Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood

by Bovberg, Jason

  Those words hang in the humid air for a moment, and the thing on the floor continues to watch them warily.

  It is a profoundly alien sight, Michael has to admit.

  “How did this happen?” he asks. “What happened? I mean, my God!”

  Both men are shaking their heads, but it’s Kevin who responds. “No one knows, man.”

  “I keep wondering what they’re seeing through those eyes,” Joel whispers. “Look at that.”

  The thing just stares with its flat eyes, obviously seeing them, regarding them … somehow … but there’s no denying the feeling that no actual human awareness remains.

  “How are they seeing out of those eyes?” Joel continues.

  “And it looks like it wants to tear your face off, right?” Kevin says. “Yeah, that’s what we thought. But I bet if we unlocked him and got out of his way, and we left that door open … he’d run right past us and search for a way out of this place.”

  Michael looks at Kevin. “What do you mean?”

  “I think this thing is more scared than angry. It just wants out of here.”

  “He looks like he wants to murder me.”

  “I know. But Kevin’s right. I think it’s scared out of its mind,” Joel says. “The question is, who’s in control of that mind?”

  Michael flashes on the bodies he has seen attached to pine trees outside. The incomprehensible sight of those bodies. Just like those bodies, this man’s limbs are hyper-extended into what must be an extraordinarily painful position. The skin covering the shoulders is enflamed, speaking of damage to the sockets. And yet the one arm not fastened into handcuffs still works, scrambling for purchase on the slippery vinyl tiles.

  “Jesus, why is he—bent over backward like that?”

  “All right, so here’s what I’ve figured,” Joel says, keeping an eye on the prisoner. “I think what we’re dealing with is an alien invasion. I’m not kidding. And I’m not talking about little green men in flying saucers. I’m talking about something atmospheric. A presence coming down and taking us over. Something has inhabited these bodies, and it’s not from here. I don’t know if you’ve seen what’s going on in the sky, but that’s what’s clinching it for me. These are aliens. Aliens that have taken over our bodies. And wherever they’re from? This is how they get around. This is how they walk.”

  The three men watch the bald man squirm angrily, occasionally gasping.

  Finally, Michael turns back to Kevin. “Please tell me this is a joke.”

  “Heh,” Kevin says. “I’m not sure I’m on board with the alien-invasion theory.” He eyes Joel with eyebrows raised. “But this thing is no joke … and I know it’s not exactly the greatest thing to wake up to at a destroyed hospital, either.”

  Michael doesn’t really know what to think. Or how to respond. He stands there staring, finally bracing himself against the doorjamb, his eyes moving from the bald man to these two survivors. These two survivors, with whom his daughter apparently endured an honest-to-God apocalyptic event.

  He can’t think of anything to say.

  Then Joel is raising his pistol arm—the weapon is some kind of semi-automatic—for a kill shot. Michael starts from his daze.

  “Hey, hey hey!” He reaches out toward the policeman. “What are you doing?!”

  Joel is still aiming. “You don’t understand, Mike.”

  “What are you talking about? What the hell is going on around here?!”

  He moves forward to somehow prevent the shot, and then—

  Wait,” comes a voice behind them. “Don’t shoot.”

  The men turn to see Rachel behind them. Her face is pale and streaked with dirt and sweat. Several days’ worth of grief are evident in her expression.

  “Rachel!” Michael says.

  Behind her, Bonnie is heading in their direction from the end of the hall.

  Michael takes his daughter’s shoulders, automatically turning her away from the horror in the room, as if to protect her. Immediately he understands that she has already seen far worse. But she falls into the embrace, almost eagerly, as she keeps an eye on Joel and his firearm.

  “Are you all right?” Michael breathes into Rachel’s hair.

  A pause. “I’m far from all right.”

  “I’m here now,” he whispers into her hair. “I’m sorry I wasn’t before.”

  There’s a pause, and her voice breaks when she says, “Me too.”

  Michael glances over at Joel, who is keeping an eye on the room’s frightful occupant. His pistol is raised, barrel pointing at the ceiling.

