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Present Day
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Ditzy returns from the shed with the same baseball bat she left with. She looks mildly annoyed, like her digging did not turn up whatever medieval pike she was hoping to find in the backyard storage of some uptown east side house in Chesnet, New Devonshire. On the other hand, her pockets jingle when she heads upstairs. I have very little desire to know what she's got in her pockets. If it were a normal person, I would. But this is Ditzy we're talking about.
She's also holding a coil of electrical wire that I hope she didn't cut from a once-live circuit, and a two-foot piece of dowel that looks freshly sawn at both ends. I go back to the stove and pretend I didn't see her come in. Which is difficult, because she's wearing cargo pants today, and I didn't know cargo pants could make someone's ass look that nice going up the stairs.
"Do I want to know what she found?" says Patrick from the opposite counter.
"I don't."
He goes back to chopping garlic. I lean over the counter to check out the window for Calico J. He left an hour ago to check out the garden we spotted in a yard down the road when we were searching for this safe house. Given that the house with the garden is only a five-minute walk away, my bet is on one of three things: either there are more gardens than I could spot from the road, he's decided to take a spontaneous trip to the nearest restaurant for spices, or he's back on his phone with the other survivors. I think I can rule out the third option, at least. His phone battery was at 3% when we wrapped up the last conversation, and he absolutely forgot to take my solar charger with him when he left the house. It's still sitting on the table where he set it down.
"Um... Meg?"
I retreat from the window. Patrick beckons me over, then holds up a half-clove of garlic. "Is it supposed to look like this?"
The inside of the clove is tinted with a reddish colour that sends a tingle up my spine. "No. Ditch that one and any that look like it."
"We might not have enough, then."
"Patrick, I'm ninety-five percent sure that's Redding."
He drops the clove like a decapitated snake head. I flick through the garlic he's already minced. Most is clean, but a patch of bits that must have all been from the same clove bears a milder version of the same red tint. I steal Patrick's knife and carefully separate them from the rest with the tip of the blade. Patrick peels the last few cloves. The entire second bulb we found beneath the grocery store tables two days ago has Redding on the inside.
"Well, that sucks," I say, when we've sent the whole thing the same way as the rest. "I was looking forward to having fresh garlic for once."
"Should we check the rest of the food? We picked up more than just garlic at that grocery store. If it's getting into things, we should find them before it spreads."
"I'll check the bag if you get the cupboards."
We split up. I empty our soft goods from the backpack hanging on the wall and set aside anything that's still unopened. Patrick's "Um..." catches my attention again. He fidgets with a cupboard handle for a moment, eyeing the items I've set aside. "Are we sure those are safe?"
"They're sealed."
"It got into the garlic without staining the outside, though."
I stare at him for a moment while my brain catches up with that. He's right: we didn't find the red tint until we cut the cloves open. Patrick is nervous to the point of obstructiveness sometimes, but there are moments when that caution leads to very valid ideas I don't think any of the rest of us would have thought of. This is one of those times.
I look down at the unopened box of cornstarch in my hand. On the other hand, I don't really feel like breaking open sealed food until we need to use it. This pits two of my different survival values against one another, and I'm not sure which to choose. I get up and check the window for Calico J again. There's no sign of him.
"Oo, what are we making?" says a voice behind me that makes my heart skip an unhealthy number of beats. Ditzy. If she and her ass just walked into the kitchen with the intent to distract, I'm not going to be able to focus adequately on the task at hand.
"Nothing," I say without turning around. "Patrick found Redding in the garlic, so we're checking the food."
"What did you make?" says Patrick a moment later. He sounds horrified.
I can't not turn around at that. I brace myself for exactly the image I find. Ditzy is standing in the middle of the floor behind us with one hand on a seductively cocked hip, and her head tipped a little to one side so her golden hair cascades over her shoulders. She's holding the dowel from before over her shoulder. There's a wire wound around a groove at the top of it. Whatever's attached to the other end hangs out of sight from me but not Patrick.
"What did you make?" I repeat warily, trying to keep my eyes on the dowel when her exposed collarbone is right there.
Ditzy makes an innocent face. "Oh, this? I'm experimenting with something."
She swings the thing off her shoulder—it's heavy—and suddenly Patrick's expression mirrors my own. I wouldn't quite call Ditzy's new weapon a flail, but that's probably the closest definition. Two lengths of wire, closely twisted, run from the dowel handle to a tightly woven bundle of wire knots loaded with metal. The majority are strings of metal nuts and washers, but I also see a hinge, nails bent into circles, at least one screwdriver, a spark plug, some lethal-looking angle brackets, and a pair of pliers. With metal jaws gaping, of course. All told, the flail end of the weapon is about the size of a grapefruit, though some of its protrusions could do hospitalization damage to a human if they hit right. Or wrong, as the case may be.
"I was hoping for a chain," says Ditzy as she turns the handle, twirling the flail for inspection. "But they didn't have any. Or solder."
"You wanted to solder it? Do you even have a soldering iron?"
"Don't need one." She pulls a lighter from one of her many pockets and looks far too pleased with herself. "I have wire. And this."
I think I can accept that Ditzy and I have very different ideas about self-preservation.
