Blood Run – The Complete Trilogy – First Promise, Two Riders, Last Chance
Page 43
He called from his cell and Maggie had already been home, standing in the kitchen, still in her scrubs; she wasn’t due back in to the hospital again for the next two days. She was exhausted from her last shift as an ER nurse. There had been so many people who came in with the flu…it had been like some kind of crazy, overnight epidemic…that her original shift had been extended by four hours.
She had the television on the counter turned to a local news station. Joe’s voice was broken up because he was on the train. Part of his ride–before the bridge–was underground. He said not to worry and he’d see her soon and to lock up.
He said he loved her.
As Maggie listened to his voice, the television was showing Philadelphia. So many people in the streets. They seemed to be pouring from every building in a human flood. The camera must have been right outside the news station and it was directed up Broad, a main thoroughfare. There was no word in Maggie’s vocabulary for what she was seeing. Chaos, anarchy, pandemonium…none of these words were big enough–bad enough–to describe what was happening. People were being hit by cars, by city busses, by cabs. They were knocking into each other, falling, screaming, crying, and in some cases, fighting.
As she watched, one man–a young man, maybe a student–was hit by a car and knocked to the side of the road. As he struggled to stand, more people ran past, kicking him or running right over his hands, arms and head as he struggled. Then a car ran over his mid-section and he stopped struggling. He was tiny and blurry; a blurred mass of denim and blood and books. Maggie stared, horrified, her mouth hanging open as she listened to Joe’s chopped up voice. She nodded as if he could see her and stepped closer to the television. The young man lay still as death. Did she really just watch that kid die? On television? Her mind danced and feinted, trying for a less unsavory explanation…but there was none. “Joe,” she said, her voice a shocked rasp. “Joe, I just saw…I just saw a guy, a boy, get…”
The blurry corpse twitched. Maggie stepped back sharply, her heart leaping painfully. Had that kid…? Had he moved? “Joe, you won’t believe this but…”
Joe’s voice went on and on. He couldn’t hear her, she realized. She could hear him, but he couldn’t hear her. “Joe?” she said, her voice tiny, a little girl’s voice.
The young man moved again and she felt a shift of hope like warm water in her head but then that warmth was washed away by icy shock…the young man was dragging himself up onto the sidewalk. But only half of himself. Only his front half. From mid-chest down, he’d been severed. She could just make out the twin lumps of his lungs dragging behind him…hanging on by threads.
The running people on the sidewalk dodged away from him as instinctively as sheep will turn from a dog. Or a coyote. He grabbed at each flying pair of legs. “Joe, this kid, he’s not dead, he’s not dead he’s oh god what is he what’s happening…?”
On some level she realized she wasn’t making any sense and she closed her mouth. She was scaring herself. Joe told her to keep the doors locked. Don’t go outside. He loved her. “Maggie? Maggie can me? Ma I love you can wrong with the train but Maggie?”
A lady fell down, right in front of the young man. Had she been pushed? Maggie thought so, yes. The young man grabbed at the lady, grabbed her hair and pulled himself up onto her. Her arms flailed and she must have been screaming, of course she was, but there was no sound from the television. The young man was…he was…Maggie slid to the floor, her back against the kitchen cabinets, until the television was above her, the picture distorted by the angle. She said, “Joe please god please come home Joe come home please.” Her voice was high and thin. She couldn’t tell if she was hearing herself from outside or inside. She didn’t care.
That young man was eating that lady. Eating her face. Tearing great hunks from her throat. Then the camera must have been hit because the scene seemed to float through the air, revolving, toppling. Maggie experienced a strong sense of vertigo as the camera fell.
“Maggie? I lov me? Can–” Joe’s voice cut off all at once and Maggie vomited between her legs onto the kitchen floor.
~ ~ ~
Maggie sent Babygirl along with Randy and Bonnie and then stepped down into the little rowboat. ThreeBees had two rowboats tied to the back of it plus two jet skis tied up alongside. From her vantage point on the rowboat, Maggie looked back at the ThreeBees. It had once been something pretty special, Maggie surmised, someone’s Shangri-la. Barbra’s Bay Breeze was painted in gold across her back end in boasting, fancy script.
Now, after two months of serious habitation, it was looking much worse for wear. The boats and jet skis tied up around it gave the formerly sleek vessel a doddering, mother hen look. It (she, Maggie corrected herself, she) was a sixty-foot cabin cruiser, a weekender yacht for someone of moderate wealth. Three bedrooms and a bathroom (head, Maggie, it’s called a head, she thought and another ghost of a smile crossed her lips…what Joe would have said about that!). The second level, the level she was looking at, consisted of the back deck, side decks, and front deck; and inside, a big salon and a galley. The cockpit was one deck up…the staterooms one deck below.
