“They’re coming down,” Bonnie whispers, almost sadly.
There are more shouts coming from the lobby, and Rachel knows they have to go there. She repeats, “Please?”
Alan says, “There’s an office down the hall, and it doesn’t have this kind of suspended ceiling. Probably built as an addition later. We can put him there. He’ll be safe.”
Rachel remembers passing the room earlier, an executive’s office, perhaps, but she didn’t pay any attention to the ceiling. Why should she?
Now Bonnie is nodding wearily. “Okay. Okay.”
With some effort, their movements punctuated by three more shotgun blasts and shouts from the lobby, the three of them manage to angle the rolling gurney through the door, down the crowded hallway, and into the office, which, sure enough, has a more traditional drywalled ceiling.
They squeeze the gurney into the room, and Bonnie checks his head wound while Rachel holds her father’s loose hand. He hasn’t stirred, but according to Bonnie, all his vitals seem okay. She’s encouraged by that but frustrated and even angry that he won’t wake up. Irrationally, she directs the anger at him.
How could you do this to me? Leave me all alone to face this shitstorm?
She feels another catch in her throat as Bonnie pulls at her to go. What if she never sees him again? She says goodbye to him silently.
They hurry out the door and into the hall. Rachel finds that the door has a lock. She doesn’t have the key to this lock, but she knows she needs to lock the door anyway. She twists the lock in the knob on the opposite side, then pulls the door shut, tests it. Locked.
“Let’s go—wait!” Rachel pauses. “More blood—we need more blood.”
Alan is already moving down the dim hallway toward the blood bank. “On my way,” he calls back. “I’ll meet you back at the lobby.”
Rachel watches him go, the way his shoulders are hunched with exhaustion, the way he’s coaxing every last bit of energy from his protesting limbs. Then Rachel gives Bonnie a look.
“You all right?”
Bonnie manages only a halfhearted smirk.
“Don’t give up yet, okay?” Rachel pleads.
“Lead the way.”
The two women careen through the dim corridor and into admissions to face a new horror. Joel and the others have assembled all the furniture they could find as a barrier in the stairwell, erecting a haphazard blue-and-gray tower of cheap plastic and scuffed metal. There are more than a dozen corpses assembled behind it and against it, gasping and growling. Now that she sees the results of the group’s frenzied efforts and the crowd of reanimated bodies behind it, Rachel is almost sure the precarious barrier will not hold.
“Oh no.”
Joel is standing in front of the unwieldy dam, loading his weapons, his eyes wide as he turns to see Rachel. He clearly registers that Alan is missing.
“We have to go,” he says, unable to contain a defeated note in his voice. “We have to get out of here.”
“It’s worse than you think,” Rachel says.
“What do you mean?”
“They’re finding other ways down.”
“How, for chrissakes?”
Rachel points up. “Through the ceiling.”
Joel glances up at the large sturdy tiles spanning the ceiling. “Jesus Christ.”
Scott chimes in from a corner, “Hey, Officer, great idea to hole up in a building with three floors full of fucking monsters above us.”
Joel ignores him. “Where’s Alan?” he asks, wincing in anticipation of her answer.
“He’s bringing blood.”
“Tell me you had some luck with it.”
Quickly, out of breath, Rachel tells him what happened—finding the blood bank, and shoving the contents of the O-negative bag into the mouth of the thing that had been hanging from the ceiling. “That was the one that came out here.”
“So it works?”
“That thing—that thing absolutely recoiled. You saw it.”
“So—what? We have to get the blood inside them? Every one of them?” He’s shaking his head. “And anyway, I don’t want these things to ‘recoil,’ I want them to die.”
“Even spraying it on them seems to work,” she says. “They hate it.”
“And what, then, fill a bunch of squirt guns with O-negative blood? Spray the bastards in their eyes? Maybe scare them off? Well, let’s load up on the stuff, but I’ll be taking my chances with this.” He finishes reloading his shotgun, makes a show of cocking the pump action.
Scott breaks in, “I can’t believe it, but I agree with the cop.”
“Hey—the name’s Joel, okay?”
“Little lady,” Scott says, “you go ahead and climb up there and squirt those bastards. You go right ahead. I want to see what happens.”
