Kevin is glaring at the same pane of glass with contempt.
“So what do we do?” Mai says. Her voice has a defiant kind of sturdiness, but Michael can tell she’s having trouble keeping it that way. “What can we do?”
More silence.
“Can we go to the roof?” Mai asks.
“Maybe,” Kevin says, “but for what purpose?”
“Time?” Ron says miserably. “Last stand?”
“Just … shut up, okay?” Scott says, doing his own pacing. He looks gaunt and defeated.
Michael catches a glimpse of Liam in the south hall. The sweaty young man has one hand planted on a bookcase behind him, and his right hand is placing his AR-15 on the ground, gently, as if any sudden movement might cause the things at the window to thrash about more wildly and break the thick glass. He makes a gesture that tells Michael he’s out of ammunition. Kevin looks Michael’s way from his left, shaking his head in stark, red-tinted disbelief, and the two men share the briefest of glances until Kevin looks down, for some reason unable to maintain the human connection.
“Christ!” Joel barks abruptly. “Don’t let this asshole get to you! Scott has been ready to give up from the start! Get off your sad-sack asses! It’s the only way we’re gonna survive this thing!”
Scott’s voice is reasonable, receded in red shadows. “No one is under any obligation to follow my lead, cop. They can do whatever the hell they want. But you can have this rifle.” He makes a show of leaning the AR-15 against the drinking fountain. “I won’t be in the line of fire anymore. I’m going upstairs.”
“Bastard’s gonna lock every door, barricade himself up there,” Kevin says.
“You can’t do that, asshole,” Joel says. “You can’t lock us down here.”
“Christ, I never said I would! What is with you people?!”
Michael grits his teeth and tunes the voices out. He has latched his attention on his daughter, who is standing wearily next to Bonnie at the main checkout area. Kayla is buried into her side, not crying but in a kind of denial, and Rachel is petting her dark hair. For a reason that Michael can’t quite pinpoint—or perhaps for many reasons—he feels a fat lump develop in his throat. His eyes blur.
Rachel eventually meets his gaze, and after a moment she beckons him toward her. As men shout behind him, he makes his way to his daughter, and Bonnie, and before he knows it, he’s engulfed in an embrace. Arms fold around him, and he’s not even sure who they belong to. He can smell his daughter’s scent, and he can feel Bonnie’s warmth, and he can sense Kayla’s innocence—a reminder of Rachel in childhood, a remembrance of a very different time—and he tries consciously to lose himself in it, closing his eyes tightly against everyone and everything outside this circle.
It’s not the loud voices that finally pull him away. It’s not the sound of rifles reloading, or the clamor of survivors hustling back and forth, or the roar of something atmospheric spelling their demise.
It’s the silence.
The racket of those bodies’ heads against the glass. Earlier, he thought that the sound had subsided. It has. In fact, it has subsided dramatically.
Michael is in the act of opening his eyes and glancing toward a window for a closer look, but then Ron hurries in from the south hall.
“They’re coming through the windows.”
“What?!” Joel says, moving immediately.
“Oh God,” Bonnie breathes.
“What do we do?!” Chloe says, seemingly ready for anything. “What do we do?”
“What do you mean they’re coming through the windows?!”
Michael hurries past Chrissy to the closest window, hopping over two sprawled bodies, nearly slipping in a large splatter of blood. He comes to an uneasy stop next to the massive pile of bodies at the front doors. Outside, several of the things’ heads are pressed firmly against the smeared glass, and now all the dead eyes swivel almost lazily and lock on his. The red pulse in the things’ heads is only too apparent, and it seems to be working at something: It seems to be the utter focus of the otherwise still bodies.
And then he sees that the glass is fogged not by breath—as he originally, unconsciously assumed—but by whatever weird radiation is being emitted from that glow. It is working on the library window glass. Despite the thickness and strength, it is working.
Michael’s first instinct is to touch the glass with his fingers, but he snatches his hand back, wary. Instead, he lifts his rifle and—
“Wait, don’t!” Pete cries, beginning to maneuver his bulk toward him.
