The two men head for her father’s body, and Rachel is left on the porch, still staring. She feels herself convulsively swallowing, not wanting to throw up. She has to concentrate hard to stop. And it’s as much shock as the horrorshow on her porch, she knows. She closes her eyes, finds strength, and turns her back to Mrs. Carmichael to face the street.
Joel and Pete are already approaching with her father.
“Go ahead,” Joel says, gesturing her forward. “Go, go.”
Rachel steps into the house, followed quickly by the two men, and although she immediately registers the foul, unmistakable reek of Susanna’s decomposing body, none of them comments on it. Rachel begins breathing through her mouth.
The house is dim, lit almost solely by her mag light, but it reminds her, once again, of the morning—less than a week ago!—when this all began. She’d awoken predawn that Saturday, enjoying the silence of the new day, eating her apple here in the front room. Her eyes dart to the coffee table to find the apple gone. No, there it is on the ground below the table, dried out, brown, a thin core. It’s still there. Her throat fattens with a kind of longing for a too-recent past.
“Back here,” she says. She clenches her teeth to keep them from chattering.
The men maneuver through the front room, into the narrow hallway, and find her dad’s bedroom.
That’s when she stops, and Mrs. Carmichael is mostly forgotten.
The reminders of her family, of her father, overwhelm her. In the sweep of the flashlight, she sees evidence of his passage here days ago, when he was alive, when he was simply going home to find his wife. When he was still a part of her life.
In a burst, the tears begin. They flood her eyes helplessly, surprising her with their ferocity. In the quiet room, she trembles and weeps, and she’s embarrassed, and she can’t help it, and she doesn’t want to apologize. She knows the gory fate of Mrs. Carmichael is coloring everything—the woman’s blood still feels warm against her back, smeared on her exposed skin—but she’s desperate for this moment to mean something, and everything else angers her.
“I’m sorry, Rach,” Joel says, and the words are strangely loud in the dark room.
Through blurred vision, she sees that her father wrapped Susanna tightly in their bedsheets. A surge of love flows through her, for both of them, for both her father and his wife. For Susanna. Imagining her fate and his grief, his loss. How he must have felt, losing two spouses.
Rachel gestures to the bed, and Joel and Pete carry her father there, laying him gently next to his wife. Rachel wipes at her eyes.
The two men step back.
“We’ll be outside,” Joel says. “Take a few minutes, okay? But not too long. We gotta get back on the road.”
She nods.
At that moment, Kayla comes out of the bathroom, her nose crinkled in the flickering luminescence of her flashlight. She doesn’t say anything, merely takes Joel’s hand when he offers it and lets him guide her back outside. Wordlessly, Joel picks her up. Rachel watches him carry the girl away toward the front door, sees Joel whispering to Kayla, and Kayla turning off her light and covering her eyes, burying her head against Joel’s shoulder.
Rachel steps back in to her father’s bedroom, stops, sighs. It’s almost impossible to ignore the high, sweet reek of decomposition, particularly as she sniffs back tears. The stench makes her eyes water still further. She wants so much to be able to ignore that smell—as well the knowledge that her father would soon only add to it. If only they had time to bury him properly.
“You’re home,” she whispers. “You’re home now.”
The words sound hollow and meaningless coming out of her mouth, but they will have to be enough. She’s suddenly at a loss what to say. She feels depression still scratching at her soul—ever since her return to the hospital after destroying Tony—and a part of her would even admit that she would be willing to crawl into her own bed right now, just as her dad and Susanna are back in their bed, and pretend that none of this ever happened. She would sleep for twenty hours and wake to some new day, and wander to the kitchen to eat her morning apple and contemplate her life as dawn gave way to morning. And Susanna would wake sighing, her father not long after her, and they would try to connect with her, with Rachel, and this time she would listen to them with all she had, and hug them, and laugh with them. Both of them.
It takes her a moment before she realizes she’s talking through her tears.
