Blood Red

by Jason Bovberg

  Reluctantly, she approaches Susanna’s body to check underneath the bed, careful to stay as far away from her stepmother’s naked corpse as possible. She kneels down silently, her breath coming quick and shallow, and lifts the bedspread from the floor.

  The purse.

  She drags it out, giving only a second’s worth of thought to the fact that her stepmother chose to hide her purse under her bed. For once, a revelation of this kind doesn’t cause her to roll her eyes.

  Rachel rifles through the purse, finds Susanna’s cell phone. She gives it a try, with no success, then tosses it onto the bed. She digs deeper into the purse and comes up with the keys.

  She’s pushing herself up when her gaze inadvertently falls on the flesh of her stepmother’s unmoving thigh. The all-too-recent sensory memory of Tony’s body seeming unnaturally pliant beneath her touch comes to her and makes her shudder. With grimacing curiosity, unable even to help herself despite her rising gorge, she reaches over and presses Susanna’s thigh with her fingers, and … maybe the flesh seems to give more than it should beneath her finger. She’s not sure. Either way, Rachel’s throat flutters on the verge of gagging, and she yanks her hand away.

  What is it doing? she thinks, horror roiling in her gut. What the hell is that—whatever it is—doing to their bodies?

  Violently, she shakes her head.

  “I’m imagining it,” she whispers insistently.

  She backs out of the room and makes her way to the kitchen. She slumps into her favorite chair and stares forward at nothing. She presses her hands against the tabletop, stopping their tremble. She forces herself to take a series of deep breaths, and finally clarity starts to grudgingly return.

  What now? she asks herself. What would Dad do?

  Slung over the rear of one of the kitchen chairs is her backpack, and the sight of it grounds her, gives her a new sense of purpose. She pulls it off the chair, unzips it, and empties its contents onto the table. Her history book, her literature text, and a heap of messily folded papers tumble out. She knows the history book has scribbles from Tony inside it, from the class they share.

  Shared.

  Rachel stands with the pack and goes to the refrigerator. In its unlit innards, she finds several bottles of water, which she stuffs inside at the bottom; she places two more in the outer side pockets. She finds boxes of crackers in a cabinet, tosses those in, and she throws in a couple of apples and bananas, too.

  What else? Be smart.

  Her dad might as well be whispering in her ear.

  Remembering the cream she used on her hand at Tony’s, she takes her backpack through the quiet house and into her own bathroom. Her family’s old dusty first-aid kit is in the corner of the medicine cabinet above the toilet. She opens it to see what’s inside. A package of Band-Aids, some gauze, some probably dried-out antiseptic wipes, and some ibuprofen. She throws in some extra items from the cabinet itself—hydrocortisone cream, some soap, and an almost-empty bottle of Vicodin she used for dental surgery last year. In the kitchen, she places the kit inside the backpack, then slings the pack over her shoulder.

  Rachel enters the dark, humid garage. Instinctively, she flips up the light switch, then curses herself for forgetting about the power outage. She props the door open with her pack to allow some light inside. She’ll have to open the garage door manually. In the dim light, she sees the release she needs to pull from the door track. She grabs the stepstool from its corner, positions it, and reaches up to grasp the release; it comes free with some effort, dangling on its cord, bringing to mind a hangman’s noose. She steps down and shoves the stepstool away, and it slides to the wall with a clatter. She goes to the door and heaves it up. It’s far heavier than she thought it would be, and it screams sourly at her, but with great effort in the dull heat of the garage, she gets the squeaking monstrosity to roll up.

  She retrieves the pack, tosses it into the car, and climbs into the driver’s seat. She twists the key in the ignition, gets the engine revving, and reverses out of the garage. Once in the driveway, she hops out, and jumps up to grab the edge of the garage door, hauls it back down. Wiping her hands on her jeans, she goes back to the car, taking a moment to study the street again. It’s still desolate, and gray with smoke.

