Blood Red

by Jason Bovberg

  Rachel turns away from the window, and her eyes land on Mrs. Duncan’s purse atop a tall, narrow table next to the door. She crosses the room and takes it in her arms, rifling through it, quickly finding a cell phone in a scuffed blue protective case. Feeling a surge of adrenaline in her veins, she presses the power button, watches the display turn on. Rachel whispers an earnest entreaty to whatever force in the universe might govern this madhouse of a world, and dials 911.

  The phone’s display stutters and immediately flashes the words No Service.

  After a brief, enraged pause, Rachel throws the phone with all her might at the wall, and it explodes into plastic and metal shards. Even as the pieces settle to the floor, she realizes that she shouldn’t have reacted so rashly, but there’s no time for second-guessing.

  She needs Tony.

  Rachel leaves Mrs. Duncan’s room and reenters the hall. At Tony’s door, she knocks and calls again for good measure—hoping against hope—then tries kicking at the wood to force it open. It doesn’t budge. She throws a more forceful kick into the door and hears a splintering crack. Encouraged, she kicks and kicks at the door, the twin sheets of flimsy veneer finally giving way. Her foot punches through and lodges in the hole. Screeching her rage, she yanks her leg free, claws of wood scratching harshly against her denim-covered calf, and then she’s reaching her hand through to unlock the door from the other side.

  She gets the door open and lurches into the room, limping.

  Tony is spread out across the bed, face down. Splayed out beneath his face is the red glow, fanning out like ghostly fingers. A sob catches in Rachel’s throat, and she falls forward to the ground next to the bed.

  This bed, on which she and Tony have made love countless times.

  She grasps the brown bedspread and pushes her face into it, and then she screams into the cloth, screams until her voice is ragged and her throat feels full of hot gravel. She squeezes her eyes tight against whatever this is, whatever has happened. In the wake of her screams, she finds herself mewling, slobbering into the cloth. She’s shaking her head, denying it, refusing it.

  The memories of their lovemaking atop this old bed are far too fresh to push aside in favor of this horror. Behind her clamped-shut eyes, she yearns for the sensory recollection of his body against hers, of Tony urgently entering her, the hot tremble of his flesh, of their playful laughing and exploring, of even the humid aftermath, the sweaty closeness. She tries desperately to hold on to these things even though she understands somewhere deep inside that they’re forever gone.

  She’s crying openly now, wanting to reach out to touch Tony, to turn him over and see his face, but she keeps pulling her hands back, only to reach out again—and stop. She feels helpless against this infuriating, otherworldly luminescence and whatever it might mean.

  It can’t be real! This can’t be happening!

  She slumps against the mattress, facing away from Tony. She brings her arms up and clamps them around her head, denying the sounds from outside, denying the world. It’s too much, this thing, whatever the hell it is, it’s too much to take. Her thoughts jag hopelessly. Fat tears are streaming down her face, and she can’t seem to stop herself from shaking. Her wrists are practically knocking against her ears, but she wills them to calm.

  After some long moments, she feels that she has slowed her heart rate and gotten past the worst of the panic. She opens her eyes.

  The dark room remains quiet, and she casts a blurred glance around, trying to ground herself in the familiar—the dusty electronics of the far wall where Tony would play his music; the concert posters plastered across the walls with thumb tacks; the dresser drawers like his mom’s, spilling clothing. Even the weirdly bright-blue carpet, worn and old, but so comforting somehow.

  The noise from the street has quieted. The city alarm has stopped, at least for the moment. Still, there’s that odd buzzing, and she hears a shouted exchange, perhaps south on Magnolia. But no explosions or screams.

  She takes a few more moments to collect herself, then pushes up to her knees to examine Tony. She dissolves again, briefly, into sobs, then composes herself. She pushes at his side to roll him over on his back. It takes her a few minutes of effort, keeping her hands away from the red glow, but she finally shifts his deadweight to the right position, and he’s facing the ceiling. Tony doesn’t appear to be breathing. His eyes are closed, and his mouth hangs slightly open, the glow lighting his cheeks like a crimson lantern. She places her ear against his bare chest to listen for his heartbeat. His flesh is warm, but the heartbeat and breath are gone. She wraps her arms around his midsection, not wanting to let go of him.

