“Keep watching!” Joel calls to the men. “Could be a diversion.”
Felicia is halfway inside the bus, her hands roaming the trapped body as if searching. The body itself has revealed itself to be that of an older woman, long gray hair spilled out over the floor. The mouth is open, revealing the alien glow, and the eyes are closed. It looks ghastly, pale and corpselike.
Rachel is transfixed and wary, but she takes another glance back at Kayla to make sure she’s safe. The girl is crouched behind the Hummer’s front seats, as if she wants to disappear into the floorboards. Rachel extends a palm, reassuring her, and Kayla nods.
“What are you looking for?” Rachel cries into the VW bus.
“I don’t know,” Felicia responds, barely audible.
Her hands inch toward the woman’s face, and with a creaky jerk, the body wakes. The eyes open blearily, and a wheezy moan escapes the dry, peeling lips.
Rachel gasps.
“Shit!” Pete shouts, bringing up his rifle.
“No!” Joel yells at him. “Scott! Bring the blood!”
But now Felicia is on top of the body, her hands placed firmly on the woman’s head. Rachel cringes at the proximity of Felicia’s limbs to the glow, but she notices that the pulse of the red light has increased and become erratic.
At that moment, Rachel sees that the old woman is looking into Felicia’s eyes with an expression of terror. The face is frozen in a mockery of humanity, the mouth twisted, a scarlet flush taking hold of the cheeks.
Scott rushes up.
“Wait, wait!” Rachel says.
The spark is loud inside the bus, brightening the interior with a purple flash, and the crimson sphere of energy inside the body’s skull collapses in a sudden implosion. As darkness overtakes the bus, the old woman’s moan turns instantly to a pained cry.
“Oh my God,” Rachel says.
“What happened?” Pete yells, lowering the rifle and wiping rainwater from his brow with his forearm.
Felicia falls away from the woman, her limbs weak, unable to support herself. She crashes back into Rachel, and Rachel takes her full weight, preventing her from spilling to the ground.
“Help!” she calls, but Joel is already there.
His weapon holstered, he takes Felicia in his arms, easily lifting her. He gets her quickly out of the rain and into the Hummer’s back seat next to Kayla. Felicia is conscious but bleary, her arms moving as if she’s suffered a concussion.
“Her name—is Julia,” Felicia whispers raggedly. “She—she—” She shakes her head groggily, as if at any moment she might fall over. “She was on her … on her way to pick up her grandson … to take him to daycare.” Her voice is high and gaspy, the words diminishing into gibberish.
In the bus, the old woman continues to moan, and tears spill helplessly from her eyes.
Rachel stares at her, unable to process what has happened.
CHAPTER 17
It has stopped raining. That’s the one bit of relief.
A moment ago, in the back of Pete’s truck, Rachel helped Chloe administer a dose of morphine to the old woman, Julia, who responded by going mercifully quiet. Since being dragged from the VW bus, the woman has been moaning a loud, agonizing drone. After the injection, Rachel checked the woman’s pulse and registered a deep kind of awe—understanding that for days, this woman has effectively been a corpse, with no vital signs. No pulse, no respiration. Whatever red thing had inhabited her, it kept her alive in an entirely different way. As the morphine began to take hold, they at least were able to get some water into her without her regurgitating it across the truck bed.
Now she’s human again. As with Felicia, her essential human functions have returned, however reluctantly, and the woman will now have to deal with the obvious pain of rehabilitation. If Felicia could do it, then—hopefully—so can this former corpse.
Rachel is back in the Hummer, looking after Felicia herself. Since somehow turning that woman back, she has been at the brink of unconsciousness—pale, unresponsive, limp, and unable or unwilling to talk about how on Earth she knew the woman’s name, let alone how she brought her back by seemingly a sheer force of will.
As they dragged Felicia back to safety, the survivors who had witnessed what happened in the VW bus exchanged bug eyes, wordlessly communicating their wonder. Something had happened, and none of them knew what it was, or how it was possible. They didn’t know what to say. And the Hummer fell into a deep silence as they all digested this thing—this supernatural thing.
