Red Hands: A Novel

by Christopher Golden

  Walker stared. “Maybe.”

  As he stood and turned toward them, a wave of disorientation swept over him. He wavered on his feet, and Rue grabbed his arm to steady him.

  Isenberg hurried over to them. “What is it? Do you feel sick?”

  The question made Rue back away from him as if touching him had burned her. She looked at her hands, eyes flaring with worry. Isenberg watched him through heavily lidded eyes, but he could practically see the anxiety bristling inside her. Her body language gave away her fear.

  “Just a little light-headed,” he promised them. “Yes, probably from the bacteriophage you shot me up with, but I don’t feel sick. Not even a cough.”

  “It wouldn’t infect you like that, anyway,” Isenberg said.

  “I know that,” Walker replied, then pointed at Rue. “Tell her.”

  Rue flushed. “I don’t need to be told. I’m just jumpy after everything. Jumpy and tired.”

  Walker saw the tension leave them, and he exhaled. “All right. So we just wait for a cleanup crew to handle this. I hope you have a deck of cards or something.”

  Isenberg started talking about what she thought would happen now, wondering who might be left alive in the building and how long it might take for someone to come investigate.

  Rue glanced back along the corridor that led deeper into the lab, where there were two isolation rooms, conference rooms, offices, and additional laboratory spaces. “You’re telling me there aren’t hazmat suits in all these labs, just as basic equipment provided?”

  “There are at least four,” Isenberg replied. “But do you really want to be the first one out there, checking out Maeve’s remains, with no backup at all? Not me. Either way, we’re all going to get to know each other much better in the next couple of days. The quarantine on this whole facility is going to be thorough and—”

  Rue pointed through the glass. “Here we go. Faster than I’d have thought.”

  Walker turned, pressed his face to the glass, and saw four people in shapeless yellow hazmat suits working their way along the wide common area around the elevator hub in the middle of the hexagon. All four had guns, and they moved like soldiers instead of scientists—though Walker himself was both and knew others who fit the same description.

  The alarm stopped blaring.

  “Thank God,” Isenberg sighed.

  Walker’s eardrums pulsed with the same rhythm, as if the alarm had not gone silent. A tinny buzz in his ears reminded him of a dozen crowded music clubs from his misspent college years. The red emergency lights kept flashing, but as irritating as they were, he would endure them forever as long as he didn’t have to hear the klaxons anymore.

  “Hey!” Rue called, slapping the glass door of SL2-Alpha. “Over here!”

  One of the hazmat-suited guards spotted them, started in their direction, and then halted as he spotted the wreckage of Maeve’s corpse. He pointed, said something to his comrades, and slowly they began to approach.

  Walker leaned against the glass, waiting for them.

  Out the corner of his eye, he saw something twitch, and looked down at Maeve’s remains.

  The dead thing’s right hand shot upward, stretching as if it had just woken from a long sleep. As it did, skin and rotting flesh tore and split. Long, spindly, skeletal fingers pushed out from within. The skin of her arm hung down in strips. The skeletal fingers reached up, sank sharpened tips into cheek and skull and brain, and ripped. The other hand propped the dead thing up and it began to rise.

  The Red Death tore Maeve Sinclair’s ruined body off as if it were nothing but a costume, a skin suit. It had grown like a tumor inside her, infected her, taken her over. It broke skull away, cracked off ribs, removing the Maeve husk like a lobster shell.

  Behind Walker, Rue Crooker had begun to pray.

  “I think it’s … Is it the devil?” Kat Isenberg asked, her voice hitching, both hands up behind her head. She trembled, shook her head, stepped back from the glass. Her eyes hinted at encroaching madness. “We woke it up, Walker! Oh, God, we woke it up!”

  Draped in ribbons and scraps and dripping fluids of Maeve, the withered, red cadaverous thing heard the shouts of the guards in their hazmat suits. They opened fire. Bullets ripped into the dead thing, ricocheted off the glass, and the Red Death turned to glare at the yellow hazmat suits awash in the flashing crimson lights.

