Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood (16 page)

“All right,” she says. “Let’s go.”

Beyond the main checkout counter is the darkened multimedia area, but it’s wide open and obviously clear. Father and daughter move quickly beyond the racks of discs and tapes, entering the large children’s section.

An arm grabs his bicep. Rachel glances back, and at the sight of Scott, she can’t prevent a grimace from snarling her lip. She continues forward.

“Nice to see you, too,” Scott says out of the side of his mouth, letting go of Michael’s arm.

“What’s up?” Michael says, noting that the Asian woman is waiting behind him. She’s watching the back of his head curiously. Michael nods at her, and she returns the gesture and glances away.

Scott moves his gaze from Rachel to Michael. There’s something shifty there, and Michael curses inwardly, recognizing it.

Assholes even at the end of the world.

“See anything?” Michael asks.

“So you’re Rachel’s dad.”

“Name’s Michael.” Impulsively, he reaches out to shake Scott’s hand, and Scott—seemingly stunned—finally accepts it in a sweaty grip. Like Michael always told Rachel (and Michael’s mom told him), it’s best to meet assholes with kindness; they’re the ones who need it most.

Scott takes a breath, seems to shake himself out of something. “Yeah, I’m Scott. Glad you woke up. I know your daughter went through hell to find you.”

“Okay, Scott, thanks.” He lets Scott’s clammy hand go. “It’s good to be alive. I think.”

Scott makes an effort to give that an appreciative murmur of laughter. “Look, I didn’t mean to be a dick back there. I don’t even know how that happened. I’m not the bad guy here.” He combs his fingers—minutely trembling—through his unkempt red hair. “It’s just that cop, man. All I’m saying is don’t just fall in line behind Joel, okay? Watch that guy.”

“Glad we found you, too, looked like you were in some trouble there.”

“God, that was a mess.” He scratches behind his ear—another nervous gesture. “I lived not far from there. I ended up there when one of those fuckers unclamped from this giant tree near the street and started racing toward me. Goddamn thing. Like an animal. And once it saw me, it was all over. Suddenly a bunch of them were surrounding me. I’m just lucky that door was unlocked.”

“So you weren’t at the church long,” Michael says, keeping an eye on Rachel, who is just about to turn a corner.

“Not long at all. I felt a little guilty—”

“Listen, we gotta check this place out, right? But let’s talk later, okay?”

Scott looks at him, and Michael can see some kind of pain in his eyes. “Sure. Yeah.”

Michael watches him go.

Huh.

Then he jogs to join Rachel. She’s walking one long aisle, letting her fingers pass gently along the books’ spines.

Broad windows surround them.

The bright daylight dazzles him. Not only that—the expanses of manicured green lawn, the rare glimpses of blue sky between gray scuds of smoke, the faces of familiar suburban homes directly north … the sight jars Michael into a weird reality shift, as if all the horrible shit that has happened in the past few days—the past few minutes!—has been a fever dream, and this quiet glimpse of near-normalcy is like a broken fever. Michael feels his breath catch with false relief.

He also notices with very real relief that his head is not gripped in a vice. He blinks exaggeratedly, at once relishing the sensation of apparent healing within his skull and taking in this brief peaceful moment with his daughter.

Rachel glances at him, sees that he’s alone.

He doesn’t think he’s ever seen her so devastated.

“Can I just curl up in here with these books?” she says. In any other situation, a mischievous smile might be lifting the corner of her mouth at this small joke, but right now, she just looks deadened.

Michael walks past two large tables of bright children’s books and stops at one of the windows. After his close call in the Hummer, he knows he won’t feel truly safe next to a piece of glass any time soon. He lets his gaze wander east and west, paying particular attention to the areas beneath the gigantic pines that dot the library lawns. The bark of several trees has clearly been assaulted; on one close tree, lines of blood mar the trunk from the damaged area all the way to the ground. He supposes the blood came from the injured mouth of whatever poor soul was attached there.

At least in the immediate vicinity, there are no reanimated bodies scurrying madly like mad spiders.

He shakes his head at the conjured image, bringing up one hand to rap softly on the window. The sound is deep and resonant. Joel was right—it’s very different from a windshield. Thick. Reassuring.

“Probably shouldn’t get so close there,” Rachel says. “They’re tinted, but—” She shrugs. "Hell, maybe we pulled one over on them. Maybe they lost sight of us.”

“It’s weird, isn’t it?” he says, stepping away. “Why haven’t they surrounded us here?”

Rachel’s voice is tired. “They don’t like books?”

Michael manages a difficult smile. “But books are made of trees.”

Rachel lets out a stunned giggle, then stops it short, sniffling. “That’s my dad.”

The open room is expansive, and although they can hear several survivors stamping about above them, on the second floor, and several more shouting all-clears to one another farther south on the main floor, there’s a welcome ration of relative silence in the air.

Michael follows Rachel through the room at a measured pace, listening to her breathe.

“Listen, Rachel ….”

In front of him, her shoulders hunch almost imperceptibly.

“I know, Daddy.”

She turns to face him, as if to stage one of her typical acts of teenaged defiance, but then she immediately crumples, and her hands come up to her face, covering her mouth. She moans miserably, emotion filling her eyes. She begins to shake her head back and forth, and now she turns back around. She’s shaking.

“… I’m sorry about Danny,” Michael finishes his thought.

“It’s not fair.”

“You’re right.”

“Just a kid … a perfect little boy.” Her eyes are darting around helplessly. “How can something like that happen?”

She’s not looking at him. She’s quiet for a long moment.

“Rachel …?”

