Blood Red (15 page)

In a few minutes, Rachel is turning into her
dad’s office park, just off Harmony. She navigates her way through
the tree-shrouded aisles, finding the parking spaces mostly empty.
But there, near the front, is her dad’s silver Acura, and the sight
of it opens up an almost painful blossom of warm dread in her
chest. Her eyes fill with moisture, and she presses the gas pedal,
racing toward the front entrance.

Jenny grabs at the dash. “Careful,
Rachel!”

“Sorry, I just—he’s here!”

She brings the Honda to a skidding stop near
the steps leading to the main foyer and kills the engine. She grabs
her Magnum light, flings her door open, and starts racing across
the concrete between ornamental trees that she can barely see in
the starlight. She scrambles up the steps.

“Rachel, wait!”

Jenny is rounding the car, following with her
own flashlight. Rachel turns, trying not to be impatient.

Jenny catches up, but then Rachel races the
final distance to the glass doors and pulls at one, finding it
open. She glances back at her friend, then takes a few blind steps
inside. She’s instantly encased in total blackness. She takes two
more steps before bringing up her flashlight. Before she clicks it
on, she peers down the open hallway she knows lies to her left. At
once, she sees a small, vague red glow coming from the floor near
the elevators. A full-body tremble overtakes her. Is the glow just
her imagination? Please let it be her imagination.

Daddy!

Still staring in that direction, she thumbs
the button on the flashlight, and a cone of light blares down at
her feet. She doesn’t want to point her light over there, doesn’t
want to go over there, doesn’t want to think about what’s over
there. Heart pounding, she backs away to the doors and stumbles
outside.

“
No no no no—”

“What, what?”

“There’s a body in there.” Tears are burning
in her eyes when she rejoins Jenny at the top of the concrete
stairwell. “What does it mean, Jenny, what does it mean that his
car is still here, and there’s a body in there? What does it
mean?”

“Is it him?” Jenny asks gravely.

“I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“Didn’t you use your flashlight?”

“I couldn’t.” There’s anguish in Rachel’s
voice. “I—I—couldn’t.”

Jenny nods in understanding. “It…well, it
doesn’t mean anything, right? We don’t know anything. There are
other cars here. He could be trapped in the dark, in his office,
that’s all.”

“Okay,” Rachel breathes.

“We have to see who it is, though. We have to
go in.”

Rachel stands there uncertainly, watching a
lone sedan move up College, threading its way through the dead,
dark traffic. Its headlights weave restlessly left and right, and
then it has moved out of sight beyond the edge of the building. Off
to the west, on the horizon, she can see a vague crimson glow in
the sky, spotted intermittently across the Front Range. The entire
length of the Rocky Mountains appears to be on fire. She stares at
the phenomenon despondently.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Rachel whispers. “I
don’t know what I’d do if I was alone.”

Jenny offers a weak smile and takes Rachel’s
hand. “Same here.”

Rachel takes a deep breath, her throat
complaining at the acrid note of smoke in the air. “All right,
let’s go.”

They enter the building together, clutching
their lights with both hands. The twin beams illuminate the rich
wood paneling of the foyer and a sprawling information desk
littered with papers. A dead flat-screen monitor dominates the
center of the desk. Behind it, a chair sits empty. Jenny nervously
pokes her light over the opposite edge, then relaxes.

“No one here.”

They move forward toward the vestibule
leading to the hallway. Rachel feels emotion tightening her throat
as their lights begin to throw unsettled rays of illumination into
the area. She stops.

“Jenny, can you…” she says, gesturing toward
the elevators. “I can’t…”

“I don’t know what your dad looks like! I’ve
never met him.”

“Just—just tell me what you see.”

Jenny makes her way forward down the short,
wide hall. Out of the corner of her eye, Rachel watches Jenny,
backlit by the silver illumination from her flashlight, walk slowly
toward the body. Jenny gives the sprawled figure a wide berth,
circling it. Rachel casts wary glances her way, trying not to look
at the body. She’s gritting her teeth.

“It’s a man. I think it’s a janitor. There’s
a vacuum cleaner here. And he’s got—oh!”

“What?!”

“Oh fuck, he’s moving! Just like that
girl.”

