The Girl in Red

There was a filter on the bottle that supposedly kept out parasites and other things but that wasn’t really what worried her. There was always the chance of a body in water, a bloated infected thing that let its infection ripple out from it, searching for another host to feed its million billion trillion children.

She knew this wasn’t an entirely logical fear; the Cough that killed everyone was an airborne disease and airborne diseases didn’t usually swim in water, but the virus might have mutated. It was entirely possible that it mutated, and that mutation might mean that whatever had stopped her from catching it before wouldn’t protect her now.

This water was running swift, swift enough to reassure her, and she would have to take a chance with a possibly mutated virus. This was not a safe place to stop and build a fire and boil it and let it cool until it was safe to drink.

Red waited and watched for a while, just to be certain that nobody else was on the opposite bank waiting and watching. After a bit she felt her head nod forward and she jerked it back in that panicky way that you do when you realize you’re falling asleep and don’t want to. She widened her eyes, as if just the act of making them bigger would stave off sleep. She was tired, more tired than she’d realized, and being tired meant that she was vulnerable and that scared her, because nobody was going to keep her alive but her.

I’m being too cautious, she thought. There was nobody about for miles. The only movement she’d heard along her night-walk from the place where she’d killed the coyote (the man, he was a man, even if he looked like a coyote, even if he looked like something whose eyes shone out of the darkness above sharp teeth) had been the scattering of little things, chipmunks and squirrels and field mice.

She was the only person near the stream at this exact place. Yes, she needed to be careful but there was such a thing as being too careful—she’d never get anywhere at this rate. Her leg wouldn’t let her walk too fast and she knew that she could only make so many miles a day—the brain was willing but at some point her body would say, Hell, no, not another step, and that was that. Too much caution only exacerbated her slow crawl. It was safe enough to approach the water.

The bank was steep and anything steep is always awkward when you’ve only got one whole leg—it didn’t matter if she was going up or going down, although up was a little easier. Going down always felt like she might lose control at any second, because she felt the imbalance of her legs more acutely and when she thought too much about walking it seemed to make it more awkward.

Red slid the last couple of feet to the water and her real foot splashed in the stream and she cursed. Her hiking boots were waterproof, but her pants weren’t and the water seeped through and ran down her ankle and made the top of her sock wet.

She hated wet socks—ranked them in her top three least favorite things, right after black licorice (just the thought of that anise/fennel/whatever-the-hell-it-was flavor made her nose wrinkle) and people who stopped in the middle of the grocery aisle to fool with their phones when other people wanted to shop. Though she supposed that wasn’t really a problem anymore, and it was easy enough to avoid licorice.

The stream was deeper than it had appeared from her perch. Deep enough, she thought, to hide the presence of the hateful thing in her hand that she so badly wanted to be rid of. She tossed it in the center of the running water and heard the satisfying plop as it sank in. Red couldn’t see the gun from where she stood, and she hoped that it went straight down for a few feet, and that no one else would find it. Or if someone ever did it would be rusted and unusable.

She crouched in the mud, reaching out with her bottle to fill it from the current, not from the muddy eddies that swirled closer to the bank. Red gulped most of the first bottle straightaway—she hadn’t realized quite how thirsty she was until the first cool touch of liquid on her tongue. The scorched bit from the hot stew was still numb.

Red refilled the bottle twice more, guzzling water until it sloshed around in her stomach, and then stood—carefully, as the footing was not very sturdy this close to the water and it would be very tiresome to have to change her clothes since she only had one other pair of pants in her backpack.

Red needed to cross the stream, partly because she needed to continue heading north and partly because if that man who came to her fire hadn’t been a total liar there might be soldiers somewhere behind her. Soldiers sometimes had dogs with them, dogs to help sniff out the infected and the uninfected alike.