Joel seems to be working it through his mind. He’s about to take the turn onto Mountain, and there, off to the right, is the Fort Collins Food Co-Op—Felicia’s store. Felicia herself is oblivious to the proximity, but Rachel notices Joel giving it a second glance. A wash of memories cascades through Rachel’s mind, and she finds herself watching Felicia’s slack face and the employee shirt she’s still wearing.
“There it is,” Joel mutters.
“What?” Scott says.
“That’s where Michael and I found Felicia.”
“The Co-Op?”
“Yeah.”
Heading west now on Mountain, Joel runs over something, and Rachel can’t help but wince at the soft, uneven feeling of the thump. She’s almost certain he ran over a body. She doesn’t even want to look.
Since she discovered that many of these bodies could be saved, she has clung to the idea that, as survivors, they should be striving to save as many of them as possible before resorting to annihilating them. She still feels the tug of humanity in that aspiration. But after all the tests, all the bloody episodes, all that has happened since they arrived at the library with nothing but a bunch of O-negative blood and a will to survive … she has come to realize that the vast majority of these spider-walking corpses are beyond redemption.
Not an easy thing to swallow.
Holding Felicia’s hand with her left and Kayla’s with her right, Rachel sighs and pushes back into the seat.
She’s able to look back on everything that has happened now. She’s not proud of herself. And some of the actions she has taken, these things she has done with her own two hands—they have caused irreparable harm. She won’t give in to the impulse to come up with excuses, not even now, at the end of the world. Her dad always told her—she can hear his half-amused voice so vividly in her mind’s ear—to be a decent human being. Above all else, be a kind and decent and empathetic person. He’d usually say this in the wake of her doing something stupid.
She’s not sure she ever really understood the full weight of that instruction until now. But goddamn, she has tried. Does it count if you try your hardest to be a good human being, but the decisions you make toward that attempt are not sound?
Oh Daddy, she whispers inside. Why aren’t you here?
His body is in the back of this very vehicle, snug inside a tarp. Joel himself wrapped the body, giving the job a formal and almost militarily solemn precision. She watched him from inside the library, through the rain, not dwelling on the details of her father’s body but rather Joel’s and Liam’s careful movements and serious expressions. Her heart swelled for the two men.
Liam had found her right after, and she had thanked him as he’d toweled his head dry, still out of breath.
“Look, I’m sorry about what happened to him,” he’d said. “He was a standup guy.” He paused, appearing to search for words. Liam didn’t know Rachel, really, or her dad. He happened to be thrown together with them under extraordinary circumstances—by virtue of them having the same blood type. Sheer coincidence. He was trying to be nice. He looked at a loss, standing there. “It’s … ridiculous.”
“I know,” Rachel had said, focusing on her work, loading boxes.
“For what it’s worth … I think your dad actually saved us. I think his plan worked.”
All she’d wanted was to go deaf at that moment, to run away, to sob. She’d found the strength to nod, if only to make him stop talking, but she knows her react
ion must have seemed rude.
Now both of her parents are gone, and she herself might be on her way to a similar fate. She has no idea what the future holds. Either death—the most probable—or something else. All she knows is that her existence is moment-to-moment. Has been for days.
“Where are we headed?” she barely hears Scott ask Joel.
“We’re stopping at Rachel’s house,” he whispers, barely audible. “We’re going to drop off Michael. If you have a problem with that, we can talk it over.”
A pause.
“I don’t have a problem with that.”
“Good.”
“We’re going to bury him? Is that the plan?”
Rachel leans forward. “That’s for later. But I do want to take him home.”
Scott nods, looking down.
Joel glances back at her. “Don’t plan on staying long, girl. If I sense any kind of danger, we’re out of there. That’s what I told Pete, and that’s the agreement.”
For the first time since the VW bus incident, Kayla speaks.
