Blood Red

by Jason Bovberg

  A young woman is hurrying up and down the hall, reminding the survivors about the dangers of proximity to their loved ones. “Remember, don’t touch them with your hands, don’t kiss them. You can stand with them, but don’t get close. Especially to their faces!” The woman whisks past Rachel, smelling of perspiration and vague perfume. Without a word, she glances at Sarah, then points down the hall to the right. Rachel nods.

  Ahead of them is the sound of human misery, very different from this near-silent hallway. They make their way along the line of gurneys, and the sounds grow louder and louder, until they reach room 109, the source of the wailing.

  This new set of double doors opens into a large room filled with beds that have been wheeled in from storage. Most of the beds are occupied, but not all of them. The beds are much more numerous and closer together than Rachel figures they would be outside an emergency situation like this. After only a moment, she can see that this room has been reserved for those people who have experienced injury from whatever radiant energy it is that’s coming out of the afflicted bodies.

  Most of these people are alive, and only a very few are accompanied by someone. There are perhaps twenty people here suffering varying degrees of deforming injury, and by and large, they are doing it alone. Two people are wandering from bed to bed, clumsily administering pain medication. They don’t appear to know what they’re doing.

  Alan says, “Over there,” in an even, low voice, gesturing.

  On the far side of the room is a collection of corpses covered by more sheets. They’re lined up in a row against the wall, body against body.

  “Okay,” Rachel nods.

  She stands there while Alan shuffles over to say goodbye to his little neighbor, and a man is wheeled in behind her, moaning. Rachel moves quickly out of the way. The plain-clothed “nurse” takes this man directly to one of the few open beds and helps him gently onto it. His moans are already halfway subsided, and by this, Rachel can tell that he was sedated before entering the room. By the time the woman gets him settled into the bed, he’s unconscious, but even in that state, his wounds are plain. His hands are curled as if the fingers have been burned together into a claw, and his face is blistered and scarred like Sarah’s. Not as bad, but close.

  The woman gives the man a parting touch on his shoulder, then rises, coming toward Rachel.

  “Ma’am,” Rachel says, feeling bad about interrupting this woman’s work but needing some scrap of new information.

  “Yes?”

  “Please, do you know what’s happening?”

  The woman, an attractive older woman who reminds Rachel of her mom before she died, seems at first reluctant to pause but comes to a stop next to Rachel, beside the doors, wiping perspiration from her brow with her forearm. She takes a deep breath and lets it out shakily, seeming grateful now for the pause of Rachel’s interruption. Her eyes show an exhausted kindness.

  “That’s the question of the day, isn’t it?”

  Rachel nods, watching peripherally as Alan kisses Sarah’s ruined forehead and lays her gently on the floor.

  “I don’t know, dear.” She looks around wearily. “All I do know is when I woke up this morning, the world was going crazy around me. The same thing happened to you, I’m sure.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “I’m so sorry. I’ve never seen anything like it. Something just…happened. Last night or early this morning. Something, all at once. A whole lot of people fell unconscious.” Her mouth works silently for a moment. “Dead.”

  Rachel nods at her, looks around the room at all the misery. There are perhaps thirty bodies at the edge, all covered with sheets; the smallest and newest body is Sarah’s. And then there are a couple dozen people at various levels of injury.

  “But,” Rachel begins, unsure of herself, “are…are they really dead?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, what’s happening inside them?” Rachel’s voice wavers despite her efforts to control it. “What’s happening inside to cause this?” She gestures toward the victims that surround them. “When I found my stepmother this morning, she had no pulse, she wasn’t breathing—same with the other bodies I’ve seen—but something’s alive inside them. That light—as crazy as it sounds, that light is alive. The bodies are warm, and…I mean…something’s happening inside them.”

  This woman is obviously weary, but she’s looking into Rachel’s eyes with a heightened sense of understanding. She touches her arm at the elbow, then reaches down for Rachel’s hand, and the gesture has the feeling of someone finally discovering a kindred spirit.

