There were other metal shelves to the right of the door, and these were filled with the store’s backstock. Several brands of cigarettes were stacked there, along with boxes of candy bars and beef jerky and potato chips and all the other random snack foods one could find at a mini-mart.
Adam grabbed a bag of nacho cheese chips, opened it, and started cramming them in his mouth like he’d never eaten before.
“At least chew with your mouth closed,” Red said.
Adam responded to this by noisily crunching several more chips. Red rolled her eyes and started scanning the shelves for anything with nutritional density.
Beef jerky wasn’t bad. The protein at least filled up your stomach. Nuts were good, too. She rolled down the stock with her eyes from top to bottom.
And when she got to the bottom, she stopped. And sucked in a hard breath.
“What?” Adam asked, chip crumbs falling over his chin.
“Blood,” Red said, and pointed.
There was a line of streaky, faded red that went from the door into the shop to the back door they’d just entered. It was rusty and erratic, but it was definitely blood. Red was sure of it.
“It’s not blood,” Adam said, because he had to argue with her. “It’s probably spilled root beer or something. Why do you always have to think of the most dramatic possibility?”
“It’s blood,” she said, and reached for the door that led into the shop.
“Wait,” Adam said, grabbing her hand. “If it is blood, and I’m not saying it is, do you really want to go in there? Somebody probably died of the virus in there, and coughed all over the floor like that lady we saw at the pharmacy.”
“If it’s blood then someone might be in there who needs our help,” Red said.
“Nobody needs our help,” Adam said. “That’s old blood, if it’s blood at all. And you know damn well that nobody with the virus can be helped.”
“It might not be the virus,” Red said. “But we’ll wear the masks and gloves, just in case.”
Adam threw up his hands.
She didn’t know why she wanted to go into the shop so badly. It went against her risk-averse nature, the intense caution that dictated almost everything she’d done since the virus had first been discovered.
Maybe it was the sensible Ford parked outside and the tidy desk with its pen cup filled with the same pens she liked best. Maybe it was just that she needed to know for sure that she couldn’t help, that she couldn’t do anything for whoever had made that trail of blood from the back door to the shop door.
Even with their masks on they could smell the rotting flesh as soon as they pulled the door open. Adam halted in the doorway.
“No need for further investigation,” he said, his voice muffled under the mask. “That’s the smell of dead things.”
Red ignored him, kept following the long streaky path of blood. There was something strange about the blood trail, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. It didn’t have the splattery look of someone coughing hard, like Probably Kathy Nolan. Anyway, the blood would more likely be on the walls or shelves in that case—not the floor. And the streaks didn’t really look like they were made by footprints, or even someone crawling along the floor on their hands or elbows.
It’s not a lot of blood, either, Red thought. It doesn’t look like a fresh wound that’s bleeding. More like someone got blood on them and was trying to wipe it off.
Red shook her head. That didn’t make any sense at all. She followed the trail around the counter, and when she saw the body everything made even less sense than before.
The man was lying on the floor behind the counter, which was why they hadn’t seen him when they peered in the front door. He was on his back, his brown eyes wide and rigid and terrified.
In the center of his chest there was a giant hole. Or rather, Red thought, there is a hole where his chest ought to be.
The ribs peeled from the center of the sternum outward, like his lungs had exploded. Whatever organs still remained inside him were a mangled mess. It was almost as if someone had rooted around inside him with the edge of a knife. Red could see the jagged pink edges of organs pushed against other jagged edges.
Even a shotgun blast couldn’t do that, if he was shot from behind. At least, Red didn’t think so. She was no expert on the outcomes of shotgun blasts.
She considered this very calmly, even though she knew that a normal person would be screaming or running or at least breathing hard. It was as if part of her had unhooked from her body and was floating above her head, looking down on her own wild curly hair and red hood and frozen face staring down at the rigid form of a man who’d had his insides pushed outside his body.
“What the fuck?” Adam said.
She hadn’t heard him move from the door to her side, and she didn’t jump but her heart took a huge leap forward, skipping over four or five beats.
“I mean, what the fuck is that?” Adam repeated.
“I don’t know,” Red said.
That was probably a first in the history of the world. Red couldn’t recall the last time she said she didn’t know something. She knew what it looked like, but she wasn’t going to say it out loud. It was completely frigging ridiculous and Adam would laugh his head off.
“That’s some Alien shit,” Adam said, pointing at the open chest. “Right? It’s that movie you like where the little monster comes out of the guy’s chest and there’s blood everywhere.”
Adam had said it, which meant she didn’t have to say it.
“But it’s not a monster. It’s a virus. Viruses don’t do that,” Red said, unable to look away from the body even though the sight made her a little sick. Everything inside the man was just a butcher’s floor of ground-up meat.
“Something came out of that dude’s chest,” Adam said. “If it wasn’t a monster and it wasn’t a virus, what was it?”
“You saw Kathy Nolan coughing on the window of the pharmacy. All that blood. Maybe the intensity of the coughing . . .” Red began, then trailed off. That was almost more absurd than the idea of something
(not a monster, monsters were not real and this she would not tolerate or acknowledge no matter how many horror movies she’d seen, it was not a monster)
erupting out of the man’s chest. No virus, no cough, had the power to make someone’s chest explode.
Adam was giving her his “I-don’t-think-so” look. “Come on, Red. You’re the one who watches all those damned movies.”
“You seem to know an awful lot about them for someone who doesn’t think much of my taste in film,” Red snapped. “Look, there’s nothing we can do for him.”
(what happened to him it had to be the virus but if it was the virus what did it mean was it mutating had this happened to other people what did it mean what happened what happened the virus has mutated it’s turned into something else)
“So we should just do what we came here to do—get some food, unload some garbage from your pack, and move on to the campsite,” Red said.
She was proud of how even her voice was, how she gave no indication that her mind was galloping in a hundred different directions, imagining possibilities that should not exist.
The virus has mutated. Mutated into what?