Blood Dawn (Blood Trilogy Book 3)

by Jason Bovberg

  “You’re getting another passenger in back,” Joel says, gesturing to the flatbed.

  As he speaks, Rachel becomes aware of miserable groaning coming from the back of the truck, where the two recently changed bodies lay. Felicia’s expression is now one of even deeper despair.

  Rachel leans in next to Joel and looks down on the twins. “We need to get morphine in the new one, probably both of them.”

  “I can do it,” Felicia manages, watching the truck. Her limbs are moving restlessly. “May I go?”

  “Of course,” says Joel, gesturing his hand in a whatever motion. “Go on ahead.”

  Felicia pushes her door open and manages to step down from the Hummer into the street. Kayla helps her shut the heavy door. At the truck, Chloe is holding a small vial of morphine in her hand, along with a syringe. Rachel catches only her profile, but she can see that the young woman is still crying copiously over Pete, inconsolable.

  What are we doing? is the question that is reverberating inside Rachel.

  Felicia approaches and takes the medicine into her hands almost delicately. Despite her flowing tears, Chloe manages to speaks to Felicia, probably instructions—but Rachel can’t make out the words. Then, Felicia goes to the flatbed and, with some effort, climbs in over the gate.

  “She’s vulnerable back there,” Joel says. “Totally open to attack.”

  His voice is right in Rachel’s ear. She realizes she’s still essentially in his lap, staring out his window. His breath is sour but masculine, his presence large and comforting. She looks into his eyes, lingers a little too long, then backs into her seat, embarrassed.

  “Sorry.”

  “Considering what those things are doing now, I’m not sure we ought to leave them out in the open.”

  Rachel watches Felicia settle in between the two bodies. Her movements are careful, empathetic.

  “Out of anyone in this little entourage, they’re the safest,” Rachel says. “And they’re stronger together. Better for us.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Rachel lets the question hang.

  I don’t, she thinks. But it feels right.

  There’s no movement out there—yet. All the surrounding homes are dark, though, so dark that anything could be lurking in those shadows thirty yards in any direction. But nothing is sprinting at them. And in the diffuse red glow of the rear brake lights, no bodies are approaching, even cautiously.

  “So … go?” Scott calls up to them.

  Joel looks down at him. “Let’s do it. I’m gonna take the lead. Stay glued to our ass, right? You’ve got all our best defense in your bed back there.”

  “Roger that,” Scott says, and Joel pulls ahead.

  Homes drift by on either side of Taft Hill, completely dark, haunted. Although they contribute to the feeling that Fort Collins has become a ghost town, their yards and fences and darker places still suggest active menace. All the survivors are on edge, expecting an attack from the shadows at any moment. But the attack doesn’t materialize, and so a sense of cautious calm takes hold of the Hummer’s occupants.

  They creep past vehicles left abandoned, their doors flung open. All empty.

  Long minutes pass.

  Fifteen minutes. Twenty.

  Kayla begins lightly snoring in the back again, stretched out on the rear seat.

  Homes drift by, islands of darkness.

  Against reason, despite the thrumming of her veins, Rachel finds herself dozing, too, and her gritty, drowsy thoughts drift back to her own home, where the bodies of her father and his wife, right now, lay decomposing in the humid night. Where a mystery presented itself to Rachel and proceeded to lodge in her skull like a spur.

  Daddy, an inner voice whispers sleepily, what were you up to?

  And she’s not only mystified by what drew her father to their home—without telling her he was going—but more urgently, by where all that money came from, and why he apparently kept it a secret. He must have had his reasons. Right? Was the money a secret from her, or from Susanna as well? Is it possible he’d headed up some kind of illicit endeavor?

  Was her father a thief?

  She would laugh under any normal circumstances. Her father was one of the most straitlaced, honest people she knew. One time, years ago, he had been jogging in the pre-dawn morning and stumbled on a $5 bill on the sidewalk in front of a home three blocks away from their house. Although it was too early to disturb the family living there, he returned with a reluctant Rachel a few hours later to try to find the bill’s owner. At the door, an eight-year-old kid listened to his story, confused, staring at the cash. The boy’s mother finally arrived at the door, confused, and stared at Michael and Rachel with alarm. She took the money and shut the door with a curt word of thanks, and Rachel’s father was left a bit bewildered, walking back home.

