Blood Red Read online

  “Oh fuck fuck fuck …” Jenny whines.

  “What is that?” Rachel whispers, unable to stop herself.

  She grabs at her friend, and they embrace desperately for a long moment, not moving. Jesus Christ what have I done? Why are we in here? This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done! We’re going to die in here! She begins to hyperventilate and can feel her heart trip-hammering in her chest. Stop, stop! she demands of herself, closing her eyes for a moment.

  The sound returns—definitely a dragging sound, probably forty feet in the distance—and her eyes are open again immediately, uselessly. The sound is coming from the direction of the indistinct glows. She focuses on them intently, trying to be still despite Jenny’s full-body quaking.

  “Wait, wait, shhhh—” she tries, but Jenny can’t stop.

  Nevertheless, Rachel is sure that at least one of the red glows is moving. Not dragging but twitching. And now the sound reveals itself to be more of a prolonged shudder. Something is happening over there.

  “We have to move,” Rachel says. “Let’s go!”

  “But—”

  “Go!”

  She pulls herself from Jenny’s sweaty embrace and begins hurriedly pulling them along the aisle. The aisle is a long display of cleaning supplies, exactly as she remembered. She shuffles them along it, her eyes locked on the glowing jitter. A steady, almost rhythmic rattle is coming from there now, growing louder as they approach. She can feel Jenny resisting Rachel’s forward motion, and a terrified, almost animal sound is escaping her mouth.

  “Stop it!” Rachel whispers hotly, shoving her friend forward.

  Now they’re practically running headlong into darkness, Rachel’s hand flitting along the endless bottles and boxes at her left. She knows that about halfway along this aisle, she’ll need to cross the big aisle and find the hardware aisle she needs. She stops at what she believes is the midpoint and steadies herself against what feels like a desk.

  “What?” Jenny mewls.

  Rachel is looking at the jittering glow that’s about ten feet away now. Even in pitch darkness, it remains a subtle illumination. It doesn’t cast light on anything around it, save for a small section of the floor. This close, she can see that the skull containing it is facedown, jerking atop its neck.

  “Oh Jesus, Rachel, what is it doing?” Jenny doesn’t even sound like herself; her voice is quavery and pitched ridiculously high.

  Rachel chooses to ignore the question, looking away from the body. “We need to cross the aisle. Here we go.”

  “No …” Jenny cries, the sound meandering into a wet groan.

  She forces them out into nothingness again, her left arm reaching out blindly, wildly. Together, they stagger across the aisle, adrift, and after what seems an eternity, Rachel locks her grip onto another endcap shelf. She explores it blindly and finds that it holds batteries.

  “Here!” she cries. “Batteries! I know where we are!”

  Rachel moves her hands along the packages, finally landing on a bulky package of D batteries. She yanks it from its moorings and tries tearing at the packaging to open it. It won’t open; the plastic is too hard. Savagely, she clamps her teeth on the plastic and pulls at it. It tears open reluctantly, and her teeth feel nearly wrenched from their gums. With shaking hands, she removes four cells and drops them deftly into her pockets. She tosses the remainder of the package onto the floor, where it lands with a jarring impact. Jenny lets out a miserable shriek.

  “Wait here!” Rachel says, taking Jenny’s arm and forcibly attaching it to the endcap shelf.

  “RACHEL!” Jenny blasts into her ear, “DON’T YOU FUCKING DARE LEAVE ME, DON’T YOU FUCKING LEAVE ME HERE, YOU FUCKING BITCH!”

  Rachel staggers under the sting of the shouted words, but she quickly rounds the endcap and feels her way into the aisle, her arms sweeping over the hanging electronics merchandise. Her heart is in her throat. She touches all kinds of small packages and bulky, strangely shaped items, nothing like a flashlight, and for at least a full moment her mind is whirling in despair. They aren’t here!

  Finally, while Jenny continues to scream obscenities, Rachel’s hand falls on an obvious Magnum flashlight, partially concealed in plastic.

  “I got it! I got it!”

