“You know, their fakey uniforms, the boots, the guns.”
“The fact that they drove up in a Ford F-150 should have told you straight off that they weren’t real soldiers,” Adam said. “I wonder how they fit all the stuff from the store and all those guys in the flatbed.”
Red shrugged. “I don’t know anything about cars. They all look the same to me.”
“Even you should be able to tell that wasn’t a government vehicle. The plates were wrong, for one thing,” Adam said.
Red inwardly marveled at the details that Adam thought important enough to note. It never would have occurred to her to look at the license plates.
“Wait, how could you even see the plates?” Red asked, thinking about the few seconds he’d had to observe them. “From that distance?”
“You don’t need to see every detail,” Adam said. “The plate is different from every state plate—usually it’s plain white with just the plate number and it will say ‘U.S. Government’ above the number. I could see even from a quick look that the truck had our state plate on it.”
“Huh,” Red said. “Well, points to you but we still don’t know why they took the body with them.”
“Maybe they’re performing bizarre experiments on it. You know, bringing zombies to life!” He said this last bit in his movie-trailer voice.
“Even I don’t believe in zombies,” Red said. “At least, not human ones. There are those weird mushrooms that take over insects, though. Not mushrooms, fungi. I saw a documentary once—”
Adam held up his hands. “I don’t want to know about any real-life zombie shit. I do not. Because I am already going to have nightmares about that guy’s ripped-open chest and the thing that crawled out of it.”
“Nothing crawled out of it,” Red said. “I told you, this is a virus. Viruses don’t crawl out of people’s bodies. They stay inside and multiply.”
“So the virus made his lungs spontaneously explode?” Adam said. “Seems more likely that there would be a creepy little animal inside waiting to burst out.”
Red didn’t want to argue about it, and part of the reason she didn’t want to argue about it was that she wanted to think all of the possibilities through, one by one.
That might mean acknowledging something you don’t want to believe, Red. Acknowledging that a tiny virus has mutated into something that could do that. It was funny how her inner voice so often sounded like Mama, and how she would argue right back at it like Mama was standing there in front of her with her debate face on.
I’ll acknowledge it when I’m damn good and ready.
And right now she was not damned good and ready. She never would have said “damn” in front of Mama, though. Mama hadn’t cared much for language like that.
CHAPTER 9
The Dearest Thing
After
The snow that woke Red in the early hours of the morning wasn’t anything that would have worried her Back in the Old Days. The Old Days, of course, weren’t that old, but a few flurries that didn’t stick to the ground wouldn’t have been anything to fuss about when she had a roof and a furnace and lots of thick blankets as proof against the weather.
Now the few fat flakes were worrisome portents of things to come. They meant that she wasn’t walking fast enough, wasn’t making good enough time, that her path to Grandma’s house might be stopped in its tracks by a snowstorm that she would have to ride out in a backpacker’s tent.
It wasn’t yet dawn but she bundled up her hammock and sleeping bag and ate a protein bar.
Oh, for a pancake, a Danish, a pile of bacon next to eggs just out of the pan. Anything except protein bars and granola bars and energy bars.
Red never wanted to eat anything bar-shaped again for the rest of her life. Even a candy bar seemed repulsive.
She took out her flashlight and carefully picked her way back to the trail. That is, she took out her flashlight after a good five-minute argument with herself over whether it was safe to use it, as the