Motivated by the intense relief of learning
that the body is not her father’s, Rachel races over, adding her
light to Jenny’s. It’s a man in plain clothes who had clearly been
in the act of vacuuming the carpet adjacent to the elevator
hallway’s stone tile. His ball cap sits crookedly next to his head,
which is straining, trying to rise. Both flashlights are trained on
the man’s head, and in the blunt vividness of the beams, the
phenomenon looks almost clinical.

Rachel’s flashlight trembles anew. “This is
happening to all of them,” she says flatly. “And I think more is
going to happen.”

“More?”

“I don’t know how, but I think these bodies
are coming back.” Her light is still fixated on the man’s
rhythmically jerking head. “And not back to life, but back
to…movement.”

Jenny is silent. Rachel shines her light
toward her, sees that she’s crying, her face a mask of shock.

“Hey, hey,” Rachel says, going to her. “It’s
okay, it’s okay, keep it together.”

“I—I—I—don’t know how much more I can
take.”

“Well, I hate to say it, but it’s only gonna
get worse.”

“Great.”

“Come on,” Rachel says, directing her light
toward the door to the stairwell. “My dad’s office is upstairs. You
ready to go?”

“No.”

“You can wait here.”

“
Fuck
no.”

Jenny takes a big, quavering breath, then
goes with Rachel to the door. Rachel takes hold of the handle and
pushes the door open. The stairwell is intensely dark. The beams of
their flashlights slice through the blackness, hard-edged. As
they’re stepping over the threshold, Rachel finds her father,
unconscious, sprawled on the stairs.

“
Daddy!”
Rachel screams.
“No, no, no
no!”

She rushes to the body, which is sprawled
across several steps, face up. She embraces her father, shutting
her eyes tight, consumed with grief. She’s sobbing into his chest,
feeling a kind of regression, feeling herself small and young, her
whole life—and particularly the past few years since her mother’s
death—coming to bear on this moment.

Rachel opens her blurred eyes to look at his
face, finds it unresponsive.

“Daddy!” she cries again, clutching him
fiercely. “Oh God no!”

Jenny has fallen to her knees at the base of
the stairs, her flashlight limp in her hand, illuminating the
entire stairwell indirectly. Her other hand is covering her
mouth.

Rachel feels that his body is warm, like the
others, and completely limp. In the next moment she snaps her head
back and focuses on her dad’s chest.

There’s a pulse.

“He’s alive!” she cries desperately. “He’s
alive!”

“What?”

“Turn your light off!”

They click off their flashlights, plunging
the stairwell into absolute blackness. And there’s no red glow
coming from her father’s head. Rachel clicks her light back on, and
Jenny follows suit.

“He’s alive,” she repeats. “Daddy! Wake
up!”

No response.

“Daddy!”

“Look, his head is bleeding,” Jenny says.

Rachel lifts herself away from her dad and
angles her light to illuminate his head. There’s blood there, and a
thin line of it has stained the stairs. It’s not flowing, though;
it has coagulated and stopped. Rachel carefully touches the area of
the wound with her palm and feels a considerable knot there. She
points her flashlight straight up the two-level stairwell, stands
up, and examines the area.

“I think he fell down,” she says. “Maybe he
was scared, I don’t know. Oh my god, I’m shaking. I was so scared
that…that…” She feels a sob of relief rising out of her but tamps
it down. “Can you help me?”

“You want to move him? Is that smart?”

“I don’t think we can count on an ambulance
showing up.”

“I know, but—”

“Set your light down on the floor so we can
see, then help me with his feet, okay?

Jenny does so immediately, setting her
flashlight against the lowest step, letting it shine upward. Rachel
stuffs the end of her own light in her back jeans pocket, also
pointing up. She gets her arms under her dad’s shoulders, and Jenny
situates herself at his knees. They manage to lift him mostly from
the ground and drag him the rest of the way down the stairs. Rachel
is careful not to let his head fall backward, trying to cradle it
against her chest. He’s breathing steadily through his half-open
mouth, almost a snore, and except for the bump above his right
temple, he appears uninjured.

“We need to go back to the hospital,” Rachel
announces.

“Okay,” Jenny manages.

