Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood (12 page)

“Jesus!”
Michael yells, his whole body flinching away from the door.

The young man’s body falls to the porch, re-establishes its balance, and begins ramming itself against the door.

Michael turns and hobbles back to the front room.

He scans the front window, sees more shadows at play there. There are bumping noises on the wooden porch—more than just the girl now. A heavy, lumbering plod tells him that it’s probably the body of Mrs. Carmichael out there.

He’s facing the prospect of nailing shut his front door and effectively barricading himself inside the humid dungeon that his home has become. He stands there with the hammer and box of nails, indecisive. What’s his best chance of escape? He’s already nailed shut one of the doors, because for whatever reason, the back is where the things have focused—

Why? Why?

—and the two remaining exits are the front door and the garage. He can’t imagine leaving by way of the garage, waiting poised as the door creaks upward, letting whatever’s out there crawl its way underneath. It would be like giving them a head start.

Is the front door his only option for escape? What about the attic? Is there access to the roof? And if he got to the roof, what would he do? Wait there for some potential rescue by helicopter while those things figure out a way to scale the walls? Not likely. He has a vision of himself standing on the roof while thousands of these bodies surround the house, gasping his name.

“Michael! Come down, Michael!”

He shudders, clutches his head, tries to focus.

Michael feels new blood from his nose draining down his throat. With contempt, he blows out the little paper-towel plug from his nostril, throwing a fine red mist across the floor. Goddamn bloody nose!

He’s particularly susceptible to them—thanks to Colorado’s dry climate and thin air—and he typically takes vitamin supplements to combat them. But he hasn’t taken them for days now.

He hocks back the blood, feels its coppery warmth at the back of his throat. He needs to spit it out.

And then his eyes go wide.

Blood.

“Holy shit,” his whispers, careful not to swallow.

He lets the bloody mucus, syrupy and viscous, swirl around his tongue.

He goes to the front window and peers between the curtains again. The naked girl has paused to the left, right on top of the welcome mat, hobbled by her broken forearm. Her head is stabbing at the limb, as if trying to make it cooperate. The blunt splay of her meticulously groomed genitals fills Michael with sadness for some reason. It all means nothing now, just like the money in the back of Michael’s closet. Just like his marriage to Susanna.

He looks away from her with something akin to shame.

He encourages more blood into his mouth from his nasal passages.

Closer to the door is indeed the massive Mrs. Carmichael, like a fat tarantula. Doughy flesh sways with her movements, the flowery muumuu shredded and inconsequential. Also on the porch is a woman in casual business attire—Michael imagines that she was struck in the act of climbing into her car, heading to Starbucks and then work. This woman is the first on the porch to notice him between the curtains: Her upside-down head goes still, studying him. Michael hears her gasp through the window. The sound is choppy and rough, hissing from a ravaged throat. Before he steps back away from the window, he scans the lawn and the street, sees one more body angling toward the house, from about half a block away.

Just as he rears back, the businesswoman stabs her head at the window, her mouth wide open. Michael can just barely make out the red glow emanating from her upper palate, from her flared nostrils …

Time to go.

He turns away, snuffling more blood, letting it collect in his mouth. He almost gags. It feels as if he already has a few tablespoons in there, swirling around with the slippery tendrils of mucus.

Surging through the pain from his head, he grabs Rachel’s backpack from the couch and hustles to the kitchen. He yanks open the fridge and grabs the two bottles of water he finds in the door, tosses them into the pack. He also takes the loaf of wheat bread and Susanna’s jar of organic peanut butter. He’s ravenous, but he can eat later. As he turns, he squeezes his nose with clenched fingers almost brutally, encouraging more blood flow. Then he snatches up the shotgun from the table.

Back out in the living room, he throws in the new box of .38 ammunition, then zips up the pack. He secures the shotgun against the side of the pack; for now, he prefers the heft and size of the handgun. If he needs the raw power and spray of the shotgun, he can easily yank it away. He pulls on the pack, cinching the nylon tight.

