirmed around in his seat. I just lost my temper a little. There I was standing in front of the class with four degrees and this undergrad wanted to know if I fit in some mold he’d already cast for me. But he apologized to me after class, so it was all right in the end.”

Mama’s school didn’t open up for the fall term either, for the same reason that Adam’s didn’t, and she never saw that boy again. Red always wondered if the boy learned anything that day—learned about making assumptions about people you didn’t know based on the way they looked. Or maybe he just realized that it wasn’t smart to insult the person who graded your papers.

•   •   •

All through late August and early September they had watched in horror as town after town and city after city was decimated by this sickness, this mysterious terror that had sprung up in several places at once without any warning. In each town just a few people were left behind, people who wandered about looking lost until they were scooped up and sent to quarantine camps.

Red and her family knew that was what happened because it was on the news—at least, until the news stopped broadcasting and every channel was nothing but those colored bars and the long continuous tone that accompanied it.

“That used to mean the end of the broadcast day, at least on some channels. Other channels just went to static after the national anthem,” Dad told Red, the first time they saw it. “This was before every channel ran continuously.”

“When dinosaurs roamed the earth, you mean?” she said, giving him a sideways smirk.

“Not quite as far back as the dinosaurs. Maybe cavemen,” Dad said, tugging on one of her curls. “And then you had to wait for programming to start again in the morning.”

“I don’t think it’s going to start again tomorrow,” Red said, pointing the remote at the TV and clicking through channel after channel playing the same thing.

Dad sighed, and she turned the television off. Adam threw his head back and huffed at the ceiling. “I bet the electricity will go out soon, too,” he said morosely.

“Well, we have the generator,” Dad said.

“What good is the generator if there’s no TV and no radio and no Internet?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Red said. “Refrigeration, maybe? Unless you enjoy eating meat that’s been contaminated with bacteria.”

This comment earned her a dirty look before he left the room, which was his default response when he didn’t know what to say back to her.

Red was one year younger than her brother, who’d just turned twenty-one and thought that qualified him to know everything about everything but from what she could tell just meant he understood less than ever. Hormones were probably involved in this stupidity. Red kept hoping he’d outgrow it.

Adam said from the first that there was nothing to worry about, that the government would take care of everybody, that it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. It was like he was deliberately misunderstanding the way diseases spread, thinking that a few quarantines would magically make it all stop.

But the truth about quarantines was that you could never catch everyone in your net, not even if you tagged and tracked every person who’d come in contact with the Typhoid Mary. And in this case, there didn’t seem to be a Typhoid Mary. Instead, pockets of sickness had just bloomed up like hideous flowers in several places at once, and then spread so fast that tracing the vectors was something like impossible.

And “the government”—well, Red had zero confidence that the government would be able to do anything. Not because it was full of bad people or there was a giant conspiracy or anything like that.

Her belief came from the fact that she could read and think and knew that the departments that address pandemics were underfunded and unprepared for the scope of the problem. She also knew that while the wheels of governing ground exceedingly fine, they were also slow as hell. By the time funding was authorized it would be too late. And it was.

So Red made her own preparations. She had been ready for hours, days, weeks before her family started to even consider leaving their home. Ever since people started falling down dying, ever since she saw the first reports of towns being quarantined and serious CDC officials making serious statements every night on the news.

The possibility of evacuation was a certainty, to her mind—whether by government intervention or by simple necessity. Sooner or later, she’d been sure, they would have to leave.

Their home was somewhat isolated—five miles outside a small town, and bordering a stretch of wooded state land that kept their surroundings quiet and protected from the sound of the highway a few miles distant. They had no close neighbors, which was not wonderful if you needed a last-minute cup of sugar but a definite advantage when proximity meant infection.