Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood

by Bovberg, Jason

  He shakes his head at the conjured image, bringing up one hand to rap softly on the window. The sound is deep and resonant. Joel was right—it’s very different from a windshield. Thick. Reassuring.

  “Probably shouldn’t get so close there,” Rachel says. “They’re tinted, but—” She shrugs. "Hell, maybe we pulled one over on them. Maybe they lost sight of us.”

  “It’s weird, isn’t it?” he says, stepping away. “Why haven’t they surrounded us here?”

  Rachel’s voice is tired. “They don’t like books?”

  Michael manages a difficult smile. “But books are made of trees.”

  Rachel lets out a stunned giggle, then stops it short, sniffling. “That’s my dad.”

  The open room is expansive, and although they can hear several survivors stamping about above them, on the second floor, and several more shouting all-clears to one another farther south on the main floor, there’s a welcome ration of relative silence in the air.

  Michael follows Rachel through the room at a measured pace, listening to her breathe.

  “Listen, Rachel ….”

  In front of him, her shoulders hunch almost imperceptibly.

  “I know, Daddy.”

  She turns to face him, as if to stage one of her typical acts of teenaged defiance, but then she immediately crumples, and her hands come up to her face, covering her mouth. She moans miserably, emotion filling her eyes. She begins to shake her head back and forth, and now she turns back around. She’s shaking.

  “… I’m sorry about Danny,” Michael finishes his thought.

  “It’s not fair.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Just a kid … a perfect little boy.” Her eyes are darting around helplessly. “How can something like that happen?”

  She’s not looking at him. She’s quiet for a long moment.

  “Rachel …?”

  “I didn’t mean to …” comes her querulous voice.

  “Mean to what?”

  She takes a long, shuddering breath, stays quiet, choked up, as if she can’t go on.

  “Mean to what?” Michael says as gently as he can.

  “Did you go home?” She turns back around to face him, letting her hands drop. “Did you make it? Were you at the house?”

  “I made it.”

  “Then ….”

  “She was—she was there.”

  “Oh Daddy.”

  “What happened?”

  Rachel makes an attempt to answer that question, but it’s clear she’s been dreading it. She can only whimper, tortured. Finally she buries herself against his chest. She clutches at him fiercely, sobs taking hold of her entire body.

  Michael swallows heavily, tentatively returning the embrace. He strokes her back, doing his best to calm her. He only wants the answers to come.

  Joel peeks in at one point, sees them, and Michael offers a cautious thumbs up. Joel nods and returns their privacy to them.

  And Rachel tells him her story. Her words are labored at first, but then they release themselves from her in a torrent, and as they rush out, she won’t let him go, she won’t release her desperate grip.

  She tells him how she woke to find Susanna afflicted, like everyone else, how she tried to help her, how she tried like hell to help her, but she was—

  “—scared, Daddy, I was fucking scared! There was that thing inside her, and it didn’t make any goddamn sense, and I tried like hell to get rid of it, whatever it was, and I tried! I tried! But I tried too hard, or something … because the light sparked out, just popped out of her, and she was gone, she was dead, she was just—gone!—and I didn’t know what to do, and I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!”

  Michael listens mutely, calming her. Over her shoulder, the library remains serene, save for distant voices calling out, establishing order. The windows look out on a changed but oddly peaceful world.

  And when she begins repeating herself, her words start trailing off, and finally she’s just breathing raggedly against him, her face pressed almost violently into his chest.

  Michael is gazing outside, but in his vision, images of Susanna are flashing again, images of her both dead and very much alive, and he shuts his eyes tightly and grinds his teeth to control the flow of emotion. His head pulses with a sensation that threatens pain but doesn’t quite get there.

  He feels as if he’s detached from himself, watching Rachel embracing him, sensing her need for him at that moment. He has failed her so many times, in ways that she’ll never know, and he realizes with a sense of black resignation that those failures have colored his perception of her now. A part of him is still suspicious of her, yes. He can’t so easily let the angry memories drop away—the many times Rachel screamed at him, screamed at Susanna. And he’s attributing dark motives to her, his own flesh and blood!

