Running Red

by Jack Bates

  I’m fighting against him. Aubrey is trying to push me down; I’m trying to stand up. He’s saying something, but I don’t want to listen to him.

  “I can’t cut it off with her sitting like that,” a man says. “Get her on her back.”

  “No!” I scream.

  “Knock her out,” someone else says. This voice is male, thin, and a little nasally. In my mind I picture the skinny guy in the tree fort swinging his legs over the side.

  “No,” Aubrey says. “Robin. Listen to me. It’s all right. Sledge killed the runner. We have to cut off its arm to free you. Robbie, do you understand? She’s latched.”

  I blink through tears. Aubrey stares at me. I can barely see his face from all of the flashlights shining on my face, into my eyes.

  “Lie down, Robbie,” he says. “Trust me, okay?” His voice is a little softer. I feel him push me towards the grass. I feel the cool, dampness of the blades under me and against my face. Then I remember Aubrey was the one who drugged me, who carried me to the back room. Trust him? No, I most certainly will not trust him.

  I hear the metal clang of a heavy blade as it strikes concrete. I hear it twice more. My head moves freely. I sit up. A woman behind me screams.

  “The hand is still in her hair,” the woman says. It’s one of the women who spied on me earlier. This one has short blonde hair. She’s waif thin. Her blue jeans hang on her narrow hips.

  The next voice I recognize. “We’ll just have to cut it out,” Auntie Annie says. “Matthew, fetch me the shears.”

  Heavy feet clomp up the wooden steps of the porch. The screen door slams, and several moments later it slams again. The feet come down the steps. In between, I lay on my back staring at the stars. If I move my head, it feels like the fingers are clawing at my scalp.

  “It’ll be okay, Robbie,” Aubrey says. He puts a hand on my forehead and smoothes back my hair. I know he’s trying to be helpful, but I am so pissed off at him for drugging me I try to spit at his face. Nothing comes out of me. I am that severely dehydrated.

  “Roll her over,” Auntie Annie says.

  Aubrey gently lifts me by my arms. I sit up in front of him.

  “Here’s the shears,” Matt says.

  “You use them,” Auntie Annie says.

  “What if I mess up her hair?” Matt asks.

  “Matthew,” the beard man says, “you heard Aunt Annie.”

  “Yes, sir,” Matt says. His voice drops low. Matt looks down at me. I can see that he’s uncertain how to proceed. I try to smile at him.

  “It’s okay,” I say. My voice is full of rocks.

  Matt reaches into my hair with one hand. I can feel him lift the hand. My hair pulls off the back of my neck. I bite down on my lower lip. He puts the shears over my hair and tries to cut too much all at once. It feels like he is ripping the hair out of my head. I reach up behind me and put a hand on his wrist.

  “Cut less,” I tell him. “Cut around it.”

  It takes Matt a while. I see my hair piling up around me. He keeps cutting until, at last, he tosses the hand onto the sidewalk. I immediately put a hand on the back of my head. There is a noticeable chunk of hair missing from the back of my head.

  “Get her inside,” Auntie Annie says. “And keep her there.”

  Aubrey reaches for me, but it is Matt’s hand I take. Aubrey steps back, his hands on his back pockets. My legs are still a bit weak, but Matt tugs me up. I fall against him. His hands go up over my back and mine land on his shoulders. We’re kissing close and I turn my face away from his. That is when I see the runner who latched onto me. Her face is gone, but in the uneven glow of the myriad of bobbing and swaying flashlights I recognize her rainbow tank top and shorts.

  It’s the female runner from the house that afternoon.

  “It’s her,” I say. Everyone lifts their flashlights at my face. I am momentarily blinded by the glare. I turn my face away.

  “It’s who?” the bearded guy asks.

  I shield my eyes and step back from Matt. I can feel one of his arms try to hold me closer. I gently push myself away from.

  “It’s the runner we saw locked in a house earlier today,” I say.

  Auntie Alice immediately challenges me. “Locked in? If she were locked in, how did she get out?”

