Blood Dawn (Blood Trilogy Book 3) Page 13

  What if what we’ve done here is to create a place that’s safe by virtue of how we defended it?

  Rachel glances warily at the sky, which is getting brighter with purple heat-lightning as evening approaches. Whatever is up there hasn’t gone away. This is not over. They’ve repelled the beasts in what amounts to one skirmish of an all-out war. Those things will indeed regroup and try to find another way to snuff out the survivors. Rachel has the strong sense that the survivors’ only chance to outmaneuver the alien threat is to remain at least one step ahead of them. And they’re not going to do that by squatting here, at the site of a ruined bunker.

  Striding through the front entrance, Rachel and Mai deliver the remaining supplies to the twins, who are already organizing everything atop three tables at the edge of the lobby. Both Zoe and Chloe watch Rachel hesitantly, peripherally.

  “How are you doing?” Rachel asks them.

  Up close, the twins appear as if they’ve been constantly sobbing for days—which is not far from the truth. They have endured a common nightmare as well as personal tragedies that Rachel hasn’t even had time to ask about. Why hasn’t she done that? These girls’ lives have changed forever in unique ways, precisely as hers has.

  “We’re fine,” Zoe says, finally turning toward Rachel, wiping her hair from her face. “How are you?”

  “Not even going there,” Rachel says.

  “Glad to have you back,” Chloe says. “Although this isn’t really a fun place to be.”

  “I’m sorry we were gone so long,” Rachel says. “I’m here to help.”

  When Rachel turns away from them, letting them do their thing, she realizes that the rest of the group is looking at her for direction. Even Scott. It’s a disconcerting moment. She doesn’t feel like any kind of composed, confident leader. But in the absence of Joel, she’ll have to do.

  “Uh … so I’d say we have the rest of daylight to do what we can here—does anyone not agree with that?” No one responds. “That gives us maybe two hours to finish this before we decide what’s next. When Joel gets back, we’ll figure out our next step, whether we stay or go, but in the meantime we find anyone here who might survive and try to take away their pain. That’s why we went to the hospital to get all this stuff, so let’s put it to good use.”

  “Are we safe?” Kevin asks from the ground. His voice is already slurring under medication. “Those things at the hospital were pretty determined to take us out.”

  “That was there, this is here. I don’t think they’re going to attack here again anytime soon.”

  “But you’re not sure about that.”

  “No, I’m not.” Rachel looks out on the library grounds and the streets beyond. There’s not a soul out there. No movement. “We’re safe for the time being. I know it. We’ve bought enough time to save some people and then get going. All right?”

  “Let’s do it,” Liam says.

  There are nods of agreement all around, only some of them reluctant.

  “Let’s keep Bill and Rick on the lookout, to the east and to the west,” Rachel suggests.

  “They’re already on it,” Liam says.

  Rachel nods and turns. Heading toward the book-returns area to find Felicia, she seizes on a thought from out of nowhere, Rachel is darting her gaze in all directions.

  “Wait … where’s Chrissy?”

  “I haven’t seen her,” Mai says.

  “Oh God, she’s not—”

  “I don’t think so.” Mai twists in a tight circle, scanning the lobby.

  Chloe and Zoe, across from each other in the lobby, pause and stare at each other for a full second, their faces mirroring a look of stunned shame. The shared look speaks volumes to Rachel. They’ve become so completely involved in their tasks that everything else has become secondary—including the well-being of their best friend.

  “Shit, Rachel, I don’t know where she is,” Chloe says, hurriedly preparing a morphine shot. Her hands shake. “I didn’t see anything happen to her, though. She was fighting right alongside us earlier, up in there.” She gestures toward the north hallway, the kids’ book area.

  Zoe can’t even look at Rachel.

  “Seriously?” Rachel shouts. “No one?”

  “Chrissy!” Liam calls.

  “Anyone see her since the attack?”

  Silence. Scott is shaking his head at the door to the book-returns room, and Liam is glancing around, too, checking his memory.

  “Not since then, no.”

