Blood Red (16 page)

The hospital.

Where hundreds of these bodies are now
gathered.

She doesn’t even want to entertain that
thought. Fear has torn a dark hole in Rachel’s center.

“Jesus!” Jenny gasps. “It keeps getting
worse! I mean, what the fuck!”

Rachel considers that. “You’re right.”

“What’s
happening
to them? Are they
coming back to life, or what?”

“I think the question is what are they
becoming
.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t think they’re human anymore.”

Jenny digests that for a stunned moment.
“What does that mean, though?” she practically screams. “Don’t say
that, I mean don’t even say that! That’s ridiculous! They’re
obviously human! Don’t just say that to scare me!”

“Calm down. I don’t pretend to actually know
what’s going on here.”

Jenny takes a deep breath, trying to settle
herself down. Her movements are nervous, jittery. “Hey, I can be
freaked out, okay?”

Rachel recognizes Jenny’s attempt at
lightening the mood, but she can hear the edge in her voice. She
decides to remain quiet.

She exits the nearly empty parking lot and
swings back onto College, heading north. From this perspective, she
can see the orange of a lingering fire in Old Town. Apparently, the
lone cop was right. The FedEx jet ignited a fire that’s still
probably swallowing portions of the downtown area. She hopes he
managed to coordinate some kind of firefighting effort and contain
the worst of it. More disturbing now is the deeper, flickering
throb of light that’s coming from the west, flashing intermittently
along the entire line of the Rockies. It seems brighter than
before.

She continues north, silent.

The night is deathly still and ominous.
Rachel feels a kind of jittery dread as she passes each vehicle,
half expecting the doors to start opening and reanimated corpses to
emerge, battering the Honda with their lifeless limbs. That’s the
stuff of dark fantasy, and she can’t take such thoughts seriously.
She smirks them away. But she still avoids looking too closely,
avoids peering into the interiors to discern what kind of life has
returned to all these bodies. She just wants to get her dad to the
hospital and get him well. She’s hobbled by the hundreds of
haphazardly wrecked vehicles, and curses now and then that she has
to slow her progress because of tight fits.

“Do you think he’s okay?” Jenny asks quietly,
evenly.

“I think he’s just knocked out,” Rachel
replies. She has to believe that.

“You’re so lucky,” Jenny says again, very
quietly.

Rachel looks over at Jenny, who is now bent
over, leaning against the passenger window. “What do you mean? I
don’t think anyone is lucky today.”

“You’re alive,” says Jenny, turning to look
at her with something resembling anger. “Your father is alive.”

Rachel opens her mouth, tries to craft a
response. She maneuvers around a crashed vehicle and then speeds
north along an undisturbed section of the street.

“Look, Jenny, I know you lost your—”

“Never mind, I know, really, I’m sorry, it’s
just…hard, and I don’t know what’s happening.” Jenny’s face melts
into despondent tears. “It’s crazy! This can’t be happening, right?
It’s like something out of a fucking movie. I mean, what the fuck
is going on out there? What’s happening to everyone?! It doesn’t
make any sense!”

“I wish I knew.”

The Honda’s headlights reveal another
multiple-car collision, and Rachel swerves left in a long arc to
avoid it. She tries peering into the windows at the vague glows but
doesn’t notice movement from this distance. After she passes the
wreckage, she glances back at her father, sees that he’s still
unconscious but breathing evenly.

She’s considering what Jenny said.

Rachel and her father have apparently
survived. From everything she’s seen, she estimates that better
than ninety percent of the population has been afflicted by this
thing. Probably more like ninety-five percent. Does her and her
father’s survival suggest that their immunity has some genetic
component? Rachel thinks of Susanna, wonders why she was affected,
and she also thinks of her mother, wonders whether she might have
been spared.

“My mother died of cancer,” she says, more to
herself than to Jenny. “It was a tumor in her brain. It was so
fast.”

Jenny is quiet for a moment, then, “I’m
sorry, I—I didn’t know that.”

“I mean, it was really like, one day she was
fine, and always there, and driving me everywhere for school stuff
and tennis and whatever, and then she was having headaches, and
suddenly she was wasting away and her hair was falling out. She was
gone in a couple of months.”

“Damn.”

