Someone is holding her, and she thinks it must be Bonnie, but no—
It’s Kayla.
Bonnie is dead. Bonnie is dead.
She reaches back at the girl, desperately, her fingers cramping, trying to latch on to life in the face of all this impossible death. Because it’s surrounding her in an obscene diorama of crumpled bodies and spattered blood, anguished faces and spent ammunition. Smoke and trauma and tears. The haze in the air speaks of inconceivable loss. She has lost control of herself. She feels as if she is spinning, caught in black chaos, bewildered.
Death.
It can’t be.
She mutters some kind of unintelligible sound, and it becomes a hopeless mantra:
“Daddy daddy daddy …”
Kevin keeps at the compressions, and he’s still breathing in great, desperate gasps, and after long minutes he gives up, cursing. “I’m sorry, Rachel, I’m so sorry, fuck!” He stares out at the library grounds, his eyes glassy. Rachel feels as if she’s seeing everything in her peripheral vision, and Kayla’s arms clutch her, and suddenly they’re suffocating her, everything is suffocating her. She pushes away from them, away from the sight of her father, bloodied and dead on the hard ground, heaps of broken and twisted bodies surrounding him like some death camp.
Except most of these are alive.
They’re writhing and screaming, unable to move their broken legs and fractured arms. Their shoulders are dislocated, and their hips are twisted horribly out of true. Rachel claps her hands to her ears, staring in all directions, eyes wide and stinging. It’s a landscape of horrors, and she’s at its center.
Some distant part of her watches Kevin’s meaty calves retreating into the distance, and she feels more alone than she’s ever felt in her life.
She staggers up off the ground and somehow gains her feet, almost trips over several bodies as she weaves away from the library. There are other bodies around her—still infected, still crabwalking—scurrying away from her as she approaches them. She notices this only peripherally as she reels almost drunkenly. She braces herself on the hood of the Thompson brothers’ truck for a dizzy moment, half-acknowledging the bright red swaths of blood along its side and splattered on its windows, then keeps going. Someone calls her name above the din of the bodies’ wretched screams, and she can’t summon the ability to respond.
Her feet find grass, and she keeps walking, dazed. She feels and smells the drying blood on her face, and she gags, wipes savagely at her cheeks with her forearms, but then she sees that her forearms are already painted crimson. A sob of revulsion erupts out of her.
She falls to the ground and begins methodically wiping her exposed skin on the grass. She spits on her flesh, loosening the already caking blood.
A small part of her knows that the blood is why those things won’t approach her, but she doesn’t care. A more overt part of her knows that she would gladly die right now, on this spot, rather than be a part of this hellscape any longer.
“Rachel!” someone yells again.
Deadened, she looks out on the lawn, out toward the street. The neighborhood far beyond the library looks halfway serene. Only a couple bodies, scampering and dragging limbs across the warm asphalt, disoriented. Most of them are headed west, gasping and seized by what appears to be fear. She doesn’t care where they’re going, she doesn’t care about anything.
She’s exhausted! She can’t believe how tired she is. Her muscles are spent. She doesn’t even think she’ll be able to rise again from this lawn. She doesn’t even want to. Ever. And with that thought, she lets her upper body crumple to the grass.
She stares at the blades of grass, so serene and all-encompassing in her vision despite the high-decibel fusillade of screams that engulf and threaten to swallow her. She wants to lose herself in these blades of grass. She wants them to speak of summer and playtime, of nature and sweet smells. Of lazy days and family, her mom laughing and reading on the porch and dad mowing their small yard, wearing his years-old grimy Broncos cap, and Rachel helping with the weeds or sunbathing in a chaise lounge with a book, texting nonsense with Tony or Michelle or Beth and grinning about stupid jokes and Internet memes. She wants these things so badly that she would die for them, right now.