  “Nobody knows where she is?” Rachel breaks into a sprint toward the north end of the library, calling back to Mai. “I’ve got to find her. Check the other end, okay?”

  CHAPTER 13

  Rachel stares wildly about. There are masses of human bodies against all the front walls, and she gives a cursory glance to the closest, to the right of the front door. All she can see is a tangle of broken limbs and twisted torsos and hair. She starts moving north, out of the lobby, checking piles. She slips on tacky blood and almost sprawls into one of the piles. She touches an elbow tentatively, then flips over the corpse of a naked man. She doesn’t see much in the way of distinctive clothing. Everything is torn, broken, thrashed.

  She moves to the next pile, searching, searching.

  Is this where she was fighting?

  She remembers Chrissy with her tranq gun, firing darts into bodies. She preferred the humane route to the rifle. Rachel has a sudden, strong image of the girl’s tiny, trembling hands grabbing O-neg-loaded darts from the box and hurrying through the hall. She went from here through to the kids’ area, back and forth—she remembers that. Chrissy had looked so small and vulnerable as she ran, diminutive in the face of the claustrophobic, roaring horror bearing down on them.

  Rachel enters the children’s section. There are bodies here, too, less tended to, and Rachel feels an anticipatory lump in her throat. Her gaze darts back and forth, from body to mutilated body.

  “Chrissy, Chrissy …” Rachel says, passing, breathing harshly.

  —her friend, meek little Chrissy, nearly killed at the hospital, nearly lost, and Rachel herself had picked her up, maybe injected a bit of confidence in the young woman … Chrissy always felt to her like a more timid version of herself—Rachel loved her, felt protective of her, but she was almost a cautionary tale, and now she was gone—

  There are four areas where Chrissy could feasibly be buried by bodies, mounds of ruined humans that have collected immediately below melted, blown-in windows. Rachel goes straight to the first, digging through them, her fingers slippery against still-wet flesh. She tosses corpses aside, in some cases shoving with her lower body, grunting and gasping, and at one point a large male arm comes loose from its shoulder socket in her hand, skin tearing and snapping like a sodden rubber band, and although somewhere deep she feels revulsion, she flings the arm away from herself, denying the sensation, and digs more deeply into the pile of bodies. Chrissy is not there.

  It takes Rachel a moment to realize that Liam has arrived, directly beside her at the next mound of corpses. He’s savagely tossing aside bodies.

  “Not here,” he barks, unceremoniously flinging a child’s carcass against the far wall.

  Rachel hopscotches to the next pile, begins shoving bodies left and right, and rolling the larger ones aside. It’s only a tiny part of her that ponders such careless treatment of human remains: In any other circumstances, she would rail against her own behavior, but she can’t deny the contradiction: Although they’re human beings, they are also the remains of monsters that attacked her, attacked the entire group in a concentrated effort to extinguish them. They killed her father, killed Bonnie—nearly killed Kevin. They took Tony and Jenny and countless others. These bodies contained murderous impulses. And they might have murdered Chrissy, too.

  Even as she digs, Liam is on to the next pile.

  “Not here,” Rachel calls.

  There’s blood everywhere, and only now does she realize that it’s beginning to stink. Not
hing like the hospital, but that sweet-rotten stench is going to overtake the library and make it uninhabitable within hours. There’s already so much blood here that she can barely look anywhere without it overwhelming her senses. She staggers back from the windows, closing her eyes.

  “Where is she?” she pants.

  Liam pulls back from his pile, looking wildly around. He doesn’t have answers.

  “Could she be on the other side of the lobby?” Rachel steps into the long hallway, peering through the lobby, down into the darkened south end. “Mai! Anything?”

  “No!”

  “That’s where we’ve been working all afternoon,” says Liam. “It’s pretty cleared out.”

  “Could she have—” Rachel is about to suggest that Chrissy might have run away, outside, away from here. Perhaps overwhelmed by the attack.

  But then Liam interrupts.

  “Look!” He’s gesturing away from the windows.

