Blood Red (28 page)

“You all right?”

Bonnie manages only a halfhearted smirk.

“Don’t give up yet, okay?” Rachel pleads.

“Lead the way.”

The two women careen through the dim corridor
and into admissions to face a new horror. Joel and the others have
assembled all the furniture they could find as a barrier in the
stairwell, erecting a haphazard blue-and-gray tower of cheap
plastic and scuffed metal. There are more than a dozen corpses
assembled behind it and against it, gasping and growling. Now that
she sees the results of the group’s frenzied efforts and the crowd
of reanimated bodies behind it, Rachel is almost sure the
precarious barrier will not hold.

“Oh no.”

Joel is standing in front of the unwieldy
dam, loading his weapons, his eyes wide as he turns to see Rachel.
He clearly registers that Alan is missing.

“We have to go,” he says, unable to contain a
defeated note in his voice. “We have to get out of here.”

“It’s worse than you think,” Rachel says.

“What do you mean?”

“They’re finding other ways down.”

“How, for chrissakes?”

Rachel points up. “Through the ceiling.”

Joel glances up at the large sturdy tiles
spanning the ceiling. “Jesus Christ.”

Scott chimes in from a corner, “Hey, Officer,
great idea to hole up in a building with three floors full of
fucking monsters above us.”

Joel ignores him. “Where’s Alan?” he asks,
wincing in anticipation of her answer.

“He’s bringing blood.”

“Tell me you had some luck with it.”

Quickly, out of breath, Rachel tells him what
happened—finding the blood bank, and shoving the contents of the
O-negative bag into the mouth of the thing that had been hanging
from the ceiling. “That was the one that came out here.”

“So it works?”

“That thing—that thing absolutely recoiled.
You saw it.”

“So—what? We have to get the blood inside
them? Every one of them?” He’s shaking his head. “And anyway, I
don’t want these things to ‘recoil,’ I want them to
die
.”

“Even spraying it on them seems to work,” she
says. “They hate it.”

“And what, then, fill a bunch of squirt guns
with O-negative blood? Spray the bastards in their eyes? Maybe
scare them off? Well, let’s load up on the stuff, but I’ll be
taking my chances with this.” He finishes reloading his shotgun,
makes a show of cocking the pump action.

Scott breaks in, “I can’t believe it, but I
agree with the cop.”

“Hey—the name’s Joel, okay?”

“Little lady,” Scott says, “you go ahead and
climb up there and squirt those bastards. You go right ahead. I
want to see what happens.”

“And you’ll be watching from the far side of
the room safe and sound. Right?”

“Hey, I don’t know you. I don’t know anyone
here. I’m not dying for anybody, least of all complete
strangers.”

“That attitude should get you far.” She looks
away from him.

“I don’t give a damn what you think.”

A clatter sounds from the stairwell.

“Guys! Guys! Shut up, c’mon—” Joel breaks in,
just as a large table comes tumbling down the makeshift barricade.
Immediately, he raises his weapon and starts approaching the
barrier that reaches up the stairs. It’s like a huge, wobbly
tinker-toy assembly.

Rachel follows him forward warily, using
Joel’s body for protection. Realizing what she’s doing, she shakes
her head with disgust and steps away from him, angling her gaze up
the stairwell.

Her stomach drops.

There are now perhaps thirty animated corpses
at the top of the open stairway. A few of them are moving
crablike—left to right, right to left—jostling for position, but
most of them are standing still, merely gazing down upon the lobby,
their inverted faces rendered obscene by their sheer number. Rachel
feels a chill travel down the length of her spine. One of the
jostling corpses rams itself into the barrier, making the entire
crooked construction wobble. Rachel staggers backward, straight
into the middle-aged woman whose name she still doesn’t know. The
woman is pale with shock, has been that way for hours now. Rachel
touches her arm shakily, apologetically, then grabs the woman and
helps her move back.

“What do we do?” Rachel asks the room,
feeling the steel edge of panic at her chest. “What do we—”

A thunderous boom sounds too close to her,
and flinches. The shotgun finds its mark above the clutter of metal
and plastic. One of the corpses twitches backward but doesn’t fall,
and now it’s back at the barrier again, staring down at them, its
dry mouth yawing open above the upturned nose. There’s blood at its
neck and shoulder, a furrow of gore. Joel pulls the trigger again,
and this time the slug embeds itself into the wall above the
spider-like corpses.

