He looks down at his sleeping daughter now, curled up with her bear, then moves back to the door and peers out again.
The smell is dreadful—rotting and stagnant.
Michael steps out into the hallway, feels the stickiness and slipperiness of the blood patches under his feet. Guiding himself along the edges of gurneys, careful not to touch any blood with his hands, he trudges through the hallway that runs along the west side of the hospital.
He finds a room with a half-closed door, into which innumerable bloody footprints lead. He stares for a moment at the floor, trying to imagine the scene. Everything is quiet and dim beyond the door. He reaches out and pushes the door. It swings inward.
This is the source of the sour stench.
Swallowing, Michael steps into the large, open room, squinting to make out details. When he sees the bodies stacked against the far wall, he lets out an involuntary cry. One hand at his mouth, he edges closer to the corpses. There are at least fifty bodies there. Most are wrapped carefully, tightly, in white hospital sheets, but the bodies at the periphery are wrapped more haphazardly, their pale flesh showing through gaps in the cloth. He comes within ten feet of the closest corpses, examining them even though every instinct is screaming at him to get the hell out of this room.
The bodies appear to have suffered in horrific ways—great patches of twisted, mottled flesh on the exposed skin. Some of their facial expressions are equally ghastly. One of the bodies is a young girl, so badly injured that her eyes are white with cataracts and her skin is sloughing from her bloated face.
Michael backs hurriedly from the sight, bumping into a metal table and then dashing out.
His heart is thudding. A terrible event occurred here—very probably while he was asleep—and he’s now convinced that his daughter witnessed it. She might have even been at the center of it.
He’s finding it difficult to breathe. He stumbles forward through the hallway, needing fresh air.
Scuffed and bloodied double metal doors give way to the admissions area. Michael pushes through one of them and stands before a scene of further stinking atrocity. The floor is so caked with blood that it’s more dirty reddish brown than its original gray tile. The admissions desk is in utter disarray, papers and computer hardware flung everywhere, torn and broken. The stench of putrefaction is overlaid by smoke and, Michael believes, the cordite reek of gunpowder.
On the far side of the large waiting room, a makeshift barricade has been assembled out of chairs and tables and other items. There’s even a large framed print—some generic mountain scene—leaning askew in the teetering assemblage. It appears as if the barricade was built and then destroyed. Many of the items are broken and flung helter-skelter. There are bullet holes all over the wall behind the barricade.
Oh Jesus, Michael keeps repeating in his head. Oh Jesus.
It’s the silence that fills him with the deepest disquiet. The sense that this place was the scene of unspeakable violence and is now abandoned. A sensation of failure, that a tremendous fight was lost. And the overriding feeling that he was powerless for the duration of it.
“Hello?” he calls again, but his voice falters and trails away.
He steps into the large area.
“Hello!” he calls, louder.
He hears a distant clamor upstairs, as if in response to him—it’s the same sound he heard above him in his room. A metallic clatter. He peers up the open stairwell beyond the fallen barricade. There’s no one at the landing that looks down on the lobby. He swallows hard.
He makes his way toward the front windows, stepping over the larger puddles and blood swipes and smeared footprints. He can feel his heartbeat at his scalp wound. He tries to take long, slow breaths to keep it under control.
The glass sliding doors there are wrenched halfway open and skewed slightly as if off the tracks. He steps up next to them and feels a waft of warm air. The day is bright out there. What might have been a beautiful day in northern Colorado, if not for the horror, the death. To the south, below a bruised veil of smoke, blue sky is dotted with other disastrous plumes in the far distance. Still no people or animals of any kind. No aircraft. No movement. Nothing. Just empty streets and about a dozen abandoned cars, at skewed angles down Lemay Avenue. Ash drifts from the sky. It’s warm out there, and inside the hospital it’s humid and foul.
Worst of all, just beyond the small parking lot are two more human beings crammed beneath a pine tree, whose needled limbs have been splintered out of the way to make room for the bodies. The bodies—both of them doughy, nearly naked men—are painfully bent backward, the limbs wrenched out of their sockets, so severely that the position almost seems natural—as if these people have been, under the force of some cruel god, remade into an entirely new monstrous species. Their mouths are locked against the bark. Michael sees movement at the throat, and a slow drip of splinters and saliva and sap has created mushy stalagmites of mulch below their inverted, sap-caked faces. Michael feels a gag forming at the back of his throat and has to force his gaze away.
He’s breathing very quickly, and he feels a knot of emotion building at his chest.
He’s summoning the courage to try the stairs when he catches movement out of the corner of his eye. South on Lemay, a police cruiser is heading north, toward the hospital, winding its way around two wrecks in the middle of the street.
“Oh shit,” he breathes, feeling as if his worst fear has come true. It has come down to the money after all. Even as the thought slashes through his brain, he understands its irrationality, and yet it’s potent enough to fill his veins with acid.
He braces himself to bolt, his thoughts immediately turning to Rachel.
He can’t leave her. No way will he leave her.
And then he sees, following in the wake of the police cruiser, a large blue Chevy truck. A civilian vehicle. Both are headed this way.