There were nine people living on it now. Randy and Bonnie, herself, Babygirl (she and Babygirl shared a bedroom), Jade and Singer, a brother and sister from New York in their mid-twenties who’d been staying with family in Sea Isle. Mrs. Allen, who had to be at least eighty, and Denny and Brian, roommates from Stockton State who’d managed to find their way to the coast. Just as Maggie had done. The young men bedded down in the salon and Jade and Mrs. Allen shared the remaining bedroom.
Clothing hung from a line draped across the entryway from the salon to the back deck, drying in the wind. Classy, Maggie thought to herself, very, very classy. Bet the former owners never thought to dry their underthings on a line this way as they cruised from port to port. But of course, they had to conserve resources. Most important thing out here: resources. Her eyes slid with unconscious resentment to Flyboy, floating serenely out on the waves about a half-mile away.
Flyboy was a yacht, too, but Maggie surmised that the owners of Barbra’s Bay Breeze would have gazed upon Flyboy with envy so deep that it would almost have been a physical itch. Flyboy was a super yacht: somewhere just over two hundred feet, Maggie would guess, eight guest rooms, six crew’s quarters, two salons, three heads, six decks–four above the water, two below, two galleys, a crew’s mess, a gym, a media room, an elevator (which wasn’t put to use), a grand circular staircase, a garage that held a runabout and jet skis or even a car…everything the seafaring billionaire would need to be comfortable.
Talk about needing resources, Maggie thought, what got used on that sucker in just one week could run the ThreeBees for a year!
But Flyboy also held over eighty people right now. Maggie had been on it last about a week ago for the general assembly. The formerly elegant appointments on Flyboy were looking even worse for wear than their own little ThreeBees. Cabinets had been chipped and countertops stained. Hand stitched leather upholstery had been snagged and gouged. Gym equipment had long since been heaved overboard to make room for beds. The luxurious owner’s quarters had been occupied by at least ten people camped out in nests of blankets and even couch cushions filched from the once glamorous salons–what once had been the private domain of some rich oil executive was now actually the least desirable area on the boat–kind of a cattle pen of humanity. The floors were dull and dirty. If the former owners could see Flyboy now, they’d probably faint dead away in a blue-blooded swoon.
Maggie dragged her mind away from resenting Flyboy and put it back on task. She was being a real bitch today–if not outside, then certainly inside. She needed rest and time alone: a bath, a drink, a magazine that hadn’t been looked at eighteen times already. All of those things were near impossibilities in their new world.
She got a firmer grip on the fishing net and scanned the floor of the rowboat. Two fingers lay under the seat and she scooped them up and over the side, her face
set in lines of disgusted determination. She had to hunt for the third; it had made it to the front of the little boat. She was reminded of snakes and chickens, both purported to ‘live’ quite some time after being divided from their heads.
She shuddered, hoping it wouldn’t twitch when she touched the net to it. That grossed her out. She finally got up enough nerve to reach forward and with one smooth movement, flung it up and over the side. It made a little ‘plip’ sound when it hit the water. She sighed and sank down onto the middle seat, blowing out a held breath.
She scanned the horizon, as had become habit, her eyes skimming from beach to road to the little motel and its surrounding cabins. They hadn’t seen any new survivors for weeks now. But you never knew.
“Maggie?”
She jumped and turned, her heart racing, but it was only Babygirl. She stood at the edge of the deck and looked at Maggie with worried eyes. “Did you get rid of them fingers?”
Maggie nodded and smiled. “All gone, Babygirl.” She scrambled up onto the deck and took Babygirl’s hand. “Want to eat?”
But Baby’s eyes went past Maggie and her face clouded. “What man is that?” she asked.
“Man?” Maggie echoed, confused, then turned to the starboard side. A yellow life raft floated twenty-five feet out. A man lay spread-eagled in the center, unconscious or sleeping–Maggie couldn’t tell which–but she could see that he was covered in blood.
The preceding was the beginning of:
The Boat
By Christine Dougherty
Available now!
Click here to preview and buy on Amazon
About the Author
Christine Dougherty is a native of South Jersey where she lives with her husband, dog, and two cats. She has been published in The Absent Willow Review, Niteblade, Necrotic Tissue, and Fiction at Work.
She draws heavily from the landscape she knows and many of her works have at least some element of South Jersey and the Tri-State area, meshed with a dark imagination that has plagued her since before she can remember.
A graduate of Hussian School of Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Christine has made her career as a graphic artist, art director and writer.
Christine’s greatest influences are Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, Anne Tyler, Dean Koontz, Wally Lamb and a fascination with the scarier aspects of life, be they paranormal or criminal.
She writes in the genres of horror, paranormal, and psychological thriller and is never happier than when she is tackling the undead, the walking dead, werewolves, vampires, zombies, ghosts, aliens, spooky scenes, scary characters, psychics, demons, devils, and quirky heroes and heroines.
Visit Christine at: www.christinedoughertybooks.com
Go back to Contents
Table of Contents
The Blood Run Trilogy
Also by Christine Dougherty
Dedications
Book One ~ First Promise
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Book Two ~ Two Riders
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Book Three ~ Last Chance
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Excerpt from The Boat
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
About the Author