Blood Red Read online

  Just as Joel ends the conversation and clips the radio to his belt, they reach the wide hallway that leads to the admissions area, and they stop. There are low gasps in the humid air, comparably quiet on an individual basis, but collectively it’s a disturbing, rumbling hiss. In the dim, windowless gloom, the energy of this new, unnatural life creeps toward them like fog.

  “Good God …” Joel breathes, giving Rachel a look as she surveys the bodies lining the walls.

  It takes her a moment to realize that, at the sound of Joel’s voice, the bodies have gone ominously silent. She scans the gurneys, finds a few of the corpses arching their backs, their heads angling in her direction, in obscene, painful angles. And now their noises have begun again. Is it her imagination, or have the gasps increased in volume?

  “All right, look,” Joel says. “We have to make a decision here. Basically, we have to decide if we’re going to leave or stay.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Jenny cuts in.

  “Now hold on, girl. Like you heard just now, we’ve got some people gathering at the college, and there aren’t nearly as many bodies all over the place there, not nearly as many as these things fucking growling like that.”

  Jenny glances back toward her sisters again.

  “I’d point out,” Alan says, “that this hospital is equipped with just about everything we might need in the event of a disaster, and I believe whatever is happening qualifies as a disaster.”

  Bonnie is nodding. “I personally wouldn’t leave. We have medicine, supplies, food, water, beds—”

  “And most of those beds are filled with bodies that are doing something extremely unpredictable,” Joel finishes.

  “Which we can take care of, given some time, and enough people,” Rachel says. “And enough blankets. Or gowns.” She gestures to the collection of gowns that Bonnie is clutching to her chest almost protectively.

  Joel eyes her. “You’re suggesting we smother all these people?”

  “You make it sound like murder or something.”

  “No, I know it’s not that.”

  “Well, I’m with Bonnie,” Rachel says firmly. “She didn’t grab all that cloth for nothing. I say we take care of these bodies before they get more active, then hunker down for whatever comes next. We can barricade this place better than most buildings in the area, and we can probably survive here longer than anywhere else, too.”

  Joel fishes his cigarettes from his breast pocket, shakes one out, and puts it between his lips. He lights it with his Bic lighter, and Rachel can tell that Bonnie is on the verge of saying something about smoking in a hospital. Or maybe she just wants to ask for one. Bonnie closes her mouth and looks down. The rules of society have died with most of the population.

  Joel takes two deep drags on the cigarette, then nods. “I think you’re right. That’s really the reason I’m still here. You can’t abandon a hospital in favor of some gym.”

  The bodies on the gurneys are rigid and twitching. In three cases, additional bodies are slumped over the animated corpses, indistinct shapes of mortally scarred loved ones who somehow became caught in the awful embraces of their reanimated family members, the orb having essentially melted their facial and upper body flesh into organic pudding.

  “And if we’re going to try to fight this thing, figure out what’s happening, then I can’t think of a better place to start than here.”

  There’s a strange moment of indecision before Alan goes to Bonnie and takes a handful of gowns from her. He walks straight toward the closest corpse, a large woman’s body whose neck is strained with the effort of craning its head toward them. Its dead eyes, all wide black pupils, are dry and flat, and yet Rachel sees cognizance there. Inhuman awareness.

  “Wait, Alan,” Joel says. “Let me.” He goes to the corpse, which intensifies its squirming, but the musculature is clearly uncooperative. “Careful of the glow.” He takes hold of the arms, which are already at the body’s side, tensing and clenching but unarticulated.

  “Of course.”

  Rachel approaches, observing carefully. Alan’s hands are shaking a little, but he doesn’t hesitate to place the wad of gowns against the woman’s face, directly over the mouth, covering it completely. The gasps coming from the mouth are muffled and weak. Rachel watches the chest: There’s no attempt to heave a breath, as this isn’t a case of preventing inhalation. This is focused on the head and what has taken residence within it.