  There’s a hollow pit in Rachel’s gut that is crammed with fear; she feels it expanding and contracting as she takes everything in. There’s no one out there in this flat, red, infuriating world. She turns away from the scene, not wanting to think about what this desolation means, but she casts one last glance toward Tony’s house.

  I’ll be back for you. I hope.

  She pulls the car out into the street and proceeds east, toward the site of the large explosion.

  Where should she go? Police? She wants to head directly for her dad’s office, but it’s so far south, down there past Barnes & Noble, past McDonald’s even. At least on the way to College Avenue, the main thoroughfare, is the police department. One way or another, she’s going to find out what the hell is going on.

  In the space of three blocks, she finds seven crashed vehicles, and in all of them, she can see bodies still strapped into the seats, their heads slumped against the windows. Most of the cars are crooked against the curb or smashed into parked cars, but on one street she finds a dairy truck halfway embedded in the front of a home, which has crumbled around it. She can see the straight path of the truck’s tires across the grass of the front yard, as if it made no effort to stop at all, just barreled into the home’s façade. Another vehicle—a brand-new Chevy truck—is completely upside down, angled across a driveway. Rachel can see the driver’s head and thick arms hanging in the half-crushed cab, and blood has streamed down the driveway in fine rivulets.

  The next block over, a middle-aged woman is sitting on her front steps, her head buried in her hands. Her hair is a messy black-and-gray tangle. Rachel is startled by the sight of this living human, just sitting there, and she jerkily steers toward the curb. She stops the car and calls out the open window.

  “Ma’am? Ma’am! Are you okay?”

  The woman looks up, startled, then shakes her head, dazed. “My … my …” Her voice sounds ghostly, defeated, and dissolves to silence. She looks down at her hands and lifts them, confused. Rachel glimpses familiar damage on her palms, and the flesh of the woman’s forearms also appears mottled and pale. Taking uncertain hold of the post next to her, the woman shifts forward, seeming about to rise, but then she falls back and looks around blankly.

  “Are you hurt?” Rachel asks, coughing under a thicker wave of smoke. She opens her door and steps out uncertainly, approaching the woman.

  The woman doesn’t appear to understand Rachel’s question, simply sits there staring, lost in her own nightmare.

  Rachel feels new helplessness in the face of the woman’s mad despair. She knows how she feels. But the woman’s confusion and inability to face the nightmare only serve to propel Rachel to action. She has to keep moving. She will not be the kind of person to turn inward.

  “I’m going to find help,” Rachel says, probably unnecessarily. “I’m going to the police. You might want to go inside away from the smoke.” She hesitates, then kneels down and asks, “Do you want to come with me?”

  The distraught woman doesn’t respond. Her eyes are red and wet, and there’s still no sound at all coming from her open mouth.

  Rachel observes the woman for a few uncertain seconds, then edges back into the street. She becomes aware of a familiar sound, and instinctively cranes her neck to gaze into the sky. Through the smoke she can barely see a passenger airliner, way up there, and for an instant the sight comforts her. Soon, though, she sees that the airliner is in trouble, doing a slow spiral in its otherwise straight path. She loses sight of it, then catches it again. It’s upside down, barrel-rolling, chilling Rachel to her core.

  “No!”

  She looks to the woman for some kind of shared acknowledgment of the horror in the sky, but there’s nothing there. The
woman is lost inside herself.

  A thick wave of smoke obscures the aircraft for long moments, but Rachel can hear its engines now; she can tell that it’s struggling, even this far away. The high-pitched whine comes and goes. When she sees it again, a black trail of smoke is snaking behind it, and its roll is turning into more of a tumble. Rachel loses her breath. Her hand shakes wildly in front of her face as she helplessly brings it to her mouth, wanting to stop the emotion from exploding out of her.

  The plane is falling, spinning crazily now. This impossible sight in the far distance, this new horror, takes an eternity to unfold across the sky, and the terrible scream of the airliner’s death throes still hasn’t even reached her yet. Now it’s breaking apart into pieces large and small. Licks of orange flame and dots of blackness color the atmosphere around it, and everything is falling slowly downward, silently beyond the smoke.

