Blood Red (26 page)

The baby-thing mewls horribly, its eyes
attempting to blink away the bloody mucus of its birth. It looks
pitiful and nearly helpless, twisting and straining on its back,
but it also looks inconceivably dangerous.

Scott whispers, “You gotta be fucking
kidding!”

“We’re in trouble,” Joel breathes.

He carefully aims the shotgun at the
abomination, and in a moment the thing is extinguished, smeared and
gone. Then he looks back at Rachel.

“I hope you’re onto something, girl,” he
says, reloading again.

Rachel, weakened to the point of near
collapse, glances back at Alan and Bonnie.

Bonnie is crying copiously but manages, “My
friend was a phlebotomist here at the hospital. I know where the
blood bank is. It’s a—it’s a start.”

At that moment, a brilliant light flashes
through the windows, a staccato strobe resembling lightning but
tinged with red. The illumination seems to go on for a full minute,
and the occupants of the waiting room hold their collective breath,
shielding their eyes. The light fades out, and Rachel peers around
warily at her fellow survivors, who are stunned silent. And almost
immediately, a great roar seems to emanate from the earth itself,
nearly shattering the windows, causing everyone to slap their hands
to their ears. It’s an enormous, otherworldly sound, at once
haunting and incomprehensible. It fades out gradually, like the
most insane thunder Rachel has ever heard

“What the
fuck
?” Scott asks the
room.

In the stunned silence that follows, Rachel
notices that the stumbling and staggering above her stopped the
moment the red light flashed, at least momentarily. And now the
movement begins again, hesitantly, as if the corpses reacted to the
sound in a significant way.

Rachel catches a glimpse of the clock above
the admissions desk. It is 5:14 a.m., and in the wake of the
atmospheric light, it’s clear that the sun is rising. The survivors
are spread out across the admissions area, caught in a moment of
bewildered indecision. It has been only 24 hours since she woke to
find the world utterly changed, and Rachel knows with yawing horror
that the world isn’t even done changing.

“You hear that?”

“You mean that sound like the end of the
fucking world?” Scott asks from against the wall. He’s still
plastered there, wanting to get as far away as possible from the
horror show that took place at the foot of the stairs.

Joel ignores him. “Those things up there
stopped moving for a second. Like it was some kind of
communication.”

“Exactly what I thought,” Alan says.

Chrissy lets out a small sound.

There’s a large double window on the south
side of the room that looks out on the small parking area, and even
now Rachel perceives a red tint throbbing there. She heads in that
direction warily, peering out into the darkness. There’s no sign of
the girl-thing that leaped past her. All she sees is the darkened
concrete of the parking lot, and the shadowy hulks of abandoned
cars and ambulances. In their windows, she catches a fading
reflection of a deeper red in the pre-dawn sky, something to the
north of the building. She cranes her neck to see as much of the
sky as possible, and she can see tremors of red fading out.

“Is this—is this something—alien?” she says
into the window. “Something from … from outer space?”

Joel is reloading his shotgun. He stops and
looks up. “There’s some kind of atmospheric thing happening for
sure. I saw it outside, too. And in fact I noticed it when
everything first happened. Didn’t everyone else? There was
something about the air, like an electric charge or something. But
different. Something definitely weird, almost an electromagnetic
feel to it.”

“I noticed that, too,” Kevin says.

“So, do all you law-enforcement types take
side jobs as scientists?” Scott says. “Is that it?”

Joel gives Scott a level gaze. “Yeah, that’s
what it is, Scott. I also might have the expertise you need to
handle your withdrawal symptoms, but you haven’t asked nicely
yet.”

The remark surprises Rachel. Apparently Joel
noticed the same symptoms she had noticed in Scott, or maybe he’d
arrived at his conclusion after Alan’s morphine revelation. And
then she realizes that as a policeman he’s probably trained to make
such deductions.

“I don’t need this shit.” Scott is pacing
again. “I don’t even know why I’m here anymore. I had this hospital
under control until that girl showed up, you know that?” He’s
addressing the whole room now but is glaring at Rachel. “This
fucking
teenager
sees a bunch of people acting weird and
assumes they’re aliens. This whole situation has become a
National Enquirer
article.”

