Blood Red (29 page)

“Get away!” Rachel feels Bonnie yanking at
her. “Get back!”

Bonnie pulls Rachel across the wet floor, and
now Rachel can see Joel. Gripped in his two fists are twin bags of
O-negative blood, pinholes pricked in each one, thin streams of the
crimson plasma arcing into the crowd of corpses. It’s only then
that Rachel understands why she’s coated with blood, and it’s only
then that she realizes that the room is filled with a cacophony of
gasping shrieks. The corpses are scissoring across the floor, away
from the blood, their upturned faces straining with exaggerated
horror.

Joel is screaming, too.

“
Drink that, you bastards! Choke on it!
Die! Die!”

The nurse-corpse skitters off toward the
front doors. With a crippling thud, it slams into the tempered
glass of the left door, still shrieking. Under its weight, the
doors ratchet open automatically, and the thing leaps nimbly over
Joel’s cruiser and disappears—so suddenly that Rachel doesn’t
immediately realize what has happened.

The other corpses in the lobby are cowering
from the spray, their weirdly back-bent bodies maneuvering in a
chaotic, almost blurry disarray. Rachel cringes at their shrieking
fury.

Joel is still yelling, his voice hoarse:
“That’s right, fuckers! Deal with that! You hate that, huh?
Fuckin’ die!”

In her peripheral vision Rachel sees Bonnie
now pulling at Alan, who is shuffling weakly across the floor, away
from the gurney. She registers relief that he’s moving, but she
knows that he is gravely hurt.

A new batch of corpses are slapping their way
across the reception area. Most of them in white gowns, some of
them former hospital employees, they leap and hiss and glower as
they move, a blur of angled limbs and upclenched torsos.

Joel tosses his two spent plasma bags to the
floor and frantically pokes at a new bag with the point of a small
pocket knife. Emboldened, Rachel rises from the ground, slipping
once on the tile, and holds her full bag out to him. He hands her
his freshly poked bag and takes hers into his grip, and she notices
that his hands are remarkably steady and sure. Rachel stands fully
upright and as the corpses reach her, she’s directing her own
stream of blood in their faces, at the exposed skin, into their
eyes, and she’s screaming at them, enraged, their limbs buffeting
her, and then they’re squealing, ratcheting backward in something
like shock, away from the blood.

The front doors are still wide open, and in a
moment of dizzy incomprehension, Rachel sees a flurry of red
movement there. She’s still screaming, out of breath, and a
sparking blackness is taking hold of the edges of her vision. She
drops to one knee, her scream giving out raggedly.

“It’s working!” Bonnie yells, her voice a
high keen.

The administration area is a red, slippery
mess. Rachel can see that both Chrissy and Kevin have grabbed blood
bags, too, and have been directing streams of blood at the corpses,
who are exiting the hospital en masse. Blood is flying everywhere,
and finally the population of corpses in the lobby is thinning out.
The dozen or so that remain cower against the walls, crab-walking
toward the double doors, giving the ragtag group of survivors a
wide berth.

“Come on!” Joel calls to the survivors
closest to him. “Get over here!”

He corrals Chrissy and the rest, moves them
over toward Rachel and Bonnie and Alan. He’s throwing glances at
the now-toppling barrier at the top of the stairs. It has crumpled
into a metal and plastic mess. Corpses are tumbling down the face
of it, spitting their strange guttural hisses in a near-chorus, and
landing heavily, crab-sprinting past the survivors and the vivid
smears of blood across the tiles. They’re clacking through the
front doors and out into the burgeoning dawn.

Rachel has her half-empty bag of blood thrust
out in front of her, and as these new things edge too near her, she
squeezes, letting loose a red stream. Joel touches her arm.

“Wait, wait …” he tells her, and she releases
the pressure on the bag. “Guys, stop!” he calls to the others.
“Save it!”

The new things crab-walk past them, over the
blood-soaked low-pile carpet, their gasps increasing when they come
into contact with the blood, then disappearing through the doors
and scaling Joel’s cruiser. Some of the larger ones have more
difficulty than others, stepping awkwardly over the lower front
bumper instead.

“Back up, back up!” Joel yells, and the group
slips and slides backward across the tiles until they’re up against
the main reception desk.

