Blood Red Read online

  “I’m done talking,” Joel says. “Get out of the way, Scott.”

  “Well, then, hell, be my guest,” he says, backing off and managing a dark laugh.

  Rachel regards Scott with curiosity as the group moves through the doors. She doesn’t think it’s cowardice, exactly, that’s motivating this man. Or at least, not totally. It’s something like selfish entitlement. When she passes, Scott gives her a supremely childish look, his expression exaggerated as if to say, “What?” She looks away and follows the rest inside.

  They make their way through the open glass doors into the dim admissions area. The long desk is littered with papers, the computers still hauntingly darkened. Joel peers up at the weak lights above him.

  “Has anyone checked the generator for fuel?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” Bonnie says.

  “This hospital goes dark, it’s not going to be a happy place.” He stops and glances back. “Hey, Scott, can you have someone check the generator for fuel?”

  Scott is still standing there staring after them. “I have no idea where it is.”

  “It’s on the roof,” Joel replies. “It’s a diesel unit, and I’m sure there’s fuel up there.”

  Scott stares daggers at the policeman, but finally, resigned, he turns to the remaining young man behind him. “Let’s go, Greg. The cop’s got a chore for us.”

  The two men trudge inside and head for the wide stairwell that leads up to the second floor. They give the body on the floor a wide berth. Just beyond the tipped-over gurney, from Rachel’s perspective, it continues to twitch, and it’s still subtly arching its back. In the generator lighting, the red luminescence is visible, particularly when the head twists beyond the edge of the gurney, and Rachel can see it deep in the throat. Just as Rachel shivers at the sight, Scott staggers in his own step, watching the corpse with distaste.

  “Christ!” he barks at it. “Come on!” He and Greg hurry up the steps.

  Bonnie leads the way beyond the admissions desk to the double doors leading to the hallway beyond. The group creeps quietly across the tile, and almost immediately they can hear the throaty gasps coming from the hall. When they come within sight of the first corpse, its groans increase slightly. Its back and neck are strained, its dead eyes glaring at them upside down. It’s emitting a steady low drone, deep in its throat, the sound reminding Rachel of a cornered cat.

  “Oh dear,” Alan whispers next to her.

  “Remember,” Bonnie says, “whatever’s inside these bodies, that light, whatever it is, it can do a lot of damage.”

  “I’ve seen what it can do, yeah.” Joel is staring down the length of the wide hall, at the bodies on gurneys lining the walls. There’s activity atop all of them, small involuntary jerks and spasms, and the gurneys move only minutely. “We’re walking through this?”

  “Yes,” Rachel says.

  When they pass it, the first corpse’s growl is still louder, and the dead eyes continue to watch them, the mouth working jerkily, muscles down the body twitching in seeming anticipation. Its left arm flops loosely off the table, only to snap back at an odd angle, its fingers twisted and pointing in severe directions. The group continues down the hall, watching the bodies warily.

  “Well, that’s not creepy at all,” Joel breathes, the guttural gasps receding behind them.

  “It’s almost like they’re seizing,” Bonnie whispers. “But … not. I mean, there’s almost control there.”

  They walk deeper into the depths of the hospital, finally getting past the rows of gurneys. Bonnie leads them through the curtained examination areas and to the private examination rooms. Rachel looks ahead to the fifth room, where she knows the motorcyclist awaits. The group’s footfalls sound overly loud in the quiet, sterile place, the weak and unstable lighting transforming this otherwise safe, brightly lit place into some kind of dank, foreboding dungeon.

  “He’s right here,” Bonnie says.

  She opens the door to reveal the motorcyclist. It’s immediately clear that the body is moving, despite its horrific injuries. Rachel realizes it’s the first time Alan or Jenny has seen this body, and as she glances in their direction, Alan closes his eyes and Jenny turns around roughly, facing the opposite direction. She steps back out into the hall.

  Joel is watching the body studiously, curiously. Rachel hears him swallow heavily.

  “Okay,” he says very quietly.

