The Girl in Red

On the other hand, she considered, cold might slow both the spread of the virus and the constant patrols. They had to stop trying to round up everybody sooner or later. She was frankly surprised at the determination to do so even in the face of decreasing numbers—both the general population and the military. Just because they were enlisted didn’t mean that soldiers didn’t get sick.

And this motivation for catching everybody? If Red was inclined to think the government had sinister motives, she might think there was a sinister motive behind all this. If the point of quarantine and containment was to limit the spread of disease, then a few people walking solo through unpopulated areas would hardly be a factor. But the patrols didn’t seem to want to let anyone go, and they were wasting (in Red’s opinion) valuable resources trying to find every single person.

It’s about more than just the virus. But she didn’t want to think about the virus, or the government, or sinister patrols circling the cabin while she slept.

Given that the best part of daylight was already gone, Red decided to spend another night in the cabin. She knew this was partly a desire to sleep indoors again, and she forced herself to acknowledge this and also to acknowledge that she would leave in the morning no matter what the weather.

It would be too easy to get bogged down there and stay for several nights, snug under a roof and with plenty of food that she wouldn’t have to carry. But the longer she stayed the more difficult it would be to start again. Her legs would get weak and she wouldn’t be able to carry her pack, and any hardiness she’d built up sleeping outdoors would disappear. So she promised herself

(pinky promise Red just like you and Adam used to do when you were little)

(don’t think about Adam)

that she would prep everything for departure before she went to bed again, and as soon as she was up in the morning she would leave.

Her belly felt stretched out, overstuffed from her gorging, so she took out one of the two books she’d packed and read for a while by the light of her clip-on booklight. Outside the doors of the cabin all the little night creatures of the forest scampered through the dead leaves.

She imagined there were also bigger creatures out there, deer and foxes and coyotes (real ones, not the human kind) and maybe even some bears. But the larger animals drifted silently between the trees, and Red fell asleep with her book on her chest, just as she had so many times at home back when the world was normal.

The next morning she kept her promise to herself and was off just after sunrise. She couldn’t resist a chance for a hot breakfast, so she mixed up some of the oatmeal she found on the shelf before starting off. Breakfast and lunch were usually eaten cold and on the trail and it was an indulgence to have oatmeal (which she’d never been crazy about before but it was another thing that suddenly seemed gourmet).

Before she started she checked her map and tried to get a rough idea of where she was. She was right in the thick of the forest now—it had been two walking days since she’d come close to that highway but she wasn’t sure how far she’d walked in the night after that man came to her fire. Whenever she crossed a road or a town she marked the place on the map and then adjusted her path accordingly. It had been some time too since she’d encountered a marked or blazed trail, but she figured she had about a hundred miles or so to go to Grandma’s.

Red expected to cross one of those marked trails soon—maybe in the next day or so. That trail would lead her about nine fairly straight miles until she encountered a state road. There was no way around this road—it cut right through the forest from east to west in a sidewinding slither. She dreaded crossing the road, because a crossing always came with the risk of an encounter, and because she’d just crossed that highway recently with bad results.

There was also a town very close to the crossing, which increased the possibility of meeting someone she did not want to meet.

Since there wasn’t any way to avoid the road, she decided that following the trail would be better than continuing to blaze through the forest. It was much easier, much less tiring, to walk on a path, even if it wasn’t perfectly groomed.