Chrissy and Chloe remain at the front doors, backed away from the men, their hands cupped at their mouths, screaming for Pete. “Get in here! Get in here!”
Michael looks at the two brand-new AR-15s in his grip, remembering that he’s holding them, and at that moment, Joel takes one from him, frantically helping him load a magazine into the remaining one, thumbing off the safety and shoving him hard on the shoulder.
“Get ready to barricade these front doors! You too, Kev!”
Outside, Pete is shambling toward the front doors, spinning to judge the distance of the threat. Seeing Pete launch himself toward the library, Jeff has fired up the truck again and leaps the big vehicle forward, turning sharply away from the entrance just as forty bodies seem to envelop the truck bed, slamming it down with their collective weight. Other bodies careen underneath the tires, jerking the vehicle to a shuddering stop. The wheels spin uselessly atop flesh that goes instantly pulpy, spraying the concrete with red mud.
As Pete rushes through the doors, the truck is completely swarmed, invisible beneath the bodies.
“Jeff!” Pete wails, and then the doors are shut, and Bill and Rick are locking them, moving large tables against them.
“No way those will hold!” Scott yells. “For fuck’s sake!”
“Move back!” Michael yells, grabbing Scott’s shoulder. “Get away from the window!”
The horde sweeps up the path, a mass of gasping anger and hyperactive limbs. Michael holds his breath, staggering backward with the rest of the group, holding Rachel and Kayla to him—and then the bodies crush against the thick windows, battering, darkening the lobby. The scrabbling things are all panting and thumping, their dead eyes staring in, their mouths open, their red glows perilous and bright and flashing from their throats.
“It held!” Chloe cries from Michael’s left. “It’s holding!”
“Shit, shit, shit …” Kevin is repeating endlessly, but he responds to Chloe: “Yeah, but for how long?” He’s backing away from the doors, unsure what to do.
Michael tries to get a glimpse through the throng to determine Jeff’s fate, but it’s impossible—it’s body on top of body on top of body. The lobby darkens further, and now the collective luminescence from the things’ throats is like an evil red fog surrounding them, swallowing the lobby, a poisonous radiation that promises to consume them at the slightest wrong move. The things’ heads are stabbing at the windows, mercilessly, and the library is filled with a discordance of knocks and thuds. Their collective gasping is like a sustained, gravelly hum. At the lobby doors, the glass is already fogging, smearing under the radiation, but it’s remaining resilient.
“Listen for breaking glass!” Joel calls. “Everyone!”
Chloe is staring at the front doors, beyond the makeshift barricade. “The glass here isn’t as thick. This glass at the doors.” She has surprised Michael, keeping her cool in the face of unimaginable horror, but she’s just a kid thrown into a warzone. “If it’s gonna break, it’s gonna break right there.” She gestures with her heavy rifle at the entrance.
Joel is right next to her, aiming. “I think you’re right.”
“Those bastards!” Pete is shouting, fiddling with his rifle. “Bastards!”
“How many of them are there?” Kayla says meekly from under Michael’s right arm.
“Thousands?” Rachel says, a hard swallow cutting the word in half. She glances up at him as she pushes away.
Michael can see tears in her eyes. He can sense his daughter’s conflict—the weight of responsibility she feels to save as many human beings as she can, and the realization, even as she cradles her own rifle, that that responsibility is about to be dealt a massive blow.
The bodies continue to press against the side of the building. Michael can hear shouting from the south and north wings: The things are swarming on all sides of the library, blotting out the world, their limbs scratching at the walls and windows, searching for entrance. The thumping becomes an oppressive and unnerving racket. Michael is waiting for one of those thumps to become a crash of broken glass.
Bonnie and three others emerge from the north end, carrying boxes full of blood-filled canisters. “Here! Here!” she’s calling. “This is our best defense.”
“Yeah, from what? A hundred of these things?” Scott says, sweaty and visibly shaking. “What about the ten thousand after those? He backs up against the drinking fountains by the stairwell and grasps at it for balance. “We gotta be ready to lock ourselves in the bathrooms or something! I’m just saying we need to be ready!”
