“Wait, wait—” Alan breaks in. He looks at them seriously. “I’m also O-negative.”
“Me too,” says Kevin behind them.
It takes a moment to sink in, to go from strange coincidence to a significant realization.
“You’re saying—” Rachel replies, but at that moment a chorus of screams erupts from the front of the hospital.
Without thinking, Rachel takes off in that direction again, sprinting into the inner corridor, past her father’s room and through the double doors. She spins into the admissions area, reeling, to find five new survivors scrambling away from something she can’t see. She stumbles across the room and comes to an abrupt stop.
She hears Bonnie, Alan, and Kevin coming through the door behind her, and then everything stutters into a sort of nightmare state.
On the far side of the waiting room is a wide stairway leading upstairs. On the fifth step, a woman’s corpse is moving crablike down the stairs, upside down, its dead, peeled-wide eyes swiveling and staring. A flimsy white-and-blue gown hangs off the body haphazardly, revealing great expanses of dead skin. The body is jerking as it descends, one laborious step at a time, the hands scrabbling awkwardly. The crowd in the waiting room has gone from bewildered to terrified, their sounds rising in pitch to screams.
The thing on the stairs reacts, flinching backward, its features clenched unnaturally. Rachel can’t tell whether it’s anger on that face or some kind of shock, encountering this shrieking group of people. It emits a raspy sound from the dry hole of its mouth, a thin warble. The thing stops moving at the third step, just staring at them, regarding them. Its sound trails away into a throaty wheeze.
Rachel nearly slips and falls over spilled magazines at the edge of a row of chairs, blindly catching herself on the back of a chair. She can’t take her eyes off the stairwell.“What the fuck is—?!” comes a high-pitched voice from behind her at the admissions desk. Rachel twists her head to see the source: It’s Scott. “Why is she walking like that?!”
“Stay back!” she calls to the crowd, trying to maintain a semblance of calm over their cries.
The thing’s flinch and pause on the steps emboldens a large bald man at the front of the crowd to come forward brusquely. Rachel feels all nineteen years of her youth, and all one hundred twenty pounds of her weight. She feels awfully small as he barrels forward fearlessly. The man is holding, of all things, a baseball bat in his fist, his shaved head gleaming under the weak fluorescents.
“Wait!” she tries, but he ignores her.
In hesitant fits and starts, he moves toward the crab woman on the stairwell, brandishing his weapon high overhead. And now he’s bellowing at the woman’s corpse, a stream of obscenities and incomprehensible barks flowing from his mouth.
Rachel watches, mesmerized, as the woman-thing hobbles back up the stairs in retreat, squawking. Encouraged, the bald man leaps forward at the thing, rearing back with the bat. He takes a savage swing that whiffs over the woman’s head, which has jerked downward defensively. As the bat swings around, the woman leaps at the man, knocking him sideways against the wall.
The bald man begins to scream, “Get it off me! Get it off me!” No one immediately volunteers to heed his cries, which quickly become high-pitched and almost girlish as the corpse-thing twists awkwardly around him with its oddly bent limbs, which seem to dislocate with each jerking, angular movement. The angry, upside-down expression on the woman’s face, and the urgent, throaty gasp communicates what Rachel thinks must be the pain of the corpse’s joint-popping movement.
Finally, Rachel leaps forward to help, and stops short when she sees another gown-clad corpse spidering down the stairs, farther up. It’s the corpse of a gaunt, gray-whiskered old man, and it’s dragging an IV rig across the floor, connected by intravenous tubing to the thing’s arm, the metal rod clattering noisily behind it on its way down the stairs.
It’s at that moment when Rachel knows that things have gone out of control.
She won’t let herself retreat. She kicks forward, searching the area crazily for some kind of blanket or cushion with which to possibly smother the things. There’s nothing—just plastic and metal and heavily trafficked low-pile carpet.
The scrawny old man, despite the apparatus he’s dragging, is quick, angling down the steps with a weird efficiency of movement. It’s not human locomotion—more akin to an insect than a spider, Rachel realizes, watching the old man clamber down the stairs toward the woman-corpse, his dead black eyes flaring, seemingly enraged. The movement is all hyperextended elbows and knees, twitching on strained ligaments. He adds his own wheezy gasp to that of the woman, then launches toward her to help her with the bald man.
