And what about that latest blast from the skies? It takes a moment for Rachel to remember that the sound directly preceded whatever happened on the ground. Does it mean anything? Was this attack orchestrated from above?
Probably, if the events of the past few days have meant anything.
It’s what Ron said a couple days ago, and it rings true. Whatever the case, she has to report this back to the group.
If they’re still there.
She ducks her head below the steering wheel and stares at the pedals at her feet. She hears her daddy’s voice, and her heart cracks, but she heeds his words.
That left pedal is the clutch. You use your left foot on that one. I guess that’s obvious. The other pedals are like the ones you use in Suzy’s car. Gas and brake. Stop and go. Easy. But in this car, that left pedal is super important. It’s what lets you shift gears here, see?
That first driving lesson is still so vivid in her mind—mostly because it didn’t take. Despite her dad’s patience with her frustrated screeches and the car’s endless jerky fits and starts, the manual transmission was never easy for her. The violent stalls outnumbered the smooth thrusts into gear. And at a certain point, rather than continue to attempt to master the clutch, she gave it up. Flatly refused her dad’s increasingly exasperated entreaties to at least try. But no, she turned down his offers of further instruction in the parking lots of City Park or Rocky Mountain High School.
What she would give now for another lesson from her dad!
At the time, though, she relied on friends to drive her places. Mostly Tony.
She presses the clutch to the floor and turns the key in the ignition. The truck roars throatily to life, rumbling like exactly the kind of vehicle Kevin, not Rachel, might drive. She pauses, gathering herself.
It’s Kayla, again, keeping her grounded. She smiles at the girl looking up at her and then focuses on the rattling thrum of the engine.
“Ready?” Rachel says.
“You got this.” Kayla’s expression sparks something almost nostalgic, as if Rachel has been given a glimpse of what this girl was like before the end of the world.
Rachel moves the gearshift into what she believes to be first gear, then carefully begins letting out the clutch and pressing the gas. She feels tension at her feet, and the truck begins to roar, and then the truck judders forward and stalls.
Damn it!
She starts again, this time managing to hiccup the truck across thirty feet of pavement before stalling out. It takes her four tries to get the vehicle into second gear, and then they’re descending the pavement onto Lemay and heading north, then west, toward the library.
“Watch those neighborhoods,” she says, gesturing toward the deceptively silent street of Myrtle, and then they’re passing Debut Theater and approaching Mulberry. After making the wide left onto Mulberry, she peers down Cowan. She doesn’t see anything, but she can feel those inverted, gaspy glares coming from all the street’s shadows.
Kayla watches everything outside her window open-mouthed. On the trip to the hospital, the girl was wedged between the two grownups, and mostly looked down at her lap, but now her dark curiosity is in full effect.
“There’s no one,” she whispers. “It’s so … it’s like a movie.”
Rachel has consciously avoided passing the Udall Natural Area, where the Thompson brothers said the mob of bodies amassed and eventually flowed from, on their way to attack the library. She’ll approach the library from the south instead.
She keeps the speed at a cautious 30mph, taking turns with great caution, and worrying about stalling every time she weaves between abandoned and wrecked vehicles. Every car she sees is empty, at least one door flung open—sometimes as many as four.
“Why are there so many cars like that?” Kayla says over the engine noise. The barrel of Kevin’s shotgun shifts over against her thigh, and she prudently rights it, holding it to the center console. “Like, with the doors open?”
“When people changed, when they could move again, they got out of their cars and … just left them where they were.”
Kayla nods thoughtfully. “They knew how to get out.”
Rachel glances over at her. “I guess so. Somehow.”
“They knew how to use the doors.”
“Eventually, yeah.”
Rachel is unsure what Kayla is getting at, but her words only reinforce Rachel’s own meager understanding of what’s going on with these bodies. There’s still humanity in this flesh, despite the snarling, gasping, aggressive evidence to the contrary. It’s as if the longer the bodies are under the sway of whatever presence has inhabited them, the more they let go of that humanity. Early on, right after the near-corpses regained locomotion, they were at their most vulnerable but also their most human. Now, most of them are long past hope of recovery—broken, ravaged, lost.
