Blood Red (34 page)

“We have a system,” Pete says. “One of us is
always ready and waiting to take down the mad ones. They just don’t
stay pissed-off very long.”

All of these words come at Rachel muffled, as
if from underwater. She glances over at Bonnie, finds her looking
in the opposite direction through her own open window, toward the
row of dark houses, longing for the cozy realities of a too-recent
past.

Rachel can’t even muster the strength to
reach over and comfort her friend.

“We’re gonna keep moving,” says Pete, “try to
gather up some people to help us. We’ve got plenty of weapons.
We’ll try to arm up some more at Active Arms. We already cleaned up
at Rocky Mountain Shooters.”

“That makes me all warm inside,” Joel says.
“But listen, I can trust you boys to … I don’t know, remain sane?
You can do that, right? Stay sane?”

“Yes we can, Officer.”

“Let’s try to stay in touch over the CB.”

“We’re using channel 17.”

“You got it. Oh, and hey…” He turns back
toward Rachel. “We’ve got some blood bags here. Back at the
hospital, we found out that the common denominator among survivors
is that we’re all type O-negative blood. Make of that what you
will, but we also found that those things don’t like it. It stings
the hell out of them.”

Rachel stares down at the bags of blood on
the seat, some of them having fallen down near her feet. There are
probably a dozen units, and next to Bonnie’s thigh lay three
sealed, disposable syringes. Rachel stares at them for a long
moment, then lifts her gaze to Bonnie’s face. She’s still staring
motionlessly out the window.

“I don’t know,” says Jeff. “I think what
we’ve got will do more damage.” He’s holding a grenade in his fist,
showing it to them. Rachel can see the lower half of his bearded
face; there’s a toothy smile there. “Why don’t you keep that stuff
for yourself?”

Joel is nodding. “Might be worth spreading
the word, huh? Do what you can.”

“You got it. Be careful, y’all!” Pete
calls.

The brothers give identical tips of their
hunting caps and wander back off into the hungry morgue that is
City Park. The sight of the large men wandering into that surreal
landscape should have filled Rachel with some kind of dull fear—she
can feel her heart slow-thudding with that kind of reaction—but she
honestly can’t summon the energy for even that. There’s a
hollowness surrounding everything, an emptiness that pulls at her
insides.

Rachel realizes with a perfect void of
emotion that she doesn’t have anything left.

She suddenly feels claustrophobic in the
confines the cruiser’s rear seat; a prisoner in the back of a cop
car. She’s more aware than ever of the proximity of her home, of
Tony’s home. She can’t even entertain the thought that he might be
lost in this mob of ruined humanity.

Joel and Kevin are talking outside the open
window, but Rachel ignores them.

Her hands begin moving almost unconsciously.
She finds the backpack at her feet, which already contains two
boxes of shotgun shells, and pulls it up into her lap. It also has
half a dozen units of O-negative blood stuffed inside it, along
with a few of the vacuum-sealed syringe packs and an assortment of
medical supplies, including bandages. She quietly zips it up, then
feels the barrel of the shotgun between her knees.

“Bonnie?” she whispers, her voice wary.

Bonnie stirs from her exhausted reverie and
turns to face Rachel, attempting but failing a smile. “Mm-hmm?”

“I need to go.” The words come out sadly,
barely making their way past her throat.

“What?”

“I want to go home.”

“But—there’s no one there, honey,” Bonnie
says, growing alarmed.

“I want to go back for my dad, and I want to
go home.”

“Wait, what?” Joel says from the front.

Rachel reaches through her open window to
open her door, then steps out to the curb with her pack. She slides
out, feeling Bonnie’s hand trying to hold her back.

“Whoa whoa whoa,” Joel says. “What are you
doing?”

“She wants to leave!” Bonnie screeches.

“My house is two blocks that way,” she says,
gesturing northeast. “I just want to be alone now. I want to go
home.”

“It’s still dangerous out there!”

“No, it’s not,” Rachel says miserably. “If
you leave them alone, they just do their thing. We thought they
wanted to kill everyone, and they almost did. I think the way they
figured it, they destroyed everyone when this first happened. But
somehow, a few of us survived. They didn’t expect that. And we
didn’t understand what they were. What they wanted.”