  Rachel pulls away from Michael, shaking her head.

  She turns to Joel.

  “Don’t kill him,” she says, her voice wavering. “We can save him.”

  Chapter 5

  “He was alive,” Rachel insists. “When I put that blood in him, he turned back. I swear it’s the truth.” She begins melting into further tears. “He spoke to me. And I killed him. I killed my Tony. But he was alive.” Shaking her head, in utter misery. “He was human.”

  “Are you serious?” Bonnie says, her hand all fluttery at her throat.

  “That can’t be right …” murmurs a young woman—one of the twins, Chloe or Zoe—to Michael’s left. She appears stunned, her eyes glassy beneath her mop of unkempt brown hair. “We’ve killed so many of them …”

  The rest of the survivors are silent for a long, tense moment.

  They’re in a large open space at the north end of the hospital, a broad vestibule that leads to various types of specialized examination areas. Through one open doorway, Michael glimpses a hulking CT scanner, and he has a fleeting thought that the machine—once a marvel of 21st century medical science and now just a dark, useless conglomeration of metal and plastic—might never be used again.

  Michael silently considers the assembled survivors, and he feels a shockwave wash over him at the fact that there are fewer than a dozen of them.

  This is what’s left?

  He feels the urge to go back to his room, get back into the bed, and dive into unconsciousness, in the hope that he might find his way out of the nightmare.

  But no.

  Each person appears numb, as if a collective rug has been pulled from underneath them. There’s Joel, Rachel, Bonnie, and Kevin, and then there’s middle-aged Karen and Jerry, who would appear to be a couple. Michael wonders fleetingly if they are—and whether they were before this thing happened. What would the odds of that be?

  There’s also the trio of girls leaning against one another on a bench at the far wall, off to the left. Michael has to remind himself of their names—meek Chrissy and the taller twins. Given the concussion, he’s surprised—and privately relieved—that he can remember all their names, even though he can’t yet tell the twins apart.

  But that’s it! Ten people!

  Michael is afraid to extrapolate from this motley crew any kind of figure estimating how many people have actually survived this event.

  Even at that thought, he’s literally shaking his head out of his ruminations, in fervent denial.

  Rachel’s words have indeed thrown the exhausted band of survivors into a muted, collective confusion. After Joel reluctantly shut the door on the handcuffed prisoner, he began questioning her and then stopped, preferring instead to bring the larger group together. Joel whisked her downstairs and called on the entire group to meet here at the humid epicenter of the hospital. He described the locked-up corpse, then called on Rachel to explain what she meant when she prevented him from killing it for good.

  Now Joel looks angrily expectant, pacing around, ready to receive the full weight of Rachel’s information but holding himself back from exploding. Rachel herself looks miserable, having just dropped a figurative bomb about her final encounter with her boyfriend Tony.

  “I’m totally serious,” she says, her voice monotone. “He spoke to me.”

  “Are you sure he was infected in the first place?” Joel asks.

  She gives him
a tearful glare. “His goddamn face was wrapped around a tree trunk, and his mouth was full of sap and splinters. Does that sound like human behavior?”

  Joel watches her out of the corner of his eye. “Calm yourself, girl.”

  “He had that light in him like all the rest.”

  Michael watches his daughter from his bench adjacent to the door of a restroom. She’s commanding the attention of this diverse band, even in the grip of a firestorm of her own emotion. He can hear her voice cracking. He knows she’s carrying something inside her that’s toxic. She’s just told the terrible truth about her boyfriend Tony. About his death and apparent rebirth—and his second death, by her hand. Even Michael feels a sudden, sharp remorse—he knows Tony well. Too well. It’s true he never completely warmed to the boy, thinking his daughter too good for the likes of him. But he feels the weight of the loss, and its effect on his daughter, who loved the boy.

  Rachel is despondent.

