The Girl in Red

The woman looked stricken, like Red had physically hit her. And because she was shocked and not on her cue her eyes slid right again and so Red had ample time to turn and see the man running toward her.

He was tall and thin and had long greasy-looking black hair that stuck to the side of his face. He held a hunting knife in his right hand, and the fact that he was tall put Red at a massive disadvantage because he had a longer reach. She’d have to get inside his reach, away from the blade, and fast.

She’d taken a basic self-defense class once, one of those offered at the college. Self-defense was not about long drawn-out battles. It was about disabling your attacker long enough for you to run away.

So she didn’t square off like she was going to have a fight with him. She held the axe close to her body, waited for him to get close, then dropped to her right knee and swung the axe into his thigh.

Blood spurted into her face but she couldn’t think about it, couldn’t think about the fact that he might be infected and that his blood had gone into her nose and mouth. He screamed and dropped the knife and when he did she swung again, taking out his other leg.

He crumpled to the ground, crying and screaming and cursing her.

Red stood up as fast as she could and turned back toward the blond woman, who she felt sure would be running at her already. But the woman just stood there with her mouth open, like she was watching a movie that was supposed to be predictable and had taken an unexpected turn.

The man was still cursing, still calling Red every name a man calls a woman when he’s angry. But his voice was fading out very quickly, a song coming to its end.

Red had hit an artery. She knew this because the blood was spraying out in time with his fading heartbeats.

“Daaaad!”

A voice from the trees, and Red saw a teenage boy—a gangly, more youthful mirror of the man dying in front of her—run past the stunned blonde and fall to the ground next to the man.

“Daaaad!” he wailed.

For a moment Red was sorry, sorry she’d killed the man who’d clearly intended to kill her. The boy looked about fifteen or sixteen, old enough to harm her if he wanted, but he only threw himself on his father’s chest and wept.

Red felt sick then, sick at what she’d become, but she couldn’t really be sorry. She couldn’t be sorry that she’d killed that man before he killed her.

The adrenaline still pushed through her and made her hands shake but she picked up her pack and slung it on, all the while keeping the axe trained toward the weeping boy.

The blonde moved then, in little slow mouse steps, toward the boy and the man. Her face was the color of ash after a fire has burned out.

Red walked past her, close enough to touch, but the woman drifted by like she couldn’t see Red at all.

CHAPTER 5 Daggers in Men’s Smiles

Before

Before they left town Red insisted on going into the pharmacy to see if there were any antibiotics available. Of course they were useless against the Cough, which was viral and tricky, but as Red had pointed out there were still plenty of bacteria that could kill you if they crawled inside an open wound.

She didn’t expect there to be any left because the first thing folks asked for when they got sick was antibiotics (whether they needed them or not). She had a feeling that any smart people around or people who’d passed through would have snatched them up, or that the pharmacist at least would have snagged them and taken them home.

They stared around at the scattered packages all over the pharmacy floor.

“I can’t believe there’s so much medicine in the world,” Mama said. “I never really thought about it when it was all lined up in packages on the shelf. But look at all of this. Something for every discomfort you might possibly feel—there’s a pill for it, a cream for it, a spoonful of something to swallow.”

“Wonder how effective most of this would be over the long term,” Dad said idly, shifting the piles of boxes with his toe. “All these boxes have expiration dates on them.”

“That’s because they want you to buy more even if you don’t need it,” Adam said. “Throw out the old stuff and buy something new.”

“It’s because the efficacy of medicine declines over time, especially if you keep it in a humid environment like the bathroom, which most people do,” Red said.

“Well, there is that place in every bathroom called a ‘medicine cabinet,’” Adam said. “You can’t really blame folks for that.”

He reached down and picked up one of the packages. “I can’t believe there’s any cold medicine left. Remember that story we saw on the news? All those people knocking each other out for Nyquil and Robitussin?”

“They thought treatment meant a cure,” Red said. “There’s not enough science education in this country. Just because the medicine makes you feel better doesn’t mean you’re not still sick. You’re just not showing symptoms. But the bugs are still building their little colonies inside you, even if you don’t know it.”