The Girl in Red

The outside noise was strangely muffled in that room. The air was still and heavy and lifeless. Even the flies buzzing around the rotting fruit had stopped moving.

Lifeless, Red thought. Nobody here to answer.

“Adam!” she called again, and felt the first sparks of panic.

Where had her stupid brother gone? He was stupid, stupid to make her worry like this.

“Adam!” she called, and she knew he wasn’t going to answer but she couldn’t stop herself because she could only move so fast, her head was spinning around and she never walked that fast even without this dizziness but maybe if she kept calling he would hear her and answer and then she could stop imagining terrible things had happened to her one and only stupid brother.

She reached the aisle that Adam had ferreted out by following streaks of blood on the floor and there was no one there.

There was no fresh blood. No sign of whatever had made the hole. And no sign of Adam or Regan.

All the panic blooming in her chest came to an abrupt and anticlimactic halt, replaced by confusion.

“They didn’t come out the door,” Red said. “I would have seen them. It wasn’t that far from where I was standing with Sirois.

“Adam?” she called again.

Nothing. Only the vague sounds of guns and shouting outside, like an echo of a war movie playing a few rooms away.

There must be another door, she thought. Or a basement, maybe. Something that had attracted their attention, and they had followed like Alice and her white rabbit.

Red circled around the perimeter of the room, checking each aisle as she went. Nothing, nothing, and then . . .

“Adam!” she cried, and she ran to him.

He was propped on the floor with his back to a closed door. The door looked like one of those large sturdy ones that sealed off a freezer room.

But the freezer can’t possibly be on because the electricity is out, Red thought, and she thought this because it was the only thing for her brain to grasp.

If she didn’t then she would have to look and to see and there was blood, so much blood, blood everywhere.

“Adam,” Red said, and she knelt beside him. His blood soaked through the knees of her pants.

Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?

She’d only ever read Shakespeare for Mama’s sake and it was strange, wasn’t it, so strange that it came back to her now as her brother lay dying.

His eyes were closed and his hands were at his sides and his legs splayed out in front of him—

—or rather what’s left of his legs, Red thought, because his right leg had a big chunk taken out of his thigh (like something bit him, which was absurd, something with sharp teeth that left sharp marks behind) and his left leg was almost completely denuded between the knee and the foot. All that was left was the bone and some ragged bits of skin hanging on.

Something had eaten his leg. It didn’t look like he’d been shot or hit by a grenade or even carved up by a mad somebody’s knife. It only looked like one thing. Something had tried to eat him alive.

“Adam,” she said, and she shook his shoulder.

His chest rose and fell, but very shallow, very gentle, like he was a machine that had been turned off and the gears were winding down.

“Adam,” she said again. “Wake up, stupid.”

Wake up. You’re my stupid brother and you’re not supposed to die. Mama told us to stay together and we’ve never had a chance to make up not really we never had a chance to say we’re sorry to each other about all the things we said and thought after Mama and Daddy died and Adam you have to wake up because you’re the only one I have left and don’t leave me don’t don’t don’t leave me

“Red,” he said, soft like an exhale.

She thought she’d imagined it, and then he said it again.

“Red.”

His eyes were closed, and the rest of his body was so still, but his lips moved. She had to lean close to hear him because his voice came from a faraway place.

“It’s . . . not . . . what . . . we . . . thought. Not . . . what they said. Don’t . . .”

He trailed off, and she waited, and wondered if he would finish before his voice left altogether.

“Don’t open this door,” he said in one long breath.