Blood Red

by Jason Bovberg

  Neither Susanna nor her dad ever mentioned it again.

  Rachel shakes off the bitter memory, glances at her friend, whose head still hangs against her chest. The two young women continue to walk, in silence, and after a while Rachel inches toward Jenny. When they’re shoulder to shoulder, she places her arm around her friend’s shoulder, pulling her toward her in a walking hug. They exchange a meaningful look. No words are necessary.

  After a moment, as they’re both giving a wide berth to a minivan from which that ever-present glow jitters, Jenny asks in a trembling voice, “How did you find Tony?”

  Rachel doesn’t particularly want to relive that aspect of the morning either, but she replies, “I live across the street from him. I grew up with him. I mean, I knew him when he…” A lump of emotion suddenly stops her words, and thickens her throat, which she clears loudly in the silent parking lot. “…when he was still a kid. We were in third grade together. We’ve lived across the street from each other all these years.”

  “Wow,” Jenny says quietly.

  “Yeah, anyway, after I found Susanna—that’s my stepmother—I went straight there, and he was the same. His mom, too.”

  “That’s the same thing that happened to me.” Jenny jumps over a little juniper plant as they begin heading down the embankment to the car. “Helen and Nancy were slumped over at the table, and after I figured out it wasn’t a joke, I got all scared and tried to call my mom, but I didn’t even notice that weird light until later in the hospital. I remember screaming and screaming because 911 wouldn’t answer. I couldn’t believe that. I had to take them to the hospital myself, carry them to the car … and then I saw…whatever it is, that it was happening everywhere.”

  “Yeah,” Rachel whispers. “Susanna was the first person I saw. Maybe I didn’t know what I was doing. Or what was happening. Hell, I still don’t. But maybe…” She can hear her voice trembling.

  “Rachel, don’t do that.” Jenny makes her way down the small descent awkwardly, her light angling spastically. “I didn’t mean—”

  “I know.”

  They reach the sidewalk and look up and down College Avenue. There are two vehicles moving along the street—a truck weaving perhaps half a mile north, and a sedan much farther north, but working its way south. Its headlights are barely visible, poking left and right, in fits and starts. Otherwise, there’s no observable human activity. Rachel sighs at the desolate sight.

  The two young women walk to the Honda. When they reach their respective doors, Rachel unlocks the doors, stops, and looks at Jenny over the top.

  “Do you have any idea—or did anyone at the hospital have any idea—why we’re still here? Why we were spared? Why would this thing hit so many people but not us? I mean, why are we so special?”

  “It’s almost like they were avoiding talking about it. Like that guy Scott just wanted to maintain order. Make sure everyone who needed it got pain relief.”

  “I think people are still stunned,” Rachel says. “I’m no fan of Scott, but yeah, I can understand that.” She shivers despite the warmth of the night. “So, what do you think? I mean, it feels like there’s no rhyme or reason at all, but there’s got to be, right?”

  “It could be anything, couldn’t it?” Jenny says. “It could be some weird quirk of our immune system. Maybe, I don’t know, people who never had chicken pox? Or people who have peanut allergies? Or…” She pauses her thoughts. “Do you have a peanut allergy?”

  “No.”

  “Well, we can rule that out.”

  Rachel ponders what Jenny has said. “Do you think it’s some kind of…some kind of weird super virus?” she asks. “And we’re immune for some reason?”

  “Would a virus cause that? That fucking glowing thing?” Jenny’s flashlight is shaking minutely against the metal of the car, causing a little rattle. “At the hospital, before you got there, they were talking about a biological weapon. I don’t even want to think about it anymore. Can we get out of here?”

  “Yes,” Rachel says decisively, opening her door. “Let’s go.”

  It is time to find her dad.

  When they’re both sitting in their bucket seats, Rachel twists the key in the ignition. The Honda comes to life, and she pulls the car out into the street, swerves past the truck blocking the turn into the Target parking lot, and continues south. The wide avenue remains a wasteland. It is the most populated of roads that Rachel has traveled today, and again, as on the smaller streets, most of the vehicles are off to the left and right, having simply stalled to eventual stops wherever their momentum carried them.

