Blood Red (27 page)

“So we test it,” Rachel says quietly.

She grabs a pint of the O-negative blood,
feels the heft of it. She closes her eyes for a moment, hearing the
continuous shuffle above her, thinking of everything that has
happened over the past day in a kind of blur. Her eyes seem to grit
together in exhaustion as she whispers her own version of a
prayer—a prayer to her father, a prayer to the Earth, a prayer to
herself to find the strength to make this work. To please make this
work.

She opens her eyes.

“Let’s go.”

The three of them rush back out through the
dim hall, lights flickering a silvered red. It’s a haunting scene,
made terrible by the clattering racket coming from above them.
Rachel feels like she might drop to the slick floor at any moment.
She’s filled with fear and weariness and now, she realizes, a
terrible thirst.

She needs to stop, to pause for a moment.

And then they’re rushing past her father’s
door again.

“Wait!” she cries. “Stop, please.”

Her two older companions seem grateful to
stop, Alan planting his hands on his knees to catch his breath. He
appears strong but also old, his skin thin as tissue paper and pale
at his shiny temples. His gray hair is brittle and wild. Bonnie
stares at Rachel, a perpetual look of shock on her face now.

“I need to see him,” she says to both of
them, and Bonnie softens and nods.

Alan, still bent over, peers up at Rachel
with pained eyes that nevertheless show understanding. He
straightens and takes her hand in his own callused but also soft
one. Then he lets go and braces himself on the edge of the gurney
next to the door.

Rachel turns and grasps the door handle,
taking a moment to catch her own breath.

She opens the door.

For a split second, Rachel’s mind can’t
comprehend what her eyes are seeing. Her breath halts, and her
brain freezes right along with it. It’s the eyes that break her
from her momentary paralysis. The eyes staring at her, staring
into
her. The eyes that remind her of the woman-corpse they
saw behind the barrier at the stairs.

The corpse hanging upside down from the
ceiling is that of an athletic woman, its nurse’s uniform torn open
at the shoulders and hips and chest. The cloth hangs off of the
body nearly in rags, revealing taut flesh and white undergarments.
The thing’s long blond ponytail dangles toward her dad’s face like
a stinger. The image is so impossibly insect-like that even after
breaking from her paralysis, Rachel can only stare at it,
bewildered.

The corpse is hanging precariously from two
thick metal supports. Three or four other flimsier slats are broken
and twisted, not strong enough to support the body, splayed out in
severe angles. Several of the large ceiling tiles have been knocked
down to the floor—eight or nine of them lay broken and angled
there. Beyond the corpse’s white-knuckled clench of the metal
supports, in the dark depths of the attic, there’s another
luminescence, another corpse on its way. Rachel hears a clipped
gasp and an abrupt clack.

Her eyes find her father—who seems
untouched—and that feeling of protection surges through her again.
She feels heat flush through her face, and she gains her feet to
rush at this horrible thing.

The nurse-corpse seems to register Rachel’s
sudden resolve and emits a sound from out of its throat, a deep,
phlegmy emanation. Beneath the mouth, the eyes flash.

And then Rachel is leaping at the corpse,
tearing at it, pulling it from the ceiling. The thing screams at
her, an animal wail, and glares at her, gripping the metal above it
as Rachel yanks at its limbs and clothing. The room is filled with
hoarse screaming now, and Rachel only half-realizes that one of the
ragged voices is her own. The nurse-corpse’s limbs begin to flail,
letting go of the stronger supports and attempting to grab the
weaker slats, and in a rush the body falls beneath Rachel to the
floor. It’s suddenly a flurry of scraping limbs beneath her as she
repeatedly pounds at the upturned face with her right fist. The
woman was obviously athletic, though, and thrashes around with
animal power.

And then Rachel feels an unnatural draining
of her own strength, an abrupt weakening of her musculature and her
will, and she flashes back to the moment she shoved her hand into
the path of the luminescence emanating from Susanna’s mouth
yesterday. The memory makes her peel herself away from the body
shuddering beneath her, and she’s helped by the hands of Alan and
Bonnie behind her. Even as she’s wrenched away from the flailing
thing, she feels a lingering numbness at her left shoulder, which
got closest to the thing’s mouth.