Michael is frozen to the spot, caught between impulses to run outside and wave them down or to get back to Rachel and gather her up and get the hell out of here. Can he even trust that the police car is occupied by an actual policeman? Why is a civilian truck following it?
He moves to the edge of the window and watches the vehicles approach, straight north along an otherwise deserted street. In a moment, he sees that the man driving the cruiser is indeed wearing a police uniform. The sight fills him with despair.
The cop’s passenger is a woman, in her forties maybe. She looks exhausted, her head lolling against the window. He can’t tell if anyone is in the back seats. The driver of the truck is a large man with a determined expression on his face. Next to him is a young blond woman. And now Michael notices several people in the back of that truck. They also appear exhausted, sprawled out and heads bowed.
The vehicles pull into the emergency parking lot. Michael decides to fall back to the double doors leading toward Rachel, see what these people decide to do. He walks purposefully across the destroyed lobby, nearly slipping and falling in front of the registration desk but finally making it. He maneuvers behind the door. He touches his head wound carefully, relieved to find that the pain there has subsided by several orders of magnitude. He still feels a bit blurry and thick, but the dizziness is gone for the moment. He watches the entrance.
The vehicles rumble straight up to the door, and their engines shut off. Car doors clank shut.
Voices just outside the wrenched-open outer doors.
“—not something I ever thought I’d say seriously.” This voice is pitched authoritatively. It’s the voice of someone in charge. It must be the cop. “I mean, in real life.”
“Me neither.” A female voice.
“It’s ridiculous,” comes another male voice—the driver of the truck? “But I keep trying to think of a less batshit idea, and I can’t. And then I start arguing with myself, and I sound like Scott.”
Michael watches through a gap in the doors, and now the men appear at the entrance. Yes, the cop is leading the way in, wrenching the doors
back further. Michael is amazed by his haggard appearance: His uniform is extremely unkempt, covered with stains, ripped in places, and his cheeks are starkly unshaven below his military crewcut. He’s laughing humorlessly at what the large man has just said. The big man steps in behind him, and he’s similarly splashed with blood. His massive forearms are smeared with it. His hair is greasy, thinning.
“I mean, bodies struck down and … and … inhabited by something,” the cop says as he comes further into the lobby. “And that light, that’s the weirdest thing, right? This red … thing. Like a possession. I’ll probably never understand that.”
“We all saw it. Believe me, you’re not alone.”
Michael is listening hard but is thrown into confusion by what this man saying. Squinting under a persistent dull throb, he watches the middle-aged woman make her way through the doorway. She’s dirty blond, just on the verge of heavy, but still attractive—at least she would probably be on a better day. She’s red-eyed, on the brink of collapse. As she steps into the lobby, she says:
“I need food. And sleep.”
The large man says, “We should start organizing trips to Safeway, grab whatever food we can find. The cafeteria is already almost wiped out of water.”
The cop doesn’t appear to hear them.
“But what about the way they move? Suppose that’s how they move wherever they’re from? On their planet, or whatever? Like their original bodies are used to.”
What in the hell? Michael thinks as he watches three younger women—all of them exhausted, leaning against one another—follow in behind the more matronly woman. Is this some kind of joke?
“But that’s their mistake, maybe. They aren’t familiar with our bodies, they don’t know how to work them. And something is keeping them from using them right.”
“Like what?” one of the younger women says tiredly.
The three younger women appear to be the same age, and in fact two of them seem to be twins. They’re young; perhaps younger than Rachel. The twins are tall, gangly, and athletic—basketball players at CSU, perhaps. They both have shoulder-length brown hair, moistened by perspiration and then dried in tangles. The other is smaller, meek, blond. She looks wrecked.
“Well, I don’t know, but it’s probably the same thing that prevented them from knowing that a certain kind of blood would make some of us immune to them.”
One of the twins says something unintelligible, and the cops shoots back:
“No, it’s not! Come on. That’s not all it is, anyway. I mean, look at it. Look at that.”
The cop has about-faced in the lobby, at the window, and gestured out toward the two bodies at the pine tree at the edge of the parking lot.
Silence, followed by the shuffling noise of the small group coming to a stop in front of the admissions desk.
“And you heard it. You can still hear it. I’ve never heard anything like that in my life.”
Michael catches only a few words of what the older woman says. “—is it—when—”
“I think they’re communicating,” the cop says. “I think that’s what that is. You remember—Bonnie, you remember—when that happened before. When all those bodies were up there, right up there.” He gestures up the stairwell. “Just scowling down at us, ready to jump down and attack, or whatever they had in mind. And then this—this sound happened, and every one of those things stopped. The mood changed. Right? I’m telling you, they’re communicating.”
The big guy says, “I feel like Scott again when I say that, yeah, if these things are alien, well, of course they’re communicating. I doubt they’d try to take over the world without a plan.”
The woman named Bonnie says, after an exhausted pause, “If they’re communicating, what are they saying?”
“Yeah, that’s the question. And I have no clue.”
Bonnie lets out a shaky sigh, and she says, “Where’s Rachel?”