Rachel arrives in time to shove the old man into the wall, deflecting him from the woman, and his limbs flail in surprise, grasping for handhold. The thing’s head swivels around on its neck to glare at Rachel, but she doesn’t allow herself to recoil at the upside-down, gasping face. Keeping as far as possible from the dangerous head, she throws herself at the thing’s scissoring legs, grabbing at them and finally latching on. He tries to lunge at her, but the limits of the old man’s atrophied muscles get the best of the thing, and Rachel uses her advantage to heave the man down the stairs, away from her. He rolls down the stairs on his back, his gown winding around him, revealing most of the old man’s gray, naked body.
“Help!” Rachel calls to anyone who will listen, not sure how to deal with the predicament of the bald man, who is now fully in the clutches of the woman-thing, its arms twisted almost comically backwards around the large man’s torso. The woman’s head is bent severely backward on the neck, pressed hard against the bald man’s chest, the dead eyes facing the ceiling. The man has gone silent, his eyes full of shock.
Bonnie and Alan are suddenly at Rachel’s side, their eyes wide but their hands empty. Rachel grits her teeth, knowing she needs something to cover these bodies, something with which to smother the things in their heads.
“Grab her!” she yells.
“How?!” Bonnie cries back, confused.
“Just get her off him! Watch the head! Alan, take care of that—” She gestures to the old man. “Get the rest of them to help you! Smother it!”
Rachel lunges forward to yank at the woman-corpse’s shoulder, and the response is instant: The thing darts at her with its head, using its inner radiation as a weapon. Rachel flinches backward, studying it. The movement reminds Rachel of a scorpion lunging with its stinger, but the limitations of the corpse’s body hobble whatever intelligence is inside. It keeps trying to lunge, but the woman’s anatomy and musculature won’t let it complete the movement—won’t let it fully attack.
Rachel grabs instead for one of its locked elbows, and Bonnie does the same on the other side. Rachel notices with strong distaste that the flesh is almost gelatinous, and her grip seems to sink down to bone. The corpse is shrieking its guttural gasps at them, back and forth, as they pry its backward-bent arms off the bald man. And they do come loose, finally, and the thing drops back to the floor. Simultaneously, the bald man slumps down the wall, drained of color. Rachel sees the same yellow bruising she saw on Jenny’s chest, from the man’s chin down his neck.
The woman-corpse is scrambling back to its oddly horrifying spider stance, and Rachel kicks at it, tripping it up. It gasps at her hatefully.
To her right, Kevin steps forward wielding one of the plastic chairs that had been on the perimeter of the room. Reminding Rachel of a lion tamer, of all things, Kevin jerks the chair forward with both his meaty hands, and now the corpse is scrambling backward, nearly perching atop the bald man’s body, as if triumphantly over its prey. Kevin jabs the chair forward, catching the woman-corpse with a metal leg in its inverted face. It scowls, and Kevin jabs again, the end of the leg lodging in the left eye socket. The corpse shakes its head furiously, jittering the chair in Kevin’s grip and stirring its own eye to jelly. He shoves forward, and the woman-thing shrieks, it head now irrevocably caught. K
evin keeps pushing as the corpse screeches at him, its limbs flailing.
At the sight and sound of this monstrosity, Rachel trips backward onto the floor.
On the other side of the room, a trio of people including Alan has descended on the old man. Alan has managed to gather clothing from somewhere, but he’s standing back in favor of a businessman in a rumpled suit who has grabbed the IV pole. The man is repeatedly stabbing the old man’s corpse in the midsection, eliciting another gasping screech. The image is that of a giant spider pinned to a board. Rachel hears the businessman yelling, “Now!” and Alan descends on the corpse’s head, the cloth wadded at the face. The glow snaps out with an electric crack, and Rachel turns back to the woman-corpse.
