Rachel is gearing up for an attack, but Joel cuts her off before she can start.
“Rachel,” Joel gives her a look, “take it easy.”
Michael wonders what might have caused such a rift between Scott and his daughter, but he supposes that’s a discussion for another day. But he speaks up:
“It doesn’t really matter where they’re from or what’s driving them, does it? All that’s important is that they’re a threat. A very weird threat. ”
“It would be nice to understand it even a little bit,” Bonnie whispers gloomily. “To get some kind of … I don’t know … starting point.”
Bill speaks up uncomfortably from his bench. “Has anybody considered …?”
“What?” Joel says.
“Well, the Rapture.”
One of the twins—it’s Chloe—giggles, and Chrissy gives her a sharp glare.
“He’s right, how come no one has talked about that?” the unassuming young woman asks the room quietly.
“I don’t know,” Mai says, “how about because it’s a fairy tale?”
There’s a cough and a gasp.
“And last I checked,” Scott says, “everyone is still, you know, on the planet. They haven’t been whisked away to paradise. Just the opposite, I’d say. Hell on Earth.”
“Who says it has to be that literal?” Bill says. “What if it’s just the souls that have been snatched away?”
“Jesus, we’re not gonna get far if we start bringing the Bible into this mess,” Scott says.
“See, I think you’re perfectly wrong with that statement,” Bill says, his face pinched again. “It might be exactly the thing we need to be talking about. And stop being an asshole about it, huh?”
“He’s right,” Chrissy says, more confident than Michael has seen her before. “No one here has spoken a word about God except to curse.”
“And what about all those tree chompers out there?” Scott says. “Leftover sinners partaking of the Trees of Life?”
“Okay, I see this isn’t quite the right crew for this kind of talk,” Bill says, looking at his hands. “But when I hear all this nonsense about aliens and evil governments and scientists, I’m thinking your Occam’s razor might just be pointing at the wrath of God.”
“End of Days,” Chrissy says solemnly. “It could be.”
Michael finds himself tuning out of this conversation. His has never been a God-fearing soul; he has always found the notion vaguely unpleasant. He determined long ago to spend his life searching for meaning rather than succumbing to predigested answers based on a Golden Age text written by ignorant farmers. He put a certain amount of pride in the fact that he raised Rachel unhindered by predisposition.
It’s her voice that pulls him from his thoughts.
“My dad’s right, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t even matter if it’s the Rapture or whatever. All we have is what’s left. Right now, we need to come up with a plan to survive, and that plan would be the same no matter what caused this. As far as God, well … here’s what I think.” She glances around at all of them. “When I think of God, I think of helping my fellow man. Or woman. Right? And it can’t be just a fluke that we’ve found a way to bring our fellow men and women back—”
“Rachel—” Joel starts.
“I’m serious!”
“Your point is well taken.”
The lobby is buzzing with a kind of indecision. Is more going to be made of this, or have Rachel’s words mollified them?
“Scott did bring up the trees,” Joel says, obviously eager to steer the conversation back down to Earth. “They’re still a mystery.”
“What could they possibly want from trees?” Bonnie says, almost a whine. “Has anybody figured that out?”
All eyes seem to land on Kayla now.
“Did you learn anything about that?” Rachel says quietly.
Kayla locks eyes with Rachel for a moment, waiting for a nod of encouragement, which she gets. Then she turns her gaze outward.
“Well, they’re all doing something really … strange … to the pine trees,” Kayla says, her voice starting a little shyly. “And they’re not just eating the bark. They’re, like, really getting in there deep, into those inside layers, and—” Her mouth curls with revulsion. “—they’re wrecking their own mouths. I was watching four of them outside the windows. It’s gross. I don’t even like to look at them.”
“I don’t either,” Rachel says. “Did you find anything in the book?”
“I don’t know, it’s kind of hard to read. I didn’t know a lot of the words.”
Michael senses the girl’s shyness overtaking her.
