Blood Red

by Jason Bovberg

He also tells Buck about what the reanimated bodies are doing at the bases of the trees. His right arm is draped on the cruiser above the passenger door, his eyes locked on the small copse of trees on the other side of the parking lot. The two male corpses have intensified their odd stranglehold on the conifer, and Rachel can see that the farthest one has popped the hip joint on its left side. The leg is bent backward so severely that the head of the femur is poking like a knob away from the body, threatening to tear the skin. The ever-present red glow continues its pulse.

  Buck responds after a long moment. “What?”

  “Yep, you heard right. I don’t understand it, but I think I want to do my damnedest to figure it out.” Rachel looks over at Joel, surprised. “Buck, if you can get to that hospital and find the blood bank, it would probably be worth your time to find some O-negative blood. Believe it or not, it can protect you. Just spray it on ’em. They can’t stand it. It’s the reason we’re still here. And spread the word, will you? I can’t get Ron on the radio. Maybe you’ll have luck.”

  “Right.”

  “I’m going back out, but I’ll get back with you later. Out.”

  He attaches the radio to his belt and turns away from the scene outside. He can’t stand to look at it anymore.

  “You’re leaving?” Rachel asks.

  He’s nodding. “Everything has changed. There’s nothing keeping us here anymore.” He takes another drag on the cigarette, then turns and flicks it out into the parking lot, over the roof of his cruiser. He looks squarely at Rachel. “I say we all gear up and see what the hell they’re up to.”

  “What?” Bonnie says from ten feet away. “Just leave? Go out there? You’re kidding. We nearly died getting them out of here!”

  “Look,” Joel says in a louder voice, knowing he’s addressing the room now. “I need to get out of here. That’s not something I would have said a half hour ago, but it’s true now. Somehow, some way, we got the better of those things. We survived. And that’s all thanks to you guys. What you did with the blood—hell, I never would have figured that out.” He nods at Rachel. “So we know how to arm ourselves in two ways. Funny thing is—I think the battle has gone out there.” He gestures out the doors. “I think those things are after something. They’re going somewhere. And I have to know what it is they’re up to. I have to go find out.”

  “You’re really going out there?” Chrissy says. “I mean—”

  Bonnie is nodding, agreeing with Chrissy’s clipped thought, and Rachel sees an almost insurmountable fear behind Bonnie’s eyes, as well as the acknowledgment that Joel is their best protection. Wherever he goes, everyone should go. Rachel feels it, too.

  Joel confirms the thought. “I think we should all go.”

  Rachel steps forward. “I want to know where they all went,” she says while watching Bonnie react with emotion.

  Kevin, next to Alan, says, “Me too.”

  Rachel is thinking of all the death that has surrounded her for the past twenty-four hours, the bleakness and the blood and the hopelessness. “We’ve gone through hell trying to find ways to hurt these things—to kill these things—and we have ways. We know they’re still up to no good, right?” She searches for words. “They’re out there right now, searching for something, I know it, they want something, and whatever it is, we know it won’t be in our favor.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying we can’t just sit here and be glad we’re still alive.”

  Bonnie gives her a pained look, bows her head.

  “We have to see this through, right?” Rachel looks around at the rest of the group. “Look what these things have done to your families and your friends. Everyone you know is dead! Don’t you want to know why?”

  “But,” Bonnie argues, “we don’t even understand—”

  “All the more reason to get out of here and see what they’re doing. Where they’re going.”

  Punctuating her words, another corpse comes tumbling downstairs, this one from the now useless barricade at the stairs. It’s a small Indian woman, her deep-brown arms and legs all akimbo as the corpse slides rattling down the plastic and metal mountainside. On her upside-down face, the woman’s red bindi looks somehow cruel below the wildly shifting flat eyes and working mouth. The corpse reaches the carpet and crab-walks across the lobby, skirting the periphery. It appears ready to attack if provoked. All the survivors are in wary, defensive positions, and Alan has even aimed his bag of O-negative blood. The Indian corpse hugs the wall and finally climbs Joel’s cruiser and leaps away, into darkness.

