Blood Red Read online

  She takes a deep breath and reaches over again, this time placing her palm directly against Susanna’s cheek.

  The same odd heat.

  Suddenly her vision begins to blur, and she takes her hand back. When focus doesn’t return, she whimpers faintly, shaking her head. No, no, no, she cries inwardly, blinking savagely and rubbing her eyes. Only slowly do her surroundings regain their clarity.

  And only then does Rachel discover what the light has done to her hand.

  She recoils from the first unclouded glimpse of the pale skin, looks away from it as she pushes off the bed and backs awkwardly out of the bedroom. Her hip makes jarring contact with the back of the living-room sofa, and she stops moving, staring back into the dark master bedroom at Susanna’s unmoving shape, at the red illumination emanating from her cheek.

  She pulls her glare back and lets her chin fall to her chest. Then, reluctantly, she pulls her hand out in front of her. Her palm is pale and dry, looking weathered, sun-bleached. When she makes a light fist and her fingers move across the palm, white flakes drift off it, falling silently to the carpet. She brings up her other hand and clamps it to her mouth to stifle her scream.

  With effort, she staggers back toward Susanna. She practically screams her name, her voice warbling. She touches Susanna’s naked shoulder, shakes it. Her body moves loosely back and forth in unconsciousness.

  “Susanna, wake up!”

  Nothing.

  This is absurd! I mean, what the fuck is happening?

  Boldly, she moves close to her stepmother’s side, gathers a fistful of cloth, and presses it lightly to the luminescence. The glow is blotted out, and a strange emotion bubbles up in Rachel, releases itself like a cough, and immediately quiets when she chokes it down. She presses the cloth more forcefully against Susanna’s cheek.

  Rachel feels as if she’s not even inhabiting her own body; she’s not in control of her actions. She pushes the cloth still harder, angling the wad of sheets over Susanna’s mouth and nose, pressing, pressing.

  Go away! she screams inwardly.

  Susanna coughs and opens her eyes. Turned up in their sockets, the eyes show only white. Rachel recoils, scrambling away across the bed. Susanna’s mouth opens and a fine mist of blood sprays out like a sneeze, dotting her own face and the sheets beyond her head. The red glow seems to strobe almost imperceptibly, and Susanna’s open mouth emits a long, hollow sound.

  “Uuuuuuuhhh ... .”

  Rachel, her breath caught somewhere deep in her throat, reacts impulsively. She leans forward and presses the cloth with still more determination against her stepmother’s face, not knowing what to do or how to stop this thing. She brings up her damaged hand to press still more forcefully, feeling that she might never be able to stop whatever is happening, no matter how hard she presses.

  Abruptly, her hands feel enveloped in wet heat.

  Rachel screams, yanking away the sheets, and Susanna’s mouth clacks shut. The red luminescence is completely gone. Her stepmother’s body scissors across the bed, shuddering, and Rachel rears back, looking away from Susanna’s bluntly revealed genitals. She can’t help but turn back to watch Susanna’s entire body convulse. She drops the clutch of sheets from her hand and reaches for her stepmother’s arms.

  “Susanna! Stop it! Stop it!”

  Susanna goes abruptly still and rigid, her legs half off the bed, her arms thrown above her head. She’s on her stomach, her face straight down into the sheets.

  Rachel stumbles away from Susanna and the bed, numb. She takes in the scene. She can hear blood rushing in her head, loud like a terrible flood. She can also hear that weird, insistent keening noise coming from outside.

  Susanna’s body is still, too still, in a way that doesn’t suggest sleep. Her skin seems flat, dull. There is no glisten, no movement. She’s not breathing.

  “No, no, no, no,” Rachel finds herself mouthing.

  What—what just happened?

  Her mouth feels dry, and her own skin has gone cold. Her breath is shallow, racing in and out of her mouth.

  She has to force herself to return to Susanna once again. She scrambles back onto the bed, pulling her stepmother up and away from the mattress, straining with all her might. She finally positions Susanna so that she’s face up, then places two fingers beneath Susanna’s jaw, feeling for a pulse. There is none.

  “Oh my God!”