“It’s okay, honey,” Rachel encourages her again. “I know you found something, you told me a few minutes ago. All these people here are friends.” Her eyes fall on Scott. “Even that guy.”
“Nice,” Scott says.
Kayla laughs a little. “Well, I was just curious why they only wanted the pine trees. That’s why I looked for that book. You know, what makes them different from regular trees.” She stops talking, shy again.
Rachel is smiling, urging her to go on.
“Well, so one thing I found is that those evergreen trees … what makes them what they are is that they don’t lose their leaves in the winter. You know? So that made me think of survival. Like, why do they need it? Maybe just to survive, I guess. To live longer.”
Joel looks impressed. “Told you she was a smart cookie.”
“Oh,” Kayla says, her voice rising slightly with confidence, “and most regular trees—those are the deciduous trees, I mean—they’re hardwood trees. Evergreen trees are soft wood. I thought that was interesting. Easier to eat.” She makes a disgusted face.
The group considers that, but Michael’s thoughts are still focused on the notion of evergreen trees being some kind of source for longevity. Survival. He thinks there actually might be something to that—until Kayla delivers another possible revelation.
She sounds very self-assured now.
“Oh, oh! There’s another way evergreens are different, too.” She’s actually smiling, like a confident student presenting a book report to her class. “It might be the most interesting thing, at least I think so. Evergreens have seeds. You know, in the cones. They’re called coniferous. That’s how they reproduce. So now I’m thinking—”
“They need it to reproduce,” Rachel finishes. “To continue.”
“Okay, okay,” Scott can’t help but jump in. “Look, this is all terrific—and you’re a sharp kid, no question, good for you—but again … and okay, I’ll say this as nicely as I can … we can’t just jump to conclusions like this. You have to—”
“Do you have ideas?” Rachel asks him. “Have you come up with anything as useful as anything Kayla just said?”
Scott purses his lips. “Ah, young lady, you make it hard to be nice.”
“No, I’m serious.”
“Well, the immediate conclusion I didn’t come to is that those human beings out there—those people who are our friends and our family—are actually … desperate aliens? That they’ve traveled through space to find some chemical in our trees?”
Kayla doesn’t detect the sarcasm. “Just the coniferous ones.”
At least three people in the room snicker.
Scott rolls his eyes. “Do we have any reasonable theories yet? Anything in the real world? I’m serious. Anybody?”
Kayla backs down, sits meekly next to Rachel.
“Scott, can you try not to be a dick?” Rachel says.
Michael still has Kayla’s book with him and has been paging through it. “I noticed something that might be pertinent,” he says, eager to cut Scott off at the knees. “It’s about phloem. I’m not sure how to pronounce that either.” He smiles at Kayla. “It’s a sap. Sugars, proteins, hormones, minerals, and so on. The interesting thing is … and this could support what Kayla said … is that phloem is thought to also send informational signals through the tree. It says, ‘Rece
nt evidence indicates that mobile proteins and RNA are part of the plant’s long-distance communication signaling system.’ And there’s this picture of leafhoppers and ants feeding on the phloem. So, I don’t know, we could be looking at a situation where these things—whatever they are—are using human bodies to collect something not only tangible like food or whatever … but also … something intangible … something I can’t even imagine, but something in the cellular memory of the tree?”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” Brian says, “one of the first things I thought of when I saw those things bending back like that was some kind of insect.”
“Sure, that sounds reasonable,” Scott says. “Giant insects.”
“I’ll ask you again, Scott,” Rachel says, not bothering to look at him, “what are your theories?”
“And are you being serious?” Joel adds. “You were out on the streets, you’ve seen what’s happening to these bodies, right? You were at the hospital, right? You saw the light glowing from the center of their goddam heads? The way they crawl around? You’ve seen the atmospheric disturbances? The sound they make? Are you being willfully ignorant here, or should we start trying to find out if a good psychologist survived?”
Scott pushes away from the wall. His eyes are edged with red, and his cheeks are flushed, showing faint freckles.
