“I still don’t get it, but they want something in those trees. And they’re only interested in the pine trees—the coniferous ones.”
She pronounces coniferous a bit oddly, too carefully, as if she’s never said the word aloud before.
Rachel can’t help but laugh at the things coming out of Kayla’s mouth.
Michael is flipping through the book’s pages.
Joel says, “Kid, you’ve just appointed yourself head researcher. Nice to have you with us. You up for telling us what you’ve learned?”
“I guess so.” Kayla has a wide-eyed look of innocence about her, but there’s also a flintiness there that’s unusual for a preteen. The kid is sharp.
“Okay, we’re gonna have a little Town Hall meeting right now out there in the lobby. We’re gonna lay everything out, see where we stand. We’ve got two groups coming together here—we’re from the hospital, and Ron’s group in there came from CSU. We learned some things at the hospital just as you learned here, so we’re all gonna start sharing things with each other.”
Ron’s group has started filtering in toward Kayla, but Joel directs them back out to the lobby.
There’s a cool cleanliness and order to the library, thankfully, but Michael can tell that’s going to be a brief pleasure. Perhaps a day or two. The group—now sixteen people strong—has a sweaty, animal humidity to it that is already spreading, and Michael knows that these books are soon destined for the floor as their heavy shelves are shoved against the windows. It’s only a matter of time.
Joel’s group—as Michael thinks of it—heads for the lobby in a loose, nervous cluster, and Rachel falls in next to him, her arm around Kayla. The two are already close pals. Rachel looks up at him, then briefly places her head against his shoulder—a reminder of the moment they had before the discovery of Kayla.
Michael allows himself an uncertain smile, and then Joel calls out to the two men at the front doorway.
“What are you seeing out there?”
The sweaty guy speaks up. “A whole lotta nothin’. There are a few clamped to trees, way off over there. But they don’t seem to be interested in detaching.”
“I don’t get it,” Joel says.
“They had no trouble sniffing us out at the hospital,” Bonnie says.
“Okay everyone, let’s settle in, grab a quick seat.”
The groups come together amiably, finally nodding to one another in tentative companionship, and there’s an eerie quiet over everything. Michael likes to think it’s the communal remembrance of being at a library, but he knows it’s merely the shared exhaustion, the common grief for the lost friends and family that every single person here is feeling, the dark uncertainty of the future. Heavy things like that—they can’t have surmounted them during the time he was unconscious. In fact, they’re probably only now just coming to terms with them. Or will in the near future.
At this moment, Michael would rather feel the soft pressure of his daughter’s head against his shoulder than deal with the fact that every other aspect of his life and identity has been devastated.
Chapter 19
Most of the assembled crew has collapsed to the floor, looking as if they might at any moment crash into slumber. The young women, in particular, look useless in their exhaustion: Chrissy and Chloe have slumped against each other like a couple of drunken sorority sisters.
Except that their clothes and skin are blotched and swiped with dried blood.
“All right, folks,” Joel calls from the foot of an open stairwell leading up to the second floor, “we have a fairly secure perimeter, as long as those things can’t break through the heavy glass of these windows. I’m pretty sure they can’t, but then again, they’ve surprised me more than a few times already.”
There’s a murmur of dismal consent across the lobby.
“We’ve completely blocked the three smaller entrances to this building—a smaller door to the south and two employee doors to the west. Ain’t nothing getting through those. Thanks guys.” He nods to two men to his left—the young man he noticed earlier, as well as the black-haired man, who looks like a heart-attack candidate, sweaty and heavy. “I guess the biggest news is we found another survivor, this scrappy youngster over here. Her name is Kayla, she’s—how old?”
Kayla says, “I’m twelve,” in a voice that contains far more enthusiasm than it probably should, given the circumstances.
A ripple of laughter flows through the room.
“Glad you’re okay, Kayla,” Bonnie says, over on the far side of Rachel.
“Me too.”