“God damn it!”

One of the corpses attempts to throw itself
upward, trying to clear the barrier. It’s a young Asian man, naked
save for a paper gown spooling in folds down to the floor. The
man-corpse fails, thumping onto its back after not even leaving the
floor, but its intentions are clear. Another corpse follows suit,
this time a small boy of about 10 years, dressed in jean shorts and
a bright yellow SpongeBob tee-shirt. Rachel watches with something
like curiosity, witnessing this obscene groupthink, because
suddenly all the corpses are trying to leap to the top of the metal
and plastic dam. It’s the small boy who finally achieves the goal,
scrambling at the top of a mountain of plastic chairs, his small
limbs flailing backwards when the barrier shifts beneath him.

Rachel and the others step back
instinctively, waiting to see what happens.

The loose chairs at the top wobble but hold
steady, and the boy-corpse loses its footing, bumping down the
stairwell perhaps eight feet. Its eyes are open wide as it
approaches, watching the survivors. Its limbs scramble among chair
legs and metal supports.

“Joel!” Rachel shouts.

Joel has aimed the shotgun, but it’s shaking
in his grip. Rachel remembers his struggle shooting the pregnant
corpse, so she sidesteps over to him and yanks the shotgun from his
grasp.

“Wait!” Joel cries, reluctantly letting her
take the weapon. “Have you ever fired one of those?”

“First time for everything.”

She takes the shotgun fully into her grip,
lets the butt fit naturally at her shoulder, clutches the foregrip,
takes aim, and pulls the trigger. The recoil slams her backward,
feeling as if it has dislocated her shoulder. She quickly composes
herself to see that she has hit the boy-corpse in the leg. The
small dead-eyed face lets loose a high-pitched screech, sounding
far too much like a very hurt little boy, and Rachel’s heart
lurches. Then the small corpse cranes its neck so that its
upside-down face can see the wound—a ragged chunk of flesh and bone
has disappeared, leaving a red and white mess. The boy’s remaining
limbs jitter amid the metal, but it can’t move. It sees Rachel
approaching determinedly, and its eyes grow wider. Rachel tries to
level the shotgun at the boy’s head from three feet away, but the
long weapon keeps wavering. She can’t seem to control her
breathing. She’s about to fire the second barrel when at the last
millisecond she yanks the weapon up and away, staring at the
boy.

The corpse’s eyes are filled with fear. It’s
mewling and wretched all of a sudden, hopelessly ensnared in the
barrier and hobbled by the confusing chaos of its inverted,
back-breaking stance.

“Kill it already!” Scott screams from behind
her.

“Wait!” she shouts, but she’s drowned
out.

Now it’s Joel’s turn to grab the shotgun from
her grip, and at first Rachel resists, relishing the power of it in
her hands, but when she pulls her gaze from the boy, she realizes
that more corpses are throwing themselves at the barrier. They’re
all growling, peering down. There appear to be more of them, more
of them all the time.

The shotgun booms next to Rachel, and the
boy-corpse’s head sheaves nearly in half, obliterated into slivered
meat. Its red luminescence sparks out, and the body falls dead to
its back. Rachel tears her stinging gaze away to see a fully naked
female corpse at the top of the barrier that’s attempting to leap
over the barrier. Joel’s weapon barks again, and the naked woman
spins backward onto the carpet, the lower half of its face
exploding into wet splinters. Its inner light, too, winks out. Joel
reloads and fires again and again, his aim now true.

“I need ammo!”

“Where is it?” Rachel asks.

“My cruiser.”

Rachel looks warily at the front doors, sees
the vehicle parked there, blocking the entrance. Through a closer
window, she can also see the edge of the cruiser’s rear end, its
trunk wide open. Beyond the vehicle, she can still see the corpse
weirdly attached to the tree on the periphery of the parking lot, a
fleshy, still shadow.

“What is it—a box? Shells? What?” She has to
scream to be heard over the cacophony of sounds all around
her—people screaming, corpses gasping, and a horde of bodies
spidering their way toward her, the shotgun threatening to deafen
her. She feels like the hospital itself is on the verge of
imploding. She wants to cram her hands against her ears and close
her eyes.

“Box of Winchesters—white box—red shells!
With gold on the end!”

