Blood Red (9 page)

Jenny listens with a horrified look on her
face, her head reared back. Still, there’s a dark curiosity in her
expression, too. “So that’s what’s happening,” she murmurs.

“Tony’s dead,” Rachel says flatly.

At this news, Jenny appears merely numb. “You
found him?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, Rachel, I’m sorry. I know you two—”

“It’s okay. Thanks.” Rachel reaches up to
touch Jenny’s eyewear. “I almost didn’t recognize you with your
glasses.”

“Oh, right…not much time for contacts this
morning.” Her eyes go watery again. “I brought my sisters—” She
can’t go any further, her voice wobbling up several octaves, and
she falls into Rachel’s embrace again.

Over her friend’s shoulder, Rachel watches
with a kind of detached curiosity as two more people enter the
emergency room’s main double doors. They don’t seem to be
communicating anything, and no one jumps to their aid. They have to
search around to find someone to offer help. Rachel was hoping to
find some sense of control here. Someone in charge.

Rachel sees that Alan is now against the
north wall, still holding Sarah, and talking quietly with an
elderly woman who is examining Sarah’s face. She’s moving the
little girl’s hair aside to assess the damage. When Jenny lifts her
head from her shoulder, Rachel gently extricates herself from the
embrace and stands.

“I need to—”

“Have you talked to them yet?” Jenny
asks.

“Hmm?”

Jenny gestures to the admittance desk, where
Rachel noticed a clutch of arguing people before. Taking a closer
look, she sees several bleary-eyed people arranged into a somewhat
haphazard group. They seem to be the center of operations here, a
modest focal point amid swirling human chaos. And now two young
men—a studious-looking guy with dark armpit stains on his blue
shirt and a well-built African American teenager—burst into the
room from the inner door and seem to report on something.

“No, I haven’t.” Rachel starts to move toward
Alan and Sarah, and Jenny walks with her.

“I got here an hour ago,” Jenny says. “I live
the next street over. My mom works here. That man in the middle?
The one with the red hair? I know him. His name is Scott, and he
works here, too. Just a pediatric assistant, not an administrator
or anything, but he’s kind of taken control of things here by
default, I think.”

Scott, the red-haired man, is perhaps 30
years old, and he looks stress-ravaged already. Three people are
vying for his attention, in addition to the two young men, and he’s
occasionally casting glances through to the inner hallway that
Rachel can’t see.

“What’s happening back there?” she asks.

“Just ... bodies,” Jenny reports quietly.

Rachel and Jenny approach Alan, and the older
woman facing him glances over her shoulder at Rachel while she
continues to examine Sarah. Rachel sees that the woman has tears in
her eyes, and she’s recovering from a wet sob. The woman wipes her
eyes on her sleeve.

Alan says, “Rachel, this is Irene. She says
we should take Sarah through here to room 109.”

“It’s all we can do for now,” Irene explains
through tears. “Until things start to make sense.”

“What’s in room 109?” Rachel asks.

Irene looks at her sadly. “People like her.”
And then she moves toward the front doors when she notices someone
new coming in.

“Let’s go,” Rachel says.

“I’ll wait here,” says Jenny, “but don’t go
anywhere without me, okay?”

“Okay.”

Rachel pushes through the double doors into a
wide, humid hallway, and what strikes her first is the number of
people—almost all of them supine. She holds the door open for Alan,
who carries Sarah in. They both stand still for a moment, taking it
all in.

The hallway is lined with gurneys, and atop
each one is a body draped with a white sheet. Next to perhaps half
of the gurneys stands a loved one. The hallway is exceedingly
crowded and close, and there’s a ghastliness to the scene. It’s a
snapshot of collective, bewildered mourning. She recognizes the man
who came in ahead of her, from his minivan. Most of the people look
over at Rachel and Alan as they enter, and there’s something in
their eyes Rachel can place immediately.

Hope. It’s a glimmer, but it’s still
there.

In the face of impossible tragedy, they’re
looking for someone to appear through these doors and tell them
they have the answer. That the horror of this morning has an easy
solution, and that the young woman who walked through these doors
of death is about to communicate it.

Rachel feels a low burn of shame, however
misplaced, that she can’t provide that answer, that she offers only
more death, in the form of this little girl.

