Blood Red (17 page)

Hailey’s eyes are open but flat, like the
others. There’s no real awareness there. They’re the eyes of a
corpse.

Rachel watches her friend with sick
fascination. She brings up the flashlight fully, shining it in
Hailey’s face, and Hailey abruptly stops her movement.

“Hailey!” Rachel calls, raising her voice to
be heard through the window.

Hailey’s head snaps toward her, and Rachel
staggers backward. Her friend’s mouth opens in a jagged slit, and a
low gasp escapes it. Hailey stares at Rachel for a long moment,
then knocks her head against the window again, hard. Then she’s
thrashing, her torso bulging forward, up out of her seat, again as
if trying to bend over backward.

“—
back here! Get back here! Get—”
Jenny is screaming.

Rachel lets her flashlight drop to her thigh,
and Hailey is reduced to a strobing red throb, her skull and teeth
vaguely underlit by the impossible luminescence.

Rachel’s hip makes jarring contact with the
Honda, and she finally looks away from the horror that Hailey has
become. She takes hold of her door with her good hand, but before
she ducks back into the car, she stops.

She hears screaming. Someone in the distance
is screaming, perhaps more than one person.

“Do you hear that?” she asks the night.

“Rachel, get in here,
just get in
here!”

She falls into her seat, dropping the
flashlight next to Jenny, and pulls forward. She senses Jenny
staring daggers at her. She ignores the look, squeaks past a pack
of cars, and picks up speed.

The interior of the Honda remains silent as
they make the left turn onto Prospect, toward the hospital. Along
Prospect, they catch sight of two people running south from between
houses, seeming lost, and one older woman races toward them. Rachel
pauses and rolls her window down to help. The woman clips the
Honda’s bumper and reels for a moment, coming to a stop.

“What’s happening?” Rachel asks her.

“My daughter—” she manages.

There’s something wrong with her voice.
Rachel grabs her flashlight and thumbs it on, directs it at the
woman, who reacts with surprise, trying to shield her face. Too
late. It’s clear that portions of her face are pale and mottled.
Her mouth is twisted in an unnatural way.

“No!” the woman screeches. “I have to go, I
have to go home!”

She spins away and continues running, a look
of confused fear on her face. Rachel and Jenny exchange a look,
then Rachel urges the car forward. She takes a final look at her
dad behind her, anxious now that she’s so close to help.

When Rachel sees the hospital in the
distance, she impatiently punches the gas. She’s already imagining
helping her father through the front doors and finding help.
However, as she draws closer to the hospital, she sees that
something is wrong. Three or four people are staggering out of the
parking lot, seeming to hang onto each other, and they’re staring
back at the hospital entrance warily.

Rachel pulls into the hospital parking lot, sees the
big, dark EMERGENCY sign above the glass double doors, and sees
three more people—in the midst of a scattered group of perhaps
seven survivors—walk hurriedly out of the hospital, seeming
stunned.

Jenny sighs. “Oh god, what now?”

Rachel steers directly toward the people,
pulling into the emergency lane and up alongside them. She turns
off the car, gets out, and scans the hospital entrance. The weak,
fluttery generator lighting is still on, and there’s movement
beyond the admissions desk—people running. A woman is yelling
something in anguish. Just an hour ago, this place was a safe haven
amidst the chaos, but it feels different now. With its dim,
flickering lights, it looks haunted.

“What’s happening?” Rachel calls to the young
man closest to her. She recognizes him as one of the loved ones she
saw haul a family member into the hospital earlier.

“They’re—they’re—”

“They’re coming back to life,” Rachel
finishes.

The man stares at her. “Something, yes.”

“Where are you going?”

The man makes a dismissive noise. “Fuck, I’m
not staying in there.” He points at the hospital entrance. “That
thing
in there—that’s not my mom.”

A woman beyond him speaks up. “It looked like
maybe they were, you know, waking up. But then…” She melts into
tears.

“Something’s wrong with them,” the man jumps
in. “They’re conscious, sort of … but they aren’t human anymore.
It’s like they’re, I don’t know, angry. I’m not waiting around to
see what else happens. Good luck!”

“Wait!”