She’s about to make a run for it when she
sees the doors at the other side of the lobby bang open. Rachel
watches helplessly, expecting another wave of the things, but it’s
a gurney edging its way awkwardly into the room. The gurney is
carrying a heap of perhaps twenty bags of blood—presumably
O-negative. Bonnie rushes toward the doors to help, then stops
short as Alan appears. He’s pushing the gurney with his back, still
faced in the direction of the hallway, and as he comes into view,
he looks wild-eyed when he risks a glance in Rachel’s
direction.

“Help!” he calls.

“What is it?” Bonnie cries.

“Take a bag!” he wheezes, just as they can
all see what he’s doing.

He has poked a pinhole in one of the
pint-bags of blood and is squeezing out a thin stream of blood,
which is arcing back through the doors. Now that the doors are
opened wide, Rachel can hear a chorus of gasps from an unseen
number of corpses.

Alan stumbles backward into the room, to the
side of the gurney, careful not to lose his grip on the bag in his
shaking hands. The thin jet of blood is a trembling red line
directed upward through the doors, and the image reminds Rachel
absurdly of kite-flying. It soon becomes clear that the wobbly line
of blood is angling down in its arc past the doors, at the mercy of
gravity, spattering corpse-flesh. The guttural gasps coming from
the hallway make her sure of that, and she is doubly glad she took
the time to move her father to the safer room.

Without even realizing, Rachel is sprinting
across the room to help. It’s quickly apparent that Alan has been
hurt by proximity to at least one of the corpses. There is a
parchment paleness to the skin of both his arms.

Behind her, the shotgun booms again, nearly
making her stumble. She takes an instant to spin mid-stride—to see
still more spider-like corpses heaving themselves at the barrier,
and Joel frantically maneuvering the shotgun in his grip. Scott is
yelling unintelligibly, but Rachel is focused on Alan and this new
threat.

She reaches the gurney and desperately grabs
a bag of O-negative blood. Only after doing so does she look toward
the open double doors through which Alan brought the gurney. The
floor is a blood bath. Eight or nine hospital-garbed corpses are
scrabbling upside down across the red-misted tiles, hissing as the
blood smears across their hands and feet and when the thin stream
from Alan’s bag needles their inverted faces. Rachel sees the same
fear in their eyes that she saw in the boy-corpse’s eyes a moment
ago. Most of these things appear to be hanging back, wide-eyed with
something like fury or confusion, but a couple of them continue to
charge forward. A petite nurse-corpse wearing white shoes manages
to avoid most of the blood thanks to its footwear, and despite its
throaty exhalations of pain and fear it catapults itself through
the doors, its eyes blinking spastically under a pert, upturned
nose. It slides across the threshold, its head jerking from side to
side, taking in the scene.

Alan is now directing the last of his blood
bag at the nurse-corpse, directing the thin stream at any exposed
flesh—face, forearms, midriff—and the thing is reacting to the
blood as if it burns, screaming and flailing. And still it
scrabbles forward awkwardly, its bent-back limbs slapping the hard
floor.

It’s through the doors and into the
admissions area now, and Rachel has no idea what to do with her bag
of blood. The thing is closing in on Alan, and she leaps forward
without hesitation to shield him. Another shotgun blast crashes
behind her—Joel yells “I’m out!” with a raspy, helpless call. She
feels that the end is near.

The nurse-corpse leaps forward and tackles
both Rachel and Alan. Unable to help herself, Rachel screams under
the weight of the ambulatory corpse. She feels the clench of its
backward grip, the propulsion of its white-soled heels. Alan cries
out, too, as the thing’s feet batter his chest and head, and Rachel
is punching at the limbs with her left hand, the bag of blood still
clenched uselessly in her right fist. There’s a horrible gasping
coming from the thing’s mouth, and its limbs continue their frenzy
atop both Rachel and Alan, battering them. Rachel is staring up at
its back, the white nurse’s uniform loose and flapping. She can’t
breathe beneath the blows of the thing’s elbows and wrists. She’s
pushing at the thing desperately, but she’s losing strength.

The thing’s cries seem to be intensifying,
and now it’s finally off of her. She rolls to face Alan, who is on
his back, lying still. Rachel reaches for him, only to find that
her left arm is completely coated in blood. The sight of it shocks
her, and then she’s frantically rubbing it off, feeling for injury.
As the guttural, inhuman screams continue above her, somewhere, the
world is suddenly red to Rachel—there’s blood on the floor and in
her eyes, and panic begins to clutch at her. And then Bonnie’s
screaming voice—