  “Can you come with me? I want to show you something.” She casts a glance behind her. “Sofia, can you take care of things here for a minute? I need a potty break.” The other woman nods in the affirmative.

  Alan walks up, looking exhausted and emotionally drained. Rachel goes to him and impulsively embraces him, thinking of her father again. Alan returns the hug with his bony arms, looking somewhat startled.

  “I’m going with this woman for a minute,” Rachel pulls away from Alan and turns to her. “I’m sorry, I didn’t ask your name.”

  “Bonnie.”

  “I’m going with Bonnie, do you want to come?”

  Alan looks past Rachel at Bonnie. “I’d like to help in here,” he says softly. “What can I do?”

  Chapter 6

  Rachel walks deeper into the depths of the hospital with Bonnie. They finally get past the makeshift morgue of gurneys holding corpses; from what she’s seen, Rachel estimates that approximately sixty bodies have been brought to the hospital this morning. Beyond them, Bonnie walks her through a deserted space divided by curtained examination areas.

  They’ve left Alan behind to assist the other impromptu volunteer, a petite young woman named Sofia who quickly jumped in to show Alan how he could help her with the injured. Before Rachel left room 109 with Bonnie, she was watching Alan soothe a preteen boy on his cot on the far side of the room. She felt an odd ache as the doors closed between them, and then she was alone with Bonnie.

  Beyond the curtained areas, there’s a series of five more private examination rooms. Bonnie leads her directly toward the fifth one. Their footfalls echo softly in the hallway, which has grown quieter the deeper into the hospital they’ve come. The area feels a lot like a basement—cold, quiet, desolate—but they’re still on the first floor. Bonnie casts two glances back the way they’ve come as they walk, and then she comes to a stop at the door.

  “You heard about the plane?” she half-whispers.

  “The FedEx jet in Old Town?”

  “I didn’t know it was a FedEx plane.”

  “I saw it. We came from there. Horrible.”

  “Well, a man came through earlier,” Bonnie reports gravely, “scared out of his wits, and he said planes are falling out of the sky all over the place. He said the same thing that’s happening to the people on the ground is happening to those pilots and most of their passengers. Apparently, people closer to DIA are talking about multiple airliner crashes, everywhere.”

  Rachel feels something inside her plummet.

  “The spookier part?” Bonnie goes on.

  “Do I want to hear this?”

  “He thinks those planes will be crashing for hours—a lot of them are on autopilot till they run out of fuel. They’ll be falling all day.” Her voice goes lower. “Imagine being a survivor on an airplane in flight—the rest of the cabin dead, the pilots and crew dead. You’re the only one left on a plane that’s coasting toward…” Bonnie stops, shuddering. “I’m sorry.”

  Bonnie takes hold of the unlocked door handle, looks around briefly, then enters. Rachel follows.

  “Now, honey, this is not a pretty sight, so I want you to prepare yourself, okay?”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s…well, I don’t know what it is, but what you said back there made me think you ought to see this. I don’t know why. Maybe it’ll tell you something. All it does to me is
scare the hell out of me.”

  A curtain divides the dimly lit room in half. Bonnie leads her to the far side of the room, where a man’s body has been placed atop the bed. The man is obviously dead. Rachel moves closer, her eyes widen, and she feels her stomach lurch. She brings a hand to her mouth.

  “Oh no.”

  “I know,” Bonnie squeaks. “I’m sorry to show you this.” She pauses. “He was on a motorcycle, as you can tell. That’s what’s left of his helmet over there. Lot of good it did. He must have been going sixty miles per hour when this thing happened. Apparently it happened north of here. Someone brought him in, I don’t know what they thought we could do for him, but…”

  The man is a disaster, a mess of broken bones haphazardly concealed by jeans and weathered leather. Overweight, probably fifty years old, he’s now a pulpy scramble of limbs and road burn. Rachel feels hot tears coming to her eyes.

  “Look at his face,” Bonnie whispers, then adds, “if you can.”

