“What the fuck, Jeff, you’re talking outta your goddamn ass!”
“Wait!” Joel holds up a hand in a halt gesture. “What are you talking about?”
“Like I said,” Jeff says, “we’ve been trying to get your attention, right Bro?”
“Uh huh.” Pete is keeping an eye out across the acreage.
“Couple days ago, those assholes got all aggressive, right? That’s the last time we talked to you before you went radio-silent. You were goin’ out to search for someone—” Michael knows immediately that Pete is talking about him “—and we were gonna hightail it out of Masonville, which was pretty much flattened by fire anyway. But would you believe those things kept coming at us, even on fire? I mean, in full flame, the fuckers!”
“Craziest shit I ever saw in my life,” Pete says. “And I’ve been seeing some crazy shit.”
“I don’t know, been a lot of crazy shit.”
“Point taken.”
Survivors have been streaming tentatively out of the library as they perceive that the large men pose no harm. Kayla clutches Bonnie’s arm as they approach, and the girl’s eyes squint against the sunbeams streaming through the smoke. Pete nods to the survivors as they appear. He’s huge and fragrant. Kayla half-hides herself behind Bonnie as Pete takes off his hunting cap to wave at his sweaty face.
“You said there’s a bunch of those things south of us?” Joel says.
“We’ve been watching those goddamn things for days—for some reason, they’re assembling at that Udall nature area, you know, west of the Wal-Mart? Thousands of ’em. They’re just squatting there.”
“That’s where they were going!” Kevin says.
“Those bastards are a mile away, massing there just like in the foothills. One difference, though.”
“No trees,” Joel says. “No pine trees, anyway.”
“Bingo. They’re just … sitting there. No, they’re there for something else—and it might be you.”
“What?!” Bonnie yelps.
“They had us on our heels before, why would they—” Joel begins.
“Strength in numbers?” Michael says, and the group considers that.
“So I told you about Mike Richards up there at the Rod and Gun Club, didn’t I?” Pete says, turning to Joel.
“Yep.”
“Well, he croaked. They just swarmed over him. We barely got out of there ourselves, but we did manage to take half his arsenal. And we’d already cleared out Active Arms. I’ve got a crapload of AR-15 hardware in the truck for you.”
Joel is taken aback. “Hell yes!”
“And then we’re leaving, no offense. I know you need the hardware. I got boxes and boxes of 30- and 50-round magazines. You either gotta get the fuck outta here—sorry, young lady—or there’s a very real possibility you’re gonna have to defend this place like the fuckin’ Alamo.”
A wave of disquiet crashes across the open concrete, quiet cries of distress and gestures of alarm.
“Well, that settles it, let’s get out of here!” Mai says, pushing away from the exterior wall she was leaning against. “Screw this place!”
“This library is barricaded better now than any other place I can think of,” Ron says.
“Yeah, but there’s plenty of other places where there aren’t a thousand of those things nearby!”
“You’re assuming they’re going to attack?” Kevin says.
“Why shouldn’t I?!”
“Have you heard anything from Buck?” Joel asks Pete.
“He’s the cop south of town? Yes sir! He’s looking for you too. He’s managed to stay put down at the Harmony hospital somehow. He’s doing okay, he’s got a small group there, holed up.”
Ron says, “Good to hear. He’s a standup guy.” Michael remembers Joel mentioning the CB communication among all of them, before everything started getting worse—and worse.
“Well,” Joel says, “whatever we do, we can sure use the weapons. We have some defense here, but nothing metal, if you get me.”
“You’re talking about the blood, right?”
“Yeah, we’ve rigged up some tranq rifles with it, and it’s been effective but … a little weird.”
Rachel gives him a look.
“Tranq rifles?” Pete says. “Man, who was the genius thought of that?” He glances around, notices Zoe raising her hand in a modest salute, Chloe right next to her hugging herself in a state of alarm. “Anyway, Buck was talkin’ about the same thing, the blood, using it as a weapon. I don’t think he got as far with it, though. He’s still a Second Amendment dude through and through.”
