Blood Red (35 page)

The front door is open wide. Rachel knows she
didn’t leave it open earlier. Glancing left and right, she brings
up the weapon and enters the home. It is dim and very quiet; no
movement whatsoever.

“Hello?” she calls.

Silence.

She makes her way through the dark front room
and into the kitchen. It’s impossible that she was in this room 30
hours ago, when this nightmare began. She sets the shotgun on the
counter, opens the dark refrigerator. It’s still relatively cold
inside. She marvels at how the world has utterly changed in less
time than it takes for a refrigerator to lose its chill. She finds
a single bottle of water in the fridge door. She opens it and
drinks it down without stopping, some of the water spilling down
her chin and onto her shirt. Her throat and sinuses feel raw and
painful from all the smoke in the air. She tosses the empty bottle
into the trashcan to the left of the refrigerator, then grabs the
roll of paper towels from the counter, tears one off, and rids her
nose of a dismaying amount of blackened mucus. She wads up the
paper towel and throws it away.

She opens the fridge again, gives it a quick
scan, and finds some leftover pizza. She takes it out and eats two
pieces cold. She’s ravenous. She has to consciously slow herself
down. When she’s finished, she tears off another paper towel and
wipes her face.

Finally she glances down the dark hallway
toward Tony’s bedroom.

She reaches for the shotgun again, cradling
it securely in her arms. Directing it ahead of her, she moves
forward into the hall. There are a bunch of crooked frames
containing family pictures on the wall, showing all the stages of
Tony’s life. She laughed at these once, but now they make her want
to cry.

“Tony?”

Just as she calls into the dark hall, a
grenade blast sounds in the distance.

Tony’s door is wide open. She swallows
painfully at its edge, and peers around the doorframe. The bed is
empty. She stares at it for a long moment without breathing, then
lets out a long, shaky exhalation. She’s not sure what she was
expecting. What, for him to still be there? For everything to be
back to normal? For this all to have been some weird dream?

She enters the small bedroom, leans the
shotgun against the wall, removes her backpack, then falls onto the
bed. There are no tears. She buries her face into Tony’s pillow,
gathering in his scent, losing herself in it. She curls into a ball
and brings his sheets and blanket over her. She closes her eyes and
feels the hard pull of sleep and comfort and forgetting. She could
drop away to sleep in an instant. She bolts back up.

“No.”

She climbs out of the bed and hurriedly pulls
on the pack. She takes up the weapon and strides into the hall
without looking back. After ensuring that Tony’s mother is gone,
too, she walks into the bathroom and relieves herself. She can’t
take her eyes off the medicine cabinet that she raided earlier for
supplies. She remembers that version of herself with a deep sense
of loss.
That
Rachel hadn’t yet seen the extent of what the
world had become. If she could become that Rachel again, perhaps
she
would
bury herself in Tony’s sheets and just stay there.
Let Tony’s light consume her so that she could go with him to
whatever dark destiny lay in wait for him.

Soon, she’s out of the house and onto the
porch. Under dark gray skies lined with red like static lightning,
she scans the street again, miserably.

She can’t put it off any longer.

She walks across the street to her house, her
eyes carefully watching for any sort of threat. The shotgun remains
at the ready, but there’s nothing to be afraid of anymore. She
knows that.

She opens the door and steps into the house.
The first thing she sees is her apple core on the table by the
front window. It’s browned but still relatively moist. She has to
force herself to look away. She’s starting to get irritated by her
mind’s tendency toward longing for a too-recent past.

Without hesitating, she proceeds down the
inner hallway to her father’s bedroom. It comes as no surprise to
Rachel that Susanna is still sprawled naked across the bed,
precisely where she left her—

—
where I killed her
—

—and the room is humid and slightly sour.
Rachel stops at Susanna’s bedside, staring down at her dead
stepmother. She lets a long moment of silence pass, in which a
jangle of emotions pass through her. They are difficult emotions,
and she weathers them stoically.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, feeling something
like sparking flint inside her. “I didn’t mean—I didn’t mean for
you to…”

She lets her words fall dead in the hollow
room. Suddenly she feels that she has nothing more to say to this
woman. Ever since she found her father unconscious in that
stairwell at work, knocked out but alive, it’s like she’s been
waiting for this moment, waiting to come back here. Working up to
it. She feels she should have words to scream at Susanna, pent-up
words, some kind of juvenile comeuppance, but in this new world,
everything from the past is dying in her throat.

