Blood Red (5 page)

Aside from unconscious bodies, there are also
no living and breathing people anywhere in sight, no people
screaming and sprinting in any direction. Her eyes lock on the
crashed car she saw from the window of Tony’s house. It’s a red
Volkswagen Jetta. Steeling herself, she makes her way toward it.
She’s glancing in all directions, wanting someone, anyone, to come
flying out of a nearby doorway to help her.

She jogs to the Jetta, which is at an odd
angle, wedged between a tree and a brick mailbox. There’s a person
slumped behind the wheel, a woman, completely still. Rachel can see
only the back of her head, the hair curly and dark, thrown forward.
The engine is still ticking under its hood, barely. She wonders
when this accident happened. There’s an oily green liquid dripping
from the front of the car—she guesses from the radiator—onto the
sidewalk. She walks around to the driver’s side window, which is
angled upward a few feet above the ground. She has to step up onto
the severely turned front tire and prop herself against the tree to
peer inside.

The red illumination coming from under the
flesh of the woman’s cheek lends a ghostly quality to the vehicle’s
dark interior. Rachel stumbles down from the car, nearly falling
into the street. She catches herself, staring, breathing.

Despair clutches at her chest, threatening to
hollow her out. Lightheaded, she sits heavily on the curb and
surveys the scene. In the space of an hour, her entire world has
become a red-tinted nightmare. The blanket of smoke over the street
isn’t helping. She can see clouds of it wafting toward her from the
south. Magnolia Street is utterly desolate of life now, eerily
empty of traffic or people.

Is anyone alive?
Are people still
dying? Am I next?

Rachel needs to find
someone
living
and breathing. She knows they must be out there, searching, like
she is. Who knows how many more are still in their homes, waking
up? She glances up and down the street. Way off to the east,
finally, she sees a figure running from one house to another,
possibly mirroring her own horrific discoveries. How many people
like her are just now realizing that their worlds have entered the
fucking
Twilight Zone
?

Her eyes dart to the Volkswagen again, wedged
up against the tree, and she remembers that she failed to check the
garage for her dad’s car before leaving the house. That would tell
her whether he went to work or for an early morning walk. She won’t
even entertain the notion of her father being afflicted like
Susanna, or Tony. She has to believe that he’s alive.

She pushes off the curb, making her way
across the desolate, smoke-dimmed street. In the middle of the
chaos surrounding her, she spins around in disbelief. In the
distance, in every direction, there’s some kind of new horror:
wrecked cars, smoking ruins, and yes, another body, a woman
face-down in a gutter a hundred yards to the east. She takes that
in only briefly, not letting her attention lock on it. The sky is
thick with smoke, and it’s still pouring out of Old Town. And over
everything is this crimson tint, this awful, buzzing thing, glowing
from bedrooms and doorways everywhere.

It occurs to Rachel that there are no sirens
wailing now. Even the city’s emergency alarm sounded only briefly
and has been silent ever since. The absence of these sounds is even
more horrifying. The city is spilling over with disasters of all
kinds, and yet it seems that no one in authority is attending to
them. There’s a disturbing hollowness to the world, an emptiness in
which everything is bleak and gone.

Why?!
she shrieks inwardly.

Her eyes catch on another figure, stumbling
perhaps a quarter mile south, and she shouts in the person’s
direction
—“Hey! Hey! Over here!”
—but the person half-falls,
not hearing her, and disappears around a corner.

Rachel makes her way quickly up her front
path, onto her porch, and into the house. Her eyes land again on
the lonely apple core on the small table in the center of the front
room, and then she’s walking through the kitchen. She flings open
the door leading to the garage, and in the dimness she can see
immediately that her dad’s car is gone. Which means he’s at work.
Right? That’s what it
has
to mean.

“He’s at work, and he’s typing away at his
computer, and he’s fine, and I just need to find him, and
everything will go back to normal!” she whispers hotly, although
she knows he’d have to be working in some basement office deep
underground to avoid the chaos of the explosions and the city alarm
earlier.

There’s no basement at her dad’s place of
business. Not that she knows of.

