“Thank you,” he says. He smiles weakly at her, embarrassed. “I passed out?”
“Kevin caught you before you hit the floor.” She gives him a slight smile.
He drinks again, swallows. The hospital is silent and dark behind her.
“Where’s Rachel?”
“She’s next door, sleeping hard.” Her brow trembles, and her gaze drifts. “Poor girl is hugging an old teddy bear.”
Michael imagines Rachel in her own hospital bed, curled fetal with her bear, and he feels a new tug of emotion.
He tries to recall the last thing he did before falling unconscious.
After the incident with the body upstairs—directly above him—Bonnie took charge of the situation medically, and she determined that the man had suffered hyper-extension in all the major joints. She used several braces to support the healing of the hyperextension. She found cold compresses to help, too. He remembers Bonnie saying, “I’m stunned his back isn’t broken. You saw the way he was bent backward. My spine hurts just thinking about it.”
After that, the survivors started in on the task of cleaning up the battle zone that the hospital had become. Michael probably took on more than he should have; he has a strong recollection of cleaning major portions of the floor in the lobby.
He doesn’t remember anything after that.
“You tried to brace yourself with your mop,” Bonnie says, “but you started slipping right down to the ground. Luckily Kevin was right there next to you.”
“So how’s it going out there?” Michael asks, motioning toward the hospital’s inner rooms and hallways.
“The man … the prisoner … he’s still asleep,” she says haltingly. “Everything else is coming along.” She gives in to a weary sigh. “I feel like—like what happened before, that the worst is over and now it’s time to recover. You know what I mean? I guess I need that. To feel like things can get better.”
“Sure, I get that.”
“We’re cleaning the place up as best we can … moving bodies to the morgue. For a sense of decorum as much as to isolate them.” She walks farther in, a frown crossing her face. “They’re starting to decompose in this heat. But I—I feel like, at least I can get my head around this. Dead bodies coming back to life and eating trees, not so much. But put me in charge of cleaning up a hospital? That I can do.”
“Makes sense to me.” He finishes a half-sandwich, resisting a strong instinct to plow right into the second half. “What time is it, anyway?”
She automatically brings up her wrist, but there’s no watch there. “It’s late, around midnight, I think. I was about to try to get some rest before my shift at the door.”
“So I’ve been out for how long?”
“Oh … five hours?”
“Jesus. Sorry.”
“Don’t knock unconsciousness, it’s your best medicine right now.”
“I need to be helping, but I keep falling asleep!”
“No one holds it against you. They just want you healthy.”
“I should be—”
“You helped a lot! All you missed was a bunch of indecisive people trying to plan what to do next.”
A long beat of silence inflates the distance between them. Bonnie appears about to come closer, perhaps settle into the plastic chair that has been pulled up next to the bed, but then she turns toward the door.
“I need to find my wife,” Michael whispers, not wanting Bonnie to leave.
She offers a sad smile, and now she moves to the chair. The chair is new to him, and he realizes that Rachel was probably sitting there at some point, watching him.
“Michael,” Bonnie says. “If I were you … I would start preparing for the worst.”
He doesn’t know how to respond to that. He takes a bite of the sandwich’s second half and chews slowly.
“I just need … I just need to make sure, I guess.”
“I understand.”
He swallows, drinks more water.
“So … what happened to you?” he asks. “I feel like I’ve been learning about all this piecemeal. It would be nice to know what you saw. What happened that morning?”
“It must be strange,” Bonnie says, introspection in her voice, “to only see the aftermath … to not have lived through that … hell.”
“It’s frustrating, actually.”
“No, I know, just that … it must feel like some kind of blank spot, between what life was like before and what it is now.”
“Something like that, yeah.” He touches the small bandage at his forehead.
Michael considers Bonnie—this woman who is unutterably exhausted and yet continues to check up on him, probably more than he realizes, even when he’s been asleep. Obviously a natural-born caregiver. She’s still walking around in the spongy white shoes of a nurse.
“Did you work here at the hospital, before—?” he starts.
Bonnie offers a slight smile, as if the gesture is difficult to summon. There’s mirth somewhere in this woman’s face, buried deep underneath a lingering haze of psychological trauma. It’s a glimpse of this woman’s life before this one. Whatever has happened over the past couple days has taken its toll on Bonnie both inwardly and outwardly.
It takes her long moments to find words, but she finally says:
“I worked at a pediatrician’s office down the street. I was on my way to work when it happened. It was the—it was the craziest, creepiest thing I’d ever seen.” She stands and moves to the counter that runs along the north wall of the room. The counter has become some kind of haphazard medical-supply area. “I was driving up Lemay, it was right around 6 a.m. and I was coming in early for some admin work. I was a physician’s assistant, and Saturdays were the best opportunity for some catch-up work.”
She turns back to face him, and he notices she’s holding a penlight.
