The Girl in Red

She considered this very calmly, even though she knew that a normal person would be screaming or running or at least breathing hard. It was as if part of her had unhooked from her body and was floating above her head, looking down on her own wild curly hair and red hood and frozen face staring down at the rigid form of a man who’d had his insides pushed outside his body.

“What the fuck?” Adam said.

She hadn’t heard him move from the door to her side, and she didn’t jump but her heart took a huge leap forward, skipping over four or five beats.

“I mean, what the fuck is that?” Adam repeated.

“I don’t know,” Red said.

That was probably a first in the history of the world. Red couldn’t recall the last time she said she didn’t know something. She knew what it looked like, but she wasn’t going to say it out loud. It was completely frigging ridiculous and Adam would laugh his head off.

“That’s some Alien shit,” Adam said, pointing at the open chest. “Right? It’s that movie you like where the little monster comes out of the guy’s chest and there’s blood everywhere.”

Adam had said it, which meant she didn’t have to say it.

“But it’s not a monster. It’s a virus. Viruses don’t do that,” Red said, unable to look away from the body even though the sight made her a little sick. Everything inside the man was just a butcher’s floor of ground-up meat.

“Something came out of that dude’s chest,” Adam said. “If it wasn’t a monster and it wasn’t a virus, what was it?”

“You saw Kathy Nolan coughing on the window of the pharmacy. All that blood. Maybe the intensity of the coughing . . .” Red began, then trailed off. That was almost more absurd than the idea of something

(not a monster, monsters were not real and this she would not tolerate or acknowledge no matter how many horror movies she’d seen, it was not a monster)

erupting out of the man’s chest. No virus, no cough, had the power to make someone’s chest explode.

Adam was giving her his “I-don’t-think-so” look. “Come on, Red. You’re the one who watches all those damned movies.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about them for someone who doesn’t think much of my taste in film,” Red snapped. “Look, there’s nothing we can do for him.”

(what happened to him it had to be the virus but if it was the virus what did it mean was it mutating had this happened to other people what did it mean what happened what happened the virus has mutated it’s turned into something else)

“So we should just do what we came here to do—get some food, unload some garbage from your pack, and move on to the campsite,” Red said.

She was proud of how even her voice was, how she gave no indication that her mind was galloping in a hundred different directions, imagining possibilities that should not exist.

The virus has mutated. Mutated into what?

Adam looked from the body to her face, then swallowed hard. His eyes seemed a little too wide, but he shrugged. Typical Adam, pretending not to be bothered.

Just like you’re doing right now. Maybe if you both pretend hard enough it will be true.

He went back around to the customer side of the counter, away from the body, and grabbed food from the shelves. Red noticed him picking all his favorite snacks—nothing but garbage that wouldn’t fill his stomach—but she didn’t say a word about it. Instead, she calmly reached past the man on the floor and pulled off several plastic carryout bags.

She handed four of them to Adam. “Put anything lightweight in these, and then double-bag them so we can tie them to the outside of your pack.”

He gave her a thumbs-up. “Good thinking.”

“Don’t think this means you won’t have to stick to the deal,” Red warned. “You still need to shed some weight from that pack. And replace it with food that has something resembling actual nutrients. But not from here. We’ll wait until we can find a grocery store or something.”

“You don’t think all the grocery stores will be trashed?” Adam asked.

Red gestured out at the empty village beyond the window glass. “It looks like most people either died quietly in their homes or they followed the instructions to go to a quarantine camp. I think we’ll find a grocery store somewhere along the way that’s not completely decimated.”

“All the stores in the cities probably are, though,” Adam said. “I bet there are bodies everywhere and everything not nailed down was looted.”

“Then we’re lucky that we don’t have to go near any cities,” Red said.