  She leans over to place her ear over her stepmother’s bloody mouth. No breath. The skin feels cold.

  Rachel quickly digs her fingers into Susanna’s open mouth, feeling for obstruction, then attempts mouth-to-mouth resuscitation repeatedly. She feels a little inept at it, considering she’s learned it only from movies and television, but she thinks she’s doing it right. She can see Susanna’s naked breasts rising, can see that air is getting into her, but it’s not working. It’s not working! She won’t let herself cry. She can’t stop her hands from trembling, but she won’t give in to tears.

  Okay, she thinks. Need help.

  She slams her way through the door, toward the kitchen phone—an old-fashioned corded phone that her dad has always insisted on keeping. She fumbles with it at the wall and jabs at the buttons—9-1-1—with crazily shaking fingers, but she can’t make her fingers work. Her fingers are still slightly numb from whatever the light did to her palm. She shakes out her hand and tries again. She fails, and curses at the phone. She can’t make it work! She switches hands, awkwardly fingers in the numbers, and finally gets it right. When the phone starts ringing, she lets herself fall against the wall to the floor, making herself as small as possible. She’s weeping softly.

  The number goes to a recording. “Sorry, all our operators are busy with other calls, please stand by.”

  “What!?”

  She stares at the receiver in her hand, then around at the quiet kitchen. Her dad! Maybe he’s at work. He has to be there. She pushes herself back to her feet and dials his office number from memory.

  Please…

  The phone begins ringing.

  “Daddy, please answer,” she warbles meekly into the phone, although now it’s doing nothing but emitting a hollow clicking sound in her ear. There is no dial tone, no ring, nothing. Her hands are shaking so badly that she can hardly hold on to the now-slippery receiver. It falls from her hands against her thigh, and she yanks it up again by its cord. “Please, please.”

  She tries dialing 911 again. Nothing. Not even a dial tone.

  She lets the phone fall to the floor.

  She becomes aware of the sounds from outside again. Now she definitely hears a siren, or several of them. And there are other noises too, perhaps screams, but she doesn’t want to hear them.

  She presses her palms to her ears and closes her eyes.

  “What’s going on?!” she screeches, blocking out everything she can so that only her voice thunders inside her muffled head. She lets the words dissolve into a prolonged exhalation of sound.

  She tries to escape to some tiny place inside herself, and she succeeds for a fleeting moment, but the world insists on crashing back. Her thoughts edge back to the bedroom where Susanna sprawls still and silent and gone. She tries to yank back those thoughts, but she keeps seeing Susanna’s naked, unconscious body sprawled across the sheets, and she keeps seeing the impossible red luminescence bleeding from her mouth and nostrils. She sees it like the afterimage of a bright light against her eyelids.

  Is she still in the grip of a nightmare?

  There is a moment when Rachel knows, quite consciously, that she has a choice. To either shrink inside, regress, and turn away from whatever horror has taken hold of her life this morning, or face it headlong and attempt to make sense of it. She is facing the illogic of a nightmare, but she knows that now is not the time to give in to inaction. Everything depends on her choice.

  She opens her eyes, uncovers her ears. The kitchen remains quiet, but the sounds from outside are still there.

  A huge crash of thunder jolts the h
ouse on its foundation, and she can feel the percussion of it in her chest. She whimpers as trinkets throughout the house jangle with the terrific jolt. Then she comes to the crushing realization that these terrible sounds have never been thunder at all.

  They have been explosions.

  Rachel races to her own bedroom and strips out of her nightgown. She takes up the wad of jeans from the floor, separates her panties from the denim and pulls them on. Then she steps into the jeans and hurriedly grabs a tee-shirt from her second drawer and throws it on over her bare breasts. Then she’s hopping on one foot at a time, slipping her tennis shoes on.

  She catches sight of her cell phone on the dresser and lunges for it. She picks it up and stabs it on. The readout displays the time: 6:52 a.m. She dials 911 and puts the phone to her ear, but nothing happens. She looks at the readout again. She sees three service bars, but the phone is silent. She turns it off, and turns it on again. Nothing. It’s unresponsive. And the battery is very low.

  “Fuck!”