It takes a moment for Rachel to realize that
her two companions are screaming at her.

“The blood!”

The unit of O-negative blood is still in
Rachel’s left hand. She has only a moment to come to that
understanding before the nurse-corpse gains its crablike footing
and charges her. The raging inverted face comes at her, its mouth
all teeth and strained, poking tongue. Not knowing what else to do
in the split second she has, she lets the corpse come at her and
thrusts the pint bag of blood directly into the thing’s maw,
cramming it in, letting the teeth break the soft plastic. Quickly,
she withdraws her hand, again feeling a withering numbness in her
fingers. She watches the corpse’s face while attempting to shake
some sensation back into her hand. Bonnie and Alan, cradling her,
watch with her.

The thing pauses in its urgency, considering
something. Its jaws work, obscenely unhinged, and the blood pours
out in rivulets down to the upturned nose, into the nostrils,
coursing down to the eyes and instigating a fit of mad, exaggerated
blinking. It shakes its head vigorously, reminding Rachel of a dog,
and blood flies everywhere, misting the room. Then the thing’s
limbs clench, rigid. In the depths of its stretched-open mouth, its
red luminescence starts popping and dimming. It’s like an organic
sparking, and Rachel thinks she can hear a flat clicking coming
from behind the upper palate.

Her curiosity seems suddenly morbid to her.
The thing is writhing directly in front of her, not three feet away
from her. She, Bonnie, and Alan are helpless to watch the effect of
the blood on this completely impossible thing.

It convulses and coughs, and suddenly it’s
leaping directly at Rachel again desperately. Rachel pushes back
against Bonnie and Alan, who both fall backward to the floor. Using
their bodies to anchor herself, she brings up her arms to ward off
the lethal head of the nurse-corpse, but it’s not interested in
her. It scrambles screaming over all three of them, its twisted
limbs buffeting them. And then it’s over and past them, careening
into the hallway, making a terrible screeching racket. It crashes
into a gurney on the opposite wall, which buckles and dumps its
cargo—a dead middle-aged woman—directly atop it. The nurse-corpse
shrugs off the deadweight, and shakes its head, blood still flying
from its mouth. It jitters its head in spastic motions.

“Back, back!” Bonnie is screaming into her
ear.

The nurse-corpse isn’t even looking at them.
It takes off toward the front of the hospital, its limbs skittering
and sliding. Rachel flings herself forward, watching the thing exit
the doorway and angle around the admissions desk. She leaps to her
feet and follows.

“Watch out!” she calls hoarsely, out of
breath. “Joel! There’s one coming your way!”

She skids to a stop at the doorway, watching
the corpse navigate an awkward, slipping circle on the tile in
front of the desk. The thing appears to be in a state of wild,
dead-eyed confusion. Joel approaches quickly and cautiously from
the left, but Rachel can’t take her eyes off the nurse-corpse. Its
face is a mask of outsized pain, anger and apparent fear. Rachel is
catching jitter-glimpses of the red luminescence behind its teeth;
it seems to be flickering. The corpse’s scream is a prolonged wet
gasp, and its body seems to be attempting to flip and twist.

The boom of the shotgun shocks Rachel. The
nurse-corpse immediately collapses, its voice dying away in a
wheeze.

Joel gives Rachel a nod. “Thanks for the
heads-up,” he says, then turns back to help the others.

Dazed, she takes a moment to see what the
group has done at the stairwell. A number of seat-rows and even a
section of the admissions desk are erected there, creating a
sizable barrier. Rachel locates the gray woman-corpse near the top
of the stairwell, but she turns away, not wanting to see those
terrible flat eyes again.

Just as she turns, she hears Bonnie’s voice.
“Rachel! Rachel, hurry!”

The image of her father sparks into her head,
and a new energy fuels her sprint back up the hallway toward the
supply room. She sees Alan at the doorway reaching for Bonnie, who
is inside. Rachel can just see the back of her head. They’re both
backing out of the room in fits and starts. Alan turns to see
Rachel coming, and then she’s at the doorway, pushing in next to
Bonnie. Her eyes go first to her father’s unconscious body, then
it’s wrenched upward to the open ceiling above him, where yet
another pair of dead, intelligent eyes stares down on the room.
It’s another woman corpse, a former patient in casual clothes, and
its flat gaze is moving around the room. Rachel thinks it’s seeing
the blood and perhaps even acknowledging the blood’s effect on the
corpse that came before it. Fearless, Rachel pushes past Bonnie,
beyond her clutching hands, and stands at the foot of her father’s
bed, glaring up at the thing in the ceiling.