She trudges forward with Alan into the gloom.
There’s a teenage boy to her left, eyes blasted with grief, who
lets his gaze linger on her face longer than the others do, and
Rachel casts her eyes down, trying to avoid contact, but she finds
that nearly impossible. He’s standing there beside three sheeted
bodies, one of them small, smaller than Sarah. And Rachel tries not
to imagine the brutal trajectory of his morning, tries like hell
not
to see him frantic in his awful, lonely discoveries.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, without being able
to help it.

A young woman is hurrying up and down the
hall, reminding the survivors about the dangers of proximity to
their loved ones. “Remember, don’t touch them with your hands,
don’t kiss them. You can stand with them, but don’t get close.
Especially to their faces!” The woman whisks past Rachel, smelling
of perspiration and vague perfume. Without a word, she glances at
Sarah, then points down the hall to the right. Rachel nods.

Ahead of them is the sound of human misery,
very different from this near-silent hallway. They make their way
along the line of gurneys, and the sounds grow louder and louder,
until they reach room 109, the source of the wailing.

This new set of double doors opens into a
large room filled with beds that have been wheeled in from storage.
Most of the beds are occupied, but not all of them. The beds are
much more numerous and closer together than Rachel figures they
would be outside an emergency situation like this. After only a
moment, she can see that this room has been reserved for those
people who have experienced injury from whatever radiant energy it
is that’s coming out of the afflicted bodies.

Most of these people are alive, and only a
very few are accompanied by someone. There are perhaps twenty
people here suffering varying degrees of deforming injury, and by
and large, they are doing it alone. Two people are wandering from
bed to bed, clumsily administering pain medication. They don’t
appear to know what they’re doing.

Alan says, “Over there,” in an even, low
voice, gesturing.

On the far side of the room is a collection
of corpses covered by more sheets. They’re lined up in a row
against the wall, body against body.

“Okay,” Rachel nods.

She stands there while Alan shuffles over to
say goodbye to his little neighbor, and a man is wheeled in behind
her, moaning. Rachel moves quickly out of the way. The
plain-clothed “nurse” takes this man directly to one of the few
open beds and helps him gently onto it. His moans are already
halfway subsided, and by this, Rachel can tell that he was sedated
before entering the room. By the time the woman gets him settled
into the bed, he’s unconscious, but even in that state, his wounds
are plain. His hands are curled as if the fingers have been burned
together into a claw, and his face is blistered and scarred like
Sarah’s. Not as bad, but close.

The woman gives the man a parting touch on
his shoulder, then rises, coming toward Rachel.

“Ma’am,” Rachel says, feeling bad about
interrupting this woman’s work but needing some scrap of new
information.

“Yes?”

“Please, do you know what’s happening?”

The woman, an attractive older woman who
reminds Rachel of her mom before she died, seems at first reluctant
to pause but comes to a stop next to Rachel, beside the doors,
wiping perspiration from her brow with her forearm. She takes a
deep breath and lets it out shakily, seeming grateful now for the
pause of Rachel’s interruption. Her eyes show an exhausted
kindness.

“That’s the question of the day, isn’t
it?”

Rachel nods, watching peripherally as Alan
kisses Sarah’s ruined forehead and lays her gently on the
floor.

“I don’t know, dear.” She looks around
wearily. “All I do know is when I woke up this morning, the world
was going crazy around me. The same thing happened to you, I’m
sure.”

“Uh huh.”

“I’m so sorry. I’ve never seen anything like
it. Something just…happened. Last night or early this morning.
Something, all at once. A whole lot of people fell unconscious.”
Her mouth works silently for a moment. “Dead.”

Rachel nods at her, looks around the room at
all the misery. There are perhaps thirty bodies at the edge, all
covered with sheets; the smallest and newest body is Sarah’s. And
then there are a couple dozen people at various levels of
injury.

“But,” Rachel begins, unsure of herself,
“are…are they really dead?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what’s happening inside them?”
Rachel’s voice wavers despite her efforts to control it. “What’s
happening inside to cause this?” She gestures toward the victims
that surround them. “When I found my stepmother this morning, she
had no pulse, she wasn’t breathing—same with the other bodies I’ve
seen—but something’s alive inside them. That
light
—as crazy
as it sounds, that light is
alive
. The bodies are warm,
and…I mean…something’s happening inside them.”