“And you’ll be watching from the far side of the room safe and sound. Right?”
“Hey, I don’t know you. I don’t know anyone here. I’m not dying for anybody, least of all complete strangers.”
“That attitude should get you far.” She looks away from him.
“I don’t give a damn what you think.”
A clatter sounds from the stairwell.
“Guys! Guys! Shut up, c’mon—” Joel breaks in, just as a large table comes tumbling down the makeshift barricade. Immediately, he raises his weapon and starts approaching the barrier that reaches up the stairs. It’s like a huge, wobbly tinker-toy assembly.
Rachel follows him forward warily, using Joel’s body for protection. Realizing what she’s doing, she shakes her head with disgust and steps away from him, angling her gaze up the stairwell.
Her stomach drops.
There are now perhaps thirty animated corpses at the top of the open stairway. A few of them are moving crablike—left to right, right to left—jostling for position, but most of them are standing still, merely gazing down upon the lobby, their inverted faces rendered obscene by their sheer number. Rachel feels a chill travel down the length of her spine. One of the jostling corpses rams itself into the barrier, making the entire crooked construction wobble. Rachel staggers backward, straight into the middle-aged woman whose name she still doesn’t know. The woman is pale with shock, has been that way for hours now. Rachel touches her arm shakily, apologetically, then grabs the woman and helps her move back.
“What do we do?” Rachel asks the room, feeling the steel edge of panic at her chest. “What do we—”
A thunderous boom sounds too close to her, and flinches. The shotgun finds its mark above the clutter of metal and plastic. One of the corpses twitches backward but doesn’t fall, and now it’s back at the barrier again, staring down at them, its dry mouth yawing open above the upturned nose. There’s blood at its neck and shoulder, a furrow of gore. Joel pulls the trigger again, and this time the slug embeds itself into the wall above the spider-like corpses.
“God damn it!”
One of the corpses attempts to throw itself upward, trying to clear the barrier. It’s a young Asian man, naked save for a paper gown spooling in folds down to the floor. The man-corpse fails, thumping onto its back after not even leaving the floor, but its intentions are clear. Another corpse follows suit, this time a small boy of about 10 years, dressed in jean shorts and a bright yellow SpongeBob tee-shirt. Rachel watches with something like curiosity, witnessing this obscene groupthink, because suddenly all the corpses are trying to leap to the top of the metal and plastic dam. It’s the small boy who finally achieves the goal, scrambling at the top of a mountain of plastic chairs, his small limbs flailing backwards when the barrier shifts beneath him.
Rachel and the others step back instinctively, waiting to see what happens.
The loose chairs at the top wobble but hold steady, and the boy-corpse loses its footing, bumping down the stairwell perhaps eight feet. Its eyes are open wide as it approaches, watching the survivors. Its limbs scramble among chair legs and metal supports.
“Joel!” Rachel shouts.
; Joel has aimed the shotgun, but it’s shaking in his grip. Rachel remembers his struggle shooting the pregnant corpse, so she sidesteps over to him and yanks the shotgun from his grasp.
“Wait!” Joel cries, reluctantly letting her take the weapon. “Have you ever fired one of those?”
“First time for everything.”
She takes the shotgun fully into her grip, lets the butt fit naturally at her shoulder, clutches the foregrip, takes aim, and pulls the trigger. The recoil slams her backward, feeling as if it has dislocated her shoulder. She quickly composes herself to see that she has hit the boy-corpse in the leg. The small dead-eyed face lets loose a high-pitched screech, sounding far too much like a very hurt little boy, and Rachel’s heart lurches. Then the small corpse cranes its neck so that its upside-down face can see the wound—a ragged chunk of flesh and bone has disappeared, leaving a red and white mess. The boy’s remaining limbs jitter amid the metal, but it can’t move. It sees Rachel approaching determinedly, and its eyes grow wider. Rachel tries to level the shotgun at the boy’s head from three feet away, but the long weapon keeps wavering. She can’t seem to control her breathing. She’s about to fire the second barrel when at the last millisecond she yanks the weapon up and away, staring at the boy.