She gives Kayla another glance.
The girl has settled back into the bench seat, as if trying to retreat from the world. She’s been scared to death for days, has had to endure so much. Rachel isn’t practiced at comforting little girls, but she can channel her mom. And Bonnie. It’s what she’s been trying to do with Kayla all along. She loosens her deathgrip on the gearshift and places her hand gently on Kayla’s thigh.
“We’ll be okay,” she says. “Just like you said, we got this. Right?”
Rachel tries for an encouraging glance but notices that Kayla’s lower lip is trembling again. She’s trying so hard to keep it together. Then Kayla mouths something that Rachel can’t hear. Her brow is furrowed in fear.
“What?” Rachel asks.
“I want my mama,” the girl says, barely audible.
“Me too, honey.”
Kayla responds with a quick wet glance.
“I lost my mom a long time ago,” Rachel barely whispers. “It was the hardest thing ever, in the whole world.” Her vision blurs only for a moment, then she focuses on the road again, concentrating on the wide, mostly deserted expanse of Mulberry. “She just … left. It wasn’t fair.”
“She died?” Kayla’s words tremble in her mouth.
Rachel nods. “Five years ago.”
Kayla sniffs. “My dad went away five years ago.”
“I’m so sorry, Kayla.”
“He didn’t die, he went away. I don’t know where he went. One day he drove away and he didn’t come back.”
Maybe that’s even worse, Rachel thinks. Worse than the agony of a dying parent must be a parent who abandons you and is then forever a dark mystery in your life, surrounded by anger and loss.
Kayla brings her knees quickly up, wraps her arms around them, shuts her eyes.
Rachel can see a new pulse of anger behind that closed-off face—a little-girl mirror image of her own. Perhaps Kayla didn’t want to say what she said about wanting her mom, and now she’s upset with herself that the words came out. Rachel understands the feeling, and it breaks her heart a little. The girl doesn’t want to show youth or weakness. Now Kayla glances away as if ashamed. Rachel doesn’t know what else to say. All she can do is squeeze Kayla’s leg with some kind of reassurance.
Finally: “I know you miss your mom, honey. I miss my daddy.”
Kayla sniffs, then nods quickly, her little head bobbing against her knees.
Rachel tries to find some appropriate words. This is what she’s not good at. “What’s she like, your mom?”
A sour look crosses the girl’s face. “She’s like … them.”
Rachel feels stupid. “Before that, Kayla, I mean before all this.”
“I don’t know,” she says, and Rachel can sense she’s letting terrible memories overshadow everything. How can she blame the girl? But then Kayla says, “She tucks me in. She reads me stories. Books from the library.”
The truck weaves through more collisions along Mulberry. Rachel keeps her eyes on the neighborhoods to their left and right, waiting for any signs of pursuit. So far, there are none.
“I know this doesn’t
help right now, but I’m not leaving you, okay? You and me, we’re a team. And it’s going to stay that way.”
Kayla considers her.
“Okay.” The word is barely a whisper.
Just as Rachel is beginning to calm down, cautiously optimistic about her driving, she’s forced to slow down for a triple collision that’s partially blocking the road at the intersection of Mulberry and Stover. Her attention is too focused on the silent homes crouching in long rows to the south—the splintered evergreens in their yards, the vehicles eerily abandoned with their doors hanging open, and what appears to be three distant bodies on the asphalt. She comes to a near-stop, forgetting about the clutch, and the truck stalls, coasting minutely.
“Oh crap.”
She turns the key without the clutch, and a grinding sound assaults the cab.
Rachel lets out a little scream and lets the key slip from her grasp. “What did I do, what did I do?” Then she remembers the clutch. “Oh.”
She’s about to try again when Kayla grabs her shoulder.
“Look.” The girl points out Rachel’s window.
