Blood Red (33 page)

The park is filled with bodies.

Thousands of bodies.

The thing that springs to Rachel’s mind is a
painting that used to hang on Tony’s bedroom wall, one that she
noticed peripherally for weeks before really looking at it. An odd
cacophony of human behavior set against darkness and fire, the
painting stopped her short in a weird post-coital moment as she
made her way naked to the bathroom. She remembered grimacing at it
while Tony laughed at her from the bed, introducing her to the
unique horrors of Hieronymus Bosch.

Surrounding the trunk of every tree and
reaching up into the lower branches are innumerable intertwined
corpses, their limbs bent at extreme angles, the skin straining and
even torn. They’re impossible jumbles of flesh, and Rachel can’t
tell where one body begins and the next ends. The bodies are
crammed together so tightly that there’s no movement at all, they
simply make up a series of dense, enflamed, unmoving masses, each
mass clinging tenaciously to the base of a tree. The sight takes
Rachel’s breath away, but none more so than the collective red
luminescence pulsing and rising like fog through the branches into
the gray sky.

Scattered along the grass of the park, in the
spaces between trees, are more human bodies, these without the
telltale faint glow at their throats. These are merely corpses,
perhaps having gotten too close to these strange things with their
weird, urgent needs. They are strewn everywhere around the car,
even in the streets, but they’re in greater numbers in the park.
There’s death everywhere.

In the dim distance, Rachel sees a corpse
spider-walking straight down the center of a residential street
toward the park. She can barely see it beyond the light from the
red collective inhabiting the park like a hive. But she can see
that it is sickeningly adept in its alien gait, covering ground
quickly despite the sheer
wrongness
of the way it holds
itself, everything turned over, everything straining and seemingly
fractured. It’s a woman in a nightgown, she sees now. It clambers
over a curb and enters the park, racing toward the nearest
flesh-crammed tree. It finds one and climbs up the mountain of
bodies in a state of near-desperation, finally clamping itself to a
high, bare patch of bark, its angled mouth burrowing, chewing.

This new corpse’s radiation joins the others’
in a throbbing steam rising into the sky. No, it’s not her
imagination. The light is rising.

Rachel becomes aware again of Bonnie weeping,
and she turns to face her. Bonnie reaches a trembling hand to
Rachel’s face, touching her cheek, and the fingers come away wet.
Rachel wipes at her tears, tears she hasn’t realized she has been
shedding.

She looks back at the red scene and cranes
her neck to look toward the sky. There’s an indistinct crimson
throb up there, roiling amidst low-hanging clouds, but most of the
phenomenon seems to be taking place farther west, in the foothills
and beyond.

Joel and Bonnie are also staring out the
window, transfixed. Rachel glances back through the rear window to
see the grill of Kevin’s truck right behind them. She can barely
see the occupants of the cab, sitting still, staring north into the
park.

“I’ll be damned if I—” Joel starts, then
gives up, letting his hands fall from the steering wheel to his
lap.

There’s a sharp crack in the near distance.
They peer among the trees, searching for the source.

“That’s a firearm,” he says. “Maybe two or
three of them. Listen.” He cocks his head, bringing his index
finger to his lips for them to remain quiet.

The shots come intermittently, at different
pitches. Then there’s a brief barrage of reports, silence for a
long minute, and the shots resume at a more measured pace. They’re
getting closer.

“There,” Joel says, gesturing.

Rachel sees a small flash of yellow fire
before she hears the shot, and it’s followed by what she believes
to be the gasp-screeching of one of the corpses. She tries
squinting to make out movement in the red mist, and finally she can
barely see two figures, maybe two hundred yards away.

Joel is leaning into the passenger seat to
peer through the window into the park, his gaze unwavering. “Yeah,
I think I know them. I think it’s the Thompson brothers. They live
out on LaPorte. Massive gun collection between the three of them.
They’ve probably been waiting their whole lives for an opportunity
like this. How lucky for us that O-negative blood flows through
their veins.”

“
The Most Dangerous Game
,” Bonnie
whispers.

Rachel says, “What?”

“Man is the most dangerous game,” she
answers. “It’s an old movie. About hunting humans for sport.”

“Except these things aren’t human anymore,”
Joel reminds her.