Rachel falls unconscious—
—her mind finding only lesser turmoil, shifty imagery of blood-slicked arms reaching for her, undulating, sliding against her flesh, coaxing her, opening her inside out, and there are no survivors, no one left, all that remains are the echoes of their screams, because they have all left her, they have all succumbed to the alien extremities, and she can see the ghostly souls of her friends rising, crimson, into the heavens, and they’re not even looking back, and whatever is up there, it has finally won, it is taking what it needed from the start, and really the survivors never had a chance in the face of global apocalypse, they were powerless, and now the limbs are gently coaxing the rest of her from her shell, but then those limbs are ratcheting as if in pain—
“… achel!” an urgent voice surges into focus. “Rachel? Are you okay?”
It’s Joel, looking ragged and stubbly now in his rumpled and bloody uniform. He kneels next to her, touching her, making sure she’s unbroken, turning her gently toward him. She feels his rough fingers at the skin below her eyes, one at a time, and he’s staring at her, very close.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he mumbles, half-embracing her.
And then he’s gone, as quickly as he arrived, and Rachel doesn’t care.
In his absence, she stares up at a maelstrom. The sky roils with a dark energy, fierce but also scattered now, sparking like something failing. She feels her vision come into better focus, and she watches the phenomenon. Something is different. Where before the atmospheric storm had a dark, smoothly swirling menace, with its beams of energy surging toward earth, it now appears to be stuttering, and the energy is no longer flowing down with assurance but rather stuttering with uncertainty.
What have we done? she thinks in a rush.
It’s a breathtaking sight, and she turns away from it. She closes her eyes tightly, tuning out the shrieks of the living and the dead. It’s all too much. She can’t bear it. She wants to return to that daydream of home, but now she can’t even recall those images. They’re gone.
She opens her eyes to find Kayla staring at her from ten feet away. Living corpses writhe and squirm around her, hissing at the blood on their skin, trying to get away from this place. Turned-back human beings cry in agony. The girl is sitting on the concrete path, an island of purity amid charnel-house horror. A look of concern for Rachel is plain on her pretty chocolate face, even with all the blood and gore surrounding her. The sight makes Rachel crumple again, but she feels a surge of love for this relative stranger, and she beckons her closer with trembling arms.
Kayla immediately gets to her feet, rushes to Rachel, and embraces her. Rachel pets the preteen girl’s frazzled hair, feeling her shiver in her arms. It must be ninety degrees, and yet Kayla is shaking as if in the grips of hypothermia. Rachel hugs her tightly. By all rights, Kayla should be sobbing, but she’s rigid and quiet and trembling.
Over the girl’s shoulder, Rachel reluctantly watches the library.
Kevin has disappeared—back inside, perhaps—but she can see Scott and Mai meandering off to the north, wobbly, as if lost. Chloe and Zoe are huddled together by the main entrance doors, sticky with red sweat, crying with what appears to be a mixture of relief and nausea. Underneath the grime, they all look pale under the bright sun, surrounded by mountains of dirt-encrusted bodies and puddles of blood.
Rachel feels her vision broadening as if loosening itself from the tunnelvision of shock. There must be a hundred or more bodies left moaning and screeching on the library grounds, shoved up against the library’s face and the melted-in windows, with more inside the building itself, piled up in mountains of hyper-extended limbs and bent-back spines. Rachel can hear their screams, rendered hollow by distance and library w
alls. They’re the bodies of their attackers, made human again. The survivors stopped them, stopped a thousand of them. Maybe more. She’s not entirely sure how they did it, but they stopped them. Repelled them. And the ones they didn’t change back, they killed or sent scurrying away in retreat.
She doesn’t want to look at her father’s body—her head won’t even turn in that direction—but she’s flickering back on his final actions.
The images flicker.
Her dad throwing himself into the throng of bodies.
The sound of his scream as the bodies enveloped him.
What did he do? What did he do to push them back? To cause the skies to fracture?
She screams rage at the too-recent recollection. Her daddy was alive moments ago! Why did he rush out here? Why did he have to sacrifice himself? Why did it have to be him? She sobs into Kayla’s shoulder, feeling younger than this compassionate little girl clutched hard to her chest. She lets the tears flow. Kayla simply holds her. Still rigid, still shaking.
