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.
Adam had dithered around all morning, trying to fit everything he couldn’t bear to leave behind in his pack, and their parents weren’t doing a very good job of hurrying him along.
Red’s brother was only home at all because his university term hadn’t begun when the outbreak started and as a precaution they’d told all the students to stay home until the danger passed, thinking (correctly in Red’s opinion) that a dormitory was the perfect petri dish for spreading disease—all those not-very-hygienic students crammed together in a rabbit warren of shared spaces.
But the danger never had passed. It had only gotten worse, despite quarantines and precautions and the supposed late-night efforts of desperate doctors to find and manufacture a vaccine to stop the nightmare that was rolling across the country.
Her parents, too, kept sighing over the things they had to leave behind—the photographs and the books and her mother’s wedding dress and the bronzed baby shoes and other things Red kept telling them didn’t matter, it was their lives that mattered, but nobody would listen to her. That’s what happens when you’re the baby of the family, even if you’re a twenty-year-old baby.
Red’s mother was already sick then, had started coughing the night before. That cough started off sounding oh-so-innocuous, like something was just stuck in her throat that she needed to get out, and she drank several cups of tea with honey and exchanged a thousand worried glances with Red’s father, because they both knew what it meant and didn’t want to say it out loud.
Parents, no matter what age they were or what age their children were, would always try to shield, to pretend nothing was wrong. But Red was no dummy and she knew what that cough meant, knew it meant they’d all been exposed and now they just had to wait and see if they would all catch it. Not everyone did. Some people seemed to be naturally immune.
It was a stretch to call those people lucky, as it usually meant they were the sole survivors of their family group, and it couldn’t feel lucky to be the last person left to mourn your loved ones.
The strange thing, to Red’s mind, was the way immunity didn’t seem to run in families. Like if Mom survived it didn’t necessarily mean her kids would, though you’d think whatever special sauce she had would get passed to the next generation. Or if there were three kids, who presumably all had similar quantities of their parents’ DNA, then why did only one child survive but not the other two?
It was almost, Red thought, as if the virus were picking and choosing, like it was sentient, like it knew that things would be better for its long-term survival if all the hosts weren’t killed off in the initial wave.
Then she would dismiss this as crazy-thinking, the product of too many apocalyptic science fiction novels and late-night horror movies.
She’d spent many nights huddled under her blankets reading far too long, unable to stop even when she needed to go to sleep. Red was paranoid about diseases, about wars, about the world coming to an end because all those books and movies told her all the ways it was possible and she knew sooner or later one of them would be right.
Her mother, who’d never read anything published later than 1900 and definitely did not think much of horror movies, had said genre fiction would rot her brain. Red could at least acknowledge that this wild theory about sentient viruses was evidence that genre fiction had multiplied her natural imagination tenfold.