  Wait…warm?

  Her head snaps up and back. If Tony is still warm, he’s still alive somehow, right? But no pulse, no breath ...? She peers at his face again, trying to make some modicum of sense out of the luminescence there, trying to figure how she can possibly help him. Whatever she did with Susanna was the wrong thing to do—and at the too-recent memory, she nearly chokes with the emotion that threatens to throttle her—so what’s the right thing?

  “Wake up! Wake up!” she screams at him, punching at his chest. “I don’t know what to do!”

  She’s flailing away at his chest, and she notices something odd. Her fists loosen, and her arms quit their assault. Rachel pauses, staring at Tony’s body. She doesn’t think it was her imagination that his flesh felt ... softer ... under her blows. There was more give in the flesh. She pushes at his chest again, and the bone and musculature do seem more pliable than usual beneath her fingers. Repulsed, she pulls back her hand. She quickly angles herself closer and studies his face, the source of the red glow. Without moving into the organic heat of the glow, she watches Tony’s expression, looks for signs of movement or simply the heft of life. Unlike with Susanna, there’s definite evidence that Tony is still there. Susanna slipped into death only after the light fled from her.

  Like a soul, Rachel thinks.

  She remembers seeing an old photograph once, depicting a man in repose on his apparent deathbed, and his soul, a ghostly half-image of the man, with closed eyes and solemn expression, was departing his body, lifting upward, away from life. She was perhaps nine years old when her dad showed her that photograph, and it haunted her beyond words. She still remembers the nightmares that followed in her little bedroom across the street. Only years later, when she learned how double-exposure photography works, did she come to understand that the notion of an actual manifestation of a soul was fantasy. However, the mythology is potent, and to think of this strange, otherworldly light as a soul, with the potential of leaving—or remaining inside—the body, is breathtaking to her.

  She studies Tony’s features for what seems a long time. She sits beside him, regarding him from different angles or touching his hands or shoulders, willing him back to consciousness. Then she hears another more distant, booming explosion, and she also hears the rapid footfalls of someone sprinting across Tony’s front yard, yelling, “It’s a plane! It’s a fucking airplane!” The voice cuts away, leaving that persistent keening.

  Then there’s a new sound, and it is perhaps most disturbing of all.

  It’s an organic flutter, a fleshy roiling sound, and it’s coming directly from Tony’s mouth. It’s far from the innocent noise of a swallow, or even the movement of tongue against palate, and indeed she notices no involuntary muscle movement in his throat or face. No, it’s deeper, and it’s enough to make Rachel recoil. Grimacing, she leans forward again to look directly into Tony’s open mouth. Although she can see nothing but moist flesh and teeth in front of the weird glow, she knows that something is happening to him, inside him, something unnatural and unprecedented.

  She reaches up to touch his forehead—careful!—to test the limits of the facial structures. The bone doesn’t seem as solid somehow, nor the flesh as resilient. Or perhaps it’s her imagination. Yet another teardrop spills down her cheek as her fingers run slowly through his hair and over his ear. She tou
ches his skull lovingly. Tony feels not just warm but very warm—hothouse warm—and now the thought of that warmth, coupled with the lack of heartbeat and respiration, makes her catch herself again. She wipes away the tear and stands up.

  She has to leave him. She has to go outside and find someone, someone who is still alive like her, who can help her. She has to find a way to make sense of this madness.

  “I can’t do it,” she whispers.

  She sits there breathing heavily for several more minutes, coming to terms with the fact that whatever impossible thing happened to Susanna isn’t confined to her own home. It’s much larger than that. She’s coming to the realization that it’s happening all over the place.

  She has to find out what it is. She has to be strong. She can hear her dad’s voice in her head, encouraging her the way he would years ago, before and especially after her mom died, encouraging her to find the strength to move on after the loss, and reminding her nearly every day that he would be with her every step of the way. Where was he now?

