Blood Dawn (Blood Trilogy Book 3) Read online

  “Even if we get medicine,” Kevin says, “are any of them gonna be left alive by the time we get back?”

  Kayla reacts to Kevin’s words—and the situation in general—with visible unhappiness, and Rachel feels the tremble in the girl’s shoulders increase in severity. She looks down on Kayla in time to see her lift one hand to her face to wipe at her eyes. This girl has withheld her flow of emotion until now, after all this, after the attack, after all this death, after comforting Rachel, even. She holds the young girl tightly against her, struck not only by the kid’s empathy but also by her inspiring bravery.

  “Let’s go,” Rachel directs toward Kevin. “We have to try, right? Let’s stop talking and go.”

  The sky continues to rumble malevolently. It crackles like heat lightning, and the sound of it reminds her of some kind of broken radio broadcast. When she was very young, her dad—her dad!—owned a ham radio, and he would play with it some nights, out in the warm garage, involving her in his weird hobby. The sound coming out of the speakers as he eagerly changed channels, from static to static, was like this: broken patches of hissing and spitting—on a much larger scale.

  Above the alien clouds, the crimson luminescence strobes in weird ways. Those columns of light from earlier—which Ron had insisted amounted to some kind of communication—are jittering and flashing unhealthily. Or angrily.

  Her dad caused that.

  —didn’t he?—

  Kevin has already taken off toward the library entrance, presumably to inform Joel that they’re going. Rachel almost calls out for him, then realizes he wouldn’t hear her over the din. She wants to go before Joel has a chance to stop her.

  Rachel half-registers loud moaning coming from somewhere and wonders if it’s a survivor or a turned human. Does it matter? She glances down at Kayla, finds the girl staring up at her.

  “I’m not—I’m not good at this,” Kayla whispers.

  Rachel can’t register the words. “What?”

  “I’m good at other things, though.” The girl’s eyes move off in the distance toward her home across the street. “I’m good at reading and math. I get the best scores on my math tests.” She’s still shivering, in little bursts now. “I like to bake things with my mom. She showed me how to put M&Ms in cookies. I’m good at that, too. I was good at remembering to feed Gizmo, that was my guinea pig, but he died last year.”

  “I bet you were. I bet you’re good at all that.”

  For some reason, the words from Kayla are calming Rachel. Perhaps the simple act of comforting a child.

  “But I’m not good at this.”

  Rachel holds her and runs her own trembling fingers over her hair. “You’re better than you think, honey. Way better.”

  Then Kevin comes back out of the library with Joel at his heels. The two men weave through the mass of broken humanity and find their way to Rachel and Kayla. Rachel braces herself as Joel stops, while Kevin moves toward his truck.

  “Hey girl,” Joel says, somehow maintaining his veneer of authority in the face of bedlam. “You’re sure you’re up for it? It would be a big help for you to grab what you can over there and—”

  “I’m on it,” she says, curtly, pushing through the rising anger in her voice. “I have to get out of here.”

  Joel pauses, watching her. He places a strong hand on her shoulder, squeezes gently—an almost effortless show of compassion. “We’ll have time to work through everything that’s happened, I promise.” His eyebrows are crooked with stress. “Let’s clean up this mess.”

  She nods, dismisses his words. Then a thought occurs to her.

  “Can you …?” she begins, softening.

  “What?”

  “Can you do something about … about … my dad?”

  “You want to take him to the hospital?”

  “Will you … put him in a safe place? Away from everything?”

  “We’ll take care of him. And after we take care of these people, we’ll figure out how to treat him right.”

  Her mouth won’t open. She looks into Joel’s eyes.

  “All right,” Joel says. “Make it quick. In and out. Get to the pharmacy. I think between you and Kevin, you can identify a shitload of pain relievers. Bring ’em all. Ron’s team is gonna start putting joints back in place and setting broken limbs as best they can.”

  “We’ll be quick,” Kevin says.

