Blood Red (32 page)

An involuntary shudder passes through
her.

There could be fewer than a two thousand
people in the entire city. The fact that they have come across so
few supports Rachel’s grisly math.

Joel seems to wake from his own daze. Perhaps
he was pondering numbers, too.

“Okay, here’s Mulberry,” he says quietly.

The intersection that leads to the large
avenue is surprisingly free of crashed vehicles, but as Joel makes
the turn onto Mulberry, heading due west, a wide-open and desolate
landscape of abandoned cars reveals itself.

“They’re all empty,” Rachel remarks.

“Yeah.” Joel is nodding, his voice high and
tight.

On this stretch of urban concrete and
structures, there are few corpses in sight. Rachel spots only five
in a quarter mile, all of them clamped to the bases of conifers. In
one case, Joel passes a corpse in the median. In the midst of its
clutch against its chosen tree, the dead eyes roll toward them, its
expression clenching into something like hate. The glow at its
mouth is as rhythmic as its chewing.

Joel pulls up next to it. “Look at that,” he
whispers. “I could probably get out of this car and stand right
next to it, and it wouldn’t care.”

Neither Rachel nor Bonnie responds.

“What you said earlier … about outer space,”
he says. “I’m wondering if you’re right. These damn things come
down here, inhabit us, take us over, whatever … Maybe their goal
was never really us, but something in these trees.”

Rachel ponders that. “They never expected us
to survive,” she whispers.

“They never expected to have to fight.” He
looks over at her, then out at the red sky again.

“What could they possibly want in a tree?”
Bonnie says behind them, almost mournfully.

“That’s the question,” Joel says as he pulls
forward again. “Who knows? Chlorophyll? Some particular kind of
algae? Something missing from wherever they’re from?”

Silence, then Bonnie asks softly, “Why
us?”

Joel is shaking his head. “I don’t know—the
right kind of brain? It’s weird, though, it’s like they don’t know
how to use our bodies. Like—like they only know how to move that
one way, the way they move wherever they’re from, and they don’t
know how to adapt, or something.”

Rachel looks over at him. “More sci-fi
novels?”

He laughs desolately. “Yeah, maybe so.”

The streets are eerily deserted, save for the
vehicles once inhabited by drivers who died at the controls and
eventually reanimated into strange consciousness. Whatever force
that was, it allowed all of them to reason their way beyond the
closed doors of their automobiles. They knew how to open and even
unlock doors.

The car has gone quiet, and Rachel
understands the weariness inherent in the silence.

She twists to look back at Bonnie, who has
positioned herself at the edge of the hard plastic bench and is
actually nearly asleep. She must be uncomfortable, on this bench
intended for arrests, but Bonnie also has been awake for at least
twenty-six hours. Like all of them.

Just glancing at her, Rachel feels the pull
of sleep. Her eyes are gritty, feeling hollowed out, the sockets
receding into her skull. She remembers the hangover headache she
woke up with yesterday morning. The headache she has now is a very
different, duller ache, one that begs her to treat it simply with
unconsciousness.

She shakes her head in an attempt to clear
it, marveling that she could feel the grasp of sleep after
everything that has happened. She supposes it’s only because she’s
sitting still.

With all the windows down, Rachel listens to
the world outside the car, and there’s really nothing beyond the
drone of the cruiser’s engine. It’s an odd disconnect. They’re
driving into the busiest section of town and yet it sounds like
they’re merely drifting along a country road. Rachel has fond
memories of doing that with her mom before she died, of cruising
those roads east of town and talking, nursing cold cans of soda as
they laughed. But they’re in the middle of Fort Collins, where on
any normal day the sounds of human activity would provide a
constant thrum and buzz.

“There’s another one,” Joel says.

A lone, gangly man is walking along the edge
of the road, up and to the right. He’s stepping past a crashed
silver Honda Civic, peering warily inside, and continuing on. A
long gray curtain of hair swings around when his head jerks to see
the approaching vehicle. Now they can all see that the lanky man
has a handgun in his grip. The snub nose rises to point directly at
them.

“Whoa, whoa,” Joel says, braking the car.
Kevin’s truck comes to a rumbling stop behind them.

