Blood Red (23 page)

It’s only after a moment that Rachel
understands what has happened to Jenny. Her friend, still in mortal
agony, is clutching her midsection exactly where her sisters’
corpses had been burrowing their heads. Rachel kneels next to
Jenny, tries to comfort her, but she doesn’t know what to do. No
matter where she touches her friend, her touch elicits increasingly
pained cries.

“Bonnie?” Rachel cries, on her knees,
indecisive.

Bonnie joins Rachel on the floor. “Where does
she hurt?”

“Her stomach.”

Bonnie tries to pry Jenny’s limbs from their
clench, to loosen her muscular, inward clamp, but Jenny is
hysterical, her face now purple with pain and fear.

“Jenny, we need to help you!” Rachel
tries.

Jenny abruptly goes silent, convulsing,
pleading, her breath caught somewhere deep inside her. A choked
gasp escapes her throat, and then a torrent of bright red vomit
gushes from her mouth, splattering Bonnie’s arms and the wall.
Bonnie flinches, then seems unfazed, but Rachel feels a sharp stab
of horror and helplessness.

Then Jenny goes unconscious, her limbs
loosening, her body spilling across the floor.

Bonnie lifts Jenny’s shirt, and she and
Rachel both gasp, flinching backward at the sight.

“Christ!” the stranger says behind them.
“What did they do to her?”

Jenny’s abdomen is one large, swollen bruise.
Bonnie pushes the shirt up farther, beyond the level of her
breasts, and Rachel can see that the bruise tapers off beneath
them. Bonnie presses the flesh gently, immediately withdrawing her
hand.

“What?” Rachel whispers hotly. “What’s
wrong?”

“It—it doesn’t feel…it doesn’t feel like
skin.” Bonnie’s eyes are wide, horrified.

Rachel reaches down to touch it, and the skin
gives beneath her fingers, feeling almost gelatinous but dry—very
dry. It’s only just warm, but it feels molten, as if it might give
way to her probing. The sensation reminds her instantly of the feel
of Susanna’s and Tony’s skin, of the motorcyclist’s leg, of the
Hispanic man’s arms; that feeling of wrongness, that alien
elasticity. But this is worse. An image comes to mind of molten
lava beneath a veined, dried skein.

“What do we do?!” Rachel cries.

“She’s bleeding internally—that’s all I know
for sure.” Bonnie looks down the hall, then back at Jenny. “Let’s
get her on a bed. Kevin, you’re going to have to empty one of those
gurneys and roll it over here.”

“Of course.”

Kevin steps heavily over Jenny and goes to
the closest gurney, which holds a single, sheeted corpse. It’s the
first time Rachel has had a moment to really see this man. He’s in
his thirties, longish hair, sweaty. He’s a big man dressed in
sneakers and jeans and a tee-shirt, like he’d been lounging around
the house when the world ended.

He makes no pretense of moving the body
gracefully off the gurney—he simply tilts it backward, and the
stiff body slides down the wall behind it. Rachel shudders when it
hits the floor, its limbs retaining their clenched positions in
rigor mortis. Kevin wheels the gurney over to them quickly, then he
bends down to help Bonnie lift Jenny atop it, Rachel keeping her
hands over Jenny’s fragile-seeming abdomen, feeling it somehow
imperative that she hold her vital organs in place. The flesh is
hideously swollen and brackish yellow, and there are alarming
streaks of black leading down toward her spine.

And now Jenny lurches awake again, a scream
blasting from her throat.
“IT HUUUURTS!”

She clenches again, clawing at her stomach,
facing the wall, her scream devolving into gurgles.

Bonnie frowns, miraculously keeping calm.
“This is beyond my skill, Rachel. Her spleen could be compromised …
her liver … everything! I’m not a surgeon.”

“Please try something!”

“Oh dear.” She pauses. “First get some
morphine from Alan, okay? Twenty milligrams.”

Rachel leaps to her feet and begins running
back through the hospital. Passing an elevator, she hears a loud,
metallic clank and rattle coming from within but pays it little
mind. Her thoughts are on Jenny. She careens into the wide hallway
full of corpses, then slides into room 109, seeing the supine
bodies everywhere, the sheeted bodies piled in the corner, and
Alan, alone, tending them. She’s struck momentarily by the
stillness, the odd loneliness of the scene, and then she’s calling
to him.

“Alan! It’s Jenny,” she says. “She needs
morphine.”

