without revealing her presence. The trees that hid her from sight ended about forty feet before the road began.
Red hovered in the shade of those trees, wishing they would get up and move with her like a herd of Ents. Ahead of her there was a stretch of scrubby yellow grass, not tall enough to hide her but high enough to carry ticks. Red hated ticks, and with all the woods-walking she’d been doing, each day ended in a thoroughly paranoid tick check all over her body. She did not want to survive the Cough only to end up with Lyme disease.
After the scrubby grass was a deep ditch that ran along the side of the highway, so that rainwater would drain and prevent the road from flooding. It looked, from where Red stood, to be very steep. Between the pack and her leg any kind of extreme angle was a struggle for her and she did not relish the thought of climbing down and up again. And she would be vulnerable there, just a little fluttering moth trying to get out of a jar.
There was one thing to be grateful for—no military roadblocks. From where Red stood she could see cars—several of them had that domino-fender-bender look, wherein one driver slams on their brakes suddenly and the vehicles behind do the same but not soon enough. She could also tell, even from that distance, that there were people still inside some of them.
Of course, these people were not moving.
Nothing was moving. There were no living humans around that she could see, no birds, no rabbits, no deer. Nothing. The breeze was so faint that it barely ruffled her hair.
“This is about as safe as it’s going to get, Red,” she said to herself, but very softly, so no one else could hear.
She set off across the yellow grass, her pants rustling against the dry stalks. They seemed inordinately loud in the still air.
When she reached the culvert she spent a few moments determining the best plan of action. She thought the ditch was thin enough that she could step across it if she climbed only partway down. What she did not want was to end up in a tangle of limbs and/or with a broken prosthesis at the bottom because she’d underestimated the space, so if she got halfway and thought she couldn’t make the step safely, then she would laboriously climb all the way to the bottom and back out again. The bottom of the ditch ran with brackish water that smelled like someone’s cow field and she did not want her boots in that if she could avoid it.
Red managed to make the step—only just. She nearly tipped over backward and had to dig her fingers into the soil on the opposite bank so she wouldn’t end up in an undignified heap at the bottom, like a turtle with its legs waving in the air.
She was out of breath when she reached the actual road. She carefully climbed over the metal barrier and then huffed out an annoyed breath. The domino-fender-bender meant that she couldn’t walk straight ahead unless she climbed over the cars. Red could do it, in a pinch, but it would be a lot of effort for little gain. Better to walk east for a bit and see if there was an opening between bumpers.
Red studiously avoided peering into the cars. She wasn’t squeamish but there was no reason to stare at rotting bodies. Besides, looking into the cars felt strangely invasive.
She finally found a space where she could crab-walk sideways between a gigantic blue SUV and a tiny silver Honda. Since she was walking sideways she couldn’t help looking straight into the Honda, and that one glance showed her a long-haired woman, openmouthed and wide-eyed (though not really wide-eyed, since her sockets were mostly empty, the tender jelly eaten away), with her hands still clutching the wheel. The skin of her face seemed like it was moving, and Red realized that insects were doing their decaying work on her flesh.
That wasn’t what bothered Red, though. It was the car seat in the back, the one with a desiccated little mummy strapped safely inside.