“… miss you so much, Daddy, you can’t be gone, you have to tell me what to do, why did this happen, why did this happen? Please wake up, both of you, please wake up, I promise things will be different, I’m sorry I wasn’t better …”
She wipes her nose and eyes with her forearm.
She goes quiet.
She knows she has to go outside and join the others.
Something catches her eye.
The bedroom closet is open, and even in the dimness she can see that a panel has been opened in back, and the open face of a small steel safe has been revealed. She steps closer, squinting, training the mag light on the closet, wiping her eyes again. This must be the safe where her dad kept grandpa’s gun. He must have grabbed it hurriedly and left everything open.
And there’s something else there. For a moment, her mind refuses to process what the stark light has revealed. She edges closer and bends down. Stacked in the safe are neat, banded stacks of cash. She reaches down to draw one out. It’s a thick packet of brand-new $100 bills. She reads the band. Ten thousand dollars. There are other packets of smaller bills, too. Her stomach does a somersault. There must be over a hundred thousand dollars in here.
“What the hell?” she asks the empty room, her voice almost a whine.
She re-examines the rest of the closet. Susanna’s clothes have been swept aside, same with the drywall-and-laminate panel that hid the safe. It has been flung to the right and left there. Her dad did this—what—two or three days ago? Is that possible? He had opened this secret safe and taken the gun but left all this money for anyone to find?
Is this what you came back to do? Why?
The scene exudes secrecy, even shame. Haste.
Crime.
She lets the money drop to the floor, kicks it with her foot toward the steel safe, and slides the closet door shut with a bang. Then she backs away from the closet, casting glances from the door to the bed.
What happened here?
In a moment, she’s rushing through the house and back outside, skirting past the demolished body of Mrs. Carmichael, giving it a resentful glare.
The relief of fresh air is tangible, but the afternoon is starting to fade toward evening. She jogs to the Hummer, which is still idling. She hurries around the great yellow hood and climbs up into the passenger seat. Tears are still moistening her cheeks, and now she feels a strange bewilderment.
Why are there untold thousands of dollars spilling out of a secret compartment in her dad’s closet?
Her mind has begun to reach back to relevant memories, grabbing for anything that might make sense. Images of her dad from the past mingle with terrible, more recent memories of him in his dying moments, and she shakes them away, feeling grief rise up like bile, knowing that she shouldn’t have to be dealing with any of this.
It’s not fair.
She can’t help but go back to the sequence of events that led to her and Joel racing from the hospital to find her dad. When she’d awoken that fateful morning at the hospital, bleary and hollow, he was gone from his room. When she’d asked Bonnie and Joel about him, they said they had no idea. It was Kevin who’d laid out the truth: Her father had left the hospital pre-dawn to return to their home.
“Why didn’t you wake me up?” she remembers crying. She’d begun to gesture with her arms, and realized with some embarrassment that she still had her stuffed bear in her left hand.
Kevin only shrugged his big shoulders. “He asked me not to.”
“He has a concussion!”
“He s
eemed pretty lucid to me.”
“Did he say why he was going?” In her head, at the time, she’d added without me.
“He said it was something he had to do, and that he’d be back within an hour or two.”
Outside the hospital’s windows, Fort Collins had been silent. Rachel could only imagine his mission, three miles away. She knew her father would find Susanna and wonder why she was dead in her bed—and they had dealt with that. But now she knows he’d had another purpose—something entirely mysterious that he “had to do.”
What else?
At some point before leaving to fetch him—Joel had even asked out of the side of his mouth, “Your dad always been the needs-rescuing type?”—the sky had opened up, once more, with an alien roar, signifying something new, some kind of change. As he’d been rooting around in that safe, had the bodies around him started becoming newly aggressive? Is that why he’d left things messy, unfinished, in his closet? At the hospital, in the wake of the roar, she remembers the bodies at the edge of the parking lot flinching. Had the corpses closer to her father reacted to the sound in a different way, immediately attacking? They were surely aggressive when she and Joel had arrived at this neighborhood to find him.