  Rachel always considered that a mostly crippled attempt to teach her a lesson of honesty.

  She thinks of the thousands of dollars secreted away under his clothes, behind a false wall, and utterly fails to reconcile the image with that memory of the returned $5 bill.

  Perhaps it was part of an inheritance she didn’t know about—from her grandfather, perhaps. It was all stashed in there with his gun, after all. But then why wasn’t the money in a bank?

  She shakes her head minutely, returning her shivery attention to the darkened street ahead of her, the warm breeze wafting in over the Hummer’s blood-stained hood. A hood stained with the remains of Pete Thompson, whose truck rumbles behind them.

  She finds herself zeroing in on conifer trees, but she sees no bodies attached to the ones she finds, only—here and there—the evidence of chewed bark in the form of ravaged trunks and small piles of vomited splinters, saliva, and sap. Bodies were definitely here, but they have moved on to some other destination. Are they in the vicinity still, aiming to attack, or are they assembling somewhere for another purpose? She imagines Joel is wondering something similar. Then:

  “Looks hairy up ahead,” Joel says, breaking a five-minute silence. “Hang tight.”

  The intersection of Taft Hill and Prospect looms ahead. Several vehicles appear to have collided. Abandoned, doors flung open, they’re all that remains of the fateful morning when the world changed. Joel clicks on the Hummer’s brights to reveal still more vehicles, illuminated in the otherwise near-pitch-blackness of the smoky night. A school bus lies on its broad right side, snugged up against the traffic-signal pole on the southwest corner. Rachel wonders briefly why a school bus was on the streets at 6 a.m. on a Saturday morning—a weekend field trip? a sporting event?—then her attention moves to other vehicles appearing in the headlight beams. The lingering smoke and ash render the beams almost solid, with sharp edges. It’s like a scene underwater, reminding her of documentaries she’s seen about deep sea divers. Silent, eerie, murky …

  “I don’t see anything,” Rachel whispers.

  “Yeah, me neither, but it’s awfully crowded around here.”

  Joel’s eyes dart left and right, as if gauging their route out of the intersection—should they need to escape in a hurry. Rachel spots several avenues through the wreckage, but they’re narrow.

  Scott’s truck rumbles behind them, its six cylinders older and louder than the Hummer’s. The truck’s weaker headlamps sweep after theirs like a yellow after-image, like an echo.

  Glancing back, she can barely see Scott in the truck’s cab, a faint outline of his silhouette, hunched over the wheel, driving carefully. And beside him, the twins, their heads swiveling wearily left and right as they check out their surroundings. Rachel can’t see Felicia and the other turned women in the flatbed, but she knows they’re there, and she knows—hopes?—that Felicia is easing the others’ pain.

  She hopes something else is happening back there, too. Something that, perhaps, she wouldn’t understand. Something to prepare them for whatever will come.

  She locks on Scott’s silhouette for the briefest moment.

  Was he wo
rth saving?

  Her gaze lingers on the faint sight of him at the wheel, and she guesses that everyone is worth saving, no matter his or her mistakes. Even Rachel had been saved by her father, and she doubted she deserved it. But she can’t help thinking that, given the trade-off of Bonnie for Scott, a weighing on the proverbial scales would have tipped far in Bonnie’s favor, and now the thought of her gone brings a fresh wave of melancholy for not only Bonnie, but her father, and even Susanna, and the rest—all those people.

  Everyone is worth saving.

  She twists back around.

  “… through there …” Joel is saying, gesturing to the left.

  Rachel sees a generous path through the wreckage, and Joel rumbles through it, approaching the center of the intersection.

  It’s about that point where Rachel begins to feel unsafe again. Something trembles in the air—is it her mind playing tricks on her, or is something atmospheric happening? Carefully, she leans forward, hand against the dash, and peers up into the nightmarish sky.

  “You feel that?” Joel whispers, startling her.

  “Uh huh.”

  “Me too,” Kayla says with a yawn from the rear.

  Joel brakes the Hummer to a stop. “What is that?”

