She nods heavily. “I can do that.”
“I’ll be back, then. I wish I had another radio to give you. I’ll try to pick up another Motorola at the station, so we can keep in contact.”
“All right. Be careful.”
“Same back atcha.”
Rachel starts to stand, but Joel raises a hand, palm toward her.
“Hey, hey,” he says. “Take a few minutes, it’s okay. Relax. You earned it.”
“I’m okay,” she says gratefully.
Listening to him stride purposefully down the hall, Rachel manages to stand, somewhat creakily. She yawns and stretches. In the midst of this comparative lull in the frantic movement of the past day, she understands how very tired she is. Her eyes are sandpapery and aching, her limbs weak, her breathing shallow. She feels that she might fall to her knees at any moment.
There’s a small window on the other side of the small room, and Rachel goes to it, draws the blinds open. For a moment, the window appears painted black, but then she can see a vehicle approaching from the south. And now she sees Joel pulling out of the parking lot in his cruiser. He takes the hard right onto Lemay and disappears.
She turns around, and her eyes fall on a small refrigerator in the corner. She goes to it and finds that it’s filled with bottled water. Gratefully, she takes one out, twists it open, and takes a long pull. She empties the bottle in less than a minute, tosses it in the small trash can at her feet. She also finds a plastic-wrapped sandwich, and the sight of it nearly causes her to convulse with hunger. She realizes that she hasn’t eaten in about thirty-six hours. She consumes the turkey-and-cheese sandwich quickly, follows it up with more water.
She returns to her chair. “Daddy, please wake up,” she murmurs, bowing her head so that it rests gently against his ribs. “I need you.” She reaches her arm over his midsection in a half-embrace.
She can smell the subtle musk of his favorite cologne, can feel his sturdy warmth. She’s suddenly enveloped in sensory reminders of home, of comfort and love, and sleep takes her effortlessly. She slips into unconsciousness feeling like a little girl.
Of her sleep, she remembers only jagged, terrifying imagery couched in blackness. And though it feels the slumber lasts for mere minutes, when a shout jolts her awake, she finds, according to the digital clock on the thermostat by the door, that she has been out for an hour and a half. It is now just after 4:00 a.m. Someone has closed the door to let her sleep—probably Bonnie. Rachel feels a conflict of gratitude and annoyance.
She lifts her arm from her father’s midsection to find that it’s asleep. She shakes it, watching his face, finding no change. Reluctantly, she leaves him.
When she opens the door, two figures—Bonnie and a person she doesn’t recognize—are running down the hallway.
“What is it?!” Rachel calls after them, her mind still foggy from sleep.
“I think it’s Jenny!” Bonnie yells back.
Chapter 13
Now Rachel can hear the screaming. The shout that woke her now strikes her, in retrospect, as obviously Jenny’s voice. Fear grasps at Rachel’s insides, and she immediately drops in step behind Bonnie.
“What happened?!”
“No idea!”
She can see Alan reaching the end of the hallway now and hurrying off to the right, and it becomes clear that their destination is the examination room that holds Jenny’s sisters. Rachel’s heart sinks further. The wide hallway pounds with footfalls. Ahead of Rachel is a blur of motion and Jenny’s now bloodcurdling scream.
She catches up with Bonnie and a large unidentified man, right on their heels. They burst through the open door to the first examination room.
They come to an abrupt stop in the doorway.
Confusion.
It’s a small room, like the motorcyclist’s room, but there are seven gurneys crowded inside it. Four of the gurneys hold bodies, and they are squirming. The movement reminds Rachel of the jerky, uncontrolled flopping of a fish out of water. The corpses’ faces are masks of absolute, twitching horror, and in the split second that Rachel has to absorb what’s happening in the room, she makes an acute observation: Whatever terrible reanimation is occurring within these corpses, it is displaying a common characteristic. The new presence inside these bodies is trying to force the bodies to locomote on their backs, upside down.
There’s a body on the floor, freshly fallen from its gurney, that’s trying to gain purchase on the tile. It’s attempting to lift itself off the ground crablike, but it’s failing with apparent frustration, the limbs slipping repeatedly in its frantic movements. It keeps clattering against the base of the gurney that it apparently fell from.
