Rachel says, “I’m guessing the same is true of everyone who’s still alive.”
“You’re guessing,” Scott spits.
Alan pushes away from the wall, tries to string a sentence together in spite of the chaos coming from above. “There must be a reason why our blood, our bodies, won’t work for whatever has happened to everyone else.”
“You’re saying that—” Joel says, but Alan cuts him off.
“Maybe whatever is inhabiting these bodies ... maybe they don’t like our blood,” Alan says. “O-negative blood.”
“So maybe our blood can hurt them,” Rachel finishes.
Scott snorts. “That’s a big fucking leap! Just because these things might not like the taste of our blood doesn’t mean this is an answer! Besides, O-negative is the universal donor, that’s what’s unique about it, it gets along with all the other blood. Didn’t all you O-negative types learn that in school?” He’s looking right at Rachel. “If there’s one blood type these things shouldn’t object to, it’s the universal donor. That’s basic.”
“What’s your blood type, Scott?” Rachel asks pointedly.
“Oh, fuck off.”
“Don’t you think that’s a little more than a coincidence? That all of us here have the rarest blood type?” She points in the direction of the double doors beyond the admissions area. “Including my dad?”
“I’m O-negative, too” says the thin young woman across from Rachel. There’s an urgency in her face. She clearly wants this to mean something. “I remember when I was little, when my doctor told me how unusual it was—how rare it was.”
Rachel’s heart is thudding. Thoughts are careening too quickly around her skull. She has a similar memory, except it was her mom who told her. “Same here,” she says, letting the memory play itself out even further. She remembers her family joking that she and her father had the special blood type, but that her mother did not.
What’s the significance?
“How rare is it?” Joel asks, taking a few steps up the stairwell and glancing up into the second-floor hallways. “Do you remember? Like, percentage of the population?”
“I don’t remember,” Rachel says, “but it was small.”
“It’s something like five or six percent,” Kevin says. “Which would make sense, right? Considering how many other survivors we’ve seen?”
“Good lord,” Bonnie says, one hand at her brow. Even from across the room, Rachel sees that the hand is shaking almost uncontrollably. “So, you’re saying ninety-five percent of …” She can’t seem to finish the thought.
“It’s been so long since I really thought about my blood type,” Rachel says. “My dad read me an article or something about it when I was fourteen or fifteen. I think he brought a brochure home from the hospital after donating. What was it he said?” She searches her memory, squinting.
“O-negatives are natural leaders,” Alan says, almost at a whisper. The edge of his mouth twitches up a bit, and he glances at Rachel.
“Oh for Christ’s sake,” Scott says, pacing the length of the far wall. “I gotta get out of here.”
This conversation is met with another charged moment of relative silence. Then the room is shocked back to the present, as Joel breaks the sudden tension. “Okay, let’s get on it, then,” he says, coming back down the stairs two at a time. “Anyone here know where we might put our hands on some O-negative blood, by any chance?”
Bonnie says, “Well, I know—”
“Good, how ’bout you three figure out a way to work that to our advantage?” He gestures to Rachel, Bonnie, and Alan. “Because now that we’re all keeping our heads—” Significant glance at Scott. “—we need to block these stairs now. They’re not gonna waste much time up there.”
Even before he’s finished talking, there’s another clatter at the stairwell, closer now, along with a chuffing gasp.
“There’s another one coming down!” cries Scott superfluously.
The petite young woman in the corner screams, her hands flying to her face, shaking uncontrollably. It’s the scream that startles Rachel more than whatever is coming down the stairs. This girl has finally reached her breaking point. She appears to have been crying for hours, her whole face enflamed but particularly around the eyes.
“You!” Joel yells, pointing at her, stunning her from her fear. “What’s your name?”
The young woman stares at him, hollowed out. “C-Chrissy,” she says in a small, uncertain voice.
“Well, Chrissy, and all the rest of you, get the fuck in gear!” Joel gestures toward the small group beyond the old-man corpse. “You want to live, right?”
