Blood Red (14 page)

“Rachel!” Jenny cries, and Rachel flinches.
“Don’t! Not so close!”

“Right.”

She takes the woman’s lifeless hand into her
own, gently turns it over, and feels for the pulse at the
wrist.

“There’s nothing.”

She doesn’t see the woman’s chest moving at
all. There is no breath going in and out of her lungs. Still, the
head twitches, almost involuntarily.

Rachel shakes her head, mystified. “I can’t
figure it out.”

Jenny backs away. “It’s almost worse in the
light.”

Rachel stands up, still watching the woman on
the ground. She’s torn between feeling something like Jenny’s
fright and a real need to help, if there’s still some kind of life
in these bodies. Ever since early this morning when she discovered
Susanna’s and Tony’s bodies, and all the others, she’s been dealing
with the question
What happened?
along with all its
implications and effects. Now, since that moment an hour ago at the
hospital, she’s facing the new question
What’s happening
now?

Because this thing is far from over. There’s
a progression happening here, and it’s something Scott at the
hospital didn’t seem to want to face. Something is building.

“Could they—could they come back?” Jenny asks
a little shakily. “Come back to life?”

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” Rachel
tells her friend the story of Susanna, the way she lay still in the
early morning, the glow creeping from her skull, the way Rachel
smothered it and the way the light was snuffed out. What happened
this morning hardly seems real now; it seems like something out of
a nightmare. Then again, this whole day does. Did it really
happen?

Jenny frowns in the uneven light. “I don’t
get it.”

“I …stamped it out. The glow seemed, I don’t
know, fragile. It just left her body. But it left her dead. Really
dead … cold.”

From the way Jenny’s light trembles, Rachel
can tell she has shivered.

Struck by an idea, she points her own
flashlight in the direction of the clothing on the other side of
the aisle. There are colorful toddler pajamas on a dark rack.

“I’ll show you,” she says.

She walks to the display and grabs perhaps
half a dozen little pink-and-blue nightgowns by their hangers. She
tests the weight and bulk of them in her grip.

“Rachel, you’re making me nervous.”

“Don’t worry, it didn’t hurt me this morning.
I want to see something.”

At that moment, there’s a terrific explosion
outside in the far distance, a great destructive rumbling that
echoes for long seconds. Instinctively, both young women direct
their flashlights toward the store’s front entrance. The sound dies
off gradually, and they bring their lights back.

“Jesus,” Jenny breathes. “Another plane?”

“Maybe.”

Rachel takes the bundle of little-girl
nightgowns to the CSU student’s body and kneels down as close as
she dares. She thumbs her flashlight off and sets it on the ground,
then glances up at Jenny, steeling herself.

“Ready?”

“No!”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, wait—I mean, you said yourself that
what you did to your stepmom essentially killed her, right?”

Rachel lets the bundle of cloth drop to the
tile floor. “I didn’t kill her, Jenny, come on.”

“I—I know, I didn’t mean that, but you said
because of what you did, she’s dead. Really dead.”

“Yeah.”

“What if that girl isn’t really dead? Look,
she’s trying to move right now.”

“That’s involuntary. That’s something
else.”

“Are you sure?”

Rachel has no choice but to pause. “No.”

She remembers the motorcyclist on the exam
table back at the hospital. The broken man to whom some horrifying
semblance of life was returning. She thinks of the alien red glow
throbbing from every body that she’s encountered.

“This isn’t about a bunch of people that have
just… fallen asleep,” she says, as the light from Jenny’s
flashlight trembles in the darkness. “Whatever’s happening here is,
well, it’s unnatural. These people’s lives are over. There’s no
getting around that. There’s no heartbeat. They aren’t breathing. I
mean, you’ve seen the CSI shows or whatever. Look at the eyes.
There’s no life there. The pupils are dilated.”

Rachel glances up from her scrutiny of the
young woman. Jenny has a miserable expression on her face, barely
discernable in the shifting shadows. Rachel knows she’s thinking of
her sisters.

“I’m sorry,” Rachel whispers. “But this is a
corpse. It’s just that there’s something really…weird happening to
it.”

Jenny is nodding. “I know.” Her voice is so
soft that Rachel can barely hear it, even in the hollow silence of
the huge store.