  In a few minutes, Rachel is turning into her dad’s office park, just off Harmony. She navigates her way through the tree-shrouded aisles, finding the parking spaces mostly empty. But there, near the front, is her dad’s silver Acura, and the sight of it opens up an almost painful blossom of warm dread in her chest. Her eyes fill with moisture, and she presses the gas pedal, racing toward the front entrance.

  Jenny grabs at the dash. “Careful, Rachel!”

  “Sorry, I just—he’s here!”

  She brings the Honda to a skidding stop near the steps leading to the main foyer and kills the engine. She grabs her Magnum light, flings her door open, and starts racing across the concrete between ornamental trees that she can barely see in the starlight. She scrambles up the steps.

  “Rachel, wait!”

  Jenny is rounding the car, following with her own flashlight. Rachel turns, trying not to be impatient.

  Jenny catches up, but then Rachel races the final distance to the glass doors and pulls at one, finding it open. She glances back at her friend, then takes a few blind steps inside. She’s instantly encased in total blackness. She takes two more steps before bringing up her flashlight. Before she clicks it on, she peers down the open hallway she knows lies to her left. At once, she sees a small, vague red glow coming from the floor near the elevators. A full-body tremble overtakes her. Is the glow just her imagination? Please let it be her imagination.

  Daddy!

  Still staring in that direction, she thumbs the button on the flashlight, and a cone of light blares down at her feet. She doesn’t want to point her light over there, doesn’t want to go over there, doesn’t want to think about what’s over there. Heart pounding, she backs away to the doors and stumbles outside.

  “No no no no—”

  “What, what?”

  “There’s a body in there.” Tears are burning in her eyes when she rejoins Jenny at the top of the concrete stairwell. “What does it mean, Jenny, what does it mean that his car is still here, and there’s a body in there? What does it mean?”

  “Is it him?” Jenny asks gravely.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

  “Didn’t you use your flashlight?”

  “I couldn’t.” There’s anguish in Rachel’s voice. “I—I—couldn’t.”

  Jenny nods in understanding. “It…well, it doesn’t mean anything, right? We don’t know anything. There are other cars here. He could be trapped in the dark, in his office, that’s all.”

  “Okay,” Rachel breathes.

  “We have to see who it is, though. We have to go in.”

  Rachel stands there uncertainly, watching a lone sedan move up College, threading its way through the dead, dark traffic. Its headlights weave restlessly left and right, and then it has moved out of sight beyond the edge of the building. Off to the west, on the horizon, she can see a vague crimson glow in the sky, spotted intermittently across the Front Range. The entire length of the Rocky Mountains appears to be on fire. She stares at the phenomenon despondently.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Rachel whispers. “I don’t know what I’d do if I was alone.”

  Jenny offers a weak smile and takes Rachel’s hand. “Same here.”

  Rachel takes a deep breath, her throat complaining at the acrid note of smoke in the air. “All right, let’s go.”

  They enter the building together, clutching t
heir lights with both hands. The twin beams illuminate the rich wood paneling of the foyer and a sprawling information desk littered with papers. A dead flat-screen monitor dominates the center of the desk. Behind it, a chair sits empty. Jenny nervously pokes her light over the opposite edge, then relaxes.

  “No one here.”

  They move forward toward the vestibule leading to the hallway. Rachel feels emotion tightening her throat as their lights begin to throw unsettled rays of illumination into the area. She stops.

  “Jenny, can you…” she says, gesturing toward the elevators. “I can’t…”

  “I don’t know what your dad looks like! I’ve never met him.”

  “Just—just tell me what you see.”

  Jenny makes her way forward down the short, wide hall. Out of the corner of her eye, Rachel watches Jenny, backlit by the silver illumination from her flashlight, walk slowly toward the body. Jenny gives the sprawled figure a wide berth, circling it. Rachel casts wary glances her way, trying not to look at the body. She’s gritting her teeth.

