The Girl in Red

“We might well need it for that purpose in the future,” he conceded when she explained why she wanted it. He didn’t even roll his eyes when she said that it was for protection from thieves and murderers when they had to leave the house. She loved him a lot for that. Her dad never made her feel like a fool, even when she acted like one. “But in the meantime we are staying in the house and I need it to slice onions.”

Still, Red wanted to be prepared to leave at a moment’s notice, and a moment’s notice meant she needed something sharp in her pack. She spent a few hours sorting through all the stuff that accumulated in the shed—it seemed sometimes like the stuff was having babies or something, where did it all even come from?—and came across a small hand axe with a snap cover for the blade. And that was even more perfect because an axe was good for more than just protecting herself from those who would try to hurt her. She could chop wood for a fire or use the blunt end as a hammer if she needed.

Once everything was arranged just the way she wanted it, she put the pack on her back and refused to so much as step into the bathroom without it. Wherever she went it was with her. When she sat down in the dining room to eat she slung it to the floor beside her chair (ignoring Adam’s rolled eyes and her parents’ exchange of glances—Red knew what they thought but she didn’t care).

She was ready for anything and she wasn’t going to be the one caught unawares, and damn Adam if he thought he was going to share the food in her pack just because he couldn’t be bothered to get ready for the world ending.

Red hated it, absolutely hated it, when she was reading a story or watching a movie and the thing a character needed the most was left behind. Like when the protagonist was in danger and he always carried a gun with him but at just the wrong moment he put the gun down on the edge of the counter and turned his back.

At that point she would start screaming the house down that the bad guy was RIGHT BEHIND HIM PICKING UP THE GUN and sure enough the camera would show the barrel rising behind the character’s head and she would pound the armrest in frustration while all the people around her said “shush.”

That was why she never went anywhere without the pack. She knew if she left it downstairs while she went up to her bedroom then Something Would Happen (a bomb, a fire, a sudden invasion of zombies) that would require her to leap from her bedroom and escape into the forest and her pack would be left behind in the living room and she would die starving in the woods.

Folk in town gave her funny looks when she went to the pharmacy or the grocery store with a huge pack and sleeping bag on her back, but then they gave her funny looks anyway because of the color of her skin and because of her leg so that wasn’t anything new and exciting.

If someone she knew and liked asked about it she just said she was getting ready to do a thru-hike, like when people got it in their heads to walk the whole Appalachian Trail, and then they would exclaim about how exciting it was and that they hoped she had a good trip.

The Cough hadn’t come to their little town yet at that point, and those first few weeks when panic was springing up in every urban area it seemed the virus might pass them by. Life just went on like nothing exceptional was really happening in the world, even though a big city about a hundred miles south of them had been hit hard already. Most people seemed to think that it was perfectly normal that Red would be planning a camping vacation.

Really, Red thought, it’s like they don’t know what’s happening outside town. Do they think anyone will be going on vacation any time soon?

But every time she would smile and say thank you and go about her business, secure in the knowledge that if she had to run for her life at that very moment she would not die of exposure in the wilderness.

Red thought she had everything all figured out. But she’d forgotten one thing, the most important factor in all those apocalypse books and movies that she loved so much; it was never the Event—illness, asteroid, nuclear war, whatever—that was the problem. It was what people did after. And people always reduced to their least human denominators when things went bad.

CHAPTER 3 Toil and Trouble

Her name wasn’t really Red, of course. Christened Cordelia by her Shakespeare-loving mother, she only answered to Red. Her dad gave her that nickname, and once she heard it no one would get a response if they called her Delia.