Rachel follows Kayla’s gaze and sees three bodies barely visible at the base of a huge Douglas fir, perhaps forty feet away. The tree’s lower branches have been snapped mercilessly to the side, and the bodies, two women and a teenage boy, are emerging like giant crabs from the trunk, which is stripped clean of bark. One of the women is wearing the sky-blue shreds of a nightgown like a tattered cape; the rest of her body is doughy and filthy. The other woman’s jeans and red blouse are stretched and torn and sticky with sap, her feet black with dirt and angled impossibly, the toes obviously broken. And the poor boy is wearing only his white briefs; he appears positively alien in his human skin, the limbs askew, the movement jerky but somehow naturalized, the gait alien but confident. All three faces, upside-down and blood-ravaged, glare at them with singular menace.
“Can we go?” Kayla cries plaintively.
“Yes.”
Rachel stomps the clutch and turns the key. The engine catches. Her knees are actually shaking. She can’t do it. She hardly moves the clutch at all, and the truck leaps forward and stalls.
“Crap!”
“They’re coming. They’re closer. Rachel?”
Rachel snaps her gaze in their direction. The bodies are crawling off the curb and into the bike lane, and they’re screeching at her from their ragged throats.
From the back, Kevin startles them. “We should—ow fuck—we should be going!”
“I’m trying!”
Rachel tries again, stalls.
The things on the street suddenly begin to gallop, and a spike of fear stabs her chest. Kayla emits a sharp whine.
The bodies are hardly even human anymore. In the split second before all three of them leap at the truck, Rachel sees tatters of bright clothing on their hideously distorted limbs, sees alien rage on their faces.
Then they’re in the air.
“Duck!” Rachel screams, grabbing at Kayla’s head and bringing her down onto the seat.
The triple explosions shatter the safety glass, showering Rachel’s lap and shoulder with tiny fragments and beads. The world goes muffled once more. She stays on top of Kayla, her eyes tightly shut. There’s something hot and wet on her face, and Rachel lets out a helpless, prolonged moan of revulsion. She wipes at it in a frenzy. It’s gray matter. She holds her breath for fifteen seconds before her mind moves beyond hysterical nausea.
“Are you all right?” Rachel asks, sitting up and scanning all directions.
Everything is painted red, glistening.
What is doing that?
Kayla nods slowly, portions of her own hair and skin dotted with gore. She stares at Rachel’s face and grimaces.
“You’re—”
“Those things were attacking us!” Kevin shouts from the back. “They exploded!”
“I know.” Rachel cranes her neck to look back into the truck bed. “You all right back there?”
“Oh, peachy.” He gives her a bloody thumbs-up. “Can we please get the hell out of here? Those fuckers are all active again!”
“Well, how are they—?”
“We’ll figure that out later, c’mon, let’s go!”
She carefully starts the truck and manages to get it moving, jerking its bulk only a few times. Rachel doesn’t even consider glancing back at the destroyed bodies in the street. Her heart pumps in a slow, hard syncopation. Her jaw is set.
It’s getting bad again, isn’t it?
Kayla peers through the rear window, eyes darting. Her trembling left hand keeps swiping at her face.
“I thought … I thought after what happened at the library … that it would be over.” She sniffs. “It was supposed to be done. No more.”
The attack at the library is still a jumble of images in Rachel’s mind, and it hardly feels real. The survivors established a stronghold even mightier than the hospital, and somehow those monsters organized and pounced. As one.
As one organism.
They surrounded the entire library, folding over it like an organic blanket, pressing in, smothering, suffocating. Melting in thick-paned windows with the force inside their skulls, crawling through, and stabbing their infected heads at the exhausted survivors. And the monsters … they had all but won. They had beaten the ragtag crew, which could only await the inevitable in the crimson darkness. And then … what?
Fortunes changed. Did her father really save them? She has a strong feeling that Kevin is right: Although he certainly helped—maybe even turned the tide—something more powerful was at play.
Felicia.