  The thing’s limbs jerk, and one leg slips off the edge of the table. Rachel shoots forward, grabs it, and lifts it back into place. She knows Alan must be exhausted, but his arms are locked on the thing’s face, the gowns completely obliterating the glow. Now the corpse’s heavy upper body clenches, twice, in a last-ditch effort to throw Alan off, but there’s not enough strength.

  There’s a muffled pop—more of an electric crack—and the corpse goes abruptly still.

  Alan stays where he is, intensely concentrated.

  “That’s it, buddy,” Joel says, touching the older man’s shoulder. “One down.”

  Alan slowly lifts the cloth from the woman’s face. The expression that remains there is one of agony. Alan looks directly at the death mask, then grabs the edge of the gurney with rigid fingers. A small cough escapes his lips. Joel quickly takes the edge of a white sheet that has partially fallen off the bottom of the gurney and pulls it up and over the corpse’s head. Rachel moves to Alan and places her hand on his arm, and he nods at the touch.

  “Let’s get this done,” Joel announces. “Bonnie, why don’t you and Alan take that side, and I’ll take this side with Rachel. Jenny, if you wouldn’t mind covering the bodies as we go, and helping out where you can?”

  Jenny nods miserably, and the group divides in silence, letting the increasing growls of the corpses provide a droning soundtrack to their movements. Bonnie separates her pile of gowns into two bunches, handing Rachel one of the loose wads. Rachel looks briefly into her eyes, finding a desolate exhaustion there. She knows that what they’re about to do must go against every instinct in Bonnie’s soul.

  “We have to do it,” Rachel whispers. “To save ourselves.”

  “I know.”

  In moments, Rachel and Joel are standing next to their first corpse, a Hispanic man whose apparent mother is folded over his midsection. Without looking at her face, Rachel pushes the woman’s body off of him. The body folds over to the tiled floor, and Rachel glimpses a flash of twisted, ruined flesh like burned dough. Her face is unrecognizable. Rachel inhales sharply with distaste, then composes herself.

  The gowns gathered in his fists, Joel gives her a look. “Ready?”

  “As ready as I’ll ever be,” she says. “Watch the—”

  “Right.”

  She takes hold of the man’s arms, which feel sweaty and thick. Like this morning, they also seem to give more than they should and her fingers sink into the flesh. Though Rachel manages to easily pin the arms at the man’s side and against the metal table, she feels a deeply unsettling tenseness under the skin, a kind of dark, uncertain energy. Against her better judgment, she looks at the man’s face, and she finds that the man appears to be looking at her, the flat eyes somehow containing awareness. The face is contorted in what appears to be anger, the mouth open in a twitchy snarl, the red glow barely visible but accentuating the seeming anger. The thing’s dry, throaty gasp seems endless, and then Joel presses the cloth down.

  She feels the corpse shudder atop the table, its arms straining against her, but she manages to hold him steady without much trouble. In moments, there’s the same electric pop, and the man goes still beneath her, relaxing into death.

  Rachel removes her trembling hands, watching the body. She’s surprised to find her eyes blurry from fresh tears. She wipes them away with her sleeve.

  “Sorry,” she says.

  She hears a scuffle behind her, turns to see Alan taking care of a young Indian woman’s corpse. Bonnie is looming over the lower half of the body, being
extra careful to keep away from the effect of the glow. Even from where she stands, Rachel can see the corpse struggle and strain, and she can see and hear the disappearance of the red illumination—it crackles like electricity.

  Rachel has only a moment to glance over at Jenny, beyond Alan, when the dim lights above them snap off, plunging the hallway into pitch blackness. In the distance, the sound of the generator’s chugging drone dwindles into silence.

  Immediately, Jenny screams—a ragged bray of high-pitched sound.

  A meandering line of throbbing red glows penetrates the darkness, into the distance, leading toward the double doors to admissions, and they’re all jerking minutely, in rhythm. Jenny’s scream dies out, and the corpses’ gasps fill the void, giving the blackness a chilling edge. Adrenaline floods Rachel as she grabs onto the edge of the gurney next to her.

