Blood Red (22 page)

Smothering the corpses along the hallway
takes less than forty minutes. When Rachel manages to locate
another battery-powered wall clock, the display reads 2:21 a.m.

Joel and Jenny are carefully covering the
corpses atop the gurneys with the sheets that were already
haphazardly gathered around the shifting bodies. In a few cases,
Joel has gently placed loved ones atop the same gurney, then
covered the horror of their defiled flesh with sheets and
spread-open gowns. Alan and Bonnie have dismissed themselves to
rooms 109 and 111 to check on the unfortunate and most likely
doomed survivors there. The majority of them are on morphine,
awaiting the end.

Rachel stares at the door of the makeshift
supply room that holds her father. She takes a deep breath and
enters the room, immediately watching his face. There’s no
movement, save for his even breathing. She lets the breath go in a
quiet sigh, then pulls up a plastic-backed chair and plants herself
at his side. She finds his left hand and squeezes it with her
right.

He hasn’t moved an inch since she was last
here. She closes her eyes, feeling grittiness there, as well as a
sharp ache behind her left brow. She knows she will never live long
enough to dispel the memory of the past hour—hell, the past entire
day. Those actions and sensations will populate her nightmares
until the day, perhaps soon, when she meets her own end.

Joel’s voice invades her thoughts, and she
opens her eyes. He’s speaking into his radio; she can hear its
intermittent squawk. He seems to be just outside the door now.

“—and who at Windsor, you said?”

“Tommy,” comes a static-filtered reply.

“Tommy? I don’t know him.”

“Her.”

“Oh. Well, I don’t know her.” He appears at
the doorway and looks in, nodding. “Does she have anything
organized there?”

“I think she’s organizing something at the
high school.”

“How about you, Buck?”

The cop named Buck describes his situation at
the elementary school down on Harmony, about twenty survivors holed
up, helping out. “Got a good group here. Everyone seems to be
pretty stand-up. We’ve got power.”

“Generator?”

“Yep, portable rigs from Home Depot.”

Rachel is thankful to have Joel here as
exhaustion settles over her more heavily by the second. She notices
that the clean-shaven, almost desperate military sense of authority
he projected at the downtown crash site has given way to a more
low-key air of control. He looks more human now. She knows he must
be as exhausted as she is, perhaps more so.

“Well, you know the score,” he says to Buck.
“Just clear ‘em out. Gotta start somewhere.”

“You done a kid yet?” Buck asks over the
radio.

“Yes.” Joel glances significantly at
Rachel.

“Try doing forty of ’em in a row. A group of
them here must have been gearing up for some kind of P.E. practice.
Stretching in the gym or something when this goddamn thing struck.
Just slumped over in a big circle.”

“Jesus.”

“Talk to you in an hour.”

“Out.”

Joel attaches the radio to his belt, then
yawns terrifically. He finds himself alone with Rachel on the other
side of her dad, and she tries to lighten the mood with a
halfhearted smile. Bonnie has returned to the admissions area,
where there’s some kind of minor commotion.

“I’ll regret this,” Joel says, pulling up the
one other chair in the room, one of the black plastic-and-metal
things that are ubiquitous throughout the hospital. “I’ll probably
be asleep in two minutes.”

“I know what you mean.”

“You okay?”

“No.”

He nods. “So this is your dad.” He looks at
his face, then back at her. “That was a pretty amazing thing you
did. How old are you?”

“Nineteen.”

“Damn, girl, that’s impressive.”

“Only if he makes it.” She watches him a
moment, then asks, “Do you have any family?”

“No, not here,” he says. “My dad is in
Denver, but I haven’t spoken to him in a few weeks. I wish I had,
now.” He pauses. “Mom’s in Texas with a new husband I can’t stand,
so I don’t see much of her either. You?”

“Just my dad now,” she says quietly.

Rachel blinks exaggeratedly, trying to
squeeze out the grit in her eyes. She shakes her head to clear it
of an encroaching sleep haze, looks at him squarely.

“So what do you think happened, really?” she
asks. “What’s going on here?”

Joel lets loose a weary sigh. “Honestly, I
keep going back to some kind of biological attack. Germ
warfare.”

“Seriously?”