He feels the keys to the Pilot in his front left pocket. He removes the Colt from his waistband and ensures again, compulsively, that it’s loaded, taking deep, even breaths through his nose, feeling the hot sluice of blood sliding forward into his mouth. The gun will be his last resort—probably best not to make a lot of racket.

He goes to the doorway and readies himself.

If he were a religious man, he’d kneel down and cross himself or something, but he does find himself conjuring a kind of prayer to the heavens. Through eyes half-shut with cramping pain, he looks ceiling-ward and nods fervently.

Just let me make it to the car, just give me that, okay, and then we’ll see where we stand, just let me make it to the goddamned car, will you, you fucking silent bastard?

His mouth full of O-negative blood, he pulls the door open and storms out of the house.

The naked young woman swivels at him, surprised, but doesn’t have time to react to Michael’s foot, which makes solid contact with the side of her head. She goes tumbling down the steps, squawking like an animal. Mrs. Carmichael is turning her bulk to face him, but Michael’s eyes are on the businesswoman beyond her. The reversed face glares at him, inhuman, and the body tenses for its leap, then launches. It uses Mrs. Carmichael’s body to extend its leap, and abruptly the businesswoman is dropping directly in front of Michael, her chin tensing to stab.

Michael leans forward and sprays blood from his mouth in a rushing red mist. It coats the woman’s enraged face, and she shrieks loudly, losing control of her limbs, tumbling to a stop at the welcome mat. But Michael is already leaping down the steps.

The naked girl has made it back to her broken-limbed crabwalk and is waiting for him. She appears to do a nimble dance on the grass, repositioning herself, and she too prepares to leap. As he hits the ground running, Michael spit-sprays what’s left of the blood at her, and mostly misses. A mist lands on her shoulder and upper chest, and even that is enough to induce a gasp from deep in the girl’s throat. She trips up and slides into his legs, nearly making him fall.

He jumps past her reaching arm and sprints across the lawn, an agonized wail coming from the porch. In his peripheral vision, he now sees three more bodies spidering toward him, clearly attracted by the noise. At the Pilot, he flings open the door and jumps in—but the naked girl has squeezed into the gap. Her upper body slides up against his left leg, on its back, too fluidly, like an awful parody of some erotic gesture. He’s kicking at her furiously, and it’s not working, she’s too strong, too single-minded, so he steadies the firearm and fires a bullet into her brain.

There’s a spark of red in the confines of the car, and the dirty, pink body goes tumbling out. He tosses the Colt onto the passenger seat, then slams the door shut just as another body leaps against it, rocking the Pilot on its wheels. Keeping an eye on the body, he maneuvers the backpack off of his shoulders, also dropping it on the seat next to him.

He twists the key in the ignition, and the engine roars to life.

Bodies are pouring out of the back yard.

Michael wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, tries to control his breathing. Blood is still trickling from his nostrils, into his open mouth, and he wipes at it with his arm, smearing himself vividly. He shifts into drive and punches it, two screeching bodies crumpling beneath him.

The Honda careens down Scott Avenue, which still lies silent and smoky under the midmorning sun. Michael presses his battered head to the soft headrest, his left eye nearly closed under a throb of pain there. He can barely see.

He tries to dispel the sensory memory of that damn woman, slinking up his leg, her eyes alien and frenzied, her gasp rotten, her body a horrible bastardization of human eroticism. A full-body tremor passes over him at the memory.

In the rearview mirror, he sees the bodies swarm onto the street in front of his house, all their heads facing him. They’re like giant, absurd insects. There must be twenty of them now. They’re all moving inexorably toward him as they fade into the background. His trembling lip curls with loathing.

Flooring it, he takes the wide turn out onto Mulberry, and then he jerks backward at the abrupt sight of a police car moving directly in front of him. He jams the brakes hard, and the tires scream.

The collision crushes the Pilot’s left front end and deploys the airbag, knocking the breath out of him. The Colt, shotgun, and backpack launch forward from the passenger seat to the floorboards, and Michael sees a bright chaos of colors and piercing sun. The Pilot stutters heavily to a sideways stop, not quite turning over. There’s nothing but the sound of the ticking motor and air whistling out of a tire.

