The Girl in Red

When she’d first gotten her prosthetic leg she’d felt like an alien, like the whole world had put a spotlight on her. She went into the ice cream shop with her mother to get a cone after the first fitting and Mary Jane, the two-thousand-year-old proprietress (she wasn’t really two thousand, of course, but she seemed that way when Red was eight—just kind of infinitely old the way some old people are, like they’d always been that old even when they were young) had given Red a giant sundae instead of the small cone she ordered, with whipped cream and chocolate sauce and a cherry on top and firmly told her mother, “No charge.”

Red knew that sundae was a kind gesture, that it was supposed to make her feel good, but all it did was make her feel worse knowing that Mary Jane felt sorry for her. She felt nauseated the whole time she was eating that sundae, choking it down over the bile that rose every time she thought of the too-kind gaze Mary Jane gave her. She didn’t taste a bite of that ice cream, but she ate it all the same and said thank you and smiled as she was supposed to when it was done, and when Mary Jane asked if she enjoyed it Red lied and said, “It was the best sundae I’ve ever had.”

After that they went in the sporting goods store to get Red a new pair of sneakers (her right foot had grown, even if her left foot never would again) and when they went into the store Hawk looked up from the counter with that familiar half-smile, half-frown like his face didn’t know what it wanted to do with itself.

He limped around the counter to meet them and he stopped in front of Red and without another word rolled up his right pant leg and she saw the shiny gleam of metal there. Her eyes snapped up to his bright blue ones and he winked at her. Then he rolled his pant leg down and said, “What can I do for you ladies?”

She hadn’t known until that day that he had an above-the-knee prosthesis, the product of an IED he’d encountered in a sandy country overseas, because he always wore cargo pants that covered him from hip to ankle. But when he’d rolled up those pants to show her his false leg, he made her feel better than a dozen ice cream sundaes could have.

The store register had been smashed repeatedly, probably with a big hammer, and all the cash removed. Red thought this was dumb, because what good was money in a world like this? It was just bits of green paper.

The vandals had left behind things that were useful, and so the family collected up sleeping bags for Frank and Shirley and new raincoats and backpacks and flashlights and other things that Red pointed out that they needed.

“I don’t know if I can carry all of this, Delia,” Shirley said, looking doubtfully at the large pack that Red handed her.

There were a lot of things Red felt she could say at that moment, things like You’re going to have to if you want to survive or How do you expect to get to Grandma’s house without proper gear? or Maybe you won’t have to if you got sick when you took your mask off, but she didn’t say any of those things.

She only patted her mother on the shoulder and said, “You can, Mama.”

And her mother dropped the pack and hugged her then, hugged her so tight, and Red held on to her because she knew Mama was sick and she wasn’t going to make it.

CHAPTER 4 Hide Your Fires

After

Red dreamed, though not of the coyote. She’d expected to see his eyes gleaming at her across the fire, to feel the wet slickness of his blood on the blade of her axe. When she settled into the cabin for the night she wasn’t so foolish as to believe that four walls could protect her from bad dreams. Bad dreams were a given.

But there was no coyote lurking in the darkness. Instead, she remembered the crossroads—the reason her axe had dried blood on it when the coyote came to her fire.

It was a place she’d dreaded for several days. The very fact of it had loomed in her mind as she approached it. There was no way around it, which sucked, because it was on her top five list of Places to Avoid in an Apocalyptic Situation.

It was an interstate highway.

Before three quarters of the population started dying from a disease that no one had ever seen before, highways were a modern marvel, though most people didn’t think of them that way. Flat straight roads that crossed state lines, with restaurants and toilets and hotels at prescribed intervals? Miraculous. Without them interstate shipping would never have been possible, nor even the concept of the cross-country road trip. Sure, they were also the source of accidents and miles-long traffic jams, but interstate highways connected America in a way that nothing else could.

But Red knew that, since the advent of the Crisis, a highway could only mean DANGER. And that was the way she thought of it, too, in all capital letters.