“They didn’t come out the door,” Red said. “I would have seen them. It wasn’t that far from where I was standing with Sirois.
“Adam?” she called again.
Nothing. Only the vague sounds of guns and shouting outside, like an echo of a war movie playing a few rooms away.
There must be another door, she thought. Or a basement, maybe. Something that had attracted their attention, and they had followed like Alice and her white rabbit.
Red circled around the perimeter of the room, checking each aisle as she went. Nothing, nothing, and then . . .
“Adam!” she cried, and she ran to him.
He was propped on the floor with his back to a closed door. The door looked like one of those large sturdy ones that sealed off a freezer room.
But the freezer can’t possibly be on because the electricity is out, Red thought, and she thought this because it was the only thing for her brain to grasp.
If she didn’t then she would have to look and to see and there was blood, so much blood, blood everywhere.
“Adam,” Red said, and she knelt beside him. His blood soaked through the knees of her pants.
Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?
She’d only ever read Shakespeare for Mama’s sake and it was strange, wasn’t it, so strange that it came back to her now as her brother lay dying.
His eyes were closed and his hands were at his sides and his legs splayed out in front of him—
—or rather what’s left of his legs, Red thought, because his right leg had a big chunk taken out of his thigh (like something bit him, which was absurd, something with sharp teeth that left sharp marks behind) and his left leg was almost completely denuded between the knee and the foot. All that was left was the bone and some ragged bits of skin hanging on.
Something had eaten his leg. It didn’t look like he’d been shot or hit by a grenade or even carved up by a mad somebody’s knife. It only looked like one thing. Something had tried to eat him alive.
“Adam,” she said, and she shook his shoulder.
His chest rose and fell, but very shallow, very gentle, like he was a machine that had been turned off and the gears were winding down.
“Adam,” she said again. “Wake up, stupid.”
Wake up. You’re my stupid brother and you’re not supposed to die. Mama told us to stay together and we’ve never had a chance to make up not really we never had a chance to say we’re sorry to each other about all the things we said and thought after Mama and Daddy died and Adam you have to wake up because you’re the only one I have left and don’t leave me don’t don’t don’t leave me
“Red,” he said, soft like an exhale.
She thought she’d imagined it, and then he said it again.
“Red.”
His eyes were closed, and the rest of his body was so still, but his lips moved. She had to lean close to hear him because his voice came from a faraway place.
“It’s . . . not . . . what . . . we . . . thought. Not . . . what they said. Don’t . . .”
He trailed off, and she waited, and wondered if he would finish before his voice left altogether.
“Don’t open this door,” he said in one long breath.
That was the last one, the last breath, though Red stayed there for she didn’t know how long waiting for another one, her eyes fixed on his mouth and clinging to the hope that it would move again, that there would be another word, that they would be able to say a proper good-bye.
She wiped angrily at her wet face but more tears kept appearing, even though she was not crying and her chest wasn’t racked with sobs that made her lungs burn.
“Stupid,” she said, and she didn’t know if she was saying it to him or herself.
They shouldn’t have separated, not even for a few minutes, not even under the threat of the military. Mama told them to stay together and Red had meant to do that. Because Red knew, had always known, that separation meant Something Would Happen. And it had.
Something had happened to Adam, and to Regan, for the other man wasn’t to be seen. Red had to assume that Regan, as a trained soldier, would have shot at whatever it was that chewed Adam’s legs to pieces.
For all the good it did him, Red thought.
He was probably behind the door that Adam guarded, and given the lack of noise coming from inside there was a pool of blood in the freezer, too.
A pool of blood, and something that Adam wanted to keep from getting out. He’d stayed there to protect her. His last words had been an order to not open the door.
Red didn’t much care for orders—direct statements tended to make her want to do the opposite of what she was told—but she wasn’t dumb. Her curiosity was not going to make her push her brother’s corpse out of the way and find out what put him in that condition.
If it were a horror movie she would have, because in movies people were always doing things that made no sense. But this wasn’t a movie. This was her life. Adam had wanted her to live, and Red wanted to live, so she wasn’t going to open that door.
That mystery would just have to remain a mystery forever.
And it was important now to get out without being snared in whatever was happening outside. This little burg had basically no tree cover, so she had to get through the town and to the other side without being seen, being caught, or losing her supplies (which were more precious than ever now that Adam wasn’t carrying half the gear).
Her practical brain took over, and it was a good thing that it did because it helped her not look at what was left of Adam.
She didn’t see his pack anywhere, and hadn’t spotted it in any of the aisles as she searched for him. That meant it had been dropped inside the room he was blocking.
Whatever is in there is gone forever, she thought. Not even the promise of what he carried in his pack could have encouraged her to open that door.
Adam had told her not to open the door. And for once, she was not going to argue with her brother.
But she needed to get out. She pictured the town in her mind—the little valley, the state road running through the middle of it, the rise that she must climb to exit on the other side. No trees, really, except a few dotted here and there on the landscape. And once she was out of the town there would be no cover at all until she reached the forest again, and that was a few miles away.
It sounded like there was a war going on outside. Somehow she’d have to cross this war zone by herself and reach the woods. Somehow. First she had to find a rear exit to this building, because the explosion had occurred at the front and she didn’t think it was a great idea to go out through all of that black smoke again.
“Wh-what happened here?”
Red turned around, furious and scared, and her hand went to the axe at her belt. Sirois stood there, his face white as chalk, staring at the blood at Red’s feet.
He could have snuck up on you and shot you, Red. If you want to remain the last surviving member of your family, then you need to start using your ears as well as your eyes.
She wasn’t going to cut herself a break just because she was standing over her brother’s corpse, either. Adam was dead, but she was alive and she needed to stay that way or else Grandma would be alone forever.
“One of your ‘tapeworms’ got my brother, and probably Regan, too,” Red said.