  He wants to understand her, wants to grasp what has happened. He feels a need to simply appreciate that his daughter has survived.

  But the truth is, Susanna is right where Rachel might have wished her. He shakes that thought away, but it keeps coming back.

  “Shhh,” he whispers. “It’s okay.”

  The words feel wrong in his throat.

  After a long moment of quiet, she pulls her head back, regards him hopefully, and then pushes away, wiping her eyes. “It is?”

  He nods slowly.

  Silence.

  He’s not sure how to feel. And he realizes that he himself is close to tears, because of this emotional morass. Whatever happened at his house, on the morning the world ended … perhaps it was nobody’s fault. Perhaps it was inevitable. Or maybe something else happened that’s too horrible to imagine, something that Rachel would never admit to him.

  And that makes the situation hurt even more.

  Can he possibly ever get beyond that kind of internal question?

  Finally, he steels himself and lets the words flow.

  “Rachel, I wouldn’t blame you for anything,” he says softly into her ear. “You haven’t done anything wrong. I know that. I really—I really just needed to know the truth. I needed to know if Susanna was alive … if there was any chance I could have saved her. If I could have helped her.”

  Long minutes pass before Rachel composes herself, and Michael is hyper-attuned to her reaction to his words. He feels her trembling. He feels her quickened pulse. But he can attribute these things to any of the awful phenomena his daughter has suffered over the past few days.

  He sighs into her neck.

  She rears back and studies him. Her eyes are reddened, and her mouth is drawn, making her appear far older than her 19 years. She seems to read a lot in his sigh.

  “She was infected. She would have been out there. One of them.”

  Her lip trembles.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt her, Daddy,” she whispers. “I promise.”

  Something breaks inside Michael.

  “I tried to help her.”

  As she melts into further tears, a wave of memories washes over him, of he and Rachel weathering the storm of Cassie’s disease and passing, of the two of them finding meaning after devastation. As a new reality stretches before him now, he imagines the impossible task of doing it again.

  “Rachel,” he says, “you’ve done better than anyone in the world would expect you to do.” He pets her head.

  “No.” She’s shaking her head again. “No, I could’ve done more.”

  “I doubt it, I really do.”

  “No! I could have saved Tony!”

  Michael continues the embrace, searching for words, and in the few seconds of silence, he feels her tension increasing again. Words begin once more to tumble out—

  “—I was wrong, wrong, wrong, if I’d just—I mean, by half a second, Daddy, I shot him, I killed him. He said my name! He called out to me, but I pulled the trigger, Daddy, why did I do that? I could’ve saved him! I couldn’t save Sarah, that poor little girl, and now Danny, that fucking thing pulled him right away from me! Right
out of my arms! I couldn’t save anyone!”

  “Shhhh …” he tries, feeling his heart beating hard. “You saved me, right?”

  She just sniffles, her head burrowed. “That doesn’t—”

  “Now wait a minute, you remember what Joel said. Maybe Tony wouldn’t have wanted to be saved.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re a smart kid. You know what’s going on. You saw what happened at the hospital, with that prisoner. There was a lot of pain. Maybe a lot of it irreversible. And that man hadn’t even been outside. He still came out of it screaming.”

  He can feel Rachel considering that, as she rocks against him.

  “There’s a good chance that you … well, that you helped him. That you actually did save him.”

  Rachel releases a massive sigh against him, then pulls back. She moves away from him, walking the aisles as she wipes at her face with her forearms. She does a half-hearted sweep, then about-faces, comes back his way, continues east in the dimness.

  “Look,” he calls to her, “all I’m saying is that it’s not as simple as you’re thinking. As we’re all thinking. Whatever has happened to those bodies is deeper and more devastating than we know. I’m sure of it. You can’t punish yourself for this, when you did what anyone else would have done, and when there are so many unanswered questions.”