She’d been rightfully angry at her dad for leaving her at the hospital without saying anything to her, and she had at first blamed that head wound. He clearly wasn’t in his right mind. That’s what she’d thought at the time.
Now, slamming the Hummer’s door shut behind her and staring at the house—with its splatter of dark red across the entire porch, with the skull-shot naked corpse at the edge of the driveway, with her father and stepmother side-by-side on their bed near a pile of mysterious cash—she feels again as if she might throw up.
Where did it all come from? What did it mean?
Her thoughts are hopelessly scattered.
Kayla has leaned forward from the rear compartment and attached herself to her left arm, nuzzling her wordlessly, and the contact spreads a modicum of warmth through her. She closes her eyes, pats Kayla’s shoulder gently, tries to let the little girl work her magic, but it won’t happen. Something inside her resists. She can also feel Felicia’s gaze on the back of her head, and once again, it feels as if the young woman’s stare is reaching more deeply inside her than her surface.
As the Hummer rumbles away from her home, Rachel watches the familiar façade recede behind them. Then she glances over at Joel. He’s staring out the windshield, inspecting the homes to the left and the right. He looks over at her.
“You okay?”
“I think so, yeah.”
“You think so?”
“Uh huh.”
Shit, is the single word that she repeats inside. She can’t afford for this thing—whatever it is—to distract her. She swallows, closes her eyes, grits her teeth, and urges it all away.
When she opens her eyes, she tells Kayla to sit back in her seat.
“Buckle up, honey, I’m fine,” she says, lying again.
Felicia is alert, turned toward her window. She’s looking at something.
“What is it?” Rachel asks her. “What’s going on?”
“They’re out there.” Felicia whispers, gesturing with her head against the glass. “They were coming toward the house, and now they’re following us.”
“You’ve been watching them?” Joel asks.
No answer for a moment. Then:
“I can feel them.”
Rachel stares out the windshield. At first she sees nothing, and then she finds them. Beyond the trees of the neighboring homes, moving in fits and starts behind low fences, their almost-indistinct crimson glows throbbing left and right, through the gaps in the weather-worn cedar. Vague flashes of red.
Joel glides to a stop, thumbs on the radio. “Pete, come in, you see our friends over here to the right? Over.”
A moment of static, then: “I see ’em now, yeah, over.”
“Just keep an eye on them, out.”
He drops the radio into the center console, then seems lost in thought, watching, as the two trucks idle.
“They’re restless,” Joel whispers.
“Can we get the hell out of here?” Scott says.
“Now hold on a sec. Look at them. They’re staying put. They’re scared.”
“They get enough numbers behind them, maybe they won’t be so scared.”
“I’m not sure that matters.”
“You’re betting with our lives again, sitting here and testing those things,” Scott says reasonably.
Rachel watches Felicia. The young woman is motionless, save for the working of her jaw.
If Felicia is protecting them, Rachel is almost certain it’s inadvertent. Felicia is still undergoing some kind of inner trauma, and a part of that struggle is wrapped up in what Rachel believes is an ability to actually communicate with those bodies. Somehow, in some way, the collective voice of this thing, this invading species, is still in her head, even if she won’t admit it. And she’s locked in an unconscious battle with it. Rachel gathers this not only from what Felicia has managed to tell her, but also from how Felicia seemed to instinctively know Julia’s name, and the shift of her jaw, the look in her eyes, the way she moves.
And if that’s the case, it’s not only Felicia protecting the survivors.
It’s the woman in the back of Pete’s truck, too.
In which case, Joel’s plan is working.
Kayla clears her throat in the middle of the back seat.
“We need to drive,” the girl says in her small voice. “Can we drive now?”
As if snapped from a doze, Joel blinks and turns to her. “Almost, girlie.”