It has freed itself from Kevin’s chair leg and is back on its hands and feet—a chaos of energy and anger. It seems about to lunge again when a terrific blast deafens Rachel. She flattens herself to the ground, hands flying to hear ears. Joel stands ten feet away, some kind of tactical shotgun cradled in his arms, its black barrels smoking.
Chapter 14
The boom of the shotgun reverberates across the waiting room and dies away, and Rachel registers two things: the almost painfully welcome sight of Joel walking briskly across the room, navigating the mess of overturned tables and chairs, and then the ominous rustling of movement coming from the second floor, right above them. One by one, still breathing raggedly, the people assembled in the lobby begin staring up at the ceiling, beyond which they all hear the sounds of unspeakable things dragging and stumbling.
“They’re coming down,” Rachel manages, pushing against a crushing weight of helplessness.
“You should see what I saw outside.”
When Joel approaches Rachel, she sees that he has been spattered with blood, and it appears that he has dipped his entire right arm into a bucket of gore. The sleeve of his uniform is caked and stiffening. Rachel does her best to ignore these details. Instead, she tries hard to focus on what he’s carrying. He has armed himself with two rifles, both slung over his shoulder, in addition to the shotgun he just fired, which is gripped tightly in his fist. He’s also wearing two pistols at his hips. He looks like something out of a movie.
She’s dimly aware of the people at her periphery, coming out of their own stunned silence. Scott, whom she didn’t even notice during the fight, lifts himself from a crouched position next to the old man’s corpse, looking on the verge of tears or rage. He staggers a bit, grasping for balance against the wall, and she half-sees that he has been splashed with blood from the old-man corpse, which is sprawled across the floor, grizzled and dead. Alan, himself painted with gore, is wide-eyed in some kind of daze.
Rachel herself can’t do much more than stand there fidgeting. She feels an inadvertent twitch in her chin.
The blood is everywhere.
Blood.
Joel reaches her and extends a hand. She takes it, and he pulls her up effortlessly. “You all right?”
“I think so.”
“Hey hey HEY!” comes a loud voice to her right. It’s Scott, and he’s pointing at the woman-corpse that Joel shot. Its twitching movements are becoming more pronounced, and its limbs are beginning again to grab at the matted low-pile carpet, slathering its own blood across the floor in wide swaths. “Christ!” he cries. “They won’t fucking die!”
Joel raises the shotgun again and pulls the trigger. Rachel flinches at the blast. As it echoes away, some kind of braying noise comes from the corpse’s mouth, a hoarse, desperate sound that doesn’t even seem close to human. Reluctantly opening her eyes, she sees a black hole in the thing’s chest, right at the heart, but impossibly the corpse is still flailing around.
“The head! Aim for the head!” she calls.
Joel does so, and a ragged, bloody hole explodes at the thing’s jaw. Rachel also sees a distinct burst of red light, quickly extinguished, like a light bulb receiving a strong pulse of wattage and popping out. And the body falls to the floor in a heap, bleeding out.
“Force of habit,” Joel breathes.
“What the fuck, man!” Scott yells now. He steps away from the still stunned assemblage and approaches the blown-apart corpse. “They’re people! What’s happening to them? They were—”
Joel points the shotgun down and away, switches it to his left hand, then steps forward to meet Scott. His right fist comes out of nowhere in a shocking hook, and the impact sends Scott stumbling backward, slipping on the tile and crashing flat onto his back.
“That’s for the generator, dickhead.”
Scott clutches the side of his face in angry surprise, glaring at Joel, but he doesn’t say anything. He works his jaw, slowly getting back to his feet.
“Now, I want everybody to calm down!” Joel says to the room. “We won’t survive this thing if we panic.”
“Fuck you, cop!” Scott sneers.
“Take it easy!” Joel says, voice raised, eyes focused and stern, aimed at Scott. “Believe it or not, we’re all on the same side.” He shakes out his right hand, then uses it to point toward the front entrance, where Rachel can see the fender of his cruiser. “If what I saw outside is any indication, every one of the bodies in this hospital is now dangerous. They’re not just flopping around anymore. They’re mobile. And it isn’t only a few of them scrambling around—it’s all of them.”