  Just as Jenny begins to scream again, Joel clicks on his police-issue mag light, flooding the hallway with a cone of white light. Rachel catches sight of Jenny on the floor, her knees to her chest, breathing heavily. Bonnie and Alan both have one hand on their chests.

  “That asshole!” Joel shouts in the blackness.

  “You think—?” Rachel whispers.

  “Scott killed the generator.” Joel points the flashlight at the tiled floor, creating plenty of ambient light without blinding anyone. “Unbelievable. All right, let’s keep calm, guys. Let’s go ahead and move—”

  The generator ratchets back on, and the emergency lighting follows shortly after. Joel looks up at the unsteady fixtures above him, then stows his flashlight in his belt. The group stands there for a moment, trading nervous glances. Jenny continues to breathe erratically and wipe at her eyes for several minutes.

  “Everybody okay?” Joel asks, his voice loud over the monotonous low gasping.

  Joel moves his gaze from face to face, and there are reluctant nods all around. He gets to Rachel, and she nods, too, says, “Yeah, Scott’s a dick.”

  Joel gives her a sideways grin, and then the group returns to its grim task.

  The third body that Rachel and Joel encounter is a young boy of perhaps six years. Towheaded and blue-eyed, he’s like a Norman Rockwell nightmare in his bright pajamas, a perfect little kid whose dead eyes shift dryly in their sockets, and whose mouth snarls open to reveal that same perplexing red glow behind white baby teeth. Now the tears are coming freely to Rachel’s eyes, her throat closing up, as she holds down his thin arms and Joel presses the wad of cloth to the boy’s beautiful, dead face. The illumination snaps out almost immediately, and Rachel crumples atop the boy for a long moment, feeling Joel’s strong hand on her shoulder. In a moment, Jenny is there, too.

  She composes herself with a nod, then returns to her duty.

  They work their way down the hallway, completing the increasingly horrifying job of smothering the remainder of the corpses—a total of twenty-one bodies, each one seeming a little more energetic in its barely restrained flailing than the last. And there are more bodies, Rachel learns as they approach the midpoint of their task, collected in four large rooms off a smaller corridor that leads west. These are among the first to come in to the hospital yesterday morning. The group decides to forego these bodies for now, opting to close and barricade the doors.

  Smothering the corpses along the hallway takes less than forty minutes. When Rachel manages to locate another battery-powered wall clock, the display reads 2:21 a.m.

  Joel and Jenny are carefully covering the corpses atop the gurneys with the sheets that were already haphazardly gathered around the shifting bodies. In a few cases, Joel has gently placed loved ones atop the same gurney, then covered the horror of their defiled flesh with sheets and spread-open gowns. Alan and Bonnie have dismissed themselves to rooms 109 and 111 to check on the unfortunate and most likely doomed survivors there. The majority of them are on morphine, awaiting the end.

  Rachel stares at the door of the makeshift supply room that holds her father. She takes a deep breath and enters the room, immediately watching his face. There’s no movement, save for his even breathing. She lets the breath go in a quiet sigh, then pulls up a plastic-backed chair and plants herself at his side. She finds his left hand and squeezes it with her right.

  He hasn’t moved an inch since she was last here. She closes her eyes, feeling grittiness there, as well as a sharp ache behind her left brow. She knows she will never live long enough to dispel the memory of the past hour—hell, the past entire day. Those actions and sensations will populate her nightmares until the day, perhaps soon, when she meets her own end.

  Joel’s voice invades her thoughts, and she opens her eyes. He’s speaking into his radio; she can hear its intermittent squawk. He seems to be just outside the door now.

  “—and who at Windsor, you said?”

  “Tommy,” comes a static-filtered reply.

  “Tommy? I don’t know him.”

  “Her.”

  “Oh. Well, I don’t know her.” He appears at the doorway and looks in, nodding. “Does she have anything organized there?”

  “I think she’s organizing something at the high school.”

  “How about you, Buck?”

  The cop named Buck describes his situation at the elementary school down on Harmony, about twenty survivors holed up, helping out. “Got a good group here. Everyone seems to be pretty stand-up. We’ve got power.”

  “Generator?”

