And this motivation for catching everybody? If Red was inclined to think the government had sinister motives, she might think there was a sinister motive behind all this. If the point of quarantine and containment was to limit the spread of disease, then a few people walking solo through unpopulated areas would hardly be a factor. But the patrols didn’t seem to want to let anyone go, and they were wasting (in Red’s opinion) valuable resources trying to find every single person.
It’s about more than just the virus. But she didn’t want to think about the virus, or the government, or sinister patrols circling the cabin while she slept.
Given that the best part of daylight was already gone, Red decided to spend another night in the cabin. She knew this was partly a desire to sleep indoors again, and she forced herself to acknowledge this and also to acknowledge that she would leave in the morning no matter what the weather.
It would be too easy to get bogged down there and stay for several nights, snug under a roof and with plenty of food that she wouldn’t have to carry. But the longer she stayed the more difficult it would be to start again. Her legs would get weak and she wouldn’t be able to carry her pack, and any hardiness she’d built up sleeping outdoors would disappear. So she promised herself
(pinky promise Red just like you and Adam used to do when you were little)
(don’t think about Adam)
that she would prep everything for departure before she went to bed again, and as soon as she was up in the morning she would leave.
Her belly felt stretched out, overstuffed from her gorging, so she took out one of the two books she’d packed and read for a while by the light of her clip-on booklight. Outside the doors of the cabin all the little night creatures of the forest scampered through the dead leaves.
She imagined there were also bigger creatures out there, deer and foxes and coyotes (real ones, not the human kind) and maybe even some bears. But the larger animals drifted silently between the trees, and Red fell asleep with her book on her chest, just as she had so many times at home back when the world was normal.
The next morning she kept her promise to herself and was off just after sunrise. She couldn’t resist a chance for a hot breakfast, so she mixed up some of the oatmeal she found on the shelf before starting off. Breakfast and lunch were usually eaten cold and on the trail and it was an indulgence to have oatmeal (which she’d never been crazy about before but it was another thing that suddenly seemed gourmet).
Before she started she checked her map and tried to get a rough idea of where she was. She was right in the thick of the forest now—it had been two walking days since she’d come close to that highway but she wasn’t sure how far she’d walked in the night after that man came to her fire. Whenever she crossed a road or a town she marked the place on the map and then adjusted her path accordingly. It had been some time too since she’d encountered a marked or blazed trail, but she figured she had about a hundred miles or so to go to Grandma’s.
Red expected to cross one of those marked trails soon—maybe in the next day or so. That trail would lead her about nine fairly straight miles until she encountered a state road. There was no way around this road—it cut right through the forest from east to west in a sidewinding slither. She dreaded crossing the road, because a crossing always came with the risk of an encounter, and because she’d just crossed that highway recently with bad results.
There was also a town very close to the crossing, which increased the possibility of meeting someone she did not want to meet.
Since there wasn’t any way to avoid the road, she decided that following the trail would be better than continuing to blaze through the forest. It was much easier, much less tiring, to walk on a path, even if it wasn’t perfectly groomed.
Crossing the country through the woods meant a lot of bad footing and slow going. Mama had insisted that Red’s half-leg would tire over the course of the journey, and she was right. Despite all of Red’s preparations the truth was that her amputated leg did tire faster than the other one, and at the end of some days she limped until she couldn’t go any farther. She’d started out with a grand notion of hiking eight or ten miles a day but the truth was that most days it was more like five or six—especially if there were any hills to climb—depending on how energetic she felt and how difficult the ground.
The two nights’ rest in the cabin had helped, though. It had been a relief to be off her feet, real and prosthetic, and to sleep for as long as she needed.
She wasn’t making terrible time, she considered as she folded up the map, but it could be better. If she’d been really fit and two-footed she might have made that ten or twelve miles a day. But Red had to take her body as it was, not as she’d like it to be. She’d prepared for the walk, but it was harder than she’d thought it would be (this was easier to admit to herself than it would be to admit to anyone else).
But the snow would come soon. Snow meant not only cold but poor footing, and heavy snow would probably stop her in her tracks for a day or more.
Red set off that morning without the nagging sense of being watched that she’d had before she found the cabin. That’s because nobody was watching you before. You were just paranoid because of that man at your fire. But you made sure he wasn’t getting up again to come after you and there was no one else and you need to stop thinking enemies are lurking behind every leaf, Delia.
She only called herself Delia when she was thinking a thought that sounded like something Mama would say, or if she was trying to be especially firm with herself.
The exercise soon warmed her muscles but a brisk wind made her nose and cheeks cold and she wished she’d thought to pack something like a balaclava.
Can’t think of everything, Red. Though she had tried, she really had. Her packing list had been refined with surgical precision. She pulled her scarf up over her nose and her hat down low over her eyebrows and kept on, because that was what she had to do.
Around midday she stopped to eat a cold lunch of a protein bar and raisins and tried not to think about the pile of spaghetti that she’d eaten the night before. She’d lost a day sleeping in the cabin and she couldn’t afford a long, leisurely lunch hour.
A couple of hours after lunch she came upon the trail she’d expected to find. It surprised her a little, because she hadn’t realized she was so close to it, and that meant that she’d walked farther than she realized the night before she found the cabin. No wonder she’d been so tired when she got there. Adrenaline and fear (because she could admit to herself now that it was in the past that she had been afraid; she never acknowledged her fear unless she had to) had pushed her harder than she would have if she’d been in her right mind.
There hadn’t been any sign of people all day—not a crumpled candy wrapper or discarded water bottle or any kind of sound. Still, she listened carefully before stepping onto the trail and made sure to scout all around for potential hiding places in the event that she did hear someone coming.
The trees were quite thick on either side of the path—oaks and evergreens, mostly—and it would be easy to disappear from view just ten or fifteen feet away from the trail. The key was not to be seen first, not to attract any interest or attention. Since most people made so much noise (unless they were trying to be quiet, and that made them suspicious in Red’s eyes) she would have a chance to dart away before anyone caught a glimpse of her. She hoped.