  It seemed to expect them to fall.

  When they did not, safe inside their hazmat suits, it moved with unnerving speed. Those spindly fingers were sharp enough to tear through the yellow suits. Men and women screamed, kept firing their guns, and then were coughing. Falling. Dying.

  “We have to do something,” Walker said quietly, almost to himself.

  Rue laughed in a way that told him something inside her had broken. “Do what? What the fuck can we do?”

  “Not you,” Walker said, looking at her. “I had the injection.”

  He turned and stared at her, then Isenberg. “Both of you get into an isolation room. Right now. Ten seconds and I’m opening this door! Go!”

  They hesitated.

  Walker was about to shout at them again when Rue pointed out through the glass.

  “Look.”

  He turned … and saw Rose.

  * * *

  Had Rose been looking only with her eyes, she would never have stopped screaming. She saw the broken, shredded human remains sprawled on the floor surrounded by little puddles of blood and viscera, and she knew it had once been her sister. But from thirty feet away, in front of the doorway to SL2-Epsilon, she felt Maeve’s presence. The yearning that drew her to this place, at this moment, came not only from the contagion inside her—the infection she and Maeve had shared—but from a deeper, even more primal connection.

  She stared at the withered husk before her, at the red gleam in its black eyes and the way its dried skin pulled back from yellow teeth into a corpse’s grin, and she saw both death and beauty there. The Red Death had been an infection, now torn free of its host, but some part of Maeve had infected it in return.

  “Sister,” Rose said.

  The husk staggered toward her, dragged its feet, smearing Maeve’s blood in its wake. It gained strength, spine straightening, thin arms rising as the red emergency lights continued to flash, so that its movements seemed a zoetrope nightmare. One step in each moment of darkness, one step bathed in red light. Bones cracked as it stretched its hands out for her, fingers bent into claws.

  In the silence, Rose heard Walker and Rue pounding on the glass door of SL2-Alpha. In the next flash of red light, she saw them there, banging, gesturing to her, calling out. They understood nothing. How could they know what it felt like to have the Red Death seething inside her? To feel the urge, the yearning so strong that the word hunger could never describe the ravenous need? How could they understand what it felt like to know you were one part of a whole, to feel the pull of your other half, to scream inside your own skull and fight with your soul to run the other direction, but to watch your body move toward death regardless?

  At least I won’t be alone, Rose thought, staring into that cadaverous grin, those hellish, eternal eyes, and searching for her sister there.

  Rose opened her arms, and the Red Death stepped into that embrace.

  * * *

  Walker smashed his fist against the glass. He started to scream Rose’s name again, but when the husk slid its arms around her and lay its head so gently on her shoulder, he saw a sorrowful peace on Rose’s face.

  He held his breath and could only watch as new blemishes emerged on Rose’s neck and cheek, blistering, cratering, bleeding black.

  Beside him, Rue cried out, pounding on the glass.

  Walker grabbed her arm, turned her toward Isenberg. “Get in the isolation room. Right now.”

  As he grabbed the larger syringe, Rue started to argue, but Isenberg reached for her hand and tugged her away from him. The two of them rushed deeper into the lab. Walker called out to them to tell hi
m when they were about to seal the isolation room door. Eight or nine seconds was all it took before he heard Isenberg shout and then the slam of the door.

  He slapped the fat black button on the wall, an emergency disengage for the lab’s entry door. Air hissed as the containment seal breached, and he closed his eyes for a moment, filled with a regret he could not express. The last thought he’d had before hitting that button should have been of his son. The injection Isenberg had given him made him feel nauseated and unsteady, his vision blurred slightly, which meant it had done something to him. Maybe killed him, maybe inoculated him. All these years, he had made one decision after another to put himself at risk with hardly a thought for the scars he would leave behind.

  I’m sorry, he thought to a son who would never hear him.

  Syringe clutched like a dagger, he ran toward the husk, unsure what it would do, knowing only that he had crossed the threshold. He breathed in the air that had killed so many others. His head throbbed with pain, and that swirl of nausea worsened. He waited for a cough, waited for a tickle in his throat, waited for the pain of fissures rotting on his skin.