  Of course you can do it! he would say. You’re the strongest person I know!

  She has to do this alone. And she knows she can do it.

  Without looking back, Rachel leaves behind the splintered destruction of Tony’s doorway and makes her way to the kitchen. Only after pausing in the kitchen to get her bearings does she realize that something is amiss. Oh yes, the power is out.

  “Think, think, think…” she murmurs.

  The next step is to find her dad. Whether he’s scrambling around like her, trying to understand what has happened, or lying on the side of the street somewhere, a glowing redness inhabiting his skull, she’s got to find him. In spite of the loud, childish voice inside her telling her to hide away inside this house or her own, to crawl back into her bed—or, yes, even into Tony’s bed, to cling tightly to his still-warm body—she has to venture out.

  She has to find answers.

  Where to start? She’s filled with panicked indecision.

  Not knowing what else to do, Rachel goes to the bathroom, pushes down her jeans, and relieves a bladder she didn’t realize was so full. She checks her lower leg and finds that the splintered wood of the door did manage to barely draw blood, even through the denim. She flushes the toilet. Standing there with her jeans pooled at her feet, she finds a hand towel next to the sink, wets it, and bends to clean her leg. In the mirrored medicine cabinet, she finds some first-aid cream and massages some into the wound. The blood isn’t flowing, so she goes without a bandage. She pulls up her jeans, becoming aware once more of the numbness in her hand.

  She sits on the toilet again and squirts some of the first-aid cream into the afflicted palm. With shaking fingers, she works the stuff laboriously into her skin. Long minutes pass. She feels herself rocking atop the toilet seat, actively pushing herself away from the new realities outside this tiny room. After a while, the oily liquid has mostly absorbed, and she inspects her hand. Still pale, but no longer dry, her palm appears to have been clumsily splattered with bleach.

  When she stands again, her eyes lock on her reflection in the full-length mirror on the wall. Her raw face beneath unkempt dark hair looks decimated, the hazel eyes ravaged from tears and smoke, her skin a lined mess.

  She casts a glance down the slowly brightening hallway leading to Tony’s bedroom. She wants to say goodbye to him. She makes her way toward his bedroom, and there’s another distant explosion; it has the feel of something massive, earth-rattling. The sound is a deep, rumbling hopelessness. She tries her best to tune it out.

  Tony hasn’t moved an inch. She goes to him and touches his hip, feels its familiar warmth. His body tugs at her, nearly demands that she lay with him and close her eyes, lose herself in a full-body embrace of denial, but she pushes gently away from him.

  “I’ll be back,” she promises.

  Chapter 3

  Rachel opens the door and finds that a layer of smoke has settled over the neighborhood, heavy and oppressive. She coughs into her sleeve and squints at the scene before her. She scans the ground in all directions, holding her breath against the possibility of a body that matches the description of her father: a tall, wiry, athletic man, possibly in casual business attire or gray workout clothes, depending on what he decided to do this morning. The only bodies she can see from this vantage point are the three lying motionless on the far driveway, and she prefers not to dwell on those.

  Aside from unconscious bodies, there are also no living and breathing people anywhere in sight, no people screaming and sprinting in any direction. Her eyes lock on the crashed car she saw from the window of Tony’s house. It’s a red Volkswagen Jetta. Steeling herself, she makes her way toward it. She’s glancing in all directions, wanting someone, anyone, to come flying out of a nearby doorway to help her.

  She jogs to the Jetta, which is at an odd angle, wedged between a tree and a brick mailbox. There’s a person slumped behind the wheel, a woman, completely still. Rachel can see only the back of her head, the hair curly and dark, thrown forward. The engine is still ticking under its hood, barely. She wonders when this accident happened. There’s an oily green liquid dripping from the front of the car—she guesses from the radiator—onto the sidewalk. She walks around to the driver’s side window, which is angled upward a few feet above the ground. She has to step up onto the severely turned front tire and prop herself against the tree to peer inside.