  The man’s cleaved skull reveals the glowing orb all too clearly; the red luminescence seems almost to have a pulse. The flat, dead eyes are moving independent of each other, but one of them finally locks on Joel, then the others, and the mouth juts open and let loose a dry huff. The thing’s movements increase in intensity, the broken limbs shuddering with no real control. And now the back is attempting to arch, but the body repeatedly fails, falling back to the metal table. The mouth continues to wheeze, partially clotted blood emerging from the mouth in bubbles and lumps.

  “There’s no way this man is alive.” Joel’s voice is a weak echo of what it was moments ago. “This is impossible.”

  “That’s why I wanted to show you this,” Rachel says, at his side.

  Joel looks away from the twitching tragedy that was once a human being. He looks pale.

  “So what do we do?”

  Rachel takes a deep breath, feeling the eyes of the others on her. “This morning, when I first knew something was wrong, my stepmother had this…thing in her head, this light. Just like this man. Just like everybody else. She was gone, she was dead. I tried to wake her. I tried to make sense of it. I ended up trying to … to smother it. I only wanted to get that thing out of her. And I did.”

  “Wait, what?” Joel says, sounding a little stronger again. “You did what?”

  “I got it out of her.”

  “You never told me—” Bonnie starts.

  “I tried it again later,” Rachel says, looking at Jenny, who is miserably peering into the room from outside the door. “We tried it with a girl we found in Target.”

  “Target?” Joel says, frowning. “What on earth were you doing at Target? That’s on the south end of town.”

  “I had to find my dad,” she says, matter-of-factly. “He works across the street from there.”

  “She found him, too,” Jenny says softly from the door. “He’s here.”

  “Anyway,” Rachel goes on, “by that time, the body was moving around, and it struggled more, but it reacted against what I was doing. It was fearful, I think. Maybe because it wasn’t strong enough to prevent me from doing it. It seemed like it was…like it was mad because it couldn’t move right. I wasn’t able to finish that one, because, well, it scared us.”

  “So how did you do it?” Joel asks. “How did you get rid of that—that thing?”

  “I—I smothered it.” She flashes back on Susanna in her bed, on that horrible moment when, for all intents and purposes, she ended her stepmother’s life. “See, I think that glow, that thing inside, it needs something, whether that’s oxygen, or some other molecule in the air, or whatever—some kind of energy to live. To do what it’s doing inside those bodies, it’s feeding on something inside and outside the body. At least, that’s what I’m thinking.” The motorcyclist twitches. “So, I cut off that supply. I blotted it out. Like holding a match to a leech attached to your skin. It’ll pull itself out.”

  The room is quiet for a moment, as the atrocity in front of them continues to jerk and gasp. Its errant eye swivels in its socket, seeming to watch them.

  “How do you know all that?” Joel whispers.

  “I don’t know all that, but I’ve been working it out, I guess, for the past few hours. Just observation.”

  “Okay, so…” The cop looks at them, his eyes scanning the room. Finally, a bitter smile takes hold of his lips, and he’s shaking his head. “Can I just say how ridiculous this is? The dead coming back to life? Seriously? Are you saying these people are fucking zombies?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Alan s
ays.

  “I don’t know what they are,” Rachel says, “or what’s causing any of this. But they’re moving around, even though they’re dead. Call them what you want.”

  The thing on the table is moving in twitches and spasms, defying all reason. The sight of this physically devastated man is, as Joel said, impossible.

  “How?” Joel says, almost too softly for Rachel to hear. He’s still staring at the motorcyclist.

  “What?”

  “So, we smother it—with what?”

  Rachel shrugs. “Towels? Blankets? Pillows?”

  “Smother it …” he repeats.

  “Sort of.” Rachel shouldn’t have used the word smother. She can see that Joel is reacting with unease to the idea of killing what appears to be a human being. “Just let me show you.”

  “You’ve got my attention, Rachel.” Joel looks at her, and for the tiniest of moments, Rachel believes she can see emotion in his gaze. “Show me.”

  Jenny is looking uncertainly at the door, and Rachel waits for her to repeat the objections she aired at Target. She keeps her mouth shut.

