The Girl in Red

CHAPTER 7 The Grief That Does Not Speak

Before

Adam and Red walked in silence for a while. Red didn’t know about Adam but she couldn’t get past the grief in her throat to say anything. Every time she felt her voice rising up it would meet that clump of tears stuck behind her tongue and whatever she was about to say would just fade back into her lungs.

There was no sound except the clomp of their boots in the dirt, the wind in the branches, the chatter of birds in the trees.

The birds didn’t know that Dad and Mama were dead. The birds didn’t care that everyone was dying and those who weren’t dying had gone crazy. The birds just went about their bird business, finding worms and building nests and shouting at other birds that came and perched on branches in trees they’d staked as their own.

Adam abruptly came to a stop, peeling off the trail and sitting down on one of the boulders scattered all over the woods. Red knew that these were the fragmented remains of glacier deposits but as a child she’d thought they were dropped here and there by fairies, and never lost the habit of calling them “fairy rocks.”

“This is bullshit,” he said, taking a long swig of water from his bottle.

“We can’t stop here,” Red said. “We’re still too close to home.”

“You think those rednecks are going to chase us into the woods?” Adam snorted. “They were out looking for easy pickings. They’re not going to leave their truck to follow us.”

“I can’t believe so many people have died and a whole truckload of motherfuckers like that lived,” Red said, unable to keep the fury out of her voice. “Why is it that assholes just go on and on, even when the world would be a better place if they just dropped dead?”

“Because their assholery protects them. They’re so full of bile that the virus can’t get a toehold,” Adam said.

“I hope like hell Daddy shot as many of them as he could before . . .” Red said, then faded away.

“Before he died?” Adam said.

There was a strange kind of challenge in his tone, and Red wondered why it felt like his hostility was directed at her.

“Something bothering you, Adam?” Red asked. She’d never been able to back down when he challenged her. Even the merest hint would get her hackles up.

“Yeah, something’s bothering me, Cordelia,” Adam said. “It’s bothering me that none of this would have happened if not for you and your stupid ideas.”

“Are you trying to say it’s my fault that a carload of racists showed up at our house to kill us all?” Red said.

“I’m saying that if it wasn’t for you and your insistence that we go on a three-hundred-mile hike across country we wouldn’t have even been there. We would have gone to a quarantine facility like everyone else with sense and we would all still be alive there.”

“You don’t know that,” Red said. “Mama was sick. She could have gotten sick in the facility, too, or anywhere.”

“She got sick when we went into town to pick up supplies for this godforsaken hike,” Adam said, and he was edging closer to a yell, his voice rising with each word. “We didn’t need to go there in the first place except for you.”

He spit out the last word, and it seemed to Red that he was spitting out years of resentment with it.

“Let me explain something to you, because you don’t seem to understand,” Red said. “This virus is everywhere, you understand? Everywhere. That means if you don’t have the magic immunity, you’re going to get it. I didn’t want to go into town at all, because I was afraid that one of us might get sick, because anywhere that people are is where this damned virus is too. If we’d stuck to the plan, if we’d left from the house three days ago, if we’d avoided any place where people might be, then we might have made it to Grandma’s. Yes, all four of us. But we didn’t. We can’t undo the choices that were made, and yelling at me won’t fix it.”

Their voices seemed so loud, even though neither of them was quite at shouting level. The tweeting birds had flown away, startled by the evidence that humans were stalking through their woods. She felt exhausted all of a sudden, too tired to argue with Adam anymore. Red waved her hand at him.

“I’m not taking the blame for this, even if you want to give it to me,” she said. “What I am going to do is keep walking, because I think we’re too close to the house and anyone even vaguely nearby can hear our voices. I want to live, so if you want to live too you can come with me.”

His face contorted in a spasm of anger, but she fixed her eyes on the trail in front of her and pretended she didn’t see. Her heart beat fast in her chest and she wondered if he would follow. They were supposed to stay together. That was the last thing their mother had told Red. But at the moment she felt she would not have minded if Adam stomped off on his own. Let him get picked up by a patrol if that was what he really wanted. Red was going to Grandma’s house, with or without him.