Blood Red (36 page)

She finishes filling the syringe, and she
turns again to approach Tony. She walks very quietly, not wanting
to alert him. She steps onto the grass once more and comes up
behind him. Immediately she sees a bulging vein in his right bicep,
remembers what she has learned from Bonnie about administering
injections.

“Okay,” she breathes.

She plants herself solidly at his side,
prepares herself, and then gently inserts the needle into Tony’s
arm. Before injecting any blood, she waits for a reaction to the
puncture. Nothing. She holds her breath and begins to press the
plunger.

Tony’s body jerks.

Adrenaline spiking inside her, Rachel presses
hard, letting the blood rush into him. His muscles clench and
shiver, and his face whips away from the tree. His mouth begins
bleating—a hard, raspy noise that sounds like it’s tearing his
throat apart.

“
No no no no!”
Rachel is
screaming.

This is not what she wanted!

With most of the syringe emptied into Tony’s
arm, his body is thrashing too violently for her to remain. She
staggers away, and the syringe drops out of his arm to the ground.
She brings her hands to her mouth and watches him. His arms
disengage from the pine, and he’s still upside down but his limbs
are uncertain, flailing. Rachel turns and runs for the car,
reaching it quickly and grasping for the shotgun.

Tony has fallen onto his back. Under the gray
sky, she can see the red illumination popping and sparking in his
open mouth, splinters and mulch flying in all directions as his
head whips back and forth.

She brings up the shotgun, new tears in her
eyes, and trudges forward toward him, releasing the safety.

It’s the final sight of Tony’s anguished face
that impels Rachel to finally pull the trigger. She can’t stand to
look at it anymore, can’t stand the ragged screech coming from his
mouth. The red glow behind his face winks out, and her finger
convulses in the trigger guard, the blast shoving her backward, and
then the world is silent again.

Rachel drives toward the hospital in a daze. She’s
barely aware of a huge conflagration off to the west, coming from
the foothills. It’s a towering blaze signaling the demise of
humanity. The words of the Thompson brothers are whispering through
her mindscape:

Best thing to do is set ’em on fire. We
sprayed gas over a bunch of ’em and lit ’em up.

There are bursts of gunfire coming from all
directions now, survivors everywhere beginning the grisly task of
wiping out the corpses for good.

She has seen seven other moving vehicles on
her way back to her father, but she has pushed their existence away
from her. She follows her path almost unconsciously, blinking to
awareness only when she has to navigate through a maze of dead
cars. And then her face goes slack again.

Because inside, Rachel has died.

Rachel!

It’s Tony’s voice inside her, calling to her,
shouting at her.

“Shut up,” she answers.

Rachel!

She closes her eyes tight and screams within
the tight confines of the car, the ragged sound dwindling into a
hoarse, raw exhalation. She pounds her fist against the seatback
next to her, hard, then harder, until her muscles give out.

She sniffles miserably and stares blankly out
at the desolate road coming at her. She doesn’t want to look at
anything else. She certainly doesn’t want to look at another
corpse, or another conifer tree, or another human being in the
world.

Except one.

“
Daddy,”
she whispers.

She extends her sore arm toward the backpack,
feels for the opening. She digs inside, rooting around toward the
bottom. In a moment, she’s pulling out her old stuffed bear. She
brings it softly to her chest, beneath her chin, and cuddles it
there. She feels the bear’s cloth fur, matted from years and years
of sleeping with her. The tactile sensation of it nurtures
something at her core.

Rachel!
comes Tony’s mangled
voice.

She shuts her eyes again for a long
moment.

Under a bruised-red sky, filled with alien
luminescence and new smoke, Rachel drives the barren streets. She
knows she is alone at the end of the world.

“I didn’t kill him,” she says out loud. Her
voice sounds papery and thin.

She repeats the phrase inwardly.

I didn’t kill him.