  “After I put the blood into him, he said—he said—my name.” She wipes a frantic tear from her cheek. “He looked at me. He recognized me. But I was too late to hold back the trigger. I couldn’t stop it. One half second, and—and—and—it would have been different. He’d be alive.” Her chin falls to her chest. “He’d be here.”

  These words are met with about thirty seconds of silence. The faces of the other survivors betray some kind of worried pain. They’re glancing around at one another, their expressions almost pleading. Pleading for understanding, or seeking kinship in despair.

  Michael feels alone on the outskirts of the room, knowing that his time in unconsciousness has cost him any sense of that kinship, for better or for worse. Over the past couple days, these people shared an experience that would bind them together for the rest of their lives—however long those lives lasted.

  He’s also further flummoxed by some of the revelations escaping these survivors’ mouths, including his daughter’s. This is the second mention of blood, and he has no idea what it means. He can only flash on the unit of blood he spied in Rachel’s open backpack, and, of course, the horrendous presence of the stuff on almost every surface he has seen.

  “But what does that mean?” Bonnie says. “Does it mean—”

  “I don’t know what the hell it means,” Joel says. “Could be some kind of … some kind of vestigial memory of what he was before he—I don’t know. Maybe even a trick. We have no idea what these fuckers want. What they’re up to. Hell, it could be that she just heard something she wanted to hear.”

  “It wasn’t like that.” Rachel stares laser beams at the cop. “I pumped the blood into him, and he changed. He changed back!”

  The group is silent.

  “Don’t you look at me like that!” she shouts. “I know what I saw. I know what happened.”

  Kevin says, “But how—I mean, look, Rachel, I’d trust you with my life, you know that, right? I’ve known you for all of two days, but that’s something I’m sure of. But listen … those goddamn things are eating trees, okay? Their throats are filled with chewed wood. Their bones are all broken—look at the way they move. Everything dislocated. Everything wrong. How could they still be … alive?”

  “Don’t forget,” Bonnie puts in as gently as she can while barely maintaining a sense of sweaty calm, “those things had no pulse for over a full day. Their eyes were dead. No respiration. We talked about it, right here. We were dealing with corpses.”

  “I know, I know,” Rachel says, looking up. “So—look, I’m not saying I have the answers … far from it—but maybe … maybe while that thing is inside them, it’s keeping them alive in a different way? I don’t know! What I do know is that despite all that—no pulse, no respiration, all that—those things felt alive the whole time. Their skin was warm.” She turns to Bonnie. “You remember—I told you that.” There’s a pause that no one jumps in to fill. “And Kevin, I have no idea what it would feel like to wake up like that. They’d be dealing with broken bones for sure, and a hell of a sore throat.” She looks at Joel. “You’re the science-fiction guy, you have any ideas?”

  “Let’s say it’s true,” Joel says evenly, darkly. “That we can inject those things with O-negative blood and essentially cure them. That’s what you’re saying, right?” He involuntarily swallows. “You realize those goddamn Thompson brothers are burning thousands of human beings in the foothills, right? You understand how many of them we killed ourselves?”

  “You don’t think I’ve considered that?”

  “And yet you decided not to tell us till now?” His voice turns into a shout. “You’ve been sleeping while people are being murdered?”

  Michael rises. “Hey, hey!”

  “What?” Joel demands.

  “Take it easy.”

  “It’s all right, Dad,” Rachel says miserably. “I deserve it.”

  “But Rach …” he begins. “You didn’t know—”

  Joel has yanked his radio from his belt and is thumbing its face. He brings it to his ear, glaring at Rachel as he walks into an adjacent hall.

  “Jeff Thompson, come in, you read? This is Officer Joel Reynolds. Come in, over.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” Rachel says, and Michael sees in her gaze something he’s never seen before, even in the crush of grief following her mother’s death. “I didn’t know what to—”

  Bonnie strides across the room and takes Rachel into her arms. The affection takes Michael by surprise—another suggestion of something he missed while he was unconscious. The moment brings strong memories of Rachel’s mother to his mind, and of course his own private guilt. He falls back onto the bench.