“Holy—”
he manages to breathe out after a moment.

The rapidly deflating airbag gives way to a scene of new smoke rising from the Pilot’s hood. In the background, smoke from the foothills chugs skyward in massive columns. Michael tries to focus on something and can’t; it’s just blurry black and gray and white smoke. He doesn’t know if this inability to focus is a symptom of his concussion or this collision.

Does it matter?

He feels consciousness swirling away into a dark gloom. He squeezes his eyes shut and tries to hold on, but the dizziness takes firm hold and swallows him, and then there’s nothing.

D-d-d-d-d …!

A strobe of light, a ratcheting crescendo of sound.

Michael feels himself being yanked.

“D-d-d-d-aaaadddy!”

He jolts awake to the sight of Rachel’s blurry face large in his vision.

“Daddy, wake up,
wake up, WAKE UP,
I am
NOT
dragging you to the fucking hospital again!”

Rachel is pulling roughly at his arm, and he’s halfway out of the Pilot’s passenger side.

“Wait, wait—” he hears himself repeating, because something’s wrong, what is it? “Wait, wait—”

He can’t clear his vision, but there’s someone else, a man, it’s the cop, Joel, he’s there yanking at him too, and now Michael feels himself being lifted from the vehicle, and he wants to plummet back into unconsciousness again—the feeling is as strong as the pull of slumber after a string of sleepless nights.

But something’s wrong.

“Daddy!”

“Calm down, girl, he's hurt. Look at his mouth.”

“But they’re coming!”

“I know they are,” comes Joel’s calm voice. “I’ll take care of him, and you better hope that Toyota over there has keys, now go get it, pull it right over here. This cruiser is shot, goddammit.”

With Herculean effort, Michael opens his eyes to a squint.

Rachel is running toward a green sedan that has bumped against the curb fifty yards to the east. She’s carrying something that Michael can’t focus on. A weapon?

Joel has pulled Michael completely from the wreckage and is leaning him up against the crumpled left fender. Michael tries repeatedly to open his eyes, but they just want to stay closed.

“You all right? Come on, big guy.” He’s snapping his fingers in front of him.

The police car looks similarly crushed, its right front end like a broken mouth. Steam is escaping something, and a loud ticking noise is coming from the grill. And there’s another sound. Michael turns his head.

Bodies are approaching from all directions.

Adrenaline trills inside Michael, making him stand up straight and get his bearings.

“Okay, I'm okay,” he says, “I think,” feeling blood in his mouth, dried on his lips and cheeks, and forgetting for a moment where it came from.

“Good—here,” Joel says, handing him a child’s plastic Super Soaker rifle. It has a cold, dark, unbalanced heft to it. Michael is momentarily flummoxed, but then he understands. “Bonnie rigged these up—good ol’ O-negative, complete with anticoagulant. Get ready!”

Joel turns quickly away, ducks into the passenger seat of his car, and pulls another Super Soaker out. He scans the area, locks on Rachel.

In the distance, Rachel arrives at the Toyota, but there’s a body closing in on her. Michael tries to focus. From here, he can’t determine the size or gender, just a purple, spidery blob, and it’s close to her. Rachel hops into the vehicle, and the door slams shut. The body buffets off the vehicle, snarling.

The engine comes to life.

Michael feels a bewildered relief.

“Here they come!” Joel calls out.

Michael swivels, sees three of the things within ten yards of the collision—all men, all three of them heavyset. One is bearded, looking all the more alien for its furry proboscis jutting forward above the shadowed face. They’re all seemingly infuriated, with their hyper-extended limbs and jerking movements and wide flat glares. Beyond them, more. Naked old women and pajama-tattered kids and frumpy housewives and athletic teens and businessmen in hanging ties—there must be forty of them here.

“Fire! Fire!” Joel is shouting, letting loose a barrage of blood streams.

