She should have cleaned the blade, though not because she was worried about scaring him. She should have done it because it was her only defense besides her brain, and she ought to take better care of it.
He’d swaggered out of the trees and into the clearing, all “hey-little-lady-don’t-you-want-some-company.” He had remarked on the cold night and how nice her fire looked. His hair was bristle-brush stiff and close to the scalp, like he’d shaved it to the skin once, but it was growing out now. Had he shaved it because he’d been a soldier? If he had been, he was likely a deserter now. He was skinny in a ropy muscled way, and put her in mind of a coyote. A hungry coyote.
He didn’t look sick; that was the main thing. Of course nobody looked sick when they first caught it, but pretty soon after they would be coughing and their eyes would be red from all the burst blood vessels and a few days after the Cough started, well . . . it was deceptively mild at first, that cough, just a dry throat that didn’t seem to go away and then it suddenly was much more, a mild skirmish that turned into a world war without your noticing.
It didn’t escape Red’s notice that underneath his raggedy field coat there was a bulge at his hip. She wondered, in a vaguely interested sort of way, if he actually knew how to use the gun or if he just enjoyed pretending he was a man while flashing it around.
She waited. She wasn’t under any obligation to be polite to someone who thought she was his next victim. He hadn’t introduced himself, although he had put his hands near the fire she’d so painstakingly built.
“Are you . . . ?” he began, his eyes darting over her again. His gaze paused for a moment when he saw the gleam of metal at her left ankle, visible just beneath the roll of her pants.
“Am I what?” she asked. Her tone did not encourage further conversation.
He hesitated, seemingly thinking better of it, then gestured at his face. “Your eyes are light, but your skin is brown. You look like you’re half-and-half.”
She gave him her blandest glance yet, her face no more expressive than a slice of Wonder Bread.
“Half-and-half?” she said, pretending not to understand.
Red had that indeterminate mixed-race look that made white people nervous, because they didn’t know what box to put her in. She might be half African or Middle Eastern. She might be a Latina or maybe she was just a really dark Italian. Her eyes were an inheritance from her father, a kind of greenish blue, and that always caused further confusion.
Their eyes always flicked up to her hair, looking for clues, but she had big fat curls that could have come from anybody. She was used to speculative glances and stupid questions, having dealt with a lifetime of them, but it always surprised her (it shouldn’t have, but it did) how many people still cared about that dumb shit when the world was coming to an end.
“I was just wondering what—” he said.
“Where I come from it’s not polite to start asking people about their folk before you’re even introduced.”
“Right,” he said. The intruder had lost some of the swagger he’d had coming into the clearing in the first place.
“What are you doing out here on your own? I thought everyone was supposed to go to the nearest quarantine camp,” he finally said, choosing not to introduce himself despite her admonishment.
They were not going to be friends, then. Red did not feel sad about this.
“What are you doing out here on your own?” she answered.
“Right,” he said, shuffling his feet. His eyes darted in all directions, a sure sign that a lie was on offer. “I lost my friends in the dark. There were soldiers and we got separated.”
“Soldiers?” she asked, sharper than she intended. “A foot patrol?”
“Yes.”
“How many soldiers?”
He shrugged. “I dunno. A bunch. It was dark, and we didn’t want to go to the camp. Same as you.”
Don’t try to act like we have something in common. “Did you come from the highway? Do you know which way they were headed? Did they follow you?”
“No, I got away clean. Didn’t hear any of them behind me.”
This sounded like something he’d made up to explain the fact that he was alone in the woods with no supplies and no companions and sniffing around her fire looking for something he didn’t have.
Red sincerely hoped he was as full of shit as he seemed, because she was not interested in encountering any soldiers. The government wanted everyone rounded up and quarantined (“to safely prevent the further spread of the disease”—Red had snorted when she heard that announcement because the fastest way to spread disease is to put a whole bunch of people in tight quarters and those government doctors ought to know better) and she didn’t have time for their quarantine. She had to get to her grandmother, and she still had a very long way to go.
Red had passed near a highway earlier in the day. The experience filled her with anxiety since soldiers (and people generally) were more likely to be near highways and roadways and towns. She hadn’t encountered a patrol there, but she’d had a small . . . conflict . . . with a group of three ordinary people about two or three miles into the woods past the road. Since then she’d tried to make tracks as fast as possible away from anywhere that might be populated. Red wasn’t interested in joining up with a group.
She hadn’t asked the coyote to sit down and join her, and it was clear he didn’t know what to do with himself. Red could see the shape of what he figured would happen on his face.
He’d thought she would be polite, that she would offer to share her space with him. He’d thought she would trust him, because she was alone and he was alone and of course people were pack animals and would naturally want to herd together. Then when her guard was down or maybe when she’d fallen asleep, he’d take what he wanted from her and leave. She was not following his script, and he didn’t know how to improvise.
Well, Red’s mother hadn’t raised a fool, and she wasn’t about to invite a coyote to sit down to dinner with her. She stirred the stew over the fire and determined that it was finished heating.
“That smells good,” he said hopefully.
“Sure does,” Red replied. She pulled the pot off the fire and poured some of the stew into her camp bowl.
“I haven’t eaten a darn thing since yesterday,” he said.
Red moved the bowl into her lap and spooned a tiny bit of stew, just a mouse bite, into her mouth. It was too soon to eat it and hot, far too hot, and it scorched her tongue. She wasn’t going to be able to taste anything for a couple of hours after that, but she didn’t show it. She only looked at him, and waited for whatever it was that he was going to do.
He narrowed his eyes then, and she glimpsed the predator he’d tried to disguise under a charm mask.
“Where I come from it’s polite to share if you’ve got food and someone else doesn’t,” he said.
“You don’t say.”
She spooned up some more stew, never taking her eyes from him. She was going to lose what was in the pot in a minute when he charged at her, and she was sorry for it, for she was hungry and it wasn’t easy to carry those cans of stew around.
He pulled out the gun then, the one he’d been pretending not to finger the whole time.
“Give me what’s in your bag, bitch,” he snarled, his lips pulling back from his teeth.
Red calmly put the bowl in her lap to one side. “No.”
“Give it to me or I’ll shoot you,” he said, waving the gun in her general direction.
He thought he was being menacing, and it made her snort. He looked like a cartoon villain in a movie, a mangy excuse for a badass—the kind that threaten the hero when he walks through an alley and get thrashed for their trouble. She wasn’t dumb enough to think that he couldn’t hurt her, though. Even an idiot with a gun was dangerous.