The Girl in Red

There was nothing for it. She would have to take her chances. Two soldiers were hanging around now. It was possible there might be twenty or thirty in a minute.

The rifle fire seemed to be tapering off to the occasional fusillade. Red didn’t know if that meant things had been fought to a standstill or if somebody had won, and she didn’t care, either. Let them shoot each other.

She adjusted the straps on her pack, made sure they were secure, and double-checked her shoelaces. Red was not going to fall on her face because of something stupid like an unlaced shoe. She took a deep breath even though it was a cliché, but oxygen was important when you were about to make a mad dash up a hill and possibly be forced to dodge bullets.

And then Sirois grabbed her shoulder and pulled her back inside. The door slammed shut behind her and made a noise that sounded inordinately loud.

“What the fuck?” she shouted, shoving his arm off her. “Just what the fuck are you doing, Sirois? I told you to go the hell away. I was about to escape and now you’ve probably attracted their attention, you goddamned idiot.”

“You can’t go out there. You’re going to get shot,” he said. His eyes flicked down to her leg and back up to her face.

“Oh, that’s what this is all about,” Red said. She could practically feel her blood reaching the boiling point. “This is because you think I’m a Helpless Little Crippled Girl.”

“No,” Sirois said, but his eyes couldn’t stay on hers.

“Yes, it is,” she said, and poked him in the chest. “I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself. I have freed you of obligation. Stop getting in my way. I’m leaving. And if those guys are outside the door I am blaming you, one hundred percent, because the door wouldn’t have slammed shut if you hadn’t grabbed me.”

Red took her axe off her belt again and held it loosely in her right hand. If those soldiers were just outside, then they were in for a surprise.

But I’d really rather not use it, she thought. When she thought about Adam

(don’t think about Adam)

and all the blood all around him it was hard to imagine using her axe to hack at anyone. But she would. If she had to.

All she wanted was to leave. She didn’t have any kind of stake in this argument between the army and the Locust Militia. She glanced behind her, where Sirois stood watching her.

She flicked her hand at him. “Go. Go away. I don’t want you.”

“I’m going to follow you out and give you cover,” he said, his mouth set in a grim line.

“Fine,” she said. “Do whatever you want. Just don’t get in my way.”

“Actually,” he said, “it would be better if I went first.”

Red huffed out a breath through her nose and looked up at the ceiling.

“Give me strength,” she said, and stepped out of the way with a dramatic flourish. “Here you go.”

“On my count,” Sirois said, taking out his sidearm.

“Yeah, yeah,” Red said.

He burst through the door like a police officer in a crime TV show, sweeping his weapon right to left. It was so perfectly executed that Red wanted to applaud.

She trundled out in his wake. He was large enough that she could literally use him as a body shield without even trying. If she stood behind him she would effectively disappear.

Her axe was still in her hand but it appeared that it wouldn’t be necessary. The two men who’d been lurking on the corner were gone.

“Go,” he said, and gestured up the slope.

“I’m going,” she said.

She’d only taken a few steps when Sirois called her name.

“Red.”

“Mother of God,” she said, rolling her eyes and turning back. “What now?”

“You know how you said the Cough might have been made in a lab?”

“Yeah?”

“Well,” he said, and it looked like it was a real struggle for him to say whatever was trying to come out of his mouth. “I don’t know about the Cough. But the other thing—the, er, tapeworm—it did come out of a lab.”

She raised her eyebrow at him. “And?”

“And that’s all I can tell you,” Sirois said. “Besides the fact that you want to avoid them.”

“I’d already figured that out,” Red said. She started climbing again.

Halfway up she peeked back over her shoulder. Sirois had his back to the hill and was checking both ends of the alley that ran behind the buildings. A soldier came around the corner holding a rifle but he must have been the wrong kind of soldier because Sirois shot him.

She could just see over the roofs of the buildings and into the town now. A plume of black smoke rose from the front of the grocery store (what had they done? Blown up a truck with a grenade launcher?) and she saw what appeared to be hasty fortifications made of vehicles facing one another on the main road.

She resolutely turned her back, because she didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to get caught again. She didn’t want to get dragged into some meaningless fight between men who wanted to control the way this new world was going to spin.