Impulsively, Rachel picks up the cloth and
presses it firmly to the young woman’s face.

The effect is instant. The body convulses,
and in Jenny’s suddenly jagging light they watch the woman’s arms
try to lift from the floor but fail. It’s as if the woman is mostly
paralyzed but is using all her existing strength to escape the pain
of what Rachel is doing. The strain is there, but the body isn’t
cooperating. A flat screech brays from the girl’s mouth behind the
cloth.

“Rachel!” Jenny screams, and Rachel
relents.

She pulls away the wad of soft cloth, and
it’s instantly clear that the girl’s mouth is curled downward in a
snarl. Now Jenny’s light is dashing away erratically, and Rachel is
left watching intermittent flashes of the employee’s face as it
screeches. The corpse’s back arches hideously. Rachel grabs her own
flashlight from the ground and stabs it on. The young woman’s eyes
are peeled wide, but still flat and dead, and the mouth is
seemingly locked open. It’s a profoundly disturbing sight and
sound, and Rachel discovers that she has lost her breath. She keeps
crawling backward on her butt, away from the corpse, and in her own
wobbly light, she sees in the strobing darkness that the glow
inside the woman seems to have brightened. Finally, the girl stops
her screeching, and in the absence of the sound, Rachel hears Jenny
still screaming, perhaps twenty feet closer to the front of the
store, still backing away.

Now the glow is subsiding, and the girl’s
body is relaxing back to the floor. Horrified but darkly curious,
Rachel sees the head return to its relaxed state against the tile,
the neck muscles returning to their minute flutter.

“
What the fuck!?”
Jenny cries from
where she stands in the shadowy distance.

Rachel, breathing hard, gathers herself and
rises up, standing a little lightheadedly. She swallows a dry click
and leaves the young woman there, backing her way toward Jenny.

“Uh, sorry about that,” she calls over her
shoulder. Her voice echoes into the store.

“Seriously!”

Rachel turns around, moves toward her friend.
“I don’t know what the…what the
hell
that was.” She stares
down at the ground, at the scuffed white tiles below her, shaking
her head. “What it means.”

That sound returns then, that wood-on-metal
dragging sound, and they both jump. Jenny sweeps her flashlight
nervously behind them, and then they’re both running as fast as
they can toward the front entrance, rounding the bargain area,
weaving between a few abandoned red carts.

Jenny pushes through the shattered glass door
at the front entrance with a great sigh of relief, and in a moment
they’re hurrying east through the parking lot again toward the car,
catching their breath. They navigate around a minor collision in
one of the aisles—a Toyota sedan crumpled lazily against a parked
van.

They’re silent for perhaps two minutes as
they carefully cross the big parking lot, their thoughts as dark as
the night. There’s a rumble in the distance, from the explosion
they heard earlier, and Rachel thinks she can see a new, flickering
glow to the east. Beyond that rumble, the night remains eerily
silent. It’s an uneasy, aberrant silence that pulls at Rachel’s
eardrums, and in this typically lively suburban setting it’s deeply
disquieting. Underneath even that, there’s an alien thrum that
Rachel doesn’t even know how to begin to identify.

“You convinced me, at least,” Jenny says.

Rachel looks over at her.

“That thing wasn’t human,” Jenny finishes.
“No way in hell.”

Rather than flash back moments ago to the
girl on the floor of Target, Rachel is remembering what happened
with Susanna this morning. Her mind won’t let go of it. The sight
of Susanna’s pretty face contorted into something monstrous, her
body rigid and angled, as this thing, this red
thing
inside
her, reacted to Rachel’s actions. Rachel smothered that glowing
thing, pressed hard against her stepmother’s face, and then harder
still, and she extinguished whatever was inhabiting Susanna.

Didn’t she? That’s what she did, right?

She remembers screaming,
“Go away!”
The words echo inside her now.

Rachel can’t escape the deep, shameful
knowledge that she had screamed those words at Susanna before, on
exactly two other occasions. The occasion that pricks at her the
most deeply is the first time. The time she yelled the words in
Susanna’s face in front of her father, in the bright kitchen, in
tears, the very first time Rachel was aware that this infuriatingly
pretty young woman had stayed the night. Had slept with her father
in her mother’s bed. She had screamed the words savagely, lost in
her rage, had stormed out of the house and to school, burying her
tears in her winter coat.