Even as he speaks, a reluctantly rejuvenated Chrissy and Kevin have together grabbed the largest piece of furniture in the room—a solid row of four plastic chairs—and are carrying it to the stairs, casting wary glances up toward the second floor. The housewife and the businessman have launched themselves toward another set of chairs.
“I’ve blocked the entrance with my cruiser,” Joel says, “but we need to block every other door in this place. Windows would be the next priority. I think we’ll be in pretty good shape, as long as we’re barricaded. Our most pressing problem is keeping them—” Joel gestures to the ceiling, “—up there. I mean, there are three floors of those things about ready to flood this place. Outside, everything is open, but in here there’s only one direction for them to go, and that’s down.”
Scott is pacing in front of a drinking fountain, looking on the verge of either sprinting away or helping. “Why don’t you just shoot the fucking things?” He brings up his thumb and starts gnawing at the nail, then spits at the ground. “I mean, you’re armed like a fucking cartoon.”
“Dude, if it’s these four or five weapons against the world, we’re in deep shit, so we gotta figure out another way.” There’s a loud clatter at the stairs. Joel leaps again toward the stairwell, casting a glance back at Rachel. “You hear me? Get to work on the blood thing.”
Before Joel is even halfway to the stairs, chaos erupts again. Rachel has been backing away, toward Bonnie and Alan, but she freezes, watching Joel flinch at what he sees. And then Rachel sees. The room is suddenly filled with shouts and screams.
Three or four corpses are angling down the broad stairs, all knees and elbows, their movements quick and already more fluid and sure than before. For the first time, their appearance looks completely alien to Rachel; they look clearly other. Repulsed, she can only stare. A male corpse leads the pack, jaw upside down and unhinged, clacking and hissing gutturally. He appears to have been a doctor. His sky-blue button-down shirt is torn at the shoulders to permit the awkward spider-like movements.
There’s a sudden boom, Joel having decided to dispatch this one with his weapon. The man-corpse deflates briefly against the wall, crippled, his right arm blown apart. He’s spitting and hissing in anger, trying to reestablish some kind of balance and locomotion. The barrel of Joel’s shotgun bucks again, booming, and this time, the head explodes like a melon, its inner light extinguishing like a blown flame. The body collapses, partially blocking the path for the other corpses. There are three left. One is a little girl in a dainty dress, and Rachel feels something tug at her heart, a flash of little Sarah. There’s also a grizzled black man, old and slow, crippled somehow, dragging cords and tubing with him.
And then Rachel’s breath catches.
The final corpse is a naked pregnant woman, her belly hideously distended, her heavy thighs splayed wide around the bloody, crowned head of her dead, half-born child. The stunted baby’s head is purple, almost black, veined and dry and caked with mucus. Rachel catches only a glimpse of it as the woman corpse spins and scrabbles itself down the stairs behind the little-girl thing.
“Dear God!” Bonnie cries from behind her.
Her words turn to a breathless scream when the little girl launches herself over the barricade into the middle of the room, still upside down, landing deftly in the center of everything, staring ab
out, her little mouth open obscenely, her small voice hissing, black tongue waggling. Joel ratchets backward to face it, fumbling with the shotgun to reload.
“Scott!” he yells. “Scott!”
“What!?” Scott is rooted to the far wall.
“Take care of it! Smother it!”
“I’m not getting near that fucking thing!”
The little-girl corpse growls and leaps again—straight at Rachel. Helpless against instinct, Rachel hears herself scream. She throws up her arms to ward off the thing. She feels the impact of the girl on her left side, a dense weight, and it half-spins her, enough to watch the small corpse skitter away from her, beyond her, toward the double front doors. It moves madly across the tiled floor there, searching for the exit, and beneath its weight, the doors slide sluggishly open and it maneuvers its way through them, squeezes past the cruiser, and is gone. Rachel is left with the after-image of its gasping, barking, upside-down mouth, and the searching, peeled-wide eyes beneath it.
There are screams at the stairwell, and Rachel turns to see that all attention is on the pregnant thing.
