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.
* * *
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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