Blood Dawn (Blood Trilogy Book 3)

by Jason Bovberg

  Joel butts the Hummer up against a seemingly vulnerable spot and edges forward. A late-model Chevy and a GM truck begin a dragging slide, but then they impact further vehicles beyond those, making the job more difficult. Joel guns the engine, and then they too begin to slide reluctantly. After agonizingly long moments, the Chevy begins to buckle and tip, and the Hummer strains. Joel backs off, and the Chevy lurches back to the ground. They all hear Joel’s loud cursing.

  “What is it?” Kayla asks.

  “Looks like that one car won’t cooperate,” Rachel says. “Maybe it’s stuck on something.”

  While Joel tries to shove at a new spot, Felicia takes a moment to check on Julia, Linda, and Philip. They’re all conscious and alert. Felicia crawls over to Julia and finds her staring out into the night, defiantly. Her only real movement is her jaw, which jerks spasmodically. Felicia senses her pain.

  “Need some—?” Felicia begins.

  “No,” Julia says, gritting her teeth.

  “But …”

  “No.”

  Felicia nods and turns to Linda, who is already watching her and nodding. She needs the relief of the morphine. As Felicia bends to the task of administering the medicine, she eyes Philip, who is watching through the truck’s cab as the Hummer pushes at the row of cars. He’s standing motionless, and Felicia detects very little fear in his mind—mostly curiosity. Some bewilderment. It’s as if he’s awakened from slumber into a darkly fantastic alternate realm. His young body and mind are so resilient! In some ways, too, he’s a little kid again, fascinated by trucks and tractors.

  Felicia carefully fills a syringe with 10mg of morphine and injects it into the muscle of Linda’s upper arm. Almost immediately, the woman relaxes, her eyes closing, tears of relief squeezing out and flowing down her cheeks.

  “It’ll be all right,” Felicia whispers.

  She settles the woman against the side wall and looks once more out into the night. She senses no movement in the vicinity. The heavens remain restless with red light and rumble with almost constant crackling thunder, but it’s distant … restrained. When she was infected, she could read the skies—even through the ceiling of the Co-Op—as if the strangers were speaking solely to her. She heard messages in the wind, in the atmosphere. Not anymore. She can’t tell if there’s a gathering of strength happening, or a weakening.

  At that moment, something takes hold of her senses.

  The breeze has shifted east, and the odor of death wafts over her.

  The others detect it, as well.

  “Whoa,” Kayla says. “Do you smell that?”

  “Yeah,” says Rachel.

  It’s been over five days since the strangers descended on Earth, and the neighborhoods of Fort Collins are filled with the corpses of human beings who escaped infestation but perished in other ways—because they got too close to those infected, because their bodies couldn’t handle the infection, because they were killed by survivors—and those corpses have begun to decompose. Neighborhoods are choked with them. Is that what the survivors are smelling now?

  “Over there,” whispers Philip, gesturing with his small arm toward the wall of vehicles.

  Felicia goes to him. “What do you see?”

  He doesn’t answer, but at that moment, the Hummer comes to a stop. Joel has mostly pushed his way through the barricade, tipping four smaller cars onto their sides, and Felicia understands why Joel has had trouble moving the barricade.

  Beyond the vehicles lies a great mound of human bodies, bolstering the vehicular barricade with a massive row of dead flesh. Thousands upon thousands of pounds of deadweight. Joel slowly backs away from the metal mass, and as the cars settle to the ground, random limbs begin flopping to the asphalt as bodies pour into the gap.

  “Oh no!” whispers Rachel, her hand moving to her mouth.

  “They moved them there?” Kayla says. “They dragged bodies there to—”

  Rachel nods. “I think that’s exactly what happened. Oh my god.”

  Joel hops down from the Hummer and approaches the truck, his face ashen. He anchors himself against the hood and doesn’t seem to know what to say. Felicia feels waves of horror radiating off of him, an inability to process what he has seen.

  “I—I don’t—”

  “Have they trapped us here?” Kayla says. “Is this a trap?”

  Joel looks to Felicia.

