“Ready?” Chloe breathes, turning to watch Kevin heft the rifle.
“Yep.” He takes aim, steadying himself against the metal edge of the door. “Here we go.”
“Wait … wait …”
The body limps out into the open, away from any foliage, and it’s in clear view.
“Okay,” Chloe says, “whenever you’re ready.”
Kevin’s breath stops, there’s a moment of complete stillness, and then he fires the tranq rifle. The dart flies straight and true, attaching itself to the thing’s hamstring.
Kevin’s breath lets loose. “Whew!”
He pulls the tranq rifle up and away.
All eyes are on the body, which has barely missed a single dragging step. But now it judders to a stop on the concrete path and seems to consider something. A raspy cough escapes its mouth, and that sound ratchets up to a screech of distress.
“Here we go,” Rachel breathes, grabbing Michael’s arm.
The thing seems to be scratching at itself, in a state of painful confusion. In a moment it has dropped straight down, flat on its back, writhing like a pinned bug. Bonnie turns away from the sight, but even more so from the sound—that flat bray of sound, that hoarse screech.
Michael can’t see what its inner light is doing, but if what Rachel told him is true, the illumination is now sparking out.
“It’s taking longer,” his daughter says now in a voice laced with distress. “It’s in pain. Can you shoot it again with more blood?”
Kevin’s eyes are locked on the body.
“Wait for it …” he says.
The body continues to jerk on the pavement.
“Kevin!” Rachel calls miserably.
“It would take too long to prepare another dart, anyway—but look, it’s happening.” He gestures out the door.
The body’s jerky movements are becoming more random, less rhythmic. The sound it’s making goes from inhuman bleat to something more guttural, something like a human response from that ravaged throat.
The thing is screaming now.
“Oh, I can’t listen!” Bonnie cries, moving away from the door. She jogs back into the gloom between bookcases.
“What do we do?” Zoe asks.
“Can we treat it?” Michael asks.
“Treat it how?” Chloe says.
“Nice to hear we were all prepared for this,” Scott says.
“What is that?!” Joel says, arriving in the lobby and rushing toward the door.
No one answers.
They’re all staring outside, at the broken thing on the concrete. At the man on the sun-baked pathway who is turning on his side and staring at them with sap-slathered eyes, attempting to wipe at them furiously, screaming in red-faced pain under the weight of countless injuries.
Whatever force is overtaking these human beings is contorting them into an impossible posture: back-breaking, limb-cracking, joint-popping. But there’s more than that. Much more than that. There’s the teeth-shattering business these bodies have been consumed with for the past few days. The constant gnawing of tree bark in pursuit of … whatever they need inside the cellular structures of those pines. The resulting ravaging of their mouths and throats and digestive tracts. All of that would be enough, but Michael—eyeing the blunt horror on the sidewalk—is pondering less obvious repercussions.
What of the inhabitation itself? The radiation at the center of the head? What is that doing to the host skull, considering the havoc it has wreaked on its targeted victims, or anyone who has gotten too close? Rachel spoke of malleable flesh in the affected bodies—a give in the skin, perhaps allowing the freedom of movement necessary for that incomprehensible crablike posture. Given all that, is the return to humanity in fact a more horrific fate than death? Beyond all the obvious damage this possession has caused, there’s the very real possibility that something cellular is at the center of it, and that’s what spells disaster to Michael.
He’s glancing worriedly at his daughter, who has placed so much faith in the fact that they can turn these people back from their horrific fate.
A strangled sound is coming from the body on the sidewalk.
A sound that becomes a word: “Huuuurts.”
Chapter 21
Rachel is grasping at Michael’s shirt.
“Daddy!”
“It’s talking?” Kayla asks in a horrified whisper.
Bonnie glances at Kayla worriedly, and Michael knows that in any other reality, the older woman would be jumping up and shielding the little girl from this atrocity.
“Is he normal again?” Kayla is asking.