  “I’ll need some cloth,” Rachel says. “Whatever you can find.”

  Bonnie and Alan exit the room to find what she needs. Joel and Rachel share a silent glance, then continue to watch the motorcyclist.

  “Rachel …” Jenny whispers, and Rachel looks straight at her. “Are you sure?”

  Bonnie returns with several starchy hospital pillows, and Alan squeezes in with an armful of blue patient gowns. Rachel reaches for the gowns, wadding a few of them up in her fists. She watches the motorcyclist’s eyes, searching for understanding there and finding none. But when she takes a step toward the body, the gasping increases.

  “Can you hold his arms?” Rachel asks Joel.

  Joel carefully secures the man’s shredded arms against the table, and the motorcyclist’s guttural screeching becomes near-deafening.

  “Rachel—” comes Bonnie’s high-pitched voice. “Careful.”

  Rachel nods, her eye on the unobstructed glow coming from the thing’s open cheek. For good measure, she takes another two gowns, making her cloth wad even bulkier. She steels herself when she gets to within a few feet of the corpse, which is going ballistic now, flailing its nearly dismembered body as much as it can. It’s practically barking at her, looking straight at her with its enraged, deadened eye, its lip curled and jumping, dry teeth raggedly exposed. As the group inches closer, the head swivels from upside down to crookedly sideways.

  “Okay, do it.”

  Joel and now Alan latch on to the body—Joel at the chest and Alan at the legs. The body squirms ineffectually. She can tell the two men aren’t exactly straining with the effort of holding it down, but its unpredictable spasms make for a challenge. The right leg squirms awkwardly toward Alan’s chest, catching Alan unaware, but he manages to hold both legs fast to the table. Joel has a firm hold on the upper body, trapping the twitching arms at the thing’s side.

  The corpse’s sound is a hollow, wet gasp made gargly by its broken and open mouth. Bubbles of black blood vibrate at the throat.

  “Go! Go!” Joel urges.

  Rachel steps forward and crams the cloth against the thing’s face. Immediately its sounds are muffled, but the body heaves and seems to want to spiral beneath Joel and Alan, fishlike. Rachel holds steady, applying as much pressure as she dares. Again she’s flashing back vividly to Susanna’s bedside, snuffing out the thing inside her stepmother, wanting to help her, help her get this alien thing out of her—

  —but was that her true motivation?

  Rachel presses down, her arms trembling, feeling tears about to burst from her eyes.

  Is this a human being beneath her now, or a dead, reanimated thing?

  She presses the cloth, in spite of the muffled scream, and then presses still harder.

  There’s a flash of red light that splays out around the pillow, accompanied by a throbbing pulse, and then a motionless, silent pause. Then the body convulses again, more weakly, a last-ditch effort to throw off its attackers. The men hold on relatively easily.

  And then it happens, just like this morning.

  Another pulse, and pop, the light is gone, and the two men instinctively let go of the now-still wreck of a body and back away against the opposite wall, bracing themselves against the crash cart there. In the stunned silence, Rachel glances at the two men, who are wide-eyed and rigid.

  “Good heavens,” Alan breathes.

  Rachel lifts away the cloth to reveal the cleaved skull, which is now obviously dead. Body clenched at contortionist angles, face tightened into frozen agony, this person is clearly gone. Rachel, finally relaxing her own clenched muscles, finds that the cloth in her hand has been sullied by splotches of blood that must have been coughed up in the smothering. She lets the wad of gowns drop, wipes her hands on her pants, feels her lip curl in revulsion.

  Joel stands fully, blinking at her, at the scene, taking in what has just occurred.

  “I think you’ve hit on something,” he says.

  “I would say so,” Alan whispers, his voice quiet and gray.

  Chapter 12

  Following the completion of their unseemly task, the survivors stand breathing heavily at the door, staring back at the motorcyclist’s broken body. Now that this man’s gasping and thumping have ceased, they become aware of the low groans of other corpses in the vicinity. Rachel looks away from the blasted corpse, trying to get a sense of direction. The sounds are close. When she sees Joel look up, she feels a burst of awareness. The upper floors themselves are probably unexplored, teeming with the twitching corpses of former patients.