  “Maybe she opened the door,” another woman says. The crowd around me laughs. I can see this woman just outside of the flashlights’ glow. All I see is her face. Her hair is pulled back super tight off her face. Her arms are folded under her breasts. Another woman stands almost directly behind her. These are the other two who kept an eye on me when I arrived.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me if she did open the door,” I say.

  “She’s a runner,” the woman with the pulled back hair says. “Everyone knows a runner is brain-dead.”

  “They’re changing,” I say. “The runners are changing.”

  “They ain’t getting any smarter,” the bald guy says. He uses the tip of his machete to move what’s left of her face to the side.

  “Finish it,” the bearded guy says. There’s a key chain hanging on his hip. From it he finds a key he uses to open the padlock and undo the chain holding the gate closed.

  The bald man chuckles. He wraps his fingers around the handle of his weapon and raises it over his head and brings it down on the neck of the dead runner. His skinny, denim clad friend kicks the head into the street.

  “He’s shoots, he scores!” the skinny guy says. He chases the head out into the street, his hands flapping over his head. The bald guy laughs and runs after him. They begin playing some bizarre game of trying to kick the head past one another.

  “Matt, Aubrey, deliver the rest,” the bearded guy says.

  “Yes, sir,” Matt says. He immediately takes the runner’s feet. I can see why. Spewing from the open neck is a puddle of slick, red juice. The stench of spoiled vegetables gags me. Aubrey straddles the puddle forming on the grass.

  “Cage, Dirks, get some gasoline. Pour some on the lawn there where the juice is puddling. Pour the rest on the husk out there in the street.”

  “Okay, Denny,” one of the men says. He has a moustache and slaps the arm of the other guy. It is the guitar strumming man I saw earlier.

  For a moment I’m left standing unattended. I could easily slip away. As if reading my mind, Auntie Alice steps up next to me. She puts a hand on my elbow.

  “What were you saying about the runner?” she asks. Her voice is low. When I look her in her eyes, I think I see concern.

  “Today, when we found her,” I say. “It was like she was aware we were there.”

  “Of course she knew you were there. Runners live to find new carriers. It’s how the fungus spreads.”

  “But it was more than that empty gaze they give you. It was like she was watching us. She kept slapping the window like she was trying to get our attention.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Auntie Alice says.

  “She was trying to remember how to open the door,” I say.

  The woman with the pulled back hair and her friend step up to us.

  Auntie Alice’s eyes grow wide, then narrow when she looks at the two other women. She is suspicious of what I am telling her. “That’s impossible.”

  “I would have thought so too,” I say. “But there is something going on with the runners. They’re adapting or learning. This one stared at the doorknob. It was like watching a puppy learn a new trick.”

  Out in the street there is a loud whoompf as the gasoline poured over the runner’s body goes up in flames. A smaller fire burns on the front lawn where the red juice is burned away. The air has a thick, oily smell.

  In the glow of the fire I see Denny talking to Matt. Matt looks distressed. Denny is jabbing a finger into Matt’s chest. He rips the shears out of Matt’s hands and I have the sudden fear he is going to ram them into Matt’s neck. Aubrey stands off to the side, away from Denny and Matt, away from the bald guy and his scarecrow sidekick, both of whom seem f
ascinated by the burning body.

  “Take her inside, Leslie,” Auntie Annie says.

  Leslie steps past me and whispers, “Come on,” as she goes up onto the porch. She stops on the top step and turns stiffly. I take one last look at the bonfire out in the street. When I look up at the stars, my eyes fill with tears. Two years ago, on a night like this, I was sneaking off to a field alongside some railroad tracks to hang with Lane and our friends around a fire made of sticks and fallen trees.

  Leslie calls out to me. “Miss?”

  The woman with the pulled back hair gives me a shove. I spin on her, but her friend with the long, black hair pulls her arm and whispers, “Not now, Bethany.”

  I slowly make my way to the porch and follow Leslie inside. I have a chilling thought that maybe this is the last night I will ever have on earth.