Two more bodies are on the ground, and they are entwined around Jenny, who is screaming. The bodies of a teen and preteen girl are heaving uncooperative limbs over her, pinning her to the ground. The corpses seem to be burrowing their heads against Jenny’s midsection, stabbing their upside-down foreheads into her. Their mouths are clenched open, their dead eyes peeled wide and jittering.
It takes a moment for Rachel to find her voice as these thoughts flit through her consciousness, and then it barks out of her—
“Jenny!”
Rachel leaps blindly toward her friend, reaching out to her outstretched arm. The two young women lock eyes, Jenny’s expression pleading, her body twisting, trying to yank away from the grasping arms of her sisters.
“Help me! Help me! They’re—they’re burning me!”
“Get their legs!” Rachel shouts to anyone who will listen.
The newcomer standing stunned next to Bonnie breaks from his horrified stupor and goes into action. He rounds the mass of limbs and grabs the corpses’ lower legs, being careful to avoid the other body scrabbling next to the gurney behind him.
“Watch their heads! Don’t let them get near you!” Rachel screams over Jenny’s cries and the guttural, animal screeches of the things holding her.
After some struggling, they manage to separate the bodies. Jenny pulls free, and Rachel goes careening backward through the doorway, into the hall, onto her butt, leaving Jenny to curl into a fetal position in front of Bonnie, who quickly kneels to tend to her.
The bulky stranger manages to flop the corpses of Jenny’s sisters atop the other one on the floor, and then he hurriedly backs away from them. They don’t give any kind of chase, just seem to cower there, watching the survivors warily, angrily, their growls reduced now to low rumbles.
“Bring her out!” Rachel calls, and Bonnie and the man do so, dragging Jenny through the doorway.
Jenny is whimpering, crying out with the movement across the floor. Rachel realizes her friend is hurt, but she can’t see any visible damage.
As soon as they’re all out in the hallway, Bonnie slams the door shut, slicing off the sounds from within. Rachel tries to get her bearings as they all breathe heavily, Jenny weeping, frowning deeply, curled up.
It’s only after a moment that Rachel understands what has happened to Jenny. Her friend, still in mortal agony, is clutching her midsection exactly where her sisters’ corpses had been burrowing their heads. Rachel kneels next to Jenny, tries to comfort her, but she doesn’t know what to do. No matter where she touches her friend, her touch elicits increasingly pained cries.
“Bonnie?” Rachel cries, on her knees, indecisive.
Bonnie joins Rachel on the floor. “Where does she hurt?”
“Her stomach.”
Bonnie tries to pry Jenny’s limbs from their clench, to loosen her muscular, inward clamp, but Jenny is hysterical, her face now purple with pain and fear.
“Jenny, we need to help you!” Rachel tries.
Jenny abruptly goes silent, convulsing, pleading, her breath caught somewhere deep inside her. A choked gasp escapes her throat, and then a torrent of bright red vomit gushes from her mouth, splattering Bonnie’s arms and the wall. Bonnie flinches, then seems unfazed, but Rachel feels a sharp stab of horror and helplessness.
Then
Jenny goes unconscious, her limbs loosening, her body spilling across the floor.
Bonnie lifts Jenny’s shirt, and she and Rachel both gasp, flinching backward at the sight.
“Christ!” the stranger says behind them. “What did they do to her?”
Jenny’s abdomen is one large, swollen bruise. Bonnie pushes the shirt up farther, beyond the level of her breasts, and Rachel can see that the bruise tapers off beneath them. Bonnie presses the flesh gently, immediately withdrawing her hand.
“What?” Rachel whispers hotly. “What’s wrong?”
“It—it doesn’t feel…it doesn’t feel like skin.” Bonnie’s eyes are wide, horrified.
Rachel reaches down to touch it, and the skin gives beneath her fingers, feeling almost gelatinous but dry—very dry. It’s only just warm, but it feels molten, as if it might give way to her probing. The sensation reminds her instantly of the feel of Susanna’s and Tony’s skin, of the motorcyclist’s leg, of the Hispanic man’s arms; that feeling of wrongness, that alien elasticity. But this is worse. An image comes to mind of molten lava beneath a veined, dried skein.