“I’m just—”
With the muzzle at the end of the AR-15’s barrel, Michael nudges at the glass, and it gives sickeningly, like half-molten plastic.
“He’s right,” Michael calls over his shoulder. “They’re coming through. They’re coming through all the windows.”
The effect of Michael’s words is instant, galvanizing the group back into action.
“Shit!” Joel shouts. “Okay, this is it, people, spread out! Arm up! If you don’t have a rifle, try a tranq gun! If nothing else, use the end of the rifle to batter the head. Extinguish that fucking light! Get ready! Be smart!”
Michael backs away from the window, watching it, watching every window in the vicinity, every window that will at any moment fall away and allow the entrance of countless things intent on ending the lives of all the survivors. Commotion reigns behind him, voices shouting, feet pounding in all directions.
Wait, Michael thinks, the word repeating into an inner echo.
“Here they come!” someone shouts from the north end of the library, and Michael flinches at the sound of gunfire.
“Go, go, go!” Joel is yelling.
Kevin and Ron sprint in that direction, but Michael stays put. He’s staring at the canisters of blood that Bonnie hauled out to the book-return area. Chloe is fidgeting a few feet away from it, considering it, not understanding how it can help her. She’s grabbing at Zoe’s forearm while her sister is in the midst of dissolving into horrified tears.
Michael finally breaks from his paralysis and goes stumbling toward them. The unassuming box is loaded with the small pressurized canisters, each with a small protective cork on its end, waiting to be loaded into one of the six tranq guns scattered around the library.
Something deep inside him clicks.
Coordination.
Just like them.
In his mind’s eye, he sees the bodies sweeping up the street toward the library—the synchronization of movement, the horrifically fluid choreography of limbs, all working in concert toward one objective. He doesn’t need to glance behind him to see them working toward a different common objective now, all their heads stabbing in unison against the glass to achieve entrance.
The lobby is in chaos, but Michael grabs Chloe’s shoulders. “Who knows how to fire these tranq rifles?” he yells loud enough for everyone in the lobby to hear.
Eyes wild, he acknowledges the twins, and Rachel and Kayla, and Bonnie, who is enduring a full-body tremble, on the verge of collapsing into shivering sobs. Chrissy has backed against a wall, her weapon empty, and can only watch as the window glass fogs. Her eyes are unblinking, her mouth slack. Liam is running toward them, seeking the safety of a group at the center of the lobby, giving up on his station.
No one answers at first. They’re succumbing to horror.
“Hey!” he screams. “We’re not done yet! Bonnie!”
Bonnie, her face a ruined mess of tears, manages to meet his gaze.
“This is our last shot. And it’s not about the guns. I don’t think the guns matter anymore. It’s about this blood right here.”
All eyes move to the unassuming box at Michael’s feet, weighing its balance against the awesome, gasping threat literally pushing in at the library windows.
This? Against that?
“We gotta hit ’em with this blood all at once!” he yells. “We have to be coordinated! Just like they are! We need to grab everything! All the bloo
d! Everything with blood in it. I’ll take care of the tranqs, but get everything else. Bonnie!”
Bonnie pushes herself away from Rachel and Kayla, still sobbing, but determined. She rushes toward the book-return area.
“Chloe,” he says, looking straight into the girl’s eyes. “And you too, Zoe. Get the tranq guns. All of them. Bring ’em here. Chrissy, you too, we need all six! GO!”
Chloe, haunted yet willing, and Zoe, dazed and barely hearing him, follow his orders without question, immediately locating two of the four tranq rifles leaning against the main counter. Chrissy is unable to hold back gasping sobs as she joins in, constantly wiping at her eyes, so Mai—dry-eyed—takes charge, yanking the woman toward the main checkout area.
“Liam!” Michael calls. “Get ready to fire. Take some canisters here.”
Bonnie crashes into Michael.
“Here!”
It’s another box, labeled INGRAM, and it’s full of various hospital supplies, including the final unit of O-negative blood, and about two dozen syringes fat and dark with cold blood. She has cleared out the little fridge. It’s everything. At the realization, Michael looks into her eyes, and there is a bottomless fear there.