  “I don’t see anything,” she says, sensing the air. “Still nothing.”

  “Can you … can you get through that?” Rachel asks Joel.

  “Oh Jesus.” He spins around, as if searching for some better option. “That would be … Fuck, Rachel. That’s horrible. The kind of thing that would weigh on a guy, you know?”

  “You want me to do it?”

  Joel glares at her.

  The survivors are at a loss for words, but Felicia can see them working through other ideas, devising alternate routes, and discarding them. On either side of the road, hardscrabble earth dips sharply into water—too much for even the mighty Hummer to surge through—and acres of other obstacles. She knows they could backtrack north to Horsetooth and find a way up to the reservoir that way—she feels Joel entertaining this same thought—but she’s sure the same kind of roadblock awaits them there. This dumping ground of corpses was planned days ago, possibly when the strangers first understood that a small contingent of survivors remained in the area, and wasn’t simply tossed together overnight.

  “We don’t have a choice,” Felicia says, breaking the uneasy silence.

  They all look at her.

  “I know it’s awful, but we have to drive through it. We don’t have the time to do anything else.” She pauses, clicks her jaw, swallows. “We can’t move those bodies one by one—it would take too much time, in the open like that. That’s what they want. And we can’t go around them. Right now, they’re thinking of other ways to end us. And they’ll win. We have a window of opportunity, but that window is going to close.”

  It’s the most she’s spoken since she changed back, and the effort nearly does her in. But a new urgency is upon her—not only because of Nicole’s pulsing soul in the distance but also because she can feel the ebb and flow of the strangers’ machinations above her.

  “Window of opportunity for what?” says Joel.

  Felicia can sense Holocaust comparisons flowing through Joel’s mind, and the fearful reluctance that has taken hold of him. For the first time, he has really considered the possibility that he, and all the rest of the survivors under his watch, will end up an anonymous corpse in a pile.

  “I mean,” he goes on, “I know where we’re headed is right. I feel it. We have some kind of opportunity here, but what is it?” Despair touches his voice, making it drop in volume, in confidence. “We’re still alive, and we’ve won some battles, but is that enough? Look at that.” He gestures toward the multitudes of bodies. “What’s after this? What’s waiting for us as we get closer?”

  Felicia watches him scan the area as he ponders his own questions.

  She’s not sure she has all the answer for him—not the solid, confident answers that his police mind requires, anyway. So she tells him what he wants to hear.

  “I can end this.”

  “How?”

  Joel’s immediate response takes her aback. The truth is that she feels a growing power and knows she is a threat to the strangers. But whenever she has used this power, this strange energy, to extinguish a corpse’s infection, the act has bled her dry, has sapped her of all energy. In the past 30 minutes, she cured three of them, and the act drove her unconscious. And she still has no idea how she’s doing it. Nevertheless, she has aspirations to drive the infection out of as many bodies as she can. Once they reach Masonville, she plans to let loose, but she has the strong feeling it will be the end of her. She’s willing to make that sacrifice.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

  “You have to trust me.”

 
“I do, Felicia, come on, there’s just a lot we’re leaving to hunch.”

  Rachel cautiously steps out of the truck, leaving it idling in neutral. She glances this way and that, watching the deep shadows for movement. Even as Felicia ponders Joel’s words, she can sense the turmoil in Rachel’s mind—the paranoia about everything, the horror she feels for the mountains of bodies behind the wall of cars, the confusion that remains surrounding her discovery in her father’s bedroom, her fiercely protective notions surrounding Kayla, and now—

  Scott.

  Scott is dying, but Rachel is holding it back from the others.

  Now Rachel is watching Felicia.

  “Joel,” she says, “you’ve seen what Felicia has done. What she’s doing for us. It’s more than trust.” She turns to face the policeman. “There’s no other way.”

  “You seriously want to bulldoze through those people? You?”

  “We’re dying, Joel.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “For all we know, this is the end of the world happening right here.” Rachel is backlit by the trucks’ headlamps, which are pointed due west, raining harsh light on the piles of dead bodies—a small silhouette against atrocity. “We’re running out of time, and we have a chance to do something about all this shit, but we have to get up there. We have to get beyond this. Can that Hummer do it, or not?”