“Shhh,” Bonnie says, now moving her body as if to protect the girl, and then realizing the absurdity of that impulse.
“There’s another one!” Zoe says, her head turned north.
Sure enough, another bent-back body is scurrying south, seemingly emerging from the yard of a home just across the street—a young woman with the tattered remains of a nightie hanging off her body. The body hops up onto the library lawn, heading toward the concrete walkway in front of the library. It will pass directly in front of them.
But the screams of the man on the sidewalk demand their attention. The man is in intense pain, his body jerking spastically, as if on fire. The limbs flail, unmoored from their sockets. Michael cringes at the sight, trying not to imagine what’s happening inside that body.
Most of the man’s sounds are animalistic, just gargled shrieks of pain. But here, as if echoing Michael’s thoughts, comes that unmistakable word again:
“Huuuuuurts!”
“Did you bring any pain killers?” Michael says.
Bonnie appears hesitant. “I have a good supply—not much, but enough.”
“What did you bring?”
“Well, the remaining morphine.” Bonnie glances furtively at Scott.
“Very nice,” Scott mumbles.
Rachel seems in tune with Bonnie, giving the man a dirty look.
Michael can’t guess the meaning behind that exchange.
Bonnie’s voice is still pitched low. “I’m sorry Scott. But we need to be mindful of what we might need. What if one of us gets hurt?”
“Can we spare a little to treat him?” Rachel asks, gesturing anxiously to the man on the ground.
“Not with those things just roaming around,” Kevin said.
“Can we bring him in here?” Rachel’s voice is on the edge of hysteria, counterpoint to the continuing savage cries from outside. “We have to do something!”
“Are you volunteering?” Kevin asks rhetorically. He’s watching the female body come closer, moving inexorably south. “I’m not setting foot out there, not for one of those things.”
There are tears in Rachel’s eyes.
Then Michael notices something.
“Look at that,” he says.
“What?” Kevin says.
“It’s moving straight south.”
“So?”
Everyone watches the female in the midst of its single-minded route. She’s thirty-ish, and her skin appears bleached-white under the remains of the blue nightie. There’s no deviation in her crab-like motion, no pause, no random gesture. The eyes don’t deviate from their straight-ahead gaze.
“So, that man on the ground is now … human … right?”
Kevin thinks about that. “Technically. In a manner of speaking.”
“So that thing out there is passing by a human being, and it doesn’t care. It’s not attacking.”
“You’re thinking … because that thing isn’t attacking him, that we’re safe.” Kevin wipes sweat off his forehead. “Right? I think that might be a dangerous assumption.”
“I’d agree with that,” Scott says, pacing behind them.
The survivors are mostly quiet, watching, considering. Rachel is squirming, listening to the strangled cries. The female is perhaps twenty feet beyond the young man now, paying no attention to him. The body simply crawls past, her limbs moving fluidly despite the horrible
stance, looking utterly alien in its human skin.
“Passing him now,” Michael breathes.
“So she is,” Kevin says.
“So we can go get him,” Rachel says, “we can go get him and help him!”
“You are volunteering!” Kevin says.
“I guess I am.”
But before anyone can react, Michael is slipping between the roughly slid-open doors, nearly tripping but breaking free into the smoky sunlight.
“Daddy!” Rachel calls hoarsely, grabbing at him—too late.
“Get the morphine ready!” he calls back. “Not a lot—we need to keep him awake!”
He tries to tune out Rachel’s hissing cries as he steps out into the open. He takes a moment to gather himself, glances around to gauge the threat. The female body continues its inexorable scuttle south.
He turns back and calls softly to Rachel and the others, “It’s okay.”
The sun is stabbing down with increased heat, despite the layer of smoke and other atmospheric phenomena. He feels instant sweat prickle his skin as he jogs toward the squirming body—farther away than he thought! He feels an immediate regret for this course of action.