This woman is obviously weary, but she’s
looking into Rachel’s eyes with a heightened sense of
understanding. She touches her arm at the elbow, then reaches down
for Rachel’s hand, and the gesture has the feeling of someone
finally discovering a kindred spirit.

“Can you come with me? I want to show you
something.” She casts a glance behind her. “Sofia, can you take
care of things here for a minute? I need a potty break.” The other
woman nods in the affirmative.

Alan walks up, looking exhausted and
emotionally drained. Rachel goes to him and impulsively embraces
him, thinking of her father again. Alan returns the hug with his
bony arms, looking somewhat startled.

“I’m going with this woman for a minute,”
Rachel pulls away from Alan and turns to her. “I’m sorry, I didn’t
ask your name.”

“Bonnie.”

“I’m going with Bonnie, do you want to
come?”

Alan looks past Rachel at Bonnie. “I’d like
to help in here,” he says softly. “What can I do?”

Rachel walks deeper into the depths of the hospital
with Bonnie. They finally get past the makeshift morgue of gurneys
holding corpses; from what she’s seen, Rachel estimates that
approximately sixty bodies have been brought to the hospital this
morning. Beyond them, Bonnie walks her through a deserted space
divided by curtained examination areas.

They’ve left Alan behind to assist the other
impromptu volunteer, a petite young woman named Sofia who quickly
jumped in to show Alan how he could help her with the injured.
Before Rachel left room 109 with Bonnie, she was watching Alan
soothe a preteen boy on his cot on the far side of the room. She
felt an odd ache as the doors closed between them, and then she was
alone with Bonnie.

Beyond the curtained areas, there’s a series
of five more private examination rooms. Bonnie leads her directly
toward the fifth one. Their footfalls echo softly in the hallway,
which has grown quieter the deeper into the hospital they’ve come.
The area feels a lot like a basement—cold, quiet, desolate—but
they’re still on the first floor. Bonnie casts two glances back the
way they’ve come as they walk, and then she comes to a stop at the
door.

“You heard about the plane?” she
half-whispers.

“The FedEx jet in Old Town?”

“I didn’t know it was a FedEx plane.”

“I saw it. We came from there. Horrible.”

“Well, a man came through earlier,” Bonnie
reports gravely, “scared out of his wits, and he said planes are
falling out of the sky all over the place. He said the same thing
that’s happening to the people on the ground is happening to those
pilots and most of their passengers. Apparently, people closer to
DIA are talking about multiple airliner crashes, everywhere.”

Rachel feels something inside her
plummet.

“The spookier part?” Bonnie goes on.

“Do I want to hear this?”

“He thinks those planes will be crashing for
hours—a lot of them are on autopilot till they run out of fuel.
They’ll be falling all day.” Her voice goes lower. “Imagine being a
survivor on an airplane in flight—the rest of the cabin dead, the
pilots and crew dead. You’re the only one left on a plane that’s
coasting toward…” Bonnie stops, shuddering. “I’m sorry.”

Bonnie takes hold of the unlocked door
handle, looks around briefly, then enters. Rachel follows.

“Now, honey, this is not a pretty sight, so I
want you to prepare yourself, okay?”

“What is it?”

“It’s…well, I don’t know what it is, but what
you said back there made me think you ought to see this. I don’t
know why. Maybe it’ll tell you something. All it does to me is
scare the hell out of me.”

A curtain divides the dimly lit room in half.
Bonnie leads her to the far side of the room, where a man’s body
has been placed atop the bed. The man is obviously dead. Rachel
moves closer, her eyes widen, and she feels her stomach lurch. She
brings a hand to her mouth.

“Oh no.”

“I know,” Bonnie squeaks. “I’m sorry to show
you this.” She pauses. “He was on a motorcycle, as you can tell.
That’s what’s left of his helmet over there. Lot of good it did. He
must have been going sixty miles per hour when this thing happened.
Apparently it happened north of here. Someone brought him in, I
don’t know what they thought we could do for him, but…”