  She plucks it from its mooring and tears savagely at its plastic. Her nervous and sweaty hands fumble at the packaging but finally the light is free. She blindly unscrews the end of the flashlight and forces herself to insert one battery at a time, feeling for the positive end of each cell as she feeds it into the light. She fastens the end and thumbs the power on.

  Blessed, bright light floods the aisle, and Rachel feels sudden tears of relief dripping down her cheeks. She coughs out a sob, catches herself, then coughs out another one. The sobs turn into a weeping that she can’t stop for a full minute.

  Jenny’s tirade has come to an end.

  Rachel widens the aperture of the flashlight so that it illuminates a broad area. Jenny is clutching the endcap, practically embracing it. Rachel goes to her and lays a hand on her shoulder.

  She directs the flashlight in the direction of the two red glows. The light reveals the motionless bodies of a man and a woman, perhaps in their thirties. They are apparently Target stockers in plain clothes. The woman is nearest, and as Rachel looks closer, she sees that her body is not entirely motionless. There’s no movement in the lower body, but at the neck the muscles appear to be straining, trying to lift the head.

  It’s the man who was the source of the noise. He is sprawled across several scattered shovels, his head balanced at the edge of one of them. Rachel imagines that he was in the act of stocking them when his world ended. When his head rears back, the shovel handle is repeatedly clattering to the tiled floor.

  She swings the flashlight around in a wide arc, sweeping the entire area.

  They’re safe.

  Rachel ducks back into the electronics aisle and opens another flashlight package, filling it with batteries, giving Jenny a little time to recover. Screwing its end back on, she takes it to Jenny and hands it to her gently. Her friend takes it awkwardly, numb.

  “Sorry to bring you in here,” Rachel says. “You okay?”

  For a long moment, Jenny doesn’t respond. Finally she glances up, her red face ravaged by tears, and she nods. “I’m okay,” she says. “And I didn’t mean to call you a fucking bitch.”

  “I know.”

  A pause.

  “Well, maybe a little.”

  Chapter 8

  Rachel and Jenny use their twin flashlights liberally, fanning out to illuminate the widest possible area. Heart rates calming, they make their way through the silent store, their cones of light darting this way and that. Extra batteries bulge in Rachel’s jean pockets. She considers raiding the store for other essential items, but figures that can wait for daytime. Target’s typically bright, red-and-white exuberance has been replaced by a ghostly shadow play—not the ideal conditions for shopping.

  Jenny is tearfully silent for a few minutes, then, “Rachel?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Really, I’m sorry about that—turning into an absolute child.”

  “Hey, don’t worry about it.”

  “No, I just…I guess I have a thing about the dark. And dead bodies glowing fucking red.”

  Despite herself, Rachel manages a humorless laugh. “Yeah, I think I do too now.”

  Before long, they’re approaching the woman who is lying folded around the edge of the aisle, both flashlights illuminating her as they make their way cautiously forward. In the beam of light, Rachel can see that the young woman on the ground was attractive, a college student from the looks of her Colorado State University tee-shirt. Tanned, blond, wearing tight black athletic shorts, she might have come to work after a morning run. She’s the after-image of a picture of health. Once beautiful but lying here on the ground unresponsive and, for all intents and purposes, dead.

  Rachel slows to study her for a moment. Just
like the woman near the hardware aisle, there’s no movement in the lower body, but the neck muscles appear to be straining. Rachel can partially see the woman’s face, the expression dead-eyed except for minute movements of the cheek muscles, like a paralyzed person discovering some minor capability in long-unused musculature. Rachel finds herself avoiding those dead eyes, wary that, like the destroyed motorcyclist’s, they’ll swivel flatly in her direction.

  “Look at this, Jenny.”

  Jenny comes to Rachel’s side, looking uncomfortable. “Is that the woman I…stepped on?”

  “Yeah.”

  They watch the movement of the neck. It’s like a muscle spasm; a relentless, involuntary muscle spasm. The sight fills Rachel with a helpless revulsion. A single glance at the eyes, or even at the flat pallor of the skin, tells her that this woman is dead. This is a corpse.

  And yet it’s moving.

  “What would cause that?” Jenny asks, a grimace curling her lip. “I mean …”

  Rachel cautiously reaches over with her left hand toward the woman’s neck to feel for a pulse.