  “What?”

  “You don’t hear that?”

  Rachel listens hard, trying to discern anything over the sounds of the engines. Then it dawns on her. It’s the moans of the women in the truck, and Felicia’s voice is among them. She’s calling to them. At that moment of awareness, Scott taps his horn.

  Before she even knows what she’s doing, Rachel has opened her door and is jumping down to the intersection’s concrete. Joel calls after her, and her veins throb with hot blood. She runs toward the truck, seeing the twins’ eyes pop as she approaches.

  Their window is open. “Something’s wrong back there,” Chloe calls back to her, red-eyed, gesturing. “I was about to—”

  “I got it.”

  At the flatbed, Felicia is in the process of standing up on the corrugated floor, steadying herself on the back of the cab, and staring off to the left. One of the women behind her has propped herself up atop the wheel well and is also staring in the same direction, her face a mask of pain and effort. The other woman—Linda, the most recent—is still unconscious on the floor.

  “What is it?” Rachel cries.

  She can’t believe she’s out here in the open. What compelled her to—?

  “Over there,” Felicia says immediately, her voice clipped, and the woman next to her voices non-verbal grunts from her own wounded throat—ragged, awful sounds that remind her of Felicia at the library less than two days ago. Felicia is gesturing to the east.

  “All right, hang on.” She jogs back toward the Hummer.

  Kayla has been calling to her. “Rachel! Rachel! Come back!”

  “It’s okay, I’m here.”

  “Come back in here.”

  “It’s all right.”

  She climbs up to the Hummer’s cab, standing on the running board.

  “What’s going on”? Joel asks, an edge to his voice. “You trying to get us killed?”

  “There’s another body over there,” Rachel calls up to him. “I don’t know if they sense it, or …?”

  Joel gives glances in all directions. “Get in.”

  Back inside the Hummer, Rachel scans the car wrecks as they drift past them, angling farther to the left. She’s watching for the telltale red glow of the infected, but it’s hard to make anything out in the glare of the headlamps. The emptiness is frustrating and terrifying at the same time. She feels as if a body might leap into the windowless cab at any moment, so she pushes back into the seat and clutches her trusty magnum flashlight. The steel is slippery in her grip, and she keeps adjusting her cramped fingers around it.

  Just as she glances in her side-view mirror, she sees Felicia jumping down from the truck, staggering into the street, and taking off, her stride hobbled by her injuries.

  “Joel!”

  “Oh Jesus!” Joel barks as Scott taps his horn again. “What the hell is with these people?!”

  Joel shoves the Hummer into Park, gives the surroundings another glance, and flings his door open. He jumps down to the pavement.

  “Girls, come on out with the weapons!” he calls. “Stay with those women, guard the trucks. Rach, bring the flashlight. Scott, you be ready to peel on out of here. Honk if you see something.”

  Felicia limps quickly to a knot of silver vehicles and turns right, disappearing in a flourish of silvered ash.

  “Felicia!” Rachel cries, still at the Hummer.

  She glances into the back seat.

  Kayla is watching her with big eyes. “Don’t go,” she whispers.

  “You’ll be safe.”

  “No!”

  “I promise. I’ll be right back.”

  She steps down into the intersection.

  I’ll be two seconds.

  “Wait!” Kayla’s voice fades behind her, and Rachel screams inwardly, drowning it out completely.

  The headlamps of the vehicles throw startlingly narrow beams—particularly the newer Hummer—and once she steps beyond the conical luminescence, a nightmarish darkness envelops her. Rachel feels her heart begin to palpitate. Shadowed by other vehicles, Felicia is gone.

  Rachel stabs on the flashlight, and an O of light bursts against the silver fender directly in front of her.

  “Rach, hold up,” Joel says. “This is stupid! We have to get her back in that truck. Immediately. We do not want to get stuck out here.”

  “Working on it.”

  “There!” Joel shouts.

  Rachel spins and directs the flashlight ahead of her. “Where?”

  “Left!”

  Just before she twitches the light in that direction, she sees the pinpoint of red—it’s a flash, actually, a pop. And she knows that pop.

  Felicia has already turned a body.

