Blood Red (30 page)

Bonnie explains quietly, almost sadly, “He’s
suffering withdrawal.”

“He’s lucky he’s not suffering withdrawal of
my foot from his ass.”

Chrissy barks a laugh, but Bonnie is shaking
her head sadly.

“He’s probably headed home to…” Kevin lets
silence finish his thought.

“Oh, I should have asked him in private,” she
says. “That was wrong. I should have—”

She’s interrupted by a rattle of movement
when the double doors behind her bang open and a corpse scrambles
through them. It’s a young woman, a doctor’s assistant, pink and
blue gown strained and shredded at the thing’s straining limbs, its
turned-over face wild and monstrous. Its wide-open mouth is
clenching and unclenching, foaming.

Bonnie and Chrissy scream, and Joel lifts his
useless shotgun like a baseball bat. The corpse hisses at them, its
dead eyes shifting, and it skitters forward across the tiled floor,
battering into Alan. Its bent-back hands come into contact with the
blood that’s splashed liberally over the floor, and the thing is
suddenly slipping and skidding, pushing back. The hissing sound
escaping its mouth ratchets up into some kind of painful, throaty
gasp. Joel steps forward, takes a swing at it with his shotgun, but
even in the midst of its scramble, it deftly ducks out of the way
of the swing, its body briefly collapsing and then lifting up
again.

The corpse’s prolonged gasp becomes a screech
when a stream of O-negative blood splashes its face. Alan is on one
knee, the half-empty bag clutched in two hands, the arc of blood
rising and falling but true. The corpse spins defensively and then
in a ruckus of swiping limbs, it’s scurrying across the vestibule,
its now-red eyes moving frantically among the survivors as it exits
the hospital. It climbs onto the smeared hood of Joel’s cruiser,
leaps off the other side, and is gone to the northwest.

“Christ!” Joel says, still panting,
recovering from this shock as well as the onslaught of the past
hour. “I’ve had about enough of those goddamn things!”

Alan collapses again to the floor, bracing
himself with one arm—his unwounded arm. He’s watching the front
doors contemplatively.

“I think Scott had the right question,” he
says, still wheezing, trying to catch his breath. “Where are they
going?” He locks eyes with Rachel for a moment. “You need to find
out.”

Something drops inside her.

The lobby is silent. They all look at each
other. Joel steps over to the cruiser, opens the rear door, and
reaches inside. He emerges with a handful of shotgun shells, lifts
his shotgun, and begins laboriously reloading shells into the
weapon’s magazine.

“I can’t help but feel …” Joel says, glancing
up between shells, “… that they’re amassing somewhere. You know?
Preparing for battle or something. Crazy, I know. But …the way they
move, the way—I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the way they
communicate. The way they
fight
.”

“Oh, don’t say that,” Bonnie says. “Please
don’t say that. This is all impossible!” She throws up her
blood-smeared hands. She notices the state of her fingers and gives
an almost comical pout, then rubs her hands on her slacks.

“All right, let’s get out of this mess,” Joel
says, frowning at the blood-splattered tiles, which are looking
more and more unpleasant under the rising sun. “Let’s get Alan into
a chair, get him comfortable. Then let’s assess the situation. See
where we stand.”

Kevin seems to snap out of a daze, coming to
the older man’s aid. “Sorry,” he says.

He and Bonnie arrange themselves beneath
Alan’s shoulders and help him rise from the red, coagulating mess.
Alan is crusted with blood; it’s caked on his clothing and misted
on his face. Rachel looks at him with a great blooming feeling of
warmth and admiration, and melancholy.

Chrissy hurries, in fits and starts, to the
edge of the stairwell, peering up the stairs to make sure there are
no more corpses coming down. She extricates a plastic chair from
the jumbled, angular mess and carries it to the middle of the empty
waiting room. Kevin and Bonnie carefully set Alan down on it.

“I’ll get water,” Bonnie says. She walks
fearlessly into the hallway beyond admissions.

“Don’t worry about me,” Alan whispers.

Joel remains near the front doors, scanning
the area outside the hospital. Rachel joins him after a moment. A
single car is moving south on Lemay. Joel watches it for a while,
then seems to come to a realization. He reaches to his belt for his
two-way radio.

“Buck, come in!” he calls into it.

Silence.

“Come in, Buck.” Joel rattles the radio,
listens again.

