As Kevin stands, his expression turns contemplative. “I’m not saying we couldn’t have used your help, but you know what? You became a sort of—what’s the word—a talisman? A good luck charm? Something to fight for? Especially for Rachel.”
“I’d rather have been a conscious good luck charm.”
“I mean, just the thought of finding you and rescuing you—I think that gave her what she needed to keep going. You know what I’m saying?”
Michael looks at Kevin.
“Yeah,” he says.
For the first time, Kevin notices the backpack and the weapon that Michael is carrying. “Uh, Mike, I—I wouldn’t go out there.”
“I have to.”
“Look, I know you just woke up, but—” He glances past Michael toward the doors that lead to the hospital’s innards.
“But I’ve been awake long enough to see how things work now. I need to see my home. I need to see if my wife is there.”
“I’m almost positive she’s—she’s—”
“I need to see for myself, I’m sure you understand.”
Kevin watches him warily for a long moment. The two men are surrounded by silence and the subtle stench of rot.
“Mike, I’m not gonna keep you here. You’re free to do whatever you want. But it might still be dangerous out there. I’m sitting here to guard these doors from whatever might come in, not to keep people from going out.” He pauses, pitches his voice lower. “Rachel is gonna go bugfuck when she hears you’ve left.”
“I just need to go home, check the house, gather a few things, and come right back. You know? It won’t even take an hour.”
Kevin is shaking his head.
“We really only have the barest sense of those things. If there’s one thing we do know, it’s that they’re unpredictable.”
“An hour,” Michael repeats.
“Sure, that’s what you say now. Nothing has worked out the way we thought it would.”
Michael gives the big man a small smile. “Who did you lose, Kevin?”
“My folks. Probably all my other friends and family. No big deal.” He stares at Michael, almost defiantly.
Michael nods. “I’m sorry.”
“I suppose you don’t want me to tell anybody about this, at least right away.”
“Give me an hour.”
Michael turns to the front glass doors, which now look out onto a burgeoning dawn. He walks over to them, stares out into the pitch black, and sighs. He feels Kevin walk up beside him.
Even by predawn light, they can see that the world is on fire. Thick smoke is curdling over the horizon to the west, milky white occasionally stained by black, signaling yet another structure lost to the flames. The blaze is towering, world-crushing, and too close, and apparently with only the puniest firefighting force to face it. He can only hope that the blaze is confined to the areas outside the city.
Michael stares into those ominous and silent scuds of smoke and feels a crush of despair. If he is to believe the weary, soot-smeared people that he has met in this strangely desolate hospital, there are human beings burning in that blaze. Thousands upon thousands of human beings. It’s too sickening to comprehend, and yet judging from the emotion on the survivors’ faces, it’s true. It’s no joke.
The smoke is thick and oppressive, even right at this window. The hospital is under generator power, and air conditioning is an obvious first casualty of that fact. Michael can hear fans whirring somewhere, though, bringing some relief from the heat outside but also giving no respite from the smoke. Michael can feel it sharply in his lungs.
He is beginning to grasp the import of what has happened, and it feels like a hollow blackness at his core. He aches for Susanna, for news of her fate, and he needs Rachel to be healthy, to be okay. He needs that connection to those close to him.
He turns his head and regards Kevin, who hasn’t said another word.
“I’ll be back.”
As he steps forward, Kevin says, “Dude?”
“Yeah?”
“Need a car?”
“I guess that wouldn’t hurt.”
“There’s quite a few in the parking lot that are unaccounted for, but honestly any car out there is just waiting for a driver. Find one you like.”
In any other situation, this information would be humorous, but Kevin says it with a sobriety that gives Michael pause.
“Just don’t take my truck. It’s the blue one.”
“You got it.”
“Be careful.”
“Thanks.”
Then Michael makes his way out the double doors.
Chapter 10
Dawn is breaking ugly and acrid.
And empty.
Fort Collins is deserted.
