Blood Red (21 page)

The radio returns nothing but static.

“You mentioned CB earlier,” Alan says as they
round a corner. “What kinds of communications are working right
now?”

“RF is the only thing I can get working. CB
is working, as long as there’s battery power. Cell phones are out,
probably because the power’s out. Obviously, Internet and landlines
are dead.” He tries his radio again: “Buck, come in.”

After letting the static go for a few
seconds, Alan says, “There’s an AM/FM radio behind the admissions
counter, running on battery. I checked both bands and didn’t find
anything.”

“That’s a power problem. Or no one’s
broadcasting.”

“Oh God,” Jenny whispers at the rear of the
group.

Abruptly, the radio squawks, and a distorted
voice comes through the speaker. “Joel, this is Ron at CSU.”

“Ron, hey, how’s it going over there?”

“We have about thirty people here, getting
dug in for—” The radio fuzzes out briefly. “…not too many bodies on
campus because it’s the weekend, but they’re around. And they’re
moving like we saw in Old Town, but it’s more—” He fuzzes out
again. “—more pronounced. Are you seeing that? They’re moving more
and more. Not sure what to make of it, but it’s freaky as
hell.”

For some reason, despite the grim words, the
tinny sound of this disembodied voice coming over the two-way
allows Rachel to feel at least a small glimmer of something
resembling hope.

“Yeah, Ron, same thing here. I made it to the
hospital. People have brought a lot of bodies here—family members
and friends.”

“Are they—are they…alive?”

“They’re dead, Ron. I can’t tell you why
they’re moving around, but one thing we’re sure of is that, yeah,
they’re dead.”

“That doesn’t make sense, man! I mean—I
mean—”

Joel waits for the channel to clear, then
transmits. “Ron, I don’t know how to explain it, but this thing is
happening, okay? But listen, if these things start getting even
more feisty, it is possible to smother them, to smother that light
that’s coming out of them. Somehow that’s the key to this, all
right? That light that’s inside them. You knock that out, you take
’em down.” He releases the transmitter and waits.

“Smother them? Really? That sounds…that
sounds horrible.”

“It’s all I got right now, but it works. Use
a bunch of cloth, blankets or towels, a pillow, whatever. Just
don’t let that light touch you. Let’s keep in touch on this
channel. Out.”

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.