  Revealed in the magnum’s light, Felicia is bending into the open window of a small Toyota. Safety glass litters the asphalt like diamonds. Rachel and Joel sprint to her and gather around her. Rachel helps her extricate the body of a little boy, bedecked in Captain America pajamas, from a car seat. He can’t be more than three years old. Returned to humanity, he begins crying—a raw, ugly bray.

  “Christ, it’s a kid!” Joel yells.

  “Oh my god,” Rachel whispers.

  Felicia is mumbling again. “… Philip, his name is Philip … he was going on a … a trip … going to the airport …” The words go faint.

  “Let’s get him back, now, now!” Joel shouts.

  But Felicia is shaking, the boy held tightly in her arms. She’s not moving.

  Rachel holds the light on the boy’s face, and the circle of illumination vibrates. A strong feeling of foreboding overcomes her. She spins around once, twice, trying in vain to spot something, anything, in the peripheral pitch-blackness. Something is out there, she’s sure of it. The magnum jitters in her grasp.

  A gasp sounds to her left, and Rachel jerks her head that way.

  “Come on!” Joel insists.

  “We aren’t alone,” she calls back behind her, where Joel is already nervously backing toward the Hummer, whose headlights seem terribly far away.

  She trains her magnum in that direction. Felicia is bent over the child’s body. She has brought him to the ground, and his small chest is heaving in a jerky motion as if trying to expel a foreign object.

  A gunshot cracks far behind them—Scott.

  The truck’s horn begins to blare, then goes staccato, then goes silent.

  “Shit shit,” Joel says. “Let’s go!”

  When he and Rachel turn back to Felicia, she’s standing again—ghastly pale and corpse-like in the flashlight’s harsh white, her face an ethereal visage, drawn and bleak, desperate. She hardly looks human—swaying, eyes red-rimmed, mouth open in a twisted circle. Her eyelids flutter, and her limbs go weak. Joel leaps forward to grab h
er as she’s falling.

  “Fuckin’ great,” he says. “Grab that kid, let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Rachel doesn’t hesitate. She takes up the child, against her chest, and the boy bleats into her neck like a wounded animal, a terrible cry that claws at her soul. She doesn’t even want to look at this child’s face; she can only too clearly imagine what she will find there, and the fact that he is an innocent boy, relatively new to the world, makes the anger pulse in her again. Hard.

  There’s movement everywhere, and she finds herself wincing in anticipation of another explosion of bone and gore—targeting her, or Joel, or Kayla.

  Kayla!

  Why did she leave her alone? What could possibly have possessed her to leave Kayla alone? She curses savagely at herself.

  The flashlight’s beam wobbles in front of her, illuminating Joel’s back intermittently and flashing against the metal surfaces of the vehicle graveyard that the intersection has become. Joel carries Felicia’s deadweight like a rag doll, her arms flopping to his left, as if unhinged. He’s drawing away from Rachel, and she’s gasping to keep up, the boy’s shifting, mewling weight loading her down, nearly causing her to stumble.

  Behind her is the scraping sound of unnatural chase, the quick-drag and collective gasp of frantic creatures, hungry for blood, desperate for the destruction of their enemy. Because that is what she and the rest have become.

  The enemy. The last of the enemy.

  Impossibly, she picks up her pace, thigh muscles burning, lungs straining, and the bright headlamps of the Hummer come into clear view. There’s another rifle blast, and now she can hear Scott screaming, enraged and terrified. One of the twins yells something, indistinguishable words, and then a muffled blast sends a shockwave against her left side—not enough to throw her off stride but enough to shower the pavement with slick blood.

  The scuffling sound behind her grows insistent, and with a cry of anguish and exhaustion, she halts and about-faces, hyperventilating, swinging the flashlight around. Seven or eight creatures are twenty strides behind her, and they come to an insectile stop, their spider-like limbs assured on the asphalt, their bodies almost entirely inhuman. Rachel’s lips twist in disgust. And that’s when she realizes that these creatures aren’t breathing—not even using their human bodies’ lungs for aspiration. They’re poised there like malevolent statues, unmoving save for slow, anticipatory positioning, angling for their next attack. They look more foreign than ever, more angry, more calculating. And yet they have stopped.