She peered all around the door, because sometimes folk kept emergency keys around in hidden places just in case. She got up on her tiptoes (and nearly fell over for her trouble, because she was balancing on just one leg) and felt around the frame at the top of the door and found nothing except a big old splinter that embedded itself in the middle knuckle of her ring finger and made her shout.
The splinter would have been nothing in the Old Days (she’d come to think of the time before everything changed this way, and just like the Crisis it was always capitalized in her head)—she would have yanked it out and maybe slapped a bandage on the wound and that would have been that. But now an infection was so much more than an infection. Not only was every open wound a potential pathway for the murderous, possibly morphing disease that had killed so many people, but without antibiotics any cut or scrape might be a killer.
Red did, as a matter of fact, have some antibiotics in her bag—a fortuitous discovery made early on in her journey—but she didn’t want to use them unless she needed them. Those pills were more valuable than diamonds.
So she sat down in the dead leaves in front of the door and pulled her first-aid kit out of her pack. She carefully scrubbed her hands with an antibacterial wipe and then did the same for the tips of the plastic tweezers in the kit. The splinter came out easily, and she cleaned and bandaged the bloody hole that remained and then stuffed her kit back in her pack.
Red sighed then, not wanting to stand up. She was just so tired. She’d never known a person could be so tired before everything had happened but it was like a cloak on her all the time now, a cloak made of tired that pressed down on her shoulders and made her neck droop.
And because she was sitting down in the dead leaves she saw something she hadn’t seen before—the little knot in one of the logs, just about a foot off the ground. Red took out her flashlight (solar plus a hand crank, so she wouldn’t have to hunt for batteries, and one of her better ideas) and peeked inside the knot.
Four or five inches back, far enough that someone couldn’t find it by accident, something bronze gleamed.
Red grabbed the key and heaved herself to her feet. As she unlocked the door she felt a surge of joy.
Inside. I can sleep inside.
The dust was thick enough to get stirred up by her feet and make her cough. She fought the impulse to slam the door shut behind her (safe, she could be safe at least for this one night) and instead found a broom hanging from the back of the door and swept out all the dust and opened the curtains to let in some light.
There were two cots folded in the corner and a small wooden table with two chairs and the percolator she’d seen from the window.
The chairs had metal frames and yellow vinyl seats and looked like something the owner had found in someone’s garbage, but they were sturdy enough and Red supposed that anything would do if you just needed someplace to sit and eat before heading out into the woods for the day.
Next to the window were three wooden shelves, and on the bottom one were plates and cups and bowls made of metal and painted blue with white speckles. There was an open mason jar with utensils sticking out of it and next to it a cast-iron frying pan and a big pot. There was even a camp stove and some cans of propane, which meant that she wouldn’t have to go outside to build a fire.
But the shelves above were full of real treasure. Canned soups—lots of them, in lots of varieties, and just-add-water meals that were vacuum-sealed. There were packages of dried pasta and two jars of tomato sauce and even a sealed package of crunchy bread sticks, though Red figured these were probably stale. On the floor below the shelves was the best find of all—several sealed gallon bottles of water.
The first thing that disappears from stores when there’s anything resembling an emergency is bottled water. People in America live in terror of going without water, a resource that is—or was—ridiculously abundant in that country. As soon as it became clear that the disease was spreading faster than anyone realized and that folks were going to have to dig in or evacuate or whatever, the cases of bottled water flew out of grocery stores like they’d sprouted wings.
On the news there had been the inevitable footage of people fighting like animals over the last few cases of water in a grocery store. Whenever Red saw this kind of thing she always wondered why the person filming hadn’t tried to help or intervene instead of taking video of his fellow man at his worst.
Red could pack the dried meals in her bag when she left the next day and they wouldn’t add too much weight, and while she was here she could eat pasta with tomato sauce. It seemed like an unbelievable luxury, the idea of spaghetti and tomato sauce from a jar. There was even a table to sit at, instead of crouching over a plate on the ground.
But first she unfolded one of the cots. It smelled a little musty, but what was that if she could sleep raised above the ground—the ground that seemed to seep through the bottom of a tent and into the warm lining of a sleeping bag and make everything sort of damp no matter what precautions she’d taken against it?
She closed the door and locked it—there was a lock on the knob and a bolt lock just above her eye level and the sound of the bolt clicking home was beautiful music. All around her she felt the comforting press of the walls keeping her in, and she heard no noises of little animals scuttling along or birds twittering or wind in the trees. It was silent, and she was safe.
But what if someone comes along while you’re sleeping?
No, she was not going to do that again, not going to go around in circles and make herself completely insane. She was going to take off her leg—and she did, clicking the button at her ankle and pulling the artificial joint out of the socket with a happy sigh.
Red unrolled the sock that she wore over her stump and cleaned and dried it and examined her skin for blisters or redness. The fear, always the fear with a stump was that you would Do Something that would result in having to take more of the leg off.
This was the constant threat that had hung over her in the early days after they’d amputated, and she never lost the free-floating anxiety that somehow the remaining part of the leg would get infected, that the infection would get into the bone, that there would be gangrene or necrosis and then the saw would come out and she’d lose a little bit more, and then a little bit more until there was nothing left of her leg at all.
Of course she could go on if that happened—she’d only been eight when her leg was amputated, and had now spent more of her life with a prosthetic than without. There was very little she couldn’t do, and she didn’t really think about it as a limitation (even if a lot of other people who looked at her with sympathetic gazes did).
But you never really got over that loss, she thought dreamily as she snuggled into her sleeping bag. You never stopped feeling the lack of the thing that was gone. Just like all the days she’d walked alone in the woods, and every time she’d turned to say something to her brother or her father or her mother, and found that they weren’t there, even if she felt they were, that they ought to be.
CHAPTER 2
All Our Yesterdays
Before
They had to get to Grandma’s house. It had been decided, and Red was ready to leave, but no one else seemed to be and it was certain that she was the only one who felt any sense of urgency about it.