The Girl in Red

But maybe not, Red thought. Maybe there was no sickness in the air, because everyone who was sick had been burned in the fire and all their little microbes had been burned with them.

But Red knew better, she really knew better, she might not be a doctor but she was so paranoid about germs that she knew you could never get rid of all of them. There were always a few that survived, the hardiest of them all, and they would reproduce and make hardier children.

Or maybe the germs were invading her mother’s lungs (throwing a party on the way down, infecting every bronchus and bronchiole they passed) but it wouldn’t matter because Mama would be one of those people who were immune to the disease.

(But if Mama carried it then Daddy might get sick)

This was a very little-girl thought, and she recognized it as such, because she hadn’t called him Daddy for ten years or more.

(Or Adam)

She didn’t want her brother to get sick, either, even if he was a pain in the ass. But available statistics promised that if one member of a family carried the germ, then most of them would catch the sickness and die.

Which was why Red wanted them to stay home in the first place. Which was why she wanted them to wear the masks. Which was why she sat there feeling free-form panic as she watched her mother breathing in the diseased air that would eventually kill her.

It didn’t make her feel any better later, when they were home, and the next day her mother started coughing. It didn’t make Red feel any better because she’d been right about the risks and nobody listened to her.

Mama did stop retching, and she did put the mask back on, but Red knew it was just a sop to make her feel better. They carefully skirted the pile of bodies and went on to the sporting goods store.

Their town had a proper, old-fashioned main street, though it seemed more of the local businesses were replaced with national franchises every year. The students who attended the college seemed to prefer it that way, having a Subway and a Starbucks and a Chipotle at hand, although they also kept the local vegan restaurant in the black with their (in Red’s opinion, strange) enthusiasm for farro and wheat berries and homemade veggie soups.

Every shop that Red’s family passed had been broken into and picked over. It looked, Red thought, like the concerted action of a gang rather than the disparate efforts of a few. And she was feeling worried about this, feeling troubled that there might be a pack of wolves about waiting to gobble them up. She felt her eyes move unconsciously again, darting all around and searching for the people that she knew must still be lingering, but there was nothing.

There was nothing and no one and no noise and that was the thing she realized was bothering her—the lack of noise. It wasn’t just the obvious—no people bustling around, no cell phones ringing, no cars rumbling in the road. It was the loss of that background buzz that most people never noticed when it was there, the omnipresent hum of lights and electric wires. Without it the air seemed too big, too empty. And all of that empty space might be filled by floating death, tiny little germs in search of a new host.

The condition of Hawk’s Sporting Goods was no surprise to them after seeing the rest of the town. Of course the windows were broken, the contents (normally kept so precise and orderly by the owner, Andy “Hawk” Hocholowski) spilled all over the floor in a seeming orgy of unnecessary destruction.

They could have climbed in through the broken display windows, but Adam opened the front door anyway. The lock was pried open but the bell above the door rang cheerfully as they pushed inside.

Red automatically looked for Hawk behind the counter, expecting to see him there with his familiar blue flannel shirt (he only wore blue ones, in various patterns and combinations but there was always blue) and his half-smile, half-frown. He was a curmudgeon by nature, not naturally friendly, but he was loaded with knowledge and wanted to share it, so he’d opened the store so he could do that.

“And also,” he told Red once, “because I spent enough time in the military to like the idea of nobody giving me orders.”

Of course Hawk wasn’t there, and Red wondered if he was one of the charred skeletons piled helter-skelter in the center of town, or if he’d died quietly in his upstairs apartment, or if he’d managed to escape and was off camping in the woods somewhere, waiting for it all to pass.

She hoped it was the latter, and that they would see him on the way. Red wasn’t a natural joiner, but she liked the idea of bumping into Hawk and having him in their little band.