“Well, after the person coughs a lot of blood—I mean a lot, like a milk gallon of blood, maybe even more than that,” Riley said, waving his/her hands around to demonstrate the pool of blood, “then they split open right here.”
Riley gestured down the center of his/her ribs.
“And then everything kind of peels in a really gross way. I never saw anybody’s ribs before except in a skeleton in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride and that doesn’t count because it was fake.”
(“That’s some Alien shit,” Adam said, pointing at the open chest. “Right? It’s that movie you like where the little monster comes out of the guy’s chest and there’s blood everywhere.”
“But it’s not a monster,” Red said, unable to look away even though the sight made her a little sick. Everything inside the person was mangled, no discernible organs, just a butcher’s floor of ground-up meat. “It’s a virus. Viruses don’t do that.”)
There had been those funny markings on the floor near the body, the ones that Red thought at first were something slithering away, and then she’d checked her too-active imagination and decided it was just the man’s clawing fingers because Red wasn’t any kind of crime scene investigator and what did she know about interpreting blood on the floor and it was absurd to think something had come out of the man’s insides.
“What happens after that?” Red asked.
“We didn’t stay anymore after that,” Riley said, glancing back at the other child. “It didn’t seem like a good idea to watch. We might have gotten sick, too.”
“I have to agree,” Red said, but only part of her brain was there, listening to the conversation. She was thinking of Probably Kathy Nolan.
(You saw someone coughing up blood like that, coughing up a milk gallon of blood, coughing all over the window of Swann’s Pharmacy like she was about to burst open)
“Daddy didn’t have that kind in him but one of our neighbors, Mrs. Mikita, she had it. We went over there after Daddy died because she said she would take care of us but then she started coughing and we knew we’d have to go soon anyway but we wanted to stay in a house for a little while longer because we weren’t sure what to do if we went outside, all our relatives live far away.”
Riley trailed off, eyes staring into the distance at some memory Red didn’t share.
“But Mrs. Mikita, she coughed like that? And you saw her chest break open?” Red prompted.
“Yes,” Riley said. “We had to leave the house then. We just ran out as fast as we could because the way she was coughing it almost seemed like she was going to cough blood right into our mouths. And I didn’t want my chest to do that. We didn’t even have our jackets or food or anything really.”
Red thought there was probably a lot more to the story than this, but Riley no longer seemed inclined to talk about it.
“You guys must have come a long way to get here,” Red said. The nearest town was at that dangerous crossing she’d been dreading, and that would be a good walk to kids of this size.
“I dunno how far it was but it seems like we’ve been walking forever,” Riley said, and said they came from a town about twenty-five miles or so away, by Red’s calculation.
“Stop telling her all this stuff!” the other child said. “It’s not any of her business.”
“You’re right,” Red said, quietly impressed that a couple of kids could get so far with basically no resources. “It’s not my business. But since I’m alone and you’re alone maybe we could walk together for a while, what do you say?”
Red would never have said this if they were adults. She knew that. Because she couldn’t trust other adults not to harm her. But it was a long lonely walk that she was on, especially without Adam
(don’t think about Adam)
and even if she wasn’t lonely there was no way she could leave these two children in the middle of the