Dad reached for her, holding her shoulders as she retched. “It’s okay, Shirley, it’s okay.”
Red raced to her mother’s side and picked up the mask. It might not be too late, she thought. If Mama put the mask back on right away she might not get sick. Of course Mama didn’t want to throw up inside it, that made perfect sense (the thought of puking inside a medical mask was really too horrible to contemplate, in Red’s opinion), but why hadn’t she at least kept it over her nose?
“It’s all right,” Dad said, rubbing between Mama’s shoulder blades. “Just take deep breaths.”
“No, no,” Red moaned. “Don’t take deep breaths.”
But nobody was listening to her then, and she sat watching helplessly as her mama—her brilliant and beautiful and difficult mama, they didn’t always see eye to eye but they loved each other for all of that—took deep breaths in an attempt to stop the vomiting.
And with every rise and fall of her mother’s chest Red could practically see the plague that had killed so many people rushing into her mother’s mouth and nose, cheering with delight at having found a new victim.
But maybe not, Red thought. Maybe there was no sickness in the air, because everyone who was sick had been burned in the fire and all their little microbes had been burned with them.
But Red knew better, she really knew better, she might not be a doctor but she was so paranoid about germs that she knew you could never get rid of all of them. There were always a few that survived, the hardiest of them all, and they would reproduce and make hardier children.
Or maybe the germs were invading her mother’s lungs (throwing a party on the way down, infecting every bronchus and bronchiole they passed) but it wouldn’t matter because Mama would be one of those people who were immune to the disease.
(But if Mama carried it then Daddy might get sick)
This was a very little-girl thought, and she recognized it as such, because she hadn’t called him Daddy for ten years or more.
(Or Adam)
She didn’t want her brother to get sick, either, even if he was a pain in the ass. But available statistics promised that if one member of a family carried the germ, then most of them would catch the sickness and die.
Which was why Red wanted them to stay home in the first place. Which was why she wanted them to wear the masks. Which was why she sat there feeling free-form panic as she watched her mother breathing in the diseased air that would eventually kill her.
It didn’t make her feel any better later, when they were home, and the next day her mother started coughing. It didn’t make Red feel any better because she’d been right about the risks and nobody listened to her.
Mama did stop retching, and she did put the mask back on, but Red knew it was just a sop to make her feel better. They carefully skirted the pile of bodies and went on to the sporting goods store.
Their town had a proper, old-fashioned main street, though it seemed more of the local businesses were replaced with national franchises every year. The students who attended the college seemed to prefer it that way, having a Subway and a Starbucks and a Chipotle at hand, although they also kept the local vegan restaurant in the black with their (in Red’s opinion, strange) enthusiasm for farro and wheat berries and homemade veggie soups.
Every shop that Red’s family passed had been broken into and picked over. It looked, Red thought, like the concerted action of a gang rather than the disparate efforts of a few. And she was feeling worried about this, feeling troubled that there might be a pack of wolves about waiting to gobble them up. She felt her eyes move unconsciously again, darting all around and searching for the people that she knew must still be lingering, but there was nothing.
There was nothing and no one and no noise and that was the thing she realized was bothering her—the lack of noise. It wasn’t just