The man stares at them, his wild eyes
belligerent and threatening. Rachel instinctively ducks behind the
dash. She peers over at Joel, who remains in control. Calmly, he
flips on the cruiser’s lightbar—no siren. Rachel risks a look above
the dash to watch the man almost comically stumbling backward along
the gutter, then racing away into a ditch and up it on the other
side. He glances back once, twice, and disappears into a gas
station.

They continue east along Mulberry. Rachel
becomes aware that they’re gradually approaching her neighborhood.
They leave the steel and concrete behind, and homes begin to
appear, along with more trees and more bodies. When they pass
College Avenue, she sees the Good Times burger place on the
southwest corner where she went with Tony the day before
yesterday.

Tony.

A realization nearly stuns her.

She hasn’t thought about Tony for hours now.
Her eyes close, and her chin falls to her chest. What is she
feeling? Survivor guilt? She brings a hand to her forehead and
massages her temples. Images of her boyfriend flash before her:
Tony laughing in that full-bodied way of his; his unlikely, nerdy
studiousness in the classes they shared; the way he would
exaggerate his politeness to Susanna; the secret communication of
distaste for her stepmother that they shared. The onslaught of
images is too much; she opens her eyes.

They pass house after house, and Rachel finds
herself scanning the occasional bodies on the lawns, any section of
landscaping that features evergreen trees, whether pine or spruce
or fir, and it takes her a moment to understand that she’s watching
for Tony. She has turned her gaze more keenly through her open
window, searching the bodies for familiarity. For that mop of dark
hair, the olive skin she knows so well, the dark clothing he was
wearing yesterday morning atop his bed, when she found him
afflicted, like everyone else.

She realizes they’re five blocks from the
turn that would take her home. And at that thought, she thinks of
Susanna, dead in her bedroom, in the bed that she shared with
Rachel’s father.
Really
dead. No coming back for her. No
unnatural life.

And perhaps, after everything else, that was
for the best.

Yes. It’s for the best that Susanna is
dead.

She glances over at Joel unconsciously, and
as she does, he lets out a grunt, and the cruiser begins to
slow.

“Shit.”

Rachel looks out onto the street.

They’ve come to a blocked portion so severe
that there’s no way to inch around it. There are perhaps a dozen
cars abandoned in a haphazard line; they appear to have slowly
collided with each other in the aftermath of the event. The
vehicles are weakly gleaming under the red-tinted sun. Most of them
are empty, their doors flung wide open. But one of them—

Rachel sees it just as Joel speaks.

“See that?” Joel says.

One of the vehicles, a Toyota van, has been
blocked in by its neighbors, crammed tight, metal to metal. The
doors won’t open. Inside the van, what appears to be a family of
three is whipping about insanely, attempting to find a way out of
their metal-and-glass prison. Rachel can see that the driver’s
window is cracked and bowed out, and one of the family members’
legs is caught in a jagged, spiderwebbed hole there, torn and
bloodied.

Joel kills the engine, and now it’s clear
that the corpses are screaming and gasping as if caught in a trap.
Their limbs are flailing, their mouths open and straining. Rachel
feels revulsion and anger, and her fingers tighten around the
shotgun.

Joel steps cautiously out of the cruiser and
makes his way back toward Kevin’s cab. The sound of the truck’s
engine dies, engulfing the world in oppressive silence punctuated
only by the sounds of the obscene family. Kevin steps out with his
own rifle held in his fist, and the two men try to assess the
situation. Looking left and right, Rachel sees that the blockade is
a perfect storm of angled vehicles and mailboxes and
driveway-parked cars and trees, all of them impeding their
progress.

“Think you can push through it?” Joel asks
the larger man.

“Yeah, but I’d rather just drive a couple of
those cars out of the way. The keys are probably in every one of
those cars.”

Joel laughs a little. “You’re right.”

“I can do it.”

Rachel keeps glaring at the minivan full of
corpses, feeling a sneer take hold of her upper lip. While the
others start to break down the blockade, she reaches for her door
handle and steps out of the cruiser. She hears Bonnie call her name
in a sleepy voice, but Rachel feels almost like she’s outside her
body. She leaves the door hanging open and approaches the van
holding the trapped family of corpses.

“Rachel!” Joel calls. “What are you
doing?”

She doesn’t answer.