  “Yep, portable rigs from Home Depot.”

  Rachel is thankful to have Joel here as exhaustion settles over her more heavily by the second. She notices that the clean-shaven, almost desperate military sense of authority he projected at the downtown crash site has given way to a more low-key air of control. He looks more human now. She knows he must be as exhausted as she is, perhaps more so.

  “Well, you know the score,” he says to Buck. “Just clear ‘em out. Gotta start somewhere.”

  “You done a kid yet?” Buck asks over the radio.

  “Yes.” Joel glances significantly at Rachel.

  “Try doing forty of ’em in a row. A group of them here must have been gearing up for some kind of P.E. practice. Stretching in the gym or something when this goddamn thing struck. Just slumped over in a big circle.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Talk to you in an hour.”

  “Out.”

  Joel attaches the radio to his belt, then yawns terrifically. He finds himself alone with Rachel on the other side of her dad, and she tries to lighten the mood with a halfhearted smile. Bonnie has returned to the admissions area, where there’s some kind of minor commotion.

  “I’ll regret this,” Joel says, pulling up the one other chair in the room, one of the black plastic-and-metal things that are ubiquitous throughout the hospital. “I’ll probably be asleep in two minutes.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “You okay?”

  “No.”

  He nods. “So this is your dad.” He looks at his face, then back at her. “That was a pretty amazing thing you did. How old are you?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “Damn, girl, that’s impressive.”

  “Only if he makes it.” She watches him a moment, then asks, “Do you have any family?”

  “No, not here,” he says. “My dad is in Denver, but I haven’t spoken to him in a few weeks. I wish I had, now.” He pauses. “Mom’s in Texas with a new husband I can’t stand, so I don’t see much of her either. You?”

  “Just my dad now,” she says quietly.

  Rachel blinks exaggeratedly, trying to squeeze out the grit in her eyes. She shakes her head to clear it of an encroaching sleep haze, looks at him squarely.

  “So what do you think happened, really?” she asks. “What’s going on here?”

  Joel lets loose a weary sigh. “Honestly, I keep going back to some kind of biological attack. Germ warfare.”

  “Seriously?”

  “What else could it be, right? It’s got all the markings of that kind of th
ing. A population decimated by some kind of biochemical agent, some kind of aerosol … When I woke to this thing, when I went outside, there was a haze over everything, did you see that?”

  Rachel nods, not relishing the memory. “The haze, and that—that buzzing noise over everything.”

  “Right! Exactly.” Joel leans back in the chair, gazes up at the ceiling. “Maybe that was, I don’t know, the sound of the aerosol being delivered. You ask me how, though, as far as who could do something like this—this kind of scale … hell, I have no idea.”

  “What about the glow? The glow coming from inside? What could cause something like that?”

  “Fuck if I know—excuse me.” He angles a sheepish glance at her, and his voice goes lower. “You want to know the first thing I really thought of? My dad and I used to read these crazy science fiction books together. He turned me on to all kinds of silly crap. I remember reading this one story about nanotechnology. It was about these scientists in Jerusalem who created a robot the size of a hornet that could kill the enemy, see?” His eyes go distant with the memory, probably recalling his father, whose fate he has no way of knowing. “That was at least three years ago I read that. So my first thought? Crazy as it sounds, what if it’s some combination of nanorobotics and biological warfare?” He pauses. “Yeah, that’s stupid.”

  Rachel stares at him.

  Joel shifts across from her. “Yeah, unbalanced cop, I know. Watch out.”

  “No, no, I just that I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “I read too much science fiction, maybe.”

  He heaves himself up, replaces the chair against the wall. “Well, I’m starting to feel it. I gotta get moving again. Look, regardless of what’s happening, I think it’s safe to proceed under the assumption that we’re under attack. And that means we have to organize and defend ourselves. Like your friend Bonnie said, we’ve got a building full of rooms and beds, we’ve got supplies. We lack weapons, but I’m going to take care of that. You’re a resourceful girl, do you think you can rally the troops to start clearing the upper floors of, you know, of bodies?”