“Yeah, yeah, I saw that outside, too. A couple of those damn things. At first I thought they were trying to hide under a tree, but this—it’s like—I don’t know—it’s looking for something?”
“I can’t see it clear enough,” Rachel says. She sees vague, shivery movement under the dark needles of the pine, the contorted limbs jerking, the intermittent twitch of red light at the tweaked-back head.
“There’s some kind of … purpose … to them, I think,” she finds herself saying.
“They’re already more mobile than when I was out there,” Joel breathes. “They seem to be wandering in the same general direc—there’s another one!”
A flash of movement near the window makes them hold their collective breath, but the thing scuttles by quickly, a small corpse that Rachel recognizes instantly. She sees the little tense face, the long brown hair hanging down to the ground, the scalp still holding one dangling pink barrette. And the luminescence, a faint strobe from behind the moving tongue.
“It’s that little girl,” Rachel says, “from upstairs. She—I thought she was attacking me, but she jumped right past and—and she left, like she didn’t see me.”
Or even care about me, she thinks. This thought flutters through her consciousness and is gone.
The girl-corpse moves crablike toward the front of the hospital, angling around the concrete pillars of the front entrance, down the grassy knoll, and gone into the red dawn.
“Aw Jesus, man,” comes Kevin’s thick voice next to her. “What now?” He turns away, not wanting to see anymore, and then Rachel hears his quick intake of breath.
Above the makeshift barricade of chairs and angled furniture, a dead old woman is poised like a gray, spindly arachnid, staring at them. Her steely eyes, below a dry, toothless mouth, dart between them with an intelligence that Rachel hasn’t yet seen. The thing crouches there on its hyperextended limbs, quiet behind the metal and plastic.
There’s noise coming from beyond the old woman, and Rachel swallows, glancing behind her at Joel, who is wiping sweat from his brow. She catches a nervous glare in his eyes, and as their eyes meet, he strides purposefully to her.
His voice is a hot whisper. “I got this. Get to the blood bank, figure something out.”
She turns immediately to Bonnie and Alan. “Let’s go.”
The waiting room is suddenly in motion again, and as Rachel moves, she watches the old woman at the barricade. The corpse seems to be staring at her, and she shivers, looking away. She sees Chrissy at the far side give her a look of weary fear. She looks absolutely helpless in her pajamas and bare feet. After giving Bonnie and Alan a look, then another glance toward the stationary old woman on the stairs, Rachel rushes over to Chrissy.
“Hey.”
Chrissy clutches at Rachel’s forearm. “I can’t—”
“Yes you can.”
Chrissy looks at her with her tear-reddened eyes. “I lost my whole family.”
The young woman glances down toward the floor, but Rachel encourages her chin back up. “We don’t want to lose you too.”
Chrissy sniffs, gives a brief, fearful glance to the stairwell. “I don’t think I can do this.”
“Yes you can!” Rachel gives the girl a quick, strong embrace, feeling like some great protector, all the while realizing that Chrissy is probably older than she is. “Now get over there and help them.”
“Okay.”
Rachel rushes toward Alan and Bonnie, taking the older woman’s hand, and as they cross the tiled portion of the floor toward the doors that lead into the hospital’s inner recesses, she hears Joel and Scott arguing at the stairwell. She glances back at them to see them wrestling with a large piece of desk furniture while the rest of the group is angling some kind of file cabinet over there.
“Get it up! Get it up there!” Joel is shouting. “Don’t let that thing near you.”
Rachel hurries into the hallway behind Bonnie and Alan. She enters into a kind of tunnel vision, not daring to glance to the left or right, where the smothered corpses lay one after another in an ordered charnel house. She knows it’s because of her that these corpses are truly dead, because of her that they retain no further semblance of life. The memories of smothering them fly back at her, like sharp pieces of glass cutting at her. She feels a profound uneasiness, but deep down, she knows the decision to blot out their light was right. Still, she can’t look at them.
She does, however, glance at the room holding her father as they pass. She feels a longing to open the door and go to him, to dive into unconsciousness with him. The longing is so great that her arm actually reaches out toward the door, and a sigh escapes her throat. Then she’s whisked past and running again with the group.