“We’re just trying to survive, man,” Joel
says. “You haven’t said one constructive word since I came in
here.”

“Yeah, maybe my jaw hurts too much.” He
glances around. “You’re all witnesses to that, you know. That’s
brutality.”

“You’re playing by the old rules,” Joel says.
“I think that’s your problem—you don’t realize that everything has
changed.”

“I think it’s called denial,” Kevin says.

Scott looks over at Kevin, annoyed. “Who the
fuck are you?”

“All right, that’s enough,” Joel says. “We
have more important things to do than snap at each other.”

A heavy, dragging clatter sounds from
upstairs, both punctuating and interrupting Joel’s words. On
instinct, Rachel ducks her head, glancing up at the ceiling. In her
peripheral vision she catches a glimpse of a scurrying body outside
the window—an older man, his limbs crooked and impossibly
mobile—and she flinches away. She finds that Alan and Kevin have
crept up beside her. They’re staring out there, too, silent. Their
presence emboldens her, and she peers out again. There are actually
three bodies spidering their way across the concrete, between the
cars, all heading toward Lemay. They’re weaving and stumbling,
awkward on inverted limbs. Their jittery upside-down locomotion
almost makes them look like they’re nervously hovering.

“Jesus,” Kevin says in a deep baritone. “That
ain’t right.”

“Look over there,” Alan breathes,
gesturing.

“What?” Rachel says, squinting.

“There—on the far side of the lot. You can
barely see it. In the grass.”

Rachel strains her eyes and finally sees it.
One of the animated corpses, a heavy woman, has attached itself to
a Blue Spruce pine tree on the far side of the parking lot. The
thing is moving in weird undulations, as if attempting to climb the
tree but not having nearly the strength.

“What’s it doing?” Rachel asks, feeling the
hair on the back of her neck stand on end.

There’s another rattle above their heads, and
innumerable distant scuffles, and the three of them glance up.
Rachel notices that Joel is right behind her now.

“Yeah, yeah, I saw that outside, too. A
couple of those damn things. At first I thought they were trying to
hide under a tree, but this—it’s like—I don’t know—it’s looking for
something?”

“I can’t see it clear enough,” Rachel says.
She sees vague, shivery movement under the dark needles of the
pine, the contorted limbs jerking, the intermittent twitch of red
light at the tweaked-back head.

“There’s some kind of … purpose … to them, I
think,” she finds herself saying.

“They’re already more mobile than when I was
out there,” Joel breathes. “They seem to be wandering in the same
general direc—there’s another one!”

A flash of movement near the window makes
them hold their collective breath, but the thing scuttles by
quickly, a small corpse that Rachel recognizes instantly. She sees
the little tense face, the long brown hair hanging down to the
ground, the scalp still holding one dangling pink barrette. And the
luminescence, a faint strobe from behind the moving tongue.

“It’s that little girl,” Rachel says, “from
upstairs. She—I thought she was attacking me, but she jumped right
past and—and she left, like she didn’t see me.”

O
r even care about me
, she thinks.
This thought flutters through her consciousness and is gone.

The girl-corpse moves crablike toward the
front of the hospital, angling around the concrete pillars of the
front entrance, down the grassy knoll, and gone into the red
dawn.

“Aw Jesus, man,” comes Kevin’s thick voice
next to her. “What now?” He turns away, not wanting to see anymore,
and then Rachel hears his quick intake of breath.

Above the makeshift barricade of chairs and
angled furniture, a dead old woman is poised like a gray, spindly
arachnid, staring at them. Her steely eyes, below a dry, toothless
mouth, dart between them with an intelligence that Rachel hasn’t
yet seen. The thing crouches there on its hyperextended limbs,
quiet behind the metal and plastic.

There’s noise coming from beyond the old
woman, and Rachel swallows, glancing behind her at Joel, who is
wiping sweat from his brow. She catches a nervous glare in his
eyes, and as their eyes meet, he strides purposefully to her.

His voice is a hot whisper. “I got this. Get
to the blood bank, figure something out.”

She turns immediately to Bonnie and Alan.
“Let’s go.”

