Blood Red (20 page)

“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 says.

“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.

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.”