“What else could it be, right? It’s got all
the markings of that kind of thing. A population decimated by some
kind of biochemical agent, some kind of aerosol … When I woke to
this thing, when I went outside, there was a haze over everything,
did you see that?”

Rachel nods, not relishing the memory. “The
haze, and that—that buzzing noise over everything.”

“Right! Exactly.” Joel leans back in the
chair, gazes up at the ceiling. “Maybe that was, I don’t know, the
sound of the aerosol being delivered. You ask me how, though, as
far as who could do something like this—this kind of scale … hell,
I have no idea.”

“What about the glow? The glow coming from
inside? What could cause something like that?”

“Fuck if I know—excuse me.” He angles a
sheepish glance at her, and his voice goes lower. “You want to know
the first thing I really thought of? My dad and I used to read
these crazy science fiction books together. He turned me on to all
kinds of silly crap. I remember reading this one story about
nanotechnology. It was about these scientists in Jerusalem who
created a robot the size of a hornet that could kill the enemy,
see?” His eyes go distant with the memory, probably recalling his
father, whose fate he has no way of knowing. “That was at least
three years ago I read that. So my first thought? Crazy as it
sounds, what if it’s some combination of nanorobotics and
biological warfare?” He pauses. “Yeah, that’s stupid.”

Rachel stares at him.

Joel shifts across from her. “Yeah,
unbalanced cop, I know. Watch out.”

“No, no, I just that I’ve never heard of such
a thing.”

“I read too much science fiction, maybe.”

He heaves himself up, replaces the chair
against the wall. “Well, I’m starting to feel it. I gotta get
moving again. Look, regardless of what’s happening, I think it’s
safe to proceed under the assumption that we’re under attack. And
that means we have to organize and defend ourselves. Like your
friend Bonnie said, we’ve got a building full of rooms and beds,
we’ve got supplies. We lack weapons, but I’m going to take care of
that. You’re a resourceful girl, do you think you can rally the
troops to start clearing the upper floors of, you know, of
bodies?”

She nods heavily. “I can do that.”

“I’ll be back, then. I wish I had another
radio to give you. I’ll try to pick up another Motorola at the
station, so we can keep in contact.”

“All right. Be careful.”

“Same back atcha.”

Rachel starts to stand, but Joel raises a
hand, palm toward her.

“Hey, hey,” he says. “Take a few minutes,
it’s okay. Relax. You earned it.”

“I’m okay,” she says gratefully.

Listening to him stride purposefully down the
hall, Rachel manages to stand, somewhat creakily. She yawns and
stretches. In the midst of this comparative lull in the frantic
movement of the past day, she understands how very tired she is.
Her eyes are sandpapery and aching, her limbs weak, her breathing
shallow. She feels that she might fall to her knees at any
moment.

There’s a small window on the other side of
the small room, and Rachel goes to it, draws the blinds open. For a
moment, the window appears painted black, but then she can see a
vehicle approaching from the south. And now she sees Joel pulling
out of the parking lot in his cruiser. He takes the hard right onto
Lemay and disappears.

She turns around, and her eyes fall on a
small refrigerator in the corner. She goes to it and finds that
it’s filled with bottled water. Gratefully, she takes one out,
twists it open, and takes a long pull. She empties the bottle in
less than a minute, tosses it in the small trash can at her feet.
She also finds a plastic-wrapped sandwich, and the sight of it
nearly causes her to convulse with hunger. She realizes that she
hasn’t eaten in about thirty-six hours. She consumes the
turkey-and-cheese sandwich quickly, follows it up with more
water.

She returns to her chair. “Daddy, please wake
up,” she murmurs, bowing her head so that it rests gently against
his ribs. “I need you.” She reaches her arm over his midsection in
a half-embrace.

She can smell the subtle musk of his favorite
cologne, can feel his sturdy warmth. She’s suddenly enveloped in
sensory reminders of home, of comfort and love, and sleep takes her
effortlessly. She slips into unconsciousness feeling like a little
girl.

Of her sleep, she remembers only jagged,
terrifying imagery couched in blackness. And though it feels the
slumber lasts for mere minutes, when a shout jolts her awake, she
finds, according to the digital clock on the thermostat by the
door, that she has been out for an hour and a half. It is now just
after 4:00 a.m. Someone has closed the door to let her
sleep—probably Bonnie. Rachel feels a conflict of gratitude and
annoyance.