“Bye,” she says flatly.

She turns and leaves the room. Directly
across the hall is her own bedroom, and she enters it slowly, her
heart beating hard. The bed is unmade, and clothes are still flung
here and there, evidence of both her night out with Tony and her
harried escape yesterday morning. The battery-powered clock on the
wall is still ticking; it reads 9:34 a.m. She scans the room, takes
in the smallness of it, the school honors and the athletic
trophies, the pop-culture posters and all the toys left over from
her youth. There’s even her ratty stuffed bear near her pillow, the
one she has slept with since she was tiny. She nearly about-faces
and leaves the room, but rushes to the pillow, picks up the stuffed
animal, and stuffs it deep into her pack next to the units of
O-negative blood, the syringe packs and the shotgun shells.

When she emerges into the living room and
goes to the kitchen, she hears a staccato burst of more gunfire in
the distance. She stands in the middle of the open area, glancing
around at everything. She wanted so badly to come here, to leave
the rest of the survivors in favor of returning to this place, and
now she knows she’s done here. She’s not really sure why she came
back, but there must have been a reason somewhere inside her.
Because she feels different now.

She’s ready to move on.

Rachel goes to her own refrigerator now and
cleans it out of whatever food she can. She has a feeling that
fresh food is going to be hard to come by in the near future. She
opens the vegetable crisper to find an assortment of apples and
oranges and pears. She looks at them for a long moment,
appreciating them. Then she tosses them into her backpack. She also
grabs a few more bottles of water.

She steps out onto the porch and then down
into her front yard. The shotgun is heavy in her arms, and she’s
increasingly convinced that she doesn’t need it—at least not
constantly in her arms. She kneels down, clicks the safety switch
that Joel showed her, and secures the weapon against her backpack,
barrel pointed skyward. She pulls the heavy backpack onto her
shoulders, then practices shrugging out of it and rearming herself.
She tries four times, learning the most expedient motion. Finally,
she moves off, scouting for a vehicle.

She starts moving south again, through the
desolate neighborhood, this time intending to head southeast, back
toward the hospital and her dad. She’s striding down the center of
the empty street, watching cars and corpses alike. None of them are
moving.

A block away, she finds an abandoned blue
Toyota Camry. It’s angled against a curb and doesn’t appear to have
suffered any damage at all. She approaches it with a shade of
wariness and leans into the open door. The keys are still in the
ignition, complete with a dangling Mountain Dew logo keychain. She
takes off her pack and steps fully in, dropping her gear in the
passenger seat. In moments, she’s driving east on Magnolia toward
Shields.

She makes it only a couple hundred yards
before stopping abruptly, the Camry’s engine juddering to silence.
Her foot is jammed on the brake, and she’s staring out her
window.

In the yard of the corner house is a giant
Australian Pine, and at its base is a single corpse. That corpse
appears to be Tony. She knows those shorts, that dark gray
tee-shirt, and she knows those feet. She can see the lower portion
of his flat belly, and his dark hair hanging down. Her brow creases
at the sight of his awkwardly clamped limbs, the obvious pain of
dislocation.

No
, she thinks.
Not Tony
.

She opens her door. She barely registers a
large explosion from the west, followed by more random gunfire.
Before leaving the car, she unfastens the shotgun from her pack, a
feeling of great emptiness blooming at her center.

She crosses the street, glancing only
occasionally left and right. Her focus is on Tony, and she’s sure
it’s him now. Closer, she can see the shape of his chin, the three
or four days’ growth of beard there. Emotion clutches at her, but
she coughs through it.

“Oh, Tony,” she whispers.