The way the young woman stood there in the window, staring out. The feeling in Rachel’s gut that it was Felicia whom the bodies were scurrying away from. Not so much the weak survivors with their tiny capsules of blood or their all-but-empty supply of O-negative blood or their remaining blood darts, but Felicia.
The one who turned.
They need to get back to Felicia. She should have attended to her right then; she should have found her and helped her.
“I won’t lie to you, Kayla, it’s not over.” She returns her hand to the gearshift knob and changes gears to third, picking up speed for a fairly long stretch of empty road. “But we can’t get pessimistic. Do you know what that means?”
“Huh-uh.”
“It means we can’t think the worst is gonna happen.”
“But that’s all that’s happening!”
“I know … I know,” Rachel says, scrambling. “But we’re alive, right? We’re still alive.”
“Not all of us.”
Kayla’s words are starting to hurt, so Rachel shuts up for a moment. Then, she says, “I think we’re gonna beat those things.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I think they’re scared. Even more scared than us. I saw it at the library. I think what we just saw? I think that means they’re desperate. They’re scared of us, and they’re desperate. They’re trying everything they can.”
“They can still kill us!”
“Not if we’re careful. We have answers now.”
“It’s like every time we think of some answers, they do something different.”
“Well,” Rachel says, making the turn north onto Peterson, “I think they’re running out of things to try.”
Kayla watches her doubtfully, then scoots over, lifting her rail-thin legs onto the seat, and lets herself fall against Rachel. Her head rests against her shoulder. She doesn’t say anything.
“I’ll keep you safe,” Rachel repeats. The words come out confidently enough.
She feels Kayla’s nod. “I know.”
Rachel clutches the steering wheel, crossing Magnolia. Her eyes are already on the library property, two blocks up on the left. From this distance, she sees no evidence of the traumatic attack. But as she gets to Olive, she begins to see the scrapes along the asphalt and on the curbs and concrete leading to the library—blood and sap and
, when she looks closely at the ground to her left, what appears to be skin. She didn’t pay attention to any of this when Kevin whisked them away earlier. She was in shock. But now it’s all too obvious.
When the bodies came, they came from the east along a few avenues—between homes, circuitously along alleys—not only that inconceivable wall of monstrous humanity that flowed directly toward the library on Oak. She shudders to think what the asphalt of Oak looks like.
Perched on the edge of her seat, Kayla watches the library come at them.
“Do you see anyone?” she whispers.
Rachel shakes her head.
There are broken trees and trampled hedges leading toward the main entrance. The scene suggests vehicles running rampant over the landscaping, but Rachel knows it was the infected human bodies. Now, the way is clear except for the evidence of their passing. As she gets closer, she can see the hundreds of corpses that lay in mounds against the exterior library walls, spreading out onto the grounds, dotting the lawns to the north and south. Then the front of the library looms directly ahead of them.
Joel is apparently still away with Pete’s truck, but the Hummer remains parked to the left of the entrance, along with two more vehicles from Ron’s group.
Rachel manages to keep the truck running as she bumps over the curb and onto the lawn, weaving between bodies.
“Keep watching for anything that might hurt us,” she says to Kayla.
“Uh huh.”
But no further creatures approach. And why would they? This is the site of the things’ largest defeat. When those human monsters were improbably turned back earlier this afternoon, the fear in their eyes was plain to see. They wouldn’t come back here. At least, that’s Rachel’s hope.
Even before she glimpses any survivors, she’s thinking again of Felicia.
And it’s exactly at that moment when she sees the young woman back at the open and mangled maw of the book-returns area, staring out, as if awaiting Rachel’s arrival.
CHAPTER 11
In a dark daze, Felicia half-watches Kevin, Rachel, and the little girl drive away in the old truck, across the battered lawn, off the curb, and onto the asphalt, on their way to the hospital. She’s locked onto their tangled mindsets—extreme stress, echoes of fear, dread of a place that is already bursting with dark recollections. She thinks she can even catch snippets of their vocal conversation, but really it’s the thoughts that lead to the words.
Blood Dawn (Blood Trilogy Book 3) Page 10