“I’m a little tired of being talked to like that, Joel. Look, no offense to the kid, okay? I’m just not sold on the ‘little green men’ card.”
A look passes between Ron and Joel. Ron is the one who speaks up.
“At this point, we’re just sharing observations. Anyone can do that. Like I said, we could look directly up into the center of that thing, and it was clear that something was happening up there. Something coming down, and something going up. After all these observations, you’re still thinking it’s something else? Something manmade? Terrestrial?”
Scott lets his gaze flit from one survivor to the next. “Of course I’m thinking terrestrial. Has everyone gone nuts? Something horrible happens, and the first instinct is to blame space aliens?”
“That wasn’t our ‘first instinct,’ man,” Joel says.
“One of the reasons I left the hospital in the first place was this kind of thinking.”
“What?” Rachel asks. “Observing things? Testing things? You mean like ‘scientific method’ kind of thinking?”
“Yeah, and attitudes like that—all high and mighty about the ‘answers’ you’re coming up with, at least until those theories turn out to be totally wrong.”
Michael listens to the conversation devolve from there, and although he finds himself—remarkably—siding with Scott on some of his arguments, he’s had enough of the tone. He knows that if these two combined groups are going to accomplish anything, it’s going to require a sense of harmony.
“Enough!” he yells, and abruptly everyone is staring at him.
He lets the word echo out among the books, and he stands up on wobbly legs.
“It doesn’t matter! Do you get that? No matter what anyone’s theories are—and Scott, I get where you’re coming from, I really do—but it doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you what matters. Regardless of what is happening to these bodies, they’re after us, and they can hurt us. We have to deal with that. And the way we deal with that would be no different whether they’re from down here or up there. It doesn’t matter. So knock it off!”
Scott doesn’t say anything for a moment, just shakes his head, eternally frustrated by everything and everyone around him. Michael finds it an annoying trait.
“It’s a good point,” Joel says. “We’re not gonna get far biting each other’s heads off.”
“What’s important right now is protecting ourselves,” Michael says. “Once we’re reasonably sure we can hold off a wave of those bodies, then we need to talk about how we can solve this thing. We have this new information from Kayla, and we need to look at that some more.” Next to Rachel, Kayla smiles shyly, looking down. “But for now, I want to know where we stand with the blood. We might differ on why our blood type matters in all this, but the fact remains that it does.”
Michael pauses, looking around. Everyone is quiet, listening to him.
“Zoe said something last night that really made an impact on me,” he goes on, and Zoe blinks, watching him. “Remember, you said that we have the answer to this inside us. We are the weapons. We all are. We are the solution. There’s a lot more of that to explore, too. But for right now, we need to focus on the ‘weapon’ part. Those bodies out there have a way to hurt us, yes, but inside every one of us is something that can kill them.” He turns to Joel. “Am I right in assuming we have no other weapons? Guns?”
“Well, obviously I have access to them, but the weapons I did have were in the cruiser.”
“And most of the firearms we had at the hospital are still there,” Kevin adds. “I have a shotgun in the cab of my truck, but no more shells.”
“I don’t think we’re getting outside anytime soon, so I think it’s reasonable to say that we need to make the most of this weapon we do have. Our blood. Hell, maybe we’re wasting time right now when we should be stockpiling blood.”
Michael glances down to find Rachel staring up at him with a half-smile. Perhaps even an expression of pride. He hasn’t seen an expression like that on her face in years.
“We did manage to bring in a box of tranquilizer guns and a crapload of reusable darts,” Kevin says, glancing over at Zoe, who speaks up.
“Yeah, we got to the wildlife office before here, and we gathered up everything we could find, which was—how many?” She twists toward Chloe.
“I don’t know the number, but a fucking lot of them,” her sister says. “We grabbed everything we could. And we still have the Super Soakers.”
“Wait, you grabbed a fucking lot of what?” Scott asks.