  He raised the syringe.

  Red lights flashed, turning the embrace between Rose and the Red Death into a flickering grotesquerie. In the quiet, he could hear Rose weeping over the sound of his own footfalls and the beating of his heart. He crept toward the husk, thumb on the syringe, aiming for the back of its neck.

  Walker’s breath caught in his throat.

  He froze in place and watched as the husk began to wither even more. The dried skin pulled taut over its bones. It shriveled in Rose’s arms. The leathery skin crumbled, cascading to the floor in a fine red dust. Rose opened her eyes, releasing a moan that echoed with loss. She fell to her knees and tried to grasp the Red Death’s bones in her hands, but they gave way at her touch and spilled to the floor into the growing pile of red dust, as if that was all they had ever been.

  Rose drew a heavier breath, there on her knees, trembling. To Walker’s eyes, she looked thinner, as if she, too, had begun to wither.

  He spoke her name, and she looked up at him, scarlet eyes gleaming brightly.

  “Help me,” she whispered in a voice he’d never heard before.

  Walker plunged the syringe into her neck, then stood back to wait.

  Seconds passed before he allowed himself to hope. Then Rose coughed once, reached up to touch the blisters on her neck, and climbed unsteadily to her feet. The red tint in her eyes remained, but it had diminished.

  She spoke in a raspy whisper, as if the words came from a long way off.

  “Get me back into isolation,” Rose said. “I’ll … hold on as long as I can.”

  Behind her eyes, he thought he saw something else looking out.

  “Whatever they’re going to do,” she said, “tell them to work fast.”

  29

  The remaining hours of darkness passed quickly. Rue managed to fall asleep shortly after sunrise, though she had only the clock to let her know morning had come. On a plastic mattress worthy of a college dormitory, sweaty under a synthetic blanket, she managed four hours of fitful sleep in which she dreamed she woke in a snowbound winter cabin. Logs crackled in the fireplace while the beams of the cabin groaned with gusts of wind. In her dream, Rue nestled herself into the arms of a lover, sprawled on the floor in front of the fire. At peace.

  She woke to the slamming of a door, saw where she was, and lay rigid on the bed, listening, waiting to hear a scream or an alarm. A full minute passed before she could slow her heartbeat to something resembling its normal rhythm.

  A knock came at the door.

  Rue sat up, looked blearily around at the cell she’d slept in. Dr. Isenberg had told her that almost everyone who worked in the sublevel labs ended up crashing in the isolation rooms at least once. As exhausted as she had been this morning, the space hadn’t bothered her, but now an urgency filled her. A claustrophobic frisson that made her drag the sweaty blanket around her and hurry to the door.

  When she opened it, Walker waited on the other side.

  She blinked. “You don’t look dead.”

  “The jury’s still out.”

  “Seriously,” Rue said. “They’ve cleared you? After Isenberg injected you with that bacteriophage?”

  “I’m not contagious,” Walker replied. “Doesn’t mean they’re letting me out of here anytime soon. They let me sleep for two hours, but mostly they’ve been taking my blood and other fun samples.”

  Rue could see how exhausted he must be. The bags beneath his eyes were dark crescents, and his skin had a sallow hue. But there were no plague blossoms, no black bruising on his throat, and at least thus far, he didn’t seem to be coughing.

  “You’re actually okay? After being so close to that … to Maeve?”

  “I wasn’t kidding. The jury is definitely still out. There’s no trace of the Red Hands bacterium in my blood culture or cells. Just the phage.”

  “That injection shouldn’t have been so effective,” Rue said. “Not if you were exposed to Red Hands. Maeve was radiating that contagion like some kind of cloud around her. Based on what Alena said last night, up at the gorge, it killed people who were almost a hundred yards away.”

  Walker shrugged. “By the time she got to us, I think she’d almost burned out. It had used her up. Director Boudreau and I think what you call a ‘cloud’ had limits. When her body gave in, the aura effect dissipated. I wouldn’t have wanted the thing that ripped its way out of her to touch me—or Rose, for that matter—but I think I got lucky.”