  The bodies are piled in an area where the carpet is inundated with blood—red, slick, clotting. Red footprints surround these areas like ghastly modern art. The farther removed from the windows, the less the carpet is stained by the assault. Rachel can trace the survivors’ frantic paths from the lobby to the various warzones—those areas where the bodies destroyed the windows and gained entrance, squeezing and crawling through the gaps.

  One pair of footprints—a small pair—meanders off into the darkening distance, alone.

  A sudden feeling of relief floods Rachel, but she tamps it down. The footprints might be Chrissy’s, but they might not be. They could be anyone’s.

  Where do they lead?

  She and Liam race to follow the prints, but the bloody tracks quickly fade through the children’s section and disappear near the elevators. Seeing a jerky curve to the trajectory of the remaining footprints, Rachel judges that Chrissy—if the footprints are indeed hers—scrambled through the inner hallway, toward the elevator and up the stairs. She glances up the two-tiered stairwell, then begins taking the steps two at a time.

  Halfway up is a discarded tranq rifle.

  “Chrissy!”

  Liam is right behind her.

  The second floor is a disaster of books and shelving, dim, sweltering, and claustrophobic. In the days preceding the attack, several of the survivors took great pains to shove bookcases against the big windows, letting books fall into disarray, and now the air is filled with a sweaty mustiness. Rachel strides blindly into it, kicking books aside.

  “Check that way,” she instructs Liam, gesturing to the north end, and he rushes into the shadows, calling Chrissy’s name.

  The community computer area is dead and ghostly to Rachel’s left, the PCs looking like something from a forgotten time. To the right, the study rooms are dark and closed off, their windows black, opaque. Rachel circles around an information kiosk. Shafts of sunset light are searing in from the mountain west—or is it the alien crimson light that has come to define her existence?

  She feels herself hyperventilating, knowing that a chunk of her sanity depends on finding her friend alive.

  No more death.

  The words rush through her mind—a desperate entreaty. She peels her eyes wide in the encroaching darkness. There are books everywhere, and the deeper she treads into the corners, the more the library seems to bear down on her, a monster all its own, ready to swallow her. The faces of those she’s lost flash vividly in front of her as she stumbles deeper into the darkness, and tears blur the shadows. She blinks rapidly, trying to focus.

  “Chrissy!”

  The teen fiction area lies in shambles ahead and to the right. Rachel steps over a small landslide of books. Huge bookcases are angled crookedly against the thick-paned perimeter windows, and books are squashed between them and the glass, looking trapped, abused. Most of the books have tumbled to the floor, their covers bent, spines cracked, pages torn. Rachel wades through them as if through the detritus of a landfill.

  A glint of something catches her eye.

  A blinking eye, reflecting the fading sunlight.

  Halfway buried in books, Chrissy watches Rachel from against the south wall. She’s nearly lost in the pile, hiding, not wanting to be discovered. Eyes brimming with tears, she turns her head away as if ashamed.

  “What—?” Rachel begins, approaching carefully. “Thank God, are you okay?”

  Chrissy begins to shake her head violently. “No … no …”

  “Liam, she’s here!”

  Rachel touches Chrissy’s arm, and Chrissy flinches. In the half-light, Rachel sees now that portions of Chrissy’s skin are pale and mottled. She’s hurt; she’s had contact with the inhabited bodies. Rachel isn’t sure of the extent of it, but some damage has been done.

  “Are you all right?”

  Chrissy sniffs, doesn’t look at her.

  Liam arrives at a sprint, tripping slightly over scattered books.

  “You found her!”

  “She needs help, let’s get her downstairs.”

  Chrissy lets out a small cry and twists her body away from them.

  Rachel watches her friend’s profile. “Sweetie, we gotta get you downstairs to take care of you.”

  Unresponsive, Chrissy closes her eyes, letting tears rain down on paper. She looks shockingly frail and vulnerable. She smells of perspiration and dried blood, and Rachel catches a whiff of urine. She settles back on her haunches.

  “Liam, I think I need a little time with her.”

  He looks down at her, looks indecisive. Then, “Okay. Call out if you need me.” He walks off, treading lightly.

