the obvious—no people bustling around, no cell phones ringing, no cars rumbling in the road. It was the loss of that background buzz that most people never noticed when it was there, the omnipresent hum of lights and electric wires. Without it the air seemed too big, too empty. And all of that empty space might be filled by floating death, tiny little germs in search of a new host.
The condition of Hawk’s Sporting Goods was no surprise to them after seeing the rest of the town. Of course the windows were broken, the contents (normally kept so precise and orderly by the owner, Andy “Hawk” Hocholowski) spilled all over the floor in a seeming orgy of unnecessary destruction.
They could have climbed in through the broken display windows, but Adam opened the front door anyway. The lock was pried open but the bell above the door rang cheerfully as they pushed inside.
Red automatically looked for Hawk behind the counter, expecting to see him there with his familiar blue flannel shirt (he only wore blue ones, in various patterns and combinations but there was always blue) and his half-smile, half-frown. He was a curmudgeon by nature, not naturally friendly, but he was loaded with knowledge and wanted to share it, so he’d opened the store so he could do that.
“And also,” he told Red once, “because I spent enough time in the military to like the idea of nobody giving me orders.”
Of course Hawk wasn’t there, and Red wondered if he was one of the charred skeletons piled helter-skelter in the center of town, or if he’d died quietly in his upstairs apartment, or if he’d managed to escape and was off camping in the woods somewhere, waiting for it all to pass.
She hoped it was the latter, and that they would see him on the way. Red wasn’t a natural joiner, but she liked the idea of bumping into Hawk and having him in their little band.
When she’d first gotten her prosthetic leg she’d felt like an alien, like the whole world had put a spotlight on her. She went into the ice cream shop with her mother to get a cone after the first fitting and Mary Jane, the two-thousand-year-old proprietress (she wasn’t really two thousand, of course, but she seemed that way when Red was eight—just kind of infinitely old the way some old people are, like they’d always been that old even when they were young) had given Red a giant sundae instead of the small cone she ordered, with whipped cream and chocolate sauce and a cherry on top and firmly told her mother, “No charge.”
Red knew that sundae was a kind gesture, that it was supposed to make her feel good, but all it did was make her feel worse knowing that Mary Jane felt sorry for her. She felt nauseated the whole time she was eating that sundae, choking it down over the bile that rose every time she thought of the too-kind gaze Mary Jane gave her. She didn’t taste a bite of that ice cream, but she ate it all the same and said thank you and smiled as she was supposed to when it was done, and when Mary Jane asked if she enjoyed it Red lied and said, “It was the best sundae I’ve ever had.”
After that they went in the sporting goods store to get Red a new pair of sneakers (her right foot had grown, even if her left foot never would again) and when they went into the store Hawk looked up from the counter with that familiar half-smile, half-frown like his face didn’t know what it wanted to do with itself.
He limped around the counter to meet them and he stopped in front of Red and without another word rolled up his right pant leg and she saw the shiny gleam of metal there. Her eyes snapped up to his bright blue ones and he winked at her. Then he rolled his pant leg down and said, “What can I do for you ladies?”
She hadn’t known until that day that he had an above-the-knee prosthesis, the product of an IED he’d encountered in a sandy country overseas, because he always wore cargo pants that covered him from hip to ankle. But when he’d