Blood Red (3 page)

“No, no, no, no,” Rachel finds herself
mouthing.

What—what just happened?

Her mouth feels dry, and her own skin has
gone cold. Her breath is shallow, racing in and out of her
mouth.

She has to force herself to return to Susanna
once again. She scrambles back onto the bed, pulling her stepmother
up and away from the mattress, straining with all her might. She
finally positions Susanna so that she’s face up, then places two
fingers beneath Susanna’s jaw, feeling for a pulse. There is
none.

“
Oh my God!”

She leans over to place her ear over her
stepmother’s bloody mouth. No breath. The skin feels cold.

Rachel quickly digs her fingers into
Susanna’s open mouth, feeling for obstruction, then attempts
mouth-to-mouth resuscitation repeatedly. She feels a little inept
at it, considering she’s learned it only from movies and
television, but she thinks she’s doing it right. She can see
Susanna’s naked breasts rising, can see that air is getting into
her, but it’s not working.
It’s not working!
She won’t let
herself cry. She can’t stop her hands from trembling, but she won’t
give in to tears.

Okay
, she thinks.
Need
help
.

She slams her way through the door, toward
the kitchen phone—an old-fashioned corded phone that her dad has
always insisted on keeping. She fumbles with it at the wall and
jabs at the buttons—9-1-1—with crazily shaking fingers, but she
can’t make her fingers work. Her fingers are still slightly numb
from whatever the light did to her palm. She shakes out her hand
and tries again. She fails, and curses at the phone. She can’t make
it work! She switches hands, awkwardly fingers in the numbers, and
finally gets it right. When the phone starts ringing, she lets
herself fall against the wall to the floor, making herself as small
as possible. She’s weeping softly.

The number goes to a recording. “Sorry, all
our operators are busy with other calls, please stand by.”

“
What!?”

She stares at the receiver in her hand, then
around at the quiet kitchen. Her dad! Maybe he’s at work. He
has
to be there. She pushes herself back to her feet and
dials his office number from memory.

Please…

The phone begins ringing.

“Daddy, please answer,” she warbles meekly
into the phone, although now it’s doing nothing but emitting a
hollow clicking sound in her ear. There is no dial tone, no ring,
nothing. Her hands are shaking so badly that she can hardly hold on
to the now-slippery receiver. It falls from her hands against her
thigh, and she yanks it up again by its cord. “Please, please.”

She tries dialing 911 again. Nothing. Not
even a dial tone.

She lets the phone fall to the floor.

She becomes aware of the sounds from outside
again. Now she definitely hears a siren, or several of them. And
there are other noises too, perhaps screams, but she doesn’t want
to hear them.

She presses her palms to her ears and closes
her eyes.

“
What’s going on?!”
she screeches,
blocking out everything she can so that only her voice thunders
inside her muffled head. She lets the words dissolve into a
prolonged exhalation of sound.

She tries to escape to some tiny place inside
herself, and she succeeds for a fleeting moment, but the world
insists on crashing back. Her thoughts edge back to the bedroom
where Susanna sprawls still and silent and gone. She tries to yank
back those thoughts, but she keeps seeing Susanna’s naked,
unconscious body sprawled across the sheets, and she keeps seeing
the impossible red luminescence bleeding from her mouth and
nostrils. She sees it like the afterimage of a bright light against
her eyelids.

Is she still in the grip of a nightmare?

There is a moment when Rachel knows, quite
consciously, that she has a choice. To either shrink inside,
regress, and turn away from whatever horror has taken hold of her
life this morning, or face it headlong and attempt to make sense of
it. She is facing the illogic of a nightmare, but she knows that
now is not the time to give in to inaction. Everything depends on
her choice.

She opens her eyes, uncovers her ears. The
kitchen remains quiet, but the sounds from outside are still
there.

A huge crash of thunder jolts the house on
its foundation, and she can feel the percussion of it in her chest.
She whimpers as trinkets throughout the house jangle with the
terrific jolt. Then she comes to the crushing realization that
these terrible sounds have never been thunder at all.

They have been explosions.