The corpse’s eyes are filled with fear. It’s mewling and wretched all of a sudden, hopelessly ensnared in the barrier and hobbled by the confusing chaos of its inverted, back-breaking stance.
“Kill it already!” Scott screams from behind her.
“Wait!” she shouts, but she’s drowned out.
Now it’s Joel’s turn to grab the shotgun from her grip, and at first Rachel resists, relishing the power of it in her hands, but when she pulls her gaze from the boy, she realizes that more corpses are throwing themselves at the barrier. They’re all growling, peering down. There appear to be more of them, more of them all the time.
The shotgun booms next to Rachel, and the boy-corpse’s head sheaves nearly in half, obliterated into slivered meat. Its red luminescence sparks out, and the body falls dead to its back. Rachel tears her stinging gaze away to see a fully naked female corpse at the top of the barrier that’s attempting to leap over the barrier. Joel’s weapon barks again, and the naked woman spins backward onto the carpet, the lower half of its face exploding into wet splinters. Its inner light, too, winks out. Joel reloads and fires again and again, his aim now true.
“I need ammo!”
“Where is it?” Rachel asks.
“My cruiser.”
Rachel looks warily at the front doors, sees the vehicle parked there, blocking the entrance. Through a closer window, she can also see the edge of the cruiser’s rear end, its trunk wide open. Beyond the vehicle, she can still see the corpse weirdly attached to the tree on the periphery of the parking lot, a fleshy, still shadow.
“What is it—a box? Shells? What?” She has to scream to be heard over the cacophony of sounds all around her—people screaming, corpses gasping, and a horde of bodies spidering their way toward her, the shotgun threatening to deafen her. She feels like the hospital itself is on the verge of imploding. She wants to cram her hands against her ears and close her eyes.
“Box of Winchesters—white box—red shells! With gold on the end!”
She’s about to make a run for it when she sees the doors at the other side of the lobby bang open. Rachel watches helplessly, expecting another wave of the things, but it’s a gurney edging its way awkwardly into the room. The gurney is carrying a heap of perhaps twenty bags of blood—presumably O-negative. Bonnie rushes toward the doors to help, then stops short as Alan appears. He’s pushing the gurney with his back, still faced in the direction of the hallway, and as he comes into view, he looks wild-eyed when he risks a glance in Rachel’s direction.
“Help!” he calls.
“What is it?” Bonnie cries.
“Take a bag!” he wheezes, just as they can all see what he’s doing.
He has poked a pinhole in one of the pint-bags of blood and is squeezing out a thin stream of blood, which is arcing back through the doors. Now that the doors are opened wide, Rachel can hear a chorus of gasps from an unseen number of corpses.
Alan stumbles backward into the room, to the side of the gurney, careful not to lose his grip on the bag in his shaking hands. The thin jet of blood is a trembling red line directed upward through the doors, and the image reminds Rachel absurdly of kite-flying. It soon becomes clear that the wobbly line of blood is angling down in its arc past the doors, at the mercy of gravity, spattering corpse-flesh. The guttural gasps coming from the hallway make her sure of that, and she is doubly glad she took the time to move her father to the safer room.
Without even realizing, Rachel is sprinting across the room to help. It’s quickly apparent that Alan has been hurt by proximity to at least one of the corpses. There is a parchment paleness to the skin of both his arms.
Behind her, the shotgun booms again, nearly making her stumble. She takes an instant to spin mid-stride—to see still more spider-like corpses heaving themselves at the barrier, and Joel frantically maneuvering the shotgun in his grip. Scott is yelling unintelligibly, but Rachel is focused on Alan and this new threat.
She reaches the gurney and desperately grabs a bag of O-negative blood. Only after doing so does she look toward the open double doors through which Alan brought the gurney. The floor is a blood bath. Eight or nine hospital-garbed corpses are scrabbling upside down across the red-misted tiles, hissing as the blood smears across their hands and feet and when the thin stream from Alan’s bag needles their inverted faces. Rachel sees the same fear in their eyes that she saw in the boy-corpse’s eyes a moment ago. Most of these things appear to be hanging back, wide-eyed with something like fury or confusion, but a couple of them continue to charge forward. A petite nurse-corpse wearing white shoes manages to avoid most of the blood thanks to its footwear, and despite its throaty exhalations of pain and fear it catapults itself through the doors, its eyes blinking spastically under a pert, upturned nose. It slides across the threshold, its head jerking from side to side, taking in the scene.