“Anyway, there were just a few cars on the road,” she continues as she approaches close and shines the light into his eyes, one by one. “I was listening to the radio and probably singing along or something, and—some of the people I’ve talked to mention some kind of, I don’t know, a pulse or something, but all I remember is that all of a sudden every other car on the road, ahead of me and behind me, started drifting. Well, first I noticed just the car right in front of me—I thought, Hey, wake up, wake up! Get off your damn phone!—because the car faded out of the lane, more and more. Finally, I was honking like hell at her, but nothing. No response at all. And that’s when I saw that other cars were doing it, too. Everywhere.” She shakes her head. “Just bumping against each other, and crashing into the trees, skidding against the gutters … crazy. Just right outside there!” She gestures out the window. “I was one of the first people here.”
She finishes up with the light, apparently satisfied.
For the next twenty minutes, Bonnie tells Michael what she experienced after walking through the front doors of the hospital. How no one was here at first, except for slumped-over bodies here and there. How people began arriving, desperately seeking help for loved ones who had been mutilated by family members overcome by some kind of foreign inhabitation. How the situation grew increasingly more chaotic and horrific, as what they first deemed to be corpses started twitching to new life and new purpose. And how Rachel took charge, desperate to find not only Michael but also some kind of answer to the mystery that had descended upon the world.
Michael listens with a kind of detached disbelief. At times, he has to keep from laughing at the absurdity of Bonnie’s story. But even as she speaks—with her hoarse, ravaged whisper—he can’t deny the evidence that he’s witnessed … the blood-soaked floors and the dried arterial sprays on the walls … the eerie emptiness of not only the hospital but the streets outside … the putrid, humid stench of smoke and death … the bodies …
“What about you?” she asks as she finishes her story. “How’s your memory? Do you remember anything about that morning yet?”
“I keep getting flashes of it,”
he tells her. “Like, I remember—I think I remember—walking into the building. It was all dark because it was Saturday.” He experiences an odd moment in which he is about to tell her exactly why he was at the office—just lay it out bare. It doesn’t matter anymore, anyway. Then he shakes himself from that potential mistake. “I remember the janitor arrived a few minutes after I did. I just get patches of that memory. The sound of his vacuum. I also have this flash of … running? It’s frustrating, because I know that whole memory is there—I just can’t get to it.”
“That sounds about right. At least you’re getting those flashes now. I bet you’ll get a full recovery of all those memories.”
“Something tells me I’d rather not.”
She smiles in a way that reminds him of Cassie, and even Rachel a little bit, back when she was his little girl. At the thought, he sits up straighter and looks at Bonnie carefully. He touches her hand.
“You need to sleep, I know. But can you do me one more favor? Tell me about Rachel.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean … I’m kind of amazed by what she’s done. And I’m ashamed to say that I’m not sure I would have expected it from her.”
Bonnie is looking increasingly sleepy in her chair, but her eyes go all deep-watery, and she says, “Your daughter … Rachel …”
“Tell me.”
“Just that … she took charge when we needed it most.”
Michael already feels his head shaking minutely.
“She’s a resourceful girl,” Bonnie goes on. “She discovered things that the rest of us just—missed. You know it was Rachel who discovered the link with the blood, right? The O-negative blood? She figured that out.”
Michael has learned almost through osmosis that the one key trait setting the survivors apart from the possessed corpses is the fact that they all have type O-negative blood flowing in their veins. Meaning, probably, that their blood type saved them. He didn’t know his daughter made that discovery. His Rachel!
How on Earth did she figure that out?
“I’m O-negative,” Michael whispers.
“That’s what Rachel told us.”
“When she was a kid, that was our thing, the cool thing we had in common. I made sort of a big deal about it back then, but I’m surprised she remembered it.”
“Her quick thinking … it saved us.”
Not only did their blood save them, it also proved a potent weapon, thanks to the stores of O-negative plasma in hospital storage. That’s mostly what Michael saw smeared over the floors and walls. He was right that there was a great battle right outside his door, but it was not at all what he initially thought. They had sprayed the scrabbling, crab-like bodies with blood, and the things had reacted violently, retreating out the front doors and leaving the survivors stunned and blood-soaked, but alive.
The picture Bonnie is painting of Rachel is of a gritty survivor who has figured everything out … a resourceful girl who, in the heat of the mortal chaos, kept her cool. Everyone else was making mistakes, jumping to conclusions—everyone but her. But that’s not the Rachel he has seen since waking up.
“If all this is true,” he whispers, “why is she curled up in a ball next door? You heard what happened with Tony.”
Bonnie sighs. “That was later. None of us saw how this would end.”
“End?”
“They don’t even care about us, you know. Those bodies just—they just disappeared into the night.” She shakes her head with some kind of regret. “Oh, that poor girl. She didn’t deserve what happened to her.”
Michael listens to her breathe.
“Where did they go?” he says after a moment. “Those things.”
“They’ve—most of them have massed in the foothills, where most of the trees are. I don’t know what they’re doing. You saw them, right? Out front? At the trees? We live in a world where everyone is dead, doing this thing that’s—that’s—that’s just incomprehensible.”
According to Bonnie, there are groups of armed survivors burning the forests, torching the bodies, denying whatever force is inside them from achieving its strange goal. And now the forests of the foothills are on fire, thousands of corpses going up in flames alongside the trees.