  “While you’re at the hospital, I’m gonna jet over to the station to sack the SWAT truck. That’s essentially the armory over there. Mobile armory. I’ve got access. I’ll bring everything here, might even bring the truck, if I can.” He glances around, at once bleary-eyed and focused. “So, we clear?”

  “Clear,” Rachel says.

  “Be careful.” He stares her down. “Got it?”

  “Yeah.” Then, after a hesitation: “Joel?

  “Yeah?” Joel stutters in his step.

  “That girl, Felicia.” She has to practically shout over the sounds of misery coming from everywhere, and she feels him looking at her in confusion. “Have you seen her?”

  “She was … yeah, I saw her over at that window.”

  “Do you know what she was doing?”

  He shakes his head. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know.” She lets the thought float away on the wretched air. “But help her, okay? Make sure she’s all right.”

  “I will.” He mumbles something after that, but she can’t hear it. “Be careful.”

  She nods.

  “All right, let’s get all this done while we have this opportunity, while those things are still stunned, and then … and then decide what to do next. See you back here ASAP.”

  He jogs back toward the entrance, and Rachel gets a glimpse of Scott, Mai, Liam, and Rick already at work moving bodies. Pete is dragging a woman’s broken body, right there at the doors, and she’s screaming like an animal. Rachel feels something like heartburn scalding her throat. She knows they must be laying the bodies out in a way to better help them, but she wonders how the crew can bear those sounds. All she knows is that if she doesn’t get in the truck soon and start for the hospital, she might start running and never stop.

  “Let’s go,” she tells Kevin and Kayla.

  And soon they’re bouncing over the grass and shrubs of the library grounds in Kevin’s old truck, bumping down off the curb, and onto Remington, headed south toward Prospect. The world is still stuttering, and Rachel is numb and shaking, and nothing is over yet.

  CHAPTER 9

  The streets are utterly quiet, and the ghost-town nightmare reality of Fort Collins is revealed again. She can’t be out here again, can she? On these streets again, entering yet another phase of a prolonged nightmare?

  What time is it?

  She peers around with gritty eyes, glancing into the smoky sky. Ash is drifting lazily, almost like light snow. A dirty orange sun, cloaked in crimson and smoke, is still high in the sky but heading west toward Horsetooth. She guesses it’s probably nearly 4 p.m.

  Holding tightly to Kayla in the passenger seat, she watches the scenery whisk past. Kevin navigates the silent, collision-strewn streets roughly, wrenching the truck this way and that, and at one point careening over someone’s lawn to get past a tangle of crashed trucks.

  “They coordinated against us,” Kevin mutters. “They attacked us because there was a bunch of us all together. Right? Don’t you think?” He shakes his head. “Jesus.”

  Rachel doesn’t respond. As Kevin continues to theorize, she feels anger continuing to grow inside her, a red heat, a powerful itch to destroy the things that have destroyed her life. She feels blunt curse words at her lips but holds them back from Kayla.

  “So you know what to look for, right?” Kevin asks as they approach Lemay. “What are we grabbing?”

  Rachel bounces on the bench seat as Kevin takes the turn.

  She tries to focus. “Pain relievers, obviously. I’m not sure how much morphine is left. Vicodin, Percocet, OxyContin?
But also gauze, antibiotics, creams … topical stuff … rubbing alcohol, hell, Band-Aids, supplies for treating wounds.” She squints, thinking. Her father’s face keeps flashing at her. “If we can swing it, basic surgery tools—scalpels, clamps, even tweezers, you know.”

  “Right,” Kevin manages to mumble. “Almost there.”

  They pass Wendy’s and Culver’s, then various medical offices, and then the dreaded hospital, all concrete and glass, looms on their left, past the burgundy footbridge to the parking garage. She seems to keep coming back to this awful place.

  Kevin turns carefully into the parking lot in front of the hospital. He’s watching everywhere. He pulls up to the all-too-familiar double front doors and stops, motor running. Now they’re all watching the entrance. There appears to be no movement. Remembering, Rachel peers out her window to her right. At the edge of the parking lot are two rather large pine trees, and the bent-back bodies of two businessmen are attached there. By Rachel’s foggy estimation, those bodies have been in those precise positions for three days.