And now his eyes lock on yet another cranked-over body, scurrying south in the far distance, east of Peterson, crossing Oak. He lets out a cough. His vision stings from the lingering smoke.
Multiple voices rise in conflict behind him, but he can’t make sense of them as he aims directly for the body on the concrete. Twenty feet, fifteen. He latches on to the man’s ragged screeches, and they are terrible. Ten feet away, Michael gets a full look at the body, and he realizes he has underestimated the horror. Blood is flowing in bright rivulets from the man’s gullet, and he’s making a desperate gargling sound.
“Huuurts!” the man gasps again, focusing his watery eyes on Michael.
“I’m here to help,” he replies.
Michael takes a look around, makes sure the female is continuing its southward lurch. Yes, the pale body is almost out of sight, beyond some shrubbery at the edge of the library property. The streets are baking under an alien sun now, and there’s a strange anticipation in the air. As if more bodies might flow from any direction at any moment. He feels reckless. Too reckless. But for now, beyond the ravaged cries of the man in front of him, everything is preternaturally quiet.
He gets his bearings, and leans over cautiously. His first instinct is to grasp the man’s arms, but he’s wary of touching him. He saw firsthand what happened to Danny. Michael is almost sure that this man is no longer a threat, but there’s still a seed of doubt. He wants to hurry, but he’s unsure…cautious. On the heels of that thought, he hears someone—Bonnie?—shout from the library doors:
“Careful!”
He gestures behind himself with a hand, shushing them, and then focuses on the young man. The eyes are peeled painfully wide, imploring. He’s trying to lift his arms toward Michael, but it seems none of his limbs will cooperate. Blood pulses out of his nose, runs in a thick stream, staining the concrete. Michael knows time is short for this man.
He tentatively reaches toward the man’s face, as if tempting a flame. He feels nothing. There’s no radiation, no heat. He’s not entirely sure what he’s supposed to sense, but nothing is happening.
Throwing caution to the wind, Michael takes the man by the forearms and begins to drag.
The man screams like an animal—a bleating, horrific screech, new blood erupting from his mouth in an obscene bubble, eyes bugging out of his skull, muscles out of control, flailing—and then he deflates, unconscious.
“Good God!” Michael says to the empty streets, and keeps pulling. The arms feel loose in their sockets, and for a queasy moment, Michael has the sensation of dragging a broken corpse.
He’s alive, he thinks. For Rachel’s sake, let him be alive.
Michael is about fifty feet from the front doors, and he already feels as if he’s out of strength. He can hear the voices behind him raised in either encouragement or alarm. He can’t make sense of them; he’s breathing too heavily. His eyes flit left and right as he pulls the body without pause. He can feel the smoke deep in his lungs as he heaves in oxygen. The man’s deadweight is a slog.
He doesn’t see any more bodies. The street remains eerily silent.
Thirty feet.
The voices behind him are a chorus of hysteria. He singles out Rachel’s voice, repeating “Daddy!” like some frenzied mantra, and now he sees the reason for their alarm: The body of a child has crab-walked out of its yard, on the other side of Oak, and is crossing the street, a hundred yards to the northeast. It’s a young boy, perhaps seven years old, and its blond hair is dark with sap and splinters. Michael watches it as he drags the unconscious man. The boy doesn’t seem to notice him at all, just climbs the curb onto the library lawn and then scurries away from him, toward Peterson.
“It’s fine!” he yells over his shoulder.
Pulling, pulling.
But the voices seem to rise an octave, and that’s when Michael bumps into something.
“Shit!” he bellows, inadvertently relinquishing his hold on the man’s right arm, thinking he must have hit a small tree, but there’s a raspy grunt of seeming surprise—right at his left ear—and Michael knows he’s in serious trouble.
He pivots away from the man on the ground, letting the other arm drop, and he stares at the very mobile body that stands there, poised like an obscenely fleshy spider, its inverted head pointing at him like an accusation.