  “Christ.”

  “She’s right,” calls Zoe, off to the right, prowling the shadows with her long weapon. “We can’t let anything they do get in the way of what we have to do.”

  Joel ponders that.

  “How am I suddenly surrounded by so many bloodthirsty women?”

  “You mean smart chicks?” Chloe calls from the left.

  “Obviously, yeah.”

  “They’re banking on your empathy,” Felicia says. “They’re counting on your to be the policeman you are.”

  “She’s right,” Rachel realizes. “They want us to care for each other as individuals rather than as …”

  “… as parts of a shared consciousness,” Felicia finishes.

  “Even when those bodies are dead.”

  “They consider that a weakness.”

  “Can it do it?” Rachel says again.

  “I think so,” Joel says. “The thing’s a tank.”

  “Let’s do it, then.”

  Joel shakes his head as he approaches the Hummer, and pauses at the open driver’s door, bending his head, gathering his wits. The twins are facing out into the darkness, but they’re casting worried glances toward the barrier.

  Felicia has been monitoring the area with her senses, and she has felt an odd emptiness, reaching out almost as far as she can extend. She can feel Nicole out there, and the attendant mass of infestations around her, but it’s as if all the closer bodies have disengaged from their tasks and headed to higher ground, leaving the survivors to this patchwork barricade. Peripherally, she’s also aware of Scott’s consciousness, dwindling.

  Like Rachel said, the survivors are dying.

  One by one.

  Joel climbs quickly into the Hummer and slams the door.

  “Are we driving over them?” Kayla asks meekly from the truck’s cab.

  “We are, honey,” Rachel says, shifting the truck into gear. “If you need to, cover your eyes.”

  “They won’t hurt, right?”

  “I promise they won’t.”

  Felicia watches Kayla bury herself in Rachel’s side, then her gaze flickers toward Joel’s Hummer, which is poised to break through a wall of flesh.

  Then Rachel herself bows her head into Kayla’s neck, closing her eyes.

  The Hummer begins creeping in reverse. Joel wants to get a bit of speed up. She can almost visualize his thoughts—not too much speed, or the impact might affect the integrity of the Hummer’s front end. He comes to a stop behind the truck, and they can all see his teeth-gritted solemnity. He revs up the Hummer and then doesn’t waste any time: It bursts forward, roaring, its huge tires bludgeoning the asphalt, three tons of blunt metal thundering its way toward a mountain of human corpses. Felicia senses the collective intake of breath among the survivors, the squeezing of eyes shut. And then the big vehicle crashes into the first vehicles, sending them catapulting in both directions and tumbling away with twin symphonies of shattering metal and glass. In the immediate aftermath, the two cars behind those skid screeching out of the way, and then Joel is pummeling over bodies, squashing and crushing.

  Felicia feels tears squirt helplessly from her eyes, but she can’t look away. Distantly, she hears Joel screaming in rage.

  Bones crack, heads split like melons, blood pools like oil.

  The Hummer rocks atop a sea of flesh like an ocean vessel, tipping to port and starboard, and Joel hangs on to the wheel with his ropy-muscled arms. The tires slip and spin, spraying strips of bloody flesh everywhere, including the truck’s windshield. Felicia feels bits of human meat dot her hair, and she ducks farther down, weeping.

  For an eternity, Joel surges through the flesh by sheer source of metallic will, and finally the bloodbath is over. He has left unprecedented carnage in his wake, and Felicia knows the survivors—all of them—will never be the same because of what happened here on this street. Rachel is the first to think it, Felicia senses. Even compared with everything that has preceded this moment, everything in the past week, this is somehow the worst thing. The most horrible thing.

  The Hummer limps out of the mess, something wrong with its inner workings. It comes to a bumpy stop, and Joel takes a moment to study his new surroundings, finding nothing but empty road and foothills rising up. Then he rests his head on the wheel.

