The Girl in Red

It was a marvel, really, the way they were both talking like everything was completely normal.

They quietly collected their supplies into the plastic bags, both of them pretending that there wasn’t a guy with his insides on the outside just a few feet away.

You kind of get used to the smell, Red thought. She supposed it was like someone who worked as a coroner, or in a funeral home. After a while the bouquet of rotting flesh faded into the background.

She wondered how many of the closed doors of this little village hid sights like the one they’d found, people frozen in their last agonies, their faces seized in a final portrait of terror and pain.

They were just tying the plastic bags to their backpacks when they heard the sound of an engine approaching. Red slung her pack over her shoulder and cautiously peered out the window behind the counter. A large black pickup was approaching, the back of the truck overloaded with men holding rifles.

She didn’t know if it was the same men who’d come to their house or another group of yahoos or even a government-sanctioned patrol, but she did know that no matter who it was she didn’t want them seeing her or Adam.

“Out!” Red said. “Now! Go!”

Adam didn’t have to be told twice. He scooped up his pack, the plastic bags full of snacks banging noisily against the outside, and sprinted through the back room. He didn’t wait for direction from his sister but ran into the thin weeds behind the gas station.

Red hurried behind as fast as she could. In theory, the fact of her prosthetic leg didn’t bother her but in practice it was not the greatest thing for trying to escape quickly.

She heard the truck engine turn off and men’s voices shouting and she did not want to get caught, she didn’t want to be seen, and half of her brain was worried about what was happening behind her and the other half wondered just what the hell had happened to Adam (again, it was just like the house all over again, when would he learn to wait for her she couldn’t go that fast for chrissakes) because it was like he’d just disappeared into a puff of smoke and the weeds really weren’t thick enough to hide in.

“Here!”

She felt something tug at her right pant leg and saw Adam lying belly-down in a little culvert maybe eight or ten feet from the edge of the parking lot. Red dropped to one knee and then shimmied down beside him, hoping like hell that no one discovered them there because the chance of her getting up quickly and running from this position was exactly zero.

Adam might get away, though.

Adam probably would leave me here. He’s already done it twice.

A second after Red managed to get into the channel (and about a millisecond after she realized there was a thin stream of water running through it that soaked the front of her clothes) three men came around the corner of the gas station. They were talking loudly, carrying guns, and wearing camouflage clothing and military-style boots.

Red couldn’t gather too many details from her position on the ground, but she did note that one of the three men was black so that meant this wasn’t the same group that attacked their house. One small favor, she thought. At least they probably wouldn’t shoot Red and Adam on sight. Probably.

Despite their combat-ready clothing, however, she didn’t think this was a government patrol. Something about the men didn’t seem right, didn’t seem like they were military. They weren’t . . . Red couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but they didn’t seem cohesive. They didn’t appear to be one body moving in separate limbs, which was the way she thought of army platoons and whatnot. Not that she had so much experience of army platoons beyond what she saw in the movies.

Red had left the back door of the station open—she felt bad about this but she’d been in a rush and she was a little surprised that it hadn’t automatically swung shut behind her.

Once the three men realized there was an open door their attitude changed completely.

They went silent, communicating with each other through a series of hand gestures that were too fast to follow. They carefully clicked the safeties off their weapons (Red assumed this was what they were doing, anyway, because right after that they all put their fingers on the trigger—the one part of a gun Red could correctly identify) and then quickly assembled into a formation with two in front and the third with his back to them and his weapon up. All of a sudden the men had the look of people who would ask questions when it was too late to get answers.

Despite this they still didn’t seem like they were Army or National Guard or anything like that—more like men who’d seen that particular formation on TV and were copying it.