The Girl in Red

Or unless there really was a vast conspiracy and the government had made sure nobody spoke about this, but really how could they do that? You couldn’t silence millions of people, and millions of people all over the world had been impacted. Don’t get any more paranoid than you already are, Red.

The woman coughed against the door, and Adam and Red automatically flinched away even though the glass and their masks were between them and the infected woman. Blood flew out of her mouth, splattering all over the glass in huge clots. Once she started coughing it was like she couldn’t stop. The Cough started in her stomach, deep in her diaphragm, and it seized her whole body. She convulsed with the Cough, her spine curving back at the start and then arching forward, and with every breath more blood was expelled.

“It’s like a morbid modern art painting,” Adam said.

“I didn’t know you knew anything about art,” Red said, but the response was automatic. She wasn’t really thinking about Adam or art. She was thinking about whooping cough and Ebola and reports about symptoms that didn’t line up with what she saw at that moment.

The woman’s face was slowly being obscured from their sight by the volume of effluvia coating the glass.

Mama and Dad came up to join them and they all stared like the woman was doing some kind of performance.

Red shook her head, shaking off the trance that had come over her at the sight of the blood running down the woman’s white, white face. Her mind wanted to solve the problem, wanted to know why this particular symptom hadn’t been generally known, and she’d gotten caught on a track thinking about it. That was stupid, because the longer they stayed the more likely it was that one of them would get infected, mask or no mask.

(One of you is already infected)

But you don’t know that for sure, Red thought.

“We can’t stay here. And we can’t go out that way,” she said, pointing at the front door.

“What if there are more like her in the back?” Adam said. “A big crowd of infected people waiting to get us?”

“First of all, they aren’t zombies, even if they kind of seem like it,” Red said. “I don’t think people are gathering in swaying hordes to eat our faces.”

“She looks like she might eat someone’s face,” Adam said doubtfully.

“She looks like she’s going to fall over any second now,” Mama said. “I think that’s Kathy Nolan—it’s hard to tell—she’s the one who had twins a few years ago? I wonder what happened to her girls.”

The thought of those two little girls dying coughing and covered in their own blood was too terrible, so Red put that aside too, in the closet where she knew Mama was sick and soon this would happen to her.

Mama was going to end up like this, coughing gouts of blood out of her mouth and her eyes would be dead like this woman’s and if Red looked into them then Mama wouldn’t be there anymore, wouldn’t be there to argue with her and call her Delia instead of Red.

(don’t think about it)

“Even with the masks on we don’t want to go out right past an infected person,” Red said. “So let’s peek out the back door and see if it’s safe to go that way.”

“Won’t the emergency alarm go off?” Adam said.

“The electricity isn’t on,” Red pointed out, but she didn’t add you dolt, though it was so tempting. Really, what did the boy go to college for? “And it wouldn’t matter anyway. Nobody is going to arrest us for stealing Twizzlers.”

Adam looked down at the packages of candy in his hand, the bright artificial red the same hue as the blood emitting from the woman who was probably Kathy Nolan. His mouth twisted and he dropped them to the floor.

Red waved her arms to indicate that they should all start moving toward the back of the store. She didn’t know how she’d gotten to be in charge, but everyone else seemed paralyzed by their first close-up sight of an infected person.

It was hard, somehow, to turn her back on the woman who was literally coughing her life onto the glass of Swann’s Pharmacy. Red knew she couldn’t do anything to help her, and that contact would only increase the risk of infection, but it didn’t feel right. People ought to help each other, especially when the world was ending.

They made it back to the car without encountering anyone else. The town was so small and so quiet that they could hear the wet expulsions that Probably Kathy Nolan made all the way back to their vehicle. Even after they climbed into the car and sped away, Red thought she still heard that woman coughing, coughing, coughing.

And the next evening Mama was coughing, too, just like Red knew she would be.

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