“Where should we go?” Bonnie says desperately.
“That’s the thing—there’s really no better option out there. There’s the college, but they haven’t got any supplies, nothing like here. So I’m not sure we should leave.” He waits for objections, but none come. “Like you said before, this place is the ultimate first-aid kit, and it’s got power.” He glances contemptuously at Scott, who’s backing against the wall. “You can’t say the same about any other place out there. These things, these corpses—they aren’t too smart. They’re like animals. But they are getting better at moving around—so my vote is to hunker down. Barricade this place.”
“How?” Rachel asks.
“We get this stairway crammed up with furniture and boxes and whatever else we can get our hands on. These fucking things, whatever the hell they are, want to get down here for whatever reason. We can still hold ’em off until we have some answers.”
“Answers?”
“Yes, answers.” Joel opens his shotgun and reloads it with cartridges from his breast pocket. “I can kill these things just fine with this weapon and the ones I’ve gathered in the cruiser, but I’ve only got so much ammo. Rachel here came up with another answer earlier, a messy answer, sure, but it worked.” He finishes reloading then gestures to Scott, who is standing again. “Scott’s right, we need to know what’s happening with these bodies. We need to understand it. Does anyone else have any ideas they want to share?”
That question is greeted by a short, heavy silence; things continue to bump and rumble above their heads, and many of the people in the waiting room have turned to look at Rachel. It’s an instant, unconscious thing: They believe her to be the authority on this phenomenon. Yes, her, 19-year-old Rachel.
She knows she somehow managed to take charge the moment these things started down the stairs, and yes, she knows she figured out how to smother these bodies, but as for answers? Real answers? Absurdly, she doesn’t think she can remember how to open her mouth and respond.
Blood.
She tries giving the word her voice, and it comes out pitifully weak.
“Blood.”
Just a whisper.
Joel seems to hear her, and he looks at her sympathetically, like a child. So it’s annoyance that breaks Rachel from her brief paralysis.
“It’s blood,” she says more loudly, more firmly.
“What?” Joel is moving toward the staircase, peering up it warily. “What do you mean?”
Rachel turns back toward Alan, sees him standing next to Bonnie. He looks frail, but when their eyes meet, he seems to stand straighter, taller. He nods at her. And Rachel feels something swell in her.
It’s one of those heightened-reality moments when everything seems stark and clear.
“I think she’s right,” Alan says.
Joel, armed and bloodied, sweat-stained face under his military-cut brown hair, eyes ablaze and ready, says, “What the hell does that mean?”
“What’s your blood type?” Rachel asks, directing the question at Joel but addressing the room.
“O-negative,” Joel calls, wincing at a clatter from beyond the stairwell.
There are murmurs of agreement coming from the small crowd. Rachel looks at each one of the remaining survivors. And all voices are silent, amplifying the rustling bumps coming from above. Bonnie, exhausted and glassy-eyed, is slumped next to Alan against a drinking fountain. She’s taking it in, processing this new information. And Scott, off to the right next to a plastic tree, his expression a mix of confusion and fury, is chewing the insides of his cheeks. His hands furrow through his mop of hair, his gaze ratcheting up that ominous stairwell. At that moment, Rachel guesses that he’s an addict of some kind. It would certainly explain the morphine.
The four others in the room also seem to be processing her words. Kevin off to her right, standing next to a petite blond-haired young woman in pajamas and bare feet; a middle-aged housewife type; and finally, the businessman in unkempt attire. Greg, the young man who accompanied Scott to the roof, is nowhere to be seen. He probably took off into the night, like most everyone else.
Minutes ago, it occurred to Rachel that she would probably be spending the final moments of her life with these people. The flashing thought had shocked her into self-defensive action. Now, even in the midst of this carnage and impending violence, a weird flame of hope is sparking through the room, and she has a very different concept of the humans around her. Together, with this knowledge, they might survive a bit longer.
“Okay, so what does that mean?” shouts Joel. “What can we do with that?”
She can see Scott looking down, thinking. “That could mean anything,” he says. “This group is tiny.”
Blood Red Page 18