The liquid ammunition is ludicrously silent in its launch from the weapons, arcing away in thin red lines, but the effect is one of instant cacophony. The closest three bodies, beefy men, stagger back as one, screeching from their ragged throats. Two of them collapse, their limbs wiping awkwardly at their faces.

And Michael discovers that he, himself, has been squeezing the trigger of his Super Soaker, almost unconsciously, into the rushing crowd.

The air is filled with the noise of anguished animals.

One of the things is suddenly flying at him from over the car, and Michael ducks, firing a staccato red burst at its head. It gasps loud as it passes, its legs crashing into Michael’s shoulder, spinning him. The Super Soaker nearly flies from his wet grasp, but he holds on. The thing tumbles to the hard asphalt, caterwauling. Michael aims dark jets straight into its dead eyes, and the whole body goes spastic.

Michael chances a look toward Rachel, sees the Toyota lurch forward and stall.

“It’s a manual!” he cries, trying to surge his way through the constant pain in his head.

“What?!”

“The car! Manual transmission! Rachel can’t drive that!”

“Aw, fuck! Let’s go!”

Joel’s strong arm grasps Michael’s bicep, and he practically drags Michael, whose limbs remain obstinate. He feels drunk and uncoordinated.

“Come on!”

“I’m trying.”

He forces himself to move and gathers some speed.

“Don’t look back!”
Joel yells.
“Just go go go!”

Michael doesn’t need the extra encouragement. As he runs, he has an image of snapping dogs at his heels—there’s a fleshy patter against the hot street, and an urgent gasping, that fills his limbs with energy.

The Toyota looms ahead. It’s coasting forward, and Rachel is frantic at the wheel, trying to make it work. The body poking viciously at its door is that of a woman, her long black hair whipping spastically as she seeks an opening, jabbing her head relentlessly at the side mirror, at the window, the tire. The locked-open mouth is emitting an endless huffing gasp, and the skin of the forehead and cheeks is streaked with blood from Rachel’s Super Soaker. The car lurches again, stalls.

“I can’t do it, I can’t do it!”
Michael can hear his daughter screaming now.

Joel begins firing at the thing from ten feet away, and the body goes scrambling backward, hissing.

“Get in the back!”
he yells at Michael.

Rachel sees them coming and is already heaving herself over to the passenger seat. Her eyes are wide, watching whatever is behind them. And then Joel and Michael hit the side of the car simultaneously, twirling to face their pursuers.

They’re all there, spidering at them, maybe fifty of them, counting the bodies racing out of yards, flowing in from neighboring streets. Michael recognizes the crowd from his house arriving on Mulberry now, all the angry upturned faces turned his way. It’s like a swarm—an impossible swarm of human bodies, moving with liquid agility despite their injuries, despite their hyper-extended limbs and dislocations.

Blood is pumping from his Super Soaker, but even in his frenzy, he can feel that it’s approaching empty. Just in time, in his peripheral vision, he sees Joel duck down into the car and slam the door shut. Michael feeds a final arcing spray to the monsters in his midst—sending them skidding to the asphalt—then opens the rear door, tumbles in, and slams it shut—

—directly on one of the things’ probing heads.

It’s a kid, just a kid, an eight-year-old kid, the face smeared with blood and sap, the teeth in the jaw broken and bloody, the expression furious. Michael rears back his leg and kicks savagely at the face, breaking the jaw—he hears it snap like a branch. The kid, undeterred, lunges at him, the chin sliding and scraping upon itself but making contact with Michael’s leg. Michael feels an abrupt tingling sensation along his shin. He fires the last of his blood madly into the kid’s eyes, and finally the body reels back, out of the car, enough for Michael to shut it.

They’re all breathing heavily in the cramped interior, and now the bodies are overwhelming the car, crashing against it on all sides.

“God!”
Rachel screams, then follows that with an expulsion of childlike sound that’s somewhere between fear and revulsion. “Why can’t it just
stop!”

“Let’s get the hell out of here, huh?” Joel says, impossibly calm.

He cranks the Toyota’s engine and guns forward, trampling three scrambling bodies. Michael nearly gasps himself when he feels the sickening crunch of bones breaking beneath the tires. The vehicle bucks and bounces.