Scott is screaming, “JESUS FUCK—JESUS FUCK!”
The old-man corpse seems to have caught itself on something on the stairwell—the tubing is stretched taut, holding it back. But the pregnant thing is near the bottom, stepping heavily, its hideous belly mountainous above it. Its breasts hang to the sides of the chest, deflated. The thing’s eyes are watching them warily, flicking from person to person, its mouth open impossibly wide, emitting that same groany hiss.
Joel has loaded the shotgun and is aiming it in the thing’s general direction. His face is in turmoil. “I—I can’t—”
“Kill it!” Rachel yells. “Just kill it!”
The barrel of the shotgun is wobbling, and the corpse is now watching Joel most closely, and it is with a dark amazement that Rachel realizes there’s an intelligence behind those blackened eyes. There’s an awareness that Joel is its greatest threat.
It spiders its way down the rest of the stairs, swollen and awful. Its mouth seems to take up its entire face, the eyes an afterthought beneath and under it. Rachel can see silver fillings in the thing’s lower jaw, gleaming in the strange luminescence glowing from the throat. The woman-thing turns in a half-circle, like a cornered animal, and Rachel glimpses the purple, crowned head of the stillborn infant again. It has pushed out a little more from its mother’s birth canal, the newly exposed flesh slick and shiny with blood. Rachel feels her gorge rise inside the depths of her panic.
Abruptly the shotgun finally fires, and there’s splatter everywhere. The corpse falls to its back, its glow extinguished.
And it’s not finished. In the silence that drops on the room, amidst the gasping breath of the survivors, there’s a sound of wet struggle. The group can merely watch as the purple baby twists with impossible musculature out of its dead mother’s birth canal, coming clear of that dark maw already alien—on its back, its weak pudgy arms attempting to find purchase on the floor but only slipping and failing. The slick umbilical cord slithers around it like a slack leash. There’s an unmistakable red luminescence radiating from its little mouth and nostrils.
“No!” Bonnie sounds from the edge of the room, a plaintive cry with an echo that Rachel feels in her soul.
The baby-thing mewls horribly, its eyes attempting to blink away the bloody mucus of its birth. It looks pitiful and nearly helpless, twisting and straining on its back, but it also looks inconceivably dangerous.
Scott whispers, “You gotta be fucking kidding!”
“We’re in trouble,” Joel breathes.
He carefully aims the shotgun at the abomination, and in a moment the thing is extinguished, smeared and gone. Then he looks back at Rachel.
“I hope you’re onto something, girl,” he says, reloading again.
Rachel, weakened to the point of near collapse, glances back at Alan and Bonnie.
Bonnie is crying copiously but manages, “My friend was a phlebotomist here at the hospital. I know where the blood bank is. It’s a—it’s a start.”
At that moment, a brilliant light flashes through the windows, a staccato strobe resembling lightning but tinged with red. The illumination seems to go on for a full minute, and the occupants of the waiting room hold their collective breath, shielding their eyes. The light fades out, and Rachel peers around warily at her fellow survivors, who are stunned silent. And almost immediately, a great roar seems to emanate from the earth itself, nearly shattering the windows, causing everyone to slap their hands to their ears. It’s an enormous, otherworldly sound, at once haunting and incomprehensible. It fades out gradually, like the most insane thunder Rachel has ever heard
“What the fuck?” Scott asks the room.
In the stunned silence that follows, Rachel notices that the stumbling and staggering above her stopped the moment the red light flashed, at least momentarily. And now the movement begins again, hesitantly, as if the corpses reacted to the sound in a significant way.
Rachel catches a glimpse of the clock above the admissions desk. It is 5:14 a.m., and in the wake of the atmospheric light, it’s clear that the sun is rising. The survivors are spread out across the admissions area, caught in a moment of bewildered indecision. It has been only 24 hours since she woke to find the world utterly changed, and Rachel knows with yawing horror that the world isn’t even done changing.
Chapter 15
“You hear that?”