  Rachel swallows and inches closer toward the far end of the bed. The man’s head is cleaved at the scalp, revealing brain tissue and messy shards of skull. She can also see that his lower jaw has dislocated and is at a severe angle, his teeth exposed at his left ear, which hangs loosely. The entire face is loose, allowing examination deep into the inner workings of the skull. And in the soft light, the red glow is all too clear.

  “Don’t get too close,” Bonnie reminds her.

  Nodding absently, Rachel moves a bit closer, beholding more of the source of the glow than would be possible in any other human. It’s the obscene damage to this man’s skull that has allowed her to see the thing in the open. And what she sees is part of a glowing orb, three or four inches in diameter, above the ruined jaw and beneath the hanging ear. Angling her gaze, she can see that it’s situated deep inside, more deeply than she realized, behind and below the nasal passages. The glow makes the bloodstains seem dark, almost tar-like.

  “Can I touch him?” Rachel asks, glancing back at Bonnie, who frowns almost comically.

  “Why would you want to?”

  “Something I noticed before.”

  “Go right ahead,” Bonnie says. “Just be careful, for goodness sake.”

  Rachel reaches out and touches the man’s skin on an unbloodied patch of his upper arm. And yes, the skin gives more than it should. It’s pliant but not loose. It still springs back after her touch, but it doesn’t even feel like human flesh. What comes to mind is not quite overripe fruit, but something like that.

  “What is it?”

  “I felt this with my stepmother and my…my friend,” Rachel says. “The skin isn’t as firm. Go ahead, feel.”

  Bonnie does so reluctantly, with a grimace.

  “Do you feel it?”

  A nod. “I do.”

  “It feels wrong, right?”

  Another nod.

  “And you know the weirdest part?”

  “What?”

  “That skin is still warm.”

  Bonnie snatches her hand back and looks at Rachel with her own look of horror. “You’re right, I didn’t even think of that.”

  The two women stand there, considering the phenomenon that’s taking place in front of them. It’s more than either can comprehend, more than either wants to fathom in the face of everything else. But they also feel it’s vital that they make the attempt.

  “I have to tell Scott about this,” Bonnie whispers.

  “He’s in charge, huh?”

  “He’s a handful, but yes, I guess so.” Bonnie can’t seem to take her eyes away from the man on the bed. “I work in a family practice a block over. I ... had to help. Scott took control, because he’s the loudest, I guess.” She offers a weak laugh.

  “I’ll tell him,” Rachel says.

  In the hallway on the way back toward the admissions desk, Rachel remembers the cell phone in her pocket and digs it out. She flips it open and sees signal meter bars, but when she attempts to call her dad’s phone, there’s nothing—no sound, no attempt to make the call. She closes the phone and jams it into her pocket again.

  “I don't think anyone has been able to make a call around here," Bonnie says. "Someone told me that even though some of the cell towers still have backup power, most of the other parts of the cell networks have been destroyed.”

  “What about landlines?”

  “Those are out too. Just dead everywhere.”

  Rachel feels another deep ache for her dad. She desperately wants to hear the sound of his voice. She shouldn’t have left the house without leaving him a note or something. Or she should have gone straight to his work without even thinking, without stopping for anyone. She should have shut out the rest of the world and made it her primary goal to find him, whether that meant finding him alive or finding his body.

  That last thought manages to cramp her insides with anticipated grief, but she doesn’t let it show. And she doesn’t think the worst is true. Perhaps it’s wishful thinking, but she believes she can feel that he’s still alive. After her mom died, she developed an almost umbilical bond with her dad that wasn’t there before. For two years, they were inseparable—until Susanna entered the scene. Now she feels that closeness surging back, that intense connection with him, however geographically distant he might be. It sounds ridiculous, but she believes it. She has to believe it.

  Her father is alive.

  And he’s at his office.

  There’s a comfort in that certainty that prevents her from leaving immediately in the Honda; she doesn’t want to challenge it. If she were to actually go out and find him dead, her world would be over. Better to believe that he’s alive.