He jogs off into the night, to the northwest.
Rachel looks after him, then turns back to see Jenny coming around
the front of the Honda. She appears nervous, shaking, casting
significant looks into the hospital.

“I need help with my dad,” Rachel says to the
small group around her. “Can someone—”

“Sorry!” one woman says meekly, moving
quickly away, shaking her head.

Two others come to her aid, albeit somewhat
reluctantly. Their expressions are hollowed out, but they gather at
the Honda. There are two wheelchairs angled against the wall of the
entrance, beyond the doors. Rachel gestures Jenny toward them, and
her friend hurries over and takes hold of one, steers it to the
car.

Four women carefully extract Rachel’s father
from the Honda, Rachel cradling his head in her palms, knowing
instinctively that she needs to keep his head as secure as
possible. She does the lion’s share of the work, breathing heavily
as they maneuver him into the wheelchair, which Jenny is holding
steady. After he’s stabilized in the chair, Rachel still holding
her father’s head upright, Jenny begins pushing him toward the
entrance. The two other women, eyeing the entrance, about-face and
take off, and Rachel calls her thanks to their backs.

When she enters the waiting room, Rachel can
see that the mood has changed dramatically. Where before there was
a sense of panicked reaction to an unknown but inactive threat, now
there’s an edgy fear in the room, a more blatant mood of horror.
The waiting room has emptied. All the activity is beyond the
admissions desk. The double doors leading into the examination
areas are propped open, and people are streaming in and out. Rachel
glimpses the back of Scott’s head, then catches sight of a more
familiar figure.

“Bonnie!” Rachel calls.

Bonnie twirls, looks around, bewildered.
“Rachel! You found him!” Bonnie looks at her dad carefully as she
approaches. “Is he—?”

“He’s alive, but he’s hurt,” Rachel says. “I
think he fell.”

“Let me look at him,” Bonnie says, ducking
between two women who are hurrying out of the inner hallway. She is
still shaken but apparently glad to be given a task involving
potential survival. “Keep an eye out.”

She gets to the wheelchair and bends over it,
immediately checking his head with her careful fingers. As the
bustling continues around them, she checks his pulse and his
breathing, checks his eyes. Rachel winces as someone—a woman—down
the hallways screeches, the sound warbling higher into a shriek. It
gives Rachel the chills.

“He needs a few stitches,” she says. “That
head wound needs to be cleaned up. I’m worried that he’s
unconscious, but his other vitals are okay for now. I’ll keep an
eye on him.”

Rachel feels that she knew this diagnosis
already, but the mere knowledge that he will now be under Bonnie’s
care floods her with relief. Her muscles go loose and she leans
heavily on the right arm of the wheelchair, feeling new tears
coming to her eyes. She feels Jenny’s hand on her shoulder.

“Can’t believe you found him.”

Bonnie stands, touches her affectionately,
and takes control of the chair. “Keep his head secure, okay?”

“Is there a room, somewhere we can put
him?”

“Yep, here we go.”

They roll Rachel’s father toward the open
doors, and immediately come to a halt to let a running man jostle
past. Rachel scrambles to keep the head steady, then takes a
breath. She looks up, and visible at the other side of the
admissions area, standing between the double doors leading to the
hallways full of bodies, is another familiar face.

“Alan!” Rachel says, surprised.

“Hi, Rachel.”

He walks gingerly toward them, a little
dazed. The sounds of low gasping are muted behind him. He’s wiping
his hands together and shaking his head almost sadly.

“Something’s happening with those bodies,” he
says.

Rachel lets out a nervous laugh. Bonnie looks
around bewildered for a moment, then cracks a smile despite
herself—and despite the horrific noises coming from behind Alan in
the hallway.

“What have they been doing?” Rachel says,
already knowing the answer.

“At first, it seemed like…like they were
coming back,” Bonnie says. “There was cheering back here. We were
caught up in it. There was hope, people were optimistic. Something
was going right. Then I remembered what you saw.” She closes her
eyes, concentrates. “There was the same movement. The same kind of
movement you told me about in the examination room. Just a
twitching eye, or a finger.” Her voice sounds strained. “It started
happening in all the bodies at once, and the family members were
getting excited, you know, that their loved ones might be okay
after all.”