“If we get out of this,” Michael says, forming a strategy while staring into the box, “you’re gonna be the hero, you know.”
Bonnie can’t take her eyes away from the front windows, to the right of the pile of destroyed human beings. One of the bodies outside is reaching a knobby forearm through the glass, which is half-stretching and half-breaking around the limb. The hand is scrabbling around, intermittently reaching out toward them as if independent of its body. The glass is pushing inward like tempered-glass taffy, close to falling away.
“I don’t want to be a hero,” Bonnie says. “I just want to be alive.”
Against every instinct to flee—up the stairs, into inner rooms, even into the non-functional elevator—the small band of survivors surges forward into an inner circle, surrounding the new blood. They’re mostly women, as the rest are at the windows in other parts of the library, expending the last of the metal ammunition or using the rifles themselves as last-ditch blunt instruments. Michael and Mai take two of the tranq rifles and hand the remaining four to Liam, Chloe, Chrissy, and Rachel.
The boy and the wet-eyed women, reluctantly lurching forward, take the rifles into their hands and study them with varying degree of hopelessness. Michael hurriedly gives them a primer on loading the canisters into the chambers, and then the shooters are ready, their pockets filled with small payload darts.
“Those are gonna save our lives,” Bonnie says, “so shoot straight. Right, Michael?”
“Could be.” He gestures to the box. “Kayla, are you fast?”
“Yeah.”
“You’ll run darts to anyone who needs them, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Whoever runs out, okay? They’ll call your name.”
Kayla nods.
“We’ll back up the tranq guns with these syringes,” Michael says. “I need Bonnie, Zoe, and—Rick, here take these!—I need anyone who doesn’t have a rifle to grab these syringes. Get over here!”
Michael searches for Scott and fails. But now there are louder voices coming their way. Ron sprints in from the north end of the library, where rifle blasts are diminishing and a fleshy commotion foreshadows the man’s words:
“They’re inside.”
“Oh God,” Bonnie cries.
“We should get to the roof.”
“I’ve got one more idea,” Michael says. “Here, help us out.” He shouts the plan to Ron, hands him two syringes. “Remember, each body needs only a small amount. Get it in, plunge, get it out, and go on to the next one.”
In the distance, Brian and Bill are in the act of falling back. Michael can see them swinging their rifles in the dim distance. Gunfire has dwindled away under the alien throb, and now even Joel is backing away from his windows, letting his rifle clatter to the floor. “That’s it! I’m out!”
“This has to be coordinated,” Michael shouts. “We’ll start shooting at the same time, all at once, on my mark. And once we start, we give them all we have until we’re out of blood. Clear?”
“Aw, fuck, let’s do this!” Mai cries.
“Okay, go, spread out! Tranq guns first, syringes backing them up! Go! Wait for my word!”
Michael takes the windows near the front doors, and the survivors spread out in a loose line. Chloe is ten feet from Michael, just beyond Rachel, and Liam is beyond her. Chloe brings her tranq rifle to her shoulder, aiming at windows just south. “I’ve seen so many officers firing these,” she says brusquely. “Never thought I’d be doing it.”
“You’ll do fine,” Michael says. “Here they come.”
Chloe takes aim at the body pushing through her window. It’s an older woman in a shredded nightgown, scowling directly at the survivors as it climbs forward, pushing through the glass as if through a birth canal. Chloe casts fearful glances at Michael, and he nods frantically, continuing to encourage her.
“Wait,” he says to her. “Wait for it to come through a little more.”
On the north side of the lobby, several bodies—having gained entrance through windows in that annex—have given the men chase, and now, as Joel and Bill and the others clamber into the lobby, those come to a halt, regarding the survivors assembled there. Their skin is bloodied from squeezing through the glass; one is literally dripping in syrupy rivulets. Their throaty gasps rise and fall, wary.
The survivors are surrounded.
“Everyone ready?!” Michael calls. “Find a target!”