  Felicia slowly rises to her full height in the truck’s flatbed, surveying the scene, wiping flecks of bloody flesh from her face. Then she bends toward the truck’s open rear window.

  “Keep her head down,” Felicia instructs Rachel, who nods furiously into Kayla’s hair.

  “Stay down, sweetie,” comes Rachel’s whispered voice.

  “I will.”

  The twins both have their free hands over their mouths. They have backed all the way to the truck and are staring at the Hummer with glistening eyes. Zoe is weeping.

  “We have to get past it,” Rachel says, rising as she makes sure Kayla remains secure against the truck’s bench seat. “Right now.”

  Wordlessly, the twins hop into the flatbed Ford, and Rachel grinds into first gear.

  “Felicia, how’s it look out there? Any threats?”

  “Quiet,” is all she says.

  Then Rachel begins to roll forward, and her headlamps render the bloodbath clinical—every inch of destroyed flesh laid bare beneath the unforgiving glow, a vivid charnal house of ripped flesh. Just like Joel, Rachel lets loose with a string of obscenities, the words thick with despair. Felicia tries to block it all out, even the interior screams flowing from the rest, by focusing hard on Nicole, who is beyond this ridge, waiting for her.

  She narrows her thoughts on the time before the end, entwined with her lover on her hand-me-down couch in her cramped apartment, in the heat of the summer with the fan on, the buzzing fan oscillating and cooling their damp flesh, the worries of the school year past them, their futures bright and giggly ahead of them, and nothing but slippery fun days and nights for now. That was all for now, and that was enough.

  In her heart, a sharp ache stabs at her.

  A sob shakes her from her reverie. It’s Zoe, right next to her. The young woman has slapped her hands to her ears, unable to take the crunching sounds of bone and flesh beneath the weight of the truck. Her rifle is on the truck bed, sliding in the grit.

  Rachel becomes aware of the skies, which are in heightened turmoil.

  Is it because they are closer? Because they are approaching the center? Are the strangers reacting to their proximity? Their continued survival?

  Are the skies roiling because of her?

  Finally, the truck bounces clear of the smeared human remains a
nd gains traction on the asphalt. Ahead of them, in the jittery yellow light of the truck’s headlamps, the Hummer is parked aslant in the bike lane, looking injured. Its sideboards and tires are red with blood. Rachel drives toward Joel in a daze—Felicia can feel her mindscape like a numbness.

  The foothills lay before them in deep darkness, the winding road reaching up and away toward Masonville. Hordes of bodies await them up there, amassed in the forests, feeding the strangers above. Great columns of light rise in shivering, crimson beams. Felicia watches the phenomenon, knowing that she once understood the communication in that light. She once understood the language.

  Not anymore.

  The light quivers, as if with rage.

  As if watching them.

  Something is happening.

  The survivors barely have time to take in their new surroundings and emit final shaky sighs before the heavens erupt with crackling thunder.

  And in the distance, a hundred enraged bodies begin racing toward them.

  CHAPTER 25

  “They’re coming!” Felicia screeches through the constant pain in her throat. “They’re—” she begins again, then stops, because everyone has seen them now as the rushing bodies appear from under the crush of sound.

  The bodies rumble like angry bugs down the slope, graceful and alien, their clothes mostly gone, their skin red, enflamed, war-torn. Their faces are ravaged by their hungry assault on bark, gooey and obscured by sap and splinters. Felicia knows instinctively that their trajectory is informed as much by extrasensory communal intellect than by human vision. And yet how fluidly they rush at them, like birds, like insects with a singular intent.

  Even Felicia, herself recently one of them, feels her chest seize with terrified awe. She is shocked where she stands, not having anticipated the approach. Had the horror of the barrier blocked her attention from the strangers? And they had taken advantage of that? Or had they tricked her?

  Survivors gather around her in panic, also silenced by terror—she can feel it like a vibration—and for a moment Felicia too can only watch the horde approach.

  Is her ability waning?

  The bodies are a hundred yards away, scrambling, gasping. They’re coming from all westerly directions, their throats glowing red, their shared purpose clear.