Blood Red (31 page)

The glass front doors have been locked open,
and Rachel sees now that Joel’s cruiser has been moved out of the
way. Joel and Chrissy hurry back through the door. Chrissy’s feet
nearly slip out from under her, but Joel catches her.

“Aw shit,” Joel says, coming to a stop when
he sees Alan and the expression on Rachel’s face.

Through the front doors, Rachel sees Kevin
pull up his truck to the entrance, parking next to Joel’s cruiser.
The sky beyond the truck is gray with a red tint, and there’s a
constant, deep rumbling overlaying everything. The two heavy men
are still attached to their tree, their limbs wrapped impossibly
tight around the trunk, branches snapped viciously away from the
embrace.

Even though Alan’s body is slack, his
breathing is labored and gasping, guttural, and now his own blood
is leaking from his mouth, running in rivulets through the darker
half-dried blood already caked there.

Kevin strides back through the doors,
accompanied by the middle-aged woman whose name Rachel hasn’t yet
learned. They stop before the scene in the center of the waiting
room. Joel has taken a knee next to Rachel, and unconsciously she
takes hold of his arm.

They don’t have a long time to wait. Alan
dies within minutes, coated in blood, his chest and arms ravaged by
a force none of them understand. More than anything that has
happened since she woke to find her world forever changed, Alan’s
death leaves Rachel reeling. She can only stare down at him and
cry.

Ten minutes later, they’ve taken Alan’s body
deep into the hospital and placed him next to the body of the
little girl, Sarah, who Alan carried into this place. Rachel slumps
to the floor next to them while Bonnie administers morphine to the
moaning victims, and soon their voices go quiet. After Bonnie has
joined the others to prepare the vehicles, Rachel sits with Alan
and Sarah in silence, surrounded by the dead and almost dead,
touching both of their faces lovingly.

Then she stands and leaves the room.

She strides back toward the front of the
hospital, and in a few minutes she’s standing before the locked
office door that leads to her father. Behind her and underneath
her, the dim hallway is coated with blood that is no longer
slippery but clotted and lumpy, and beginning to stink. She places
a hand against the door, debating whether to force it open somehow,
and finally deciding against it. She can’t hear him moving in
there, even when she places her ear against the door. The notion of
kicking her way into the room, only to find her father dead…no, she
won’t even consider it. She shakes the thought out of her head,
frowning deeply.

“Daddy, I have to go,” she whispers.

Hot tears are still stinging her eyes. She
lets them remain, wanting the sting, wanting the pain.

“I’ll be back. I’ll be back for you.” She
lets a beat pass. “I love you … and I’m sorry.”

She lets her head rest for a moment against
the wood, closing her eyes. Then she pushes away and walks through
the charnel-house hallway, out the double doors, and into the
devastated waiting area.

Outside the hospital entrance, the rest of
the survivors have gathered at the chosen vehicles—Joel’s cruiser
and Kevin’s blue Chevy truck. They’re looking to the gray skies,
which are laced with tendrils of red. Overtly weird and
threatening, the expanse of sky seems to throb with menace. None of
them can take their eyes off it—whatever it is.

Little bits of flaky ash are settling over
everything. The still-smoky air feels charged; humid but electric.
Alien.

Finally, Joel says, “Let’s go.”

The sky is roiling in the midst of a silent,
otherworldly storm, and there’s a disquieting stillness in the air
outside her open window, despite the alien swirls of weird moisture
moving across the atmosphere.

“It’s localized to the west, do you see
that?” Joel says. “I’m thinking Lory State Park. Down to
Horsetooth, really, and beyond. There’s something happening up
there. I want to get closer.”

Rachel leans forward over the steering wheel
to peer at the bruised sky. He’s right. The red tendrils of light
are more focused at the horizon—not beyond it, but
at
it,
drifting upward from the near distance, in the foothills.

“Wait, what? What are we doing?” Bonnie asks,
awaking from her trance, her voice confused and tired. “Where are
we going?”

“We’re going to see what the hell is going
on.” Joel reaches down to his dash radio again, tries
unsuccessfully to contact Ron. “We’ve been on our heels this whole
time. Whatever these damn things are, whatever they’re doing, we’ve
got to find out.”