  Six

  Leslie leads me up the great staircase. There are more pictures of the family that once lived here. Portraits mostly. A pretty but tired mother. A smiling husband whose eyes tell me he looked at more women than just his wife. A boy; a younger girl. All in pink and white shirts or sweaters. An Easter portrait, I think. The wife probably changed these seasonally.

  At the top of the stairs is a window that looks out on the backyard. With no lights on up here I can see into the backyard. Some of the tents glow from lanterns lit inside them. I can see the silhouettes of the people living out back. They talk in small groups. I wonder what has brought all of these people here, or if they were rounded up like I was.

  Like Matt wanted to do with the runner.

  “The bathroom is over there,” Leslie says. She steps back against the wall, puts her hands behind her back, and leans against the paneled wall beneath the wainscoting. Leslie won’t look at me. She keeps her eyes on the floor.

  “So you’re Leslie,” I say. “My name is Robin. Robbie to just about everyone.”

  Leslie looks up, but looks past me. “The bathroom is over there.” She nods her head, indicating where I should go.

  I decide to take her advice. As I open the door, I hear an anguished wail from outside. I look back at Leslie. She hangs her head far down against her chest. She shakes it and mutters to herself.

  “Leslie. What’s wrong?” I ask.

  She doesn’t answer me. She hurries down the stairs. I hear the door slam.

  I lock myself inside the bathroom.

  With my haircut, I look like one of those kewpie doll anime girls: big, almond eyes, puckered little mouth, and straight, chopped lengths of dishwater blonde hair. It hangs over each of my shoulders, but my neck is bared. I have an image of permanently open curtains revealing the back of my head. I lean into the mirror and stare at myself. I notice a tiny white dot on my chin and my heart skips.

  It could be just a pimple.

  Or it could be the rash.

  I lift my shirt and look at my belly. There’s nothing there, but I feel around anyhow. The rash starts on the belly. It spreads out like a belt, usually three rows wide. The face is the last place the rash spreads. If it gets to the face, the carrier is just days from trying to latch. Because it starts on the belly, a lot of the early theories said it had something to do with food. More specifically, hormone injected, gene manipulated super foods. Just before the pandemic, industrial complex farms had been experimenting with growing larger foods faster. It was thought that our bodies tried to combat the manipulations and the rash was some type of mutational residue.

  I’ve heard so many theories since I set out on my own I don’t know what is fact or what is fiction. The only fact I know is that the human race is changing.

  There’s a bar of soap on the edge of the pedestal sink. I run a little water and wash my face. The water smells heavily of iron and rust. I’m familiar with well water. The cabin my family owned in the Upper Peninsula has a well. My dad installed a water softener, but my mom insisted we always buy our drinking water from the grocery stores. I’m too far north to have the comforts of city water. This stuff is pumped directly out of the ground.

  I look around for scissors to cut my hair evenly. If I had Baby with me, I could use the ones I carry. The drawers in the cabinet behind me are empty. I don’t even see towels.

  I sit down on the toilet seat lid and cover my face in my palms. For thirteen months I have avoided any long-term contact with people. I’ve come across campers and squatters, but I’ve kept my distance, even when acknowledging them. And now, in a single moment of weakness, I have landed myself in the type of situation I promised myself—and Yuki—I would never enter into.

  There’s a light tapping on the door. I stand up and turn on the hot tap in the sink. I start rubbing my hands over the bar of soap.

  “Who is it?” I ask. I half turn to look over my shoulder at the door. I can see it fine in the mirror over the sink. I hear the old-fashioned door lock tumble. The door opens a sliver.

  “Aunt Alice wants to know if you are all right,” one of the girls says.

  “Leslie? Is that you?” When I get no answer, I shake the water and soap off my hands and shut off the tap. I open the door. Leslie steps back quickly. She tucks one of her short locks of hair behind her ear. “There’re no towels in here.”

  “We have to use our own,” she says. Her voice is very low.

  “Is everything all right?”

  Our eyes meet. Hers are wide. They say more than Leslie ever will.

  I ask, “What is it?”

  Auntie Alice calls up the stairwell. Leslie practically jumps out of her skin. “Leslie? What’s taking you two?”