She can’t get the vision of Tony out of her
head. On his back, the alien glow sparking, sputtering. The syringe
falling away from him, most of its O-negative contents rushing
through his veins.

They had never tried injecting the blood, had
they?

They had never tested that.

RACHEL!

Rachel is crying savagely, not wanting to
hear his voice, not anymore, not ever again.

Why hadn’t they tested that? On some
anonymous corpse? They were too caught up in the chaos. All she can
remember is stuffing that entire unit of blood into that
nurse-corpse’s mouth, and watching its red glow pop and stutter.
She remembers the apparent pain the corpse endured. And then the
boom of Joel’s shotgun, blowing apart the nurse’s skull and the red
luminescence. Extinguishing it.

No, they’d never actually seen the effect of
injecting the blood. They’d never tried it.

Until now.

She hugs her bear to her chest, to her neck,
against the side of her face, and the fur becomes damp with her
tears. The bear brings to her the comfort of her home, her bed, her
family. Her dad. Her mom.

She thought the injection would bring Tony a
peaceful death, away from this alien thing. It was supposed to give
him an escape. Like Susanna.

The sight of him jerking on the ground comes
back to her. His eyes, glazed over with sap and saliva, locked on
her and blinking spastically, trying to focus. And his
screams—horrible in the gray morning. Screams of pain, screams of
anguish.

She couldn’t handle the sound anymore. She
couldn’t bear the sight of him gone and in agony.

So she pulled the trigger.

In the split second before the shotgun barked
and obliterated Tony’s skull, he uttered one final, impossible
word.

“
Rachel!”

There are no tears now. She’s wiping her face
with her forearm. She can’t afford more tears.

It’s too big,
she thinks.
I can’t
do it. I can’t do it alone. And it’s too late, anyway.

In her peripheral vision, off to the west,
the fires are burning in the Rockies.

There’s nothing I can do now. And what would
I say, even if I could find them?

Her path is clear. She turns onto Lemay from
Riverside, and the hospital looms in the distance. She motors into
the parking area south of the emergency entrance, angles the Toyota
in front of the doors, shuts off the engine. She stares at the
entrance. Then she places her bear gently back in the pack. With
great weariness, she steps out of the car with her shotgun.

It cures them.

The words sting her.

The blood cures them.

The hospital is empty. Carrying only her
weapon, she trudges into the admissions area, over the blood-caked
tiles. Everything is quiet, save for the distant murmur of the
generator. Everything is hollow.

She makes her way through the double doors
and into the inner hallway. The office door that leads to her
father is still closed. She tries the knob; it’s still locked. She
tries kicking at the door several times, but it’s too sturdy.

She stops.

There’s noise inside the room, some kind of
slow shuffling movement.

“Daddy?” she calls.

No answer.

“Daddy, if that’s you, stay away from the
door.”

Please let it be you
, she thinks.

She brings up the shotgun, aims it at the
doorknob, and pulls the trigger. The bark of the weapon is gigantic
in the dim hallway, and the knob is reduced to a mangled mass.
Rachel kicks at it again, but it holds. She tries the shotgun
again. The boom threatens to shatter her eardrums; the world seems
to stutter into a shrill, jittery whine.

Now there’s a hole in the door where the knob
used to be. Rachel kicks at it once again, and the door splinters
and swings open.

She drops the shotgun to the floor and enters
the room, looking left and right.

There’s no threat.

She comes to a stop at the foot of the bed.
Her father is awake. His eyes are wide, and he’s staring at her in
confusion.

“Rachel! Good God! What in the—?”

Rachel lets out a long exhalation, as if
she’s been holding her breath for a whole day.

“Hi, Daddy.”

“What on Earth are you—?” He blinks his eyes
carefully, squinting beneath his wound. “What happened? Where are
we?”

“We’re at the hospital.” She can’t take her
eyes off of her father, awake and aware. “I’ll explain
everything.”

He appears mildly confused.