The car makes a turn into the neighborhood on
the west side of Lemay and disappears. Shadows are still fairly
long outside. Rachel takes a quick glance at the clock over the
admissions desk: 6:43 a.m. She focuses outside again. In the far
distance, she can make out stationary figures, corpses in the
centers of suburban lawns, attached to the bases of trees. The more
she squints and focuses, the more bodies she sees.

“Do you see that?” she whispers.

“The bodies? Yeah.”

“Are they
all
doing that?”

He’s shaking his head slowly. “I don’t know.”
He fishes out his cigarette pack and places one between his lips.
“It doesn’t make sense.” He lights it up.

“What do you want to d—”

The radio squawks. “Joel, Buck here.”

“Buck, how’s it going down there?”

“Pretty quiet here,” comes Buck’s voice,
breaking and fading under static. “Got about a dozen people. We’ve
barricaded—” Static for a long moment. “—generator and cleared out
the school. I’ve got a couple of guys from the Harmony hospital
just came in. Word is, that place is a—” More static.

“Fuck.” Joel exhales a cloud of smoke.

Finally, Buck’s voice comes back. “—bodies
outside.”

“Buck, can you repeat about the
hospital?”

“It’s a hellhole. Filled with those goddamn
bodies. Wiped out at least twenty people there. Thought of—”
Static. “—good to hear your voice. How’s it going up there?”

“Well, we survived, anyway. But listen…”

Joel goes on to describe the makeshift
O-negative blood solution and how they’ve made it work, as well as
how the corpses have reacted. Buck confirms that it is his own
blood type, and he congratulates Joel for figuring it out.

“I’m not taking credit for that one,” Joel
says, giving Rachel a sideways look. “I’ve got a smart little lady
here.”

He also tells Buck about what the reanimated
bodies are doing at the bases of the trees. His right arm is draped
on the cruiser above the passenger door, his eyes locked on the
small copse of trees on the other side of the parking lot. The two
male corpses have intensified their odd stranglehold on the
conifer, and Rachel can see that the farthest one has popped the
hip joint on its left side. The leg is bent backward so severely
that the head of the femur is poking like a knob away from the
body, threatening to tear the skin. The ever-present red glow
continues its pulse.

Buck responds after a long moment.
“What?”

“Yep, you heard right. I don’t understand it,
but I think I want to do my damnedest to figure it out.” Rachel
looks over at Joel, surprised. “Buck, if you can get to that
hospital and find the blood bank, it would probably be worth your
time to find some O-negative blood. Believe it or not, it can
protect you. Just spray it on ’em. They can’t stand it. It’s the
reason we’re still here. And spread the word, will you? I can’t get
Ron on the radio. Maybe you’ll have luck.”

“Right.”

“I’m going back out, but I’ll get back with
you later. Out.”

He attaches the radio to his belt and turns
away from the scene outside. He can’t stand to look at it
anymore.

“You’re leaving?” Rachel asks.

He’s nodding. “Everything has changed.
There’s nothing keeping us here anymore.” He takes another drag on
the cigarette, then turns and flicks it out into the parking lot,
over the roof of his cruiser. He looks squarely at Rachel. “I say
we all gear up and see what the hell they’re up to.”

“What?” Bonnie says from ten feet away. “Just
leave? Go out there? You’re kidding. We nearly died getting them
out of here!”

“Look,” Joel says in a louder voice, knowing
he’s addressing the room now. “I need to get out of here. That’s
not something I would have said a half hour ago, but it’s true now.
Somehow, some way, we got the better of those things. We survived.
And that’s all thanks to you guys. What you did with the
blood—hell, I never would have figured that out.” He nods at
Rachel. “So we know how to arm ourselves in two ways. Funny thing
is—I think the battle has gone out there.” He gestures out the
doors. “I think those things are after something. They’re going
somewhere. And I have to know what it is they’re up to. I have to
go find out.”

“You’re really going out there?” Chrissy
says. “I mean—”

Bonnie is nodding, agreeing with Chrissy’s
clipped thought, and Rachel sees an almost insurmountable fear
behind Bonnie’s eyes, as well as the acknowledgment that Joel is
their best protection. Wherever he goes, everyone should go. Rachel
feels it, too.

Joel confirms the thought. “I think we should
all go.”

Rachel steps forward. “I want to know where
they all went,” she says while watching Bonnie react with
emotion.