  She shoves the phone into the front pocket of her jeans.

  Have to get across the street. Tony will know what to do.

  She tears through the house. Nearing the front door, she casts a single glance toward the large front room, where her already-browning apple core sits forlornly on the coffee table, and she feels an instant ache for that lost peaceful moment. An image of her mom relaxing there comes to her again, then vanishes. A mewling sound catches in her throat as she grabs hold of the front doorknob.

  When she steps outside, Rachel sees that the entire world has gone insane.

  Chapter 2

  In the near distance, off in the direction of Old Town, a great plume of roiling smoke is billowing into the sky, the result of some kind of massive explosion. It’s so close that Rachel imagines she can feel its shockwave against her face as she steps onto the porch. A scorching waft of hot air. This is surely the source of the explosive noise she heard moments ago, inside the house. The black smoke is like a solid thing, thick and ropy, undulating and urgent.

  “Holy ... shit!” Rachel mouths, staggering back, eyes wide.

  She can only stare at the smoke, caught between awe and horror. She tries to connect the sight with what has happened inside her house, but cannot. The disconnect stops her in her tracks. Her consciousness feels jammed, incapable of processing. Everything is chaos.

  And then Rachel sees that there are other dark plumes in the distance, dotting the horizon, to the north toward Cheyenne and to the south toward Denver. She feels her insides drop further. It can’t be. It’s impossible. The first word to come to her mind is attack, but what can these explosions possibly have to do with Susanna?

  Rachel has the very real impulse to flee back indoors and cower under her covers. But there’s no solace to be found behind her; everything lies forward. She can see Tony’s house in her panic-narrowed vision, and she forces herself to focus on it even as her hands reach backward, searching for stability against the bricks of her own home’s front porch.

  A middle-aged woman is sprinting down the street, breathing heavily, in the opposite direction of the blast. She’s in a flower-print nightgown, and her hands are raised to her face as if brushing something away.

  “Wait!” Rachel calls, and the woman looks around bewildered for a split second then continues on. “Lady!”

  The woman disappears from sight, beyond the shrub-lined perimeter of Rachel’s house. And now, racing from the other direction, a police cruiser screams into view, its siren slicing the morning air, making Rachel wince. She follows it almost reluctantly with her eyes, and as it disappears down the street in the direction of the Old Town fire, she catches sight of several bodies lying lifeless in a far driveway. Her eyes bug with horror. Two of the bodies appear to be children, in bright-colored clothing and athletic shoes.

  Emotion pulses in Rachel’s chest, hitching toward panic. She has to propel herself forward, away from the door. She must force herself to keep moving. She pauses on the steps leading down to the front path, latching onto the white post at the edge of the porch, the edge of her world. She stares out at her familiar neighborhood, and although everything is the same, everything is different. The homes slouch in their rows, defeated. They’re flatter somehow, and the foliage in their yards seems deadened, the trees lifeless and dull, crooked in their patches of earth.

  And a fog hangs in the air; subtle, but there. Everything seems tinted red. Is it her eyes? Is it some lingering aftereffect of the weird light radiating from Susanna? As she nearly stumbles down the path leading to the street, she furiously rubs her eyes against her forearm, trying to refocus. It’s still there, this haunting, ember effulgence, like fog at sunset. Or even sunrise, though she knows it’s about an hour past dawn now.

  “Tony!”

  She’s crying already, heading directly across the street to his house. She passes his family’s gray mailbox and weaves across the stepping stones to his front porch.

  Something catches her eye—a flash of red like a flickered flame. Then it’s gone, and she’s approaching the front door. She bangs on it, calling Tony’s name again. She tries the knob, finds it locked. She bangs more loudly on the door. There’s no answer, and all around her is noise. She wants to be in this house, to be with Tony, the first person she could think of besides her absent father, who can help her. There’s no way he’s out of the house already. He was with her last night, after all. She can now remember most of what they did and where they went. She knows he must still be unconscious from all that.