  “Jeff or Pete, goddammit, put your ears on! Over!”

  The entire group watches Joel stalk out of the room, his voice trailing off as he moves down the corridor toward Admissions.

  “We should test it,” Kevin speaks up. “I mean, like … now.”

  “Yes,” Rachel says, gently extricating herself from Bonnie’s embrace. “And we have the perfect way to test it.”

  “I thought they all rushed out of here …” Chrissy says, miserable.

  “… unless they were locked up,” Kevin finishes the thought.

  “It was the first thing I heard when I woke up,” Michael says to her. “In fact, that might have been what woke me. Just dragging around above me. Scared the shit out of me.”

  “So how is it trapped?” one of the twins says. Michael thinks she’s Chloe. Closer to her, he notices her slightly darker, more haunted eyes. Also distinguishing from her twin is the fact that she’s covered in more dried blood than her sister Zoe. “Is it just barricaded in the room somehow? I mean, we know that these things can open doors. They’re obviously escaping from the cars, and from their homes—”

  “Handcuffed to the bed,” Michael says. “A prisoner. There’s a chair outside the door. Joel thinks he had a guard positioned there.”

  “How secure is he?”

  “Flopping around on the ground, just one arm secured. And actually that hand is just about severed.”

  “How do we get close to it?” Chrissy asks, glancing around the room. “This thing isn’t exactly gonna be cooperative.”

  Bonnie speaks up. “We haven’t tried knocking one out with drugs. What about a barbiturate? Chloroform? Nitrous?”

  “We’d still have to get close to it to administer those, right?” Kevin says. “I’m not getting within ten feet of that thing.”

  Bonnie slaps her forehead with her palm. “You’re right.”

  “Knocking it out is a fine idea, but we’d need to do it from afar—how?”

  “Tranquilizer dart?” Zoe says from across the room.

  Everyone looks her way, and she shrugs modestly, then continues.

  “My mom works at … I mean, she worked at the CSU vet hospital.” Zoe pauses as emotion touches her features and makes her voice husky. “They partnered with the Colorado Division of Wildlife sometimes. Last year, there was a bear they had to tranquilize and kill bec
ause it came into town. For the gun, they would fill and reuse these things, basically like syringes, so I’d think you could fill them with blood.”

  Kevin says, “No shit? I mean, not about the bear, but about the tranquilizers. Would you know where they’re kept?”

  “Ummm.”

  “And sorry, I don’t mean to be a dick, but which one are you? Chloe or—”

  “That’s okay.” She sniffs. “She’s Chloe. I’m Zoe. Our mom was the same person.”

  “I figured,” Kevin says, laughing a little. “And I’m sorry.”

  “I never saw them, but I’m sure there are darts and guns at the vet hospital, and the Wildlife office too. I think that’s on Prospect near that big hotel.”

  “Do you think a tranquilizer will work, though?” asks Rachel. “I mean, like I said, there’s no heartbeat. Does that mean there’s no circulation, or is something else moving blood through them? Any kind of drug would need a bloodstream, right?”

  Michael listens to his daughter. He feels as if he hasn’t been asleep for days but rather months. Years. However long it might take for Rachel to grow into this take-charge, no-nonsense persona.

  “Blood is obviously important to these things,” Bonnie says, “so I’d imagine that—whatever’s in their heads is moving that blood around? In something approximating circulation?”

  It takes this latest mention of blood for Michael to glance over at Rachel thoughtfully. Of course, one of the things the two of them have in common is their blood type. The rarest blood type. It was a fun connection between them when she was a kid, a goofy talking point. O-negative blood. The universal donor. The universal healer.

  “Look, this is a conversation we need to have, for sure,” Kevin says. “What makes these things tick and all that. But we don’t have time to go to the Division of Wildlife or whatever. We have to test this thing now. I say we all get in there and hold it down like we did before, get it done.”

  Bonnie murmurs, “Oh no.”

  “I agree,” Rachel says. “We know how to handle them. For chrissakes, we held off a whole hospital full of them. We can handle one.”