  When Rachel and Bonnie reach the corridor full of bodies, Rachel notices that some of the family members are leaving the bodies of their loved ones, perhaps to go in search of others in town? She watches one woman say her goodbyes, touching what appears to be the body of her husband with a note of finality and rushing forward out of the hallways in tears.

  While the two women approach the double doors that lead back into the admissions area, they hear heightened commotion at the front of the hospital—yelps of pain or anger. They glance at each other, pick up their pace into a jog, and hurry through the doors. Perhaps half a dozen new people have arrived, and the volunteers have their hands full with their needs. Most have new bodies to add to the corridor of bodies behind the double doors.

  “Oh my!” Bonnie says, already hurrying to the new arrivals. She calls back to Rachel, “Can you give me a hand?”

  Rachel follows Bonnie to a man who has stumbled through the front doors, cradling a boy in his arms. The boy is writhing in pain, obviously suffering from the same affliction that befell Sarah. The father keeps crying, “Help him! Help my son!”

  Before Bonnie can reach him, the poor man stumbles against a waiting-room chair and goes sprawling, the boy flying from his arms and landing awkwardly against one of the magazine-littered tables. The boy cries out wretchedly, alarmingly—that same wounded-animal mewling that Sarah made.

  And now Jenny is back at Rachel’s side, helping her lay the boy flat on the ground. There are several large, pale swatches of skin across his face, and his eyes have gone blind; the pupils are thick, gray, unseeing dots. Rachel places her hand softly against the thick, damaged flesh of his cheek, trying to soothe him. Then he’s being lifted away from her, onto a stretcher and whisked away with his father by one of the volunteers. She knows they’re on their way to room 109 and to Alan, and for some reason that comforts Rachel.

  She surveys the waiting room, which is about half full of survivors—like Rachel and Jenny themselves—who remain stunned by what has happened to their world in the space of a few hours. They stand there, pale, scared, staring blankly. People move hesitantly to the admissions area to ask a question, receive earnest though uncertain replies, after which they wander away, not having received any kind of answer they were hoping for. They even seem to be glancing to Rachel for answers. Their loved ones
are mysteriously gone to them, probably forever, lying on beds and stretchers behind those double doors, and no one can tell them anything.

  “Rachel?” comes Bonnie’s voice from across the room.

  Both Rachel and Jenny turn. Bonnie is standing with Scott at the admissions desk. Rachel walks over, and Jenny follows. The admissions desk still has a look of stressed-out disarray. A few seemingly anonymous volunteers huddle together in confused consultation. Scott looks intensely weary, as if he’s been on official duty here for thirty-six hours, and the others surrounding him look dazed. But despite his look of bleary-eyed distress—which Rachel can certainly empathize with—he has a look about him that repels Rachel at once, particularly as she gets closer, arriving at the desk. Rachel takes in Scott’s shock of sweat-matted red hair, the deep concentration of freckles all over his face and arms. He has the look of a man in charge who has no doubt that he should be.

  “This is Rachel,” Bonnie says, gesturing, and Scott gives Rachel a curt nod. Her tone goes lower. “I was talking to her about the bodies, and she might have some information we haven’t heard yet. Rachel, can you tell Scott what you told me?”

  Rachel feels the eyes of several people turning her way, and she feels a current of teen inadequacy wash over her. She takes a breath. “I’m sure you’ve already seen—”

  A slash of a smile crosses Scott’s face. “We’ve seen quite a lot this morning.”

  “Well, um, I discovered something strange about these bodies.”

  Scott gives Bonnie a look. “All right.”

  “These bodies have no pulse,” Rachel says, haltingly. “And obviously they aren’t breathing. They’re unresponsive. Like probably everyone here, I woke up this morning to find everyone around me dead.” Her voice warbles at that last word, and she has to clear her throat. “And by now, we all know about that red glow coming from inside them. But something is happening to these people. I don’t know, it’s…it’s like they’re somewhere between life and deat—”

  “You’re suggesting these corpses aren’t … dead?” Scott cuts in.