Rachel feels the eyes of the whole group on
her. Her voice starts getting louder. She’s already rounding the
back of the cruiser, away from the group.

“We
still
don’t understand what they
are. Maybe we never will. I don’t know. But we know what they’re
doing. We can see what their target was all along. And it wasn’t us
at all. They don’t care about us. What they really care about is—is
crazy! It doesn’t make sense. They never counted on us surviving.
They’re basically cowards. They’re desperate, but they’re not
fighters. They …need something. Something that doesn’t make
sense.”

She’s babbling now, stumbling over her words
as she backs into the middle of Mulberry, her rear bumping the
fender of an abandoned Toyota.

“I just want to go home.”

“You’d be safer to stay with us,” Joel says
calmly. “I think I speak for the rest of us when I say that we’re
stronger with you here.”

“I feel like I’ve been stumbling the whole
way. Making decisions that have been wrong, and seeing people die
along the way. I don’t want anyone else to die. I don’t want to
cause anymore death.”

Bonnie shakes her head. “You haven’t—”

“It doesn’t matter. Just let me go,
okay?”

“Oh, Rachel.”

“No, I don’t want that.” Rachel looks
straight at Bonnie. “I love you, but I have to go.”

“Look,” Joel says, “of course you can go. Do
what you need to do. But let’s consider the hospital to be our home
base, okay? You say you’re going back for your dad? Let’s just say
we’ll meet you back there. Deal?”

“Yeah,” says Rachel. “Yeah, okay.”

Bonnie is suddenly hustling out of the car,
her arms outstretched to embrace Rachel. At first, Rachel’s
instinct is to start running, but she stops and lets Bonnie take
her in her arms. The hug is nearly suffocating, reminding Rachel
instantly of the corpses’ tree-clutch, and she hurries to
disentangle herself from Bonnie, despite the twinge of emotion she
feels.

“Be careful,” Bonnie whispers, her hands
resting on Rachel’s shoulders. “I’d go with you, but I—I need to
feel safe. I need to feel safe now. You know?”

“I know.”

“
Promise
me you’ll get back to the
hospital.”

“You can count on it.” Rachel gently removes
Bonnie’s hands. “I need to go back for my dad, after all.”

“Okay.”

Rachel takes in the group of survivors one
last time, nods to the three girls in the flatbed of Kevin’s truck,
who are watching her curiously. Chrissy gives her a melancholy
little wave. The middle-aged man and woman in the cab aren’t even
paying attention to her; they’re still staring out into the red,
shifting mists of City Park. Kevin and Joel are watching her
stoically from the cruiser.

Without a word, Rachel pulls the backpack on
fully, then turns and begins walking east on Mulberry.

Holding the shotgun tightly in her right fist,
Rachel gets to the sidewalk and keeps a close eye on the nearest
group of bodies. At a medium-sized pine, about half a dozen corpses
are crammed against the base, their bodies angled up, their limbs
wrapped crazily backward. The limbs of the tree are similarly
twisted and splayed to allow the things to get closer and closer to
whatever essential thing is inside that tree. Rachel feels her lip
curl at the sight. She has the shotgun steadied in their direction
now, but they don’t seem to notice her.

She picks up her pace and jogs to the first
turn at Jackson. Just before she takes the left, she glances behind
her and can see the two vehicles standing there at Sheldon, about
the midpoint of the large park’s south edge, and she can just make
out the figures of Bonnie and Kevin. The frantic police-cruiser
lightbar still flashes silently in the gray smoke and mist. Rachel
takes the turn and slows to a walk, breathing heavily and coughing
a little. The bag on her back is heavy with bullets and blood.

On the walk to the first block of Jackson,
she is consumed by almost debilitating regret. She moves in fits
and starts along the sidewalk opposite the east edge of the park.
The silence is oppressive. She twice considers turning back but
manages to stay her course.

Her eyes stinging, she becomes aware of
smaller masses of corpses at the conifer trees along Jackson,
particularly the larger ones. Each corpse is marked by that strange
red illumination, that pinpoint of crimson that she hasn’t seen so
clearly since before she was at the hospital.