He’s watching the surreptitious movement beyond the fences. It’s far enough away to not be an immediate threat, but Rachel can’t help but flash again on the loss of Danny, before they got to the library. The horror of that moment will stay with her forever, and the thought of that happening to Kayla makes her break into a quivering sweat.
The radio squawks, and every occupant of the car except Felicia jumps.
“Christ,” Joel whispers. He picks up the radio, messes with the volume.
“Joel, this is Mai, come in.”
Joel grabs the radio. “Mai! Good to hear from you, go ahead.”
“Well, we were attacked.” Pause. “We’re okay, but Jesus Christ. They’re still active. Over.”
“Where are you?”
“We, uh, we made it past I-25 on Mulberry, and we managed to gas up there. Siphoned a truck. There was nothing in the area, no movement at all, only a bunch of empty cars, and we thought we were safe, but as we got farther east, a swarm of them came rushing out of one of those neighborhoods and started ramming us.” Her voice stops, and in the empty hiss of the spectrum, Rachel can barely hear other voices in the background. “We got a few darts into them, and they broke off like a wave, man, it was the weirdest thing, like the library. But a few of them jumped at us and—and they blew up, they just blew up!” Her voice rises and falls as if the vehicle is moving quickly over unsteady road. “We got windows busted out, some minor cuts and shit, but damn!” Another pause. “Anyway, that’s what I’m calling for.” Empty static for a moment, then: “Over.”
“Glad you’re all okay, Mai.” He proceeds to tell her what happened on Rachel’s porch.
“Sounds like they have a new mission.”
“Yep,” Joel says. “But it still sounds a little desperate to me.”
A pause. “Hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“They’re literally killing themselves to stop us.”
“I guess so.”
“You got enough supplies to take care of those cuts?”
“Yeah, we got plenty of that. It’s pretty gross, though. It’s bone. Blood and bone. You think that’s all safe? That’s not gonna, like, cause, I don’t know—”
After a pause, Joel says, “I wouldn’t worry about that too much. Just clean everything up as good as you can. We’ve got eno
ugh to worry about. You keep on heading east, see what you find, got it?”
“Got it, over.”
“Take care of yourself. Keep in touch. We’ve got some bodies trying to keep pace with us, but they’re keeping their distance. We’re heading west, see what kind of trouble we can get into, over.”
“All right, you guys be careful. Out.”
Joel drops the radio into the console and lets out a sigh. Rachel can see him working through everything, despite the extreme fatigue evident in his eyes. His eyes flick upward, to the right, at a clear view of the western sky, where daylight is almost completely gone now. The jittery purple lightning continues, and the shifting columns of energy continue to pulsate. The alien presence is focused southwest of Horsetooth, seemingly between the sites of two diminishing wildfires. She can feel him tracing the route they must take.
Then he’s talking.
“This is it. Moment of truth. Jesus, I could use a whiskey about now.”
Silence hangs heavy in the cab.
“Back at the library, we knocked those fuckers back on their heels,” Joel says. “They didn’t expect that. We showed them we have some fight in us. But did you see them back there? They don’t know what to do.” He gestures toward the broiling sky, which ripples with deep reds, strobing and crackling. “They are not sure of their next move. That’s what Felicia said, and I believe it.” He brings his attention back to Rachel and the others, who are watching him with suspense. “So I think it’s time we make a move.”
CHAPTER 19
Joel motions Pete to come up beside the Hummer, and slowly the truck comes abreast of them. As soon as the vehicle comes to a quiet stop, Chloe rolls down the window.
“Yeah?”
Joel looks down at her. “Talked to Mai. They were attacked, like that thing on the porch. Those bodies are basically suicide bombers at this point, so we can count on that.”
Pete leans over to catch Joel’s attention. “Do we need to find another stronghold? Right now, we don’t have nearly the munitions or the numbers to hold these things back, ’specially if they’re massing up like they did at the library. Those damn things back there looked like they were about to swarm us.”
Blood Dawn (Blood Trilogy Book 3) Page 20
