Blood Red

by Jason Bovberg

  “Have you been inside?” he asks her.

  She shakes her head, rocking on the grass with the girl, who is moaning softly now and responding to Rachel’s presence.

  “Try to keep her calm, Rachel,” he says slowly. “I’ll be right back.”

  Alan faces the girl’s house. He gives it a long, weary look, then makes his way to the porch and enters the home.

  Rachel hears nothing of his investigation inside, just rocks gently with this broken little girl on this suburban patch of green. The child is suffering in the clutches of shock, perhaps madness, and her stunted hands beat softly against Rachel’s chest even as she succumbs to the insistent embrace. Tears stream out of the girl’s eyes, down her twisted and patchy face. Her breathing is labored, choked.

  She needs to go to the hospital, but Rachel wonders what she’ll find there. Barren, silent hallways and hundreds of red-tinted near-corpses? It’s still the place she has to go now. Right now.

  She glances behind her at the front door, which hangs open, a silent maw.

  “Come on …”

  She looks through the haze of smoke into the sky, cringing in anticipation of what she’ll see. Sure enough, the twisting contrails of the airliner are still visible, diffused now into an ephemeral gray spiderweb streaking down toward the earth. She brings her gaze down and studies the other sources of smoke along the horizon. The Old Town fire is gigantic in her vision, a great mass of undulating darkness, but there are five other major sources of smoke in the distance. Three of them are to the south, as far as Loveland or Longmont. The other two are northeast of her. She knows there are small airports in both directions, homes to small private aircraft of all kinds. She shakes her head, fearing the worst.

  And then there are the houses all around her, filling the neighborhood, perhaps the entire city. Are they all filled with unresponsive bodies, inconceivable red glows emanating from underneath their skin, deep inside their skulls? She looks from one house to the other, in a long row down this street, and despite the fact that she’s outside under an open sky, she feels a claustrophobic horror at the possibility. The entire city could be affected. Rachel won’t let her conception go beyond that geographical span. Not yet. Even glancing off the notion that the phenomenon could be far wider, her mind slams its doors hard.

  Finally, Alan comes back out onto the porch and quietly closes the door behind him. He shuffles to the edge of the steps and gazes out onto the lawn. Rachel looks back at him, waiting for him to tell her what he found inside. Finally, he breathes out a trembling sigh and nods.

  “Just like my Jeannie,” he says.

  “I’m going to the hospital,” Rachel announces. “Do you want to come?”

  Alan looks at her, emotion tugging at his features. He turns his body slightly westward and stares off in the direction of his home, his manicured lawn, his wife. He runs a nervous hand through his thin hair.

  “I can’t leave…” he says, gesturing futilely. Then, “Yes.”

  “Help me get her in the car?”

  “Of course.”

  Together, they lift Sarah from the ground and carry her to the car. The little girl holds tightly to Rachel now but clearly feels the pain of the movement, and she bawls almost relentlessly. The sound of it brings tears to Rachel’s eyes and to Alan’s.

  He opens the back door of the Honda, and after some maneuvering, they get Sarah into the rear seat. At this point, however, the girl is crying so vehemently that her destroyed face is red-blotched with effort, and she can’t even breathe behind the force of the sobbing. Rachel hurries to the girl’s side and must sit with her for a few minutes before she finally calms somewhat, at which point, Rachel gestures to Alan to take her place. He sits down with the girl, embracing her, petting her, soothing her, and Sarah eventually accepts the switch from Rachel to Alan.

  Rachel gets behind the wheel again, scanning the street for any new movement, any new horror. Everything else is desolate. She starts up the car and gets back on her way.

  “I’ll go through Old Town, see if we can find someone who knows anything.”

  On the little armrest control pad on her door, she brings down all the windows. Even before 9:00 a.m., the summer day is getting warm. The air is smoky, but not suffocating yet. She keeps an eye on Alan and Sarah in the back. The little girl is emitting wet, damaged sounds from her nose and mouth, as if her tongue is bloated or she’s experienced significant oral trauma. Rachel’s pulse thuds with heartbreak for this child.