  “Rachel!” Jenny cries, and Rachel flinches. “Don’t! Not so close!”

  “Right.”

  She takes the woman’s lifeless hand into her own, gently turns it over, and feels for the pulse at the wrist.

  “There’s nothing.”

  She doesn’t see the woman’s chest moving at all. There is no breath going in and out of her lungs. Still, the head twitches, almost involuntarily.

  Rachel shakes her head, mystified. “I can’t figure it out.”

  Jenny backs away. “It’s almost worse in the light.”

  Rachel stands up, still watching the woman on the ground. She’s torn between feeling something like Jenny’s fright and a real need to help, if there’s still some kind of life in these bodies. Ever since early this morning when she discovered Susanna’s and Tony’s bodies, and all the others, she’s been dealing with the question What happened? along with all its implications and effects. Now, since that moment an hour ago at the hospital, she’s facing the new question What’s happening now?

  Because this thing is far from over. There’s a progression happening here, and it’s something Scott at the hospital didn’t seem to want to face. Something is building.

  “Could they—could they come back?” Jenny asks a little shakily. “Come back to life?”

  “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” Rachel tells her friend the story of Susanna, the way she lay still in the early morning, the glow creeping from her skull, the way Rachel smothered it and the way the light was snuffed out. What happened this morning hardly seems real now; it seems like something out of a nightmare. Then again, this whole day does. Did it really happen?

  Jenny frowns in the uneven light. “I don’t get it.”

  “I …stamped it out. The glow seemed, I don’t know, fragile. It just left her body. But it left her dead. Really dead … cold.”

  From the way Jenny’s light trembles, Rachel can tell she has shivered.

  Struck by an idea, she points her own flashlight in the direction of the clothing on the other side of the aisle. There are colorful toddler pajamas on a dark rack.

  “I’ll show you,” she says.

  She walks to the display and grabs perhaps half a dozen little pink-and-blue nightgowns by their hangers. She tests the weight and bulk of them in her grip.

  “Rachel, you’re making me nervous.”

  “Don’t worry, it didn’t hurt me this morning. I want to see something.”

  At that moment, there’s a terrific explosion outside in the far distance, a great destructive rumbling that echoes for long seconds. Instinctively, both young women direct their flashlights toward the store’s front entrance. The sound dies off gradually, and they bring their lights back.

  “Jesus,” Jenny breathes. “Another plane?”

  “Maybe.”

  Rachel takes the bundle of little-girl nightgowns to the CSU student’s body and kneels down as close as she dares. She thumbs her flashlight off and sets it on the ground, then glances up at Jenny, steeling herself.

  “Ready?”

  “No!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, wait—I mean, you said yourself that what you did to your stepmom essentially killed her, right?”

  Rachel lets the bundle of cloth drop to the tile floor. “I didn’t kill her, Jenny, come on.”

  “I—I know, I didn’t mean that, but you said because of what you did, she’s dead. Really dead.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What if that girl isn’t really dead? Look, she’s trying to move right now.”

  “That’s involuntary. That’s something else.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Rachel has no choice but to pause. “No.”

  She remembers the motorcyclist on the exam table back at the hospital. The broken man to whom some horrifying semblance of life was returning. She thinks of the alien red glow throbbing from every body that she’s encountered.

  “This isn’t about a bunch of people that have just… fallen asleep,” she says, as the light from Jenny’s flashlight trembles in the darkness. “Whatever’s happening here is, well, it’s unnatural. These people’s lives are over. There’s no getting around that. There’s no heartbeat. They aren’t breathing. I mean, you’ve seen the CSI shows or whatever. Look at the eyes. There’s no life there. The pupils are dilated.”

  Rachel glances up from her scrutiny of the young woman. Jenny has a miserable expression on her face, barely discernable in the shifting shadows. Rachel knows she’s thinking of her sisters.

  “I’m sorry,” Rachel whispers. “But this is a corpse. It’s just that there’s something really…weird happening to it.”

  Jenny is nodding. “I know.” Her voice is so soft that Rachel can barely hear it, even in the hollow silence of the huge store.

  Impulsively, Rachel picks up the cloth and presses it firmly to the young woman’s face.