“I didn’t mean to …” comes her querulous voice.

“Mean to what?”

She takes a long, shuddering breath, stays quiet, choked up, as if she can’t go on.

“Mean to what?” Michael says as gently as he can.

“Did you go home?” She turns back around to face him, letting her hands drop. “Did you make it? Were you at the house?”

“I made it.”

“Then ….”

“She was—she was there.”

“Oh Daddy.”

“What happened?”

Rachel makes an attempt to answer that question, but it’s clear she’s been dreading it. She can only whimper, tortured. Finally she buries herself against his chest. She clutches at him fiercely, sobs taking hold of her entire body.

Michael swallows heavily, tentatively returning the embrace. He strokes her back, doing his best to calm her. He only wants the answers to come.

Joel peeks in at one point, sees them, and Michael offers a cautious thumbs up. Joel nods and returns their privacy to them.

And Rachel tells him her story. Her words are labored at first, but then they release themselves from her in a torrent, and as they rush out, she won’t let him go, she won’t release her desperate grip.

She tells him how she woke to find Susanna afflicted, like everyone else, how she tried to help her, how she tried like hell to help her, but she was—

“—scared, Daddy, I was fucking
scared!
There was that thing inside her, and it didn’t make any goddamn sense, and I tried like hell to get rid of it, whatever it was, and I tried!
I tried!
But I tried too hard, or something … because the light sparked out, just popped out of her, and she was gone, she was dead, she was just—
gone!
—and I didn’t know what to do, and I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!”

Michael listens mutely, calming her. Over her shoulder, the library remains serene, save for distant voices calling out, establishing order. The windows look out on a changed but oddly peaceful world.

And when she begins repeating herself, her words start trailing off, and finally she’s just breathing raggedly against him, her face pressed almost violently into his chest.

Michael is gazing outside, but in his vision, images of Susanna are flashing again, images of her both dead and very much alive, and he shuts his eyes tightly and grinds his teeth to control the flow of emotion. His head pulses with a sensation that threatens pain but doesn’t quite get there.

He feels as if he’s detached from himself, watching Rachel embracing him, sensing her need for him at that moment. He has failed her so many times, in ways that she’ll never know, and he realizes with a sense of black resignation that those failures have colored his perception of her now. A part of him is still suspicious of her, yes. He can’t so easily let the angry memories drop away—the many times Rachel screamed at him, screamed at Susanna. And he’s attributing dark motives to her, his own flesh and blood!

He
wants
to understand her,
wants
to grasp what has happened. He feels a need to simply appreciate that his daughter has survived.

But the truth is, Susanna is right where Rachel might have wished her. He shakes that thought away, but it keeps coming back.

“Shhh,” he whispers. “It’s okay.”

The words feel wrong in his throat.

After a long moment of quiet, she pulls her head back, regards him hopefully, and then pushes away, wiping her eyes. “It is?”

He nods slowly.

Silence.

He’s not sure how to feel. And he realizes that he himself is close to tears, because of this emotional morass. Whatever happened at his house, on the morning the world ended … perhaps it
was
nobody’s fault. Perhaps it was inevitable. Or maybe something else happened that’s too horrible to imagine, something that Rachel would never admit to him.

And that makes the situation hurt even more.

Can he possibly ever get beyond that kind of internal question?

Finally, he steels himself and lets the words flow.

“Rachel, I wouldn’t blame you for anything,” he says softly into her ear. “You haven’t done anything wrong. I know that. I really—I really just needed to know the truth. I needed to know if Susanna was alive … if there was any chance I could have saved her. If I could have helped her.”

Long minutes pass before Rachel composes herself, and Michael is hyper-attuned to her reaction to his words. He feels her trembling. He feels her quickened pulse. But he can attribute these things to any of the awful phenomena his daughter has suffered over the past few days.

He sighs into her neck.

She rears back and studies him. Her eyes are reddened, and her mouth is drawn, making her appear far older than her 19 years. She seems to read a lot in his sigh.

“She was infected. She would have been out there. One of them.”

Her lip trembles.

“I didn’t mean to hurt her, Daddy,” she whispers. “I promise.”

Something breaks inside Michael.

“I tried to help her.”

As she melts into further tears, a wave of memories washes over him, of he and Rachel weathering the storm of Cassie’s disease and passing, of the two of them finding meaning after devastation. As a new reality stretches before him now, he imagines the impossible task of doing it again.

“Rachel,” he says, “you’ve done better than anyone in the world would expect you to do.” He pets her head.

“No.” She’s shaking her head again. “No, I could’ve done more.”

“I doubt it, I really do.”

“No! I could have saved Tony!”

Michael continues the embrace, searching for words, and in the few seconds of silence, he feels her tension increasing again. Words begin once more to tumble out—

“—I was
wrong, wrong, wrong,
if I’d just—I mean, by
half a second
, Daddy, I shot him, I
killed
him. He said my name! He called out to me, but I
pulled the trigger
, Daddy, why did I do that? I could’ve
saved
him! I couldn’t save Sarah, that poor little girl, and now Danny, that fucking thing pulled him right away from me! Right out of my arms! I couldn’t save anyone!”

“Shhhh …” he tries, feeling his heart beating hard. “You saved
me,
right?”

She just sniffles, her head burrowed. “That doesn’t—”

“Now wait a minute, you remember what Joel said. Maybe Tony wouldn’t have wanted to be saved.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re a smart kid. You know what’s going on. You saw what happened at the hospital, with that prisoner. There was a lot of pain. Maybe a lot of it irreversible. And that man hadn’t even been outside. He still came out of it screaming.”