Red waited and watched for a while, just to be certain that nobody else was on the opposite bank waiting and watching. After a bit she felt her head nod forward and she jerked it back in that panicky way that you do when you realize you’re falling asleep and don’t want to. She widened her eyes, as if just the act of making them bigger would stave off sleep. She was tired, more tired than she’d realized, and being tired meant that she was vulnerable and that scared her, because nobody was going to keep her alive but her.
I’m being too cautious, she thought. There was nobody about for miles. The only movement she’d heard along her night-walk from the place where she’d killed the coyote (the man, he was a man, even if he looked like a coyote, even if he looked like something whose eyes shone out of the darkness above sharp teeth) had been the scattering of little things, chipmunks and squirrels and field mice.
She was the only person near the stream at this exact place. Yes, she needed to be careful but there was such a thing as being too careful—she’d never get anywhere at this rate. Her leg wouldn’t let her walk too fast and she knew that she could only make so many miles a day—the brain was willing but at some point her body would say, Hell, no, not another step, and that was that. Too much caution only exacerbated her slow crawl. It was safe enough to approach the water.
The bank was steep and anything steep is always awkward when you’ve only got one whole leg—it didn’t matter if she was going up or going down, although up was a little easier. Going down always felt like she might lose control at any second, because she felt the imbalance of her legs more acutely and when she thought too much about walking it seemed to make it more awkward.
Red slid the last couple of feet to the water and her real foot splashed in the stream and she cursed. Her hiking boots were waterproof, but her pants weren’t and the water seeped through and ran down her ankle and made the top of her sock wet.
She hated wet socks—ranked them in her top three least favorite things, right after black licorice (just the thought of that anise/fennel/whatever-the-hell-it-was flavor made her nose wrinkle) and people who stopped in the middle of the grocery aisle to fool with their phones when other people wanted to shop. Though she supposed that wasn’t really a problem anymore, and it was easy enough to avoid licorice.
The stream was deeper than it had appeared from her perch. Deep enough, she thought, to hide the presence of the hateful thing in her hand that she so badly wanted to be rid of. She tossed it in the center of the running water and heard the satisfying plop as it sank in. Red couldn’t see the gun from where she stood, and she hoped that it went straight down for a few feet, and that no one else would find it. Or if someone ever did it would be rusted and unusable.
She crouched in the mud, reaching out with her bottle to fill it from the current, not from the muddy eddies that swirled closer to the bank. Red gulped most of the first bottle straightaway—she hadn’t realized quite how thirsty she was until the first cool touch of liquid on her tongue. The scorched bit from the hot stew was still numb.
Red refilled the bottle twice more, guzzling water until it sloshed around in her stomach, and then stood—carefully, as the footing was not very sturdy this close to the water and it would be very tiresome to have to change her clothes since she only had one other pair of pants in her backpack.
Red needed to cross the stream, partly because she needed to continue heading north and partly because if that man who came to her fire hadn’t been a total liar there might be soldiers somewhere behind her. Soldiers sometimes had dogs with them, dogs to help sniff out the infected and the uninfected alike.
She was sure that a smart, well-trained dog would have no trouble following the smell of blood on her—no matter how careful she was, some of it always splashed on her pants. Dogs could help those soldiers catch up to her a lot faster, but crossing the water would make them lose her trail.
At least that was what always happened in the movies (a good deal of Red’s survival knowledge was culled from books and movies)—the hunted would swim across a river and then all the barking, baying hounds following that hunted thing would run up to the edge of the water and bark and turn in circles and the people with them would shake their head and say the dogs had lost the trail at the water.
Red would not be a hunted thing. She didn’t want to be scooped up in anyone’s butterfly net and pinned to a board. She was going to her grandmother’s house, because she was the only person left in her family that could do so. The last time she’d talked to her grandmother (before all the telephone service, wired or unwired, stopped working), the old lady had told Red and the rest of her family to come so they could stay safe in the woods, together.
That was six weeks before, and many things had happened since then. And every day Red imagined Grandma peeking through the curtains of her cabin in the woods, watching for her family to emerge out of the trees and into the clearing.
Whenever Red thought about this her eyes would tear up, because though she could go on alone it was very tiring to do so and all she wanted more than anything was to have someone to lean into. Grandma was the nicest person to lean into, because she was soft and round and smelled like whatever she’d just been cooking (and she was almost always cooking).
It was impractical to walk along the bank—the mud sucked at her shoes and made walking more of a chore than usual. She hated the idea of staying along the higher part of the bank, though, even though the footing was better. There was hardly any tree cover and she would be dangerously exposed. The way the land rose away from the stream hid her from view unless someone got close to the water.
Of course, she reflected that it also meant that any approaching person was also hidden from her. Besides, it would be easier to get away quickly if necessary from the higher part of the bank.
Weren’t you just saying not to be overly cautious? She needed to stop weighing and measuring every decision like her life depended on it.
(It might, though)
Well, that was the trouble, Red reflected. Every choice could be the difference between living and dying, and it had been that way for long enough now that she’d almost forgotten what it was like to make silly choices—to watch a horror movie instead of a samurai movie, to have ice cream for dessert instead of a candy bar, to read a book instead of vacuum the floor. She almost wished for a dirty floor to vacuum just then. At least it would mean that nothing had changed.
Red went up on the high part of the bank and tried not to rub the back of her neck. It felt like someone was watching her, but whenever she glanced back there was nobody and she knew damned well that it was her imagination but she couldn’t stop it.
Sometimes the more you tried not to think about a thing, the more you did, and Red had a case of what Grandma called “the heebie-jeebies.” Once you got the heebie-jeebies it was hard to shake them loose. If you kept thinking there was a spider on your neck you’d keep brushing at your collar even though you damn well knew no arachnid was crawling on your spine. Or you’d keep looking behind you even when there was no evidence that you were being followed.
After she’d walked about half a mile she came to a little footbridge, one of those kinds that swung side-to-side when you walked on them—just rope and some panels tacked on at the bottom. She surveyed it doubtfully. She’d never liked these kinds of bridges even before she lost the bottom half of her left leg. There were always swinging bridges of this sort on playgrounds so certain kids could terrorize most of the others by herding them on and making the bridge shake.