He limped around the counter to meet them and he stopped in front of Red and without another word rolled up his right pant leg and she saw the shiny gleam of metal there. Her eyes snapped up to his bright blue ones and he winked at her. Then he rolled his pant leg down and said, “What can I do for you ladies?”
She hadn’t known until that day that he had an above-the-knee prosthesis, the product of an IED he’d encountered in a sandy country overseas, because he always wore cargo pants that covered him from hip to ankle. But when he’d rolled up those pants to show her his false leg, he made her feel better than a dozen ice cream sundaes could have.
The store register had been smashed repeatedly, probably with a big hammer, and all the cash removed. Red thought this was dumb, because what good was money in a world like this? It was just bits of green paper.
The vandals had left behind things that were useful, and so the family collected up sleeping bags for Frank and Shirley and new raincoats and backpacks and flashlights and other things that Red pointed out that they needed.
“I don’t know if I can carry all of this, Delia,” Shirley said, looking doubtfully at the large pack that Red handed her.
There were a lot of things Red felt she could say at that moment, things like You’re going to have to if you want to survive or How do you expect to get to Grandma’s house without proper gear? or Maybe you won’t have to if you got sick when you took your mask off, but she didn’t say any of those things.
She only patted her mother on the shoulder and said, “You can, Mama.”
And her mother dropped the pack and hugged her then, hugged her so tight, and Red held on to her because she knew Mama was sick and she wasn’t going to make it.
CHAPTER 4
Hide Your Fires
After
Red dreamed, though not of the coyote. She’d expected to see his eyes gleaming at her across the fire, to feel the wet slickness of his blood on the blade of her axe. When she settled into the cabin for the night she wasn’t so foolish as to believe that four walls could protect her from bad dreams. Bad dreams were a given.
But there was no coyote lurking in the darkness. Instead, she remembered the crossroads—the reason her axe had dried blood on it when the coyote came to her fire.
It was a place she’d dreaded for several days. The very fact of it had loomed in her mind as she approached it. There was no way around it, which sucked, because it was on her top five list of Places to Avoid in an Apocalyptic Situation.
It was an interstate highway.
Before three quarters of the population started dying from a disease that no one had ever seen before, highways were a modern marvel, though most people didn’t think of them that way. Flat straight roads that crossed state lines, with restaurants and toilets and hotels at prescribed intervals? Miraculous. Without them interstate shipping would never have been possible, nor even the concept of the cross-country road trip. Sure, they were also the source of accidents and miles-long traffic jams, but interstate highways connected America in a way that nothing else could.
But Red knew that, since the advent of the Crisis, a highway could only mean DANGER. And that was the way she thought of it, too, in all capital letters.
Most people would prefer to stay on highways, whether they were walking or in cars, because they were nice clear demarcated lines that could take them from point A to point B. There was no bushwhacking or messing about trying to use a compass. That meant that any living people around would be on or near the highways, and Red was trying very hard to avoid people.
Highways would also be littered with abandoned cars, and abandoned cars meant not only the presence of infected bodies but also obstacles that predators could use to hide and then scoop up prey. If you were the kind of person who wanted to steal and rape and murder, then a highway was nothing more than a feeder tube for man’s worst instincts.
Even if there weren’t any creepy killers around, the possibility of a military roadblock was very strong. And since the military often had dogs, just approaching their vicinity was risky.
Red did not want to cross the highway. There were so many strong reasons not to do it.
But it was a highway, which meant that it ran straight across her path. There was no avoiding it without walking hundreds of miles out of her way.
It wasn’t even that easy to approach the highway without revealing her presence. The trees that hid her from sight ended about forty feet before the road began.
Red hovered in the shade of those trees, wishing they would get up and move with her like a herd of Ents. Ahead of her there was a stretch of scrubby yellow grass, not tall enough to hide her but high enough to carry ticks. Red hated ticks, and with all the woods-walking she’d been doing, each day ended in a thoroughly paranoid tick check all over her body. She did not want to survive the Cough only to end up with Lyme disease.
After the scrubby grass was a deep ditch that ran along the side of the highway, so that rainwater would drain and prevent the road from flooding. It looked, from where Red stood, to be very steep. Between the pack and her leg any kind of extreme angle was a struggle for her and she did not relish the thought of climbing down and up again. And she would be vulnerable there, just a little fluttering moth trying to get out of a jar.
There was one thing to be grateful for—no military roadblocks. From where Red stood she could see cars—several of them had that domino-fender-bender look, wherein one driver slams on their brakes suddenly and the vehicles behind do the same but not soon enough. She could also tell, even from that distance, that there were people still inside some of them.
Of course, these people were not moving.
Nothing was moving. There were no living humans around that she could see, no birds, no rabbits, no deer. Nothing. The breeze was so faint that it barely ruffled her hair.
“This is about as safe as it’s going to get, Red,” she said to herself, but very softly, so no one else could hear.
She set off across the yellow grass, her pants rustling against the dry stalks. They seemed inordinately loud in the still air.
When she reached the culvert she spent a few moments determining the best plan of action. She thought the ditch was thin enough that she could step across it if she climbed only partway down. What she did not want was to end up in a tangle of limbs and/or with a broken prosthesis at the bottom because she’d underestimated the space, so if she got halfway and thought she couldn’t make the step safely, then she would laboriously climb all the way to the bottom and back out again. The bottom of the ditch ran with brackish water that smelled like someone’s cow field and she did not want her boots in that if she could avoid it.
Red managed to make the step—only just. She nearly tipped over backward and had to dig her fingers into the soil on the opposite bank so she wouldn’t end up in an undignified heap at the bottom, like a turtle with its legs waving in the air.
She was out of breath when she reached the actual road. She carefully climbed over the metal barrier and then huffed out an annoyed breath. The domino-fender-bender meant that she couldn’t walk straight ahead unless she climbed over the cars. Red could do it, in a pinch, but it would be a lot of effort for little gain. Better to walk east for a bit and see if there was an opening between bumpers.