  Rachel jerks her head away from the sight. Her chest is convulsing as she trudges around the front of the car, holding onto it, trying desperately to remain standing when her heart is telling her to simply fall down. She presses her hands to her ears as the sounds of the distant sky explosion reach her. She falls into the driver’s seat, crying hard, and starts up the car.

  She drives with blurred vision, trying to contain her breaths, which are clutching at her ribcage, rasping in and out of her. She presses her right hand between her breasts, willing her body calm.

  “Daddy!” she manages to whisper, and then she’s repeating the word beneath her tears. She’s watching the gutters and the sidewalks, searching for him, even though her conscious mind knows that he took his car, that he’s somewhere else, somewhere safe and alive and probably looking for her. Right?

  Her breathing gradually calms, although she has to blink herself away from the memory of the falling passenger jet. Swallowing, she forces herself to keep watching for further survivors, scanning porches and yards and windows.

  In the distance, she sees two figures running toward the pillar of black smoke that’s still rising above the downtown area. She’s only a mile away from there, but she feels incapable of moving at more than a snail’s pace, as if her mind will permit her to observe only so many new horrors per minute.

  From nearly every home, every window, especially the ones shaded by massive trees, glows the subtle red radiance. She might not have noticed it had she not been looking for it, but it’s there in the smoky air. It’s everywhere, so omnipresent that it’s almost unnoticeable. It’s just a part of the world. If she focuses through stinging eyes, she can see it peeking from behind blinds, from between curtains, this damned light, suggesting unnaturally stunted mortality in every home she passes. There’s a lump in Rachel’s throat that she doesn’t believe will ever subside.

  Near the corner of Magnolia and Scott, activity catches her eye. There’s a small child on a front lawn, writhing about, clearly in pain. Rachel brings the Honda to an abrupt stop, shuts off the engine, and gets out of the car. The child is perhaps two or three years old, a little barefoot blond girl in a princess nightgown. She’s hurt somehow, mewling an almost animal sound, her hands groping about in the grass to steady herself.

  “Are you okay?” Rachel calls, coming closer. “Honey, are you okay?”

  She reaches the girl and touches her shoulder, and the girl reacts with fear, her sounds rising in pitch to near-hysteria. The sounds make Rachel’s gut lurch; there’s something terribly wrong with the little girl’s voice. Rachel reaches out again to steady the girl, who’s now scrambling awkwardly across the grass away from her. She moves as if her hands are broken.

  The girl lifts her head to look at the stranger who touched her, and Rachel stops, clamping her hands to her mouth. The girl’s eyes are clouded over and the skin of her face is pockmarked with angry welts. Her eyelids and most of the skin of her face are a barrage of raised marks, like third-degree burns. Beneath the blank, ruined eyes—which Rachel can hardly look away from—the girl’s nose and mouth seem twisted out of their natural symmetry, the mouth in particular cocked to the left and the tongue protruding slightly.

  “Oh, sweetie,” Rachel croaks, “what’s happened to you? Who did this to you?”

  The girl mewls again, turning away, perhaps not even hearing Rachel. Her ears are also disfigured, though not as severely as the rest of her face.

  Rachel looks to the surrounding homes.

  “Help!” she calls. “Somebody please come out and help! For God’s sake! Help!”

  Her voice echoes down the desolate, smoky street.

  She lunges for the girl, falling to the ground and embracing her. The girl thrashes and screeches, in fear and misery. Rachel tries to soothe her, to pet her hair, but the girl resists wildly. She can see now that the girl has folded her hands into useless clubs, and the flesh there is damaged, too. It’s only at this proximity that Rachel notices the flakiness of her skin—the dry, bleached look of the flesh—and at the sight, she coughs out a knowing sob.

  Still holding on to the flailing girl, Rachel brings up her right hand and looks at the skin of her own palm. The skin is discolored and scaly from its exposure to whatever it was that was glowing from Susanna’s face.

  “Shhhh,” she breathes, pulling the girl tightly to her, and the child is gradually weakening, though clearly still in pain. Rachel tries not to touch her more egregious welts.