“What are they doing?” Bonnie cries, really seeing the bodies against the glass for the first time now. “Why are they—”
But her words are cut off by the crack of Pete’s rifle and the crash of shattered glass at the left door. There’s a collective gasp from the survivors, the loudest of which come from Liam and Chloe flanking the door.
“What the hell are you doing?” Joel yells at the large man.
Pete can only mumble. “It was about to give.”
Bodies are immediately surging in through the hole, their upside-down, angular movement seeming more than ever like a throng of agitated spiders. Joel, Michael, Kevin, and Ron raise their AR-15s simultaneously and fire. The bodies squeal as the bullets hit them, tearing through their flesh, but they continue toward them inexorably. They scream and flinch but keep coming. Michael stares at them, appalled, unconsciously bringing down his weapon.
“God!” Rachel yells from somewhere.
“The heads!” Joel calls. “Aim for the heads!”
Michael aims and misses. He screams his annoyance. He focuses, aims again, and delivers a headshot to the closest body, whose luminescence immediately sparks out as the skull explodes out behind it in a red mess. The body falls limp at the vestibule. The others follow suit, and more bodies fall, but they’re climbing through with increasing rapidity.
“Need help in the lobby!” Ron calls loudly. “Now!”
“Like fucking immediately!” Kevin yells.
Pete seems to snap out of his daze, and begins firing into the churning tumble of flesh.
The lobby is soon a maelstrom of lead, rifles firing ceaselessly at the bodies squeezing through the gap. Bodies crash to the floor, extinguished in a messy, red tangle, piling up, and yet more bodies keep pushing through. Muzzles strobe in the claustrophobic dimness of the lobby, and the sound of gunfire is like an endless string of deadly firecrackers.
Scott screams incoherently, backing away toward the bathrooms.
“Hold the line!” Joel calls. “They’re slowing down!”
Michael can’t believe it, but it’s true: The pile of bodies across the front entrance is growing, becoming more and more of a roadblock against easy entry. The things are slipping on blood, fumbling as they climb atop the mountain of corpses. They’re hissing and leaping, straight into rifle fire. But they’re not mindless. In fact, most of them are disturbing in their intelligence and ferocity. One of them, a lean young woman in ripped jeans and a white tee shirt, rises over the pile, eyes Michael with a vicious sneer, and prepares to leap, angling her body strategically, but before he can even take aim, her head is obliterated by Ron’s weapon. The body goes tumbling backward toward the door, partially blocking it.
“Thanks,” Michael coughs.
He sees only a look of terror on Ron’s face—a quick flick of Not doin’ this for you, pal—and then he’s reloading and firing once more.
Michael hears Joel yell something, but he can’t make it out over the gunfire. Someone grabs his shoulder. It’s Joel at his ear.
“Be efficient! We’ve already gone through a lot of ammo!” The cop shows him a new magazine, sets it at Michael’s feet.
Within minutes, the pile of bodies is so great that the influx has slowed significantly, and Michael backs off, listening for other cries of alarm from other sections of the library. The bulk of the survivors are right here in the lobby, breathless with amazement at what has jus
t taken place, and eager to pitch in if the wall of bodies breaks and more of them flood in. But it seems to be holding, and only the occasional boom of gunfire breaks the creepy, shifting silence.
“Watch your fire!” Joels yells in the relative silence. “Conserve your ammo!”
“Can they get in?” Bonnie asks from the back of the room, trying and failing to push back on her panic. “Are we safe? Are we safe? Joel? Michael?”
“Take it easy,” Joel says, breathing heavily.
“What are they doing?” Scott’s voice is near hysteria.
“Obviously they’re trying to get in,” Kevin says. “Finish us off.”
“Christ, man!” Scott yells. Eyeing an unused AR-15, he strides across the lobby, grabs it, and finds a full magazine. With some uncertain effort, he shoves it in place. “Why am I even here? I shouldn’t be here. And now I’m buried beneath a million of those fuckers!”