“So they’re just wandering around, shooting
the—”

“Appears so.”

After about five minutes, Rachel can see
movement off to the northeast, two figures in camo gear moving
steadily toward them. Their weapons are still firing
intermittently, and by now she’s sure the men are shooting at the
corpses. She can hear the gasping breaths of the things as their
reanimation comes to an end. She leans her head out the open window
to get a better look. The two men are in an open space, only
occasionally visible between the trees and the conglomerations of
corpses. Now she can barely see one of the figures aiming his
rifle, flash, and an almost immediate crack. A single corpse falls
away from its tree, tumbling down the pile and out of Rachel’s line
of sight.

One of the men calls out something
unintelligible, like some kind of self-congratulatory whoop. The
sound is a hollow note in the alien void.

“Yeah, it’s them,” Joel breathes. “Two of
them, anyway.”

Suddenly there’s a face at Joel’s window, and
Rachel nearly screams. Everyone jumps, then immediately relaxes
when they recognize Kevin’s broad face.

“Sorry,” Kevin says.

“Jesus Christ,” Joel whispers.

“Won’t be long before we’ll be in range of
those assholes.”

“Just want ’em to get closer so I can talk to
’em.”

Kevin nods wearily. “Doesn’t surprise me
seeing shit like this.”

Joel seems to consider that, gives a half
nod. “They’re okay.”

Kevin notices Rachel for the first time.
“You’re awake.”

She can only glance down, feeling a strange
embarrassment.

Kevin opens his mouth again to speak, only to
be interrupted by the shouting of the men in the distance.

All four of them turn their heads in that
direction, just in time to see a bright flash and chaos of flying
bodies and limbs, followed by a concussive blast. The two men are
some distance from the explosion, and Rachel knows that they have
caused it. She can see their faces a little more clearly in the
dwindling fire, and their expressions seem almost exuberant. They
have their weapons clamped to their sides, their fingers pressed to
their ears.

The blast echoes away like diminishing
thunder, and Joel curses. “That was a grenade!”

He reaches down to flip on the light bar atop
the cruiser and grabs the microphone of his loudspeaker. Kevin
moves out of the way, and Joel gets out of the cruiser, radio mic
in hand. He steps away from the flashing light bar and stares over
his cruiser’s hood into the park. After a squawk of feedback,
Joel’s voice bursts into the park.

“Jeff and Pete Thompson, this is Officer Joel
Reynolds.” He clicks off the transmitter and stares into the
distance.

The men stare dumbly back, then regard each
other with something akin to red-handed guilt.

Joel puts the microphone to his mouth again.
“Come on over here, boys, just want to have a few words with you.
Secure those weapons.”

Rachel is watching the mass of corpses for
any reaction to Joel’s booming voice. There is none.

“If they run,” Kevin says, “there’s nothing
we can do, really.”

“They’ll come.”

Sure enough, without much hesitation at all,
the brothers begin a wary trudge toward the cruiser, while a cloud
of red mist and smoke settles over the scene of the grenade blast.
In the dimness, she barely makes out a battlefield of body parts
and a single broad tree trunk mostly emptied of corpses. On the
periphery of the scene, several corpses attempt to regain their
crablike postures but fail because of broken or missing limbs. They
are screeching in animal pain and perhaps anger, making Rachel
moan.

The brothers approach and seem to grow more
massive with each step. These are large men, and they look
increasingly ridiculous to Rachel in their tent-like camouflage and
big boots. Seeing them this way, she feels more emboldened and
finally scoots over to the open window to face them.

“Officer Reynolds,” one of the brothers
murmurs in greeting.

“Having fun, are ya, Pete?”

“I, uh, I guess you’ve seen what these things
have been doing,” Pete says.

“We’ve seen, yeah.”

“I never woulda thought it would end like
this,” says the other man, whose name must be Jeff. “I mean, look
at those fuckers! Oh, sorry, ladies.”

Rachel speaks up. “You plan to destroy every
last one of them?”

“Well, little lady,” Pete says, “we figure
that’s why we’re still here, to clean up the mess. Right, bro?”

Jeff is silent for a moment, taking in the
survivors’ makeshift caravan. “Where you all coming from?”