Michael swallows heavily as a black pit of fear opens in the precise center of his chest. He sees all the faces in the window beyond the body, how they’ve all gone silent now, motionless with fear.
The body is that of a large, grizzled man, perhaps early sixties, his skin sun-leathered, his muscles lean from hard work. He might have been a late-in-the-years mechanic, or a farmer. The tobacco-stained but mostly gray goatee on his chin looks like an arrowhead directed at Michael’s heart. He’s wearing a stained white tee shirt and jeans, which are torn at the joints and falling away. The body is mostly still, staring, considering, but it’s ever-so-slightly angling toward Michael, and its wide nostrils are flaring. Blood is leaking out of them, down into the unblinking, deadened eyes and into the ragged hair.
A throaty growl issues from its cranked-open and massacred mouth.
Michael freezes.
A long moment passes as the thing in front of him seems to gauge Michael’s level of threat. Then the thing’s flat eyes shift to the right, away from Michael. Then they move back. The body is still swiveling in his direction, but now in fits and starts. It appears ready to launch—either toward Michael or away from him—and Michael positions himself to jump in the opposite direction of wherever this thing chooses to go.
The mouth lets loose with a gravelly bark, spraying Michael with flecks of bloody wood mulch. There’s anger in its face, if not the dead eyes—he can see it in the brow and the cheeks, an undeniably human expression of rage even in the clutches of what is quite possibly an alien intelligence.
In the midst of his terror, Michael tries to gather something, anything, from that expression. Tries to find motive there, tries to find reason. But all he can see is a cold unreason, a wholly inexplicable monster in bent-over human form.
It barks at him again, as much a clearing of a savaged throat as an angry expulsion of sound, and Michael doesn’t dare move a muscle. He can only watch as the old man’s head does a slow jab at him. Michael can imagine the radiation inside the skull, promising harm, but he can’t actually see it under the bright sun. He knows it’s there, waiting to hurt him. And now the head lunges at him more sharply, like the snout of an aggressive dog. The snarl becomes more pronounced.
Michael feels that any move he makes will be the wrong one.
But Kevin makes the decision for him.
A tiny flash of blue, and the body in front of Michael twitches. Its attention wavers. And then its face twists in confusion. The body thrashes
once—a full-body spasm—and its growl becomes a yowl of pain. It wobbles to the left, and Michael can plainly see the blue tranq dart embedded in the right side of its upthrust abdomen.
The grizzled man falls to the ground and flails. Michael can see Kevin in the distance, at the doorway, the rifle still aimed in his direction. The big man brings the weapon down, watching.
Michael does a quick survey of the area, sees no further bodies. Emboldened, he creeps closer to the old man and studies his face. The features are clenched, every muscle vibrating, and a choking gasp is hissing involuntarily from the mouth. It’s a heart-breaking sight, to see humanity return in the grip of mortal anguish. But Michael has no doubt that human consciousness is flooding back into this body: The eyes flicker and brighten, from corpse-flat to livid, from dead to very much alive, brimming with awareness of a sudden and absolute agony.
The eyes lock on him.
Blood gurgles forth from the mouth, as if given release.
“Come on, old man,” Michael says, and reaches down to grab hold of his arms. He starts to drag him, trying to ignore the helpless screams of protest. Unlike the younger man behind him, the old-timer doesn’t lose consciousness, but Michael senses the same dislocation of joints, the same looseness of limbs. He grits his teeth, blotting out the screams, not caring to imagine the suffering, but that’s impossible. This man’s only hope is inside that library.
Michael pulls him the rest of the way to the library doors and gets him over the threshold, and the voices are a cacophony, Bonnie urging everyone out of the way so that she can administer morphine, several others helping her cause, and Rachel yelling at him for taking the risk. As he lets go of the arms and puts the man in Bonnie’s care, Rachel bats at him angrily.
“—can’t believe you went out there!”
“Okay, thirty milligrams of morphine, here we go.”
Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood Page 22
