The Girl in Red

“Where do you get your gall from?” Sirois asked. He didn’t sound offended—just curious. “Most people would be cowering before the authority of the military in this situation.”

“Cowering isn’t my thing. I rarely submit to anyone’s authority,” Red said. “And you can’t discover anything if you don’t ask.”

“Fair,” Sirois said.

“But it really sounds absurd. I hope you realize that,” Red said. “I mean, the stomach isn’t really a hospitable place for a parasite. Stomach acid exists for a reason—to break things down. That’s why most digestive system parasites hurry on to the intestines. And nematodes and cestodes don’t have the kind of musculature you’d need to push bones out with that much force.”

“You really do like science,” Sirois said. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say ‘nematode’ in casual conversation.”

“I remember things that I read,” Red said. “So?”

“So what?”

“So do you want to tell me just what these creatures are really, and why the government is so determined to find them that it’s sending the military out to sweep the back end of nowhere?”

“I’d like to tell you, but . . .”

“It’s classified,” they both said together. Sirois laughed, but Red scowled at him.

Then he sighed, and waved the gun in his hand. “And I know you’ve been hoping that I’ll forget about this, but I still have to test you.”

“How do you know I’ve been hoping you’ll forget?” Red said. She would do anything to stall the inevitable.

“You have one of the most expressive faces I’ve ever seen,” Sirois said. “Never play poker, because you tell like anything.”

“I see,” Red said.

She didn’t scowl, even though she wanted to. It annoyed her that whatever she felt was so obvious on her face, because she’d always thought of herself as one of those cool, stony-faced characters that gave nothing away.

“I’m sorry, Red,” he said, and reached for her arm.

She tried to dance backward, but evading a determined someone’s grip is not the easiest damned thing when one of your legs doesn’t dance too easily.

He grabbed hold of her wrist. “I don’t want to hurt you. But I will if you don’t stop moving.”

“I’m sure you’re violating a whole lot of my civil rights,” Red said.

“Civil rights went out with the electricity,” Sirois said. “You’re just lucky you met up with us and not someone else’s command. Regan is more human than most of them.”

Red tried to turn her arm, to twist away, but there was no give in his grasp and anyway if she did get out of it she would likely just fall down. She could feel how off-balance she was, thanks to both her leg and the heavy pack and the awkward way she was standing. The only thing keeping her upright was Sirois’s hold.

I can’t even escape from one soldier who doesn’t mean me any harm, Red thought, infuriated with her own helplessness. How the hell am I going to get away if I meet someone who does want to hurt me?

She’d taken a self-defense class that had been offered on campus, but for some reason she couldn’t remember a single thing she’d learned at the moment. Her brain and her gaze had narrowed to just one thing—the gun in Sirois’s hand.

No no no don’t let him do it I don’t want whatever he’s got in there it’s not fair I tried so hard I thought I was so smart I was going to be the one that got away I did everything right from the start so how did this go wrong how how how no no no

And then something happened that she should have expected (as she thought later) because in every Apocalypse Comes story it always does.

The world exploded.

CHAPTER 12

A Walking Shadow

After

Red and Riley and Sam hid behind an abandoned truck at the edge of the town. They were in a field of vehicles, most of them rusted and lacking wheels. These were Seriously Abandoned, not the recent refuse of people fleeing the Cough or the government or the militias or whatever. Red knew about as much about cars as she did about guns—that is to say, not very much—but she knew enough to tell that most of these cars were thirty years old or more. She wondered if this was once a used-car lot that had been sacrificed to nature.

Red had convinced the two children that they needed better gear if they wanted to continue on, with or without her. Sam had seen the wisdom of this (Red suspected that she, too, was worried about the coming winter and had no wish to subsist on increasingly stale granola bars), but Riley had glanced fearfully from one to the other.

“What if someone tries to get us?” he asked.