Through her tears, Rachel manages to whisper, in a softly hiccupping voice, “It’s all right … it’ll be all right … I promise …”
She would like to believe her own words.
She’s not sure how much time passes, but she loses consciousness again inside the embrace—
—and the limbs are still snatching at her but with diminishing force, and they are pulling up into the alien sky, her father rising with them as if curled in a crooked palm, and inside she is screaming at the crimson vortex, screaming for him to come back, come back to her, he can’t possibly leave now that she has rescued him, it’s not fair—
When she opens her eyes, it’s as if she’s awakening from a coma.
She surveys the scene, blinking in an exaggerated way to clear her eyes of tears. She doesn’t want to wipe her blood-stained hand or forearm there.
The remaining Thompson brother—Pete is the name that comes to her rattled mind—is standing forlornly at the passenger-side door of his truck. He doesn’t seem to know what to do. Perhaps they’re all in shock, all of them except for Joel, maybe, whose police training might have prepared him better for what happened. But then Rachel shakes her head: Who could have prepared for this?
Pete is covered with drying blood, just like her, just like everyone, and he’s hobbled by injury. Rachel doesn’t know what happened to him, but there are pale blotches across his face and arms. He’s limping, but he’s a survivor. The surreality of what they’ve gone through, collectively, keeps coming back at her like the fragments of a nightmare. Pete is peering into his truck, repeatedly, as if hoping that his brother Jeff will materialize there, alive and boisterous, behind the wheel.
And then Rachel realizes that Jeff’s body is still in the cab. She can see the man’s protruding, meaty shoulder over the rim of the dash. Pete has been walking around the truck, catching glimpses of the corpse that was once Jeff, unsure what to do. Rachel sees now that there are tears in Pete’s eyes.
She looks away.
She spots Scott, to the right, at one of the windows close to the main doors, and he’s helping that girl. The one her dad brought to the library, the CSU student from the Co-Op. Felicia. She’s standing on a makeshift ledge of concrete—what was once a bulky window sill—facing the horrors. Her hands are open, palms forward, and Rachel notices even from a distance the wide O of her mouth, and her turned-up eyes. Is she in pain? What is she doing? The questions dissolve inside her.
Kevin appears to Rachel’s left, coming away from the library entrance. He turns blindly about for a moment, then spots Rachel.
Rachel pushes herself up, finding determination somewhere deep inside, and Kevin arrives breathless and red-faced.
“It’s over,” he gasps. “They’ve stopped, but it’s a bloodbath in there.”
She doesn’t know how to respond to that.
Kevin offers his arm, and she accepts it, steadying herself. Her other arm is still entwined with Kayla’s, and she helps the girl up from the ground. They move together, on unsure feet.
“Let’s go,” Rachel says, and her gaze moves unconsciously toward the blown-out window where she last saw Felicia. “We have to help.”
Everything is numb.
Felicia is no longer at the window, which looks like a mouth with blown-out teeth. Rachel feels scraped out at her core, but some part of her awareness is drawn to that window.
“You sure?” Kevin says.
“We’re going back in.” Rachel clears her throat. “I need to. Seriously. Get me away from here, okay?”
At that moment, the gangly Ron comes jogging over. He looks haggard and about ten years older than he did an hour ago, with his bony limbs and slumped shoulders. He’s not as drenched with blood as the others, for some reason, but he still appears as if he just stepped off of a battlefield.
“We need pain relievers, bad!” he says. “There’s at least two hundred people who need help. It’s terrible in there. I mean, it’s bad out here—” He casts his gaze around the bloodied vicinity. “—but it’s absurd in there. I don’t even know where to start. But what I do know is we need morphine. Whatever else is there. Anything and everything.”
“We’re out?” Kevin asks, looking like he already knows the answer.
“Hell, we were out before they attacked. Joel is rounding up a crew to get to the Old Town police station, the armory there, and arm up again, but what are we gonna do about those people? They’re alive, and they’re—” He slaps his hand to his mouth to stifle an unexpected sob and gather himself. “—they’re … begging. They’re desperate.”