“You mean that sound like the end of the fucking world?” Scott asks from against the wall. He’s still plastered there, wanting to get as far away as possible from the horror show that took place at the foot of the stairs.
Joel ignores him. “Those things up there stopped moving for a second. Like it was some kind of communication.”
“Exactly what I thought,” Alan says.
Chrissy lets out a small sound.
There’s a large double window on the south side of the room that looks out on the small parking area, and even now Rachel perceives a red tint throbbing there. She heads in that direction warily, peering out into the darkness. There’s no sign of the girl-thing that leaped past her. All she sees is the darkened concrete of the parking lot, and the shadowy hulks of abandoned cars and ambulances. In their windows, she catches a fading reflection of a deeper red in the pre-dawn sky, something to the north of the building. She cranes her neck to see as much of the sky as possible, and she can see tremors of red fading out.
“Is this—is this something—alien?” she says into the window. “Something from … from outer space?”
Joel is reloading his shotgun. He stops and looks up. “There’s some kind of atmospheric thing happening for sure. I saw it outside, too. And in fact I noticed it when everything first happened. Didn’t everyone else? There was something about the air, like an electric charge or something. But different. Something definitely weird, almost an electromagnetic feel to it.”
“I noticed that, too,” Kevin says.
“So, do all you law-enforcement types take side jobs as scientists?” Scott says. “Is that it?”
Joel gives Scott a level gaze. “Yeah, that’s what it is, Scott. I also might have the expertise you need to handle your withdrawal symptoms, but you haven’t asked nicely yet.”
The remark surprises Rachel. Apparently Joel noticed the same symptoms she had noticed in Scott, or maybe he’d arrived at his conclusion after Alan’s morphine revelation. And then she realizes that as a policeman he’s probably trained to make such deductions.
“I don’t need this shit.” Scott is pacing again. “I don’t even know why I’m here anymore. I had this hospital under control until that girl showed up, you know that?” He’s addressing the whole room now but is glaring at Rachel. “This fucking teenager sees a bunch of people acting weird and assumes they’re aliens. This whole situation has become a National Enquirer article.”
“We’re just trying to survive, man,” Joel says. “You haven’t said o
ne constructive word since I came in here.”
“Yeah, maybe my jaw hurts too much.” He glances around. “You’re all witnesses to that, you know. That’s brutality.”
“You’re playing by the old rules,” Joel says. “I think that’s your problem—you don’t realize that everything has changed.”
“I think it’s called denial,” Kevin says.
Scott looks over at Kevin, annoyed. “Who the fuck are you?”
“All right, that’s enough,” Joel says. “We have more important things to do than snap at each other.”
A heavy, dragging clatter sounds from upstairs, both punctuating and interrupting Joel’s words. On instinct, Rachel ducks her head, glancing up at the ceiling. In her peripheral vision she catches a glimpse of a scurrying body outside the window—an older man, his limbs crooked and impossibly mobile—and she flinches away. She finds that Alan and Kevin have crept up beside her. They’re staring out there, too, silent. Their presence emboldens her, and she peers out again. There are actually three bodies spidering their way across the concrete, between the cars, all heading toward Lemay. They’re weaving and stumbling, awkward on inverted limbs. Their jittery upside-down locomotion almost makes them look like they’re nervously hovering.
“Jesus,” Kevin says in a deep baritone. “That ain’t right.”
“Look over there,” Alan breathes, gesturing.
“What?” Rachel says, squinting.
“There—on the far side of the lot. You can barely see it. In the grass.”
Rachel strains her eyes and finally sees it. One of the animated corpses, a heavy woman, has attached itself to a Blue Spruce pine tree on the far side of the parking lot. The thing is moving in weird undulations, as if attempting to climb the tree but not having nearly the strength.
“What’s it doing?” Rachel asks, feeling the hair on the back of her neck stand on end.
There’s another rattle above their heads, and innumerable distant scuffles, and the three of them glance up. Rachel notices that Joel is right behind her now.
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