“Joel!” Rachel cries, desperate tears in her eyes.

“What?”

“Just—”

“What?!”

“They’re
human beings!”

“Not anymore they’re not!”

As if purposefully, Joel twists the wheel into the loose crowd, crushing several more, which screech beneath them. Rachel grasps at the wheel, moaning now.

“Joel! Knock it off!” Michael shouts. “Just … just get us out of here.”

Rachel turns on him. “We wouldn’t even be here right now if it wasn’t for you!”

Michael is speechless.

“How could you leave? I can’t believe you left!”

“I—”

“I saved you, and you … you—”

“That’s just—” Michael can’t even finish the sentence.

The car meets asphalt again, bouncing, and Joel floors it, straightening out, heading east on Mulberry. The bodies thin out, but Joel manages to steer directly into a teenager’s body, sending it spinning to the curb, screeching. Rachel buries her face in her hands.

“I thought I could get back before—” Michael says.

“Didn’t quite work out that way, huh?” Joel says, tight-lipped.

“I didn’t ask anyone to come after me.”

“No, you left that decision to your daughter.”

“Joel!” Rachel says, miserably. “Don’t be a dick.”

Michael twists around to watch the scene behind them—the wreckage of the cars in the distant background, and the foreground a chaos of crab-like movement. Several of the things remain motionless on the asphalt, observing the retreating humans with alien calm, but the majority are scrambling after them in tireless pursuit.

“Why are they after
me?”
he says, almost philosophically.

“After you?” Joel says.

“They just started attacking the house, coming from all directions.”

“Dad, they’re attacking everyone.”

Michael stares at Rachel blankly. “But—” He tries to get his head around this information. He nearly lets loose a scoffing sound, directed right at himself. He thought they were after him, as some kind of comeuppance. Ego or divine expectation? Who knows?

Rachel returns his gaze, still irritated.

“It was right after one of those—that thunder,” she says. “Didn’t you hear it? It broke a few windows at the hospital. We all went to the windows to see what was going on. That’s when these things just started creeping out of the neighborhoods.”

As they drive, they catch glimpses of other bodies scurrying in the streets. A few blocks east, near College, they see a dozen of them swarming toward a home west of the thoroughfare.

Michael finds a wadded-up gray shirt at his feet, and he grabs it, uses it to wipe at his bloody nose and mouth and his stained arm. The blood has stopped flowing from his nostrils, but when he pulls the shirt away, it’s filthy. He spits into the cloth and wipes some more.

“They sure seemed to get more certain of themselves,” Joel says, his voice monotone, seething with his own brand of fear. “They know we’re here now.”

Michael remembers the teen at the back door, the way it seemed only too comfortable with the back-breaking transformation its human host had endured. But then Michael latches on to Joel’s other words.

They know we’re here now.

The words speak of an evolving mindset on the part of the animated bodies—perhaps even a series of events that Michael missed while he was unconscious. Joel is suggesting that whatever is possessing these bodies has an intelligence. Michael himself has seen evidence of this in their eyes—a strategizing, animal cunning—but he thinks Joel is also referring to a more collective consciousness. A hive mentality?

After swerving around a series of abandoned automobiles, Joel shifts into third and gathers some speed, passing the Safeway and the 7-Eleven where Michael took Rachel for countless Slurpees in her youth. He watches it flit past with a painful ache—or maybe that’s still his concussion.

“So, what, are they sensing us? Smelling us? What?”

“Something we need to figure out,” Joel says. “Hey, here’s a question you haven’t answered yet: Why’d you leave the hospital? In the middle of the night?”

Michael feels the urge to match Joel’s venom, but he backs down, looks away. “Look, I’m sorry, Joel. Okay? I needed to—I needed to find my wife. And I needed to do it alone.”

The interior of the car is silent as Joel navigates the dead street. Michael lets his gaze move to Rachel in the front seat. Her entire body is clenched, expectant. He tries to read something there, but her angst could have any number of causes.

What do you know?
he wonders.