Rachel races to her own bedroom and strips
out of her nightgown. She takes up the wad of jeans from the floor,
separates her panties from the denim and pulls them on. Then she
steps into the jeans and hurriedly grabs a tee-shirt from her
second drawer and throws it on over her bare breasts. Then she’s
hopping on one foot at a time, slipping her tennis shoes on.

She catches sight of her cell phone on the
dresser and lunges for it. She picks it up and stabs it on. The
readout displays the time: 6:52 a.m. She dials 911 and puts the
phone to her ear, but nothing happens. She looks at the readout
again. She sees three service bars, but the phone is silent. She
turns it off, and turns it on again. Nothing. It’s unresponsive.
And the battery is very low.

“Fuck!”

She shoves the phone into the front pocket of
her jeans.

Have to get across the street. Tony will
know what to do.

She tears through the house. Nearing the
front door, she casts a single glance toward the large front room,
where her already-browning apple core sits forlornly on the coffee
table, and she feels an instant ache for that lost peaceful moment.
An image of her mom relaxing there comes to her again, then
vanishes. A mewling sound catches in her throat as she grabs hold
of the front doorknob.

When she steps outside, Rachel sees that the
entire world has gone insane.

In the near distance, off in the direction of Old
Town, a great plume of roiling smoke is billowing into the sky, the
result of some kind of massive explosion. It’s so close that Rachel
imagines she can feel its shockwave against her face as she steps
onto the porch. A scorching waft of hot air. This is surely the
source of the explosive noise she heard moments ago, inside the
house. The black smoke is like a solid thing, thick and ropy,
undulating and urgent.

“
Holy ... shit!”
Rachel mouths,
staggering back, eyes wide.

She can only stare at the smoke, caught
between awe and horror. She tries to connect the sight with what
has happened inside her house, but cannot. The disconnect stops her
in her tracks. Her consciousness feels jammed, incapable of
processing. Everything is chaos.

And then Rachel sees that there are
other
dark plumes in the distance, dotting the horizon, to
the north toward Cheyenne and to the south toward Denver. She feels
her insides drop further. It can’t be. It’s impossible. The first
word to come to her mind is
attack
, but what can these
explosions possibly have to do with Susanna?

Rachel has the very real impulse to flee back
indoors and cower under her covers. But there’s no solace to be
found behind her; everything lies forward. She can see Tony’s house
in her panic-narrowed vision, and she forces herself to focus on it
even as her hands reach backward, searching for stability against
the bricks of her own home’s front porch.

A middle-aged woman is sprinting down the
street, breathing heavily, in the opposite direction of the blast.
She’s in a flower-print nightgown, and her hands are raised to her
face as if brushing something away.

“Wait!” Rachel calls, and the woman looks
around bewildered for a split second then continues on. “Lady!”

The woman disappears from sight, beyond the
shrub-lined perimeter of Rachel’s house. And now, racing from the
other direction, a police cruiser screams into view, its siren
slicing the morning air, making Rachel wince. She follows it almost
reluctantly with her eyes, and as it disappears down the street in
the direction of the Old Town fire, she catches sight of several
bodies lying lifeless in a far driveway. Her eyes bug with horror.
Two of the bodies appear to be children, in bright-colored clothing
and athletic shoes.

Emotion pulses in Rachel’s chest, hitching
toward panic. She has to propel herself forward, away from the
door. She must force herself to keep moving. She pauses on the
steps leading down to the front path, latching onto the white post
at the edge of the porch, the edge of her world. She stares out at
her familiar neighborhood, and although everything is the same,
everything is different. The homes slouch in their rows, defeated.
They’re flatter somehow, and the foliage in their yards seems
deadened, the trees lifeless and dull, crooked in their patches of
earth.

And a fog hangs in the air; subtle, but
there. Everything seems tinted red. Is it her eyes? Is it some
lingering aftereffect of the weird light radiating from Susanna? As
she nearly stumbles down the path leading to the street, she
furiously rubs her eyes against her forearm, trying to refocus.
It’s still there, this haunting, ember effulgence, like fog at
sunset. Or even sunrise, though she knows it’s about an hour past
dawn now.

