The Girl in Red

Dad looked over his shoulder at where she sat in the backseat just as she always had since she was a child. All four of them were in their prearranged positions—Dad driving, Mama beside him, Red behind Mama, Adam behind Dad. Boys on one side and girls on the other, because Adam had wanted it that way when he was five and they’d never gotten out of the habit.

Her father looked like he wanted to ask why, then changed his mind. Instead he did a quick three-point turn so the nose of their SUV faced the way they’d just come.

For one wild moment Red wondered if she told Dad to keep driving back to the house if he would just do what she said. The sight of the thing in the street had clearly shaken him. But she didn’t think she could get away with two direct orders in a row. He was still Dad, and in a minute he would remember that.

He pulled the key out of the ignition and they all climbed out of the car at the same time, like they were following the steps of a dance. Red slung her pack over her shoulders and closed the car door behind her. Now they all faced the obstacle in the street and the smell outside the car was far worse than that inside and the masks might keep out free-floating disease but they didn’t keep out the stench.

They walked forward, again without speaking, because they all knew that they had to get past the Thing in front of them and there was no point in dawdling when an unpleasant task had to be done.

Red had a feeling they all also knew just what it was that they were looking at, but no one wanted to say it out loud.

After about twenty feet of walking it was clear what it was anyhow, and there was no more pretending that it wasn’t awful.

Someone—or several someones, probably—had dragged a bunch of people into the street just inside the town line and piled them on one another and set them on fire. There were charred skeletons in the middle, where the fire had been hottest or burned longest, but the bodies around the bottom and outside still appeared mostly like people, people who’d been singed around the edges, their eyes wide and staring.

(Red thought: I hope they were dead first, I really do. I hope they died quietly in their homes and were not subjected to the terror of a fire just because they were coughing and someone was trying to do a half-assed cleanup by burning all the sick people. Because that would mean that things were much worse here than even I thought, and I can always imagine the worst.)

It made her worry, and made her wonder. Wonder and worry about just who had done the stacking and burning, and where those people were now. Her eyes darted all around, searching for suspicious movement in upper stories. It couldn’t be possible that everyone was gone from the town.

Somebody would be lingering—maybe because they were sick, or because they were afraid to leave. Somebody would have witnessed whatever terrible event happened here.

Then Mama made a choking sound, that sound that you make when you’re about to throw up and you don’t want to but it’s going to happen anyway. She bent double, and it was just the stink getting to her, Red knew that, but then Mama did the thing she absolutely should not have done. She reached behind her and pulled at the elastic binding around her hair and took off the mask.

“No!” Red said, but it was too late. Mama dropped the mask to the ground beside her as she fell to her knees.

Dad reached for her, holding her shoulders as she retched. “It’s okay, Shirley, it’s okay.”

Red raced to her mother’s side and picked up the mask. It might not be too late, she thought. If Mama put the mask back on right away she might not get sick. Of course Mama didn’t want to throw up inside it, that made perfect sense (the thought of puking inside a medical mask was really too horrible to contemplate, in Red’s opinion), but why hadn’t she at least kept it over her nose?

“It’s all right,” Dad said, rubbing between Mama’s shoulder blades. “Just take deep breaths.”

“No, no,” Red moaned. “Don’t take deep breaths.”

But nobody was listening to her then, and she sat watching helplessly as her mama—her brilliant and beautiful and difficult mama, they didn’t always see eye to eye but they loved each other for all of that—took deep breaths in an attempt to stop the vomiting.

And with every rise and fall of her mother’s chest Red could practically see the plague that had killed so many people rushing into her mother’s mouth and nose, cheering with delight at having found a new victim.