The Girl in Red

She was ten or fifteen feet away when she heard him exhale loudly, and then the sound of his heavy footsteps as he jogged after her.

•   •   •

They never talked about that argument. Adam seemed to want to pretend it never happened and Red went along, though secretly she dug a trench in her heart for the day when the war started again.

That kind of feeling that Adam had didn’t just go away, and if she was completely honest with herself (and she tried to be) it hurt like all that was holy to have her brother blame her for their parents’ deaths.

But Red took that great big blossoming pain at Adam’s words and put it in a closet, a closet that held her grief for her dead parents and her fury at the people who’d killed them and her anger at the incompetence of those who should have seen this sickness coming and done something to stop it.

If she opened that door she’d find she was mad at everything and sad too and Red didn’t need to feel all her feelings just then. She needed to keep on so that she and Adam got to Grandma’s house intact.

They walked for a couple of hours—nothing too brisk, and Red thought of it as less of a mosey through the woods than a careful pace. She couldn’t help feeling that someone might be ahead of or behind them, and if they went too fast it was harder to hear every sound all around them.

And Red wanted to hear if they (what “they” she didn’t know—could be her parents’ killers or government soldiers or just a pack of strangers out to take what they could get) were coming for her and Adam. Even if Adam thought it was her fault that Dad and Mama were dead, she wanted to keep his dumb ass alive. He was all she had and she was all he had and Mama told her to stay with her brother and she was going to do that.

Unless he insisted on going to the quarantine camp. That she could not abide. If he really wanted to clump up with the other sheep then he could do that by himself.

Sorry, Mama, Red thought. I can’t let him take me to one of those places.

The stretch of state land behind their house was about twenty or twenty-five square miles. It was broken up by another small town nearby—a one-road village with a gas station and a few storefronts even smaller than their own hometown—and then the forest started again. In that part of the woods there was a campground about seven or eight miles from the border.

A dirt track led straight to that campground from the main road. There was nothing much to the campground—just tent sites with picnic tables and fire pits and a lime-reeking outhouse—but Red thought it would be a good place to aim for. The site wasn’t especially popular since it wasn’t near a lake like the other camp-ground in the area. Mostly it was a place for day hikers to stop and eat lunch and use the facilities, such as they were.

“How far from the road do you think we are?” Red asked over her shoulder, trying to calculate in her head. She didn’t think they could make that campground before nightfall. That would be a lot of hiking, and it was already midday.

Adam shrugged. “Maybe three or four more miles.”

“Right, that’s what I was thinking,” Red said. “We should find someplace to stop before we get there and set up camp for the night.”

“Whatever,” Adam said. “I’m hungry. You got any food?”

Red came to a full and abrupt stop. She turned around with all the slow drama of a stage actor and stared at Adam.

“What?” he said.

He’d stopped when she had, and he seemed totally unaware of the reason for the fury building on her face, though not totally unaware of the fury’s existence. He took a half step back.

“Why don’t you have any food?” Red said through her bottom teeth. “What the hell is in your pack if you don’t have any food?”

“Hey, it’s not my fault,” Adam said. “I thought we were all going to divvy up stuff in the kitchen but then . . .”

He trailed off.

“Adam,” Red said. “You spent half the morning putting shit in your pack. And it’s completely filled to the top. Where were you going to put any food even if the plan was to divvy up supplies?”

Adam shrugged. He looked like a little kid all of a sudden, a little kid who’d done something senseless and impulsive and didn’t really have a reason why except “because.”

“Adam!” Red said, and she heard the yell and tried to dial it back because the forest was so quiet and yelling could attract attention and she was trying so damned hard not to attract attention. “For crying out loud, you’ve gone backpacking before. You know how important weight is and about leaving enough room for essentials. This is not new information for you. For Mama, yes. For you, no. So just what the hell is in your bag?”

“Stuff I didn’t want to leave behind,” Adam said, his mouth flattening. “Do you have any goddamned food or not? Because I am starving and I am not walking another step unless I eat.”