Red flattened herself against the wall beside the window just in time. She didn’t know if her silhouette was visible through the shutters but she wasn’t taking any chances. Once the light moved away she went back to her viewpoint.
“Nobody ever goes in that one,” one of the other men called from the street. The group was moving down the road, inspecting the other homes.
The first man said, “Really?”
He was tall and very thin (which made Red mentally dub him Toothpick) and his hair was shaggy and he wore a denim jacket with his denim pants and had a bandanna tied around his neck like a robber’s kerchief.
He looked, Red thought, like a refugee from The Outsiders (which was not a film she would normally watch but her eleventh-grade English teacher had done a Book vs. Movie term and that was one of his selections).
His flashlight (which was really bright, bright like a policeman’s flashlight) was on the ground now, and he appeared to be peering at something there very intently.
Footprints, Red thought. Even though it hadn’t rained, there would still be signs that someone had disturbed the grass—especially if you knew what to look for.
Toothpick bent over and picked something up out of the grass. Red couldn’t see what it was—the slats of the shutters blocked her view of his hand. The object was small enough to go into his pocket, whatever it was.
He cast a thoughtful look at D.J.’s house.
“He’s going to come up here,” Red said under her breath. “He’s going to walk right up to the front door and look around and then he’s going to find something that will make him want to break the door down.”
But instead Toothpick followed his compatriots, though he did look back once at D.J.’s house again.
“So he’ll come back another time,” Red said.
D.J. stood a few feet away, watching her. “Did you see the larger patrol?”
Red nodded. “It’s really not safe to travel at night through here.”
She dreaded the thought of this group coming upon herself and Sam and Riley in the woods, asleep and vulnerable. Before they could go any farther forward, Red would have to find out just where the group was based and the size of their patrol circle. She had to make sure that her path and theirs would never cross.
“It would be easier to reconnoiter if Adam were here,” she murmured.
“Adam?” D.J. asked.
Red looked up. Her brain had gone into planning mode, and she’d forgotten that D.J. was there (and listening) for a minute.
“Adam,” Red said, and her heart hurt when she said his name. “My brother. Adam.”
CHAPTER 13
Brief Candle
Before
The world exploded, or maybe it only felt like the world, but there was certainly an explosion.
Red and Sirois were knocked off their feet by the percussion. The room immediately filled with heavy thick smoke.
Getting knocked over by an explosion was not, Red thought groggily, like the movies. She did not feel at all like leaping to her feet and running toward the danger the way film heroes did, or even away from it like a movie extra. Mostly her ears hurt, and they made her head hurt, and when she thought about standing she felt a little sick. The smoke didn’t help, because whenever she tried to get a good gulp of oxygen to clear her brain she instead got a mouthful of black fog to choke on.
She heard lots of shouting, and the sound of rifles firing, and more explosions. Sirois moaned. He was a few feet away from her, struggling to push to his feet. He touched the side of his head and his fingers came away covered in blood.
Red had landed on her right side, and the heavy pack felt like a snail’s shell holding her in place. She had to get up. She had to get away from Sirois before he grabbed her again. She had to find Adam. And she had to take advantage of whatever the hell was going on outside so they could escape.
She rolled to her belly, pushed herself up to her knees, and then paused there, because her head swam and the kind-of-vomity feeling was back again. She coughed, felt bile rising, tried breathing through her nose to make it stop and instead just got a deeper inhale of the chemicals in the air, which hurried on the inevitable.
Red turned her head away from Sirois, because for some stupid reason she didn’t want him to see her puking. When she was done she drank some water and then remembered that she had her mask around her neck, so she pulled it up and that made things a little better. At least there was some kind of filter between her and the smoke that poured in through the open doorway.
She grabbed one of the metal shelves and used it to hoist herself up. Sirois had collapsed to the floor again and wasn’t moving. Red hesitated, then went to check on him.
His head was turned to one side and she saw the flare of his nostrils that indicated breathing. The head wound wasn’t bleeding a lot that she could tell, so the blood cells were doing their clotting thing and he would probably live.
There wasn’t really anything else she could do for him—she wasn’t a medic, and he was far too big for her to drag even if she knew where to take him. It didn’t seem like a good idea to throw him out into the street, where apparently a pitched battle was going on. Her priority was Adam, who still hadn’t emerged from the back room.
“Sorry, pal,” she whispered to Sirois. “Your buddies should come and find you soon.”
She stepped over his body, noted the staple gun/tracker gun/whatever-it-was nearby and kicked it away under a shelf.
A little cloud of smoke entered the back room with her when she pushed open the door but it was otherwise clear. Red pulled her mask down again and breathed deeply. Even the rotting fruit fog was better than the metallic tang of that smoke.
“Adam!” she called, walking toward the place where they’d found the hole in the concrete floor. “Adam!”
Why hadn’t Adam and Regan come out when they heard the explosion? What was taking them so long?
Maybe whoever threw that bomb came in the back and dragged them away already and you’ll never see your brother again.
“Too many movies, Red,” she said. It was more likely that Regan and Adam were having such a fascinating conversation that they hadn’t noticed everything shaking and burning.
The outside noise was strangely muffled in that room. The air was still and heavy and lifeless. Even the flies buzzing around the rotting fruit had stopped moving.
Lifeless, Red thought. Nobody here to answer.
“Adam!” she called again, and felt the first sparks of panic.
Where had her stupid brother gone? He was stupid, stupid to make her worry like this.
“Adam!” she called, and she knew he wasn’t going to answer but she couldn’t stop herself because she could only move so fast, her head was spinning around and she never walked that fast even without this dizziness but maybe if she kept calling he would hear her and answer and then she could stop imagining terrible things had happened to her one and only stupid brother.
She reached the aisle that Adam had ferreted out by following streaks of blood on the floor and there was no one there.
There was no fresh blood. No sign of whatever had made the hole. And no sign of Adam or Regan.
All the panic blooming in her chest came to an abrupt and anticlimactic halt, replaced by confusion.