“We aren’t all that’s left, I hope you didn’t think that,” Bonnie says. “We ran into some men, and they were hell-bent to burn every last one of them. In a bid to survive. They had live grenades, flame throwers. They were armed to the teeth. Just destroying them.”
Now Michael can grasp the moral weight of the situation—particularly as it falls on Rachel’s shoulders.
“My God, just the thought of what to do next!” Bonnie closes her eyes, and when she reopens them, there are tears there. “That girl—Rachel—your daughter is going to need you.” She’s staring down at the floor. “Yeah, she needs you. I’m so glad you’re awake.”
“Have you been in to see her tonight?”
“I have.” Bonnie looks troubled as she stands up.
“Is she all right?”
“She was awake, yes, but—she’s not very responsive. She’s just lying there, on her side.”
“I’ll go see her.”
“She needs to stop blaming herself.” She’s brushing the front of her blouse, straightening up, looking ready to leave. She goes to the counter and opens a packet of Tylenol, brings the two tablets back to him. He swallows the pain relievers dutifully. “Anyway, you need your rest. You’ll need a lot more. I know you want to jump right in to help, but you should be careful with that concussion. Don’t overdo anything.”
He smiles his thanks at her. “What about you? Going to sleep?”
“I realized last night that I haven’t slept in about 72 hours. Is that even possible?”
“Seems we’ve had opposite experiences.”
“Yes.”
After a moment, Bonnie turns to leave.
“One more thing,” Michael says, a thought occurring to him. “What about animals? Is this happening to them? Have you seen any dogs? Birds?” Ever since he woke, he can’t recall seeing or hearing evidence of any kind of animal—either outside his window or out the front doors.
Bonnie considers him, her eyes still moist. “I’m actually not sure that’s occurred to anyone.” One hand on the door, she yawns terrifically. “There was a lot going on.”
After Bonnie excuses herself, Michael sits with his head in his hands, waiting for the Tylenol to work.
Michael knows his skull is healing, thanks to Bonnie. When he first woke, he was in a state of confusion. But now he feels more and more grounded, even though it’s inside a reality that he’d rather not be a part of.
He’s beginning to think he has Bonnie as much as his daughter to thank for his survival. She has been incredibly attentive, treating his wound when Rachel brought him in, and later treating him for the resulting concussion. Bonnie reminds Michael of Cassie, strongly now, and so submitting to her care was easier than it perhaps might have been.
Bonnie … Cassie … Susanna … Rachel …
If Bonnie is to be believed—as well as the evidence all around him—his daughter is a broken, exhausted shell of herself; the sky is filled with the stinking smoke of an uncontrolled pyre of cremated human beings; and most of the world is dead—including Susanna.
He stares at the ceiling, listening to the silence.
Chapter 8
Michael pushes himself out of bed, past a wave of dizziness, and goes to the already open window. He stares out toward the burning foothills. Along the western horizon, licks of flame brush the dark orange underbellies of smoke clouds drifting northeast, and behind everything are weird flashes of purple and red, atmospheric and alien. He can’t quite see the mountains to the south—Longs Peak and the neighboring summits, so familiar, so reliable. They’re blocked by the homes and businesses down Lemay. But he doesn’t want to see them in the context of this new reality.
Michael is startled by a noise that he has never heard befo
re. It’s a deep, rumbling roar, vibrating the walls—throaty and yet almost … electronic. As soon as it begins, it starts to fade away.
Bonnie is back at the door, new alertness in her eyes. Right behind her is Joel, still up, still on alert.
“—what I was talking about,” Joel is saying. “Hey Mike.”
They join him at the window.
“This has happened a few times,” Bonnie explains to Michael. “Joel thinks it’s how they’re communicating. This is the quietest one we’ve heard.”
“It doesn’t seem to have any rhyme or reason,” Joel says. “The volume of it, or the frequency. At least, to us, it doesn’t. But I think it makes sense to them. ”
“I think you might be right,” Bonnie says. “I know it happened right as all the bodies raced out toward the foothills.”
Michael watches the horizon carefully. Did the smoke react to the low roar, shivering in the sound wave seemingly originating from above it? He voices the question, and Bonnie and Joel agree silently.
After perhaps ten minutes, as nothing further has come of the comparatively quiet phenomenon, Michael is left alone at the window, both Bonnie and Joel giving him separate pats on his shoulder.
“Try to sleep, okay”? Bonnie says.
He continues to stare at the foothills, mesmerized. The longer he watches, the more apparent it is that there’s a great red fog rising into the night. And there’s a relentlessness to it, paired with the columns of smoke rising from the burning hills. It’s a constant pulse. And it’s all too clear that the two forces—the red fog and the roar—are somehow related. Michael tries to understand it, to connect these phenomena with what has happened to humanity.
He comes up with nothing. Only more questions.
At just past 1 a.m., Michael pulls open his door and peers up and down the empty hallway. A contingent of survivors has spent some time cleaning up the blood on the floor, but there’s just no way they could erase all trace of it—and the proof is in the stench. It still smells rotten, and he knows it’s only going to get worse with those bodies in the basement.
Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood Page 7