She edges closer, noting the rhythmic,
muscular motions of his jaw. There’s almost no movement left for
his hyperextended limbs. They’re twisted back tightly, and she
can’t imagine them moving any farther without submitting to
multiple, debilitating fractures. A mash of splinters and bark has
puddled below his head atop a small mound of pine needles. She
cranes her neck slowly to see his face, which is nearly
unrecognizable behind a mask of sap and mulch.

Without meaning to, Rachel collapses at
Tony’s side, sitting awkwardly with the shotgun against her
shoulder. She stares at him bluntly, and she realizes that she
wishes she hadn’t found him. Better to have never seen him again
and forever wonder about the fate of his reanimated corpse, whether
in the mob at City Park or as part of the teeming multitudes of
bodies seemingly amassing in the foothills. She would rather
embrace that mystery than be forced to say this brutal goodbye.

In the shadow of the large pine, whose lower
branches have been cracked aside to permit Tony’s proximity to the
base, Rachel observes the red illumination quite clearly. It’s
pulsing from his mostly plugged nostrils and barely visible from
beneath the skin of his jaw.

She stares at the illumination with
contempt.

“Fuck you!” she says loudly.

At these words, Tony’s mouth ceases its
chewing, and the head swivels upside down to consider her. Rachel
scrambles backward a few feet, bringing up the shotgun. A wad of
moist, woody chaw falls out of Tony’s mouth, and he emits a
congested wheeze. He is now facing her fully. She sees his eyes,
gummy with sap, and emotion takes her.

There’s no recognition in those dead eyes.
She’s not sure what part of her expected it, or hoped for it, but
now that she sees the complete absence of Tony in this horrible
corpse, she begins to sob almost uncontrollably. She tries to stop
the tears and keep her eyes focused, but they keep coming. She
swipes them away on her sleeve, angry at herself.

Tony’s corpse continues to gasp at her like a
cornered animal.

After a while, the sobs dwindle to wet spasms
in her chest. She watches Tony’s face while she takes control of
herself again. She becomes aware of the shotgun still in her grip,
its stock planted in the grass below it. And now she’s nodding,
bringing the weapon into her lap and clicking off the safety.
Rachel anchors herself on her knees, sniffling, and levels the
shotgun. She brings the barrel up toward Tony’s forehead.

Tony doesn’t react in the slightest to the
weapon, just continues that low, gurgly gasp.

The barrel begins to wobble and sway.

“Come on,” Rachel tells herself, but the
barrel falls down and away. “Shit!”

She can’t do it, she can’t use a goddamn
shotgun to kill her boyfriend. She knows there’s nothing left of
Tony there, but she still can’t do it. No way.

She pulls the shotgun back to her lap and
secures the safety again. She gets to her feet, watching him. She
backs away, three feet, six feet, and his face slowly turns away
from her. And by the time she reaches the sidewalk, he has opened
his mouth and clamped it against the already-savaged pine bark, the
red glow beginning again to throb.

She knows she should leave him here.

Except, she can’t.

She didn’t leave her dad to die in a dark,
concrete office stairwell, and she’s not going to leave Tony to
this inhuman life.

She gets to the car and stores the shotgun.
She pulls the backpack out of the passenger seat and unzips it. She
rummages through to the bottom and finds a unit of O-negative
blood. She vividly recalls the pain and fury at the hospital
admissions area. The thought of poking a hole in this bag and
spraying Tony with blood, apparently scalding him, is also too
much. Even in the face of this heinous and false approximation of
life, she doesn’t want to cause him pain.

It needs to be quick, and as painless as
possible.

She begins to put the blood back into the bag
in favor, again, of the shotgun. It will be messy, but she doesn’t
have to look at the aftermath. She can shut her eyes. Then her eyes
stop on the nearly forgotten plastic package that includes three
syringes of differing capacities. She digs it out and considers
it.

One of the syringes has a large,
60-millileter tube. She unpeels the packaging and removes it.
Without thinking, she presses the needle into the blood packet and
uses the plunger to carefully fill the wide tube. The blood looks
dark and thick.

It’s odd to think of blood as a weapon. But
it’s more than that, she knows. In a way, it will save him. She’s
sure of it. By injecting it rather than merely spraying it, she
will ensure a quick end to Tony’s living death.