The Girl in Red

“He’s going to come up here,” Red said under her breath. “He’s going to walk right up to the front door and look around and then he’s going to find something that will make him want to break the door down.”

But instead Toothpick followed his compatriots, though he did look back once at D.J.’s house again.

“So he’ll come back another time,” Red said.

D.J. stood a few feet away, watching her. “Did you see the larger patrol?”

Red nodded. “It’s really not safe to travel at night through here.”

She dreaded the thought of this group coming upon herself and Sam and Riley in the woods, asleep and vulnerable. Before they could go any farther forward, Red would have to find out just where the group was based and the size of their patrol circle. She had to make sure that her path and theirs would never cross.

“It would be easier to reconnoiter if Adam were here,” she murmured.

“Adam?” D.J. asked.

Red looked up. Her brain had gone into planning mode, and she’d forgotten that D.J. was there (and listening) for a minute.

“Adam,” Red said, and her heart hurt when she said his name. “My brother. Adam.”

CHAPTER 13 Brief Candle

Before

The world exploded, or maybe it only felt like the world, but there was certainly an explosion.

Red and Sirois were knocked off their feet by the percussion. The room immediately filled with heavy thick smoke.

Getting knocked over by an explosion was not, Red thought groggily, like the movies. She did not feel at all like leaping to her feet and running toward the danger the way film heroes did, or even away from it like a movie extra. Mostly her ears hurt, and they made her head hurt, and when she thought about standing she felt a little sick. The smoke didn’t help, because whenever she tried to get a good gulp of oxygen to clear her brain she instead got a mouthful of black fog to choke on.

She heard lots of shouting, and the sound of rifles firing, and more explosions. Sirois moaned. He was a few feet away from her, struggling to push to his feet. He touched the side of his head and his fingers came away covered in blood.

Red had landed on her right side, and the heavy pack felt like a snail’s shell holding her in place. She had to get up. She had to get away from Sirois before he grabbed her again. She had to find Adam. And she had to take advantage of whatever the hell was going on outside so they could escape.

She rolled to her belly, pushed herself up to her knees, and then paused there, because her head swam and the kind-of-vomity feeling was back again. She coughed, felt bile rising, tried breathing through her nose to make it stop and instead just got a deeper inhale of the chemicals in the air, which hurried on the inevitable.

Red turned her head away from Sirois, because for some stupid reason she didn’t want him to see her puking. When she was done she drank some water and then remembered that she had her mask around her neck, so she pulled it up and that made things a little better. At least there was some kind of filter between her and the smoke that poured in through the open doorway.

She grabbed one of the metal shelves and used it to hoist herself up. Sirois had collapsed to the floor again and wasn’t moving. Red hesitated, then went to check on him.

His head was turned to one side and she saw the flare of his nostrils that indicated breathing. The head wound wasn’t bleeding a lot that she could tell, so the blood cells were doing their clotting thing and he would probably live.

There wasn’t really anything else she could do for him—she wasn’t a medic, and he was far too big for her to drag even if she knew where to take him. It didn’t seem like a good idea to throw him out into the street, where apparently a pitched battle was going on. Her priority was Adam, who still hadn’t emerged from the back room.

“Sorry, pal,” she whispered to Sirois. “Your buddies should come and find you soon.”

She stepped over his body, noted the staple gun/tracker gun/whatever-it-was nearby and kicked it away under a shelf.

A little cloud of smoke entered the back room with her when she pushed open the door but it was otherwise clear. Red pulled her mask down again and breathed deeply. Even the rotting fruit fog was better than the metallic tang of that smoke.

“Adam!” she called, walking toward the place where they’d found the hole in the concrete floor. “Adam!”

Why hadn’t Adam and Regan come out when they heard the explosion? What was taking them so long?

Maybe whoever threw that bomb came in the back and dragged them away already and you’ll never see your brother again.

“Too many movies, Red,” she said. It was more likely that Regan and Adam were having such a fascinating conversation that they hadn’t noticed everything shaking and burning.