  “Let’s roll,” Kevin says, shutting off the engine.

  For the first time, Rachel recognizes that he has brought along one of the rifles. As he hefts it and prepares to open his door, she asks, “Didn’t we run out of ammo in the attack?”

  “We scrounged some out of Pete’s truck. Not much, but enough to hold us till Joel gets back to the library. I hope.” He glances down at the rifle, which is specked with blood, like everything else in Rachel’s reality. “I have exactly one mag left, so let’s not get into too much trouble. Keep your eyes open.”

  He pushes out of his side of the truck, and Rachel follows suit. The three survivors quickly and stealthily enter the hospital through the cockeyed and broken front doors. Everything is dark inside. The generator must have died. Or did they shut it off? She can’t even remember the events of a few days ago.

  Immediately, they notice the sweet-sour, eye-watering stench of death. All three of them lift their hands and forearms to their face, trying to block the smell. It’s powerful. Rachel knows all too well that there are still scores—perhaps hundreds—of dead bodies in this hospital, covered and given as much dignity as possible, but nevertheless unrefrigerated and untreated.

  “What is that smell?” Kayla says with dismay. Her left arm reaches out blindly as if for support.

  In answer, Rachel can only give her a look.

  “That,” Kevin says, “is exactly what the library’s going to smell like in a couple days.”

  “Let’s get this done,” Rachel says, surging forward.

  “This is gonna be fun,” Kevin says, muffled.

  Rachel pushes through the metal doors beyond the admissions desk, and the smell of putrefaction now hits her like something physical. She stops dead, and so do her companions.

  An incredulous, horrified expression overtakes Kayla’s face. “What—?”

  Rachel has to urge her forward to get her moving again.

  “Rachel …” Kayla breathes through her sleeve. “I told you I’m not good at this.”

  “And I told you you’re better than you think.” Rachel places a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s be strong, okay?”

  “This won’t take long,” Kevin says, his left hand drawing a magnum flashlight from his belt. Some distant part of Rachel recognizes it as one of the two that she and Jenny took from Target on that first horrible night. “Kayla, can you be the lightbearer?”

  Kayla, one hand still crammed against her nose, takes the flashlight and directs the light ahead of them in a nervous jitter. The halls are ghostly, muted and smeared, making the hospital appear as if it’s been abandoned for far longer than a few days.

  “It’s all right, kid, there’s no one here but us,” Kevin assures her.

  The girl’s big brown eyes consider him, then focus on the hallway again. Without the generator light, there’s only occasional ambient light from windows in offices to the left. Rachel is glad Kevin had the presence of mind to grab the magnum.

  At first, she barely registers the shattered door handle of the office that recently held her father, but then she does a double-take and stares into the empty room. Remembers her reunion with him there, the way she sunk inside herself. She hurries past. She sees the open door of the pharmacy on her right.

  “Here we are.”

  The room already appears ransacked, but Rachel recognizes the mess. For the most part. She sees evidence of both Bonnie and Scott—Bonnie’s desperate sense of order, and Scott’s panic and theft—but most of all, she comes to the realization that she’s out of her league. When she helped Bonnie on that first day, the older woman escorted her to one precise section of the pharmacy, where the morphine packets and vials sat in orderly rows. Most of that medication has since been swept quickly out into a box, probably by Bonnie herself, when the newly aggressive bodies attacked the hospital and the survivors were forced out.

  Those rows of morphine are all but empty now, although she sees several packages toward the back.

  “Kayla, can you see if you can find a box? Some kind of container? A pretty big one. Just whatever you can find. Dump something out.”

  The girl now has her forearm clamped to her nose. She nods, her big eyes shiny. Kayla hands Kevin the flashlight, turns, and begins searching.

  “Be careful, stay close.” Rachel exhales and focuses on the other shelves. She recognizes perhaps three medicinal names on the bottles and boxes in front of her.

  “Uh, where do we start?” Kevin says, scanning the rows with the light.