People need her.
A lot of people need her.
“So what do we do?” Kevin asks. He keeps glancing around, waiting for the bodies to attack again, but it’s not happening. They’ve mostly crawled away, leaving this bloody aftermath.
Rachel feels herself convulsively swallowing.
“Isn’t it over—?” Kayla pulls at her.
“It’s not over,” Rachel says, striding toward the entrance on leaden feet. “We need to help. Okay Kayla? Do you think you can help? Help them with—with me?”
She glances down at the girl.
Kayla is peering up at her with her large brown eyes. The compassion remains, but there’s fear in there, and an exhaustion that mirrors Rachel’s—bottomless and vast. Her eyebrows tremble, as if at any moment she will dissolve into little-girl tears. But she holds it inside. Somehow.
“Are we going back in the library?” Kayla says.
“Yes.” Rachel watches the entrance, steels herself for the chaos of the lobby, not letting her eyes wander over to her lost father. “We have to … have to figure out what’s next.”
“No!” Kayla half-whines, clutching at her.
Rachel closes her eyes for a moment, and everything is suddenly assaulting her at once. She feels faint.
Kayla’s protestations fill with a memory from her youth, of being with her dad at the fairgrounds near Windsor for a carnival. It’s one of her earliest memories, a crowded night, a hot night, and she held his big hand tightly, squeezing through the rowdy masses, eating funnel cake and cotton candy, buying tickets for dirty little rollercoasters and all manner of spinning rides, and getting all giddy and sweaty. At one point, a giant smelly bearded man with a greasy handkerchief wrapped around his forehead inadvertently squashed her foot, and he only gave Rachel a passing glance, but she choked back tears for twenty minutes and never told her dad about it. She wanted to be brave under the clamor and chaos of the bewildering night, and perhaps because of her internalization of that little horror, the moment defined her nightmares for years later—the overbearing horror of something huge towering over her, a hulking threat to her soul, threatening to squash her …
She opens her eyes, blinking spastically, feeling that old night terror getting the better of her as its equivalent is now all around her.
“I can get medicine,” Rachel says, halting her stride.
She�
��s not quite sure where the thought has come from. All she knows is she doesn’t want to go back in that library, doesn’t even want to approach the entrance. Not now. She doesn’t want to see—
“Where?” Kevin says.
“Where do you think?”
“The hospital? You want to go back there?”
“I … I don’t want to go back there, no.” She looks down at Kayla. “I have to. We have to.”
Kevin looks around. “Is it safe?”
All Rachel can do is nod. She can’t find her voice. She needs it to be true. She needs to leave. She knows her way around that pharmacy better than anybody. Why not her? She has to leave. Now.
Ron is spinning around, assessing the threat, but he stumbles, betraying his own inner turmoil.
“Those things are scattering.” Ron points west. “But they all seem to be going that way. Toward the mountains. It’s a miracle, really, but they’re retreating. And none of them in the direction of the hospital. So there’s that.”
Kevin sighs raggedly. “Why don’t we all get the hell out of here?”
The question is met with silence—and the chorus of agonized moans all around them suffices as an answer.
Rachel finds her voice. “We can’t leave them. They’re people again. They need help.”
She takes her first good look at the remaining bodies around her. Some of them are managing to crawl fitfully along the ground, in search of some kind of relief, but others are incapable of movement, their limbs fractured and unusable. More than a few of them are vomiting bright red blood onto the concrete, their throats ravaged by splinters. In their eyes is a desperate fear and pain. Very few of them are even acknowledging their surroundings; they’re too consumed by their own plight.
“I can help them,” she says, getting control of herself but feeling a growing flame of anger and determination deep inside her. “I can do this.”
“Jesus,” Kevin says. “All right, I’m in. We have a tight window, or maybe we don’t, but right now, we have an opening to gear up.”
“I’m going with you,” Kayla says, not even looking up.
Blood Dawn (Blood Trilogy Book 3) Page 7