The corpses continue to stream past them,
through the front double doors, all of them staring at the
survivors. Rachel tries to read the expressions in the corpses’
upside-down faces but can see nothing but outsized rage.

In minutes, the crowd of corpses that had
amassed above the makeshift barrier is gone, and the humans are
left panting, cowering, ashen with exhaustion. The reception area
is clear, and for now, the entire lobby is empty of animated
corpses. The world has descended into a stunned silence.

“Is that—is that all of them?” Bonnie asks the room.
Her gaze is snapping from the front entrance to the stairwell to
the doors that lead to the examination rooms. She finally lets go
of Alan, who is sitting up under his own power, one hand at his
neck massaging a large, pale expanse of skin, and rises on unsteady
legs.

Rachel searches the blood-drenched area for
more bodies, then, finding none, approaches the front doors.

“Rachel!” Bonnie calls, her voice raspy and
uncertain. “Careful!”

Rachel only glances back at her briefly. She
moves forward to the glass metal-framed doors, which slide almost
reluctantly open, straining again from the weak generator power.
The clamor of the corpses clattering through this vestibule still
echoes in her ears. She braces herself on the edge of the left door
and peers outside, her heart thumping hollowly in her chest.

Activity catches her eye, making her rear her
head back. She looks more closely. Most of the bodies that trampled
through these doors and over the cruiser are now out of sight,
presumably racing somewhere northwest, but two heavy male
corpses—both naked, one of them trailing a blood-spattered hospital
gown from its ankle—are lumbering upside down across the small
grassy area to the south. The blunt sight of their exposed genitals
causes a wave of revulsion to pulse through her, but she’s more
focused on their destination.

“What is it?” Chrissy is suddenly at her
side, making her jump.

Rachel points at the doughy male corpses,
which are crab-walking their way toward a small copse of
evergreens. She lets her eyes flit over to the other corpse she
noticed earlier; it’s still clamped to the base of the Blue Spruce
there, its limbs wrapped around the needled branches. In the past
twenty or thirty minutes, its body has clenched even more
desperately to the Spruce’s trunk, and the corpse’s limbs are
obviously fractured here and there, angled horribly, the joints
dislocated, the fingers and toes digging into sappy bark. It almost
looks like the corpse is attempting to merge with the tree. From
where she stands, Rachel can still see the thing’s jaw working
obscenely. Squinting, she thinks it’s actually eating the tree—both
needles and bark—and a pulpy mulch seems to be splatting from its
mouth to the spongy ground beneath it.

The two male corpses have found a lone
conifer tree and are tentatively exploring it, their inverted
mouths finally attaching to the wood. They remind Rachel of animals
surrounding, exploring, and feasting on fallen prey.

“What are they doing?” Chrissy whispers, her
tone aghast.

“I think they’re…I think they’re eating the
trees,” Rachel replies.

“What?” Joel says, his energy drained, his
face full of weary confusion. In one hand, he’s gripping his empty
shotgun, bracing it against the remaining piece of the admissions
desk to prop himself up. His other hand drops a sticky, empty
plasma bag to the floor; he wipes the red hand on his pants.

“Always something new around here,” Kevin
says.

“What does it mean?” Bonnie asks no one in
particular.

Rachel can only shake her head, dumbfounded,
watching the male corpses begin to chew at the bark. Their hulking,
fatty bodies inch ever closer to the trunk while their sideways
skulls clamp to the tree with ever-growing determination. The jaws
work with inhuman strength; Rachel can see the muscles of their
necks and jaws straining even from where she stands. The red
luminescence is vaguely pulsing at the point of contact.

“Disgusting!” Chrissy says, looking away.

“Why …?” Rachel says quietly. “Why are they
doing that?”

Joel makes his way across the sticky tiles to
stand at the doorway next to Rachel. For a moment, he has no words.
Then, “I saw one doing this in a yard on Laurel, didn’t think much
of it then.” He wipes at his forehead. “I was more focused on the
ones that were moving. But this—this tells me that it means
something.”

Alan, still on the floor, is leaning forward,
trying to peer through the doors with his weak gaze. “Could it be
an instinct of some kind?”

“Yeah, they’re hungry,” Scott says from
Rachel’s left. “Humans, trees—what’s the difference?”

