rolled up those pants to show her his false leg, he made her feel better than a dozen ice cream sundaes could have.
The store register had been smashed repeatedly, probably with a big hammer, and all the cash removed. Red thought this was dumb, because what good was money in a world like this? It was just bits of green paper.
The vandals had left behind things that were useful, and so the family collected up sleeping bags for Frank and Shirley and new raincoats and backpacks and flashlights and other things that Red pointed out that they needed.
“I don’t know if I can carry all of this, Delia,” Shirley said, looking doubtfully at the large pack that Red handed her.
There were a lot of things Red felt she could say at that moment, things like You’re going to have to if you want to survive or How do you expect to get to Grandma’s house without proper gear? or Maybe you won’t have to if you got sick when you took your mask off, but she didn’t say any of those things.
She only patted her mother on the shoulder and said, “You can, Mama.”
And her mother dropped the pack and hugged her then, hugged her so tight, and Red held on to her because she knew Mama was sick and she wasn’t going to make it.
CHAPTER 4
Hide Your Fires
After
Red dreamed, though not of the coyote. She’d expected to see his eyes gleaming at her across the fire, to feel the wet slickness of his blood on the blade of her axe. When she settled into the cabin for the night she wasn’t so foolish as to believe that four walls could protect her from bad dreams. Bad dreams were a given.
But there was no coyote lurking in the darkness. Instead, she remembered the crossroads—the reason her axe had dried blood on it when the coyote came to her fire.
It was a place she’d dreaded for several days. The very fact of it had loomed in her mind as she approached it. There was no way around it, which sucked, because it was on her top five list of Places to Avoid in an Apocalyptic Situation.
It was an interstate highway.
Before three quarters of the population started dying from a disease that no one had ever seen before, highways were a modern marvel, though most people didn’t think of them that way. Flat straight roads that crossed state lines, with restaurants and toilets and hotels at prescribed intervals? Miraculous. Without them interstate shipping would never have been possible, nor even the concept of the cross-country road trip. Sure, they were also the source of accidents and miles-long traffic jams, but interstate highways connected America in a way that nothing else could.
But Red knew that, since the advent of the Crisis, a highway could only mean DANGER. And that was the way she thought of it, too, in all capital letters.
Most people would prefer to stay on highways, whether they were walking or in cars, because they were nice clear demarcated lines that could take them from point A to point B. There was no bushwhacking or messing about trying to use a compass. That meant that any living people around would be on or near the highways, and Red was trying very hard to avoid people.
Highways would also be littered with abandoned cars, and abandoned cars meant not only the presence of infected bodies but also obstacles that predators could use to hide and then scoop up prey. If you were the kind of person who wanted to steal and rape and murder, then a highway was nothing more than a feeder tube for man’s worst instincts.
Even if there weren’t any creepy killers around, the possibility of a military roadblock was very strong. And since the military often had dogs, just approaching their vicinity was risky.
Red did not want to cross the highway. There were so many strong reasons not to do it.
But it was a highway, which meant that it ran straight across her path. There was no avoiding it without walking hundreds of miles out of her way.