He’s not entirely sure what he was expecting—the emptiness, yes, and that awful sense of desolation he glimpsed from his window—but what strikes him now about the world outside is its muted sense of menacing wrongness.
Even as the east brightens under a sickly orange sun, the western foothills are alive with strobing colors, quiet now but deeply alien. Above and beyond the great clouds of gray and black smoke, whatever’s up there is alive and active, pulsing as if eager. He catches glimpses of columnar light, mostly drifting heavenward.
Wrong.
In a sort of private denial, Michael looks away from the phenomenon, focusing on his path. He holds Rachel’s shotgun tightly in his fist, and he wears her backpack on his back.
North of the hospital, the streets are dim and dry. Kevin’s right: Several vehicles lay ahead of him, empty, neglected against curbs, their doors hanging open. He peers down a quiet neighborhood street and sees more: a black Volkswagen Beetle crushed up against a crooked mailbox, a white Ford Escape sitting almost serenely in the middle of a weed-infested yard, and—way down the street—a milk-delivery truck on its side.
Michael doesn’t search immediately for a viable car, preferring to walk for now. He heads north toward Mulberry, wanting to get a feel for this new world before insulating himself in a vehicle.
He sees only one body, perhaps a hundred yards down the street, what appears to be an old man, naked, wrapped around the base of a small pine, right near the curb of what was probably his own home. Just before Michael passes beyond that street, he catches a quick glimpse of a forgotten blue bicycle in a gutter.
Just as that thought whispers through his consciousness, movement to the far north causes his heart to flip in his chest. A vehicle is moving slowly along Mulberry, at the Wal-Mart intersection, and continuing east.
So there are other survivors.
He needs to be careful. If there’s one thing he’s sure of, it’s that people in desperate situations can revert with astonishing swiftness to their basest instincts. They can become human monsters, making the most of dire circumstances. He hurries his pace, sticks to the shadows.
He reaches the intersection of Lemay and Riverside and pauses. Is he okay? He touches his bandage tentatively, makes sure it’s secure. He concentrates on his headache, makes sure his eyes are focusing correctly. The concussion seems to be healing. What was once a cramping pain in his skull is now a mostly tolerable ache, and he aims to maintain that pain-reduction trajectory. Just as an extra precaution, he reaches into his pocket, roots around for a Tylenol packet. He rips it open and pops the tablets into his mouth, crunching them dry.
According to Rachel, he sustained his wound in the concrete stairwell at work, but he still has no memory of falling there, or of anything at work that morning—and that makes him nervous. There’s only one reason he might have been at work on a Saturday, and to have no memory of it? It’s too much to just leave to apocalyptic chance. And yet, he’s not sure at all what he would do with the information if he had it. The world is totally different now, and that fills him with guilt-ridden loss, but he just has to achieve a sense of finality.
He has to know. To just know.
Everything is an alarming red blur, underneath which flit
shards of memory that he can’t grab on to. When he tries, his head warns him with searing pain. One of the things he feels might happen at home is an ability to begin retracing his steps, see if he can encourage the reconstruction of his memory.
He begins walking again, keeping his eyes wide open. There’s zero activity now on the street. Zero! Typically this intersection is one of the busier in the city, but there’s nothing, and it gives the entire area a haunted vibe. The business center to his left—the Wendy’s, the Walgreens and the Albertsons, a branch of the bank where he and Cassie secured the mortgage for their home—appears ghostly, already part of a distant past. It is utterly forsaken, empty of any life. There’s no electricity anywhere. All intersections are powered down, all windows are dark, and there’s nothing buzzing or ticking or thrumming or moving.
He pauses under the dawn shadows of the corner bank as the noiseless morning creeps into day. Directly in front of him, a late-model Cadillac is partially crumpled against the base of a street lamp, its broad hood flapped upward at the impact site. The left blinker is still strobing weakly.