She gets to the van, and at her arrival, the
things inside stop moving and stare at her through the large
windows, their peeled-wide eyes red and angry below their yawing,
upside-down mouths. Rachel raises the weapon and aims the barrel
directly at the closest one’s forehead, the corpse of a blond
suburban mom. The mom-corpse doesn’t even flinch, just continues to
glare at her warily, defiantly. Rachel presses forward
threateningly, but the thing doesn’t move. She can see that frothy
saliva has dripped down from the thing’s mouth, filling its nose
and running in rivulets down the forehead and into the hair, which
is matted in stiff disarray.

They’re animals
, she thinks.

“Rachel!” comes a distant voice; she tunes it
out.

In her mind, she can hear only the final
breaths of all the people she has lost, like agonized whispers in
her ear. Wheezing in death throes, calling her name desperately.
And her father, dwindling away in a coma, on the verge of leaving
her forever, orphaning her in an impossible future.

The shotgun barks, the glass of the rear
window implodes, and the closest corpse’s head takes the damage
with a red jerk. The body falls lifelessly onto its back. The two
remaining corpses—a heavy bald man who was clearly the father, and
a preteen boy—react in a frenzy, thrashing their limbs at the
windows and squealing. The father is the one whose leg is caught in
the glass of his window. Blood continues to stream down the glass
and the door’s gold-painted metal. Rachel moves to him next,
climbing atop the bumper of an Audi. The corpse, again, stares her
down. The look gives her pause, but as bile surges up her throat,
she pulls the trigger again, throwing the father-corpse’s head
backward. Her own vomit spills out of her mouth; she heaves it out,
coughing.

Suddenly a hand is pulling at her shoulder,
and she yanks it back angrily, facing down Bonnie.

“Stop,” Bonnie says.

“No.”

She reloads the shotgun laboriously, the way
Joel showed her at the hospital entrance before leaving. Then she
climbs to the other side of the van; all the while, the boy-corpse
watches her, growling. Rachel perches herself against the fender of
a gold Subaru, takes careful aim, and kills the remaining corpse.
Its small limbs give way, and the van is silent.

“Feel better?” Joel asks, right at her side.
There’s a tinge of bewilderment in his voice.

Rachel hands him the shotgun wordlessly. She
makes her way back to the cruiser, spitting the foul taste of bile
from her mouth. She feels lightheaded. She barely senses that she’s
wobbling, veering out of her path toward the cruiser. Bonnie
catches her and guides her back to the car, settling her gently
inside, and unconsciousness takes her so suddenly that even in
sudden deep sleep, Rachel flinches.

“—
believe
it.”

“Good God.”

“I don’t even know what to—what to—how—”

“Look at that one!
Damn!
”

“Oh my.”

The words come at Rachel in a muted jumble.
She thinks she also hears quiet tears. She tries to comprehend
their meaning from under a deep blanket of gauze. Despite the
commotion, her eyes don’t want to open; the eyelids are gummy,
reluctant to surrender unconsciousness. Finally her vision comes to
her, at the forefront of a headache that threatens to blind her
anew. She blinks exaggeratedly, forcing herself awake.

She senses no motion. She’s in the backseat
of the cruiser, and it is stopped, its motor turned off. The cab is
dim, with a foreboding red tint. Rachel focuses on Bonnie’s face,
directly above her; Rachel’s head is resting in her lap. The
woman’s gaze is fixed on something outside, and her right hand is
clamped to her open mouth. It’s Bonnie who is weeping.

Rachel attempts to lift her head up and feels
something lurch in her skull. She drops back to Bonnie’s lap.

Bonnie glances down, and a tear splashes on
Rachel’s forehead. “Oh, dear, you’d better stay put.”

“No, I’m okay,” Rachel mutters, surging
through the pain to rise.

She steadies herself and tries to focus her
gaze outside, tries to comprehend what’s out there. It takes Rachel
a long moment to realize that she’s looking at the south edge of
City Park. It’s shrouded in a smoky red haze. At first, Rachel
believes she’s looking at a fog of crimson smoke rising from all
the foliage in the park. There’s definitely a kind of fog in the
air, a moving mist. She lowers her gaze and she can finally make
out what Joel and Bonnie have already seen.