Neither Susanna nor her dad ever mentioned it
again.

Rachel shakes off the bitter memory, glances
at her friend, whose head still hangs against her chest. The two
young women continue to walk, in silence, and after a while Rachel
inches toward Jenny. When they’re shoulder to shoulder, she places
her arm around her friend’s shoulder, pulling her toward her in a
walking hug. They exchange a meaningful look. No words are
necessary.

After a moment, as they’re both giving a wide
berth to a minivan from which that ever-present glow jitters, Jenny
asks in a trembling voice, “How did you find Tony?”

Rachel doesn’t particularly want to relive
that aspect of the morning either, but she replies, “I live across
the street from him. I grew up with him. I mean, I knew him when
he…” A lump of emotion suddenly stops her words, and thickens her
throat, which she clears loudly in the silent parking lot. “…when
he was still a kid. We were in third grade together. We’ve lived
across the street from each other all these years.”

“Wow,” Jenny says quietly.

“Yeah, anyway, after I found Susanna—that’s
my stepmother—I went straight there, and he was the same. His mom,
too.”

“That’s the same thing that happened to me.”
Jenny jumps over a little juniper plant as they begin heading down
the embankment to the car. “Helen and Nancy were slumped over at
the table, and after I figured out it wasn’t a joke, I got all
scared and tried to call my mom, but I didn’t even notice that
weird light until later in the hospital. I remember screaming and
screaming because 911 wouldn’t answer. I couldn’t believe that. I
had to take them to the hospital myself, carry them to the car …
and then I saw…whatever it is, that it was happening
everywhere.”

“Yeah,” Rachel whispers. “Susanna was the
first person I saw. Maybe I didn’t know what I was doing. Or what
was happening. Hell, I still don’t. But maybe…” She can hear her
voice trembling.

“Rachel, don’t do that.” Jenny makes her way
down the small descent awkwardly, her light angling spastically. “I
didn’t mean—”

“I know.”

They reach the sidewalk and look up and down
College Avenue. There are two vehicles moving along the street—a
truck weaving perhaps half a mile north, and a sedan much farther
north, but working its way south. Its headlights are barely
visible, poking left and right, in fits and starts. Otherwise,
there’s no observable human activity. Rachel sighs at the desolate
sight.

The two young women walk to the Honda. When
they reach their respective doors, Rachel unlocks the doors, stops,
and looks at Jenny over the top.

“Do you have any idea—or did anyone at the
hospital have any idea—why we’re still here? Why we were spared?
Why would this thing hit so many people but not us? I mean, why are
we so special?”

“It’s almost like they were avoiding talking
about it. Like that guy Scott just wanted to maintain order. Make
sure everyone who needed it got pain relief.”

“I think people are still stunned,” Rachel
says. “I’m no fan of Scott, but yeah, I can understand that.” She
shivers despite the warmth of the night. “So, what do
you
think? I mean, it feels like there’s no rhyme or reason at all, but
there’s got to be, right?”

“It could be anything, couldn’t it?” Jenny
says. “It could be some weird quirk of our immune system. Maybe, I
don’t know, people who never had chicken pox? Or people who have
peanut allergies? Or…” She pauses her thoughts. “Do you have a
peanut allergy?”

“No.”

“Well, we can rule that out.”

Rachel ponders what Jenny has said. “Do you
think it’s some kind of…some kind of weird super virus?” she asks.
“And we’re immune for some reason?”

“Would a virus cause that? That fucking
glowing thing?” Jenny’s flashlight is shaking minutely against the
metal of the car, causing a little rattle. “At the hospital, before
you got there, they were talking about a biological weapon. I don’t
even want to think about it anymore. Can we get out of here?”

“Yes,” Rachel says decisively, opening her
door. “Let’s go.”

It is time to find her dad.

When they’re both sitting in their bucket
seats, Rachel twists the key in the ignition. The Honda comes to
life, and she pulls the car out into the street, swerves past the
truck blocking the turn into the Target parking lot, and continues
south. The wide avenue remains a wasteland. It is the most
populated of roads that Rachel has traveled today, and again, as on
the smaller streets, most of the vehicles are off to the left and
right, having simply stalled to eventual stops wherever their
momentum carried them.