“I can’t believe he’s alive!”

“You’re lucky,” Jenny says wistfully.
“
He’s
lucky.”

After considerable exertion, they get him out
of the stairwell. He’s not an overweight man, but he’s not exactly
thin, either. He’s solid. Rachel remembers, out of the blue, when
he told her he once played football in college. He would joke about
all that young muscle going soft with age.

She pauses, breathing heavily. “Go ahead and
set him down … grab your light.”

While Jenny does so, Rachel goes to her
knees, still cradling her dad’s upper body. She feels intensely
protective of him, needing to take care of him, needing to save
him. At the same time, she feels drained from the emotional turmoil
of believing him to be gone and then abruptly discovering,
improbably, that he’s alive. She’s been emptied and then filled
back up again. After everything else, it’s too much. Her dry tear
ducts are throbbing. Her head is spinning dully. It doesn’t help
that she’s physically and psychologically exhausted.

“Ready?” Jenny asks, her own flashlight in
her back pocket, its beam dancing across the ceiling behind
her.

“Yes.”

They continue dragging Rachel’s father
through the hallway, past the elevator doors, onto the tile.
Rachel, hauling backward, remembers the janitor lying there,
glances down to make sure they avoid him. She notices the movement
of his head again, and despite her own jerky movements, she can see
that the movements are already more pronounced.

“Wait, stop.”

Jenny drops the feet, breathing heavily
again, and Rachel carefully sets her father’s upper body down to
the floor. She takes her flashlight out of her back pocket and
focuses its light on the janitor. Immediately, she stumbles
backward, tripping over her dad’s shoulder, staggering against the
wall next to the elevator door.

“What?!” Jenny shrieks.

And then she sees.

The janitor’s entire upper body is now
moving. He’s flat on his back, and his head has lolled over onto
its crown, upside down, its dead eyes staring at them, shining
flatly in the trembling light. The facial muscles are working
horribly, now into a rictus smile, now into a sharp grimace. His
jaw clicks hollowly.

The young women can only stare, stunned.

The man’s shoulders jerk without real
control, twitching rhythmically. And now a sound is coming from the
dry hole of the man’s open mouth—a guttural, gasping sound—and it’s
directed right at them. There’s no mistaking that.

“Rachel!” Jenny yells desperately.

“Come on!” Rachel cries, pocketing her light
and hauling up her father’s shoulders. “Let’s get the hell out of
here!”

Jenny, emitting a loud whine to mask the
awful sound coming from the janitor, grabs Rachel’s father by the
knees. They heave him across the tile, then onto the carpet,
keeping their eyes on the janitor, who lies in shadow now,
jittering, his jack-o’-lantern head angling over to follow their
movements. He’s jerking his right shoulder now, trying to rise and
follow, but Rachel can see that his body remains uncooperative, the
flesh at odds with whatever motivating force is now propelling
it.

“What is it?!” Jenny cries in a high-pitched
warble. “What’s happening to him?!”

“I don’t know,” Rachel manages, breathing
hard, yanking at her father with every backward step. “Let’s
go!”

They pick up speed as they get past the
reception desk and burst through the front door. They drag him down
the steps, then across the front path, stopping adjacent to the
car. Rachel sets him down gently, opens the rear door. She squats
down behind her dad and pulls him into the back seat, uttering a
prolonged gasp of effort. Jenny helps angle his lower legs into the
seat, and slams the door closed. Rachel hops out the other rear
door, making sure her father’s head looks secure and comfortable,
and closes the door behind her. She removes the flashlight from her
back pocket, ducks into the driver’s seat, and cranks the engine to
life as Jenny falls into the passenger seat.

Rachel punches the gas and jolts the Honda
forward. She catches sight of her father’s Acura and has a brief
moment of indecision—should she switch cars for his roomier one?
But she’s seriously disturbed by what she has seen. The
motorcyclist with his askew eye and jittery skin was one thing, but
this terrible reanimation is quite another. In a matter of minutes,
that janitor inside her father’s building swiftly evolved from
involuntary trembling to seemingly conscious—and monstrous—life.
She can’t spare the time to make the switch. She has to get the
three of them back to relative safety.