The Girl in Red

There were still several containers left, and Red debated whether to take them all. If something happened, if one of them got sick . . . there was no telling what they might need. But then she thought of someone like her, maybe someone alone and sick, maybe hoping like hell that there were a few packages of antibiotics left in the abandoned pharmacy. So she didn’t take everything, and hoped that a person who needed the drugs would find them.

Adam stood up. “I’m going to get some candy.”

Red shrugged. “It’s not the most nutrient-dense choice for a long walk, but whatever.”

“I’m not getting it for the walk. I’m getting it because I want Twizzlers and there are a shitload of them in a pile over there.”

Red didn’t like to waste her sweet tooth on most candy, which was filled with scary-sounding chemicals and fillers and thickeners that made her disease-paranoia antennae go twang. She didn’t want to catch a virus, and she for damned certain did not want cancer. Artificial colors might be perfectly safe, but then everyone thought it was okay to put arsenic in wallpaper once upon a time and she didn’t think that had worked out too well.

She followed her brother anyway, because there might be some other useful thing lying about. “Did the folks who trashed this store take anything? Or did they just pull it all off the shelves?”

“They took the money and the beer,” Adam said. He pointed to the tall refrigerators along the wall that were normally filled with six-packs.

“Huh, you’re right,” Red said. “I didn’t notice that.”

“The great and powerful Red didn’t notice something?” Adam said, grabbing his chest and pretending to have a heart attack.

“You’re so funny, har har,” Red said.

Then there was a sound that made them both jump, and they turned toward the front of the store. A woman stood just outside the glass door (which was still intact—the vandals had used a crowbar to pry open the door rather than smash the glass as they had done at Hawk’s).

She was leaning against the door with both hands splayed against it, and the impact of her hands had made the sound that startled Adam and Red. But the woman didn’t appear to have the strength to push the door open. She looked like a plastic bag drifting along in a current of wind, like her bones weren’t functional anymore and her muscles were just holding on because that was what they’d always done.

The woman didn’t seem like she knew where she was, or what she was doing. Her eyes were wide but Red didn’t think she could see anything. She was wearing black leggings and a green sweatshirt and her brown hair hung oily and lank against her very white face. Her feet were bare.

And she had blood running out of her nose and mouth.

Not a little blood, not a slow rusty trickle. This was a horrific red gush, impossible in its flow. Where was the blood coming from? Red thought. How could she be hemorrhaging like that? And why had none of those sober-faced anchors on the news ever mentioned this?

All they had talked about was a cough, a cough that eventually killed the sufferers. Red had imagined something like a deadlier whooping cough, a mutation that defied the existing vaccinations. She hadn’t imagined this, hadn’t imagined free-flowing blood and zombie eyes.

“That’s some Ebola shit right there,” Adam said, moving closer to his sister.

“No, Ebola isn’t airborne,” Red said.

“Come on, I remember you reading that book about Ebola and the author was talking about how blood came out of every orifice. You read me so many gory bits I couldn’t eat my lunch,” Adam said, and pointed at the woman whose fresh blood was running down her face. “You’re telling me that’s not it?”

“Ebola isn’t airborne,” Red repeated. Her brain was clinging to this fact, clinging to the reports about a killer cough. Ebola had a longer incubation period, and it first presented flu-like symptoms, not a cough.

But nobody had talked about the blood. If everyone who got sick was bleeding like this, then how was it that the doctors hadn’t warned about it? And if the major news networks decided this information was too much for their viewers then it should have been on YouTube, or Facebook, or something. Red couldn’t believe nobody had filmed this with their phone.

Unless it’s a recent mutation. Unless this didn’t start happening until all the lights went out and the Internet went black and the phone networks were down.