“The blood bank is down here to the right,” Bonnie says breathlessly. “There’s a security door, but it’s open. I happened to notice earlier when I was thinking it might be handy. Before everything went to hell.”
Bonnie leads them through two sets of doors into a small room containing three upright refrigeration units. They’re not labeled; just anonymous looking with their tan veneer. Bonnie pulls open a door to reveal a series of drawers containing many units of blood. The blood type is stamped in a large letter at the top left of each packet. Rachel’s eyes search frantically left to right, up and down, seeing only a great deal of useless A and B types.
“I’m not really sure how this works …” Bonnie says, bending to scan all the drawers, her practiced hand flitting among the packets. “Rachel, would you—” She gestures to the next refrigerator.
Rachel opens the doors and immediately sees two drawers filled with O-type blood.
“Here,” she says.
Bonnie joins Rachel. But as she does so, Rachel sees that every O packet also bears the words Rh Positive beneath the large O.
“There it is,” says Alan behind them. “Bottom drawers.”
The two women glance down to see at least fifty O-negative units, standing in order, receding into the depths of the long refrigerated drawers.
“Okay, so we have it, now what do we do with it?” Bonnie asks the room. There’s a quaver to her voice.
Alan says, “We…do we inject it …?”
“I don’t think we can’t get close enough for that anymore,” Rachel says.
“Some kind of dart? A tranquilizer dart? Something that would inject it from a distance?” Bonnie asks.
“Joel might know something.”
“I think at this point, we just need to see what effect it has,” Alan says. “I say we start by splashing it on them.”
Rachel and Bonnie are nodding.
It’s clear that several sources of commotion surround them. They can hear the clank of metal and plastic coming from the front of the hospital, as well as raised voices there. Above them, there are the bumps and thumps of reanimated bodies, and there’s even some kind of clang and rattle coming from farther down the dim hallway. At these sounds, Rachel feels a shiver down her spine.
“So we test it,” Rachel says quietly.
She grabs a pint of the O-negative blood, feels the heft of it. She closes her eyes for a moment, hearing the continuous shuffle above her, thinking of everything that has happened over the past day in a kind of blur. Her eyes seem to grit together in exhaustion as she whispers her own version of a prayer—a prayer to her father, a prayer to the Earth, a prayer to herself to find the strength to make this work. To please make this work.
She opens her eyes.
“Let’s go.”
The three of them rush back out through the dim hall, lights flickering a silvered red. It’s a haunting scene, made terrible by the clattering racket coming from above them. Rachel feels like she might drop to the slick floor at any moment. She’s filled with fear and weariness and now, she realizes, a terrible thirst.
She needs to stop, to pause for a moment.
And then they’re rushing past her father’s door again.
“Wait!” she cries. “Stop, please.
”
Her two older companions seem grateful to stop, Alan planting his hands on his knees to catch his breath. He appears strong but also old, his skin thin as tissue paper and pale at his shiny temples. His gray hair is brittle and wild. Bonnie stares at Rachel, a perpetual look of shock on her face now.
“I need to see him,” she says to both of them, and Bonnie softens and nods.
Alan, still bent over, peers up at Rachel with pained eyes that nevertheless show understanding. He straightens and takes her hand in his own callused but also soft one. Then he lets go and braces himself on the edge of the gurney next to the door.
Rachel turns and grasps the door handle, taking a moment to catch her own breath.
She opens the door.
For a split second, Rachel’s mind can’t comprehend what her eyes are seeing. Her breath halts, and her brain freezes right along with it. It’s the eyes that break her from her momentary paralysis. The eyes staring at her, staring into her. The eyes that remind her of the woman-corpse they saw behind the barrier at the stairs.
The corpse hanging upside down from the ceiling is that of an athletic woman, its nurse’s uniform torn open at the shoulders and hips and chest. The cloth hangs off of the body nearly in rags, revealing taut flesh and white undergarments. The thing’s long blond ponytail dangles toward her dad’s face like a stinger. The image is so impossibly insect-like that even after breaking from her paralysis, Rachel can only stare at it, bewildered.