“As you can imagine,” Joel goes on, “Kayla’s been doing some reading in here. Apparently she’s even been reading about the types of trees that these goddam things seem most interested in. So maybe she can help us get a handle on what we’re dealing with out there. Turns out we’ve got several young ladies who are pretty smart cookies. Kayla, I’m glad you found Rachel first. You two are the ones who are probably gonna figure a way out of this mess.”
Joel is striving for a tone of hope in his ragged voice, but Michael can hear the cracks. On a kind of instinct, Michael searches the room for Scott, finds him leaning against the wall over by the book-return slot. His mouth is closed tight, and there’s the slightest twitch at the corners, a grimace. Then again, Michael is looking for it, so it might just be imagination.
“For some reason, those things are leaving us alone at the moment,” Joel goes on. “Now, we can debate all we want about the reason for that—and we should—but we can’t just assume we’re safe here. That’s what we started to do at the hospital, and that was overrun.”
He nods to Kevin, who is standing side by side with Chrissy and the twins.
“We had the sliding doors open, like morons, just to let in some fresh air,” the big man says. “That place got incredibly rank, with all the spilled blood and the bodies—Jesus! But yeah, while we were cleaning up, they creeped right in, four of the motherfuckers. Sorry. We lost two people, and Bonnie was hurt.”
Michael, surprised, turns to Bonnie. Rachel does, too. Bonnie doesn’t appear to want the attention. Timidly, she shows her hands and forearms, which appear as if they have been splattered with bleach.
“They just … rammed into me, with their heads. I shoved at them, but they were stronger.” She drops her arms, hiding them behind her as if ashamed. “They’re a little numb. Those monsters would’ve killed me if it hadn’t been for Kevin.”
“Monsters?” comes Rachel’s voice, hardened. “Is that—” She composes herself. “—is that how we’re talking about them?”
“Yes,” Scott says from the edge of the group. “Yes it is!”
“Well, you haven’t seen what we’ve found.”
Kevin and Bonnie exchange an uncomfortable glance.
“Because they’re still—well, they’re still people, right?” Rachel is looking around sharply for support. “Underneath it all? We know that.”
A few survivors start talking at once, but it’s Joel’s voice that’s most forceful.
“Rachel, I can’t see how you can go through something like what we just saw in that Hummer, and think there’s any humanity left in those things!”
“But you saw it yourself, at the hospital.” Rachel is defiant, and her pose suggests a protective shielding of Kayla. “The man in that bed came back. The blood turned him back.”
Kevin steps back in. “Rachel, that dude is dead. He’s dead.”
“How?”
“He was in pain,” Bonnie says. “The worst pain I’ve ever seen, even worse than Jenny.”
Michael doesn’t know who Jenny is, but the words have a stinging effect on Rachel, who closes her eyes and brings her head down.
“Whatever is inside them …” Joel says, “… it has changed them irreversibly.”
Rachel shakes her head.
“I have to believe,” she seethes, “that we can cure them. That we can fix this.” Her eyes come up blazing. “Otherwise, we’re
doomed, aren’t we? As a race! I mean, we’ve found this solution, and it’s a solution inside all of us. We’ve found what it can do. We can’t just ignore it! I don’t believe that it’s … that it’s irreversible! It can’t be. How did he die?”
Kevin takes a moment before answering. “Those things got him—”
Michael is suddenly aware that Chrissy is crying. “He was—he was screaming.”
“All ri—” Joel tries to cut in.
“So you’re not even sure?” Rachel says. “You left him to die? I know none of us knew him, but … you left him in that room and they just swarmed him?”
“He was the only reason we were able to get away,” Bonnie says, and Kevin gives her a reproachful look.
“That’s terrible,” Rachel murmurs.
“He was gone, Rachel,” Kevin insists. “Too far gone.”