  “It didn’t even try to attack,” Kevin says.

  “Okay, we’re going,” Joel announces. “There’s seven of us now, so we’ll take two vehicles. We’ll take my cruiser and whatever other car we have the keys to. We’ll split up the weapons. Any objections?” The room is silent. “We’ll split up the blood, too. Kevin, can you take care of that?”

  The big man is already in motion, grabbing hold of the gurney piled with blood packets and wheeling it toward the front doors.

  “What about vehicles?” Joel asks the room. “What do we have?”

  “I got a truck,” Kevin says.

  “That’s the answer I was looking for.”

  Most of the others begin gathering the blood and preparing to take it to the vehicles. Rachel catches sight of Alan, who is slumped in his chair in the middle of the lobby, looking forlorn. A bag of plasma is still in his left hand. His eyes are glassy, his facial muscles betraying inner pain. The rest of his body is convulsing weakly. Bonnie has returned to him as well; her fingers are at his neck.

  “What can we do?” Rachel asks.

  Bonnie gives her a grave look.

  “No no no no …!” Rachel gasps. At the expression on Bonnie’s face, she nearly collapses, and hot tears spring to her eyes. Not Alan. Not when things are finally turning their way. Not so close to the end.

  “He needs morphine,” Bonnie says.

  The sobs come freely as Rachel races through the double doors into the hallway leading to the morphine supplies. She nearly loses her footing when she slides into room 109, and she can’t stop her chest from hitching with the force of her weeping. There are a few low moans around her, coming from the drugged victims on some of the cots, but she ignores them. She makes it to the cabinet, whose doors now hang open, and scans the supply with blurred vision. Just as she did for Jenny, she quickly selects a small yellow syringe labeled Morphine Sulphate - 20mg. She races back toward the lobby, casting a weepy glance toward the locked room that holds her father, and she lets loose another uncontrolled sob. Rachel curses herself for her inability to hold it in, to keep her emotions under control. She finds herself clenching her fist and pounding repeatedly at her thigh.

  When she punches through the double doors into the lobby, she finds it a desolate place, blood-smeared and hollow, most of the survivors outside delivering blood bags to the vehicles. At the center of it all, Bonnie kneels over Alan, who is now gasping. His face is slack, but his mouth is working spasmodically.

  Rachel hands the morphine to Bonnie, who expertly prepares the syringe and plunges it into the flesh of Alan’s shoulder. The effect on Alan is near-immediate, his jaw relaxing, his clenched muscles loosening up. Rachel can see the expanses of parchment skin across Alan’s arms, extending up beneath his shirt. She can only imagine what has happened to his chest. At the palest portions of skin, mottled bruises are appearing, purple and brown, and an almost greenish edge. Rachel looks away helplessly, trying to get ahold of her breathing.

  The glass front doors have been locked open, and Rachel sees now that Joel’s cruiser has been moved out of the way. Joel and Chrissy hurry back through the door. Chrissy’s feet nearly slip out from under her, but Joel catches her.

  “Aw shit,” Joel says, coming to a stop when he sees Alan and the expression on Rachel’s face.

  Through the front doors, Rachel sees Kevin pull up his truck to the entrance, parking next to Joel’s
cruiser. The sky beyond the truck is gray with a red tint, and there’s a constant, deep rumbling overlaying everything. The two heavy men are still attached to their tree, their limbs wrapped impossibly tight around the trunk, branches snapped viciously away from the embrace.

  Even though Alan’s body is slack, his breathing is labored and gasping, guttural, and now his own blood is leaking from his mouth, running in rivulets through the darker half-dried blood already caked there.