“What do we do?!” Rachel cries.
“She’s bleeding internally—that’s all I know for sure.” Bonnie looks down the hall, then back at Jenny. “Let’s get her on a bed. Kevin, you’re going to have to empty one of those gurneys and roll it over here.”
“Of course.”
Kevin steps heavily over Jenny and goes to the closest gurney, which holds a single, sheeted corpse. It’s the first time Rachel has had a moment to really see this man. He’s in his thirties, longish hair, sweaty. He’s a big man dressed in sneakers and jeans and a tee-shirt, like he’d been lounging around the house when the world ended.
He makes no pretense of moving the body gracefully off the gurney—he simply tilts it backward, and the stiff body slides down the wall behind it. Rachel shudders when it hits the floor, its limbs retaining their clenched positions in rigor mortis. Kevin wheels the gurney over to them quickly, then he bends down to help Bonnie lift Jenny atop it, Rachel keeping her hands over Jenny’s fragile-seeming abdomen, feeling it somehow imperative that she hold her vital organs in place. The flesh is hideously swollen and brackish yellow, and there are alarming streaks of black leading down toward her spine.
And now Jenny lurches awake again, a scream blasting from her throat. “IT HUUUURTS!”
She clenches again, clawing at her stomach, facing the wall, her scream devolving into gurgles.
Bonnie frowns, miraculously keeping calm. “This is beyond my skill, Rachel. Her spleen could be compromised … her liver … everything! I’m not a surgeon.”
“Please try something!”
“Oh dear.” She pauses. “First get some morphine from Alan, okay? Twenty milligrams.”
Rachel leaps to her feet and begins running back through the hospital. Passing an elevator, she hears a loud, metallic clank and rattle coming from within but pays it little mind. Her thoughts are on Jenny. She careens into the wide hallway full of corpses, then slides into room 109, seeing the supine bodies everywhere, the sheeted bodies piled in the corner, and Alan, alone, tending them. She’s struck momentarily by the stillness, the odd loneliness of the scene, and then she’s calling to him.
“Alan! It’s Jenny,” she says. “She needs morphine.”
Alan stands as quickly as his weary bones will allow and goes to the medicine supply in a far cabinet. Rachel bounds over a low cot, which contains a mercifully unconscious, mutilated figure, and joins Alan.
“Twenty milligrams, Bonnie said.”
“That’s a lot.”
“She’s really hurt.”
Alan scans the supply and selects a syringe labeled Morphine Sulphate - 20mg. It’s a small yellow tube, completely unremarkable.
“Let’s go,” he says.
“What about them?” Rachel says, gesturing toward the room.
“They’re fine.”
Rachel practically yanks him from the room and back into the dim hallway, then across the wide open space to the examination rooms, and directly toward the grisly aftermath of Jenny’s encounter with her sisters. When they arrive, Rachel can see the new guy, Kevin, visibly recoiled from the scene, as far as he can get from Bonnie and Jenny without fleeing the space. He sees her approaching.
“What happened to her?” he calls, his voice nervous, as if realizing the gravity of everything.
“I don’t know,” Rachel says breathlessly.
All of Jenny’s muscles seem clenched. Her face remains purple, and blood is everywhere—down her shirt, bright shiny red all over the lower half of her face, spattered all over the white sheet beneath her head. Her eyes are bulging, but seemingly unseeing. Rachel’s breath catches at the sight.
“Is it contagious?” Kevin asks louder.
“What?” Rachel manages. “How the hell should I know?!”
“Let me do it, okay?” Bonnie says to Alan, who is bending toward Jenny, ready to administer the shot. “We have to get this into a vein. It’ll take too long otherwise. Hold her down!”
He hands over the syringe, and he and Rachel lean over Jenny, trying to hold her still. Bonnie has readied a spot on Jenny’s rigid arm and now prepares the needle. She expertly plunges it into a bulging vein beneath Jenny’s bicep. In seconds, Jenny’s expression and full-body clench begin to relax, and she goes mercifully unconscious again. Jenny’s limbs spread out, and the damage is fully revealed along her midsection. A great sheet of flesh now appears necrotic—blackened and dead. At its edges are ridges of angry red and yellow pus, and from there, the yellow bruising reaches long fingers around her trunk toward her back.
