“Because their assholery protects them. They’re so full of bile that the virus can’t get a toehold,” Adam said.
“I hope like hell Daddy shot as many of them as he could before . . .” Red said, then faded away.
“Before he died?” Adam said.
There was a strange kind of challenge in his tone, and Red wondered why it felt like his hostility was directed at her.
“Something bothering you, Adam?” Red asked. She’d never been able to back down when he challenged her. Even the merest hint would get her hackles up.
“Yeah, something’s bothering me, Cordelia,” Adam said. “It’s bothering me that none of this would have happened if not for you and your stupid ideas.”
“Are you trying to say it’s my fault that a carload of racists showed up at our house to kill us all?” Red said.
“I’m saying that if it wasn’t for you and your insistence that we go on a three-hundred-mile hike across country we wouldn’t have even been there. We would have gone to a quarantine facility like everyone else with sense and we would all still be alive there.”
“You don’t know that,” Red said. “Mama was sick. She could have gotten sick in the facility, too, or anywhere.”
“She got sick when we went into town to pick up supplies for this godforsaken hike,” Adam said, and he was edging closer to a yell, his voice rising with each word. “We didn’t need to go there in the first place except for you.”
He spit out the last word, and it seemed to Red that he was spitting out years of resentment with it.
“Let me explain something to you, because you don’t seem to understand,” Red said. “This virus is everywhere, you understand? Everywhere. That means if you don’t have the magic immunity, you’re going to get it. I didn’t want to go into town at all, because I was afraid that one of us might get sick, because anywhere that people are is where this damned virus is too. If we’d stuck to the plan, if we’d left from the house three days ago, if we’d avoided any place where people might be, then we might have made it to Grandma’s. Yes, all four of us. But we didn’t. We can’t undo the choices that were made, and yelling at me won’t fix it.”
Their voices seemed so loud, even though neither of them was quite at shouting level. The tweeting birds had flown away, startled by the evidence that humans were stalking through their woods. She felt exhausted all of a sudden, too tired to argue with Adam anymore. Red waved her hand at him.
“I’m not taking the blame for this, even if you want to give it to me,” she said. “What I am going to do is keep walking, because I think we’re too close to the house and anyone even vaguely nearby can hear our voices. I want to live, so if you want to live too you can come with me.”
His face contorted in a spasm of anger, but she fixed her eyes on the trail in front of her and pretended she didn’t see. Her heart beat fast in her chest and she wondered if he would follow. They were supposed to stay together. That was the last thing their mother had told Red. But at the moment she felt she would not have minded if Adam stomped off on his own. Let him get picked up by a patrol if that was what he really wanted. Red was going to Grandma’s house, with or without him.
She was ten or fifteen feet away when she heard him exhale loudly, and then the sound of his heavy footsteps as he jogged after her.
• • •
They never talked about that argument. Adam seemed to want to pretend it never happened and Red went along, though secretly she dug a trench in her heart for the day when the war started again.
That kind of feeling that Adam had didn’t just go away, and if she was completely honest with herself (and she tried to be) it hurt like all that was holy to have her brother blame her for their parents’ deaths.
But Red took that great big blossoming pain at Adam’s words and put it in a closet, a closet that held her grief for her dead parents and her fury at the people who’d killed them and her anger at the incompetence of those who should have seen this sickness coming and done something to stop it.
If she opened that door she’d find she was mad at everything and sad too and Red didn’t need to feel all her feelings just then. She needed to keep on so that she and Adam got to Grandma’s house intact.
They walked for a couple of hours—nothing too brisk, and Red thought of it as less of a mosey through the woods than a careful pace. She couldn’t help feeling that someone might be ahead of or behind them, and if they went too fast it was harder to hear every sound all around them.
And Red wanted to hear if they (what “they” she didn’t know—could be her parents’ killers or government soldiers or just a pack of strangers out to take what they could get) were coming for her and Adam. Even if Adam thought it was her fault that Dad and Mama were dead, she wanted to keep his dumb ass alive. He was all she had and she was all he had and Mama told her to stay with her brother and she was going to do that.
Unless he insisted on going to the quarantine camp. That she could not abide. If he really wanted to clump up with the other sheep then he could do that by himself.
Sorry, Mama, Red thought. I can’t let him take me to one of those places.
The stretch of state land behind their house was about twenty or twenty-five square miles. It was broken up by another small town nearby—a one-road village with a gas station and a few storefronts even smaller than their own hometown—and then the forest started again. In that part of the woods there was a campground about seven or eight miles from the border.
A dirt track led straight to that campground from the main road. There was nothing much to the campground—just tent sites with picnic tables and fire pits and a lime-reeking outhouse—but Red thought it would be a good place to aim for. The site wasn’t especially popular since it wasn’t near a lake like the other camp-ground in the area. Mostly it was a place for day hikers to stop and eat lunch and use the facilities, such as they were.
“How far from the road do you think we are?” Red asked over her shoulder, trying to calculate in her head. She didn’t think they could make that campground before nightfall. That would be a lot of hiking, and it was already midday.
Adam shrugged. “Maybe three or four more miles.”
“Right, that’s what I was thinking,” Red said. “We should find someplace to stop before we get there and set up camp for the night.”
“Whatever,” Adam said. “I’m hungry. You got any food?”
Red came to a full and abrupt stop. She turned around with all the slow drama of a stage actor and stared at Adam.
“What?” he said.
He’d stopped when she had, and he seemed totally unaware of the reason for the fury building on her face, though not totally unaware of the fury’s existence. He took a half step back.
“Why don’t you have any food?” Red said through her bottom teeth. “What the hell is in your pack if you don’t have any food?”
“Hey, it’s not my fault,” Adam said. “I thought we were all going to divvy up stuff in the kitchen but then . . .”
He trailed off.
“Adam,” Red said. “You spent half the morning putting shit in your pack. And it’s completely filled to the top. Where were you going to put any food even if the plan was to divvy up supplies?”
Adam shrugged. He looked like a little kid all of a sudden, a little kid who’d done something senseless and impulsive and didn’t really have a reason why except “because.”