Blood Red (6 page)

“No!”

She looks to the woman for some kind of
shared acknowledgment of the horror in the sky, but there’s nothing
there. The woman is lost inside herself.

A thick wave of smoke obscures the aircraft
for long moments, but Rachel can hear its engines now; she can tell
that it’s struggling, even this far away. The high-pitched whine
comes and goes. When she sees it again, a black trail of smoke is
snaking behind it, and its roll is turning into more of a tumble.
Rachel loses her breath. Her hand shakes wildly in front of her
face as she helplessly brings it to her mouth, wanting to stop the
emotion from exploding out of her.

The plane is falling, spinning crazily now.
This impossible sight in the far distance, this new horror, takes
an eternity to unfold across the sky, and the terrible scream of
the airliner’s death throes still hasn’t even reached her yet. Now
it’s breaking apart into pieces large and small. Licks of orange
flame and dots of blackness color the atmosphere around it, and
everything is falling slowly downward, silently beyond the
smoke.

Rachel jerks her head away from the sight.
Her chest is convulsing as she trudges around the front of the car,
holding onto it, trying desperately to remain standing when her
heart is telling her to simply fall down. She presses her hands to
her ears as the sounds of the distant sky explosion reach her. She
falls into the driver’s seat, crying hard, and starts up the
car.

She drives with blurred vision, trying to
contain her breaths, which are clutching at her ribcage, rasping in
and out of her. She presses her right hand between her breasts,
willing her body calm.

“
Daddy!”
she manages to whisper, and
then she’s repeating the word beneath her tears. She’s watching the
gutters and the sidewalks, searching for him, even though her
conscious mind knows that he took his car, that he’s somewhere
else, somewhere safe and alive and probably looking for her.
Right?

Her breathing gradually calms, although she
has to blink herself away from the memory of the falling passenger
jet. Swallowing, she forces herself to keep watching for further
survivors, scanning porches and yards and windows.

In the distance, she sees two figures running
toward the pillar of black smoke that’s still rising above the
downtown area. She’s only a mile away from there, but she feels
incapable of moving at more than a snail’s pace, as if her mind
will permit her to observe only so many new horrors per minute.

From nearly every home, every window,
especially the ones shaded by massive trees, glows the subtle red
radiance. She might not have noticed it had she not been looking
for it, but it’s there in the smoky air. It’s everywhere, so
omnipresent that it’s almost unnoticeable. It’s just a part of the
world. If she focuses through stinging eyes, she can see it peeking
from behind blinds, from between curtains, this damned light,
suggesting unnaturally stunted mortality in every home she passes.
There’s a lump in Rachel’s throat that she doesn’t believe will
ever subside.

Near the corner of Magnolia and Scott,
activity catches her eye. There’s a small child on a front lawn,
writhing about, clearly in pain. Rachel brings the Honda to an
abrupt stop, shuts off the engine, and gets out of the car. The
child is perhaps two or three years old, a little barefoot blond
girl in a princess nightgown. She’s hurt somehow, mewling an almost
animal sound, her hands groping about in the grass to steady
herself.

“Are you okay?” Rachel calls, coming closer.
“Honey, are you okay?”

She reaches the girl and touches her
shoulder, and the girl reacts with fear, her sounds rising in pitch
to near-hysteria. The sounds make Rachel’s gut lurch; there’s
something terribly wrong with the little girl’s voice. Rachel
reaches out again to steady the girl, who’s now scrambling
awkwardly across the grass away from her. She moves as if her hands
are broken.

The girl lifts her head to look at the
stranger who touched her, and Rachel stops, clamping her hands to
her mouth. The girl’s eyes are clouded over and the skin of her
face is pockmarked with angry welts. Her eyelids and most of the
skin of her face are a barrage of raised marks, like third-degree
burns. Beneath the blank, ruined eyes—which Rachel can hardly look
away from—the girl’s nose and mouth seem twisted out of their
natural symmetry, the mouth in particular cocked to the left and
the tongue protruding slightly.

“Oh, sweetie,” Rachel croaks, “what’s
happened to you? Who did this to you?”

The girl mewls again, turning away, perhaps
not even hearing Rachel. Her ears are also disfigured, though not
as severely as the rest of her face.

Rachel looks to the surrounding homes.