  “Your family…?” Alan ventures after some silence, almost too quietly for Rachel to hear beneath Sarah’s sounds.

  Rachel looks into his dazed eyes through the rearview mirror. “My stepmother is dead,” she says. “I don’t know where my dad is. His car was gone this morning.” She hesitates before telling him about Tony. “My friend across the street, too.”

  “My Jeannie is gone,” he says faintly, repeating himself from earlier. “She just… wouldn’t wake up. Died in her sleep. Very peaceful.” He pauses. “Except for that…that red…”

  Rachel doesn’t know how to respond to that. “I’m sorry, Alan,” she says, knowing her words are insignificant. “I think a lot of people are gone.” She tells Alan about the cars she’s found on the side of the road, the occupants who all appeared to suffer the same fate as Susanna and Tony and Jeannie and Sarah’s parents.

  “What does it mean?” he says in a soft tone, wondering aloud. “This …this red glow coming from inside?” Rachel watches him frown deeply. “It doesn’t make a lick of sense.” Embarrassed, she sees a tear flow down his left cheek, sees him wipe it away. “Not a lick of sense.”

  Whatever it is, Rachel senses that it’s beyond human understanding. When her mind veers in the direction of that otherworldly illumination, shining from underneath flesh and bone, she encounters an insurmountable block in her thinking. Her mind simply turns in another direction, say, to contemplate some other terror—some terror that is itself a symptom of the red glow. She can handle only the symptoms, and those only barely. She can’t handle the source. Not yet. She doesn’t know how to put all that into words.

  So she drives.

  “Look,” she says after a minute, and Alan glances up.

  There’s a man sprawled in the road up ahead, right at the edge of Howes. Dressed in shorts, a tee-shirt, and athletic shoes, he’s simply lying there. He’s facing their way, and when Rachel pulls up beside him, she can see that his eyes are half-open, dead-seeming. She pauses there and studies him. Behind her, Alan leans over and looks down on him. The sun has risen, and she can’t see evidence of a red luminescence, but she knows it’s there. Alan settles back into his seat, cradling Sarah, and Rachel motors on, leaving the jogger where he lies. He recedes in the rearview mirror. It seems wrong to leave him, but what else can she do? How can it be that in the short space of this single morning, she has come to a place where she could do such a thing—just drive on?

  She keeps moving toward the center of town.

  There are more crashed vehicles. She has kept count since that first one on Magnolia. She has seen twenty-three cars and seven trucks angled into curbs or trampled across lawns or crashed into homes, and she has seen four bicycles lying in the streets and crumpled against parked cars, their riders slumped at odd angles over aluminum-and-rubber wreckage.

  “I’m scared,” Rachel says meekly, surprising herself. She can barely keep it together.

  Alan is breathing in quick breaths. “Me too.”

  She maneuvers through the small, meandering business district that precedes College Avenue. There are dozens of crashed vehicles, most of them off to the side of the road, some of them stopped right in the middle, and then she’s facing the main thoroughfare. The traffic signal isn’t working. The large pillar of black, stinking smoke is just to the north, but the smoke is heavy here too, so heavy that Rachel reverses her decision and brings all the windows up. She presses the button on the dash to restrict the cabin air to recirculated.


  A woman appears directly in front of them, running south to north, straight up College Avenue toward the fire. She’s harried, crazed. Her gaze touches on Rachel’s for the briefest of moments, but there’s no recognition, and she keeps running toward the smoke.

  Rachel carefully makes the turn onto College, and there are so many cars wrecked along the thoroughfare that Rachel loses count. Not crumpled hunks of metal, steaming or smoking, but gentle impacts, fender benders, the cars seeming to have lost power and drifted into their accidents. The parking rows lining the center of the avenue constitute a weird scene dotted with untended collisions every few meters. In every car, human beings are slumped against the wheel or smashed against the window. In the gray dimness, she can discern the ubiquitous red glow—it’s everywhere under the smoke, coming from hundreds of bodies, inside vehicles, lying motionless on the sidewalks, crumpled in the roadway next to bicycles. It’s a haunting scene, desolation amidst bedlam, and Rachel can only stare numbly.

