an anomaly (and that would explain why nobody had reported it—Red liked to have things understood and filed and cataloged with full details).
Red knew that one of the reasons Dad was delaying their start was Mama’s cough. He hadn’t felt confident that she could manage the trip to begin with (he hadn’t said it, there was just something Red noticed in the way he looked at Mama), and now that she was coughing he definitely didn’t feel confident.
They were supposed to start at sunup so they could get a good amount of walking completed on the first day, but it was nine thirty a.m. and there was no indication that they were going to leave soon. Red wondered if they were going to leave at all.
So far no one else had shown signs of infection, though Red suspected her father would soon. Maybe Adam would get it, too. In all her calculations, though, she never considered the possibility that she might be the one to get sick. She laughed at herself a little, because it was beyond arrogant, but she just felt she wouldn’t get sick now that the killer was inside their home. Red was going to be the final girl, the sole survivor of a massacre, just like in horror movies.
She had to think this way, to make it something outside herself, because if she truly considered the reality of her whole family dying before her eyes and leaving her alone she would curl up into a ball inside her closet and stay there. And that wasn’t her. Red had never hidden from anything in her life. When life punched her in the face she stuck her chin out. She didn’t fall down.
But it was easy to stick your chin out when you had a team in your corner waiting for you when the bell rang at the end of the round.
Dad and Mama were in the kitchen, murmuring quietly about things that they didn’t want Red or Adam to hear. Adam was upstairs, and Red could hear him squeaking around on the hardwood floor as he found one more thing he couldn’t live without and had to figure out how to squeeze it into his already overstuffed pack. She was certain that at some point in their journey he would realize he needed to shed unnecessary things and they would drop from his backpack one by one, like the bread crumbs that were supposed to lead you home.
Except these bread crumbs would lead people to them, Red was certain of that. She loved her family but she did not love the way they were so unprepared for the reality of the Crisis.
Adam seemed to think everything would be fine if only they would join up with all the other lemmings in government camps. Even after seeing Probably Kathy Nolan expelling blood from her lungs all over the window of Swann’s Pharmacy, he still thought it would be a great idea to live in close quarters with lots of people and let someone else worry about food and shelter. Adam wasn’t interested in surviving on his own, and so he dillydallied around upstairs hoping another answer would present itself and he wouldn’t have to carry his pack across the “goddamned country” (his words, and he’d gotten a raised eyebrow from Mama for the blasphemy) to Grandma’s house.
Red pulled her pack over her shoulders. More than ever she felt the urgency of not leaving it behind, even to go from the living room to the kitchen. She was not going to be the dumbass heroine in the movie who put her Very Important Object on the ground and ended up losing it in a perfectly predictable plot twist. Her neck had been prickling all morning, and she didn’t know if it was because she had some premonition of Bad Things Happening or simply because she was eager to leave.
Mama and Dad stood close together by the dining set, their heads resting against each other, like each was drawing strength from the other to keep on standing. Dad’s pack was there, filled and zipped up, but Mama’s was overflowing with all kinds of useless things while useful things were scattered on the table. When Red entered they pulled apart, looking guilty, like she was a hall monitor who’d caught them