“Help!” she calls. “Somebody please come out
and help! For God’s sake! Help!”

Her voice echoes down the desolate, smoky
street.

She lunges for the girl, falling to the
ground and embracing her. The girl thrashes and screeches, in fear
and misery. Rachel tries to soothe her, to pet her hair, but the
girl resists wildly. She can see now that the girl has folded her
hands into useless clubs, and the flesh there is damaged, too. It’s
only at this proximity that Rachel notices the flakiness of her
skin—the dry, bleached look of the flesh—and at the sight, she
coughs out a knowing sob.

Still holding on to the flailing girl, Rachel
brings up her right hand and looks at the skin of her own palm. The
skin is discolored and scaly from its exposure to whatever it was
that was glowing from Susanna’s face.

“
Shhhh
,” she breathes, pulling the
girl tightly to her, and the child is gradually weakening, though
clearly still in pain. Rachel tries not to touch her more egregious
welts.

She imagines this once-pretty little girl
waking up this morning, as she herself had, and playing with her
toys in her still-quiet house while the day brightened around her …
perhaps growing hungry as time wore on, or merely antsy because her
mother and father hadn’t yet risen … wandering into her parents’
bedroom and finding them still asleep on their bed … jumping up
onto the sheets, perhaps giggling at the prospect of waking them.
But they didn’t wake up. Instead, they met her with stony red
silence. At first she was laughing at her parents’ make-believe
unwillingness to rise, and then more and more frightened, the girl
pushed at them and screamed at them and shrieked in fear.

The scene plays out in Rachel’s mind’s eye.
The terrified girl pleading with her unresponsive parents, holding
their heads in her small hands, demanding that they wake up,
peering into their eyes, staring, glaring, only peripherally aware
of the crippling horror the red luminescence was inflicting on her
face and hands. And finally lurching away when the pain overrode
her need for her parents.

The girl still writhes in her grasp, but she
is already calming, although the pain-frenzied, warbling sobs
continue. Rachel clings to her, her own tears streaming down her
face.

Rachel catches movement out of the corner of
her eye. She jerks her head to the right to see a figure just yards
away, backlit by a smoke-filtered sun. She grunts and lurches
backward defensively, holding tightly to the girl, whose hideous
screams ratchet up anew.

“It’s okay, it’s okay …” comes a tremulous
male voice.

And for some reason, even though she can
barely make out the older man standing above her, merely the sound
of his voice—the calm, authoritative though querulous reassurance
there—unleashes new sobs from Rachel’s throat. She is so grateful
for his presence next to her at this moment that she’s nearly
paralyzed with emotion. She can hardly form decipherable words when
she chokes out, “I don’t…I don’t know what to do.”

Rachel wipes at her eyes with her sleeve. When her
vision adjusts, she can see that the man is perhaps in his sixties,
and he’s moving a little unsteadily. He seems a gentle soul in his
wrinkled khaki slacks and white tee-shirt. Wait, she knows this
man. She’s seen him before, perhaps mowing his well-manicured lawn
or walking out to the street for his mail. She’s waved to him from
her dad’s car, and earlier in her life, from her bicycle.

He steps closer, his gaze directed toward the
girl. “Is that Sarah?”

“Please, she’s…hurt,” Rachel manages, her
voice still catching involuntarily. “Can you help?”

“What’s the matter with her?”

“I don’t know, she’s…” Rachel is unsure how
to finish that sentence.

“Sarah?” the man says, leaning closer.
“Sarah, honey?”

Rachel loosens her grasp on the child, and
the man can see her face.

“Good heavens.” There’s gaspy emotion in his
voice. He has to steady himself on Rachel’s shoulder.

“It’s that light!” Rachel shrieks, and the
man removes his hand, recoiling. “That fucking red ... radioactive
… whatever it is!” She swallows heavily, calming herself. “You know
her, then?”

There’s a moment while he studies Rachel’s
face gravely; perhaps he’s understanding that whatever has happened
this morning is far more serious than he imagined. As it already
has for Rachel, the nightmare has become real for him. His troubled
expression falls further, the weight of a traumatized world on his
narrow shoulders. This man looks very frail indeed.

“I live down there,” he says finally,
gesturing with one shaking hand a couple doors west.

“I know.”

“Yes.” He smiles in brief recognition. “My
name is Alan.”