Alan stands as quickly as his weary bones
will allow and goes to the medicine supply in a far cabinet. Rachel
bounds over a low cot, which contains a mercifully unconscious,
mutilated figure, and joins Alan.

“Twenty milligrams, Bonnie said.”

“That’s a lot.”

“She’s really hurt.”

Alan scans the supply and selects a syringe
labeled
Morphine Sulphate - 20mg
. It’s a small yellow tube,
completely unremarkable.

“Let’s go,” he says.

“What about them?” Rachel says, gesturing
toward the room.

“They’re fine.”

Rachel practically yanks him from the room
and back into the dim hallway, then across the wide open space to
the examination rooms, and directly toward the grisly aftermath of
Jenny’s encounter with her sisters. When they arrive, Rachel can
see the new guy, Kevin, visibly recoiled from the scene, as far as
he can get from Bonnie and Jenny without fleeing the space. He sees
her approaching.

“What happened to her?” he calls, his voice
nervous, as if realizing the gravity of everything.

“I don’t know,” Rachel says breathlessly.

All of Jenny’s muscles seem clenched. Her
face remains purple, and blood is everywhere—down her shirt, bright
shiny red all over the lower half of her face, spattered all over
the white sheet beneath her head. Her eyes are bulging, but
seemingly unseeing. Rachel’s breath catches at the sight.

“Is it contagious?” Kevin asks louder.

“What?” Rachel manages. “How the hell should
I know?!”

“Let me do it, okay?” Bonnie says to Alan,
who is bending toward Jenny, ready to administer the shot. “We have
to get this into a vein. It’ll take too long otherwise. Hold her
down!”

He hands over the syringe, and he and Rachel
lean over Jenny, trying to hold her still. Bonnie has readied a
spot on Jenny’s rigid arm and now prepares the needle. She expertly
plunges it into a bulging vein beneath Jenny’s bicep. In seconds,
Jenny’s expression and full-body clench begin to relax, and she
goes mercifully unconscious again. Jenny’s limbs spread out, and
the damage is fully revealed along her midsection. A great sheet of
flesh now appears necrotic—blackened and dead. At its edges are
ridges of angry red and yellow pus, and from there, the yellow
bruising reaches long fingers around her trunk toward her back.

Rachel feels tears spilling out of her eyes,
but she can only stare, unblinking.

An ominous silence settles over the scene.
Even as it descends, Rachel becomes aware of the weird scrabbling
sounds coming from behind the examination-room door where Jenny’s
sisters apparently murdered her, like huge spiders angling about on
slippery glass. Bonnie finally speaks.

“She won’t survive.”

“I know,” Rachel says immediately, surprising
herself with her bluntness. A baseless anger rises inside her,
directed at Bonnie. “I’m not stupid.”

She feels Alan’s hand on her shoulder, trying
to comfort her, but she shrugs it off, glaring at him. Then she
dissolves into dry sobs. Her resolve to keep emotion tamped down
fails her, and she melts into Alan’s embrace.

“I’m sorry,” she breathes into him, “I’m
sorry, I’m sorry ...”

She snuffles against his shirt, smelling him,
his sweet grandfather scent, feeling his narrow body quiver. She
knows he’s shaken to his core as well. Not wanting to linger, not
wanting to be needy, she pushes gently away and composes
herself.

She’s thinking that the answers she tested
only an hour ago, which seemed so right, so like a possible
solution, have come to nothing. All the straining effort of
smothering those things lining that corridor, was it all for
naught? The notion sends tendrils of hopelessness down her spine,
across her already exhausted limbs.

Why did I sleep? Why did they let me
sleep?

“Well, obviously, I’ve never seen anything
like this,” Bonnie says, the color drained from her face. She looks
tired, beaten. “I’ve never
heard
of anything like it. I
can’t even comprehend it. But it’s happening. Damned if it isn’t
happening: Those things are—they’re alive and they’re moving.”

“And they seem to want to…to kill us,” Alan
says.

Rachel and Bonnie look at him. Rachel knows
he’s said something that neither of them cares to imagine, but it
seems to be true. In every case of reanimation that she’s
encountered, the thing has been overtly angry, its impossibly dead
eyes glaring at her, its limbs flailing at her. And in Jenny’s
case, even the reanimated corpses of her sisters had aggressively
attacked her, somehow, and left her for dead.