Michael watches the pile of bodies at the entrance, aiming his rifle, waiting for movement. The rear of the pile seems to have effectively crammed the shattered door—or at least the pile in combination with the bodies’ weird compressing motion from the outside.
He feels Rachel join him, grasping his forearm. He glances down. One hand covers her mouth in dismay. She’s staring at the pile of bodies. He matches her gaze, and whereas before he saw them as monsters, it takes her expression to see what she sees: broken and bleeding human beings, destroyed victims of this horror show.
“Oh Daddy,” she whispers.
“I know.”
An oppressive quiet returns to the library. The survivors are panting, jogging from room to room with their weapons, double-checking their ammo, their eyes large with fear. The library is utterly surrounded, packed in by thousands of those monstrosities. At every window, Michael glimpses upside-down faces and twisting limbs, torsos and hands and feet, squirming minutely, caught under the weight of the bodies on top of them, and the bodies on top of those bodies, all vying for entrance.
He doesn’t dare get too close to any of those windows, but he does watch them. He remembers all too clearly the way that red luminescence softened that glass of the Hummer’s window, allowing one of the things to steal that boy. Danny.
Michael isn’t exactly relieved to see some fogging of the glass, but at least there are no signs of softening, of the glass giving way.
“What are they trying to do?” Mai says, striding in from the north annex, red-faced. “They can’t just push in like that. They can’t even move, the way they’re pressed up against the windows. I mean, look at them.”
“I don’t want to look,” Kayla says.
But it’s mesmerizing. In the absence of the generator lighting—nobody has made a move to turn anything on—the only luminescence is coming from the rare gap between the compressed bodies or the multitude of glowing orbs in the throats of the bodies themselves. The heads continue to stab at the windows, all around the library, lending a rhythmic thumping to the red throb of the glow itself. In the claustrophobic heat of the late afternoon, the library feels like the pit of Perdition.
“We need light!” Michael calls to whoever will listen. He can hardly see anybody. “That generator’s on, right?”
No one answers at first, but then Brian speaks up from the south hall. “Not a whole lot of fuel up there, but should be okay.”
“Someone flip a switch, for Chrissakes!” someone says. Michael doesn’t recognize the voice.
“Where?” Mai says.
“Anywhere!”
Just as Michael starts searching the lobby, he notices the overhead lights flickering softly as if struggling, and then finally turning on. “Got ’em,” Chrissy calls from somewhere.
A measure of relief filters through the lobby, but it is short-lived. Both Pete and Ron utter exhalations of surprise and lift their weapons. One of them fires, Michael isn’t sure which.
“What?!” Joel yells, twirling.
Michael doesn’t see it at first. But a gasping noise reveals it: Three bodies have managed to squeeze through the gap and are poised at the top of the corpse pile, staring down at them.
Someone else fires, and the top of one of the bodies’ skulls jerks in a red mist. The remaining two bodies are abruptly rushing down this side of the pile. They’re both thin, nimble bodies, and in the midst of his horror—fixated on their angry, intelligent, focused gazes—Michael understands that these cursed things have achieved an awareness of the human body, a sense of athleticism, a strategic notion of which kinds of human bodies are best suited to certain kinds of attacks.
“Look out!” he yells.
One of them lands directly atop Pete, crumpling the big man to the floor, and the other clambers into Mai, sending her sprawling. It’s the seasoned hunter who lets out a whimpering yell, though, panicking as he falls and using his rifle to batter the body on top of him. Joel and Kevin leap into action, kicking at the body—that of a young man in gym shorts and a roughed-up tee shirt—but it holds firm, wrapping its arms backward around Pete’s upper torso, the head stabbing mercilessly at Pete’s face while simultaneously snarling at the two combatants above it. The rifle clatters to the ground.
“It’s strong!” Kevin screams.
Pete emits a long string of muffled syllables, and Michael quails at the sight of the thing’s head stabbing repeatedly at his face.
“Watch the door for more!” Joel yells, kicking and battering with his own rifle.