“The same thing is happening out there,”
Jenny says, giving Rachel a look.

Alan comes over to Rachel’s side. “So, any
idea what we’re dealing with? What are these bodies becoming?”

“Something…else,” Rachel says quietly. “I
don’t know exactly.”

“Whatever it is, it’s happening to all of
them,” Bonnie says. “Let’s get him back there.”

“Your father?” Alan places a hand on her
shoulder gently. “How can I help?”

“We have to get him on an examination table
and stabilize that head,” Bonnie says. “There’s a private
examination room inside the door to the right that we wanted to
keep clear for supplies brought down from upper floors. But it’s
still pretty clear, and the bed is intact. You can help us get him
carefully onto the bed.”

“Let’s go,” Rachel says, but Bonnie is
hesitant, eyeing the area beyond the doors.

“People are leaving this hospital because of
what’s going on in there, and now we’re marching right through
them,” she says with a kind of nervous disbelief.

They enter the corridor, and at their
entrance, the low growling in the hallways ceases, leaving an eerie
silence in its wake. The group pauses at the threshold, staring
forward at the line of bodies atop gurneys. Most of the corpses
have craned their necks, twisting to peer at them upside down.
Rachel has seen this awkward, painful-seeming movement a few times
now, and it suddenly strikes her as a shared characteristic.
Whatever has afflicted these bodies, they have it in common, and
Rachel is sure that heinous glowing orb is at the heart of it.

“What if those things…what if they get up?”
Jenny asks, quiet hysteria in her voice.

“They won’t,” Rachel says decisively. “They
can’t. We’re safe for now.”

She knows that if these things are evolving,
they’re doing so in similar fashion and pace everywhere. What’s
happening with one body is happening with them all. She doesn’t
have any real idea whether she and the others will have time for
that observation to be of any help to them, but she knows it’s a
start.

All she truly knows is that she needs to help
her dad now.

“Alan, can you get that door?” Bonnie asks,
her voice low, her eyes wide and lingering on the bodies lining the
hall.

Alan steps around the wheelchair and opens
the door, leading the way in. He flips the switch for the overhead
light, which takes a moment to flicker on weakly. Bonnie pushes the
chair into the room, Rachel to her side, still cradling her
father’s head. Jenny takes up the rear, hurrying in and closing the
door behind them.

“No, leave that open,” Alan says quietly. “I
think we should keep an eye on those bodies.”

“Okay,” Jenny says warily.

“All right, let’s clear off this table and
get him up there.” Bonnie gestures Alan and Jenny to the bed, and
they take armloads of supplies—boxes of bandages, haphazard
packages of sample painkillers, towels—off the bed and arrange them
on the floor. The limited counter space is already filled with
stacks of supplies. The far wall is a strange assemblage of
multicolored, labeled bins filled with splints, metal braces, and
casts.

Bonnie returns to the chair, and the other
two follow. She casts a glance to the doorway, beyond which a
chorus of low growls is rising once more.
Those things know
we’re in here
, Rachel realizes. The knowledge of that brings
gooseflesh to her arms, despite the close, hot humidity of the
room.

“Here we go,” Bonnie says. “Keep the head
still. I’ll get under him. Alan, Jenny, take care of his legs.”

They lift Rachel’s father, fairly easily now
with four people, and his body settles onto the bed. Rachel feels a
tremendous measure of relief wash over her. She remains at his
head, peering down at his untroubled face. She tries not to look at
the wound at his right temple, the red blood there, and the clotted
and dried blood down the right side of his head, around his
ear.

Bonnie goes to the chaos of supplies on the
desk and manages to find some sterile gauze. She wets it with
alcohol and tends to the wound. She studies it carefully as she
cleans it.

“I’ve never done stitching, but I think I can
handle it, if you’ll let me.”

“He’s in your hands,” Rachel says. “Thank
you.”

“First, let’s stabilize that head.”

After some more rooting around, Bonnie comes
up with a neck brace with a flat back that will restrict movement
atop the bed. She secures that, freeing Rachel’s hands, and she
gets to work with the sutures she finds in another box.