  “Where’s Jenny?” Bonnie says.

  Rachel’s friend is no longer behind her. She squeezes between Joel and Bonnie, moves through the doorway, and searches the open tiled area. Jenny is standing in front of the door of the first private examination room, her hand on the door’s handle. The hand falls when she senses Rachel noticing her. Rachel sees tears in her eyes.

  “You okay?”

  “I can’t look at them, Rachel. I can’t see them like that.” She wipes her eyes against her forearms, one at a time.

  “Your sisters?”

  Jenny nods. “I brought them here,” she whispers. “Away from the others.” She turns to face Rachel, can’t even bring herself to look at the door which she knows will open onto her loved ones. Rachel tries her best to console her, thoughts of her own father hanging over her. “They’re moving in there, but I can’t…”

  “I know.”

  “But what you did in there, I don’t want you to do that to them, okay?”

  “Jenny, they’re… they aren’t your sisters anymore.”

  “I just—just don’t. Okay?”

  Jenny goes quiet, pulls away from the door, and mopes back toward her. Rachel watches her approach, sensing the others filing out of the morbid examination room behind her. Bonnie closes the door almost respectfully with her free hand. With her other hand, she’s clutching her heap of gowns against her chest.

  Joel removes his two-way police radio from his belt.

  “Buck, come in.”

  He begins walking back the way they came, and the others fall in line behind him. Jenny casts one more glance back at the room that holds her sisters.

  Joel tries again. “Buck, come in, this is Joel.” He releases the transmitter button and says, “Buck’s the other officer I was talking about, from the southeast precinct. He’s down on Harmony.”

  The radio returns nothing but static.

  “You mentioned CB earlier,” Alan says as they round a corner. “What kinds of communications are working right now?”

  “RF is the only thing I can get working. CB is working, as long as there’s battery power. Cell phones are out, probably because the power’s out. Obviously, Internet and landlines are dead.” He tries his radio again: “Buck, come in.”

  After letting the static go for a few seconds, Alan says, “There
’s an AM/FM radio behind the admissions counter, running on battery. I checked both bands and didn’t find anything.”

  “That’s a power problem. Or no one’s broadcasting.”

  “Oh God,” Jenny whispers at the rear of the group.

  Abruptly, the radio squawks, and a distorted voice comes through the speaker. “Joel, this is Ron at CSU.”

  “Ron, hey, how’s it going over there?”

  “We have about thirty people here, getting dug in for—” The radio fuzzes out briefly. “…not too many bodies on campus because it’s the weekend, but they’re around. And they’re moving like we saw in Old Town, but it’s more—” He fuzzes out again. “—more pronounced. Are you seeing that? They’re moving more and more. Not sure what to make of it, but it’s freaky as hell.”

  For some reason, despite the grim words, the tinny sound of this disembodied voice coming over the two-way allows Rachel to feel at least a small glimmer of something resembling hope.

  “Yeah, Ron, same thing here. I made it to the hospital. People have brought a lot of bodies here—family members and friends.”

  “Are they—are they…alive?”

  “They’re dead, Ron. I can’t tell you why they’re moving around, but one thing we’re sure of is that, yeah, they’re dead.”

  “That doesn’t make sense, man! I mean—I mean—”

  Joel waits for the channel to clear, then transmits. “Ron, I don’t know how to explain it, but this thing is happening, okay? But listen, if these things start getting even more feisty, it is possible to smother them, to smother that light that’s coming out of them. Somehow that’s the key to this, all right? That light that’s inside them. You knock that out, you take ’em down.” He releases the transmitter and waits.

  “Smother them? Really? That sounds…that sounds horrible.”

  “It’s all I got right now, but it works. Use a bunch of cloth, blankets or towels, a pillow, whatever. Just don’t let that light touch you. Let’s keep in touch on this channel. Out.”