Susanna’s car, an older black Honda Civic, is
there. Rachel herself has no car, even though she got her driver’s
license three years ago. Susanna never liked when Rachel asked to
use her car—always gave her the stink-eye—and even though Rachel
knows that Susanna is sprawled impossibly, abruptly dead beyond the
next wall, it takes her a moment to make the decision to take her
stepmother’s car. Susanna always kept her keys deep in her purse.
Rachel doesn’t relish the thought of going back into her
stepmother’s bedroom, but she knows that’s where Susanna keeps the
purse.

“Damn it!” she yells into the garage,
listening to her words reverberate against the unfinished
walls.

Gritting her teeth, she runs to the bedroom.
At the threshold, she pauses to shut her eyes and take in an uneasy
breath before she enters the room. Susanna is still lying across
the bed in the same deflated position, the bedsheets tangled and
hanging half off the bed. Rachel casts her gaze around the room
looking for Susanna’s purse. She doesn’t see it. She steps around
the perimeter of the room, checking the dresser and the rocking
chair, and she pokes her head in the closet. No.

Reluctantly, she approaches Susanna’s body to
check underneath the bed, careful to stay as far away from her
stepmother’s naked corpse as possible. She kneels down silently,
her breath coming quick and shallow, and lifts the bedspread from
the floor.

The purse.

She drags it out, giving only a second’s
worth of thought to the fact that her stepmother chose to hide her
purse under her bed. For once, a revelation of this kind doesn’t
cause her to roll her eyes.

Rachel rifles through the purse, finds
Susanna’s cell phone. She gives it a try, with no success, then
tosses it onto the bed. She digs deeper into the purse and comes up
with the keys.

She’s pushing herself up when her gaze
inadvertently falls on the flesh of her stepmother’s unmoving
thigh. The all-too-recent sensory memory of Tony’s body seeming
unnaturally pliant beneath her touch comes to her and makes her
shudder. With grimacing curiosity, unable even to help herself
despite her rising gorge, she reaches over and presses Susanna’s
thigh with her fingers, and … maybe the flesh seems to give more
than it should beneath her finger. She’s not sure. Either way,
Rachel’s throat flutters on the verge of gagging, and she yanks her
hand away.

What is it doing?
she thinks, horror
roiling in her gut.
What the hell is that—whatever it is—doing
to their bodies?

Violently, she shakes her head.

“I’m imagining it,” she whispers
insistently.

She backs out of the room and makes her way
to the kitchen. She slumps into her favorite chair and stares
forward at nothing. She presses her hands against the tabletop,
stopping their tremble. She forces herself to take a series of deep
breaths, and finally clarity starts to grudgingly return.

What now?
she asks herself.
What
would Dad do?

Slung over the rear of one of the kitchen
chairs is her backpack, and the sight of it grounds her, gives her
a new sense of purpose. She pulls it off the chair, unzips it, and
empties its contents onto the table. Her history book, her
literature text, and a heap of messily folded papers tumble out.
She knows the history book has scribbles from Tony inside it, from
the class they share.

Shared.

Rachel stands with the pack and goes to the
refrigerator. In its unlit innards, she finds several bottles of
water, which she stuffs inside at the bottom; she places two more
in the outer side pockets. She finds boxes of crackers in a
cabinet, tosses those in, and she throws in a couple of apples and
bananas, too.

What else? Be smart.

Her dad might as well be whispering in her
ear.

Remembering the cream she used on her hand at
Tony’s, she takes her backpack through the quiet house and into her
own bathroom. Her family’s old dusty first-aid kit is in the corner
of the medicine cabinet above the toilet. She opens it to see
what’s inside. A package of Band-Aids, some gauze, some probably
dried-out antiseptic wipes, and some ibuprofen. She throws in some
extra items from the cabinet itself—hydrocortisone cream, some
soap, and an almost-empty bottle of Vicodin she used for dental
surgery last year. In the kitchen, she places the kit inside the
backpack, then slings the pack over her shoulder.

