The Girl in Red

Red thought there was probably a lot more to the story than this, but Riley no longer seemed inclined to talk about it.

“You guys must have come a long way to get here,” Red said. The nearest town was at that dangerous crossing she’d been dreading, and that would be a good walk to kids of this size.

“I dunno how far it was but it seems like we’ve been walking forever,” Riley said, and said they came from a town about twenty-five miles or so away, by Red’s calculation.

“Stop telling her all this stuff!” the other child said. “It’s not any of her business.”

“You’re right,” Red said, quietly impressed that a couple of kids could get so far with basically no resources. “It’s not my business. But since I’m alone and you’re alone maybe we could walk together for a while, what do you say?”

Red would never have said this if they were adults. She knew that. Because she couldn’t trust other adults not to harm her. But it was a long lonely walk that she was on, especially without Adam

(don’t think about Adam)

and even if she wasn’t lonely there was no way she could leave these two children in the middle of the woods. They would starve to death, or someone with ill intent would find them.

“How do we know you’re not working with the soldiers?”

“Soldiers?” Red asked. She wasn’t sure if they were talking about the homegrown kind or the real military.

“Those soldiers that go around collecting people in trucks?” the second child said, his/her voice doing that uptalk thing at the end like it was half a statement and half a question. “They have dogs.”

The child’s fearful tone told Red that these two had been chased by those dogs. It was miraculous that they’d managed to get away—get away from the infection, get away from the soldiers, get away from the dogs. Red wanted to hear that story, wanted to know exactly how they got to where they were—two little kids miles from anywhere.

Why hadn’t she and Adam seen more bodies like the one in the gas station? Of course, they hadn’t seen that many dead bodies to begin with. They’d seen the ones stacked up in their own town and burned in the center square. For the most part the places they’d passed through had been swept clean of people, living or dead, as if a fairy had come through with her wand and magicked them all away.

Or maybe some guys in a truck picked them up and took them away for some nefarious purpose of their own.

The kids stared at her expectantly, and she realized she’d never responded to the second child.

“I’m not working with the soldiers,” Red said, coming back from the place where she’d gotten lost in her own brain. “I’m just trying to get to my grandma’s house.”

“Is your grandma nice?” Riley asked, and Red couldn’t miss the wistfulness behind the question.

“She’s the best grandma in the world,” Red said. “She always has our favorite kind of drink in the refrigerator when we come to visit, and she puts cedar blocks in all of her dresser drawers so that your clothes smell like the forest. And she makes pizza dough from scratch and cooks the pizza in a brick oven outside and it tastes better than any pizzeria could ever make. But all grandkids think their grandma is the best, right?”

“Our grandma was the best,” Riley said. “She made one million kinds of cookies at Christmastime—chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin and sugar cookies shaped like Santa and snickerdoodles and . . .”

“Ri-ley,” the second child said, obviously weary at this point.

Red didn’t see any point in chiding Riley, but the second kid seemed to feel it was important to try.

“Do you . . . ?” Riley trailed off, looking uncertainly at the second child, as if expecting him/her to object. “Do you have any food?”

“I do,” Red said. “And I’ll share it with you, if you’ll come out of there and walk with me a bit.”

“No,” the second child said, and snatched at Riley’s wrist, trying to pull the other one back.

“Get off, Sam,” Riley said.

Sam. Another maybe-a-boy-maybe-a-girl name. So, maybe two sisters, maybe two brothers, maybe one of each. Red didn’t care so much which except that she wanted to stop thinking of each kid as him/her.

“We’re not going with you,” Sam said, nice and loud so Red couldn’t make a mistake.

Red recognized the technique—it was used in a lot of self-defense classes. Sam was “using her voice” (or maybe his voice) to protect herself and her sibling—speaking up, not letting anyone run over her. It was a good thing to teach kids, and Red was glad Sam felt confident enough to do it. But it meant that she had some more work to do before the two of them would agree to come out from under that shrubbery.