was easier to see the caverns where their chests used to be—the broken ribs (jagged at the edges), the ripped muscle, and the spray of dried blood that had decorated their remaining skin like a modern art painting. The man’s lips were pulled back from his teeth, frozen there in a permanent grimace.
Someone—or a few someones—had pushed the bodies onto the second shelf from the bottom, one on each side of the aisle so that they faced each other. Red was at a loss to explain why anyone would do this.
“And they’re just like that other guy,” Adam said. “The one in the gas station. Which means it wasn’t some fluke thing and there really is a parasite bursting out of people’s lungs. Look, there’s the slither marks on the floor, too.”
Adam pointed to the end of the aisle in front of them. There were bloody trails there, leading away from where they stood and toward the back of the store.
Red took a deep breath. She wasn’t ready to believe in chest-bursting monsters even if Alien was one of her favorite movies. “It doesn’t make sense. How can the parasite get inside their lungs in the first place?”
“They inhaled it,” Adam said. “It’s the virus. They inhale it and it makes people cough because it’s growing inside their lungs and then when it’s too big it busts out.”
“Adam,” Red said patiently. “I told you before, viruses don’t grow that way. They’re like a trillionth of an inch long to start and they don’t get larger. They’re not tapeworms that get bigger and bigger inside you.”
“Why not?” Adam asked. “You’re looking at the evidence.”
“I’m not looking at anything,” Red pointed out. “I see two bodies with open chest wounds and some marks on the floor. Until I actually see an alien life form crawling on the ground I’m not buying it.”
“Then let’s follow the tracks,” Adam said.
“Oh, let’s not,” Red said.
“Afraid you’ll be proven wrong?”
“No, just afraid that we’ll waste our time with this when we should be looking for food. I think we might have to break into one of the houses nearby and see if they have anything stored. There’s nothing left here.”
Red hated breaking into houses, because it felt like such a terrible violation. Of course it was necessary. They needed to eat and it was likely that the owners were dead or rounded up into quarantine camps. But it never stopped feeling wrong.
“I want to see where the tracks go,” Adam insisted.
Red sighed. She recognized his “digging-in-my-heels” voice and decided it was better to play along for a few minutes and get it over with so that they could move on to more important things. Like finding food, which seemed to occupy a huge portion of their lives now.
She was getting that itchy feeling again, the one that made the back of her neck prickle. There hadn’t been anything obviously wrong with this little run-down village, but that didn’t mean wrong things weren’t hiding in the seams.
“Fine,” Red said, then grabbed his shoulder before he could stride forward. “Hold on, idiot. If you really think there’s a monster lurking in the shadows, you don’t go charging forward without something to defend yourself.”
“Right,” Adam said. “Like what?”
It was so hard not to roll her eyes right out of her head sometimes. Someone ought to give her an award for dealing with Adam.
“Don’t you have a hunting knife?” Red asked. She’d seen him using it not too long ago.
He dropped his eyes and shuffled his feet and he looked just like one of her babysitting charges caught eating extra dessert.
“I, uh, lost it,” Adam said.
Red narrowed her eyes. “How did you—wait, never mind. I don’t want to know. It’ll just make me want to beat you and we don’t have time for that.”
“I think I left it at one of our campsites,” he said. “By accident.”
“I just told you not to tell me,” Red said, unhooking her hand axe from her belt. “Get behind me, dummy.”