  Kevin strides back through the doors, accompanied by the middle-aged woman whose name Rachel hasn’t yet learned. They stop before the scene in the center of the waiting room. Joel has taken a knee next to Rachel, and unconsciously she takes hold of his arm.

  They don’t have a long time to wait. Alan dies within minutes, coated in blood, his chest and arms ravaged by a force none of them understand. More than anything that has happened since she woke to find her world forever changed, Alan’s death leaves Rachel reeling. She can only stare down at him and cry.

  Ten minutes later, they’ve taken Alan’s body deep into the hospital and placed him next to the body of the little girl, Sarah, who Alan carried into this place. Rachel slumps to the floor next to them while Bonnie administers morphine to the moaning victims, and soon their voices go quiet. After Bonnie has joined the others to prepare the vehicles, Rachel sits with Alan and Sarah in silence, surrounded by the dead and almost dead, touching both of their faces lovingly.

  Then she stands and leaves the room.

  She strides back toward the front of the hospital, and in a few minutes she’s standing before the locked office door that leads to her father. Behind her and underneath her, the dim hallway is coated with blood that is no longer slippery but clotted and lumpy, and beginning to stink. She places a hand against the door, debating whether to force it open somehow, and finally deciding against it. She can’t hear him moving in there, even when she places her ear against the door. The notion of kicking her way into the room, only to find her father dead…no, she won’t even consider it. She shakes the thought out of her head, frowning deeply.

  “Daddy, I have to go,” she whispers.

  Hot tears are still stinging her eyes. She lets them remain, wanting the sting, wanting the pain.

  “I’ll be back. I’ll be back for you.” She lets a beat pass. “I love you … and I’m sorry.”

  She lets her head rest for a moment against the wood, closing her eyes. Then she pushes away and walks through the charnel-house hallway, out the double doors, and into the devastated waiting area.

  Outside the hospital entrance, the rest of the survivors have gathered at the chosen vehicles—Joel’s cruiser and Kevin’s blue Chevy truck. They’re looking to the gray skies, which are laced with tendrils of red. Overtly weird and threatening, the expanse of sky seems to throb with menace. None of them can take their eyes off it—whatever it is.

  Little bits of flaky ash are settling over everything. The still-smoky air feels charged; humid but electric. Alien.

  Finally, Joel says, “Let’s go.”

  Chapter 18

  The sky is roiling in the midst of a silent, otherworldly storm, and there’s a disquieting stillness in the air outside her open window, despite the alien swirls of weird moisture moving across the atmosphere.

  “It’s localized to the west, do you see that?” Joel says. “I’m thinking Lory State Park. Down to Horsetooth, really, and beyond. There’s something happening up there. I want to get closer.”

  Rachel leans forward over the steering wheel to peer at the bruised sky. He’s right. The red tendrils of light are more focused at the horizon—not beyond it, but at it, drifting upward from the near distance, in the foothills.

  “Wait, what? What are we doing?” Bonnie asks, awaking from her trance, her voice confused and tired. “Where are we going?”

  “We’re going to see what the hell is going on.” Joel reaches down to his dash radio again, tries unsuccessfully to contact Ron. “We’ve been on our heels this whole time. Whatever these damn things are, whatever they’re doing, we’ve got to find out.”

  Bonnie’s voice is nearly deadened. “Shouldn’t we go—find someone? Find somewhere safe?”

  Joel doesn’t seem to know how to answer that question, so it remains unanswered. He continues motoring northwest along Riverside, and Rachel keeps taking long glances down the small, one-lane streets that lead into quiet neighborhoods to the south. There are bodies wrapped painfully around the base of perhaps every fourth or fifth tree. Since leaving the hospital, Rachel has observed that it’s only the evergreen trees that the corpses seem interested in. She said this aloud as they drove north on Lemay, and the cruiser’s other inhabitants responded with silence. They were all too consumed by what they were seeing.

  “Look,” Bonnie says now from the back seat, gesturing between Joel and Rachel to a small park off the road. “Over there.”