  The effect is instant. The body convulses, and in Jenny’s suddenly jagging light they watch the woman’s arms try to lift from the floor but fail. It’s as if the woman is mostly paralyzed but is using all her existing strength to escape the pain of what Rachel is doing. The strain is there, but the body isn’t cooperating. A flat screech brays from the girl’s mouth behind the cloth.

  “Rachel!” Jenny screams, and Rachel relents.

  She pulls away the wad of soft cloth, and it’s instantly clear that the girl’s mouth is curled downward in a snarl. Now Jenny’s light is dashing away erratically, and Rachel is left watching intermittent flashes of the employee’s face as it screeches. The corpse’s back arches hideously. Rachel grabs her own flashlight from the ground and stabs it on. The young woman’s eyes are peeled wide, but still flat and dead, and the mouth is seemingly locked open. It’s a profoundly disturbing sight and sound, and Rachel discovers that she has lost her breath. She keeps crawling backward on her butt, away from the corpse, and in her own wobbly light, she sees in the strobing darkness that the glow inside the woman seems to have brightened. Finally, the girl stops her screeching, and in the absence of the sound, Rachel hears Jenny still screaming, perhaps twenty feet closer to the front of the store, still backing away.

  Now the glow is subsiding, and the girl’s body is relaxing back to the floor. Horrified but darkly curious, Rachel sees the head return to its relaxed state against the tile, the neck muscles returning to their minute flutter.

  “What the fuck!?” Jenny cries from where she stands in the shadowy distance.

  Rachel, breathing hard, gathers herself and rises up, standing a little lightheadedly. She swallows a dry click and leaves the young woman there, backing her way toward Jenny.

  “Uh, sorry about that,” she calls over her shoulder. Her voice echoes into the store.

  “Seriously!”

  Rachel turns around, moves toward her friend. “I don’t know what the…what the hell that was.”
She stares down at the ground, at the scuffed white tiles below her, shaking her head. “What it means.”

  That sound returns then, that wood-on-metal dragging sound, and they both jump. Jenny sweeps her flashlight nervously behind them, and then they’re both running as fast as they can toward the front entrance, rounding the bargain area, weaving between a few abandoned red carts.

  Jenny pushes through the shattered glass door at the front entrance with a great sigh of relief, and in a moment they’re hurrying east through the parking lot again toward the car, catching their breath. They navigate around a minor collision in one of the aisles—a Toyota sedan crumpled lazily against a parked van.

  They’re silent for perhaps two minutes as they carefully cross the big parking lot, their thoughts as dark as the night. There’s a rumble in the distance, from the explosion they heard earlier, and Rachel thinks she can see a new, flickering glow to the east. Beyond that rumble, the night remains eerily silent. It’s an uneasy, aberrant silence that pulls at Rachel’s eardrums, and in this typically lively suburban setting it’s deeply disquieting. Underneath even that, there’s an alien thrum that Rachel doesn’t even know how to begin to identify.

  “You convinced me, at least,” Jenny says.

  Rachel looks over at her.

  “That thing wasn’t human,” Jenny finishes. “No way in hell.”

  Rather than flash back moments ago to the girl on the floor of Target, Rachel is remembering what happened with Susanna this morning. Her mind won’t let go of it. The sight of Susanna’s pretty face contorted into something monstrous, her body rigid and angled, as this thing, this red thing inside her, reacted to Rachel’s actions. Rachel smothered that glowing thing, pressed hard against her stepmother’s face, and then harder still, and she extinguished whatever was inhabiting Susanna.

  Didn’t she? That’s what she did, right?

  She remembers screaming, “Go away!” The words echo inside her now.

  Rachel can’t escape the deep, shameful knowledge that she had screamed those words at Susanna before, on exactly two other occasions. The occasion that pricks at her the most deeply is the first time. The time she yelled the words in Susanna’s face in front of her father, in the bright kitchen, in tears, the very first time Rachel was aware that this infuriatingly pretty young woman had stayed the night. Had slept with her father in her mother’s bed. She had screamed the words savagely, lost in her rage, had stormed out of the house and to school, burying her tears in her winter coat.