Bonnie’s voice is nearly deadened. “Shouldn’t
we go—find someone? Find somewhere safe?”

Joel doesn’t seem to know how to answer that
question, so it remains unanswered. He continues motoring northwest
along Riverside, and Rachel keeps taking long glances down the
small, one-lane streets that lead into quiet neighborhoods to the
south. There are bodies wrapped painfully around the base of
perhaps every fourth or fifth tree. Since leaving the hospital,
Rachel has observed that it’s only the evergreen trees that the
corpses seem interested in. She said this aloud as they drove north
on Lemay, and the cruiser’s other inhabitants responded with
silence. They were all too consumed by what they were seeing.

“Look,” Bonnie says now from the back seat,
gesturing between Joel and Rachel to a small park off the road.
“Over there.”

At every conifer, there are two, three, or
sometimes even a half dozen corpses, wrapped tightly around trunks
and limbs. There are perhaps thirty corpses in the small park,
whose centerpiece is a children’s brightly colored jungle gym
surrounded by towering Ponderosa Pines and Blue Spruce trees. The
corpses aren’t just children; they are old men and young women,
tailored businessmen and naked teens, girls in jogging attire and,
yes, children in pajamas. It’s a group of people rudely interrupted
a day ago in their morning routines; interrupted from sleep or
commutes or showers or exercise or breakfast. Normal, everyday
people, engaged in a wholly unnatural act.

These former human beings are wrapped around
the bases of the conifers, their limbs straining backward to the
splintering detriment of their limbs, digging ever more deeply into
bark, their inverted mouths attached hungrily, working, working.
And glistening mounds of semi-masticated mulch are dripping from
their upside-down faces, falling to thick puddles beneath them.
It’s happening everywhere, in front yards, in the landscaped
islands between asphalt thoroughfares, along the perimeters of
parking lots, and especially in community parks like this one.

At every one of them, the red luminescence
throbs.

Rachel feels something like helplessness,
beholding the mass phenomenon. It defies all reason and meaning,
and therefore is absolutely ominous.

“When I went to get the weapons before,” Joel
says, “it was so different out here. Everything was crazy. Those
goddamn things were jittering to life, you know? Moving around,
falling out of cars, scrambling around on the street. Upside down,
I mean what the fuck? Crazy.”

Everything is deadened out there now, and
terribly quiet.

“They were like a swarm of giant crabs or
something,” he says, then pauses, looking around. “But crippled.
Slow. And now …”

None of them has really yet spoken of the
phenomenon that Joel is referring to—or truly wants to. The sight
of these things makes Rachel want to close her eyes and surrender.
She feels she has tried her best to comprehend and even tackle a
number of complete alien oddities, only to see those oddities pale
in comparison with whatever comes next.

All she can do is take each new development
as it happens, weather each new storm. And all the while, she feels
a dull, building anger deep at her core.

Rachel keeps flashing on Alan’s devastated
face—pale, bloodied, all life drained from it—and the fury she
feels in response leaves her trembling but also fills her with
resolve. She grips one of Joel’s shotguns with both hands, its
barrel angled out the open passenger window. Between her and Joel
is a small mound of O-negative blood bags. She feels the reassuring
liquid heft of one of them against her upper thigh.

Most of all, she wants to
hurt
these
things. She wants to destroy them. For the fear they’ve planted in
her, for how they’ve changed her life forever, for how they’ve
taken from her everyone who ever meant anything to her. She doesn’t
know what they are, what they’ve become, but she wants to ruin
them.

She looks out the window at what remains of
Fort Collins. It’s a ghost town. Whatever has inhabited these dead
bodies, this presence, this intelligence, this weird thing, has
decimated the city. It has spared practically no one. Those who
have survived, including herself, are alive now only because of a
seeming fluke, a genetic stroke of luck.