“Well, Rachel has a point,” Joel says. “If nothing else, the blood—injecting the blood—has the effect of destroying what’s inside them.” He turns to Ron. “I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves, though. I’d like to fill in Ron’s group about what we’ve discovered, and vice versa. So now seems as good a time as any to share some names. I’ll start with the hospital crew …”
Joel introduces Rachel, Kevin, and Bonnie, even gives an inclusive nod to Scott. He points to Michael, and makes special mention of Rachel’s desperate search and successful retrieval of him south of Harmony. He finishes off the introductions with Chrissy, Chloe, and Zoe, and Kevin mentions the two other survivors at the hospital—Karen and Jerry—both of whom were injured and took off in their own vehicles for other locations.
Mostly, Joel summarizes Rachel’s discoveries about the blood, and as he does so, Michael feels a weird pride for his daughter. He’s learned that she was the first person to discover the temporary solution of smothering out the strange luminescence from those bodies’ heads, in addition to being the first to find the common link between all survivors—O-negative blood. She’s proven herself to be an honest-to-goodness survivor, seeking answers in the face of outright horror. Yes, she made mistakes, but she’s capable of thinking in a way that Michael doubted even he would have been able to in the same circumstances.
Joel finishes with an account of their blood test on the prisoner in the upstairs room. The story has Ron’s crew riveted, and they ask a few questions in disbelief, not daring to hope that the fate of these bodies everywhere might actually be open to reversal.
“Holy shit,” says the small, wiry Asian girl.
Joel gives her a glance, then goes on. “You’ve probably gathered by now, but this is Ron here,” Joel says.
“Hey.”
“Ron and his group were at the college, holed up in the student center. Do you want to …”
“Sure, yeah, I’m Ron, but you guys from the hospital know me as the voice on Joel’s radio.”
A murmur of quiet laughter among the survivors.
“I don’t have any affiliation with the school, just ended up there through circumstance. Started with Mai over there.” The young Asian woman gives a pert salute from her perch atop one of the checkout counters. “We ran into each other on Drake, near the Walgreens, just, you know, bowled over by everything. And then we just started gathering people. We saw Old Town in flames, and we started in that direction to see if we could help, but then we met this other guy, Randy—he’s dead now—but after we met him near the Chuck E Cheese, we saw another big fire west of there, so we headed that way. That was at the Varsity Apartments—where we found Bill and Rick, trying to stop the fire.” Ron nods toward the door. “See anything yet, guys?”
“Quiet,” says the younger man on the left. He’s a good-looking fellow with bright blue eyes, an easy smile, and crooked teeth. “Hey, I’m Rick.”
“Joel, Rick was the one who picked you up on the portable CB that first time. Anyway, it was a small private aircraft, a Cessna, embedded in one of the apartments. Scariest thing I’d ever seen—at the time, anyway. Man, I wish now that’s all I’d seen. But that whole place was full of bodies. All of them dead … glowing out of their heads. We thought we were gonna get that fire under control, with the four of us throwing buckets of water on it, but it was just too far out of hand. That whole thing went up … all those people.”
“You tried, at least,” Bonnie says. “That’s all you could do.”
“Wait, wait, wait—I’m sorry, can I say something?” Scott says from the edge of the group. “I mean, yeah, ordinarily you’d want to save people from a fire—of course!—but considering what they’ve become … isn’t it more like, I don’t know, good luck that they burned?”
Next to Michael, Rachel stiffens. “Didn’t you hear what I just said? We have a way to save these people—”
“Okay, okay, you two, you’ll get your turn,” Joel says, and Scott just shakes his head. “Go ahead, Ron.”
“Right,” Ron says, eyeing both Rachel and Scott curiously. “Well, after that, Mai led us through the college, and we found …” He cranes his neck around to locate two more survivors. “ … Brian and Liam there.” The two men are on a bench by the stairs. Brian is the stocky heart-attack candidate, but he’s calmed down how. Looks to be in his forties, appears devastated, haunted; he very probably lost his whole family. Liam is younger, with angular features and a sharp gaze; might have been a student. “Brian had the keys to the student center, so that’s how we managed to dig in there.”