  Rachel settles down to her rear, letting a hand rest lightly on Chrissy’s knee. At least her friend is alive. Exhaustion opens like a pit inside Rachel’s chest, everything catching up with her. She feels as if she could fall unconscious without the slightest provocation—simply slump sideways and sleep for days. Instead, she merely lets her head drop to her chest, closes her eyes, and breathes in a careful, controlled rhythm as if she’s meditating. She lets Chrissy get used to her presence, touching her, offering her strength.

  Long minutes pass in the sweltering gloom.

  Chrissy hasn’t moved.

  After a while, Rachel scoots over next to her and lies beside her so that she’s looking straight into her eyes. She moves her hand from her friend’s knee to her upper arm, where she can discern no injury. The contact seems to have happened on the forearms and the hands. It doesn’t look terrible. Mostly incidental. She massages the skin lightly.

  Chrissy locks her gaze on Rachel. There’s an emptiness in the girl’s eyes, a hopelessness that Rachel feels she can understand. She latches on to it, and suddenly everything washes over her—her failure to be strong at the beginning, the poor decisions she made when she thought she was trying for confidence, the times she wanted to help but might have made everything worse, her father’s sacrifice—and she lets silent tears stream down her face and darken the pages of a book that lies splayed open on the floor.

  There’s distant commotion downstairs, and Rachel knows she should be helping, but she gives Chrissy long moments of silence, knowing it is what her friend needs.

  Finally, a sound comes from Chrissy’s throat. Almost a word. She coughs a little and blinks.

  “I’m sorry,” she says meekly.

  Her whole body shakes uncontrollably, then settles.

  “Don’t apologize.”

  Another small eternity passes.

  “I don’t know why I … why I ran. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t mean to—”

  “Shhh.”

  Chrissy’s expression goes from pleading to a tentative acceptance of Rachel’s calming influence.

  “Are you hurt?” Rachel asks.

  Chrissy gives herself a half-hearted examination, twisting her arms back and forth, then shrugging. “One of those things—” Her lip trembles in disgust. “One of them touched me while I was kicking at it, like it was trying to bite me. It was a kid, Rachel, it could have been a kid fr
om my street. Only a little older than my brother. He still had socks on, socks with stripes.”

  She stops talking, relives the moment.

  “It felt like my skin was going numb. It freaked me out.” She sniffs. “I fell backwards a little bit, and then …” She stops, looking Rachel in the eye. Her mouth trembles.

  “And then what?”

  “… then I kept going backward until I was leaving. Leaving everybody.” She shakes her head, eyes closed hard, full of self-loathing. “I left you. I’m sorry.”

  Rachel feels a mixture of compassion and disappointment rising up in her. Of course she can understand the impulse to hide in a kind of amnesia. She herself has felt it. But she has not given in to it. She doesn’t exactly feel pride for that realization, but she can’t help but compare herself to Chrissy at this moment. She can’t imagine abandoning her fellow survivors in a moment like that, but can she blame someone whose personal fears or failings led her to do that?

  She scoots closer to Chrissy as if to embrace her, but Chrissy doesn’t respond, simply lies there, deadweight.

  Rachel flashes back on the aftermath of Tony’s death, which seems weeks ago now. After a shudder, reliving the shotgun blast, she focuses on her mindset while driving back to the hospital to her unconscious father. She hardly remembers any of that. She’d been in a shocked daze. Stunned. Ready for everything to simply end, for whatever had taken hold of the world to get it over with already, to strike her down if only to put an end to the red chaos. Even after the relief of finding her father awake, Rachel descended into a pessimistic funk that lasted for days. In a sense, she had given up. She abandoned her fellow survivors, too. So who was she to judge?

  “You don’t have a thing to be sorry about,” she whispers. “No one is gonna blame you for anything. We all do what we can, and that’s all we can do.”

  After a pause, Chrissy impulsively surges forward and hugs Rachel sideways, pulling her against her. There are no tears, as if she has cried out everything she has, but the emotion is hot and close between them.