Kevin, peering into the back of the Thompsons’ truck, says, “I’d guess the Constitution doesn’t much matter anymore.”
“Constitution will transcend this,” Pete says solemnly.
“Not if there’s no one left,” Scott calls, combing his hair back with his fingers. He’s exiting the library cautiously, glancing up repeatedly into the heavens.
And then Rachel speaks up.
“Right, yay for guns!” Her voice isn’t exactly dripping sarcasm, but Michael can hear it, being a practiced soundboard for her sarcasm. “We need more out-and-out killing as opposed to efforts to help these people.”
“People?” Pete echoes. “Those things stopped being people a few days ago.”
“A point of contention around here,” Joel says.
“All I’m saying,” Rachel says, “is that I don’t think of the blood so much as a weapon as … well it’s the reason we’re alive. And it could be our best protection.”
“You might be right, young lady,” Pete says, “but there’s really no time to debate it. You use what you got, is what I say.”
“Anyway,” Joel says. “Thanks.”
“We’re all in this shitstorm together, right?”
“Maybe I had you guys pegged wrong the whole time.”
“Which is what we kept telling you all those years.” Pete winks broadly.
“Right.”
“All right, now listen,” Pete says. “I ain’t stayin’ here, and I don’t think you ought to either. You did us a solid a few days ago, and I’m just payin’ you back now.”
Michael follows them out just as commotion erupts behind him. Mai and some of the others—Liam and Scott among them—are already racing back to the library to gear up for an escape. Michael hears Mai ask, “Who’s going?” Bonnie is trying to reason with her. Most of the others are just standing around, indecisive.
As Joel, Pete, and Kevin stride ahead of him toward the truck, Michael observes the neighborhood again. It’s so quiet that there’s almost a negative energy to it. It’s as if he can feel it in his ears, like they’re on the verge of popping. He flexes his jaw, and in fact his ears do pop.
Probably the concussion still having its way with me.
He walks farther out onto the concrete path, Ron jogging past him to help Joel. When Michael has a view of the sky to the west, he cranes his neck to search the horizon. It’s still pulsating with a sickly crimson, the columns seeming at once to be flowing down and reaching up.
Wait. Sickly?
Is that how he would characterize this phenomenon, or is that just the suggestion of Felicia’s words coming back to him? He’s reminded of that old H.G. Wells story, War of the Worlds, probably the most famous alien-invasion book ever. In that story, a very healthy and aggressive alien species means to conquer Earth, but what they didn’t count on was that a foreign atmosphere would not sustain them. From the moment they arrived, they were doomed. Michael isn’t sure if he’s remembering the book or the movies. Either way, they arrived healthy and were undone by Earth itself.
If what the survivors are dealing with is indeed alien in origin, then it strikes Michael as the opposite of Wells’ vision. Perhaps what they’re dealing with is a dying species, somehow—remotely?—feeding off a very particular resource on Earth, and in the act of doing so, becoming slowly healthy again. And it’s using Earth’s own inhabitants to do i
ts bidding. Anger burns inside him now, watching the skies.
He wonders again whether these things ever expected the likes of him to survive. If they did, what purpose was he serving in their ghastly plan? He forces the pessimistic thought away from him.
Michael turns back to the small clutch of survivors grabbing weapons out of the truck. They’re twenty feet ahead of him, apart from him. The library group is behind him, behind glass and stone.
He feels abruptly separate from all of them.
There’s that sensation again, that feeling of remove. If it’s true that the survivors have an obligation to fight back, to reclaim the world, how is Michael part of that crew? Maybe he should have died back at home, or at his office. That’s when the world ended, and that’s when he should have ended. He doesn’t blame his daughter for saving him from that fate, but it was his fate.
Maybe it should have been his punishment.
A small, bitter laugh escapes his lips, and he feels a weight of self-loathing overtake him.
