be rid of. She tossed it in the center of the running water and heard the satisfying plop as it sank in. Red couldn’t see the gun from where she stood, and she hoped that it went straight down for a few feet, and that no one else would find it. Or if someone ever did it would be rusted and unusable.
She crouched in the mud, reaching out with her bottle to fill it from the current, not from the muddy eddies that swirled closer to the bank. Red gulped most of the first bottle straightaway—she hadn’t realized quite how thirsty she was until the first cool touch of liquid on her tongue. The scorched bit from the hot stew was still numb.
Red refilled the bottle twice more, guzzling water until it sloshed around in her stomach, and then stood—carefully, as the footing was not very sturdy this close to the water and it would be very tiresome to have to change her clothes since she only had one other pair of pants in her backpack.
Red needed to cross the stream, partly because she needed to continue heading north and partly because if that man who came to her fire hadn’t been a total liar there might be soldiers somewhere behind her. Soldiers sometimes had dogs with them, dogs to help sniff out the infected and the uninfected alike.
She was sure that a smart, well-trained dog would have no trouble following the smell of blood on her—no matter how careful she was, some of it always splashed on her pants. Dogs could help those soldiers catch up to her a lot faster, but crossing the water would make them lose her trail.
At least that was what always happened in the movies (a good deal of Red’s survival knowledge was culled from books and movies)—the hunted would swim across a river and then all the barking, baying hounds following that hunted thing would run up to the edge of the water and bark and turn in circles and the people with them would shake their head and say the dogs had lost the trail at the water.
Red would not be a hunted thing. She didn’t want to be scooped up in anyone’s butterfly net and pinned to a board. She was going to her grandmother’s house, because she was the only person left in her family that could do so. The last time she’d talked to her grandmother (before all the telephone service, wired or unwired, stopped working), the old lady had told Red and the rest of her family to come so they could stay safe in the woods, together.
That was six weeks before, and many things had happened since then. And every day Red imagined Grandma peeking through the curtains of her cabin in the woods, watching for her family to emerge out of the trees and into the clearing.
Whenever Red thought about this her eyes would tear up, because though she could go on alone it was very tiring to do so and all she wanted more than anything was to have someone to lean into. Grandma was the nicest person to lean into, because she was soft and round and smelled like whatever she’d just been cooking (and she was almost always cooking).
It was impractical to walk along the bank—the mud sucked at her shoes and made walking more of a chore than usual. She hated the idea of staying along the higher part of the bank, though, even though the footing was better. There was hardly any tree cover and she would be dangerously exposed. The way the land rose away from the stream hid her from view unless someone got close to the water.
Of course, she reflected that it also meant that any approaching person was also hidden from her. Besides, it would be easier to get away quickly if necessary from the higher part of the bank.
Weren’t you just saying not to be overly cautious? She needed to stop weighing and measuring every decision like her life depended on it.
(It might, though)
Well, that was the trouble, Red reflected. Every choice could be the difference between living and dying, and it had been that way for long enough now that she’d almost forgotten what it was