She lifts her arm from her father’s
midsection to find that it’s asleep. She shakes it, watching his
face, finding no change. Reluctantly, she leaves him.

When she opens the door, two figures—Bonnie
and a person she doesn’t recognize—are running down the
hallway.

“What is it?!” Rachel calls after them, her
mind still foggy from sleep.

“I think it’s Jenny!” Bonnie yells back.

Now Rachel can hear the screaming. The shout that
woke her now strikes her, in retrospect, as obviously Jenny’s
voice. Fear grasps at Rachel’s insides, and she immediately drops
in step behind Bonnie.

“What happened?!”

“No idea!”

She can see Alan reaching the end of the
hallway now and hurrying off to the right, and it becomes clear
that their destination is the examination room that holds Jenny’s
sisters. Rachel’s heart sinks further. The wide hallway pounds with
footfalls. Ahead of Rachel is a blur of motion and Jenny’s now
bloodcurdling scream.

She catches up with Bonnie and a large
unidentified man, right on their heels. They burst through the open
door to the first examination room.

They come to an abrupt stop in the
doorway.

Confusion.

It’s a small room, like the motorcyclist’s
room, but there are seven gurneys crowded inside it. Four of the
gurneys hold bodies, and they are squirming. The movement reminds
Rachel of the jerky, uncontrolled flopping of a fish out of water.
The corpses’ faces are masks of absolute, twitching horror, and in
the split second that Rachel has to absorb what’s happening in the
room, she makes an acute observation: Whatever terrible reanimation
is occurring within these corpses, it is displaying a common
characteristic. The new presence inside these bodies is trying to
force the bodies to locomote on their backs, upside down.

There’s a body on the floor, freshly fallen
from its gurney, that’s trying to gain purchase on the tile. It’s
attempting to lift itself off the ground crablike, but it’s failing
with apparent frustration, the limbs slipping repeatedly in its
frantic movements. It keeps clattering against the base of the
gurney that it apparently fell from.

Two more bodies are on the ground, and they
are entwined around Jenny, who is screaming. The bodies of a teen
and preteen girl are heaving uncooperative limbs over her, pinning
her to the ground. The corpses seem to be burrowing their heads
against Jenny’s midsection, stabbing their upside-down foreheads
into her. Their mouths are clenched open, their dead eyes peeled
wide and jittering.

It takes a moment for Rachel to find her
voice as these thoughts flit through her consciousness, and then it
barks out of her—

“Jenny!”

Rachel leaps blindly toward her friend,
reaching out to her outstretched arm. The two young women lock
eyes, Jenny’s expression pleading, her body twisting, trying to
yank away from the grasping arms of her sisters.

“Help me! Help me! They’re—they’re burning
me!”

“Get their legs!” Rachel shouts to anyone who
will listen.

The newcomer standing stunned next to Bonnie
breaks from his horrified stupor and goes into action. He rounds
the mass of limbs and grabs the corpses’ lower legs, being careful
to avoid the other body scrabbling next to the gurney behind
him.

“Watch their heads! Don’t let them get near
you!” Rachel screams over Jenny’s cries and the guttural, animal
screeches of the things holding her.

After some struggling, they manage to
separate the bodies. Jenny pulls free, and Rachel goes careening
backward through the doorway, into the hall, onto her butt, leaving
Jenny to curl into a fetal position in front of Bonnie, who quickly
kneels to tend to her.

The bulky stranger manages to flop the
corpses of Jenny’s sisters atop the other one on the floor, and
then he hurriedly backs away from them. They don’t give any kind of
chase, just seem to cower there, watching the survivors warily,
angrily, their growls reduced now to low rumbles.

“Bring her out!” Rachel calls, and Bonnie and
the man do so, dragging Jenny through the doorway.

Jenny is whimpering, crying out with the
movement across the floor. Rachel realizes her friend is hurt, but
she can’t see any visible damage.

As soon as they’re all out in the hallway,
Bonnie slams the door shut, slicing off the sounds from within.
Rachel tries to get her bearings as they all breathe heavily, Jenny
weeping, frowning deeply, curled up.