Rachel enters the dark, humid garage.
Instinctively, she flips up the light switch, then curses herself
for forgetting about the power outage. She props the door open with
her pack to allow some light inside. She’ll have to open the garage
door manually. In the dim light, she sees the release she needs to
pull from the door track. She grabs the stepstool from its corner,
positions it, and reaches up to grasp the release; it comes free
with some effort, dangling on its cord, bringing to mind a
hangman’s noose. She steps down and shoves the stepstool away, and
it slides to the wall with a clatter. She goes to the door and
heaves it up. It’s far heavier than she thought it would be, and it
screams sourly at her, but with great effort in the dull heat of
the garage, she gets the squeaking monstrosity to roll up.

She retrieves the pack, tosses it into the
car, and climbs into the driver’s seat. She twists the key in the
ignition, gets the engine revving, and reverses out of the garage.
Once in the driveway, she hops out, and jumps up to grab the edge
of the garage door, hauls it back down. Wiping her hands on her
jeans, she goes back to the car, taking a moment to study the
street again. It’s still desolate, and gray with smoke.

There’s a hollow pit in Rachel’s gut that is
crammed with fear; she feels it expanding and contracting as she
takes everything in. There’s no one out there in this flat, red,
infuriating world. She turns away from the scene, not wanting to
think about what this desolation means, but she casts one last
glance toward Tony’s house.

I’ll be back for you. I hope
.

She pulls the car out into the street and
proceeds east, toward the site of the large explosion.

Where should she go? Police? She wants to
head directly for her dad’s office, but it’s so far south, down
there past Barnes & Noble, past McDonald’s even. At least on
the way to College Avenue, the main thoroughfare, is the police
department. One way or another, she’s going to find out what the
hell is going on.

In the space of three blocks, she finds seven
crashed vehicles, and in all of them, she can see bodies still
strapped into the seats, their heads slumped against the windows.
Most of the cars are crooked against the curb or smashed into
parked cars, but on one street she finds a dairy truck halfway
embedded in the front of a home, which has crumbled around it. She
can see the straight path of the truck’s tires across the grass of
the front yard, as if it made no effort to stop at all, just
barreled into the home’s façade. Another vehicle—a brand-new Chevy
truck—is completely upside down, angled across a driveway. Rachel
can see the driver’s head and thick arms hanging in the
half-crushed cab, and blood has streamed down the driveway in fine
rivulets.

The next block over, a middle-aged woman is
sitting on her front steps, her head buried in her hands. Her hair
is a messy black-and-gray tangle. Rachel is startled by the sight
of this living human, just sitting there, and she jerkily steers
toward the curb. She stops the car and calls out the open
window.

“Ma’am? Ma’am! Are you okay?”

The woman looks up, startled, then shakes her
head, dazed. “My … my …” Her voice sounds ghostly, defeated, and
dissolves to silence. She looks down at her hands and lifts them,
confused. Rachel glimpses familiar damage on her palms, and the
flesh of the woman’s forearms also appears mottled and pale. Taking
uncertain hold of the post next to her, the woman shifts forward,
seeming about to rise, but then she falls back and looks around
blankly.

“Are you hurt?” Rachel asks, coughing under a
thicker wave of smoke. She opens her door and steps out
uncertainly, approaching the woman.

The woman doesn’t appear to understand
Rachel’s question, simply sits there staring, lost in her own
nightmare.

Rachel feels new helplessness in the face of
the woman’s mad despair. She knows how she feels. But the woman’s
confusion and inability to face the nightmare only serve to propel
Rachel to action. She has to keep moving. She will not be the kind
of person to turn inward.

“I’m going to find help,” Rachel says,
probably unnecessarily. “I’m going to the police. You might want to
go inside away from the smoke.” She hesitates, then kneels down and
asks, “Do you want to come with me?”

The distraught woman doesn’t respond. Her
eyes are red and wet, and there’s still no sound at all coming from
her open mouth.

Rachel observes the woman for a few uncertain
seconds, then edges back into the street. She becomes aware of a
familiar sound, and instinctively cranes her neck to gaze into the
sky. Through the smoke she can barely see a passenger airliner, way
up there, and for an instant the sight comforts her. Soon, though,
she sees that the airliner is in trouble, doing a slow spiral in
its otherwise straight path. She loses sight of it, then catches it
again. It’s upside down, barrel-rolling, chilling Rachel to her
core.