Alan is now directing the last of his blood bag at the nurse-corpse, directing the thin stream at any exposed flesh—face, forearms, midriff—and the thing is reacting to the blood as if it burns, screaming and flailing. And still it scrabbles forward awkwardly, its bent-back limbs slapping the hard floor.
It’s through the doors and into the admissions area now, and Rachel has no idea what to do with her bag of blood. The thing is closing in on Alan, and she leaps forward without hesitation to shield him. Another shotgun blast crashes behind her—Joel yells “I’m out!” with a raspy, helpless call. She feels that the end is near.
The nurse-corpse leaps forward and tackles both Rachel and Alan. Unable to help herself, Rachel screams under the weight of the ambulatory corpse. She feels the clench of its backward grip, the propulsion of its white-soled heels. Alan cries out, too, as the thing’s feet batter his chest and head, and Rachel is punching at the limbs with her left hand, the bag of blood still clenched uselessly in her right fist. There’s a horrible gasping coming from the thing’s mouth, and its limbs continue their frenzy atop both Rachel and Alan, battering them. Rachel is staring up at its back, the white nurse’s uniform loose and flapping. She can’t breathe beneath the blows of the thing’s elbows and wrists. She’s pushing at the thing desperately, but she’s losing strength.
The thing’s cries seem to be intensifying, and now it’s finally off of her. She rolls to face Alan, who is on his back, lying still. Rachel reaches for him, only to find that her left arm is completely coated in blood. The sight of it shocks her, and then she’s frantically rubbing it off, feeling for injury. As the guttural, inhuman screams continue above her, somewhere, the world is suddenly red to Rachel—there’s blood on the floor and in her eyes, and panic begins to clutch at her. And then Bonnie’s screaming voice—
“Get away!” Rachel feels Bonnie yanking at her. “
Get back!”
Bonnie pulls Rachel across the wet floor, and now Rachel can see Joel. Gripped in his two fists are twin bags of O-negative blood, pinholes pricked in each one, thin streams of the crimson plasma arcing into the crowd of corpses. It’s only then that Rachel understands why she’s coated with blood, and it’s only then that she realizes that the room is filled with a cacophony of gasping shrieks. The corpses are scissoring across the floor, away from the blood, their upturned faces straining with exaggerated horror.
Joel is screaming, too.
“Drink that, you bastards! Choke on it! Die! Die!”
The nurse-corpse skitters off toward the front doors. With a crippling thud, it slams into the tempered glass of the left door, still shrieking. Under its weight, the doors ratchet open automatically, and the thing leaps nimbly over Joel’s cruiser and disappears—so suddenly that Rachel doesn’t immediately realize what has happened.
The other corpses in the lobby are cowering from the spray, their weirdly back-bent bodies maneuvering in a chaotic, almost blurry disarray. Rachel cringes at their shrieking fury.
Joel is still yelling, his voice hoarse: “That’s right, fuckers! Deal with that! You hate that, huh? Fuckin’ die!”
In her peripheral vision Rachel sees Bonnie now pulling at Alan, who is shuffling weakly across the floor, away from the gurney. She registers relief that he’s moving, but she knows that he is gravely hurt.
A new batch of corpses are slapping their way across the reception area. Most of them in white gowns, some of them former hospital employees, they leap and hiss and glower as they move, a blur of angled limbs and upclenched torsos.
Joel tosses his two spent plasma bags to the floor and frantically pokes at a new bag with the point of a small pocket knife. Emboldened, Rachel rises from the ground, slipping once on the tile, and holds her full bag out to him. He hands her his freshly poked bag and takes hers into his grip, and she notices that his hands are remarkably steady and sure. Rachel stands fully upright and as the corpses reach her, she’s directing her own stream of blood in their faces, at the exposed skin, into their eyes, and she’s screaming at them, enraged, their limbs buffeting her, and then they’re squealing, ratcheting backward in something like shock, away from the blood.
Blood Red Page 21