Kevin, next to Alan, says, “Me too.”

Rachel is thinking of all the death that has
surrounded her for the past twenty-four hours, the bleakness and
the blood and the hopelessness. “We’ve gone through hell trying to
find ways to hurt these things—to kill these things—and we have
ways. We know they’re still up to no good, right?” She searches for
words. “They’re out there right now, searching for something, I
know it, they want something, and whatever it is, we know it won’t
be in our favor.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying we can’t just sit here and be
glad we’re still alive.”

Bonnie gives her a pained look, bows her
head.

“We have to see this through, right?” Rachel
looks around at the rest of the group. “Look what these things have
done to your families and your friends. Everyone you know is dead!
Don’t you want to know why?”

“But,” Bonnie argues, “we don’t even
understand—”

“All the more reason to get out of here and
see what they’re doing. Where they’re going.”

Punctuating her words, another corpse comes
tumbling downstairs, this one from the now useless barricade at the
stairs. It’s a small Indian woman, her deep-brown arms and legs all
akimbo as the corpse slides rattling down the plastic and metal
mountainside. On her upside-down face, the woman’s red bindi looks
somehow cruel below the wildly shifting flat eyes and working
mouth. The corpse reaches the carpet and crab-walks across the
lobby, skirting the periphery. It appears ready to attack if
provoked. All the survivors are in wary, defensive positions, and
Alan has even aimed his bag of O-negative blood. The Indian corpse
hugs the wall and finally climbs Joel’s cruiser and leaps away,
into darkness.

“It didn’t even try to attack,” Kevin
says.

“Okay, we’re going,” Joel announces. “There’s
seven of us now, so we’ll take two vehicles. We’ll take my cruiser
and whatever other car we have the keys to. We’ll split up the
weapons. Any objections?” The room is silent. “We’ll split up the
blood, too. Kevin, can you take care of that?”

The big man is already in motion, grabbing
hold of the gurney piled with blood packets and wheeling it toward
the front doors.

“What about vehicles?” Joel asks the room.
“What do we have?”

“I got a truck,” Kevin says.

“That’s the answer I was looking for.”

Most of the others begin gathering the blood
and preparing to take it to the vehicles. Rachel catches sight of
Alan, who is slumped in his chair in the middle of the lobby,
looking forlorn. A bag of plasma is still in his left hand. His
eyes are glassy, his facial muscles betraying inner pain. The rest
of his body is convulsing weakly. Bonnie has returned to him as
well; her fingers are at his neck.

“What can we do?” Rachel asks.

Bonnie gives her a grave look.

“
No no no no …!”
Rachel gasps. At the
expression on Bonnie’s face, she nearly collapses, and hot tears
spring to her eyes. Not Alan. Not when things are finally turning
their way. Not so close to the end.

“He needs morphine,” Bonnie says.

The sobs come freely as Rachel races through
the double doors into the hallway leading to the morphine supplies.
She nearly loses her footing when she slides into room 109, and she
can’t stop her chest from hitching with the force of her weeping.
There are a few low moans around her, coming from the drugged
victims on some of the cots, but she ignores them. She makes it to
the cabinet, whose doors now hang open, and scans the supply with
blurred vision. Just as she did for Jenny, she quickly selects a
small yellow syringe labeled
Morphine Sulphate - 20mg
. She
races back toward the lobby, casting a weepy glance toward the
locked room that holds her father, and she lets loose another
uncontrolled sob. Rachel curses herself for her inability to hold
it in, to keep her emotions under control. She finds herself
clenching her fist and pounding repeatedly at her thigh.

When she punches through the double doors
into the lobby, she finds it a desolate place, blood-smeared and
hollow, most of the survivors outside delivering blood bags to the
vehicles. At the center of it all, Bonnie kneels over Alan, who is
now gasping. His face is slack, but his mouth is working
spasmodically.

Rachel hands the morphine to Bonnie, who
expertly prepares the syringe and plunges it into the flesh of
Alan’s shoulder. The effect on Alan is near-immediate, his jaw
relaxing, his clenched muscles loosening up. Rachel can see the
expanses of parchment skin across Alan’s arms, extending up beneath
his shirt. She can only imagine what has happened to his chest. At
the palest portions of skin, mottled bruises are appearing, purple
and brown, and an almost greenish edge. Rachel looks away
helplessly, trying to get ahold of her breathing.