Since leaving the hospital, they have seen
only fourteen other survivors. Chrissy has been providing a running
tally. Half of them have been in vehicles moving in the opposite
direction, and all have stopped for brief, wary conversations. A
ragtag group of five, crammed into a tiny Ford sedan, claimed to
have holed up in a neighborhood recreation center to the north,
watching the world go to hell behind the safety of a huge
plate-glass window. They were now on their way through surrounding
neighborhoods, trying to gather others and begin developing some
kind of order. The driver was in priest’s garb, complete with
vestments and white collar beneath a sweaty but determined face.
They parted ways—the man pleading for Joel’s group to follow but
finally calling, “God bless you!”—and Rachel watched his car fade
into the distance in the rearview mirror.

On Lemay, they come across an old, orange
Volkswagen bus crashed into a chain link fence in front of a strip
mall. The door slides open on the approach of Joel’s cruiser. Two
survivors hop out, twin sisters perhaps in their early twenties, in
nightclothes, looking dazed and terrified. Their identical faces
are ravaged by a flow of seemingly constant tears, pale devastated
faces haggard under the muted sun.

“Help us!” one of them cries. “Stop!”

Joel pulls over, and Kevin comes to a stop
behind them. Both engines remain running, and Joel’s eyes dart in
all directions, watching for any threat.

“What’s happening!?” the other twin says as
they come up to the cruiser. “Everyone was dead, and now…” Her
voice devolves into a loose warble.

“Wait, wait!” Chrissy whispers hotly toward
Rachel. “I know them!” She leans over Bonnie and pokes her head out
the window. “I know you!”

The twins’ faces show confusion for a
moment—then a dawning realization and a relief so profound that
Rachel feels a knot of emotion fatten in her throat. She watches
enviously as Chrissy throws all caution to the wind, reaches
outside to open the door, exits the cruiser on her side, and races
around the back of the car to the twins, who embrace Chrissy almost
desperately, clawing at her.

They are classmates from middle school years
ago. After weepy reintroductions, and introductions to the other
survivors, Chrissy finally leaves the cruiser with her old friends,
Zoe and Chloe, and climbs into the back of Kevin’s truck. The three
young women are suddenly a knot of energy, feeding off one another
for new strength in the face of an incomprehensible darkness.
Rachel wishes she could lose herself in the teary embrace of that
little group. Most of all, she feels a pang of loss for Jenny.

And then they are moving on.

In a span of perhaps ten minutes, Rachel sees
only two moving cars in the distance. One is accelerating too fast
on Riverside, heading southeast; she sees it as they approach the
intersection. The man driving the car doesn’t even seem to notice
the cruiser. Not a minute later, she glimpses a station wagon
wandering carefully through the neighborhood just to the south of
Riverside as they traverse it northwest toward Mulberry.

“What time is it?” Bonnie asks wearily from
the back seat of Joel’s cruiser.

Joel checks the dash. “It’s almost
eight.”

“I guess I should ask what day it is.”

This rhetorical remark is met with silence,
and Rachel herself hesitates, pondering the answer. It seems like
far more than a single day has passed since she woke up to a
different world.

Rachel occasionally glances at the sky. The
red rumblings on the unsettled horizon seem to pull at them. It’s
like nothing she’s ever seen. When she was 12, she traveled with
her family to Alaska, and one of her only sharp memories of that
trip was beholding the Northern Lights—a green, shimmery curtain of
luminescence that she couldn’t look away from. Nestled back in her
father’s arms, she watched and watched, filled with wonder.

This sight before her now only fills her with
dread. Although the Aurora Borealis is the first thing this
throbbing atmospheric thing reminds her of, it’s nothing like it.
It’s the difference between wonder and despair.

She forces herself to look away.

The monotonously hollow scenery blurs
by—automobiles abandoned and askew, empty homes slouched beyond
their sidewalks, a gray skein of smoke over everything—and she
finds herself pondering numbers. If, as Bonnie said, this thing
wiped out as much as 95 percent of the population, that means there
are fewer than five thousand survivors in all of Fort Collins. That
estimate reflects only the number of survivors as of dawn yesterday
morning. How many more died in the initial confusion of the
aftermath, when doomed survivors tried to rouse their loved ones
and got too close? Rachel has seen enough of those, starting with
little Sarah, and all the others in rooms 109 and 111.