“Did I fall?” He’s exploring the wound at his
forehead, poking at it gingerly. “I remember…” He’s trying to
recall something, but it won’t come to him.

Rachel shakes her head. “Better not mess with
that wound.”

He removes his hand, watches her curiously.
“Listen, Rachel, I’m sorry about last night. I didn’t mean to take
all that out on you.”

Rachel looks at her father with an abundance
of love in her heart. She walks around to his left, looks down on
him. “No, I’m sorry, Dad.”

He seems to focus on her more intently. “Hey,
you’re all scraped up. You’re bloody!” His confusion evolves into
worry. “What happened? What’s going on?”

She leans over him and embraces him. A single
tear drops into his hair. She shuts her eyes tight, holding him.
She shuts out the rest of the world.

And she says, “I saved you.”

In many ways,
Blood Red
is a return to my
roots. When I was a wee lad, horror was huge. I devoured King,
Barker, Straub, McCammon, Lansdale, Laymon, Bloch, and Matheson
religiously. Trying to follow their lead, I wrote savage and often
pointless tales of extreme horror. Then I explored other genres,
tried new styles, and came away unsatisfied. Only recently—after
becoming a father, weirdly enough—have I returned full-force to the
horror genre. (Perhaps it was all those dirty diapers.) But I like
to think that fatherhood has softened me up and given me a
perspective from which to instill my tales of terror with genuine
warmth and heart. For that, I want to thank my family: my
ever-supportive wife Barb and my little ones, Harper and Sophie,
who are being raised meticulously to be discriminating horror
aficionados.

At the heart of my writing is the inspiration
of my own father, John Bovberg, who taught me how to write, and
gave me the passion to work hard and keep at it. He didn’t quite
live to see this book’s publication, but he read the manuscript and
bragged about it till the end. He was my number-one fan. My
number-two fan is my fabulous sister, Missy, who promises to keep
the bragging tradition moving forward. You rock, sis. Thanks also
have to go to my mom, Brenda, for her admittedly biased but
excessively proud and loud cheerleading.

Major props to James W. Powell and Kirk
Whitham for substantive advice throughout the writing process. You
guys have been there to offer sound criticism for twenty years, and
I can’t thank you enough. Thanks also to my other early readers,
Darin and Sally Sanders, Corey Edwards, Justin Bzdek, Alli
Oswandel, Lisa Pere, Dawn Cyr, Bob Kretschman, Dan Kaufman, Lavon
Peters, Jeff James, Mark Minasi, John Savill, and my tech advisor,
Michael Dragone.

A special note of thanks to Jacob Kier for
giving
Blood Red
a home at Permuted Press. I never really
got to know him before the Permuted reins were taken over by
Michael L. Wilson and Anthony Ziccardi, but I wish I had. For their
part, Michael and Anthony have been fabulous new stewards, and I
look forward to a long working relationship. My gratitude to
Felicia Sullivan for putting the finishing touches on the book, and
to Roy Migabon for the cover. And finally, warm thanks to several
“hero” authors for taking the time to read
Blood Red
—some
weird manuscript by this new guy—and help me push it out to the
world: Joshua Gaylord, Tom Piccirilli, Richard Lee Byers, Grant
Jerkins, Brian Hodge, and (most of all) my old pal and mentor,
Robert Devereaux.

Jason Bovberg is the author of
Blood
Red
, the forthcoming sequel
Draw Blood
(also from
Permuted Press), and an as-yet-untitled concluding volume in the
Blood
trilogy. He is also the author of
The Naked
Dame
, a pulp noir novel. He was the founder of Dark Highway
Press, which published Robert Devereaux’s controversial
Santa
Steps Out
, as well as the highly acclaimed weird-western
anthology
Skull Full of Spurs
. He lives in Fort Collins,
Colorado, with his wife Barb, his daughters Harper and Sophie, and
his rabid canine, Cujo. You can find him online at
www.jasonbovberg.com
.