"Can you put that away?" says Patrick nervously. He's still holding the handle of an open cupboard door, like he's ready to use it as a shield if Ditzy decides to make a demonstration. "We're trying to do something."
"I just came here for a snack."
Ditzy sallies towards him. Patrick's face flushes bright red, and he flees to the other side of the room. Ditzy selects a can of baked beans from our designated snacks hoard. The click of a can opener rings sharp in the silence. I'm suddenly hyper-aware that Patrick and I are both cowering on the opposite side of the room, staring like morons while she does her thing. She hums a little tune as the can opener cranks around the rim of the can. In that moment, I'm hit full in the face with an inexplicable feeling of dread.
"Ditzy, stop," I want to say, but my voice has frozen. An embarrassing gurgle comes out instead. Ditzy turns back to us, spoon poised over the open can, and I swear the sight of her there paralyzes me until she dips the spoon without removing her gaze from me, and it comes up red. Ditzy continues to pin me with those piercing blue eyes as she lifts the spoon towards her mouth. She's about to take the bite when something in me snaps. I spring forward and dash the spoon from her hand. I make a snatch for the can, too, and miss; Ditzy's hand hits the counter, and the can skids away across it, to crash into the wall at the back.
And just like that, I find myself chest-to-chest with the most gorgeous girl in my life, my body pressing hers back against the edge of the counter, and our faces terrifyingly and thrillingly close. Ditzy's is set in a look of utter surprise. Her cheeks begin to turn pink.
"Redding," I manage to garble. I shove myself off her so fast, I nearly fall in the opposite direction. I fumble for the can. It takes me three tries to actually get a hold of it. When I've chased it down the counter and finally won, I pick it up to get a look at its contents.
Beans in tomato sauce, says the side of the can. I'm about to spontaneously combust in embarrassment when the smell hits me. I drop the can in the sink, spraying drops of bean liquid everywhere. It tips over in slow motion. The kitchen is silent again as the tinny thunk of the can lands in the bottom of the sink. Beans in red sauce of a too-familiar shade ooze towards the drain. Slowly but surely, the musty smell of Redding fills the room.
Ditzy is staring at me in shock. She looks like she doesn't know what to say, and to be honest, I don't either. I couldn't explain myself if I tried. I didn't even smell the Redding in the food as she lifted it towards her lips. I just knew.
I hear my own voice like it belongs to someone else, hoarse and cracked. "Check the other cans."
"But—" begins Patrick, and I already know what he's going to say.
"If they're all contaminated, we need to know. If it's just that one, we'll find out."
My eyes land on the drawer where Ditzy sourced the can opener. There's another one there, and I have a can opener on my pocket knife, too. Crude, but functional. We'll only need a small opening in each can to smell the inside anyway.
I slap the extra can opener in Patrick's hand, another can in Ditzy's, and grab one myself. Creamed corn. The first stab I make spurts more Redding-smell into the already heavy air. I tip the can over the sink. A dribble of pinkish-red corn juice runs out. Patrick confirms contamination on a can of soup, Ditzy on canned peas, me on a different soup. When the bottom of the sink fills, I give my pocket knife a quick rinse, click on its miniature LED flashlight, and go for the cupboard instead. A thorough inspection reveals no traces of Redding.
"Where are you?" I mutter. I sweep a couple cans aside, hoping to catch the swift retraction of any veins of Redding connected to them. There aren't any. "It developed from inside," I say, sliding down off the counter. Patrick looks queasy. The smell is potent here, but the Redding Ditzy was about to eat was impeccably camouflaged, and our standards of food have definitely fallen since the onset of the apocalypse. There's nothing to say we haven't already eaten some of this without realizing. The thought makes me want to puke in the can-filled sink.
"What the hell is going on here?" demands a voice. We all jump and spin around to find Calico J in the doorway with a look midway between horror and fury on his face. He turns straight to me. "Meg?"
"It's in the food." I pick up a can still trickling red into the sink to demonstrate. "And it didn't get there from the walls. We've been carrying it around."
The anger drains from his face. I rattle off some robotic explanation of what we've been doing here while he turns over the cans in the sink one by one, watching their red-stained contents leak down the drain. From his face, you'd have thought someone just ran over his pet gerbil.
"We found one can of flaked tuna that still seems to be okay?" I finish. "Though there are still a few cans left to check."
"How?" he whispers.
"If I had to guess? Anything that had a lot of water in it already." I spot the two bags he dumped by the door when he walked in. One is collapsed over the oblong shapes of what I would guess are spice containers, while carrot tops peek from the other. "We'll need to check the vegetables, too. Patrick found Redding in the garlic. Half of it, anyway."
Calico J's look of devastation only intensifies. I figured he'd be saddest about the garlic.
"This is days worth of food," he says, with a gesture over the sink. "Was it all fine just a day ago, or have we been eating this stuff? And why now?"
He's just repeating the questions I've already asked myself a dozen times over. I stay silent while he repeats my inspection of the cupboards, then up and down the walls beneath them, then back to the sink again. He doesn't find anything that I didn't. We both look at each other.
"So if it's in the food," says Calico J, "then where do we find food now?"
Like this chapter if you cried at the food waste 😢
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