The Girl in Red

“I am not walking another step until you open your bag and show me what nonsense you have in there,” Red said. “And then you’re going to throw out anything useless and make room for things you actually need to survive.”

Her mind was racing ahead. They would have to go into someone’s house, or into a town. She had enough food for herself for two weeks—she’d calculated it very carefully, every meal and snack. Red had known that at some point they would have to scavenge, but she hadn’t expected it on the first day. That town they would pass through wasn’t much of a town, though she supposed the gas station would at least have snack food.

Assuming it hasn’t been raided or destroyed.

“You are not taking a damned thing out of my pack,” Adam said, breaking into her thoughts.

“Yes I am, if you want to eat,” Red said. “I’ve got the food, so I make the rules.”

“You think I can’t take that pack off you?” Adam said. “I could take it and run away and you’d never catch me.”

He didn’t say, Because you can’t really run with that leg, but it was definitely implied.

Red felt that trench she’d dug in her heart earlier, felt all the barbed wire going up around it, started mentally stockpiling grenades. But she didn’t throw them at Adam, the way she longed to do. They’d always had a squabbling relationship, always quick to point out the fault of the other. It would be incredibly easy to fall into that again, but this time there was an undercurrent of anger that had never been present before.

Adam blamed Red for their parents’ deaths. He’d said that, right to her face. And it lay there between them, a dirty thing neither of them wanted to touch but couldn’t fully ignore.

So she could make another angry remark, and this could escalate, and each would probably end up trying to wrestle the backpack away from the other and likely they would separate. Red didn’t want to separate. Adam was her brother, like it or not. And Mama said they should stay together. She hung on to that. Mama said we should stay together.

Red bit her tongue and silently pulled her pack off and dug around until she’d found a protein bar. She held it out to Adam but it didn’t feel like a white flag somehow. It felt like unexploded ordnance.

He looked from the protein bar to her face and then looked away, something like shame in his eyes. “Thanks,” he muttered.

“You’re welcome,” she said, and started hiking again.

She didn’t repeat that they were going to have to find supplies soon because he’d been an idiot who hadn’t packed any food. Once Adam had eaten the bar and his brain stopped badgering him for food he would realize that himself. She just tried to think about what was before them—what she knew was ahead, and what complications might be in the way.

Even though the next town was nothing much to write home about, it was still a space where there might be people—infected people, dangerous people. That was why she wanted to camp for the night before they reached the road, and then cross it in the morning—preferably before dawn, under cover of darkness. She knew that if she even suggested such a thing at that moment, Adam would at best laugh at her paranoia. At worst it would start another argument and she wasn’t in the mood for an argument.

But all the same she fortified for the future, because Adam wasn’t going to magically change his mind. They shared that quality—once an opinion was formed it was very, very difficult to dislodge it. Adam couldn’t shout at the men who’d come to their house, or destroy all evidence of the virus that infected their mother, so he’d fixed on Red as the source of all his woe. It was up to her to be the better person, to control her temper, to wait for him to conclude that his anger was misplaced.

Mama, give me strength, she thought, because it was probably going to take some kind of divine intervention to stop her from snapping Adam’s head off if he picked another fight. Red thought she was pretty good at self-reflecting. She knew her faults.

Adam didn’t complain when Red suggested they pitch their tents in a clearing she found about a quarter mile before the road. He didn’t speak as she boiled water over the small fire she built and handed him a meal from her bag. He added water to the meal, ate it with a spoon from his own pack. Red figured she ought to be grateful he at least had utensils, because she only had one set and she did not know what kind of fight would ensue if they had to share a fork. After dinner he went into his tent and didn’t come out again, leaving his sister alone by the fire.

CHAPTER 8 The Serpent under It

Before