The waiting room is suddenly in motion again,
and as Rachel moves, she watches the old woman at the barricade.
The corpse seems to be staring at her, and she shivers, looking
away. She sees Chrissy at the far side give her a look of weary
fear. She looks absolutely helpless in her pajamas and bare feet.
After giving Bonnie and Alan a look, then another glance toward the
stationary old woman on the stairs, Rachel rushes over to
Chrissy.

“Hey.”

Chrissy clutches at Rachel’s forearm. “I
can’t—”

“Yes you can.”

Chrissy looks at her with her tear-reddened
eyes. “I lost my whole family.”

The young woman glances down toward the
floor, but Rachel encourages her chin back up. “We don’t want to
lose you too.”

Chrissy sniffs, gives a brief, fearful glance
to the stairwell. “I don’t think I can do this.”

“Yes you can!” Rachel gives the girl a quick,
strong embrace, feeling like some great protector, all the while
realizing that Chrissy is probably older than she is. “Now get over
there and help them.”

“Okay.”

Rachel rushes toward Alan and Bonnie, taking
the older woman’s hand, and as they cross the tiled portion of the
floor toward the doors that lead into the hospital’s inner
recesses, she hears Joel and Scott arguing at the stairwell. She
glances back at them to see them wrestling with a large piece of
desk furniture while the rest of the group is angling some kind of
file cabinet over there.

“Get it up! Get it up there!” Joel is
shouting. “Don’t let that thing near you.”

Rachel hurries into the hallway behind Bonnie
and Alan. She enters into a kind of tunnel vision, not daring to
glance to the left or right, where the smothered corpses lay one
after another in an ordered charnel house. She knows it’s because
of her that these corpses are truly dead, because of her that they
retain no further semblance of life. The memories of smothering
them fly back at her, like sharp pieces of glass cutting at her.
She feels a profound uneasiness, but deep down, she knows the
decision to blot out their light was right. Still, she can’t look
at them.

She does, however, glance at the room holding
her father as they pass. She feels a longing to open the door and
go to him, to dive into unconsciousness with him. The longing is so
great that her arm actually reaches out toward the door, and a sigh
escapes her throat. Then she’s whisked past and running again with
the group.

“The blood bank is down here to the right,”
Bonnie says breathlessly. “There’s a security door, but it’s open.
I happened to notice earlier when I was thinking it might be handy.
Before everything went to hell.”

Bonnie leads them through two sets of doors
into a small room containing three upright refrigeration units.
They’re not labeled; just anonymous looking with their tan veneer.
Bonnie pulls open a door to reveal a series of drawers containing
many units of blood. The blood type is stamped in a large letter at
the top left of each packet. Rachel’s eyes search frantically left
to right, up and down, seeing only a great deal of useless A and B
types.

“I’m not really sure how this works …” Bonnie
says, bending to scan all the drawers, her practiced hand flitting
among the packets. “Rachel, would you—” She gestures to the next
refrigerator.

Rachel opens the doors and immediately sees
two drawers filled with O-type blood.

“Here,” she says.

Bonnie joins Rachel. But as she does so,
Rachel sees that every O packet also bears the words
Rh
Positive
beneath the large
O
.

“There it is,” says Alan behind them. “Bottom
drawers.”

The two women glance down to see at least
fifty O-negative units, standing in order, receding into the depths
of the long refrigerated drawers.

“Okay, so we have it, now what do we do with
it?” Bonnie asks the room. There’s a quaver to her voice.

Alan says, “We…do we inject it …?”

“I don’t think we can’t get close enough for
that anymore,” Rachel says.

“Some kind of dart? A tranquilizer dart?
Something that would inject it from a distance?” Bonnie asks.

“Joel might know something.”

“I think at this point, we just need to see
what effect it has,” Alan says. “I say we start by splashing it on
them.”

Rachel and Bonnie are nodding.

It’s clear that several sources of commotion
surround them. They can hear the clank of metal and plastic coming
from the front of the hospital, as well as raised voices there.
Above them, there are the bumps and thumps of reanimated bodies,
and there’s even some kind of clang and rattle coming from farther
down the dim hallway. At these sounds, Rachel feels a shiver down
her spine.