The Girl in Red

And Red didn’t trust other people—didn’t trust that they wouldn’t try to hurt her or steal her supplies, or even that they wouldn’t try to force her into staying with them instead of continuing on to Grandma’s. She didn’t want to be answerable to anybody or to have to share what she had so painstakingly acquired. You couldn’t always tell if someone was good just by looking at them, and Red was taking no chances.

Her hand axe was hooked through a loop at her belt so that she could grab it easily if necessary. It was not a necessity she was fond of, and she shook her head to clear it of the memory of the man-coyote’s flesh ripping apart under her blade. She’d much rather slip into the cover of the trees and wait for any stranger to pass than have another homicidal encounter. There was already too much death weighing on her heart. Red didn’t want any more weight.

The sun was going down earlier and earlier every day, and the tall trees made it seem like dusk well before sunset. The thick cover, however, made it difficult to find a good place to pitch her little tent. Red had a hammock, though she didn’t love the idea of sleeping out when it was so cold. The rapidly falling dark made her decision for her since she wasn’t able to find a suitable spot. The lack of clearings also meant that there was no safe place for a fire, and that meant another cold dinner.

Two nights in that cabin made you soft, Red, she thought. So what if she wasn’t able to have a hot dinner? She’d find a good place to pitch her tent the next day, and then she’d build a fire and have one of the cans of soup knocking around in her pack.

The surprise find of the cabin in the woods meant that Red could put off a little longer something she’d been dreading beyond all measure—going into a residence or a town to find more food. She’d started off with lots of lightweight backpacker food, the kind of stuff that came in pouches or plastic containers. These were things that she’d ordered online early on in the Crisis, when she could see which way the wind was blowing even if nobody else could.

But as time had gone on she’d run out of that food, and she and Adam

(don’t think about Adam)

had been forced to scavenge in abandoned houses or shops. Red didn’t have a ton of survival skills—she could light a fire without matches and she knew how to find running water and things like that, but she couldn’t hunt or fish and even if she could kill something she wasn’t sure how to clean the carcass and make it safe to eat.

And the way she figured it was that there was plenty of packaged food in the world—there was probably more packaged food than everyone in America could eat even before the Crisis decimated the population. One grocery store that she and Adam happened upon had been hardly touched at all, the shelves lined with every kind of good imaginable—except for milk and bottled water. When there was a panic people always came for milk and bottled water.

Most of the bread had been injected with preservatives so it was still good to eat, and she smiled at the memory of the two of them delightedly toasting slices of bread over a fire and spreading them with peanut butter. The peanut butter had been in Adam’s bag

(don’t think about Adam, don’t think about him unless you want to work yourself up again)

and Red thought that if she found another grocery store she would grab some more of it because even without bread, peanut butter was one of life’s greatest joys and she could eat it straight from the jar with a spoon.

Thinking about peanut butter wouldn’t solve the problem at hand, though. She was going to have to use her hammock, and that meant a cold exposed night. There was no point in walking any more when she could see the thickness of the trees far ahead of her on either side of the path. And it would not be fun to try to attach the hammock in the dark.

She turned off the path, looking for trees that were set the correct distance apart. After ten or fifteen minutes of searching she found what she wanted and got her hammock in place.

There wasn’t really a good place to build a fire, and anyhow she was still fairly close to the trail because she didn’t want to lose track of it and have to waste time getting back. Ever since she woke up in the cold that morning she’d felt a low-level anxiety building up about her pace, even though she’d told herself to accept the fact that she was going as fast as she could. Trouble was, going as fast as she could still felt too damned slow.

She thought she wouldn’t sleep that well in her hammock, especially after the coziness of the cabin. In the hammock she didn’t even have the psychological comfort of her tent fly. But she dropped off almost immediately. It was a good thing, too, because she woke a couple of hours before dawn when the snow started to fall.