Michael is deeply creeped out, but strangely, he feels little overt fear. He feels as if he should, given everything that has happened, but ever since he first saw with his own eyes that twisted body cramped up against that tree across from his hospital window, feeding in such an alien way … he hasn’t felt threatened by the new reality. All he feels—as he looks out on this usually bustling but now uncannily silent section of north Fort Collins—is that hollow sense of loss and unreality.
He takes Riverside northwest, hurrying along the sidewalk of the exposed street, then ducks west on Myrtle, into a deathly still neighborhood. He sees more abandoned cars, and he sees front doors of homes standing open. Empty.
Michael stops abruptly.
He’s just caught sight of what he’s sure are the tail and hindquarters of a dead dog. The animal is deep into the yard to his left, immediately to the right of another human being wrapped around the base of a pine tree. The upper half of the dog is out of sight, but the tail suggests a larger dog, perhaps a German shepherd or a Collie.
For some reason, the fact of that dog lying there dead disturbs Michael more than the thought of ninety-six percent of the human population taken over by some tree-hungry alien thing. Even now, outside beneath a rising sun, he sees no evidence of animal life. The early day should be filled with birdsong, and yet there’s nothing in the air but smoke and ash. There are no wandering dogs or cats, not even any insects that he can see. He wonders if the same thing that happened to humanity has happened to the animal kingdom.
He finds himself mumbling mindless prayers. He’s never been a particularly religious man, but something inside him is pleading with whatever invisible force gives rhythm to the world to just please knock it off, just please stop. Let there be room for hope. If his daughter has really found some kind of solution, please let it be the beginning of something positive.
And yet he knows he’s praying into a maelstrom of chaos, in the face of this gigantic thing that is beyond his understanding, perhaps beyond human understanding altogether.
He’s about to continue forward along the sidewalk, but then he pauses again. He exhales sharply through his teeth, deciding to get a closer look at the human form. He can’t deny his dark curiosity. He reassures himself with the heft of the shotgun, then creeps up quietly on the body, which is moving in weird ululations, wrapped backward around the tree. It shifts very slightly as if sensing him, but its face is hidden beneath heavy branches. It doesn’t make any other movement.
It’s such a strange sight—what appears to be a businessman, decked out in a now-tattered, haphazardly arranged suit, bereft of any human purpose. Michael approaches stealthily, finally feeling a spurt of fear in his chest, despite the fact that the body really does appear to have no interest in him—until he gets too close, within a few feet, and he sees the body’s muscles tense minutely. For what? To spring away from the tree and attack? What threat could it be with its mouth full of splinters and sap?
He decides not to tempt fate any further.
Michael takes a quick look around the neighborhood again, then turns to the dog. He carefully takes hold of one of its paws and slides it out from the shadows onto the lawn. Yes, it’s a German shepherd, and yes, it is dead. There is no life, not even any strange otherworldly light emanating from it.
Michael grits his teeth hard.
“Oh fuck.”
He remembers high school science, of course. All that stuff about the earth being a complicated system of interconnected species, each one shaped and defined by its relationship to those around it. The thought of eliminating species after species? Well, that’s an extinction-level event in itself. At that point, who cares about bringing those infected human beings back to life? Because in a world without other life forms, it wouldn’t be long before humanity collapsed anyway.
He rises and has a moment of dizzy imbalance. He stops and gathers himself. He has to be careful. A concussion is not something you just bounce back from. It’s almost as if he can hear Bonnie’s voice.
Time to find a vehicle.
He scans the street. There are abandoned cars here and there along the street, and if what Kevin said was true, the vast majority of them are ripe for the taking. Keys in the ignition, very little damage from their collisions. Most of them apparently just drifted to the sides of the roads in the immediate aftermath of the event. And then later, as the bodies in those cars began to reanimate, they abandoned the vehicles in search of a strange, common destination.
Michael spots a silver Honda Pilot with two doors flung open. He approaches it warily.
