Red wished she’d taken the time to find out just how big the sector was, because that would be useful information to have right now. It would help her avoid Regan’s group, at least. Too bad there hadn’t been a handy map hanging around for her to steal before she escaped.
Well, the circumstances were fairly urgent. There wasn’t time for data collection.
“Red?”
Sam was looking at her expectantly, and Red realized she’d gone off on a tangent in her brain (again) and never acknowledged what the girl had said.
“I think,” Red said slowly, thinking it through as she spoke. It would be okay. It would probably be safe. “I think that we might try sleeping in one of the houses. Just for tonight.”
Riley’s eyes lit up. “We could sleep in a real bed. With warm blankets.”
It made Red’s heart break just a little to hear him say that, to hear him speak so hopefully about a bed and warm blankets—basic things a kid should not have to worry about.
“What if there are dead bodies in the houses?” Sam asked, her voice just above a whisper.
“I’m not going to sleep in a house with a dead body, don’t worry,” Red said. “There might be some that have bodies in them, though. We can’t expect that everyone will have left the area before they got sick. But I bet that at least a few of them will be empty. Everyone was told to go to a quarantine camp, and most people are the law-abiding types and complied.”
“Why didn’t you?” Riley asked.
“I’m a rebel,” Red said, and Riley laughed, but Sam looked at her in a funny way, like she knew Red’s answer was no answer at all.
There was a little dip in the road about a mile away, and Red watched the three silhouettes of the men disappear and then reappear on the rise. She couldn’t hear their voices anymore, despite the silence that hung all around, and that meant they were far enough away for safety.
She couldn’t worry that they might be back later, or that they were only a patrol that was part of a large group. Or rather, she could worry about such things but knew that worrying wouldn’t stop anything that was going to happen. Several weeks on the road had convinced Red that Fate had her own plans and didn’t consult humans before she laid them.
“All right, let’s start checking houses,” Red said.
First they looked for houses that already had open doors or windows, for Red thought it better to enter houses that already looked derelict rather than signal to anyone who might be checking that someone had done some fresh breaking and entering.
After trying a few of these Red quickly realized the flaw in that plan. If someone had gone to the trouble of opening the house, then they’d also gone to the trouble of taking all the food they could carry. There wasn’t anything edible left in those first few residences—not even a stray Cheerio for a colony of ants to carry away.
There were some useful things to be found here and there, however.
In one home there was a pink bedroom with a dresser stuffed with underwear and shirts and jeans and leggings just Sam’s size. Sam was inclined to wrinkle her nose at these—“They’re all covered in hearts and glitter”—but Red convinced her that personal taste in fashion was less important than having clean clothes that fit.
In another house Red found a stash of camping equipment in the attached garage, and was able to cull out another backpacker’s tent for the kids and a good-sized pack for Sam to carry. They ditched the school backpack—there was nothing in it but the granola bars and a dirty blanket. There was also a two-person kayak in the garage, which Riley desperately wanted to take with them.
“There are no rivers nearby,” Red said, nonplussed by his sudden desire to paddle.
“But we might find some,” Riley said. “Look, it has wheels. We could pull it until we find a river to put it into.”