Red's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Red came back from the wall with the controller still warm in her hand. The yard was quiet. The man was not. He had rolled onto his side in the upstairs room and kicked the wall twice in his sleep. Each thud carried. Sound was what had brought the horde the first time. She could not leave him in the house, and she could not stand over him all day. She needed him held, watched, and silenced, and she needed it done before dark. She dragged him down the stairs by his good leg and out to the small shed at the back of the yard. It was a patched box of mismatched planks with barred windows and a heavy door. She had built it last winter for storage and never filled it. She laid him on the floor and ran a chain from a bolt in the center beam to a cuff around his ankle. The chain was four feet long. It reached the water bucket. It did not reach the door. She tested the crossbeam from the outside, then tested it again. The door held. She set the rest of her plan around him. On a stool near his hand she put a plastic water gun she had filled with vinegar from the kitchen. If he woke and started to yell, he could spray his own mouth before she got there. It would burn enough to stop a scream. She wrote one word on a scrap of cardboard and propped it against the stool. QUIET. Then she carried her tripod out to the oak across the yard and set it up under the low branches. The camera on top wore a tarp stitched with ivy and dead leaves. She angled the lens through the barred window of the shed and turned the small screen toward the kitchen sill. The solar panel caught the afternoon light. The feed came up gray and clear. She could see his chest move from inside the house. He woke near sundown. She watched from the sink. He pulled against the chain once, felt it, and stopped. He saw the cardboard. He saw the water gun. He looked straight up at the barred window, then past it, searching for the lens. He did not find it. His mouth opened, then closed. He picked up the water gun, turned it in his hand, and set it back on the stool. Then he lay down on his side and waited. Red let out the breath she had been holding for a day. The stranger was inside her walls, and for the first time since she had dragged him through the gate, she knew where he was and what he would do if he made a sound.