It sits crookedly on a grassy embankment, one rear tire in the gutter. He peers inside, notices that the dome light is emitting a weak glow. He checks the rear seats—nothing. He hops in, shuts his door, then reaches over to close the passenger door. He drops his weapon and backpack into the seat next to him.
The key is right there in the ignition. From what he has gathered from the other survivors, some kind of electromagnetic pulse must have wreaked technological havoc at the instant the world changed, some kind of temporary blast that rendered almost everything useless. Cars drifted to gutters, phones sputtered dead, personal electronics became bricks. But vehicles almost immediately became viable again.
No one knows why.
He cranks the ignition, and the engine does a slow churn, then begins to click uselessly. He sits there for two minutes and tries again. This time, the engine sounds a bit livelier, and finally it catches. The Pilot rumbles to life.
He backs off the curb, straightens out into the street.
“Okay, here we go,” he whispers.
There’s a part of him that hoped against hope that everything he’d been told was a fiction. Some kind of elaborate practical joke. But the evidence of it is all around him now, and his insides go increasingly colder.
Beneath a bruised sky, everything beyond the windshield is silent and gray. Fort Collins, Colorado is ruined. When Michael gazes in the direction of his home, off to the west, all he sees is smoke—not just the white-mottled wildfires across the horizon but thick black plumes rising from Old Town. It appears as if the entire length of north College Avenue, even Old Town Square—where he once walked with his little girl, enjoyed the free evening concerts, bought her ice cream, watched her play near the fountain—has been reduced to timbers and ash.
Michael navigates the streets in a state of numbness. Nothing is moving except his appropriated Pilot. He feels all too alone beneath the fat clouds of smoke drifting across the atmosphere.
As he approaches Mulberry, he begins catching sight of more bodies. There are probably many more along these streets that he’s not seeing, simply because they’ve managed to cram themselves so completely against their trees and effectively hide beneath the branches. Their bodies appear mangled, bent back upon themselves and, in many cases, seemingly broken and splintered. Those arms a
nd legs must be fractured. The stress would simply be too much at those angles. The bodies resemble great, straining beetles with their bulging abdomens and thoraxes and their sharply slanting limbs.
In one yard to his left, he sees one of the things in full view under a sparsely branched evergreen. He slows down and pulls to the curb, brings down his window. The face is mashed against a section of chewed pine bark, and the mouth is slowly working, like a turtle, maybe, or a cow chewing its cud. But even slower than that. Most disturbing is the almost rhythmical movement of the throat as it takes in whatever the mouth is letting pass. And even as Michael makes that observation, he sees that a large portion of whatever the thing is chewing is sliding down the top of its upturned face, filling and piling at its nostrils, forming a chunky wood paste over the eyes, turning its hair into ragged columns of wet mulch. There’s a sizable mound of bark and pine splinters on the ground beneath the head.
Michael stares at this sight for long minutes, trying and failing to understand what this thing might be ferreting out of the tree in the midst of these constant efforts. Something in the chemistry, something cellular? There’s a desperation to the thing’s clutch, a hunger, and Michael is reminded of an addict satisfying a need.
That thought jibes with what the survivors heard the prisoner say last night. Was he really voicing his need for—something?
“Nneeeeeee—”
The ragged voice nags at him. He doubts any of these bodies out here, outside the hospital, would be able to so quickly find an approximation of their voice, considering their mouths are bloated with wood and sap. He can’t imagine the physical state of their mouths, throats, and stomachs—hell, their entire digestive systems.
Michael moves on.
After ten minutes of careful driving, winding his way around and through collisions, he is crossing the main thoroughfare, College Avenue. A glance to the right, up the street and into the heart of Old Town, shows him a scene of blackened devastation, of ash and drifting smoke, of broken glass and stalactites of splintered building foundations upheaved like claws. The tail end of a jet is plainly visible, blackened by fire. There’s an abandoned fire truck, its hose snaked out and forgotten.
Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood Page 9