  Michael keeps an eye on her body language. He thinks he’s said the right words, but it has been so long since he’s been able to find them that he’s not sure what they sound like. It’s been years since she embraced him like that, and equally long since they’ve had a conversation like that. A conversation that matters.

  But the way she’s bounded away from him, avoiding eye contact, makes him think he should do more, say more … that everything he said was wrong.

  Then she stops between two towering tables of kids’ books and appears to consider something. She turns back, walks back to him, and embraces him anew.

  Then she lets go and returns to her search.

  Michael feels his spirits lift like the release of an almost physical weight. He falls in step behind her, and he can tell by the way that she’s holding herself that he has—in some small way—helped her. He’s stunned to realize it, but right here, right now, in the midst of the bleakest horror, this is his finest moment with his daughter in years. It’s all wrapped up in death and misery, and yet there it is.

  He wants to reach out to her, touch her shoulder, hold her back, and sit with her among these books, savor the moment.

  But he doesn’t lift his hand.

  “Let’s finish this up and get back, huh?” she says.

  He feels his head nodding.

  There are two small private rooms off the library floor, and Rachel pokes her head into the dim one with the open door. “Clear.”

  The other door is closed. Michael tries the knob.

  “Locked.”

  “Let’s tell Joel. Probably just files in there or som—”

  Then something clanks beyond the door, and Michael jumps. Rachel goes reeling backward, nearly colliding with a computer kiosk.

  Chapter 18

  “Holy—!” Rachel cries.

  “Shhh! Wait.”

  “What if …?”

  “Hold on.”

  “What?!”

  Michael moves back closer to the door and raps on it softly. “Hello?”

  Rachel is wide-eyed, ready to bolt.

  “Is someone in there?”

  Silence.

  “We won’t hurt you, we just want to help.”

  Rachel covers her mouth with a white-knuckled hand, and they stand there listening, but there’s nothing. Finally, her hand drops.

  “I’ll get Joel,” she whispers. “And blood.”

  Michael extends a hand, as if to say Wait …

  “Whoever’s in there, you have the chance right now to come out and talk to us, and we’ll help you.” He pauses, listens. “But in a few seconds, there will be weapons here, and it won’t be as nice.”

  An immediate scuffling sounds behind the door, and there’s a fiddling with the knob.

  “Daddy!” Rachel is batting at his arm, ready to run.

  “Don’t worry.”

  The knob is still jerking around.

  “Wait!” comes a small voice from behind the door. “I’ll come out!”

  Michael swallows with relief as Rachel’s jaw drops. She stares at him, mouthing, How did you know?

  The lock gives, the knob turns, and the door is opening inward. The room is dark, and a waft of humidity finds Michael’s face, along with a slightly tart, slightly sweet odor of sweat. His gaze darts downward to find a preteen child staring fearfully up at him. She’s a young African American girl, and she’s attached to the door, her lip quivering, but determined to show strength. It’s taking a lot of energy to hold back tears.

  “Hey,” he says, automatically dropping to a crouch. “You okay in there?”

  She doesn’t respond, just looks over at Rachel, who has also kneeled down.

  “I’m Kayla,” she says, barely audible.

  “I’m Michael, this is my daughter Rachel.”

  The girl’s deep-brown eyes move back and forth between them. She opens the door a little farther, revealing herself and the darkened room behind her. Michael sees stacks of books, empty food wrappers, water bottles, and three flashlights. Kayla herself is thin and athletic, with shoulder-length hair, thick and unkempt, and a slightly upturned nose over a full-lipped, expressive mouth.

  “Have you been staying here?” Rachel asks gently.

  Kayla nods. “Is that okay?”

  Rachel tentatively touches the side of Kayla’s head.

  “Of course it’s okay, sweetie,” she says. “How long have you been here?”

  Kayla swallows. “I don’t know.”

