Mama was going to end up like this, coughing gouts of blood out of her mouth and her eyes would be dead like this woman’s and if Red looked into them then Mama wouldn’t be there anymore, wouldn’t be there to argue with her and call her Delia instead of Red.
(don’t think about it)
“Even with the masks on we don’t want to go out right past an infected person,” Red said. “So let’s peek out the back door and see if it’s safe to go that way.”
“Won’t the emergency alarm go off?” Adam said.
“The electricity isn’t on,” Red pointed out, but she didn’t add you dolt, though it was so tempting. Really, what did the boy go to college for? “And it wouldn’t matter anyway. Nobody is going to arrest us for stealing Twizzlers.”
Adam looked down at the packages of candy in his hand, the bright artificial red the same hue as the blood emitting from the woman who was probably Kathy Nolan. His mouth twisted and he dropped them to the floor.
Red waved her arms to indicate that they should all start moving toward the back of the store. She didn’t know how she’d gotten to be in charge, but everyone else seemed paralyzed by their first close-up sight of an infected person.
It was hard, somehow, to turn her back on the woman who was literally coughing her life onto the glass of Swann’s Pharmacy. Red knew she couldn’t do anything to help her, and that contact would only increase the risk of infection, but it didn’t feel right. People ought to help each other, especially when the world was ending.
They made it back to the car without encountering anyone else. The town was so small and so quiet that they could hear the wet expulsions that Probably Kathy Nolan made all the way back to their vehicle. Even after they climbed into the car and sped away, Red thought she still heard that woman coughing, coughing, coughing.
And the next evening Mama was coughing, too, just like Red knew she would be.
• • •
Mama’s cough had gotten worse by the day they were supposed to leave, though it hadn’t reached the convulsive body-shaking stage that Probably Kathy Nolan had exhibited outside the pharmacy. And there was no sign of the hemorrhaging, either, so Red hoped that was just an anomaly (and that would explain why nobody had reported it—Red liked to have things understood and filed and cataloged with full details).
Red knew that one of the reasons Dad was delaying their start was Mama’s cough. He hadn’t felt confident that she could manage the trip to begin with (he hadn’t said it, there was just something Red noticed in the way he looked at Mama), and now that she was coughing he definitely didn’t feel confident.
They were supposed to start at sunup so they could get a good amount of walking completed on the first day, but it was nine thirty a.m. and there was no indication that they were going to leave soon. Red wondered if they were going to leave at all.
So far no one else had shown signs of infection, though Red suspected her father would soon. Maybe Adam would get it, too. In all her calculations, though, she never considered the possibility that she might be the one to get sick. She laughed at herself a little, because it was beyond arrogant, but she just felt she wouldn’t get sick now that the killer was inside their home. Red was going to be the final girl, the sole survivor of a massacre, just like in horror movies.
She had to think this way, to make it something outside herself, because if she truly considered the reality of her whole family dying before her eyes and leaving her alone she would curl up into a ball inside her closet and stay there. And that wasn’t her. Red had never hidden from anything in her life. When life punched her in the face she stuck her chin out. She didn’t fall down.
But it was easy to stick your chin out when you had a team in your corner waiting for you when the bell rang at the end of the round.
Dad and Mama were in the kitchen, murmuring quietly about things that they didn’t want Red or Adam to hear. Adam was upstairs, and Red could hear him squeaking around on the hardwood floor as he found one more thing he couldn’t live without and had to figure out how to squeeze it into his already overstuffed pack. She was certain that at some point in their journey he would realize he needed to shed unnecessary things and they would drop from his backpack one by one, like the bread crumbs that were supposed to lead you home.
Except these bread crumbs would lead people to them, Red was certain of that. She loved her family but she did not love the way they were so unprepared for the reality of the Crisis.
Adam seemed to think everything would be fine if only they would join up with all the other lemmings in government camps. Even after seeing Probably Kathy Nolan expelling blood from her lungs all over the window of Swann’s Pharmacy, he still thought it would be a great idea to live in close quarters with lots of people and let someone else worry about food and shelter. Adam wasn’t interested in surviving on his own, and so he dillydallied around upstairs hoping another answer would present itself and he wouldn’t have to carry his pack across the “goddamned country” (his words, and he’d gotten a raised eyebrow from Mama for the blasphemy) to Grandma’s house.
Red pulled her pack over her shoulders. More than ever she felt the urgency of not leaving it behind, even to go from the living room to the kitchen. She was not going to be the dumbass heroine in the movie who put her Very Important Object on the ground and ended up losing it in a perfectly predictable plot twist. Her neck had been prickling all morning, and she didn’t know if it was because she had some premonition of Bad Things Happening or simply because she was eager to leave.
Mama and Dad stood close together by the dining set, their heads resting against each other, like each was drawing strength from the other to keep on standing. Dad’s pack was there, filled and zipped up, but Mama’s was overflowing with all kinds of useless things while useful things were scattered on the table. When Red entered they pulled apart, looking guilty, like she was a hall monitor who’d caught them necking behind the lockers.
She looked at them and tapped her wrist. “We’ve got to go.”
Mama made a helpless little gesture at her pack. “I’m not ready.”
Her voice was scratchy because she’d been coughing. No blood yet, though. Maybe not at all, Red hoped. Maybe Probably Kathy Nolan had a unique reaction to the virus, one that not every victim would develop.
It was possible.
Red sighed and went to the table, looking at the mess of her mother’s pack. “First thing is, you don’t need all these clothes. Two sweaters? No. One sweater, and you wear it, either on your person or around your waist. See?”
She gestured at her own clothes—a lightweight wicking T-shirt with long sleeves, a gray-and-red striped sweater (also lightweight and wicking), and her customary red hooded sweatshirt over both. On the bottom she wore synthetic cargo pants that would shed water easily if it rained and wicking socks (for her real foot, since her fake foot did not get sweaty) and her well-worn hiking boots.
Mama wore her “Saturday pants”—cheap cotton sweats that she threw on when she wanted to relax. They weren’t very practical for walking a long way, but Mama wasn’t crazy about exercise and so she didn’t even have yoga pants or leggings like all the white women in town. It was sweats or jeans and Mama’s jeans were all the neat, dressy type. On top she wore a cotton T-shirt with the name of her college printed on it. This was about as exercise-ready as Mama got.
Mama’s face was gray and there were lines of strain around her eyes and Red didn’t want to see them there. She didn’t want to acknowledge that Mama was sick because maybe if she pretended it wasn’t there it wouldn’t be true.