  Now she sees another moving car off in the distance, coming from the east on Mountain, turning north toward the blast, and then another, maneuvering north along the southbound lanes of College, also approaching the smoke.

  When Rachel crosses Mountain, she’s facing a scene of chaos. She stutters the car to a stop. Alan and Sarah bump forward, and Alan emits a grunt of surprise. Rachel gapes at the sight of the broken airliner in flaming pieces across the avenue, great blackened chunks of it scattered into the burning buildings on the east side. A giant, crumpled FedEx logo is plainly visible along the fuselage. Thick plumes of smoke rise from several structures and from the destroyed plane itself. The impact has made a crater of College Avenue south of Laporte. Perhaps thirty businesses—some of Rachel’s favorite stores, concert venues, and restaurants—are completely burned out.

  A helpless group of survivors has assembled in a wide perimeter around the wreckage, there to help but unsure how to begin. It’s a frumpy, unkempt bunch; they all appear to have recently tumbled out of bed. To Rachel’s amazement, there is only a single police cruiser in the vicinity, lights flashing. Rachel believes it to be the one she saw speeding east on Magnolia earlier. The officer is in uniform, standing by his cruiser, two-way radio in hand. He’s repeatedly speaking into it and listening, and it seems he isn’t getting a response. Even from her car fifty feet away from him, Rachel can see it in his worried expression.

  “Stay back!” he calls abruptly to the crowd, then goes back to his radio.

  Flames have engulfed half the street. Small explosions continue to pop inside the buildings, and Rachel can tell the fire is spreading. Windows at the edge of the flames are blowing out, throwing glass across the sidewalk.

  Five or six people have gathered around the cop: two older women in nightclothes, a young man in shorts and no shirt, and two pre-teen children, who are backed against the car, looking scared out of their minds. The woman Rachel saw running north on College has arrived at the cruiser, has planted her hands on the black trunk, and is now catching her breath. No one pays her any attention. All she needed was the comfort of the flashing police car’s appearance of control.

  Perhaps thirty more people are closer to the plane, getting as close as they dare, pointlessly looking for survivors in the cockpit. The policeman calls out to them again, but this time Rachel can’t hear his words. Most of the people are more cautious, farther back from the wreckage, some turning away and finally hurrying back toward the cop.

  “I want to talk to him,” Rachel says. She turns back to face Alan, and Sarah, who is clutched to him. “Do you want to wait here?”

  “I’ll wait,” Alan says, unable to take his eyes from the nightmare of College Avenue. “I think she’s okay, but her breathing is still labored. Please hurry.”

  “We’ll get her to the hospital, I just—”

  “Go ahead,” Alan urges.

  Rachel pulls the car forward and parks close to the cruiser, switches off the engine. She jumps out, immediately coughing under the assault of the thick smoke, and runs toward the police officer, who looks over at her. His face is drenched with sweat, and his bloodshot eyes are ravaged from stress. He’s a close-shaven, serious man. Despite his youth, he has an air of military authority that he seems desperate to preserve in the face of pandemonium.

  The others see Rachel approach as well, giving her no more than a glance before they go back to their panicked study of the disaster that has befallen their town.

  The policeman tosses his radio on his seat, giving up on it. “Nothing,” he announces. “There’s no one. I don’t fucking believe it.”

  “Is that thing even working?” a soot-smeared woman behind him asks in a surprisingly even voice.

  The cop glares back at her. “Radio’s fine, just no one receiving.”

  “Hey,” Rachel says.

  The officer nods at her. “You okay?”

  “I’ve been better,” Rachel says. “What the hell is happening?” She asks her question to the policeman but loudly enough for everyone to hear.