Michael feels a rush of relief at the mention of his daughter’s name, and yet something is keeping him from revealing himself. For a long moment, he can only hold his breath, trying to make sense of the strange conversation he just overheard. He shakes his head, unable to process. And then the imagery conjured by their words brings back the image of Rachel blasting through the door to find him. Did that really happen? He still has the sensory memory of the shattered door handle; he can still see the shredded veneer. The tacky blood smeared across the floor, starting to stink.
And now these words.
He almost feels that, if he could only slink back to Rachel undetected, he could steal her away from this crazy place, and go home. Go back to where things might still make sense.
Finally he clears his throat and calls out, “Hello?” The word comes out raspy and not loud enough to be heard in the lobby. He tries again. “Hello! I’m unarmed!”
The group is startled, each person wearily frozen in his or her tracks, watching him emerge from the hallway. The cop has some kind of large weapon at his side, loosely at the ready. It appears to be a police-issue patrol rifle. As Michael makes his way fully into view, the cop relaxes into an odd expression of resigned satisfaction. He’s a clean-cut young man, former military, Michael is sure.
“Oh my God, look who it is!” Bonnie has a look of glad surprise on her dirty, lined face. Michael sees relief, surprise, and also melancholy in this stranger’s expression.
Patches of the woman’s skin and great swaths of her clothing have been splattered and even drenched with blood. The same is true of all of these people.
“Rachel’s dad!” the large man says, stepping forward. He brings up a meaty hand holding a red ball cap, secures it on his head, then reaches for a handshake. Michael tentatively lifts his own hand and returns the gesture. His hand is engulfed. “Name’s Kevin. It’s good to see you alive, brother.” The man is sweaty and filthy, obviously fatigued, and after only a brief moment of gladness, his features bend toward a stark solemnity.
And then Bonnie is embracing Michael, hard. He grimaces not only at the jarring clinch, and the way it seems to clang his loose skull like a bell, but also at the smell of her. He detects the sharp tang of sweat, but also a coating of blood—wiped at but still evident in the creases of her flesh—and what he imagines to be the stink of an awful experience. Perhaps the same experience that Rachel went through.
“I’m Bonnie,” she says into his chest. “I was afraid I’d never see you conscious.”
“My name is Michael,” he says to the group over her shoulder. “Do I—do I know any of you?”
“Oh, we know who you are!” Kevin says.
Bonnie murmurs quiet laughter and pulls away. There are actually tears in her eyes. She glances back at the cop, as if searching for what to say.
“You have no idea what happened, do you?” the cop says. It’s his turn to step forward, switch the rifle to his left hand, and shake hands with Michael. The man has that confident way of carrying himself that speaks of good upbringing and strong training, and he has a powerful handshake. Michael has never met this man, and yet the cop greets him as if he has known him for years and is relieved to see him alive.
Michael can only shake his head in response to the cop’s question.
“I’m Joel.” A small smile takes hold of his lips. “Michael, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“All this time, you’ve been ‘Rachel’s dad’.”
Kevin murmurs a laugh. “True.”
Joel gestures behind him, toward the three young women. “That’s Chrissy there—she and Rachel are pretty tight—and the twins, Chloe and Zoe.”
The young women nod to him, too tired to do anything more. Chrissy, the petite one, is in gray shorts and a blue tee shirt that is spattered with dried blood. She looks to be in her early twenties and has a dark, haunted quality to her face. Her eyes and face are red as if she’s been crying uncontrollably for days. The twins, about the same age as Chrissy, are wearing what Michael might consider nightclothes: cotton pants and white bl
ouses, all of it filthy with blood and grime. Michael stares at the young women with increasing confusion.
There are three others just now entering through the main entrance, a man in a business suit and a woman in a drab pantsuit, both of them perhaps in their fifties. Also exhausted.
“That’s Jerry and … Karen, right?” Kevin says.
The woman acknowledges Michael with a half-hearted smile.
Michael doesn’t know what to say for a long moment. The enormity of everything leaves him speechless. Kevin lays a hand briefly on his shoulder, offers a weary smile, and then pushes away and through the double doors. The young women settle to the floor in a heap, utterly spent from whatever they were doing outside.
“I don’t remember anything, no,” he says, belatedly answering Joel’s question. He feels a tinge in his skull as the words escape him. “I’m pretty sure I’ve got a concussion.”
“I’d say that’s a safe assumption.” Bonnie reaches up to touch his bandage, begins to expertly remove it.
“I keep falling asleep,” he says.
She’s blinking exaggeratingly as if to keep her own eyes open. “Your body is trying to recover. How does your head feel?”
“Like a truck ran over it.”
“Nausea?”
“A while ago, but not now.”
“How about your vision?”
“Fine, actually.”
“I think you did suffer a concussion, but it’s healing. Just gotta take it easy. I’ll get you some Tylenol.”
He nods gratefully.
“Where’s Rachel?” Joel asks.
Michael looks at Joel curiously. “She’s back there, in the room where—where I was sleeping.”
Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood Page 3