  “It’s a man. I think it’s a janitor. There’s a vacuum cleaner here. And he’s got—oh!”

  “What?!”

  “Oh fuck, he’s moving! Just like that girl.”

  Motivated by the intense relief of learning that the body is not her father’s, Rachel races over, adding her light to Jenny’s. It’s a man in plain clothes who had clearly been in the act of vacuuming the carpet adjacent to the elevator hallway’s stone tile. His ball cap sits crookedly next to his head, which is straining, trying to rise. Both flashlights are trained on the man’s head, and in the blunt vividness of the beams, the phenomenon looks almost clinical.

  Rachel’s flashlight trembles anew. “This is happening to all of them,” she says flatly. “And I think more is going to happen.”

  “More?”

  “I don’t know how, but I think these bodies are coming back.” Her light is still fixated on the man’s rhythmically jerking head. “And not back to life, but back to…movement.”

  Jenny is silent. Rachel shines her light toward her, sees that she’s crying, her face a mask of shock.

  “Hey, hey,” Rachel says, going to her. “It’s okay, it’s okay, keep it together.”

  “I—I—I—don’t know how much more I can take.”

  “Well, I hate to say it, but it’s only gonna get worse.”

  “Great.”

  “Come on,” Rachel says, directing her light toward the door to the stairwell. “My dad’s office is upstairs. You ready to go?”

  “No.”

  “You can wait here.”

  “Fuck no.”

  Jenny takes a big, quavering breath, then goes with Rachel to the door. Rachel takes hold of the handle and pushes the door open. The stairwell is intensely dark. The beams of their flashlights slice through the blackness, hard-edged. As they’re stepping over the threshold, Rachel finds her father, unconscious, sprawled on the stairs.

  Chapter 9

  “Daddy!” Rachel screams. “No, no, no no!”

  She rushes to the body, which is sprawled across several steps, face up. She embraces her father, shutting her eyes tight, consumed with grief. She’s sobbing into his chest, feeling a kind of regression, feeling herself small and young, her whole life—and particularly the past few years since her mother’s death—coming to bear on this moment.

  Rachel opens her blurred eyes to look at his face, finds it unresponsive.

  “Daddy!” she cries again, clutching him fiercely. “Oh God no!”

  Jenny has fallen to her knees at the base of the stairs, her flashlight limp in her hand, illuminating the entire stairwell indirectly. Her other hand is covering her mouth.

  Rachel feels that his body is warm, like the others, and completely limp. In the next moment she snaps her head back and focuses on her dad’s chest.

  There’s a pulse.

  “He’s alive!” she cries desperately. “He’s alive!”

  “What?”

  “Turn your light off!”

  They click off their flashlights, plunging the stairwell into absolute blackness. And there’s no red glow coming from her father’s head. Rachel clicks her light back on, and Jenny follows suit.

  “He’s alive,” she repeats. “Daddy! Wake up!”

  No response.

  “Daddy!”

  “Look, his head is bleeding,” Jenny says.

  Rachel lifts herself away from her dad and angles her light to illuminate his head. There’s blood there, and a thin line of it has stained the stairs. It’s not flowing, though; it has coagulated and stopped. Rachel carefully touches the area of the wound with her palm and feels a considerable knot there. She points her flashlight straight up the two-level stairwell, stands up, and examines the area.

  “I think he fell down,” she says. “Maybe he was scared, I don’t know. Oh my god, I’m shaking. I was so scared that…that…” She feels a sob of relief rising out of her but tamps it down. “Can you help me?”

  “You want to move him? Is that smart?”

  “I don’t think we can count on an ambulance showing up.”

  “I know, but—”

  “Set your light down on the floor so we can see, then help me with his feet, okay?