“We’re still agreed they’re not human?”
Rachel asks.

“Well, they’re quite dead,” Alan answers.
“Whatever is giving them life is something I’ve never seen before.
I hesitate to think of what has happened with my Jeannie back
home.”

Realization dawns on Bonnie’s face. “There
are people like this everywhere, now, huh? People waking up like
this?”

Rachel barks out a humorless laugh. “This
is—well, this is impossible! Right? I mean—” She swallows
involuntarily, cutting herself short. “Okay, I—I—I can’t just stand
around here. What can we do? How can we start to make sure we’re
safe?”

Alan’s head is angled toward the floor, but
his eyes peer up beneath gray brows. “I’d remind you that this
hospital is filled with bodies.” His voice has a calm authority to
it that Rachel appreciates at the moment, as she feels more panic
settling into her bones. “There are probably three hundred beds on
the floors above us. Not to mention all the hospital staff struck
down when it happened.”

“So we barricade the upper floors from this
floor,” Bonnie offers. “Leave them no way to get down.”

“How?” Alan says.

“Furniture—desks?” Rachel says.

“There’s a half dozen new people that have
gathered in the waiting area,” Alan says. “We could get them to
help.”

“Let’s do it,” Rachel says. “We’ve got to
start somewhere.”

She looks at her dying friend, who looks
peaceful now with the morphine flowing through her. There’s blood
everywhere, though, and her skin is deathly pale.

“Bonnie, I didn’t mean to snap at you.”

“I know, honey.”

“I’ll just ask this once, then, since you
already told me the answer.” She turns to face her, “Is there any
chance she could survive?”

“Rachel, this is serious trauma.” Bonnie
looks at Jenny regretfully. “I wouldn’t know where to start. She’s
lost so much blood.”

“Can I give her blood?”

“Do you know her type?” Bonnie asks without
conviction.

“No.”

“I don’t even know how to determine
that.”

“Wait, but I’m a universal donor, I’m
O-negative.”

“So am I,” Bonnie says, “but—”

“Wait, wait—” Alan breaks in. He looks at
them seriously. “I’m also O-negative.”

“Me too,” says Kevin behind them.

It takes a moment to sink in, to go from
strange coincidence to a significant realization.

“You’re saying—” Rachel replies, but at that
moment a chorus of screams erupts from the front of the
hospital.

Without thinking, Rachel takes off in that
direction again, sprinting into the inner corridor, past her
father’s room and through the double doors. She spins into the
admissions area, reeling, to find five new survivors scrambling
away from something she can’t see. She stumbles across the room and
comes to an abrupt stop.

She hears Bonnie, Alan, and Kevin coming
through the door behind her, and then everything stutters into a
sort of nightmare state.

On the far side of the waiting room is a wide
stairway leading upstairs. On the fifth step, a woman’s corpse is
moving crablike down the stairs, upside down, its dead, peeled-wide
eyes swiveling and staring. A flimsy white-and-blue gown hangs off
the body haphazardly, revealing great expanses of dead skin. The
body is jerking as it descends, one laborious step at a time, the
hands scrabbling awkwardly. The crowd in the waiting room has gone
from bewildered to terrified, their sounds rising in pitch to
screams.

The thing on the stairs reacts, flinching
backward, its features clenched unnaturally. Rachel can’t tell
whether it’s anger on that face or some kind of shock, encountering
this shrieking group of people. It emits a raspy sound from the dry
hole of its mouth, a thin warble. The thing stops moving at the
third step, just staring at them, regarding them. Its sound trails
away into a throaty wheeze.

Rachel nearly slips and falls over spilled
magazines at the edge of a row of chairs, blindly catching herself
on the back of a chair. She can’t take her eyes off the
stairwell.“What the fuck is—?!” comes a high-pitched voice from
behind her at the admissions desk. Rachel twists her head to see
the source: It’s Scott. “Why is she walking like that?!”

“Stay back!” she calls to the crowd, trying
to maintain a semblance of calm over their cries.

The thing’s flinch and pause on the steps
emboldens a large bald man at the front of the crowd to come
forward brusquely. Rachel feels all nineteen years of her youth,
and all one hundred twenty pounds of her weight. She feels awfully
small as he barrels forward fearlessly. The man is holding, of all
things, a baseball bat in his fist, his shaved head gleaming under
the weak fluorescents.

“Wait!” she tries, but he ignores her.