“We were at the hospital during the worst of
it,” Joel says. “When they started … coming back.”

“Ain’t no ‘coming back’ to it, Officer,” says
Pete. “These things are something else. Jeff here figures they’re
aliens, like alien brains inside the dead bodies.”

“Yeah, they ain’t zombies exactly, like in
the movies, but more like some kind of alien possession. It’s the
God’s honest truth that you gotta kill these things in the head.
Only way to kill ’em dead is to get ’em in the head. Or blow ’em
up.”

“I guess there’s more to your arsenal than I
know about.”

The brothers look sheepish for a moment, but
then a little defiant behind their stained-tooth smiles.

“Doesn’t really matter now, does it?” Jeff
asks with a smile.

“Guess not.”

Joel looks beyond them into the busy dimness
of City Park. The thousands of corpses continue to work at the
trees with their mouths, hungrily, messily. A look of distaste
crosses his features, then he focuses back on the brothers.

“You boys have any idea what the hell they’re
doing?”

“Hell if I know, man,” Pete says. “Whatever
it is, it’s disgusting. It’s unnatural.” His brother is nodding.
“It ain’t God’s plan, that’s for damn sure.”

“So,” Rachel says, “the plan is to kill them
now and ask questions later?”

She’s acutely aware of the hypocrisy in these
words, having recently killed the trapped family in the van. She
can feel the eyes of her fellow survivors on her.

“In the head,” Jeff repeats.

“Those things’ll come after you, though,
you’re not careful,” Pete adds. “You hit the wrong spot or make too
much of a ruckus, they’ll try to kill the fuck out of you. Like,
from the inside. Look here.”

He sets his rifle against the cruiser and
rolls up his sleeve. The skin of his left arm is pale and burned.
Rachel is all too familiar with the sight.

“They’ll fuckin’ hurt you without even biting
or anything. Sorry for the language, ladies. They’ll just get close
to you and do this shit.”

“Best thing to do,” Jeff adds, “is set ’em on
fire. We sprayed gas over one bunch of ’em and lit ’em up. That
works, man. But it spread pretty easily to another tree. We don’t
want to burn up the world, right? And the screaming is pretty
horrible.”

Pete is flexing his fingers, but they’re slow
and trembling. “It’s all numb and shit.”

“Yeah,” Joel says, looking at the hand. “We
saw a lot of that at the hospital. So, is that really the plan,
boys? Just wander around and kill as many of these things as
possible?”

The brothers shift their feet and glance
around, at each other and out into the red darkness.

“Um, well, yeah?” Pete says.

“What we need,” Jeff cuts in, “is bigger
guns. This shit is happening everywhere there’s trees. Hell, look
at the foothills. That’s where most of the people are.”

“What?” Kevin says over the hood of the
cruiser. “How do you know that?”

“You know Mike Richards up in Laporte, don’t
you?” Pete directs to Joel. “He survived.” For the benefit of the
others, he says, “Mike runs the Rod and Gun Club. He’s got three or
four citizens holed up in a cabin up there on the edge of the
forest. Unbelievable sight, he says.”

“How are you communicating with him?”

“Ham radio back home,” Jeff says. “CB in the
truck hasn’t worked for shit. Most of the channels are dark, and
the radius of our transmitter sucks.”

“The police band is working,” Joel says.
“I’ve got an officer down on Harmony organizing a group, but I
haven’t heard anything from him in an hour or so.”

“I think we’ve heard some of that, yeah,”
Pete admits.

Joel murmurs a laugh. “Hearing anything
else?”

“I think there’s some groups out there trying
to organize,” says Jeff. “We catch bits of conversations. And
there’s some others holed up in their homes. Scared as fuck. Sorry,
ladies.”

Joel is quiet for a long moment, considering
these revelations. He stares off into the distance. Even from her
vantage point inside the car, Rachel can see that his eyes are
deadened. She watches the side of his face, feeling her own
soul-crushing weariness return. It descends upon her like a great
weight. She falls heavily backward from the dash, against the hard
plastic of her seat.

“Okay, guys,” she hears Joel say. “I’m not
gonna stop you. Do what you have to do. I’d tell you to be careful,
but under the circumstances ...”