Blood Red (24 page)

In hesitant fits and starts, he moves toward
the crab woman on the stairwell, brandishing his weapon high
overhead. And now he’s bellowing at the woman’s corpse, a stream of
obscenities and incomprehensible barks flowing from his mouth.

Rachel watches, mesmerized, as the
woman-thing hobbles back up the stairs in retreat, squawking.
Encouraged, the bald man leaps forward at the thing, rearing back
with the bat. He takes a savage swing that whiffs over the woman’s
head, which has jerked downward defensively. As the bat swings
around, the woman leaps at the man, knocking him sideways against
the wall.

The bald man begins to scream, “Get it off
me! Get it off me!” No one immediately volunteers to heed his
cries, which quickly become high-pitched and almost girlish as the
corpse-thing twists awkwardly around him with its oddly bent limbs,
which seem to dislocate with each jerking, angular movement. The
angry, upside-down expression on the woman’s face, and the urgent,
throaty gasp communicates what Rachel thinks must be the pain of
the corpse’s joint-popping movement.

Finally, Rachel leaps forward to help, and
stops short when she sees another gown-clad corpse spidering down
the stairs, farther up. It’s the corpse of a gaunt, gray-whiskered
old man, and it’s dragging an IV rig across the floor, connected by
intravenous tubing to the thing’s arm, the metal rod clattering
noisily behind it on its way down the stairs.

It’s at that moment when Rachel knows that
things have gone out of control.

She won’t let herself retreat. She kicks
forward, searching the area crazily for some kind of blanket or
cushion with which to possibly smother the things. There’s
nothing—just plastic and metal and heavily trafficked low-pile
carpet.

The scrawny old man, despite the apparatus
he’s dragging, is quick, angling down the steps with a weird
efficiency of movement. It’s not human locomotion—more akin to an
insect than a spider, Rachel realizes, watching the old man clamber
down the stairs toward the woman-corpse, his dead black eyes
flaring, seemingly enraged. The movement is all hyperextended
elbows and knees, twitching on strained ligaments. He adds his own
wheezy gasp to that of the woman, then launches toward her to help
her with the bald man.

Rachel arrives in time to shove the old man
into the wall, deflecting him from the woman, and his limbs flail
in surprise, grasping for handhold. The thing’s head swivels around
on its neck to glare at Rachel, but she doesn’t allow herself to
recoil at the upside-down, gasping face. Keeping as far as possible
from the dangerous head, she throws herself at the thing’s
scissoring legs, grabbing at them and finally latching on. He tries
to lunge at her, but the limits of the old man’s atrophied muscles
get the best of the thing, and Rachel uses her advantage to heave
the man down the stairs, away from her. He rolls down the stairs on
his back, his gown winding around him, revealing most of the old
man’s gray, naked body.

“Help!” Rachel calls to anyone who will
listen, not sure how to deal with the predicament of the bald man,
who is now fully in the clutches of the woman-thing, its arms
twisted almost comically backwards around the large man’s torso.
The woman’s head is bent severely backward on the neck, pressed
hard against the bald man’s chest, the dead eyes facing the
ceiling. The man has gone silent, his eyes full of shock.

Bonnie and Alan are suddenly at Rachel’s
side, their eyes wide but their hands empty. Rachel grits her
teeth, knowing she needs something to cover these bodies, something
with which to smother the things in their heads.

“Grab her!” she yells.

“How?!” Bonnie cries back, confused.

“Just get her off him! Watch the head! Alan,
take care of that—” She gestures to the old man. “Get the rest of
them to help you! Smother it!”

Rachel lunges forward to yank at the
woman-corpse’s shoulder, and the response is instant: The thing
darts at her with its head, using its inner radiation as a weapon.
Rachel flinches backward, studying it. The movement reminds Rachel
of a scorpion lunging with its stinger, but the limitations of the
corpse’s body hobble whatever intelligence is inside. It keeps
trying to lunge, but the woman’s anatomy and musculature won’t let
it complete the movement—won’t let it fully attack.