  “Since all this started?”

  “Since after my mom—after she woke up.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Across the street.” She points vaguely out the window.

  “How old are you, Kayla?” Rachel asks.

  “I’m twelve.”

  The girl is warming to them already, venturing out, inch by inch, hanging onto the knob, swaying a little.

  “But I’m okay.”

  Michael knows she’s certainly not okay, but he smiles despite himself, admiring her pluck.

  Rachel says, “Well, it’s been very hard for me, and I know I could use a hug from a pretty girl.”

  Michael is startled by how quickly Kayla lunges for Rachel. The poor girl practically plows into her, eager for human contact. As Michael stands from his crouch, he touches the girl’s head, and then Kayla is sobbing into Rachel’s shoulder, strangely mirroring the moment he shared with Rachel moments ago. The emotional synchronicity strikes him sharply, briefly, pricking him with a feeling of loss for what he’s missed out on with Rachel over the past few messy years—and then he moves away to check the rest of the room while Rachel and Kayla embrace, talking softly.

  Michael makes his way to the edge of the room, peers down the corridor, sees Bonnie sitting on one of the benches, her posture beaten down.

  “Bonnie!” he calls softly.

  She turns.

  “We found someone.”

  “One of them?” she whispers, alarmed.

  “No, no, a girl. Where’s Joel?”

  “I’ll get him.”

  Michael knows Bonnie will keep it quiet for now. He doesn’t want to overwhelm the poor girl with a throng of sweaty survivors. As Bonnie hurries off in the opposite direction, Michael watches from afar as his daughter soothes this unlikely newcomer. There’s something immediately … almost sacred … about the contact. He lets them have their moment.

  “What’s up?” says Joel, arriving with Bonnie, as well as Chrissy and the twins.

  “Found a girl,” Michael says, gesturing.

  “Really?” Chrissy says, excited but utterly wiped out. She cranes her neck to see
beyond the small clutch of survivors. For the first time, Michael notices that she has a tiny nose ring, glinting in the semi-darkness.

  “Yeah, looks like she holed up in a storage room there.”

  Now Rachel is looking at them from Kayla’s doorway, and she waves her arm for everyone to come over. Kayla is smiling, wiping her eyes.

  Michael leads them over to Rachel, and it turns out he needn’t have worried about bombarding Kayla with survivors. Now that she’s had her moment with Rachel and found herself embraced by humanity again, she’s remarkably poised at the center of attention. She’s gesturing into the room where she’s been hiding.

  “—had plenty to read!” she’s saying.

  Her voice sounds almost enthusiastic now, and Michael can detect an edge of overcompensation: He’s sure she’s still scared out of her mind, he can see it in her eyes and in the twitch of her mouth, but she’s already trying hard to be the girl she was before.

  Bonnie asks Kayla where she found food and water, and Kayla answers with a politeness that sounds almost nostalgic.

  “That’s actually how I—how I ended up in there. See that little refrigerator there?” She gestures behind her. “It was full of bottled water, and people had left their lunches in there, I guess. I ate those. There’s still water, though, if you want some.”

  As the group murmurs, Michael cranes his neck to read the titles of the books Kayla has been accumulating. There are several teen fiction titles in there—unsurprising. But one of the titles does startle him: Deciduous and Coniferous Trees of the Rocky Mountains.

  Michael breaks away from the group, moves past Kayla into the room, and picks up the book. He takes the opportunity to scan the small space, sees the fridge, notes the small sleeping area that Kayla has fashioned out of towels, both cloth and paper. He brings the book out.

  “Oh, yeah, that one,” Kayla says.

  The small group exchanges glances, and then everyone is focusing on this twelve-year-old kid.

  “You’re really reading that book?” Rachel asks.

  “Kind of,” Kayla says, her gaze flicking from one survivor to the next. “You’ve seen what those people are doing, right? They’re eating the—”

  “No, yeah, we’ve seen it.”