Rachel looks over at Jenny. “I didn’t mean to
bring all that up, just that cancer is what got her.”

“Okay.”

“What if—what if it’s the cancer ‘gene,’ or
whatever, that this thing is targeting?”

Jenny frowns over at her. “What do you
mean?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I’m babbling.” She slows
to twist her way through some wreckage, keeping an eye on the dark
interiors of the vehicles. “Who knows? It could be that a quirk of
DNA, a genetic quirk that leaves people vulnerable to any assorted
cancers, also left people vulnerable to this … whatever it is.”

“As good an answer as any, I guess,” Jenny
says.

The memories of Rachel’s mother are hard to
shake. And why is it always the images of her later, in bed, cheeks
sunken, hair gone, wan smile playing on her lips, that come to her
first? For two years, Rachel has tried to banish those memories
from her mindscape and replace them with the more vibrant images
from even two months earlier. But those earlier recollections
remain elusive, maddeningly washed out.

She wonders again whether her mother would
have survived this thing. She can’t help but surmise that she would
not have. And even if her mom might have had the luck or genetic
disposition to avoid this red affliction, Rachel finds a tiny
amount of comfort in the notion that her cancer did her the quick
favor of preventing her from experiencing this bleak new
reality.

“Hey, Rachel,” Jenny says, startling Rachel
from her introspection. “You remember that time when we were
little? That field trip up to Horsetooth?”

Rachel frowns, trying to bring up the
recollection. She remembers that she and Jenny were in the same
third-grade class but that Jenny left for another school in fourth
grade, and they never reconnected again until last year at college.
Her recollection of Jenny as an eight-year-old is spotty at
best.

“Your mom was one of the chaperones.”

Rachel has no memory of this. “She was?”

“I remember it because she drove. You don’t
remember that? I was in the back seat with you.”

“Maybe … vaguely.”

“It’s probably my only memory of your mom.
She was very kind. I remember I got my shoes muddy, and I was
crying about it. I was high maintenance even then!” She laughs
softly. “Your mom was very patient. She helped me clean them in the
restroom. She held my hand. It sounds silly, but that meant a lot.
She seemed like…like she was a natural mother. To anyone.”

Rachel feels that she’s been given a snapshot
of her mother that she’s never seen before. She glances over at
Jenny, reaches over and takes her hand.

“It’s not silly at all.”

The car is filled with silence for long
moments as Rachel veers around more crashed vehicles. There’s a
large accumulation of them in front of the Barnes & Noble. And
then they’re approaching the major intersection of College and
Horsetooth. Cars and trucks rest against medians and light poles
and each other. It was a haunting sight coming south, and it’s even
more disturbing now, as the night deepens even further into the wee
hours. The dashboard clock reads 11:22. Fleetingly, she wonders how
two hours have passed since they left the hospital.

Rachel glances into the rear seat again to
find that her father hasn’t moved an inch. She can tell by the way
his chest moves that he’s still breathing evenly. She thinks he’ll
be okay, but she wishes he would wake up and discover that she had
found him. She thinks he would be proud of her.

Jenny catches her glance.

“Rachel, I’m really glad we found your
dad.”

“I know, and really, I couldn’t have done it
without your help. I just hope that injury isn’t anything
serious.”

“It’s not.” She’s twisted around in her seat,
her chin on her forearm, watching him. “I’m sure of it.”

“Your folks might be fine, you know,” Rachel
says, doubting herself. “I mean, there’s no reason to think this
thing is that big, right? They’re probably trying to get ahold of
you right now. And as soon as the power comes back, the cell phones
will work, and you’ll find thirty messages waiting for you.”

Jenny doesn’t respond for a moment. “I think
they’re gone,” she says softly.

“Oh, come on, no need to be so
pessimistic.”

“There’s
every
reason to be
pessimistic,” Jenny says, lifting her chin. “Look around you! It’s
a miracle
we’re
here. Explosions everywhere, planes falling
out of the sky …”

Rachel knows she’s right. She doesn’t know
what to say.

“They’re two thousand miles away and probably
slumped over in a taxi right now, like any one of these—these
things
.” Her voice is thick with emotion.