He wonders if these people would have taken him in so easily had they known he was a fraud. Imagine Bonnie learning what he’d been involved in when these things struck!
He feels a pulse of that negative energy again, his ears popping.
At the same moment, Bonnie says from the library doors, “Do you feel that?”
The group stops, its members glancing around at one another.
Yes, they all feel it.
And that’s when the sky opens up with a roar so massive that it knocks the survivors to the ground.
Chapter 27
Michael trembles under the weight of the sound, covering his ears. He curls on the ground, protectively, but then he angles his head to try to spot Rachel. There she is, right at the library entrance, in front of the propped-open glass doors. Father and daughter make eye contact for the briefest of moments, and then she shuts her eyes tight, burying her chin in her chest to wait out the deafening sound.
The roar seems to last for a full minute, and then it slices off cleanly, leaving the world shaking. He hears glass shattering in the distance, and Michael, filled with dread, twists to scan the library windows across the length of the building. They’re wobbling minutely in their frames, but miraculously they’re holding strong. He can see the trees rustling not from any breeze but from the energy of the roar. And in the absence of the otherworldly sound, he can now hear car alarms wailing.
“Oh no,” Bonnie is saying, positioned above Kayla protectively. “What now!”
Michael catches sight of Chrissy and the twins, sprawled on the ground, glancing up and around blearily. Just visible through the doors of the library, Rick and Mai are on the floor, dazed. Rachel is shaking her head.
“Can’t be good,” Pete says, on one knee, anchored against an exterior book-return kiosk near the front doors. “That never means anything good.”
Joel, already recovered, is rushing two boxes of ammo from the truck toward a library entrance. His footfalls on the warm concrete sound hollow, echoing off low stone walls. “Everyone get ready! It could mean anything, but expect the worst.”
“Let’s go, let’s go!” Kevin calls, also back on his feet, hauling his own armfuls of ammo.
“Don’t get too worked up, now,” Ron warns, looking over at Pete, but his gaze looks worried. “Sometimes it doesn’t mean a goddamn thing.”
“Probably not this time, though.” Scott has crept out of the library and clings to the glass door, watching the skies.
Michael gets back to his feet, listening intently to everything. He’s frozen on the concrete path. There are no new bodies rushing onto the streets, no further noises from the sky. In the wake of the alien thunder, all is calm. But there’s an electricity hanging in the air, seething, crackling. Survivors are now hustling all around him. Someone hands him two AR-15s, and he awkwardly takes them in both fists.
“C’mon, c’mon!” someone yells.
A throbbing void seems to have settled around the library. Something is definitely different. He pops his ears, turns. The sky above the library is smoky and red, as it has been, but is it more intense? Straight above them, the drifting smoke seems to swirl under some kind of atmospheric influence. The smoke moves unnaturally, in shifting fits and starts.
“Something’s happening,” he breathes uneasily.
Bonnie is also staring skyward. “Oh God.”
Behind her, Chrissy and the twins are trembling with an awed fear, Chrissy clutching a charm at her breast. Michael is sure it must be a cross.
A chirping noise sounds from the cab of the Thompson brothers’ truck almost immediately. Jeff is already struggling with his bulk toward the truck, and the chirp lights a fire under his hefty ass. He hefts himself up to the cab and grabs a squawking walkie talkie off the driver’s seat.
“—read, do you read?!” a voice crackles.
“Jeff here.”
“Jeff! Get the fuck out of there!” The voice comes through full of static and panic. “They’re coming—fast—go—get the fuck—”
Several screams echo across the square.
“Holy shit!” Pete yells, and pushes himself away from the wall. He jostles into an unwieldy jog.
Jeff keys the walkie talkie. “How long, over?”
“Now, now, they’re coming fast, leave now—!”
“What’s going on?” Kevin is asking, using the truck to stand. “What? Who is that talking?”
“That’s Trevor on the ridge,” Pete calls over his shoulder, his voice high and tight. “He’s watching our back. Bastards are coming, and they’re coming fast. Are you coming or going? We gotta go!”
