The Girl in Red

Adam had gone on ahead, because his stomach was always his priority. He was about four storefronts ahead of her when she saw him stop suddenly.

“Damn!”

“What?” she asked, hurrying along a bit to catch up with him.

In response he pointed at the storefront before him. There was a green awning with white script on it that read Albertson’s Grocery. But the double doors to the shop were broken open, and even from the sidewalk Red could see that the store had been scavenged already.

“Damn,” Red repeated, then automatically checked around to see if there was a person in the immediate vicinity who had done the scavenging.

“There’s no one here,” Adam said, rolling his eyes. “This looks like the work of those militia guys. Which means there won’t be so much as a crumb left inside.”

“But we should check anyway,” Red said. “There might be something.”

The smell hit them a few feet inside. Adam gagged and Red immediately dug for the masks that she kept in a handy pocket. “The mask isn’t going to cover the smell,” Adam said, but he took it anyway.

“Hang on, I have an idea,” Red said, dropping her pack on the ground. She dug through until she dredged up the jar of Vicks VapoRub that she’d taken from Swann’s Pharmacy—so long ago, psychologically speaking, that it seemed like a scene from another life.

She rubbed some of it under her nose and reapplied the mask, then handed it to Adam. He looked at the jar doubtfully.

“Go on, give it a try,” she said.

He copied her and gave an impressed nod as he handed the jar back.

“What made you think of that?” he asked, then added, “Some movie, I bet.”

“The Silence of the Lambs,” Red admitted. “There’s a scene where everyone’s come to look at a body and they put stuff under their nose so it doesn’t smell so bad.”

“I never thought I’d be grateful for your horror movie habit,” Adam said.

“You watched it,” Red said.

“Yeah, but I only remember the part where Hannibal Lecter put the guy’s skin on his face,” Adam said. “Because that was just wrong.”

“Like the killer making a skin suit out of women isn’t wrong?”

Red noticed that both of them were using voices a half-pitch above their regular ones, what she thought of as cocktail-party voices. And she also noticed that neither of them had come out and said, The smell means there’s at least one body in here, even though they were dancing around it by talking about a serial killer movie.

“Let’s start on the left and work our way to the right,” Red said, pointing at the aisles. “All the packaged food is always in the middle of the store, so if there’s anything left it will be there.”

“It would go faster if we worked separately from each side,” Adam said, but there wasn’t a lot of conviction in his tone. Red knew he didn’t want to be alone when he found the body.

It’s just foolishness, because a dead person can’t touch you or hurt you, Red thought. But foolishness didn’t matter when the dead had been the boogeymen of humanity since the dawn of time. People feared the dead because they feared becoming one of them, but Red thought that there were worse things than death. Death meant you didn’t have to worry about staying alive anymore and that seemed like a comfort, especially now when staying alive was the primary concern of every moment.

“I don’t think we should separate,” Red said. She held fast to this rule, because separating was always wrong in an apocalypse situation—even if it was only one of them on the right side of the grocery store and the other one on the left. Something Would Happen, and then they would no longer be Red and Adam, and a solo traveler would be left behind. Red didn’t want to be left alone, even if she and Adam didn’t always get along.

“We’ll be in the same building,” Adam said, but his protest felt half-hearted, and they moved together to the left side of the store.

The cash registers were on that side, so they quickly checked the impulse-buy shelves, even though Red knew if there was anything it would be of the sugar-salt-fat variety, nothing properly filling. But Adam was a damned bottomless pit at home when he wasn’t walking several miles a day, and now he was hungry pretty much every fifteen minutes so even a random, nearly expired Snickers bar would be something.

There was nothing there, though, not even a pack of gum. That didn’t bode well for the rest of the store, but Red felt that they should check. Adam took the higher shelves. Red was five foot one and he was a full foot taller, which meant she would have needed a rolling ladder to see the rear of the top shelves.

She used to have to stand on the bottom shelf to reach items on the top shelf, back when she used to do normal things like go to fully stocked grocery stores and buy food with money that was more than just worthless bits of green paper.