Even in the face of this unprecedented
nightmare, Rachel can’t imagine being so fatalistic. She also can’t
imagine the horror of not knowing the fate of two parents so far
distant, like being told your mother and father have been involved
in a horrific car accident somewhere far away, but nobody knows
whether they were thrown free, unscathed, or perished in blunt
metal trauma.

Rachel continues to maneuver through the
destruction. Her mind still reels with the events of the past two
hours, so it takes her a while to take new notice of the movement
off to her left, on the mountainous horizon. When she sees it, she
squints in that direction, trying to make sense of it.

“Look at that,” she says.

What was before an intermittent red glow is
now a ribbon of shimmering light in the western sky, not unlike the
photos of the northern lights that Rachel has seen. It’s a
surprising bit of beauty, a dark rainbow of glowing luminescence.
It’s mostly reds and purples, indigo and flame, and there’s a pulse
to it, a throbbing. Rachel tries to convince herself that it’s yet
another explosion or fire in the distance, but there’s something
atmospheric about it, something bigger. This is something she’s
never seen before, and despite its beauty, it fills her with still
more dread.

Jenny remains silent, staring at it
miserably.

Rachel approaches Prospect, readying for the
turn that will take them east toward the hospital. In her
peripheral vision, she catches sight of red movement.

“Wait, wait,” Rachel breathes, slowing the
Honda to a crawl. “There’s something—”

“What?”

Rachel carefully maneuvers around the hulking
shape of a crashed SUV. A single, barely discernible glow radiates
from the interior. The Honda slows, and it becomes clear that the
dot of illumination is moving rhythmically. Rachel comes to a full
stop, staring into the SUV, which has bumped gently into the median
and stalled, just before making the left turn onto College. Rachel
rolls down her window.

“Rachel, what?” Jenny repeats.

“I think—I think I know that car.”

“It’s moving—that thing inside is
moving.”

“I do know it,” Rachel says. “That’s Hailey,
this girl I know from high school. I remember when she got this
truck. For her eighteenth birthday. I remember thinking what a
spoiled bitch she was for getting it.” She’s trying to make out
Hailey’s face. “Not a very nice thing to think about a friend, huh?
I wonder where she was going …”

Rachel puts the Honda in Park, grabs her
flashlight, and quietly opens her door.

“Rachel! Are you insane? Don’t!”

“Don’t worry.” She steps out into the
darkness.

“What?! Get your ass back in here! We have
to—we have to get your dad to the hospital!”

Rachel ducks back in and glares at her
friend. “Just a second—I have to see something.”

“Oh for—”

There’s a bumping sound coming from the SUV.
Rachel steps closer, and she can make out the shadowy figure of her
old friend Hailey in the driver’s seat. Her upper body is twisting
back and forth in the seat, the head bumping the closed window. The
red illumination is leaking from her open mouth and nostrils, but
it’s also present beneath the skin of the entire lower half of
Hailey’s face, which nevertheless remains in deep shadow. Rachel
feels compelled to get closer and really see her friend’s face.

She comes within three feet of the window and
stares in, her heart thudding.

“
Hailey,”
she whispers.

The rhythmic bumping continues.

“Rachel!” Jenny cries. “Jesus Christ!”

“Shut up!”

Rachel directs her flashlight at the ground
and thumbs it on. A circle of bright light appears at her feet. She
takes another step toward the SUV, watching Hailey. The young woman
is still twisting in her seat, trying to use the left side of her
forehead to smash the window open. In the darkness, Rachel can’t
make out much of the girl’s features, just the glowing crimson
beneath them. She gradually brings the light up between herself and
the window, and only then is Rachel consciously aware of what she’s
doing.

She needs to see if this thing that was once
Hailey is going to recognize her at all. Because if there’s even a
spark of recognition …

“Rachel …” Jenny is whining.

When the light from the flashlight
illuminates Hailey’s head, Rachel is now sure that this is her
friend. Her dark hair is pulled back into an uncharacteristic
ponytail, but the face is definitely Hailey’s. The left side of the
forehead is enflamed from the repeated thudding against the window.
Even as Rachel brings the light higher, the body’s twisting and
bumping continues. Hailey almost appears to be trying to bend
herself backward, arching her back as she twists, only stopping
because the window is in her way.