  “Looks like all the painkillers are together. Here we go … Oxycodone, Fentanyl, Bupre … Buprenorphine—?” Rachel points at a lower shelf. “—Amitriptyline, Gabapentin … let’s grab everything in this general area.”

  Almost immediately, Kayla brings over three white U.S. Post Office bins, of all things. Rachel lifts out one of the bins and starts sweeping small boxes and bottles into it. She finds large assortments of salves and ointments after some scrutiny, and Kevin helps her find the antibiotics. In a small adjacent room that Kevin has to break into, they find boxes and boxes of sterilized, plastic-wrapped surgical tools, along with gauze and wraps of all kinds. They load up the bins quickly.

  “Let’s start filling the truck—Kayla, can you handle that? Just start dumping the bins in the back, then come right back with the empties. Got it?”

  Without a word, Kayla takes a full bin and sprints for the truck.

  “Let us know if you see anything out there!” she calls, immediately feeling a spike of apprehension for sending her off on her own.

  But she knows the kid can handle herself—possibly better than Rachel can.

  Kevin and Rachel do their best to raid what they can from the shelves, feeling an increasingly urgent need to get out of there. Not because of any physical threat but because of the psychic damage caused by the dark and the stench. Rachel’s eyes have been watering for ten minutes, and her sinuses feel singed.

  “What do you think happens next?” she asks darkly, breaking a silence.

  “Those things?”

  “Yeah.”

  Kevin is quiet, seeming to finish up his scan of the medical inventory. He exhales loudly through clenched teeth.

  “I’ve been thinking about what happened.” He widens the beam of the flashlight and trains it on a new bank of shelves. “What your dad did. He turned the tide, Rachel, he really did. I have no doubt about that. But it seemed like something scared them, too, something bigger. I mean, they went from super organized and confident to … scared as rabbits, just, you know, scurrying away. And it was instant. Something spooked them. Grab those bandages there.”

  Kayla returns with an empty bin, grabs another full one, and sprints away.

  “Was it the blood?” Kevin goes on. “We were pumping them with O-negative for quite a while before they turned tail, right? How long? An hour? My sense of time is all screwed up, but it was a long time.”

  Rachel almost can�
��t bear to listen, feels that pulse of anger growing stronger. She stays quiet, filling her bin.

  “Was there a point where the blood finally had a … a collective effect that scared them?” Kevin says. “Enough to worry that hive mind, or whatever?”

  That was her dad’s plan, yes. She can visualize him attacking those things with his tranq rifle and then with syringes, wildly injecting the curing blood into the mass of bodies—

  She shakes her head, blocking the image, feeling her eyes moisten.

  Later.

  “Maybe it doesn’t matter,” Kevin interrupts her thoughts. “Maybe they’re on the run for good now. But I doubt it. I think they’ll regroup, and they’ll come after us again eventually.”

  Rachel’s gut clenches.

  “I’ll tell you what I don’t want to do—and that’s to regroup ourselves into a giant goddamn target again.” Kevin pauses in his work, letting his words fill the small room. “I’m for gearing up with more weapons, more ammunition, some machetes and baseball bats, right, and all this medicine and supplies, enough food and water to last a while, and getting the hell away from Fort Collins. Just drive east and see what happens. We already know they want something in these trees, right? So why are we staying near the fucking trees?”

  Kayla has returned from the lobby and stops short at Kevin’s words.

  “Sorry kid,” he sighs. “But listen, even if that’s not what everyone agrees to, it’s what I plan to do. I’m done with this town. Now let’s get the hell out of here, huh?”

  The three survivors make their way toward the front doors, carrying the last of the bins.

  Even after fifteen minutes, Rachel hasn’t grown accustomed to the smell, and its power has her on the edge of nausea. It doesn’t help that she knows exactly where these odors are coming from. She experiences visceral flash-images of Alan and the little neighbor girl, Sarah. Jenny and all the others. They’re all here, piled in with innumerable other corpses.

  Rachel brought death to many of those other bodies. She was the one who smothered dozens of human beings without realizing that life could return to them, given the right antidote. That’s something that she did. She won’t be able to wipe away that stain.