Red peered out the window at the other houses sprinkled along their route. Most of them were set far back from the road as her own home was, and so it was hard to tell if there was anyone left alive inside them. She was genuinely surprised to see no abandoned cars along the side of the road. Yes, they lived in a fairly isolated area but she’d expected some sick people to try to leave town and have to stop because they were unable to drive. But there was no evidence of that.
As they got closer to town she noticed that more of the houses had no cars in their driveways, and a few of them had broken windows. Red assumed that survivors were looting for whatever was available—food, medicine, blankets. It was understandable, because people just wanted to survive. But it was also sad, sad to see someone’s castle broken open and violated, sad to see doors hanging drunkenly from their hinges or possessions strewn on the lawn. Photographs might not be useful if you were looking for food, but there was no reason to throw them around and break them, in Red’s opinion. There were plenty of ways to get what you needed without being a destructive jerk.
The number of houses increased, signaling the approach of the town proper, and with that increase came more signs of destruction, of chaos, of panic. It had been a couple of weeks since any of them had come this far, and it was difficult not to be surprised by just how much had changed.
At that time many of the businesses were closed up and several houses had appeared empty, but there was no sense of end-of-the-world-type panic—just an unusual hush that came from lack of cars and folks moving around the same space. The grocery store had still been open then, and while things were pretty picked over a general sense of decency had reigned—nobody taking the last ten gallons of milk for themselves, nobody punching anyone out for a case of water. This was a small town, after all, and in small towns everybody knew everybody. No one wanted to behave badly and be reported for this behavior to a neighbor.
So it was startling to see furniture dragged into the street where it had been set on fire, and clothing tossed all along the sidewalk. It was a shock to see broken bottles everywhere, and rusty stains along pavement that could only be blood.
Then they saw it.
In point of fact they smelled it before they saw it—a deep, gut-wrenching reek that seeped through the closed car windows and the masks they wore over their mouth and nose. It smelled like gasoline and burnt fat, like the flare-ups on a barbecue when the meat was dripping.
Mama pointed and said, “What in the name of heaven is that?”
They could see a large pile of . . . something . . . blocking the center of the street. With the sun behind it the pile was just a big black shadow, not a uniform hill but a messily stacked pyramid, one with trailing edges and uneven sides. It was tall, though, for all of that—if not a story high then close to it. Dad slowed the car down and came to a stop maybe forty or fifty feet away from it.
“Should we get out and see what it is?” Adam asked.
He sounded scared, a thing Red rarely heard from him. Adam was all bravado all the time, had been like that since he was twelve or thirteen, and he had been very unconcerned about almost everything that had happened since the Crisis began. In fact, the only thing that had resulted in something like panic from him had been the lack of reception bars on his smartphone.
“I suppose we ought to,” Dad said, his voice full of the reluctance that he clearly felt. “We have to get around it to get to Hawk’s in any case.”
“We don’t have to keep going forward,” Red said. “We can turn around and head home and figure out your supplies from what we have there. I’m sure we can pull something together.”
Mama and Dad looked at each other. Dad’s mouth twisted. “I wish it were so, Red, but our reasons for coming here are still valid.”
“What if the sporting goods store has been looted?” Red said, with a trace of desperation.
She didn’t want her mother to get out and see what was out there, not up close. She didn’t know why it was so important that Mama not see this, but it was. Her mother was sensitive, though she pretended not to be. Even though they’d all sat together watching people be terrible to each other on television (until the TV had gone off forever) this was somehow different. It was close-up. It was real, not separated from them by the glass of the television and the glare of the camera. And it wouldn’t be good for Mama to see it. It just wouldn’t.
“I guess I’ll leave the car here,” Dad said.
He sounded uncertain, which was not like him at all, and Red didn’t like that this one little jaunt into town had already made two of her family members act in ways not like themselves.
“Turn the car around before we get out,” Red said.
Dad looked over his shoulder at where she sat in the backseat just as she always had since she was a child. All four of them were in their prearranged positions—Dad driving, Mama beside him, Red behind Mama, Adam behind Dad. Boys on one side and girls on the other, because Adam had wanted it that way when he was five and they’d never gotten out of the habit.
Her father looked like he wanted to ask why, then changed his mind. Instead he did a quick three-point turn so the nose of their SUV faced the way they’d just come.
For one wild moment Red wondered if she told Dad to keep driving back to the house if he would just do what she said. The sight of the thing in the street had clearly shaken him. But she didn’t think she could get away with two direct orders in a row. He was still Dad, and in a minute he would remember that.
He pulled the key out of the ignition and they all climbed out of the car at the same time, like they were following the steps of a dance. Red slung her pack over her shoulders and closed the car door behind her. Now they all faced the obstacle in the street and the smell outside the car was far worse than that inside and the masks might keep out free-floating disease but they didn’t keep out the stench.
They walked forward, again without speaking, because they all knew that they had to get past the Thing in front of them and there was no point in dawdling when an unpleasant task had to be done.
Red had a feeling they all also knew just what it was that they were looking at, but no one wanted to say it out loud.
After about twenty feet of walking it was clear what it was anyhow, and there was no more pretending that it wasn’t awful.
Someone—or several someones, probably—had dragged a bunch of people into the street just inside the town line and piled them on one another and set them on fire. There were charred skeletons in the middle, where the fire had been hottest or burned longest, but the bodies around the bottom and outside still appeared mostly like people, people who’d been singed around the edges, their eyes wide and staring.
(Red thought: I hope they were dead first, I really do. I hope they died quietly in their homes and were not subjected to the terror of a fire just because they were coughing and someone was trying to do a half-assed cleanup by burning all the sick people. Because that would mean that things were much worse here than even I thought, and I can always imagine the worst.)
It made her worry, and made her wonder. Wonder and worry about just who had done the stacking and burning, and where those people were now. Her eyes darted all around, searching for suspicious movement in upper stories. It couldn’t be possible that everyone was gone from the town.
Somebody would be lingering—maybe because they were sick, or because they were afraid to leave. Somebody would have witnessed whatever terrible event happened here.