“Fuck you!” she yells at it. “I dare you to
come down here, you bitch!” She kneels down and swipes her hand
through a smear of blood on the linoleum floor, then extends it
palm out toward the corpse. “Come on down, get a taste of
this!”

The shadowed corpse hisses, and in a dark,
reckless blur, it retreats.

The three of them are left near
hyperventilation, in shock, staring in at a destroyed room in which
Rachel’s father lies, barely undisturbed.

“Well,” Rachel says, panting, wiping her
trembling hand on her jeans. She turns to face Bonnie and Alan.
“Successful test.”

Rachel, one eye still on the torn-open ceiling, goes
to her father’s side. She places her small hand on his forehead
above his closed eyes, avoiding the wound at the hairline. She
notices that her fingers are shaking almost uncontrollably. In this
weird reality, the trembling catches her eye for only a moment, and
then she has forgotten about it. She feels the reassuring warmth of
her father’s skin, feels the clammy life there, deep inside, and it
calms her.

“You’ll be okay,” she whispers, her voice
breaking. She leans over him, to press her body against his, shut
her eyes tight, and attempt an embrace. “Daddy, you’ll be
okay.”

Bonnie and Alan have risen and approached
her, placed their hands on her back.

After a moment, Bonnie’s voice whispers at
her ear: “Rachel, we have to—”

A shotgun blast booms from the lobby amid the
distant yelling, and all three of them jerk, startled.

“I know.” She snatches herself away, standing
up straight, summoning the strength to leave him yet again. And
then she’s glancing around, her eyes still blurred with new tears.
“I have to move him, I have to get him out of this room. Help me?
Please?”

Bonnie is still out of breath, one hand
flattened above her breasts. This woman has had enough. Her face
has a gray complexion, and she’s spotted with blood all over.
Rachel feels sudden empathy for her; she can tell that Bonnie is
running on fumes, and as they stand there indecisively, they’re all
casting glances upward, aware that the entire hospital is alive
with scuttling movement, a dark promise of more horrors to
come.

“They’re coming down,” Bonnie whispers,
almost sadly.

There are more shouts coming from the lobby,
and Rachel knows they have to go there. She repeats, “Please?”

Alan says, “There’s an office down the hall,
and it doesn’t have this kind of suspended ceiling. Probably built
as an addition later. We can put him there. He’ll be safe.”

Rachel remembers passing the room earlier, an
executive’s office, perhaps, but she didn’t pay any attention to
the ceiling. Why should she?

Now Bonnie is nodding wearily. “Okay.
Okay.”

With some effort, their movements punctuated
by three more shotgun blasts and shouts from the lobby, the three
of them manage to angle the rolling gurney through the door, down
the crowded hallway, and into the office, which, sure enough, has a
more traditional drywalled ceiling.

They squeeze the gurney into the room, and
Bonnie checks his head wound while Rachel holds her father’s loose
hand. He hasn’t stirred, but according to Bonnie, all his vitals
seem okay. She’s encouraged by that but frustrated and even angry
that he won’t wake up. Irrationally, she directs the anger at
him.

How could you do this to me? Leave me all
alone to face this shitstorm?

She feels another catch in her throat as
Bonnie pulls at her to go. What if she never sees him again? She
says goodbye to him silently.

They hurry out the door and into the hall.
Rachel finds that the door has a lock. She doesn’t have the key to
this lock, but she knows she needs to lock the door anyway. She
twists the lock in the knob on the opposite side, then pulls the
door shut, tests it. Locked.

“Let’s go—wait!” Rachel pauses. “More
blood—we need more blood.”

Alan is already moving down the dim hallway
toward the blood bank. “On my way,” he calls back. “I’ll meet you
back at the lobby.”

Rachel watches him go, the way his shoulders
are hunched with exhaustion, the way he’s coaxing every last bit of
energy from his protesting limbs. Then Rachel gives Bonnie a
look.