The corpse is hanging precariously from two thick metal supports. Three or four other flimsier slats are broken and twisted, not strong enough to support the body, splayed out in severe angles. Several of the large ceiling tiles have been knocked down to the floor—eight or nine of them lay broken and angled there. Beyond the corpse’s white-knuckled clench of the metal supports, in the dark depths of the attic, there’s another luminescence, another corpse on its way. Rachel hears a clipped gasp and an abrupt clack.
Her eyes find her father—who seems untouched—and that feeling of protection surges through her again. She feels heat flush through her face, and she gains her feet to rush at this horrible thing.
The nurse-corpse seems to register Rachel’s sudden resolve and emits a sound from out of its throat, a deep, phlegmy emanation. Beneath the mouth, the eyes flash.
And then Rachel is leaping at the corpse, tearing at it, pulling it from the ceiling. The thing screams at her, an animal wail, and glares at her, gripping the metal above it as Rachel yanks at its limbs and clothing. The room is filled with hoarse screaming now, and Rachel only half-realizes that one of the ragged voices is her own. The nurse-corpse’s limbs begin to flail, letting go of the stronger supports and attempting to grab the weaker slats, and in a rush the body falls beneath Rachel to the floor. It’s suddenly a flurry of scraping limbs beneath her as she repeatedly pounds at the upturned face with her right fist. The woman was obviously athletic, though, and thrashes around with animal power.
And then Rachel feels an unnatural draining of her own strength, an abrupt weakening of her musculature and her will, and she flashes back to the moment she shoved her hand into the path of the luminescence emanating from Susanna’s mouth yesterday. The memory makes her peel herself away from the body shuddering beneath her, and she’s helped by the hands of Alan and Bonnie behind her. Even as she’s wrenched away from the flailing thing, she feels a lingering numbness at her left shoulder, which got closest to the thing’s mouth.
It takes a moment for Rachel to realize that her two companions are screaming at her.
“The blood!”
The unit of O-negative blood is still in Rachel’s left hand. She has only a moment to come to that understanding before the nurse-corpse gains its crablike footing and charges her. The raging inverted face comes at her, its mouth all teeth and strained, poking tongue. Not knowing what else to do in the split second she has, she lets the corpse come at her and thrusts the pint bag of blood directly into the thing’s maw, cramming it in, letting the teeth break the soft plastic. Quickly, she withdraws her hand, again feeling a withering numbness in her fingers. She watches the corpse’s face while attempting to shake some sensation back into her hand. Bonnie and Alan, cradling her, watch with her.
The thing pauses in its urgency, considering something. Its jaws work, obscenely unhinged, and the blood pours out in rivulets down to the upturned nose, into the nostrils, coursing down to the eyes and instigating a fit of mad, exaggerated blinking. It shakes its head vigorously, reminding Rachel of a dog, and blood flies everywhere, misting the room. Then the thing’s limbs clench, rigid. In the depths of its stretched-open mouth, its red luminescence starts popping and dimming. It’s like an organic sparking, and Rachel thinks she can hear a flat clicking coming from behind the upper palate.
Her curiosity seems suddenly morbid to her. The thing is writhing directly in front of her, not three feet away from her. She, Bonnie, and Alan are helpless to watch the effect of the blood on this completely impossible thing.
It convulses and coughs, and suddenly it’s leaping directly at Rachel again desperately. Rachel pushes back against Bonnie and Alan, who both fall backward to the floor. Using their bodies to anchor herself, she brings up her arms to ward off the lethal head of the nurse-corpse, but it’s not interested in her. It scrambles screaming over all three of them, its twisted limbs buffeting them. And then it’s over and past them, careening into the hallway, making a terrible screeching racket. It crashes into a gurney on the opposite wall, which buckles and dumps its cargo—a dead middle-aged woman—directly atop it. The nurse-corpse shrugs off the deadweight, and shakes its head, blood still flying from its mouth. It jitters its head in spastic motions.
“Back, back!” Bonnie is screaming into her ear.
The nurse-corpse isn’t even looking at them. It takes off toward the front of the hospital, its limbs skittering and sliding. Rachel flings herself forward, watching the thing exit the doorway and angle around the admissions desk. She leaps to her feet and follows.