“Are we almost there?”
Rachel peers out the window at the homes flitting by. She watches for a street sign. After a moment, she catches a glimpse of the Philly cheesesteak place at College and Olive.
“A little longer,” she says to Kayla.
“I have to pee.”
“Can you make it 10 minutes?”
“I think so.”
“You’ll get to see where I live,” Rachel says, then immediately guesses that it wasn’t the brightest thing to say to someone who no longer has a home.
Kayla doesn’t say anything.
After checking on Felicia again, feeling her pulse, Rachel leans over her and stares out the window. The streets are preternaturally quiet, devoid of any life. She would almost prefer to see one of those things spidering its way down one of these side streets, even rushing at them, than to see these barren roads. Even now that the survivors are on the move, away from the library, there’s the sense that monsters are peering at them from hiding places, plotting their next move or watching for vulnerabilities. Even worse, there’s the feeling that Fort Collins itself has been murdered—and by extension, the rest of the world.
Up front, both Joel and Scott are watching the streets as well, silent and wary. But it has been long minutes now since they found the old woman, and a sense of relative calm has fallen over the crew. She knows they’re all cautious of that being a false sense of calm. Nothing that has happened so far has been predictable.
Rachel becomes aware of a soft sound in the silence, and she realizes it’s the radio spilling static.
“Has anyone tried the radio?” she says, scooting forward.
Scott appears startled from his reverie. He looks away from the passenger-side window. “At the library, yesterday, yeah, but not recently.”
He tries the knobs, turning up the volume and poking through the presets as Joel makes the turn onto Mulberry. Giving up on the presets, Scott finds the Seek button, presses it, and the digital readout scrolls endlessly through the FM dial.
“Try AM?” she suggests.
He switches the band and tries again.
Same thing.
He stabs the button off. “I’ll try again later. That’s depressing.”
“I don’t see anything out there,” Joel mutters from the driver’s seat, watching the dark businesses float by. “Not a goddamn thing.”
“Where did they all go?” Kayla asks in a small voice.
“That’s definitely the question, kid,” Joel says.
Slowly coming into focus in the distance is a smoking ruin—the remains of some kind of collision?—near the corner where Mulberry meets Meldrum, below the Lincoln Center performing arts complex. As they approach, memories of her friends’ productions with the youth troupe at Debut Theatre wash over her. Rachel had attended some of the plays in those days, before her mom started her gradual decline. She feels a distant pang of regret now for the way a lot of her friendships at that time dissipated. Rachel finds it hard to believe that she was once weak enough to let her entire life crumble like sand from her grasp.
How is it possible she lacked the maturity and strength to weather those times? She feels more regret for her own actions than for the machinations of fate. After a period of grieving, her dad brought home a woman. So what? He was human, after all. All she remembers now is an embarrassing teen rebelliousness, and it stabs her painfully knowing that her father was right about her all those years.
She feels the urge to glance back toward his wrapped body, which is right behind her in this big, unwieldy, stupid vehicle—inches away. If only she could wake him with apologies. She would do that. She would definitely do that.
“What is that?” Kayla wonders as they get closer to the wreck.
Joel approaches the smoking hulk warily and comes to a stop thirty yards short of it.
Pete pulls the truck up next to them, windows rolled down.
“What’s up?” he calls.
Rachel thumbs her window down. “Not sure, hold tight.”
Two cars are angled toward each other, not quite touching, and one of the cars is a blackened shell, completely burned out. Black stains have blistered the other vehicle’s silver paint on its left side. Rachel counts nine bodies strewn across the asphalt—a horrifically gory scene that has become all too clear in the headlights of the survivors’ vehicles.
“Don’t look, Kayla, okay?”
But Kayla has already seen something and is curling into a trembling ball next to her.
“This is recent,” Joel says, loudly enough for Pete to hear. “Look at the blood there.”