Rachel grabs instead for one of its locked
elbows, and Bonnie does the same on the other side. Rachel notices
with strong distaste that the flesh is almost gelatinous, and her
grip seems to sink down to bone. The corpse is shrieking its
guttural gasps at them, back and forth, as they pry its
backward-bent arms off the bald man. And they do come loose,
finally, and the thing drops back to the floor. Simultaneously, the
bald man slumps down the wall, drained of color. Rachel sees the
same yellow bruising she saw on Jenny’s chest, from the man’s chin
down his neck.

The woman-corpse is scrambling back to its
oddly horrifying spider stance, and Rachel kicks at it, tripping it
up. It gasps at her hatefully.

To her right, Kevin steps forward wielding
one of the plastic chairs that had been on the perimeter of the
room. Reminding Rachel of a lion tamer, of all things, Kevin jerks
the chair forward with both his meaty hands, and now the corpse is
scrambling backward, nearly perching atop the bald man’s body, as
if triumphantly over its prey. Kevin jabs the chair forward,
catching the woman-corpse with a metal leg in its inverted face. It
scowls, and Kevin jabs again, the end of the leg lodging in the
left eye socket. The corpse shakes its head furiously, jittering
the chair in Kevin’s grip and stirring its own eye to jelly. He
shoves forward, and the woman-thing shrieks, it head now
irrevocably caught. Kevin keeps pushing as the corpse screeches at
him, its limbs flailing.

At the sight and sound of this monstrosity,
Rachel trips backward onto the floor.

On the other side of the room, a trio of
people including Alan has descended on the old man. Alan has
managed to gather clothing from somewhere, but he’s standing back
in favor of a businessman in a rumpled suit who has grabbed the IV
pole. The man is repeatedly stabbing the old man’s corpse in the
midsection, eliciting another gasping screech. The image is that of
a giant spider pinned to a board. Rachel hears the businessman
yelling, “Now!” and Alan descends on the corpse’s head, the cloth
wadded at the face. The glow snaps out with an electric crack, and
Rachel turns back to the woman-corpse.

It has freed itself from Kevin’s chair leg
and is back on its hands and feet—a chaos of energy and anger. It
seems about to lunge again when a terrific blast deafens Rachel.
She flattens herself to the ground, hands flying to hear ears. Joel
stands ten feet away, some kind of tactical shotgun cradled in his
arms, its black barrels smoking.

The boom of the shotgun reverberates across the
waiting room and dies away, and Rachel registers two things: the
almost painfully welcome sight of Joel walking briskly across the
room, navigating the mess of overturned tables and chairs, and then
the ominous rustling of movement coming from the second floor,
right above them. One by one, still breathing raggedly, the people
assembled in the lobby begin staring up at the ceiling, beyond
which they all hear the sounds of unspeakable things dragging and
stumbling.

“They’re coming down,” Rachel manages,
pushing against a crushing weight of helplessness.

“You should see what I saw outside.”

When Joel approaches Rachel, she sees that he
has been spattered with blood, and it appears that he has dipped
his entire right arm into a bucket of gore. The sleeve of his
uniform is caked and stiffening. Rachel does her best to ignore
these details. Instead, she tries hard to focus on what he’s
carrying. He has armed himself with two rifles, both slung over his
shoulder, in addition to the shotgun he just fired, which is
gripped tightly in his fist. He’s also wearing two pistols at his
hips. He looks like something out of a movie.

She’s dimly aware of the people at her
periphery, coming out of their own stunned silence. Scott, whom she
didn’t even notice during the fight, lifts himself from a crouched
position next to the old man’s corpse, looking on the verge of
tears or rage. He staggers a bit, grasping for balance against the
wall, and she half-sees that he has been splashed with blood from
the old-man corpse, which is sprawled across the floor, grizzled
and dead. Alan, himself painted with gore, is wide-eyed in some
kind of daze.

Rachel herself can’t do much more than stand
there fidgeting. She feels an inadvertent twitch in her chin.

The blood is everywhere.

Blood
.

Joel reaches her and extends a hand. She
takes it, and he pulls her up effortlessly. “You all right?”

“I think so.”

“Hey
hey HEY!
” comes a loud voice to
her right. It’s Scott, and he’s pointing at the woman-corpse that
Joel shot. Its twitching movements are becoming more pronounced,
and its limbs are beginning again to grab at the matted low-pile
carpet, slathering its own blood across the floor in wide swaths.
“Christ!” he cries. “They won’t fucking
die
!”

