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Red hated it, absolutely hated it, when she was reading a story or watching a movie and the thing a character needed the most was left behind. Like when the protagonist was in danger and he always carried a gun with him but at just the wrong moment he put the gun down on the edge of the counter and turned his back.

At that point she would start screaming the house down that the bad guy was RIGHT BEHIND HIM PICKING UP THE GUN and sure enough the camera would show the barrel rising behind the character’s head and she would pound the armrest in frustration while all the people around her said “shush.”

That was why she never went anywhere without the pack. She knew if she left it downstairs while she went up to her bedroom then Something Would Happen (a bomb, a fire, a sudden invasion of zombies) that would require her to leap from her bedroom and escape into the forest and her pack would be left behind in the living room and she would die starving in the woods.

Folk in town gave her funny looks when she went to the pharmacy or the grocery store with a huge pack and sleeping bag on her back, but then they gave her funny looks anyway because of the color of her skin and because of her leg so that wasn’t anything new and exciting.

If someone she knew and liked asked about it she just said she was getting ready to do a thru-hike, like when people got it in their heads to walk the whole Appalachian Trail, and then they would exclaim about how exciting it was and that they hoped she had a good trip.

The Cough hadn’t come to their little town yet at that point, and those first few weeks when panic was springing up in every urban area it seemed the virus might pass them by. Life just went on like nothing exceptional was really happening in the world, even though a big city about a hundred miles south of them had been hit hard already. Most people seemed to think that it was perfectly normal that Red would be planning a camping vacation.

Really, Red thought, it’s like they don’t know what’s happening outside town. Do they think anyone will be going on vacation any time soon?

But every time she would smile and say thank you and go about her business, secure in the knowledge that if she had to run for her life at that very moment she would not die of exposure in the wilderness.

Red thought she had everything all figured out. But she’d forgotten one thing, the most important factor in all those apocalypse books and movies that she loved so much; it was never the Event—illness, asteroid, nuclear war, whatever—that was the problem. It was what people did after. And people always reduced to their least human denominators when things went bad.

CHAPTER 3

Toil and Trouble

Her name wasn’t really Red, of course. Christened Cordelia by her Shakespeare-loving mother, she only answered to Red. Her dad gave her that nickname, and once she heard it no one would get a response if they called her Delia.

Her very first babysitting-money purchase was a bright red hooded sweatshirt with a zip up the front, and she earned that sweatshirt because the deLuccis had four boys between the ages of two and eight and that job was as awful as it sounds.

Once her dad saw her in it he said she looked just like Red Riding Hood. She’d been looking for an excuse to ditch her name for at least a year (it’s not easy being a Cordelia in a classroom full of Ashleys and Jessicas and Madisons—she always lamented that if Mama wanted to give her a Shakespearean name, why couldn’t her mother have named her something beautiful, like Juliet?), and she’d never been without a red sweatshirt since. Cordelia was her name, but Red was who she was.

Mama always wrinkled her nose when anyone called her Red (the same way she wrinkled her nose at Red’s reading material and scary movies). She tried for a long time to get Red to acknowledge the name she had chosen, but there is no one more stubborn than a teenage girl, so after a while her mother decided it wasn’t her hill to die on.

If Mama was talking to someone else—like, say, her father—she would always refer to her as Delia, though. This was her mother’s way of showing Red that she hadn’t one hundred percent won the battle. Red was sure Mama hoped she would grow out of it. But she never did. At least, not before her mother died.

•   •   •

Grandma—Dad’s mother—lived about three-hundred-odd miles away. Those were road miles, miles on smooth pavement with rest stops, and the only conflict was what they would listen to on the radio (NPR, always, which was probably inevitable when your parents were college professors, and that made Red eternally grateful for the existence of personal headphones). When it was pretty clear that a lot of people were dead or dying, and that if they didn’t move along they were going to get scooped up in a government net and sent to one of the quarantine camps, they had a family conference.

“Let’s go to Grandma’s house,” Red said. “She’s alone in the woods, her cabin is far away from everything, and we can go through state or federal land for a good part of the trip, which means we can avoid the roads.”

“I’ve never seen anyone so paranoid about roads,” Adam said. “What do you think is going to happen if we go on the roads? We’ll get chased by Ringwraiths?”

Adam hadn’t actually read The Lord of the Rings, just watched the movies, so this reference irritated Red because she hated it when he pretended to know things he didn’t know anything about.

“Ever heard of roadblocks? If you want everyone in a certain area to go to a central location like oh, say, a camp, then you set up personnel on all the roads and catch people when they drive up to you,” Red said. “Or how about traffic jams? Have you ever watched the news when there’s a hurricane or something and a bunch of people are trying to leave a city? The roads get backed up. There are accidents.”

“We don’t live in a city,” Adam pointed out. “We live in a backwater college town where seventy-five percent of the population is only present during the school year, and the school year never started. Last time we were in town half the stores were closed, which means most people have either left or they’re sick already. I doubt the roads are going to be backed up.”

“Right, because no road we travel on will ever cross with another road or meet up with a large population center,” Red said, rolling her eyes.

“That’s enough,” Dad said, rapping his knuckles on the table.

Dad was tall and thin all over, from his long bony legs to the blond hair slowly disappearing from the top of his head. He had greenish-blue eyes, just like Red, and he didn’t seem like the authoritative type, but when he said stop, Red and Adam stopped, and it didn’t matter that they weren’t little kids anymore. “We are going to have to walk. I think that’s pretty clear.”

Adam huffed. “Really? You’re going to believe all the nonsense she reads in her books?”

“No,” Dad said. “I’m going to believe the evidence of my own eyes. We’ve already seen those traffic jams on the news. And lots of people probably abandoned their cars when they got sick. If anything, we want to stay as far away as possible from people—dead or alive—who might be infected. There won’t be a lot of folks heading into the woods, and Red’s right about one thing—there is a lot of state land between here and Mom’s cabin. If we plan carefully enough we can stay well away from roads and populated areas.”

“But that will take forever!” Adam said.

“Quit whining,” Red said. Adam acted younger than she did most of the time. She had read somewhere that it took longer for boys’ brains to mature than girls’ brains, which explained a lot. Still, knowing why he acted that way didn’t mean it was any easier to tolerate him.