Mama was an English lit professor who taught classes on Shakespeare at the little (little, which meant “prestigious and ridiculously expensive” and mostly populated by white kids from rich families) college on the other side of town. Her mother said she sometimes got sideways looks from those white kids who didn’t expect a black woman teaching their Shakespeare class.
“One boy asked me in front of the class if I liked Shakespeare because it was like rap music, the rhythm of the verses,” Mama said, sighing in that way that made Red know she was tired inside, in her heart rather than her body.
“What did you say?” Red asked. She wasn’t surprised by the boy’s remark, although she felt she ought to be. People didn’t often surprise her because she always expected the worst of them. Mostly she was curious about her mother’s response.
“I asked him if all white people liked country music and NASCAR,” Mama said. “I shouldn’t have, because he got embarrassed and squirmed around in his seat. I just lost my temper a little. There I was standing in front of the class with four degrees and this undergrad wanted to know if I fit in some mold he’d already cast for me. But he apologized to me after class, so it was all right in the end.”
Mama’s school didn’t open up for the fall term either, for the same reason that Adam’s didn’t, and she never saw that boy again. Red always wondered if the boy learned anything that day—learned about making assumptions about people you didn’t know based on the way they looked. Or maybe he just realized that it wasn’t smart to insult the person who graded your papers.
* * *
• • •
All through late August and early September they had watched in horror as town after town and city after city was decimated by this sickness, this mysterious terror that had sprung up in several places at once without any warning. In each town just a few people were left behind, people who wandered about looking lost until they were scooped up and sent to quarantine camps.
Red and her family knew that was what happened because it was on the news—at least, until the news stopped broadcasting and every channel was nothing but those colored bars and the long continuous tone that accompanied it.
“That used to mean the end of the broadcast day, at least on some channels. Other channels just went to static after the national anthem,” Dad told Red, the first time they saw it. “This was before every channel ran continuously.”
“When dinosaurs roamed the earth, you mean?” she said, giving him a sideways smirk.
“Not quite as far back as the dinosaurs. Maybe cavemen,” Dad said, tugging on one of her curls. “And then you had to wait for programming to start again in the morning.”
“I don’t think it’s going to start again tomorrow,” Red said, pointing the remote at the TV and clicking through channel after channel playing the same thing.
Dad sighed, and she turned the television off. Adam threw his head back and huffed at the ceiling. “I bet the electricity will go out soon, too,” he said morosely.
“Well, we have the generator,” Dad said.
“What good is the generator if there’s no TV and no radio and no Internet?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Red said. “Refrigeration, maybe? Unless you enjoy eating meat that’s been contaminated with bacteria.”
This comment earned her a dirty look before he left the room, which was his default response when he didn’t know what to say back to her.
Red was one year younger than her brother, who’d just turned twenty-one and thought that qualified him to know everything about everything but from what she could tell just meant he understood less than ever. Hormones were probably involved in this stupidity. Red kept hoping he’d outgrow it.
Adam said from the first that there was nothing to worry about, that the government would take care of everybody, that it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. It was like he was deliberately misunderstanding the way diseases spread, thinking that a few quarantines would magically make it all stop.
But the truth about quarantines was that you could never catch everyone in your net, not even if you tagged and tracked every person who’d come in contact with the Typhoid Mary. And in this case, there didn’t seem to be a Typhoid Mary. Instead, pockets of sickness had just bloomed up like hideous flowers in several places at once, and then spread so fast that tracing the vectors was something like impossible.
And “the government”—well, Red had zero confidence that the government would be able to do anything. Not because it was full of bad people or there was a giant conspiracy or anything like that.
Her belief came from the fact that she could read and think and knew that the departments that address pandemics were underfunded and unprepared for the scope of the problem. She also knew that while the wheels of governing ground exceedingly fine, they were also slow as hell. By the time funding was authorized it would be too late. And it was.
So Red made her own preparations. She had been ready for hours, days, weeks before her family started to even consider leaving their home. Ever since people started falling down dying, ever since she saw the first reports of towns being quarantined and serious CDC officials making serious statements every night on the news.
The possibility of evacuation was a certainty, to her mind—whether by government intervention or by simple necessity. Sooner or later, she’d been sure, they would have to leave.
Their home was somewhat isolated—five miles outside a small town, and bordering a stretch of wooded state land that kept their surroundings quiet and protected from the sound of the highway a few miles distant. They had no close neighbors, which was not wonderful if you needed a last-minute cup of sugar but a definite advantage when proximity meant infection.
While that isolation might have saved Red and her family from the first ravages of the disease that rolled over the country like a tornado, she expected that an army truck full of survivors would show up any day to take them to a camp, just like in those movies about the end of the world. Everyone always ended up at a government camp, ragged refugees surrounded by gun-toting soldiers in gas masks.
She had treated the memory of those movies and books she loved just like an instruction manual. Red had always liked camping, though her mother was inclined to fuss whenever they hiked. Mama seemed to think Red didn’t know her own body well enough to stop if she needed to, and so Red was pleased when Mama decided Red and Adam were old enough to go backpacking without her or their father. Adam was an okay brother in at least one respect—he never asked Red one million times a day if her leg was sore or if she needed to sit down.
As soon as Red knew the End of the World was nigh she started packing. She sorted and discarded things in her pack until it was down to just the necessities—clothes (breathable layers that could be rolled up small), food with a long shelf life, a portable water bottle with a purifier, some of those space blankets that volunteers wrapped around marathoners at the end of a race (they were lightweight and packed into a rectangle the size of a playing card box and were good for extra insulation if need be), soap (because she was not going to stink all day and all the time, and if you could only pack four pair of underwear you were going to need to wash them sometime), baby powder and skin cream (because when you have a prosthetic leg your stump gets sweaty and chafes if you walk a lot and powder and cream help and she was not getting through the apocalypse without those things, that’s for damn sure) and antibacterial gel and a first-aid kit and other gear deemed vital for living.