  The cop lets out a weary sigh. “I don’t have any answers for you, except that there’s a cargo plane crashed in the middle of Old Town, with zero emergency response except yours truly. This fire is going to take out half of downtown. There’s about a thousand vehicles crashed within the few square miles I know about, and most of the goddamn people in this town appear to be dead—dead!—right in their goddamn beds. If they’re not dead in their cars, that is.” He gestures toward the airliner. “I picked up some chatter on the CB, and a guy on Mulberry way out near the interstate said he was seeing explosions like this in every direction, especially down Denver way. Airplanes falling from the sky.”

  “I saw one,” Rachel blurts out. “A passenger plane, to the north. It just broke up and fell.”

  He glares at her, dry-swallowing involuntarily, then looks back at the devastation in front of them.

  “It’s some kind of attack, I’m sure of it.” This comes from the thin, shirtless young man behind the policeman. He has to practically yell under the crackling whoosh of the flames. “I was out running before dawn, and way ahead of me I watched two cars swerve and crash into the curb. I mean, one minute, they were just people on their way to work, and the next, it was like they both fell asleep at the same time, right in their seats.”

  “Everything happened at once?” comes another voice, panicked, high-pitched.

  The young man is nodding, his eyes darting around.

  This revelation jibes with what Rachel has seen so far. At some point before dawn, something happened to this town. Possibly more than this town. People just turned off. No pulse, no respiration, nothing. For all intents and purposes, dead—simultaneously. It was some kind of cataclysmic event, culminating with that red … presence … beneath the skin.

  “But what kind of attack?” Rachel yells into the maelstrom of flames and booming clatter. Her first thought, she remembers, had been terrorism.

  “I ... I don’t know. Biological?” the young man says.

  “You’ve seen what’s happening to all the people, right?” She asks this of the loose group around her. “You’ve seen the bodies? You’ve seen what’s happening under the skin?”

  There are a few nods.

  “I saw it,” says one of the bleary-eyed kids at the cruiser, a middle-school kid with a mop of brown hair.

  “Wait, what?” the cop says. “What are you talking about?”

  “Red,” says a woman off to the left, a grimace of painful memory slashed across her mouth. “Red light coming from…from inside them, inside their bodies.”

  The cop looks confused and flustered. “What?!” He shakes his head. “I don’t even know how to begin to deal with that right now. Jesus Christ. All I know is I got this fucking plane burning a hole in the city. I need to deal with that right now.”

  One woman calls out, “Where’s the fire department?!” and then moans raggedly when the answer is reflected in the small crowd’s silence. During
the silence, minor heat explosions continue to burst from a dozen buildings beyond the crashed jet. The woman’s outburst causes a couple of women in the near distance to begin crying, and at the sound, Rachel’s own tear ducts well up. Others are reacting with silent dismay. A crushing hopelessness settles over them. Rachel can feel the collective need for some sense of control, and fortunately the cop senses it too.

  “Okay, the closest firehouse is on Remington by the library,” calls the cop. “I need volunteers!” Most of the group surges toward him at the suggestion. “Let’s go there and get a truck. I won’t know what the fuck I’m doing, but I can give it a shot. Let’s go!”

  Rachel feels the same urge to help, to do something, to be a part of recovery. But Alan and Sarah are waiting for her in the car. She needs to get the little girl to the hospital. Rachel can handle a young child and an old man. She thinks she can. What she can’t handle is a city in ruin.

  She finds herself backing away from these suddenly scrambling people. They’re crowding around the cruiser, and the cop is singling out a few of the hardier survivors. “You! And you two!” They’re climbing into the back of the cruiser.

  “Does anyone know about the hospital?” Rachel calls out. “Has anyone been there?”

  Most of the crowd doesn’t hear her beneath the roar of the fire, but a young woman a few yards away calls out, “I came from there!” She pushes herself from the edge of the crowd and goes to her. “There’s people there, like here. Trying to make sense of it. Some injured people making their way there.”

  So maybe there’s someone at the hospital who can help.

  “Thank you!” Rachel yells, touching the woman’s arm, and now she’s running away, back toward the Honda. She plants her hands against her ears, silencing the screams and the explosions and the crackling fire and that same insistent keening over everything. That terrible, constant sound that signals the end of everything.