Joel raises the shotgun again and pulls the
trigger. Rachel flinches at the blast. As it echoes away, some kind
of braying noise comes from the corpse’s mouth, a hoarse, desperate
sound that doesn’t even seem close to human. Reluctantly opening
her eyes, she sees a black hole in the thing’s chest, right at the
heart, but impossibly the corpse is still flailing around.

“The head! Aim for the head!” she calls.

Joel does so, and a ragged, bloody hole
explodes at the thing’s jaw. Rachel also sees a distinct burst of
red light, quickly extinguished, like a light bulb receiving a
strong pulse of wattage and popping out. And the body falls to the
floor in a heap, bleeding out.

“Force of habit,” Joel breathes.

“What the fuck, man!” Scott yells now. He
steps away from the still stunned assemblage and approaches the
blown-apart corpse. “They’re people! What’s happening to them? They
were—”

Joel points the shotgun down and away,
switches it to his left hand, then steps forward to meet Scott. His
right fist comes out of nowhere in a shocking hook, and the impact
sends Scott stumbling backward, slipping on the tile and crashing
flat onto his back.

“That’s for the generator, dickhead.”

Scott clutches the side of his face in angry
surprise, glaring at Joel, but he doesn’t say anything. He works
his jaw, slowly getting back to his feet.

“Now, I want everybody to calm down!” Joel
says to the room. “We won’t survive this thing if we panic.”

“Fuck you, cop!” Scott sneers.

“Take it easy!” Joel says, voice raised, eyes
focused and stern, aimed at Scott. “Believe it or not, we’re all on
the same side.” He shakes out his right hand, then uses it to point
toward the front entrance, where Rachel can see the fender of his
cruiser. “If what I saw outside is any indication, every one of the
bodies in this hospital is now dangerous. They’re not just flopping
around anymore. They’re mobile. And it isn’t only a few of them
scrambling around—it’s all of them.”

“Where should we go?” Bonnie says
desperately.

“That’s the thing—there’s really no better
option out there. There’s the college, but they haven’t got any
supplies, nothing like here. So I’m not sure we should leave.” He
waits for objections, but none come. “Like you said before, this
place is the ultimate first-aid kit, and it’s got power.” He
glances contemptuously at Scott, who’s backing against the wall.
“You can’t say the same about any other place out there. These
things, these corpses—they aren’t too smart. They’re like animals.
But they are getting better at moving around—so my vote is to
hunker down. Barricade this place.”

“How?” Rachel asks.

“We get this stairway crammed up with
furniture and boxes and whatever else we can get our hands on.
These fucking things, whatever the hell they are, want to get down
here for whatever reason. We can still hold ’em off until we have
some answers.”

“Answers?”

“Yes, answers.” Joel opens his shotgun and
reloads it with cartridges from his breast pocket. “I can kill
these things just fine with this weapon and the ones I’ve gathered
in the cruiser, but I’ve only got so much ammo. Rachel here came up
with another answer earlier, a messy answer, sure, but it worked.”
He finishes reloading then gestures to Scott, who is standing
again. “Scott’s right, we need to know what’s happening with these
bodies. We need to understand it. Does anyone else have any ideas
they want to share?”

That question is greeted by a short, heavy
silence; things continue to bump and rumble above their heads, and
many of the people in the waiting room have turned to look at
Rachel. It’s an instant, unconscious thing: They believe her to be
the authority on this phenomenon. Yes,
her
, 19-year-old
Rachel.

She knows she somehow managed to take charge
the moment these things started down the stairs, and yes, she knows
she figured out how to smother these bodies, but as for answers?
Real answers? Absurdly, she doesn’t think she can remember how to
open her mouth and respond.

Blood
.

She tries giving the word her voice, and it
comes out pitifully weak.

“Blood.”

Just a whisper.

Joel seems to hear her, and he looks at her
sympathetically, like a child. So it’s annoyance that breaks Rachel
from her brief paralysis.

“It’s blood,” she says more loudly, more
firmly.

“What?” Joel is moving toward the staircase,
peering up it warily. “What do you mean?”