Michael and Rachel have descended on the second of the bodies, which has bounced off Mai and landed in a wreck against a book display. It attempts to scramble back up, but Michael delivers a vicious strike to the bridge of its upturned nose, and a geyser of blood sprays his forearm. A throaty screech escapes the thing’s mouth, and it locks its flat eyes on Rachel, whom it perceives as the lesser threat. It makes a leaping move for her, and Michael kicks savagely at the body, knocking it off course, but it clutches at her lower leg, behind itself, blindly but with preternatural assurance.
“No!” Michael roars, kicking again, but the head nearly catches his foot in its open mouth.
A rifle fires once, then a second time, and there’s a screech, but Michael isn’t sure where it came from. All he sees is his daughter in peril, and he screams at the body, hammering at it repeatedly with the butt of his own rifle.
Then the body spasms, a gaspy grunt launching from its throat. It falls to its back and squirms for a moment, then stops thrashing. Rachel kicks away from it, panting, leaving it there on the floor. The thing whips its head around three times, and the eyes begin blinking rapidly, almost violently, and it occurs to him what has happened.
Bonnie is standing apprehensively above the body, an empty syringe in her fist, the other hand steadying herself against the book display to her left. Behind her, a rifle has ended the threat of the other body, and Joel and Kevin are tending to Pete. But Michael only has eyes for Bonnie.
“Nice work,” he wheezes, gulping air.
“It’s the blood,” she says, shrugging but breathing heavily. “Like Rachel says—it’s our best defense.”
Chapter 28
Kevin, Ron, and Bill—who looks once again on the verge of a heart attack—have heaved the two new bodies on the pile at the entrance, effectively sealing the gaping hole in the glass door. Pete, for his part, has regained his clumsy feet, although he has sustained obvious injuries. He’s gasping, almost choking, working his jaw. He stands proudly, though, his big trembling fists checking his rifle. He’s monitoring the area with eagle eyes, occasionally shaking his head—presumably at his own stupidity. He’s murmuring to himself, sweating profusely, pacing. There’s no further movement at the doors, except for a slow twitching among the bodies; it doesn’t appear alarming.
The twins are tending to an apparently unharmed Mai, and Michael kneels next to Rachel, making sure she’s unharmed.
“I’m fine,” she keeps repeating, shrugging him off. “Dad!”
Michael backs off, noticing that her
hands are shaking with near-spastic tremors, and despite her toughness he sees a despairing fear behind his daughter’s eyes.
She softens a bit, letting him help her up.
“All right,” Joel says, taking advantage of the stunned lull. “We are seriously low on ammo. But we’ve got six tranq guns. I need six good shooters to take those and spread out with—” He glances around, then, his eyes red-rimmed and twitching. He’s seeing the doubtful, sullen glances that everyone is exchanging. “What?”
It’s Scott—backed up against the drinking fountains again, clutching his rifle, aimed low—who speaks up.
“There’s a thousand of those things out there,” he says. “And no matter how many of them we blow away, there’ll be another thousand right behind them. Just waiting. Do you honestly see a way out of this with six tranquilizer rifles and a few more boxes of ammo?” He glares around. “Does anyone?”
In the center of a lobby strewn with the bleeding dead, claustrophobically shut in by countless reanimated corpses, not one of the exhausted survivors says a word for a long moment. The silence intensifies the sense of doom. The library pulses with crimson light, and Michael notices almost subconsciously that it’s rhythmic. He can feel it in his chest. He imagines the collective red luminescence drifting, throbbing, in columns toward the sky, toward whatever influence guides these things’ motives.
Under everything is the sound of weeping—Michael thinks it’s one of the twins—and now, in the silence, Michael can hear only occasional thumping … the things’ heads attempting to gain entry at any point possible. But that has subsided, and in its wake is that turgid and still rhythmic pulse. There is an inevitability to it—the overwhelming sense that the survivors never really had a chance. Michael feels it like an almost tangible weight.
“Are they doing something to the glass?” Chrissy says. “Are they melting it?” She’s watching a pane closely. Faces are mashed against it, upside-down, furious, their mouths moving around an impossible crimson glow.
Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood Page 29