  Jenny does so immediately, setting her flashlight against the lowest step, letting it shine upward. Rachel stuffs the end of her own light in her back jeans pocket, also pointing up. She gets her arms under her dad’s shoulders, and Jenny situates herself at his knees. They manage to lift him mostly from the ground and drag him the rest of the way down the stairs. Rachel is careful not to let his head fall backward, trying to cradle it against her chest. He’s breathing steadily through his half-open mouth, almost a snore, and except for the bump above his right temple, he appears uninjured.

  “We need to go back to the hospital,” Rachel announces.

  “Okay,” Jenny manages.

  “I can’t believe he’s alive!”

  “You’re lucky,” Jenny says wistfully. “He’s lucky.”

  After considerable exertion, they get him out of the stairwell. He’s not an overweight man, but he’s not exactly thin, either. He’s solid. Rachel remembers, out of the blue, when he told her he once played football in college. He would joke about all that young muscle going soft with age.

  She pauses, breathing heavily. “Go ahead and set him down … grab your light.”

  While Jenny does so, Rachel goes to her knees, still cradling her dad’s upper body. She feels intensely protective of him, needing to take care of him, needing to save him. At the same time, she feels drained from the emotional turmoil of believing him to be gone and then abruptly discovering, improbably, that he’s alive. She’s been emptied and then filled back up again. After everything else, it’s too much. Her dry tear ducts are throbbing. Her head is spinning dully. It doesn’t help that she’s physically and psychologically exhausted.

  “Ready?” Jenny asks, her own flashlight in her back pocket, its beam dancing across the ceiling behind her.

  “Yes.”

  They continue dragging Rachel’s father through the hallway, past the elevator doors, onto the tile. Rachel, hauling backward, remembers the janitor lying there, glances down to make sure they avoid him. She notices the movement of his head again, and despite her own jerky movements, she can see that the movements are already more pronounced.

  “Wait, stop.”

  Jenny drops the feet, breathing heavily again, and Rachel carefully sets her father’s upper body down to the floor. She takes her flashlight out of her back pocket and focuses its light on the janitor. Immediately, she stumbles backward, tripping over her dad’s shoulder, staggering against the wall next to the elevator door.

  “What?!” Jenny shrieks.

  And then she sees.

  The janitor’s entire upper body is now moving. He’s flat on his back, and his head has lolled over onto its crown, upside down, its dead eyes staring at them, shining flatly in the
trembling light. The facial muscles are working horribly, now into a rictus smile, now into a sharp grimace. His jaw clicks hollowly.

  The young women can only stare, stunned.

  The man’s shoulders jerk without real control, twitching rhythmically. And now a sound is coming from the dry hole of the man’s open mouth—a guttural, gasping sound—and it’s directed right at them. There’s no mistaking that.

  “Rachel!” Jenny yells desperately.

  “Come on!” Rachel cries, pocketing her light and hauling up her father’s shoulders. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”

  Jenny, emitting a loud whine to mask the awful sound coming from the janitor, grabs Rachel’s father by the knees. They heave him across the tile, then onto the carpet, keeping their eyes on the janitor, who lies in shadow now, jittering, his jack-o’-lantern head angling over to follow their movements. He’s jerking his right shoulder now, trying to rise and follow, but Rachel can see that his body remains uncooperative, the flesh at odds with whatever motivating force is now propelling it.

  “What is it?!” Jenny cries in a high-pitched warble. “What’s happening to him?!”

  “I don’t know,” Rachel manages, breathing hard, yanking at her father with every backward step. “Let’s go!”

  They pick up speed as they get past the reception desk and burst through the front door. They drag him down the steps, then across the front path, stopping adjacent to the car. Rachel sets him down gently, opens the rear door. She squats down behind her dad and pulls him into the back seat, uttering a prolonged gasp of effort. Jenny helps angle his lower legs into the seat, and slams the door closed. Rachel hops out the other rear door, making sure her father’s head looks secure and comfortable, and closes the door behind her. She removes the flashlight from her back pocket, ducks into the driver’s seat, and cranks the engine to life as Jenny falls into the passenger seat.