  The red illumination coming from under the flesh of the woman’s cheek lends a ghostly quality to the vehicle’s dark interior. Rachel stumbles down from the car, nearly falling into the street. She catches herself, staring, breathing.

  Despair clutches at her chest, threatening to hollow her out. Lightheaded, she sits heavily on the curb and surveys the scene. In the space of an hour, her entire world has become a red-tinted nightmare. The blanket of smoke over the street isn’t helping. She can see clouds of it wafting toward her from the south. Magnolia Street is utterly desolate of life now, eerily empty of traffic or people.

  Is anyone alive? Are people still dying? Am I next?

  Rachel needs to find someone living and breathing. She knows they must be out there, searching, like she is. Who knows how many more are still in their homes, waking up? She glances up and down the street. Way off to the east, finally, she sees a figure running from one house to another, possibly mirroring her own horrific discoveries. How many people like her are just now realizing that their worlds have entered the fucking Twilight Zone?

  Her eyes dart to the Volkswagen again, wedged up against the tree, and she remembers that she failed to check the garage for her dad’s car before leaving the house. That would tell her whether he went to work or for an early morning walk. She won’t even entertain the notion of her father being afflicted like Susanna, or Tony. She has to believe that he’s alive.

  She pushes off the curb, making her way across the desolate, smoke-dimmed street. In the middle of the chaos surrounding her, she spins around in disbelief. In the distance, in every direction, there’s some kind of new horror: wrecked cars, smoking ruins, and yes, another body, a woman face-down in a gutter a hundred yards to the east. She takes that in only briefly, not letting her attention lock on it. The sky is thick with smoke, and it’s still pouring out of Old Town. And over everything is this crimson tint, this awful, buzzing thing, glowing from bedrooms and doorways everywhere.

  It occurs to Rachel that there are no sirens wailing now. Even the city’s emergency alarm sounded only briefly and has been silent ever since. The absence of these sounds is even more horrifying. The city is spilling over with disasters of all kinds, and yet it seems that no one in authority is attending to them. There’s a disturbing hollowness to the world, an emptiness in which everything is bleak and gone.

  Why?! she shrieks inwardly.

  Her eyes catch on another figure, stumbling perhaps a quarter mile south, and she shouts in the person’s direction—“Hey! Hey! Over here!”—but the person half-falls, not hearing her
, and disappears around a corner.

  Rachel makes her way quickly up her front path, onto her porch, and into the house. Her eyes land again on the lonely apple core on the small table in the center of the front room, and then she’s walking through the kitchen. She flings open the door leading to the garage, and in the dimness she can see immediately that her dad’s car is gone. Which means he’s at work. Right? That’s what it has to mean.

  “He’s at work, and he’s typing away at his computer, and he’s fine, and I just need to find him, and everything will go back to normal!” she whispers hotly, although she knows he’d have to be working in some basement office deep underground to avoid the chaos of the explosions and the city alarm earlier.

  There’s no basement at her dad’s place of business. Not that she knows of.

  Susanna’s car, an older black Honda Civic, is there. Rachel herself has no car, even though she got her driver’s license three years ago. Susanna never liked when Rachel asked to use her car—always gave her the stink-eye—and even though Rachel knows that Susanna is sprawled impossibly, abruptly dead beyond the next wall, it takes her a moment to make the decision to take her stepmother’s car. Susanna always kept her keys deep in her purse. Rachel doesn’t relish the thought of going back into her stepmother’s bedroom, but she knows that’s where Susanna keeps the purse.

  “Damn it!” she yells into the garage, listening to her words reverberate against the unfinished walls.

  Gritting her teeth, she runs to the bedroom. At the threshold, she pauses to shut her eyes and take in an uneasy breath before she enters the room. Susanna is still lying across the bed in the same deflated position, the bedsheets tangled and hanging half off the bed. Rachel casts her gaze around the room looking for Susanna’s purse. She doesn’t see it. She steps around the perimeter of the room, checking the dresser and the rocking chair, and she pokes her head in the closet. No.