  She decides to run around back to the rear entrance. She edges out onto the path and looks around. Even as she’s on the verge of hyperventilation, she comes to the panicked realization that all the houses along the street seem to be emitting that diffused red glow from their windows. Is it her imagination? No, it’s there. It’s faint, but it’s there, barely distinguishable in the early morning. Then she’s running around the side of Tony’s house, crashing through the gate, winding her way toward the back patio.

  When she arrives at the rear screen door, another explosion booms in the far distance, and now she can hear some kind of rising caterwaul in the distance, like a citywide storm alarm. It reaches a high note and comes dipping down, then rises again loudly. From downtown, she guesses.

  She wonders if Fort Collins is under terrorist attack. Who would attack a little college town in Colorado?

  She opens the screen and finds the back door unlocked. She pushes the door open and calls out, “Tony? Mrs. Duncan?”

  Silence.

  The kitchen is shadowed and silent with its drawn shades, dark and foreboding. This house is such a familiar place, not only because it’s the same floor plan as her own home across the street, but also because she’s spent so much time over here recently. And yet, this is not the comfortable kitchen she knows. That awful red tint is coloring everything now, even this room, its windows shielded by slatted blinds from whatever is going on outside. There’s a weird energy in the air. She can feel it on her skin like a dull buzz of electricity.

  “Tony!” she calls loudly. “Wake up!”

  She reaches for the light switch, only to find that the power is out. Was it out at home? Was there a working light in her refrigerator over there? She can’t remember. She steps over to the phone, picks it up. Dead.

  “Oh come on,” she whispers, and she can detect the obvious tremble in her voice. She pulls in a shaky breath.

  Beyond the front room, the hallway toward the bedrooms yawns like a dark mouth. And as her eyes adjust, she sees that a red glow is emanating from there, and she knows that whatever happened to her stepmother has happened in this home, too. Her thoughts quickly turn to Tony’s mother, Maggie Duncan. She imagines that the slightly frazzled, kindly older woman is afflicted in her bed, and then she flashes back on Susanna, dead and deflated on her own bed.

  Pushed forward by new sounds from outside—yet another distant blast, and a dog barking in mad fear—Rachel races int
o the hallway, sliding to a stop at the first doorway, which is Tony’s room. The door is closed and locked, as usual. Tony has always been fiercely protective of his privacy, even when he doesn’t have Rachel inside with him, naked and fumbling around on his twin bed, shushing copious giggles. Her thoughts turn yet again to her stepmother, who never warmed to Tony, and because of whom Rachel no doubt spent far more time in this room than she might have otherwise.

  That little friction is something Rachel will never have to worry about again. She shakes her head away from that thought, upset with herself for even letting her mind go there.

  She bangs on the door. “Tony, wake up! I’m freaked out!”

  Bang bang bang.

  There’s no movement from behind the door, but underneath it, where wood meets carpet, she can see a horizontal shaft of vague red light, and Rachel thinks that she might break down sobbing.

  She forces the emotion down and goes quickly to Mrs. Duncan’s room. The door is open wide, and Rachel rushes to the bed, where Tony’s mother is sprawled crookedly, the bedsheets thrashed from their moorings, showing the mattress beneath. The scene speaks of struggle, as if Mrs. Duncan had resisted something with a lot of effort and finally succumbed. The dresser next to the bed is messy, two drawers open, spilling a sweater and pants.

  “Mrs. Duncan!” she shouts, going to the woman’s side.

  Maggie’s face seems peaceful and alive, as if in slumber, but the same red light is glowing from her cheek and peeking out of her half-open mouth.

  “Oh god,” Rachel whispers, moving up and away. She knows only too well what will happen if she tries to touch that light or even get near it. What can it possibly be? She has never seen anything like it in her life.

  She stumbles a little on a book that’s tented open on the floor and moves to the window. She yanks back the curtain there and stares over the low backyard fence, out into the street. She didn’t notice it in her mad dash across the street moments ago, but a car has laid down skid marks across the west end of the street and ended up propped at a slight angle against a tree. No one seems to have approached the wreckage, and she can see no movement from inside the car. She peers further west and east, and although she sees a couple of frantic figures out and about in the distance, the street appears horribly desolate. She avoids looking at the bodies in the driveway to the east, preferring not to have to deal with that.