“Well, obviously hunger,” Alan wheezes. He
seems to swallow with difficulty. “But these bodies have gone
through something totally unusual. You see, maybe it makes sense
that … that the way they express hunger is something…something
strange like that?” His voice is weak and shaky. Rachel looks over
her shoulder at him, concerned.

“Shhh …” Bonnie says, kneeling again at his
side. She’s touching the skin of his upper arm and examining his
neck. “You’re hurt.”

“I’m all right,” Alan says, sounding far from
all right.

“What I want to know is, where did the rest
of them go?” Scott calls. He’s staring out the windows from a
crouch, his eyes red and wild. “I mean, who cares about these—these
monstrosities? It’s the meaner fuckers I’m worried about.” Rachel
can see that his left arm is clutching his abdomen. His face is
drenched with sweat.

“Scott?” Bonnie says from Alan’s side. “Are
you all right? Are you hurt?”

Scott glares at her from his cramped
position. “I’m fine.”

Rachel senses movement behind her; Bonnie is
moving past her toward Scott. She lays a quick hand on Rachel’s
shoulder, and then she’s past her.

There’s an enraged, red-rimmed fury to
Scott’s face when it angles up toward the approaching woman. “What
do you—get away from me!”

“Scott, something is wrong.”

Scott is now attempting to laugh—a harsh,
high-pitched noise. His face clenches, and he doubles over further.
“Fuck! Fuck!”

“Scott, what are you on?” Bonnie asks.

“What? Are you—get—what the—”

“If you tell me what you’re on, I might be
able to help you.”

“Fuck off!” His eyes are flashing, and he’s
trying to stand, willing himself beyond the obvious pain. He tries
a derisive laugh, but the unpleasant bark is cut short with an
intake of breath.

Joel is suddenly standing next to Rachel.
“C’mon Scott, listen to her.”

“Everybody’s a fucking moron,” says
Scott.

And then, almost miraculously, he manages to
stand. He is the embodiment of suffering. Watching the rest of
them, the muscles of his face jerking, he stalks crookedly through
the lobby, taking a wide berth around Joel toward the front doors.
He reaches down and grabs two bags of O-negative blood.

“C’mon, man,” Joel says, eliciting a scathing
look from Scott before he steps across the threshold tentatively.
“What are you doing? Where are you going?”

Scott is searching the parking lot and the
street beyond, which is still brightening under the new sun.
Everything is silvered and red—the deepest crimson sunrise Rachel
has ever seen. It reminds her of waking in summer to occasional
Colorado sunrises bruised by forest fires deep in the Rockies, the
way the fire and smoke turned everything a wounded brown and red.
Although she’s sure the local fires have caused a lot of this
atmospheric phenomenon, there’s something else—something she’s
never seen before.

The world seems eerily calm and quiet out
there. There are no moving bodies that Rachel can see at the
moment; no vehicles maneuvering the streets; none of the usual
sounds of a city waking up.

Scott glances back, jittery. “Home,” he says
simply. “I’m going home.”

“Scott, don’t go,” Bonnie pleads.

He’s shaking his head, not hearing her, and
the motion of his sweaty, red-haired skull increases, as if he
can’t stop the movement. He plants his hand on the trunk of Joel’s
cruiser and manages to squeeze past it and through the doors. He’s
tentative, watching the two male corpses in the grass for a
reaction. The survivors behind him are watching intently for the
same thing.

There’s no movement there except for the
muscular clench of the corpses’ limbs, bent back and straining, as
they grasp the tree still more forcefully. They don’t appear to be
aware of anything except for the base of that tree. Rachel watches,
mesmerized, as the closest corpse gnaws at the bark, which is
giving way to the softer sapwood underneath. Clots of mulch fall
from the mouth as the jaws churn and chew.

Scott steps beyond the cruiser’s fender and
into the parking lot. He casts a single glance back toward the
survivors assembled beyond the doors. There’s a sneer on his lips.
He appears about to say something, but then thinks better of it.
And then he’s walking southeast toward Lemay.

“Scott!” Bonnie calls.

“Good riddance!” Kevin says from the base of
the admissions counter. “Guy’s a goddamn tool.”