  Rue leaned against the doorframe, wrapped in her blanket. “I’m glad. Enough good people died yesterday.”

  “I’m still stuck here for a while, though,” Walker said. “I’m guessing four or five days of poking, prodding, tests, and observation to see if I start unraveling. I’d like to get home, but I’m also glad to stick around and see how things go for Rose.”

  Rue lifted her eyebrows.

  Walker nodded. “She’s alive. And sick, but not any sicker than she was when you fell asleep. Isenberg is working with the SRC team that Alena brought in.”

  A darkness seemed to pass over his face. Walker exhaled, eyes downcast. “The only voice coming out of her is her own, so far, but you can see it in her eyes sometimes, when she looks at you. The infection is still there, and so is the other thing. The old thing. Sometimes you can feel it watching.”

  “Last night, Isenberg said she thought if we could kill the infection in Rose, we could get rid of it.”

  Rue and Walker studied each other for a moment. She’d noticed neither of them wanted to name the ancient presence rooted inside Rose Sinclair. Neither of them wanted to call it the Red Death, as if someone using the term Poe had coined would lend the thing even more malignant power.

  “Speaking of Alena,” Walker said, “I hear she offered you a job.”

  “Last night,” Rue confirmed. “Though I get the impression it’s more about locking me into the penalties for revealing government secrets. If I’m an employee—”

  Walker scowled. “Don’t kid yourself. She needs you way more than the university does. You’ve already proven your usefulness.”

  “I strip-mined Oscar Hecht’s research and took a shot in the dark when we were desperate.”

  “Okay,” Walker said. “Have it your way. But I hope you take the job.”

  “I’ve been searching for biological secrets to unlock my whole life. After the things I’ve seen, there’s no way I can go back to my old job. Besides, Kat Isenberg told me she wants someone to boss around.” Rue shrugged. “I’ve got a few days to think it over. None of us are going to be released from quarantine till then, at least, so I might as well make myself useful in the meantime.”

  Walker held on to the door. “I’m glad to hear it. And I’m grateful, Rue. I don’t want that to get lost in all of this. Alena sent me up here on an assignment. This was my job. But you got into it just because you cared about Ted and his f
amily. Not many people would have stuck with it when they realized how dangerous things were becoming.”

  Rue flushed. “He’s my best friend. They’re my family, too.”

  “I know,” Walker said. “And he’s asking for you. Why don’t you go and see him before you get to work.”

  “I’ll do that. Thank you,” Rue replied. “How is he?”

  “Edgy. Probably itchy for a drink, but he’s focused on his daughter. Determined. Standing tall.”

  Rue surprised herself by smiling. That was something, at least.

  * * *

  Rose couldn’t bear to tell her father she wanted to be alone. Flush with fever, racked with chills, plagued by whispers and hunger pangs, she had barely slept at all. The isolation room she found herself in now had a bit more personality than the one she’d been in the night before. The researchers in this lab had painted the walls a soothing blue, and phosphorescent paint had been used to dapple the ceiling with glow-in-the-dark stars, but that didn’t make it any easier to look at her father and Priya through the glass.

  When Rue came to the door, knocking softly, and called Ted out into the corridor to speak with her, Rose felt weak with gratitude.

  Priya slept on the other side of the glass. The Homeland Security agents had carried a bed in from another part of the lab so that they could all be together, despite being separated by the glass. Rose watched Priya sleep, and it soothed her to know she would be okay. Her bullet wound had been seen to. Her parents had been called. Someone on the outside had apparently met with them in the early hours of the morning, shortly after it had all come to an end, and explained that she would be quarantined here at Garland Mountain for several days along with Rose and Ted. Priya had spoken to her father, and then Ted had gotten on the phone.

  Now Priya slept. Rose exhaled softly, spreading her fingers across the glass, heart aching as she watched Priya’s chest rise and fall. Her face looked peaceful, as if none of the horrors of the prior day had ever happened.