The two men give unenthusiastic nods to the rest of the group.
“At its largest, our group had about thirty people, but a few of them left to try to find family, or they were just restless, and at one point we had a group venture out to Old Town to try to help out, but it was too far gone, and those things were starting to come back. We got your word about smothering them to kill them, and we did that to a few of them in the building, to clear it out.”
Rachel appears to hang her head in private shame.
“We were all prepared for some zombie-like attack.” He offers a mirthless laugh. “But they just crawled away.”
“Never saw that coming,” Rick grumbles from the door.
“Yeah, well, now they’re definitely after us, and here’s where we might have something to add to the discussion. Those huge goddamn roars coming from the sky? They’re communications.”
“I knew it,” Joel said, “but tell them what you saw.”
“We had windows that looked straight out onto a big mass of those things west of the Lory Student Center, in a park. Every time that roar happened, it was like the sky opened up, and all this red light came rushing downward. Immediately after that, there would be some kind of change in behavior in the bodies, whether it was as small as a twitch or an angle of the head, or a movement from tree to tree or from area to area. Something synchronized. The biggest roar was this morning, and that’s when a bunch of the bodies broke away from the trees and started targeting us.”
“And there was another one when we got here,” Chrissy says in a small voice.
“Which is about when, if you noticed, they suddenly stopped targeting us. At least for the moment.”
“Why would they stop?” Michael asks. “They had us on our heels.”
“That’s the question.” Ron lets that sink in. “But the communication goes both ways. Whatever those things are getting out of those trees, we think it’s being sent—” He jerks his thumb skyward. “—up.”
“I’m sorry, I’ve gotta jump in here,” Scott says. “Are we really talking about aliens here? I mean, yes, things are fucking weird—all those people are doing things that I don’t understand at all, and yes, there’s something going on in the sky, but we’re not seriously saying that the obvious conclusion is little green men … right?”
Ron pauses, glances around. “I actually don’t think there’s any question about it at this point.”
For a long moment, the band of survivors react mutely to Ron’s certainty. A sort of dumbfounded acceptance. Then Scott releases a
scoffing laugh, shaking his head.
Liam says, “If you’d seen everything from the perspective we had, you’d get it.”
“Oh, then I’d get it?” Scott says.
The young man just eyes him coolly.
“Because as far as I can see,” Scott says, “no matter what those things are doing, they’re still people. Just because we don’t understand it, well … maybe that doesn’t automatically mean they’re from outer space.”
“Scott,” Rachel says, “I think you’re forgetting that a lot of the time we were learning about these things, you decided to make yourself scarce.”
“Gotta say,” Mai says, “I’m kinda siding with Scott on this one.”
“Little Miss Contrary,” Rick mumbles from the door, looking away, and Michael can sense a little history there.
“Fuck you, limp dick,” Mai says, hopping off her little table and glaring lasers Rick’s way.
Rick consciously looks away, preferring the view outside to staring Mai down.
“Guys, guys!” Ron says. “Come on, now. Whole new place, whole new start, right? Let’s be nice.”
Mai is still glaring at Rick.
“Mai, it was you who suggested some kind of invasion at the school!” Brian challenges her.
“A girl can change her mind.” She twirls back toward the checkout desks. “Maybe it’s the government. Maybe a foreign government. Hey, maybe it’s some whacko religion.” Michael hears glee in her voice.
Scott fidgets, as if he can sense the conversation getting away from him.
“It could be anything. Anything on Earth. Occam’s razor.”
“What’s that?” Mai says over her shoulder.
“Forget all the wild theories. The simplest explanation is probably true.”
“What’s your simple explanation, Scott?” Rachel asks.
“We did this! Man-made! Yes, maybe a government somewhere fucked up. Foreign astronauts in the ISS let an experiment get away from them. Hell, I don’t know.”
“Exactly,” Rachel says.
“God, you’re—” Scott starts, then his eyes land on Michael and he shuts up.
Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood Page 19