“Rachel.”

“I know her parents, just as neighbors.” His
voice is low. “The Fergusons, I believe.” A pause, then his lip
trembles. “What’s happening here, Rachel? Do you have any
idea?”

Rachel can plainly hear his fear. “No.” Eyes
blurred, she looks at him pleadingly. “I don’t know.” Then a queasy
laugh escapes her throat. “I was hoping you might!”

His movements are jerky. He places an awkward
hand on her shoulder, this time to comfort her, and she welcomes
the gesture. She wants more than anything to embrace this stranger.
He straightens up, and begins looking from the girl to the street
to the horizon, taking in the lingering columns of smoke in the
distance. When his gaze returns, his watery eyes have filled with
uncertainty.

“Have you been inside?” he asks her.

She shakes her head, rocking on the grass
with the girl, who is moaning softly now and responding to Rachel’s
presence.

“Try to keep her calm, Rachel,” he says
slowly. “I’ll be right back.”

Alan faces the girl’s house. He gives it a
long, weary look, then makes his way to the porch and enters the
home.

Rachel hears nothing of his investigation
inside, just rocks gently with this broken little girl on this
suburban patch of green. The child is suffering in the clutches of
shock, perhaps madness, and her stunted hands beat softly against
Rachel’s chest even as she succumbs to the insistent embrace. Tears
stream out of the girl’s eyes, down her twisted and patchy face.
Her breathing is labored, choked.

She needs to go to the hospital, but Rachel
wonders what she’ll find there. Barren, silent hallways and
hundreds of red-tinted near-corpses? It’s still the place she has
to go now. Right now.

She glances behind her at the front door,
which hangs open, a silent maw.

“Come on …”

She looks through the haze of smoke into the
sky, cringing in anticipation of what she’ll see. Sure enough, the
twisting contrails of the airliner are still visible, diffused now
into an ephemeral gray spiderweb streaking down toward the earth.
She brings her gaze down and studies the other sources of smoke
along the horizon. The Old Town fire is gigantic in her vision, a
great mass of undulating darkness, but there are five other major
sources of smoke in the distance. Three of them are to the south,
as far as Loveland or Longmont. The other two are northeast of her.
She knows there are small airports in both directions, homes to
small private aircraft of all kinds. She shakes her head, fearing
the worst.

And then there are the houses all around her,
filling the neighborhood, perhaps the entire city. Are they all
filled with unresponsive bodies, inconceivable red glows emanating
from underneath their skin, deep inside their skulls? She looks
from one house to the other, in a long row down this street, and
despite the fact that she’s outside under an open sky, she feels a
claustrophobic horror at the possibility. The entire city could be
affected. Rachel won’t let her conception go beyond that
geographical span. Not yet. Even glancing off the notion that the
phenomenon could be far wider, her mind slams its doors hard.

Finally, Alan comes back out onto the porch
and quietly closes the door behind him. He shuffles to the edge of
the steps and gazes out onto the lawn. Rachel looks back at him,
waiting for him to tell her what he found inside. Finally, he
breathes out a trembling sigh and nods.

“Just like my Jeannie,” he says.

“I’m going to the hospital,” Rachel
announces. “Do you want to come?”

Alan looks at her, emotion tugging at his
features. He turns his body slightly westward and stares off in the
direction of his home, his manicured lawn, his wife. He runs a
nervous hand through his thin hair.

“I can’t leave…” he says, gesturing futilely.
Then, “Yes.”

“Help me get her in the car?”

“Of course.”

Together, they lift Sarah from the ground and
carry her to the car. The little girl holds tightly to Rachel now
but clearly feels the pain of the movement, and she bawls almost
relentlessly. The sound of it brings tears to Rachel’s eyes and to
Alan’s.

He opens the back door of the Honda, and
after some maneuvering, they get Sarah into the rear seat. At this
point, however, the girl is crying so vehemently that her destroyed
face is red-blotched with effort, and she can’t even breathe behind
the force of the sobbing. Rachel hurries to the girl’s side and
must sit with her for a few minutes before she finally calms
somewhat, at which point, Rachel gestures to Alan to take her
place. He sits down with the girl, embracing her, petting her,
soothing her, and Sarah eventually accepts the switch from Rachel
to Alan.