“Tony!”

She’s crying already, heading directly across
the street to his house. She passes his family’s gray mailbox and
weaves across the stepping stones to his front porch.

Something catches her eye—a flash of red like
a flickered flame. Then it’s gone, and she’s approaching the front
door. She bangs on it, calling Tony’s name again. She tries the
knob, finds it locked. She bangs more loudly on the door. There’s
no answer, and all around her is noise. She wants to be in this
house, to be with Tony, the first person she could think of besides
her absent father, who can help her. There’s no way he’s out of the
house already. He was with her last night, after all. She can now
remember most of what they did and where they went. She knows he
must still be unconscious from all that.

She decides to run around back to the rear
entrance. She edges out onto the path and looks around. Even as
she’s on the verge of hyperventilation, she comes to the panicked
realization that all the houses along the street seem to be
emitting that diffused red glow from their windows. Is it her
imagination? No, it’s there. It’s faint, but it’s there, barely
distinguishable in the early morning. Then she’s running around the
side of Tony’s house, crashing through the gate, winding her way
toward the back patio.

When she arrives at the rear screen door,
another explosion booms in the far distance, and now she can hear
some kind of rising caterwaul in the distance, like a citywide
storm alarm. It reaches a high note and comes dipping down, then
rises again loudly. From downtown, she guesses.

She wonders if Fort Collins is under
terrorist attack. Who would attack a little college town in
Colorado?

She opens the screen and finds the back door
unlocked. She pushes the door open and calls out, “Tony? Mrs.
Duncan?”

Silence.

The kitchen is shadowed and silent with its
drawn shades, dark and foreboding. This house is such a familiar
place, not only because it’s the same floor plan as her own home
across the street, but also because she’s spent so much time over
here recently. And yet, this is not the comfortable kitchen she
knows. That awful red tint is coloring everything now, even this
room, its windows shielded by slatted blinds from whatever is going
on outside. There’s a weird energy in the air. She can feel it on
her skin like a dull buzz of electricity.

“Tony!” she calls loudly. “Wake up!”

She reaches for the light switch, only to
find that the power is out. Was it out at home? Was there a working
light in her refrigerator over there? She can’t remember. She steps
over to the phone, picks it up. Dead.

“Oh come on,” she whispers, and she can
detect the obvious tremble in her voice. She pulls in a shaky
breath.

Beyond the front room, the hallway toward the
bedrooms yawns like a dark mouth. And as her eyes adjust, she sees
that a red glow is emanating from there, and she knows that
whatever happened to her stepmother has happened in this home, too.
Her thoughts quickly turn to Tony’s mother, Maggie Duncan. She
imagines that the slightly frazzled, kindly older woman is
afflicted in her bed, and then she flashes back on Susanna, dead
and deflated on her own bed.

Pushed forward by new sounds from outside—yet
another distant blast, and a dog barking in mad fear—Rachel races
into the hallway, sliding to a stop at the first doorway, which is
Tony’s room. The door is closed and locked, as usual. Tony has
always been fiercely protective of his privacy, even when he
doesn’t have Rachel inside with him, naked and fumbling around on
his twin bed, shushing copious giggles. Her thoughts turn yet again
to her stepmother, who never warmed to Tony, and because of whom
Rachel no doubt spent far more time in this room than she might
have otherwise.

That little friction is something Rachel will
never have to worry about again. She shakes her head away from that
thought, upset with herself for even letting her mind go there.

She bangs on the door. “Tony, wake up! I’m
freaked out!”

Bang bang bang.

There’s no movement from behind the door, but
underneath it, where wood meets carpet, she can see a horizontal
shaft of vague red light, and Rachel thinks that she might break
down sobbing.

She forces the emotion down and goes quickly
to Mrs. Duncan’s room. The door is open wide, and Rachel rushes to
the bed, where Tony’s mother is sprawled crookedly, the bedsheets
thrashed from their moorings, showing the mattress beneath. The
scene speaks of struggle, as if Mrs. Duncan had resisted something
with a lot of effort and finally succumbed. The dresser next to the
bed is messy, two drawers open, spilling a sweater and pants.