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.
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