There’s a long moment of held-breath silence, during which both the survivors and the reanimated bodies have paused in a state of uncertainty. Michael catches the briefest glimpse at his window of an upside-down face—a young woman, her otherwise beautiful features cranked into villainy—her dead eyes regarding him, taking his measure, along with the other survivors around him. He sees something in her expression that he can’t place, but it boosts him.
“FIRE!” Michael screams. “Keep firing!”
His tranq gun thunks, sending a dart into the young woman’s strained neck, and in his peripheral vision, he can see Chloe reacting backward, having fired her own rifle. The body at Michael’s window is already flailing, gasping, stuck in the window frame, landing on its back on the hard, jagged metal. Michael is watching it, watching for the next body, and yes, the next body is there immediately—another older woman, this one larger, uglier, meaner. Blood and sap is smeared down the forehead, and the black hair is twisted in all directions, Medusa-like.
“Reload!” Michael calls, laboriously inserting a new dart into his own rifle.
“Trying!” Chloe shouts.
“Bonnie!” Michael says.
Lip curling, Bonnie leaps forward with her syringe before the body can get fully into the window frame. She plunges the needle into the woman’s face just as the body skitters across the floor, swiping at Michael and smacking him straight in the balls. Michael falls back helplessly, his rifle nearly falling from his grasp. Through squinted eyes, he sees Bonnie flailing backward too, the syringe apparently undepressed.
They know our weaknesses! The thought whisks through his head.
“I got it!” Chloe says, sending another tranq dart flying. It embeds itself below the young woman’s left eye, and immediately the head begins to whip into a frenzy. The body partially blocks the window frame, but here comes another—a young man in sleep shorts—twisting around the metal frame to gain partial entrance. His inverted face peers at them with red malevolence.
Michael grits his teeth against the pain and clambers back up.
“Reload!” he manages, loud enough for everyone to hear. “Reload!”
“I’m trying!” comes Liam’s voice from somewhere.
Now Bonnie steps forward again. She jabs the needle into the new thing’s shoulder, and before the body can react, she has injected a squirt of
blood and yanked the syringe back violently, nearly breaking it off in the flesh. The young man pauses, as if shocked, and then begins to gasp and writhe. His top half crumples atop the now-screaming young woman below him.
Another body—a raven-haired woman, dead eyes flashing—surges through the glass, its head stabbing at Bonnie’s arms as if to knock the syringes from her grip. Bonnie lets out a helpless scream as the radiation throbs against her arms.
“Bonnie!” Rachel cries.
Somewhere, Kayla is crying.
Michael reaches out to yank Bonnie away from the threat, and out of nowhere, Scott is battering the new body down with the butt of an empty AR-15. Some kind of growl is coming out of his throat. The body is gasping at him, strategic with its lunges. It’s attempting to launch full-bodied at this new red-haired threat, but Scott is ruthlessly crushing the skull, and after a few moments, the inner light sparks out from sheer violence, the head bleeding out. Scott is left breathing heavily, watching the gap.
He releases a savage bark of triumph.
The moment he tears his gaze away, yet another body is squeezing through, a gangly man, obscene in his crabwalk. The thing uses its spindly legs to launch itself against Scott, whose next brutal swing with the rifle whiffs over the body. The thing clutches onto Scott with its long limbs, elbows and knees moving frantically, and Scott relinquishes the rifle and begins punching at the thing’s gut and its inverted, raging face.
“No!” Bonnie cries from Michael’s grasp.
“Keep firing!” Michael calls to anyone who’s listening.
And then Bonnie has wrenched free of Michael’s grip and is diving into the fray with her syringes.
“Scott!”
She plunges one needle straight into the gangly-limbed thing’s abdomen, yanks it free, and then starts shoving her foot at the head, which is twitching and gasping deep in its throat. It collapses shortly, straight atop Scott, who is already crawling backward on his elbows, scurrying away. He kicks at the sparking head with desperate fury and loathing, and the body goes reeling backward and up, colliding with Bonnie, who yelps in surprise.
Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood Page 30