Rachel feels tears spilling out of her eyes, but she can only stare, unblinking.
An ominous silence settles over the scene. Even as it descends, Rachel becomes aware of the weird scrabbling sounds coming from behind the examination-room door where Jenny’s sisters apparently murdered her, like huge spiders angling about on slippery glass. Bonnie finally speaks.
“She won’t survive.”
“I know,” Rachel says immediately, surprising herself with her bluntness. A baseless anger rises inside her, directed at Bonnie. “I’m not stupid.”
She feels Alan’s hand on her shoulder, trying to comfort her, but she shrugs it off, glaring at him. Then she dissolves into dry sobs. Her resolve to keep emotion tamped down fails her, and she melts into Alan’s embrace.
“I’m sorry,” she breathes into him, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry ...”
She snuffles against his shirt, smelling him, his sweet grandfather scent, feeling his narrow body quiver. She knows he’s shaken to his core as well. Not wanting to linger, not wanting to be needy, she pushes gently away and composes herself.
She’s thinking that the answers she tested only an hour ago, which seemed so right, so like a possible solution, have come to nothing. All the straining effort of smothering those things lining that corridor, was it all for naught? The notion sends tendrils of hopelessness down her spine, across her already exhausted limbs.
Why did I sleep? Why did they let me sleep?
“Well, obviously, I’ve never seen anything like this,” Bonnie says, the color drained from her face. She looks tired, beaten. “I’ve never heard of anything like it. I can’t even comprehend it. But it’s happening. Damned if it isn’t happening: Those things are—they’re alive and they’re moving.”
“And they seem to want to…to kill us,” Alan says.
Rachel and Bonnie look at him. Rachel knows he’s said something that neither of them cares to imagine, but it seems to be true. In every case of reanimation that she’s encountered, the thing has been overtly angry, its impossibly dead eyes glaring at her, its limbs flailing at her. And in Jenny’s case, even the reanimated corpses of her sisters had aggressively attacked her, somehow, and left her for dead.
“We’re still agreed they’re not human?” Rachel asks.
“Well, they’re quite dead,” Alan answe
rs. “Whatever is giving them life is something I’ve never seen before. I hesitate to think of what has happened with my Jeannie back home.”
Realization dawns on Bonnie’s face. “There are people like this everywhere, now, huh? People waking up like this?”
Rachel barks out a humorless laugh. “This is—well, this is impossible! Right? I mean—” She swallows involuntarily, cutting herself short. “Okay, I—I—I can’t just stand around here. What can we do? How can we start to make sure we’re safe?”
Alan’s head is angled toward the floor, but his eyes peer up beneath gray brows. “I’d remind you that this hospital is filled with bodies.” His voice has a calm authority to it that Rachel appreciates at the moment, as she feels more panic settling into her bones. “There are probably three hundred beds on the floors above us. Not to mention all the hospital staff struck down when it happened.”
“So we barricade the upper floors from this floor,” Bonnie offers. “Leave them no way to get down.”
“How?” Alan says.
“Furniture—desks?” Rachel says.
“There’s a half dozen new people that have gathered in the waiting area,” Alan says. “We could get them to help.”
“Let’s do it,” Rachel says. “We’ve got to start somewhere.”
She looks at her dying friend, who looks peaceful now with the morphine flowing through her. There’s blood everywhere, though, and her skin is deathly pale.
“Bonnie, I didn’t mean to snap at you.”
“I know, honey.”
“I’ll just ask this once, then, since you already told me the answer.” She turns to face her, “Is there any chance she could survive?”
“Rachel, this is serious trauma.” Bonnie looks at Jenny regretfully. “I wouldn’t know where to start. She’s lost so much blood.”
“Can I give her blood?”
“Do you know her type?” Bonnie asks without conviction.
“No.”
“I don’t even know how to determine that.”
“Wait, but I’m a universal donor, I’m O-negative.”
“So am I,” Bonnie says, “but—”
Blood Red Page 17
