She found herself holding her breath so she could hear better, hear any silent enemies that might try to sneak up on them, and then she gave herself a little shake because it made absolutely no sense to deprive herself of oxygen.
The gas station was empty, as expected, and the few shops that lined the road all had their CLOSED signs turned out. There was no evidence of the damage that had occurred in their hometown—no rampaging destruction, no broken windows.
This little village never seemed populated at the best of times and the postapocalyptic look wasn’t that much different, Red reflected. It was like everyone was still inside having breakfast and none of the stores had opened up yet.
The gas station door was locked. Red and Adam peered inside the windows, an untouched array of chips and snack cakes and cigarettes and lottery tickets on display.
“We’ll have to break the door glass,” Adam said.
Red wrinkled her nose. She was reluctant to do that for a number of reasons—chief among them that breaking the glass seemed too much like theft. Of course it was ridiculous to think that way—the owner was unlikely to come back, and even if he did, would he really begrudge some hungry kids the food they needed?
She also didn’t want to break the front door glass because it faced the road, and Red couldn’t shake that prickly someone’s-watching-me feeling. How could they hear someone coming along if they were making a bunch of noise breaking the glass? And there was nowhere to hide.
“Why don’t we see if there’s a back entrance?” Red said. She tried to make her suggestion sound casual, like it wasn’t fueled by vague suspicions of lurking enemies.
And right after she did that she got annoyed with herself, because she was tiptoeing around Adam’s feelings and it pissed her off that she had to do that. It wasn’t natural. He didn’t seem especially concerned about her feelings.
Mama said you should stay together.
Red knew that underneath that excuse (yes, it was an excuse, really) was a lurking fear that Adam might leave her. She wasn’t usually afraid of being alone—she was a fairly solitary person by nature—but she was afraid of her brother unknotting that last family tie, of loosing her into the world to drift without anyone else who would remember the last moment their mother said good-bye.
But it was hard, really damned hard, not to speak her mind when she wanted to tell him that it was stupid as hell to stand out in front of the gas station, visible to anyone who might look out from a window or drive by.
Just thinking about the possibility of a spy in a window made Red glance behind her and squint at all the residences for a twitching curtain. It was not impossible that someone had survived in this little town and that they’d refused to go to a camp and that they were watching Red and Adam right now and they had a rifle ready if it looked like the two of them would get up to any mischief.
The trouble is, Red, that you can imagine too many possibilities. And imagining all the possibilities can get you in hot water just as easy as not thinking things through.
Too much consideration and she could end up lost in the weeds, paralyzed by the vast permutations of potential outcomes.
“Who cares if there’s a back door?” Adam said. “It’s probably locked, too.”
Red shrugged. “It might not be. Isn’t it worth checking? We could at least save ourselves the trouble of breaking glass.”
Adam opened his lips, his ready-to-argue face on. Then abruptly he closed his mouth, turned, and went around the right side of the building.
Red hurried after him, surprised by his lack of response but also relieved. She didn’t know how much longer she could avoid arguing with him. Being so considerate went against the grain of her personality. She felt her stiff shoulders relaxing as both she and Adam cleared the corner of the building. She couldn’t see the road from there nor the second-story windows of the few buildings that had them (it was not only a one-horse town, but a one-story town for the most part) and that meant they couldn’t see her either.
A weedy field, littered with crumpled cigarette packs and dirty soda bottles, bordered the small parking area. Past the field the trees stretched up again into the forest.
There was a car parked behind the station that hadn’t been visible from the road—a modest-looking blue Ford sedan. Red wondered if it was the owner’s car.
Adam reached the back door first—he had a head start, and Red was distracted looking around for possible spies. The door was a solid gray and the keyhole was part of the silver knob.
Red thought it strange that there wasn’t a deadbolt as well—those little door locks seemed like they would be easy to pick. Not that she really knew anything about picking locks other than what she’d seen in movies, where someone with a bobby pin or a paper clip always seemed to be able to get around a securely locked door. She supposed that the owner didn’t see the need for extra security. There wasn’t even a camera over the back door, and she thought every gas station had video cameras these days.
Adam paused in front of the door, his hand hovering over the knob. Red wondered why he was hesitating. He looked up at her and smirked.
“Bet it’s locked,” he said.
“Bet it’s not,” she shot back. “And if I’m right you have to take five useless things out of your pack and carry all the extra food we get from here.”
“Who decides what’s useless?” Adam demanded.
Red thought for a second. “I pick three things and you pick two. Fair?”
“Fine,” he said. “And if I’m right then you have to carry all the extra food.”
“There’s nothing useless in my pack to get rid of,” Red said. “Where would I put it?”
“That’s your problem,” Adam said. “Deal or no deal?”
Red felt a little pang when Adam said that. It was something Dad always said, a phrase from a TV game show that he liked to watch, and for a moment she heard him saying it and could see the twinkle in his eye and she wondered how long it would take for a person’s heart to finish breaking.
“Deal,” she said.
Adam grabbed the knob. It turned easily and the door swung open.
Red laughed at the expression on his face. “You made the deal. Now you’re stuck with it.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he grumbled. “You pick three things and I pick two.”
The back door opened into a small storeroom. To the left there were industrial cleaning supplies and rolls of extra toilet paper stacked on metal shelving next to a miniature desk. Red peered at the contents, always curious about other people’s lives. The desk was scrupulously tidy, all the unpaid invoices in a tray marked “unpaid.” Red assumed all the paid invoices were in the file drawer. She opened the drawer and saw a line of file folders with months and years marked on the tabs in a neat hand.
A calculator sat next to the tray and a cup with several black Bic Cristal pens—the owner clearly preferred only one type of pen and Red knew the brand because it was the one she liked best, too.
It was an odd thought to make her melancholy, but it did. They had shared something—a small something, to be sure, but it was still a shared trait. They liked the same pen, and now Red would never know what else she and this person might have in common.
The virus hadn’t just stopped existing relationships in their tracks. It had taken away the promise of the future, of all the connections that might be made. All those possibilities had been clipped neatly away, loose strings falling to earth.