Adam looked from the body to her face, then swallowed hard. His eyes seemed a little too wide, but he shrugged. Typical Adam, pretending not to be bothered.
Just like you’re doing right now. Maybe if you both pretend hard enough it will be true.
He went back around to the customer side of the counter, away from the body, and grabbed food from the shelves. Red noticed him picking all his favorite snacks—nothing but garbage that wouldn’t fill his stomach—but she didn’t say a word about it. Instead, she calmly reached past the man on the floor and pulled off several plastic carryout bags.
She handed four of them to Adam. “Put anything lightweight in these, and then double-bag them so we can tie them to the outside of your pack.”
He gave her a thumbs-up. “Good thinking.”
“Don’t think this means you won’t have to stick to the deal,” Red warned. “You still need to shed some weight from that pack. And replace it with food that has something resembling actual nutrients. But not from here. We’ll wait until we can find a grocery store or something.”
“You don’t think all the grocery stores will be trashed?” Adam asked.
Red gestured out at the empty village beyond the window glass. “It looks like most people either died quietly in their homes or they followed the instructions to go to a quarantine camp. I think we’ll find a grocery store somewhere along the way that’s not completely decimated.”
“All the stores in the cities probably are, though,” Adam said. “I bet there are bodies everywhere and everything not nailed down was looted.”
“Then we’re lucky that we don’t have to go near any cities,” Red said.
It was a marvel, really, the way they were both talking like everything was completely normal.
They quietly collected their supplies into the plastic bags, both of them pretending that there wasn’t a guy with his insides on the outside just a few feet away.
You kind of get used to the smell, Red thought. She supposed it was like someone who worked as a coroner, or in a funeral home. After a while the bouquet of rotting flesh faded into the background.
She wondered how many of the closed doors of this little village hid sights like the one they’d found, people frozen in their last agonies, their faces seized in a final portrait of terror and pain.
They were just tying the plastic bags to their backpacks when they heard the sound of an engine approaching. Red slung her pack over her shoulder and cautiously peered out the window behind the counter. A large black pickup was approaching, the back of the truck overloaded with men holding rifles.
She didn’t know if it was the same men who’d come to their house or another group of yahoos or even a government-sanctioned patrol, but she did know that no matter who it was she didn’t want them seeing her or Adam.
“Out!” Red said. “Now! Go!”
Adam didn’t have to be told twice. He scooped up his pack, the plastic bags full of snacks banging noisily against the outside, and sprinted through the back room. He didn’t wait for direction from his sister but ran into the thin weeds behind the gas station.
Red hurried behind as fast as she could. In theory, the fact of her prosthetic leg didn’t bother her but in practice it was not the greatest thing for trying to escape quickly.
She heard the truck engine turn off and men’s voices shouting and she did not want to get caught, she didn’t want to be seen, and half of her brain was worried about what was happening behind her and the other half wondered just what the hell had happened to Adam (again, it was just like the house all over again, when would he learn to wait for her she couldn’t go that fast for chrissakes) because it was like he’d just disappeared into a puff of smoke and the weeds really weren’t thick enough to hide in.
“Here!”
She felt something tug at her right pant leg and saw Adam lying belly-down in a little culvert maybe eight or ten feet from the edge of the parking lot. Red dropped to one knee and then shimmied down beside him, hoping like hell that no one discovered them there because the chance of her getting up quickly and running from this position was exactly zero.
Adam might get away, though.
Adam probably would leave me here. He’s already done it twice.
A second after Red managed to get into the channel (and about a millisecond after she realized there was a thin stream of water running through it that soaked the front of her clothes) three men came around the corner of the gas station. They were talking loudly, carrying guns, and wearing camouflage clothing and military-style boots.
Red couldn’t gather too many details from her position on the ground, but she did note that one of the three men was black so that meant this wasn’t the same group that attacked their house. One small favor, she thought. At least they probably wouldn’t shoot Red and Adam on sight. Probably.
Despite their combat-ready clothing, however, she didn’t think this was a government patrol. Something about the men didn’t seem right, didn’t seem like they were military. They weren’t . . . Red couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but they didn’t seem cohesive. They didn’t appear to be one body moving in separate limbs, which was the way she thought of army platoons and whatnot. Not that she had so much experience of army platoons beyond what she saw in the movies.
Red had left the back door of the station open—she felt bad about this but she’d been in a rush and she was a little surprised that it hadn’t automatically swung shut behind her.
Once the three men realized there was an open door their attitude changed completely.
They went silent, communicating with each other through a series of hand gestures that were too fast to follow. They carefully clicked the safeties off their weapons (Red assumed this was what they were doing, anyway, because right after that they all put their fingers on the trigger—the one part of a gun Red could correctly identify) and then quickly assembled into a formation with two in front and the third with his back to them and his weapon up. All of a sudden the men had the look of people who would ask questions when it was too late to get answers.
Despite this they still didn’t seem like they were Army or National Guard or anything like that—more like men who’d seen that particular formation on TV and were copying it.
Good thing they didn’t see us, Red thought. They would definitely have shot Red and Adam just for being there.
The two men in front—Red thought of them as Number One and Number Two—had a quick signed conversation before entering the open door. Then one went high, one went low—again, just like in a cop show.
The third man—Number Three—stood outside with his back to the wall just next to the open door, moving his gun back and forth across the horizon like he was scanning everything in front of him. Red ducked her head a little lower and hoped that her curls blended in with the dirt and the weeds and everything else. Beside her Adam lay perfectly still, like he was afraid to breathe.
Number Two came out again and reported to Number Three in a low voice. Red couldn’t hear what he said but she had a pretty good idea that they’d discovered the man with the gutted torso inside the shop. Number Three lowered his weapon and ran around the front of the building. He was shouting something to the others, but Red wasn’t certain she heard it clearly. She thought it sounded like “crawler,” but that didn’t really make any sense.
Number Three returned with two other men, both of whom had the same anonymous pseudo-military look of the first three. Number Three pointed at the ground just outside the door. Red didn’t know what they might be looking at—it was pavement, after all, and wouldn’t show any kind of prints. Had Red and Adam left some sign of their passing inside the store?