were dying every day, it seemed impossible to contemplate Grandma dying from the thing that was killing everyone.
Grandmas didn’t die from stuff like that. Grandmas went on and on, enduring year after year, shriveled and worn but somehow ageless. Grandmas outlived grandfathers and after they grieved they just rolled up their sleeves and got on with it. Grandmas knew how to do everything (except maybe with their smartphones—they would need a little help there but in this new world smartphones were just garbage anyway, so that meant grandmas were now without flaw) and get through any crisis. So of course Grandma would be there at the end of the road.
And Red was going to do her damnedest to make sure all four of them got there, too, whatever the odds might say.
But her father insisted that they drive into town. And of course town was where Mama got sick.
* * *
? ? ?
One of the many things Red had managed to acquire early on in the Crisis was a pack of surgical masks and another of vinyl gloves. She’d ordered them online and had them shipped to the house long before the local pharmacy ran out of them. Before they climbed into the car for that ill-advised trip into what Red thought of as the Contagion Zone, she handed one of each item to her family members with all the solemnity of a priest handing out the host.
“Don’t roll your eyes at me, Adam,” Red said. “You are an idiot, but I don’t want you to die. So put the damn mask on.”
“You really think this flimsy thing is going to help?” Adam asked, giving the mask a doubtful glare as he held it in front of his face.
“It’s an airborne disease, isn’t it?” Red said. “At least, the CDC sounded pretty sure that it is. I suppose it’s possible that it mutated.”
“Into the Thing from Another World!” Adam said in his best horror-movie-announcer voice.
“The mask can’t hurt,” Dad said, in that deceptively mild tone that meant Adam ought to listen.
Adam put the mask on.
Mama also gave her mask an uncertain look but she put it on without complaint, carefully arranging her hair around the elastic band. Red was very tempted to make a remark about no one caring what her mother’s hair looked like, but she bit her tongue because there was still a little frost in the air between them and she wanted things to thaw instead of escalating to polar vortex.
Besides, Mama had always been sensitive about her hair. She always stroked Red’s smooth fat curls with longing, repeating a thing that Red hated to hear—that she had “good hair.” Mama’s hair was kinky—if she let it grow out like Red’s she would have a proper Pam Grier Afro, and Red thought it was gorgeous.
But Mama, she didn’t like it. She wanted it straight and smooth, the exact opposite of everything that she was born with. So she subjected herself to chemical treatments and salves and oils and smoothers and watched vigilantly for a hint of frizz. She took great pride in her appearance generally, and a little thing like a worldwide pandemic wasn’t going to result in lowered standards.
Despite the fact that the whole family was together as they should be, Red couldn’t shake her trepidation as the car coursed slowly along the winding back roads. Her father always obeyed the speed limit, even when her mother sat gnashing her teeth beside him (Mama was well known by the local police as a lead-foot driver), even now when there was no one around to enforce that speed limit.
Red peered out the window at the other houses sprinkled along their route. Most of them were set far back from the road as her own home was, and so it was hard to tell if there was anyone left alive inside them. She was genuinely surprised to see no abandoned cars along the side of the road. Yes, they lived in a fairly isolated area but she’d expected some sick people to try to leave town and have to stop because they were unable to drive. But there was no evidence of that.