“Trevor?”
“We’re leaving! I suggest you do the same! Follow us. We’ll go for high ground!”
“Where?” Ron says, uncertain.
Jeff is already firing up the truck.
“What’s happening?” Scott calls from the doors.
“Where are they coming from?” Joel says, looking around wildly. “I don’t see anything!”
“There’s nothing out there!” Kevin says.
“They’re a mile away, though, aren’t they?” Michael says, not sure what to do. “Right?”
“I don’t—” Joel is staring around wildly, from the faces at the library entrance to the trucks sitting idle just yards away. “Shit!”
Michael hears them first, the mad scramble of thousands of bodies scraping across asphalt, tumbling over one another, gasping in seeming anticipation. Inadvertently, he raises his arm in that direction—due east—pointing, but he’s unsure what’s happening. The incomprehensibility of the sound roots him to the spot, unable to form words. He glares back at Rachel, finds her poised at the entrance between Joel and Kevin, staring at him and beyond him. Her eyes are bulging with fear but show a grim determination.
Everything is stuttering into slow motion.
And then there they are, pouring down Elm Street, heading straight at them. The bodies form a great wall of flesh, like an organic thing, choreographed and synchronized, a mass of giant teeming spiders. Limbs clutch limbs for leverage, for balance, fluidly, in concert, all in service of propelling this impossible conglomeration forward. There are housewives and businesswomen, morning joggers and bicyclists, shop owners and cops, couch potatoes and senior citizens. There are ninety-year-olds, and there are three-year-olds. There are representatives of every race and religion, every body type, every age—all manner of human beings—their eyes enraged, their inverted mouths stretched wide, crooked and gasping.
They’re leaping and sprinting, their collective, roiling breadth filling the entire street, from porch to porch.
A chorus of screams erupts from the library’s interior, and the thought that bursts through his own mind is—
This is happening.
“Aw fuck!” Jeff yells from the truck, and revs the engine brutally. The horn blares. “Let’s go! Let’s go!”
Pete is stunned motionless for a moment, holding his rifle in
his hand like some useless stick, watching the flood of bodies flow down Elm like a rushing tide.
“Pete!” Jeff screams, honking in mad, staccato bursts. The truck lurches forward and stalls. Jeff lets loose with a barrage of profanity that Michael can barely hear under the alien cacophony.
Right next to him, Pete very clearly says, “Fuckers were just waiting.”
“What?!” Joel yells.
“They were waiting for us to come here,” Pete says unsteadily, managing only to take one lurching step backward, away from the sight. “They were watching.”
Michael understands somewhere inside himself that he can’t move his feet. He’s as planted to the spot as Pete. Standing ten feet from Jeff’s truck, he’s torn between leaping into the relative safety of the cab and making a dash up the concrete toward Rachel, toward the questionable safety of the library, and the indecision has frozen him.
Everything is chaos.
Rachel is screaming his name, and then Joel is grabbing his shoulder.
“We have to get inside!”
Wordlessly, he lets Joel yank him backward, away from the truck, but despair clutches at him.
The two men sprint toward the library, and as they race across the last few yards of hot cement, Michael sees the tide of bodies reflected in the window glass. It’s a huge, teeming flood of distorted humanity. It has reached the corner of the library commons and is about to crest over onto the concrete. In seconds it will swallow the trucks.
Joel is yelling as soon as they cross the threshold.
“Go! Go! Take the rifles! Bonnie, I don’t know what good the blood can do, but get it out here! Get those tranq rifles ready, and be ready to get them where we need ’em! Now! Go!”
Most of the survivors are already stumbling around in disarray, but now a measure of focus takes hold. Bonnie rushes toward the refrigerator in the book-return area, closely followed by Mai and Zoe, screaming nervously about collecting the blood canisters. Kevin shouts over her about the more traditional weapons at the front doors, and Michael flows in that direction with Joel and Ron and Liam and Scott.
Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood Page 28
