The Girl in Red

“I didn’t know we had technology like that,” Red said. She was still pretty sure that the gun was actually implanting something inside them

(like a tracker)

and not doing something as benign as taking a blood sample.

And anyway, if they’re so worried about us being infected . . .

“How come you aren’t wearing masks?” Red asked, finishing her thought out loud.

She backed up a little more as she said this, because Sirois was approaching her with the tracker/staple/blood sample gun and she was not going to submit without a fight. In fact, there would be no submission at all. If he wanted to shoot her with that thing, then he was going to have to hold her down.

Sirois stopped, and Regan gave her a sharp look.

“What do you mean?”

“If you’re so concerned about infection, then why aren’t you wearing masks?” Red asked, gesturing to her own mask. She’d almost forgotten it was on her face, and she yanked it down to her neck.

“We’ve been immunized,” Regan said.

His tone was bland and his face was blank but Red knew he was lying. Even if no other muscle on his face gave him away, his eyes said that he was lying.

And if he would lie about that he’d lie about anything.

“There’s no vaccine,” Red said. “Before the lights and the Internet and everything else got turned off there was no vaccine, and I know for damned sure that nobody has found one in the last few weeks.”

“How would you know that?” Regan asked. He sounded genuinely curious about her answer.

Red held up a finger. “First, tons of people have died, and that means lots of smarty scientist types also died. So you’ve got brain drain right there. Fewer people to try to find a cure or a vaccine decreases the odds.”

“Go on,” Regan said.

He seemed, at that moment, like a professor encouraging a bright student in class. It was like there was no urgency, no shouting men outside, no Sirois standing there with his magic gun poised.

“Second, it’s a lot harder to find a vaccine quickly without technology. And technology is also in short supply these days.”

“Edward Jenner found a vaccine for smallpox by observing milkmaids in the eighteenth century,” Regan said.

“Yeah, and the vaccine that he created had nothing like the efficacy of current vaccines,” Red said. “Most vaccines were discovered and/or perfected after 1950 using modern methods and technology, and those methods have only become more refined in the last sixty or so years. Man, don’t use an outlier as your example. That kind of shit pisses me off.”

The corners of Regan’s mouth twitched. Sirois gave her a curious look.

“Are you a med student?” he asked.

“No, I just like science,” Red said.

“She’s a liberal arts major,” Adam said. “No special concentration.”

“I haven’t decided yet,” Red said. “And I probably would have been better off taking a survival class or something at this rate.”

“You seem very well informed,” Regan said. “For a liberal arts major.”

“I told you, I like science. And I’ve been accused of a lot of things—”

“Paranoia, stubbornness, a general unwillingness to entertain the opinions of others . . .” Adam said.

“—but none of those things are stupid,” Red said with a glare. “I know that no vaccine was developed for this disease, so don’t lie to me and tell me that you’re immune. And you’re not wearing masks, so that toy over there is not taking blood because you’re worried that we’re infected. You’re worried about something else.”

Regan and Sirois exchanged glances. Regan seemed to be weighing what to say next.

“The infection is manifesting differently in this sector than it is everywhere else,” Regan said. “Because of that we do the blood test. We perform it on ourselves as well. I promise you that it really is a blood test and not a secret government tracker.”

“What’s it testing for?” Red asked.

“The presence of certain agents in the blood,” Sirois said.

“I told you, I like science, so if you explained to me what you were looking for I would probably understand,” Red said slowly. She was thinking it through now. “Whatever it is you’re looking for isn’t contracted like this cough that’s killing everyone, is it? That’s why you’re not bothering with masks. It’s not airborne.”

Regan slowly shook his head side to side.

Red looked at Adam, and then back at Regan and Sirois. Sirois still had the blood-testing gun up in what Red thought of as a drawn position, like he could lunge at her any moment and stick it into her exposed arm.

“Is it . . . ?” She stopped, took a breath, because the whole thing was crazy, even crazier than some blood-spattering cough that killed everyone and also because once she said it out loud she knew Adam was going to whoop because it was his theory and he was right. “Is it some kind of parasite? Is it nesting inside people?”

“That’s right!” Adam said. “I told you that was some Alien shit coming out of people.”