She finds herself searching for Tony. She
can’t help it. She’s so close to his home now, he could be
anywhere. She’s certain he’s no longer sprawled across his bed, the
way she found him. She knows it! As much as she wishes it were true
that she had smothered him before he twitched back to unnatural
life, she’s sure he’s out here somewhere, engaged in this
unspeakable … something.

A street away from her house, she begins to
see that everything is exactly as she left it a day ago, except
that the bodies she observed on the ground and crumpled over their
steering wheels are gone. The same crashed cars sit silent and
still against the curbs; the same truck is embedded in the home
across the way. Where the two children lay unconscious in their
driveway yesterday morning, Rachel sees only a little blue baseball
cap as evidence that something happened there. The kids are nowhere
to be seen, but Rachel knows what has become of them. Just like all
the others.

Tony’s house looms on the right, and she can
see her own home across from it. There’s a body attached to the
Bristlecone Pine in Tony’s side yard, but she’s not sure she
recognizes it. She slows down, bringing up the shotgun in her
grasp. She carefully edges closer to it, off the street and onto
the sidewalk, then onto the grass.

The head is bent backward, its jaw working at
the tree’s bark, so she can’t see the face, but it is a massive
woman wearing a blue patterned muumuu. She knows who this must be.
It’s her neighbor from three doors down, Mrs. Carmichael, whom
she’s never before now seen leave her property. As a little girl,
Rachel would catch glimpses of the fantastically large woman behind
her porch—always friendly, moon-faced and shy. Rachel feels sad for
the woman, wrenched by this affliction outside of her home and now
hideously attached to a tree, of all things.

In sadness and pity, Rachel lets the
shotgun’s barrel drop. She can’t seem to take her eyes off the
massive body, which has wrapped itself around the base of the pine.
The layers of fat are concealing a lot of the hyperextended strain
and stretch of the bones and skin she’s seen on the other bodies,
leaving this one to appear perhaps the most alien of all of them,
simply because it appears more comfortable. But it is absolutely
bent backward upon itself, all the while depositing a brown
splatter of masticated bark below its head.

While Rachel studies it, it abruptly stops
its chewing, and the head swings around on its big shoulders to
stare at her.

Startled, Rachel nearly falls to her knees.
Yes, it is indeed Mrs. Carmichael, although the inverted face is a
disaster of wet splinters and sap, which has streamed stickily into
the hair, making it hang down in stiff cords. The mouth is full of
chewed bark, but it manages to emit a low growl like an angry
feline. The eyes are flat and dead, though there’s some kind of
awareness there.

Rachel brings up the shotgun and watches
her.

Mrs. Carmichael makes no other movement, just
continues growling, so Rachel eases back away from the scene. Once
she has moved perhaps eight feet from the large woman’s body, the
head returns to the bark and begins again to chew at it.

Rachel regains her path and rounds the corner
to Tony’s house. She scans the street in every direction, her gaze
darting from tree to tree. She sees perhaps a dozen corpses clamped
to them, but none of them appear to be Tony or even his mother.

Rachel’s own home, despite what happened
there yesterday, looks extremely inviting. In spite of everything,
her bedroom is in there, after all. Her bed with its covers, her
bathroom with a probably still-working shower—the notion of
showering and falling into her bed fills her with a longing so
profound that Rachel nearly swoons. She loses herself in an
impossible daydream for a few moments.

The lure of self-delusion is powerful, and
she very nearly gives in to it, nearly begins walking toward her
front door. The overriding image is of herself buried under her
covers, her pillow over her head. Even now, this image seems the
most ideal path for her future.

What snaps her out of her daydream is the
sounds of shots fired. Apparently the Thompson brothers are back to
their campaign to rid the world of the reanimated corpses, one at a
time. Or perhaps it is another group—her own?—beginning a similar
campaign. The thought sickens her a little now, even though she
herself is guilty of the same kind of execution. Not only the
family in the van but also the countless corpses she smothered at
the hospital.

She closes her eyes as she turns, and heads
by instinct straight toward Tony’s house. She doubts he’s there,
but she has to be sure.