  She imagines this once-pretty little girl waking up this morning, as she herself had, and playing with her toys in her still-quiet house while the day brightened around her … perhaps growing hungry as time wore on, or merely antsy because her mother and father hadn’t yet risen … wandering into her parents’ bedroom and finding them still asleep on their bed … jumping up onto the sheets, perhaps giggling at the prospect of waking them. But they didn’t wake up. Instead, they met her with stony red silence. At first she was laughing at her parents’ make-believe unwillingness to rise, and then more and more frightened, the girl pushed at them and screamed at them and shrieked in fear.

  The scene plays out in Rachel’s mind’s eye. The terrified girl pleading with her unresponsive parents, holding their heads in her small hands, demanding that they wake up, peering into their eyes, staring, glaring, only peripherally aware of the crippling horror the red luminescence was inflicting on her face and hands. And finally lurching away when the pain overrode her need for her parents.

  The girl still writhes in her grasp, but she is already calming, although the pain-frenzied, warbling sobs continue. Rachel clings to her, her own tears streaming down her face.

  Rachel catches movement out of the corner of her eye. She jerks her head to the right to see a figure just yards away, backlit by a smoke-filtered sun. She grunts and lurches backward defensively, holding tightly to the girl, whose hideous screams ratchet up anew.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay …” comes a tremulous male voice.

  And for some reason, even though she can barely make out the older man standing above her, merely the sound of his voice—the calm, authoritative though querulous reassurance there—unleashes new sobs from Rachel’s throat. She is so grateful for his presence next to her at this moment that she’s nearly paralyzed with emotion. She can hardly form decipherable words when she chokes out, “I don’t…I don’t know what to do.”

  Chapter 4

  Rachel wipes at her eyes with her sleeve. When her vision adjusts, she can see that the man is perhaps in his sixties, and he’s moving a little unsteadily. He seems a gentle soul in his wrinkled khaki slacks and white tee-shirt. Wait, she knows this man. She’s seen him before, perhaps mowing his well-manicured lawn or walking out to the street for his mail. She’s waved to him from her dad’s car, and earlier in her life, from her bicycle.

  He steps closer, his gaze directed toward the girl. “Is that Sarah?”

  “Please, she’s…hurt,” Rachel manages, her voice still catching involuntarily. “Can you help?”

  “What’s the matter with her?”

  “I don’t k
now, she’s…” Rachel is unsure how to finish that sentence.

  “Sarah?” the man says, leaning closer. “Sarah, honey?”

  Rachel loosens her grasp on the child, and the man can see her face.

  “Good heavens.” There’s gaspy emotion in his voice. He has to steady himself on Rachel’s shoulder.

  “It’s that light!” Rachel shrieks, and the man removes his hand, recoiling. “That fucking red ... radioactive … whatever it is!” She swallows heavily, calming herself. “You know her, then?”

  There’s a moment while he studies Rachel’s face gravely; perhaps he’s understanding that whatever has happened this morning is far more serious than he imagined. As it already has for Rachel, the nightmare has become real for him. His troubled expression falls further, the weight of a traumatized world on his narrow shoulders. This man looks very frail indeed.

  “I live down there,” he says finally, gesturing with one shaking hand a couple doors west.

  “I know.”

  “Yes.” He smiles in brief recognition. “My name is Alan.”

  “Rachel.”

  “I know her parents, just as neighbors.” His voice is low. “The Fergusons, I believe.” A pause, then his lip trembles. “What’s happening here, Rachel? Do you have any idea?”

  Rachel can plainly hear his fear. “No.” Eyes blurred, she looks at him pleadingly. “I don’t know.” Then a queasy laugh escapes her throat. “I was hoping you might!”

  His movements are jerky. He places an awkward hand on her shoulder, this time to comfort her, and she welcomes the gesture. She wants more than anything to embrace this stranger. He straightens up, and begins looking from the girl to the street to the horizon, taking in the lingering columns of smoke in the distance. When his gaze returns, his watery eyes have filled with uncertainty.