“Watch out!” she calls hoarsely, out of breath. “Joel! There’s one coming your way!”
She skids to a stop at the doorway, watching the corpse navigate an awkward, slipping circle on the tile in front of the desk. The thing appears to be in a state of wild, dead-eyed confusion. Joel approaches quickly and cautiously from the left, but Rachel can’t take her eyes off the nurse-corpse. Its face is a mask of outsized pain, anger and apparent fear. Rachel is catching jitter-glimpses of the red luminescence behind its teeth; it seems to be flickering. The corpse’s scream is a prolonged wet gasp, and its body seems to be attempting to flip and twist.
The boom of the shotgun shocks Rachel. The nurse-corpse immediately collapses, its voice dying away in a wheeze.
Joel gives Rachel a nod. “Thanks for the heads-up,” he says, then turns back to help the others.
Dazed, she takes a moment to see what the group has done at the stairwell. A number of seat-rows and even a section of the admissions desk are erected there, creating a sizable barrier. Rachel locates the gray woman-corpse near the top of the stairwell, but she turns away, not wanting to see those terrible flat eyes again.
Just as she turns, she hears Bonnie’s voice. “Rachel! Rachel, hurry!”
The image of her father sparks into her head, and a new energy fuels her sprint back up the hallway toward the supply room. She sees Alan at the doorway reaching for Bonnie, who is inside. Rachel can just see the back of her head. They’re both backing out of the room in fits and starts. Alan turns to see Rachel coming, and then she’s at the doorway, pushing in next to Bonnie. Her eyes go first to her father’s unconscious body, then it’s wrenched upward to the open ceiling above him, where yet another pair of dead, intelligent eyes stares down on the room. It’s another woman corpse, a former patient in casual clothes, and its flat gaze is moving around the room. Rachel thinks it’s seeing the blood and perhaps even acknowledging the blood’s effect on the corpse that came before it. Fearle
ss, Rachel pushes past Bonnie, beyond her clutching hands, and stands at the foot of her father’s bed, glaring up at the thing in the ceiling.
“Fuck you!” she yells at it. “I dare you to come down here, you bitch!” She kneels down and swipes her hand through a smear of blood on the linoleum floor, then extends it palm out toward the corpse. “Come on down, get a taste of this!”
The shadowed corpse hisses, and in a dark, reckless blur, it retreats.
The three of them are left near hyperventilation, in shock, staring in at a destroyed room in which Rachel’s father lies, barely undisturbed.
“Well,” Rachel says, panting, wiping her trembling hand on her jeans. She turns to face Bonnie and Alan. “Successful test.”
Chapter 16
Rachel, one eye still on the torn-open ceiling, goes to her father’s side. She places her small hand on his forehead above his closed eyes, avoiding the wound at the hairline. She notices that her fingers are shaking almost uncontrollably. In this weird reality, the trembling catches her eye for only a moment, and then she has forgotten about it. She feels the reassuring warmth of her father’s skin, feels the clammy life there, deep inside, and it calms her.
“You’ll be okay,” she whispers, her voice breaking. She leans over him, to press her body against his, shut her eyes tight, and attempt an embrace. “Daddy, you’ll be okay.”
Bonnie and Alan have risen and approached her, placed their hands on her back.
After a moment, Bonnie’s voice whispers at her ear: “Rachel, we have to—”
A shotgun blast booms from the lobby amid the distant yelling, and all three of them jerk, startled.
“I know.” She snatches herself away, standing up straight, summoning the strength to leave him yet again. And then she’s glancing around, her eyes still blurred with new tears. “I have to move him, I have to get him out of this room. Help me? Please?”
Bonnie is still out of breath, one hand flattened above her breasts. This woman has had enough. Her face has a gray complexion, and she’s spotted with blood all over. Rachel feels sudden empathy for her; she can tell that Bonnie is running on fumes, and as they stand there indecisively, they’re all casting glances upward, aware that the entire hospital is alive with scuttling movement, a dark promise of more horrors to come.
Blood Red Page 20