  “We’re coming, Aunt Alice. She doesn’t have a towel.”

  “Tell her I have one in my backpack,” I say. Leslie hesitates to tell her. I mouth, “Go on.”

  “She says she has one in her backpack.”

  There is no immediate response. I strain to hear. I think Aunt Alice is talking to someone downstairs. A moment later, she shouts up, saying, “There’s an extra in the hall closet up there. She can use that for now. Get it for her and then get down here.”

  “Yes, Aunt Alice.” Leslie wiggles a finger for me to follow. She walks down the hall, her eyes down. I watch her open and close her fingers. She might be talking to herself. Leslie opens a dark, wooden door. There are towels, but there are also plenty of other utensils in there that could be useful. Hanging on the inside of the door is a plastic organizer with see-through pockets. Sticking up out of one is a pair of scissors.

  “Leslie.” The sound of my voice makes her jump again. She looks at me like a frightened mouse. I smile to try and calm her. She doesn’t buy into it. “The scissors. I want to even out my hair.”

  Leslie looks at the scissors. I think she is afraid to touch them. I walk down the hall and take them out of their pocket. “See?” I say. “They didn’t bite.”

  There is no humor in Leslie’s face. She stares at me as if I’ve just admitted I started the rash.

  “Please tell Aunt Alice and the others I will be down in a moment.” I leave Leslie standing outside the hall closet. Inside the bathroom I watch her hurry past in the mirror, her eyes still cast down. She stops for a brief second and looks at me. When our eyes meet in the mirror, she turns to go, then stops.

  “Denny must like you,” she says.

  “Why do you say that?”

  Leslie drops her eyes and walks away.

  With the door closed behind me, I take hold of my hair and slip it between the blades. It takes a couple of small snips until I find a groove, but I cut it away. By the time I finish, I look like a pixie.

  There’s hair all over the sink. It takes me a while to clean up the mess. I’ve lost track of time, but really, time abandoned me a while ago.

  When I go downstairs there is a small meeting going on in the living room. The former owners of the house decorated as much as they could with Victorian furniture. There’s a wooden frame couch with ball and claw legs, a pair of high-back chairs at either end of an oval coffee table, and an oval, hooked rug in t
he center of it all. An autumn landscape painting hangs above the sofa. It saddens me when I look at it. I am reminded of how much I once loved the fall. I used to love a lot about the old world. I just didn’t know I did.

  But there are modern conveniences in the room as well. A flat screen TV sits on an entertainment center in one corner of the great room. A grandfather clock that is all too modern sits catty-corner from the TV. None of these electronic devices are operating. I wonder if they ever will again.

  Auntie Alice sits in the high-back chair nearest the front bay window, the standing clock to her left. Denny sits in the one across from her, the flat screen TV to his left. Aubrey sits between two other women on the sofa. They are the women I saw with Leslie earlier. One of the women has bright, orange hair pulled back in a tight bun. The woman on the other side of Aubrey has long, black hair that frames her narrow face. The bald guy with the head tats and his scarecrow buddy sit on folding chairs, squeezed in between the high-backed chairs and the ends of the couch. Leslie stands off to the side behind the bald man. It’s a cramped family portrait. If I were to have come upon this scene in the days before the rash, I would have thought I was interrupting a Sunday afternoon brunch.

  I can’t tell what the topic is, but Aubrey is visibly upset. He has been looking at Denny, but when Leslie looks up and sees me standing at the base of the staircase, she lets out a breathy “Oh!” and everyone looks from her to me. I move into the narrow hall that leads into the back kitchen and separates the cluttered dining room from the busy living room. Everyone is staring at me. I touch my hair self-consciously.

  “I could still feel the runner’s hand in my hair,” I say. No one says anything. I look away from their stares and see for the first time what is strewn over the coffee table. It is all of my belongings. The wrist rocket. My hand axe. My knife. My disposable lighters have been piled off to the side. There are a couple of books of matches. I see a picture of Lane I’ve kept with me forever. There’s also the tennis ball I toss for Yuki. I have never felt so violated.

  “You went through my backpack,” I say.