“Tranq darts,” Zoe clarifies. “We got a shit ton of them, and we got six rifles. Those darts are reusable. I’m not exactly sure how to use them, but I don’t think they’ll be too hard to figure it out. They’re 5cc darts. I’m pretty sure we grabbed everything we need—stabilizers, pressurizing syringes, everything.”
For the benefit of the college team, Joel says, “I told Ron about the effect blood has on these things, even on their skin, but it’s really injection that turns them back. The Super Soakers are great for annoying the shit out of them, especially if you get it in their eyes, but you really have to get the blood inside them. That’s what extinguishes that light. Problem is, we can’t get too close to ’em. So … tranq darts. Worth a try, anyway.”
Liam says, “You guys were busy over at the hospital.” The young man has a nervous energy to him that looks like sickness but could just be anxiety.
“Sure helped that we had a bunch of O-neg plasma bags in the next room,” Joel says.
“We need to figure out how much blood we need in each dart,” Rachel says. “I mean, is a drop enough to change them back, or do we need to inject a large amount?”
“Exactly!” Kevin says. “This is the conversation we need to be having.”
Scott rolls his eyes.
“So how much blood do we have, anyway?” Michael asks the room.
Bonnie says, “I managed to take twelve units, which was basically all we had left, but when we were attacked in the truck, we used a lot of them. We only have a few left.”
“How many is a few?” Scott says.
Bonnie looks disconsolate. “Three?”
“Well, like I said, let’s not forget that our bodies are filled with the stuff,” Michael says.
“And I did grab some equipment for drawing blood,” Bonnie says. “As long as we can find a way to sterilize it. I didn’t grab any alcohol from the hospital, but I’m hoping there’s some around here. I did grab a lot of liquid Heparin—that’s an anticoagulant. It doesn’t work long-term—things will still get gummy after a while—but as long as we keep everything refrigerated, the blood should be pretty effective for
—”
It’s at that moment that another thundering roar rips the sky and vibrates the entire library. In the middle of her sentence, Bonnie goes to one knee, her hands going to her ears. Several people cry out. Cringing under the onslaught, Michael sees Rachel protectively covering Kayla’s ears and squeezing her eyes shut. The room itself seems to cower under the weight of the sound, the walls shrinking beneath it, books shivering atop tables and falling to the floor.
The roar lasts approximately fifteen seconds but seems longer. It seems to go on forever, until the survivors simply give in, helpless to the advance of the possessed bodies outside. But it finally ends on a sharp note, and only in awful retrospect can Michael process it: It wasn’t quite as long as the aural assault that preceded the recent aggression from the bodies, but it was a major event. The quiet that descends in its wake feels malevolent.
All of the survivors are gasping and glancing around warily.
“Oh no!” says Bonnie, the first to form a coherent thought. “What are they doing now?”
Chapter 20
Chrissy and the twins immediately rush to the windows by the doors, peering out, searching for activity. Liam and Brian hustle up behind them. Michael is there too, fearing the worst. Joel and Ron are at his side, angling for a view.
“Look there,” says Rick, to the left of the door. He’s pointing.
At a coniferous tree directly across Peterson, in the lawn of a nicely restored Dutch colonial home, a body is attached to the bark.
“That’s one of the two we’ve had our eye on,” says Rick, to the left of the door. “It hasn’t really moved at all, just the usual chewing—”
“—but it’s moving now,” Michael finishes.
“Yes.”
Bonnie starts emitting a series of moans.
Although the body is roughly fifty yards distant, its movements are visible: Formerly attached organically, almost seamlessly, to the pine, the body—that of a young, shirtless man with longish hair—has paused in its splintery mastication. Even from here, the survivors can see blood, bright at the thing’s mouth, flowing in slow rivulets down into its eyes and stiffened hair. The mouth has stopped chewing, but the jaw is still working as the face detaches from the trunk with sticky effort. Then the upturned face seems to consider something—an almost human expression, except for the sealed-shut eyes and the streaming sap and mulch.
Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood Page 20