Twin, bright red lakes of blood—fresh blood—have formed next to two mangled bodies perhaps ten feet from the vehicles. Both bodies appear to have been dismembered, and not neatly, either. They have been torn apart, decapitated. Rachel feels her gorge rise and looks away.
“Let’s get the hell away from here, huh?” Scott says.
“I’m almost positive we’re safe.”
“I wish that ‘almost’ filled me with more confidence.”
“Do you think this is the same thing that—?” Rachel begins.
“The same thing that attacked us near the station—same one that almost got you and Kevin at the hospital. Yeah.” Joel lets his forearms rest against the top of the steering wheel as he cautiously glares around the vicinity.
“And you think we’re safe from that?” Scott says, genuinely matter-of-fact. “How?”
Joel gestures with his thumb straight backward, toward Felicia, who is still dozing but now mumbling softly. “Her.”
After what happened north of the library, Rachel is even more in line with the theory that Felicia is the key to something—something larger than the odd sense of safety that she engenders, and even larger than what she showed them at the VW bus. She’s not sure that what Felicia did equates to actual salvation, in any way, shape, or form, but there’s a certain amount of promise to her. Truth is, she’d rather be with Felicia than not. She’s not even sure she would have agreed to this little mission without her.
“How?” Scott asks.
“Well, I don’t know yet, Scott, but I think we’re gonna find out.”
“You have any theories? I mean, you think it’s those things doing this?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“How?”
“Get out of the car with me, I’ll show you.”
Rachel feels Kayla tense up next to her, and she lays a comforting hand on her thigh.
“I don’t think so,” Scott says.
“I’m gonna prove right now that we’re safe.”
The door opens, and Joel begins stepping out.
“Joel!” Rachel shouts. “Wait! Are you sure—?”
“I’m pretty damn sure, but—” He pauses, looks across the Hummer’s vast hood. “Hey, Pete, just in case, you watch my back, willya? Honk if you—you know—if you see anything horrible.”
“Jesus, Joel!” Rachel pleads, grabbing at his sleeve, which slips through her grasp.
“You got it,” Pete says as the twins watch him bring up his AR-15 and maneuver it through his window to aim in the general direction of the scene.
Joel slips out of the Hummer. His service revolver is in his fist immediately, drawn steady and high. He signals to the occupants of the car next to them to stay put and remain quiet. Gaze darting left right and behind, he inches toward the suspicious wreckage.
Rachel’s eyes are peeled, anxiously watching the surroundings. She knows Joel can take care of himself, and she’s somewhat encouraged by the fact that the skies have been relatively calm. The attack at the hospital occurred suddenly, out of the blue, yes, but it was preceded and perhaps precipitated by some kind of cosmic roar. When Rachel glances skyward now, all she sees is a dissipated smokiness, backlit by crimson—as if whatever powerful presence was once there has receded but is keeping a watchful eye.
Or perhaps it’s only wishful thinking that the presence is no longer powerful.
Joel makes it to the scene of the accident and kneels to examine something. He cocks his head, rises, goes to the first of the bodies. He stares at it with distaste, then goes to another body—what’s left of it. After that, he takes a look at two more bodies, then backs away from the wreckage.
When he climbs back into his seat, Rachel and the others wait for him to talk.
Finally: “It’s so quiet.”
“What did you see?”
“I think it happened in the past hour, probably. So it wasn’t the same time as the library attack, and I think it’s even more recent than the two attacks on you and me, Rach. They’re still active, and I think it’s safe to assume they’re still targeting humans. Survivors.”
“Okay, so …?”
Joel nods. “They’re basically suicide bombers.”
A moment of silence.
“What?” Rachel says.
“You’re kidding me,” Scott says.
“It’s pretty clear out there: There are two bodies that were turned—it’s obvious from what’s left of them that their joints are popped. Skin abrasions from the way they walk. Dislocated limbs. All that sap and splinter and shit. And so on. Those are bodies in the worst shape.”
Blood Dawn (Blood Trilogy Book 3) Page 18