  At every conifer, there are two, three, or sometimes even a half dozen corpses, wrapped tightly around trunks and limbs. There are perhaps thirty corpses in the small park, whose centerpiece is a children’s brightly colored jungle gym surrounded by towering Ponderosa Pines and Blue Spruce trees. The corpses aren’t just children; they are old men and young women, tailored businessmen and naked teens, girls in jogging attire and, yes, children in pajamas. It’s a group of people rudely interrupted a day ago in their morning routines; interrupted from sleep or commutes or showers or exercise or breakfast. Normal, everyday people, engaged in a wholly unnatural act.

  These former human beings are wrapped around the bases of the conifers, their limbs straining backward to the splintering detriment of their limbs, digging ever more deeply into bark, their inverted mouths attached hungrily, working, working. And glistening mounds of semi-masticated mulch are dripping from their upside-down faces, falling to thick puddles beneath them. It’s happening everywhere, in front yards, in the landscaped islands between asphalt thoroughfares, along the perimeters of parking lots, and especially in community parks like this one.

  At every one of them, the red luminescence throbs.

  Rachel feels something like helplessness, beholding the mass phenomenon. It defies all reason and meaning, and therefore is absolutely ominous.

  “When I went to get the weapons before,” Joel says, “it was so different out here. Everything was crazy. Those goddamn things were jittering to life, you know? Moving around, falling out of cars, scrambling around on the street. Upside down, I mean what the fuck? Crazy.”

  Everything is deadened out there now, and terribly quiet.

  “They were like a swarm of giant crabs or something,” he says, then pauses, looking around. “But crippled. Slow. And now …”

  None of them has really yet spoken of the phenomenon that Joel is referring to—or truly wants to. The sight of these things makes Rachel want to close her eyes and surrender. She feels she has tried her best to comprehend and even tackle a number of complete alien oddities, only to see those oddities pale in comparison with whatever comes next.

  All she can do is take each new development as it happens, weather each new storm. And all the while, she feels a dull, building anger deep at her core.

  Rachel keeps flashing on Alan’s devastated face—pale, bloodied, all life drained from it—and the fury she feels in response leaves her trembling but also fills her with resolve. She grips one of Joel’s shotguns with both hands, its barrel angled out the open passenger window. Between her and Joel is a small mound of O-negative blood bags. She feels the reassuring liquid heft of one of them against her upper thigh.

  Most of all, she wants to hurt these things. She wants to destroy them. For the fear they’ve planted in her, for how they’ve changed her life forever, for how they’ve taken from her everyone who ever meant anything to her. She doesn’t know what they are, what they’ve become, but she wants to ruin them.

  She looks out the window at what remains of Fort Collins. It’s a ghost town. Whatever has inhabited these dead bodie
s, this presence, this intelligence, this weird thing, has decimated the city. It has spared practically no one. Those who have survived, including herself, are alive now only because of a seeming fluke, a genetic stroke of luck.

  Since leaving the hospital, they have seen only fourteen other survivors. Chrissy has been providing a running tally. Half of them have been in vehicles moving in the opposite direction, and all have stopped for brief, wary conversations. A ragtag group of five, crammed into a tiny Ford sedan, claimed to have holed up in a neighborhood recreation center to the north, watching the world go to hell behind the safety of a huge plate-glass window. They were now on their way through surrounding neighborhoods, trying to gather others and begin developing some kind of order. The driver was in priest’s garb, complete with vestments and white collar beneath a sweaty but determined face. They parted ways—the man pleading for Joel’s group to follow but finally calling, “God bless you!”—and Rachel watched his car fade into the distance in the rearview mirror.

  On Lemay, they come across an old, orange Volkswagen bus crashed into a chain link fence in front of a strip mall. The door slides open on the approach of Joel’s cruiser. Two survivors hop out, twin sisters perhaps in their early twenties, in nightclothes, looking dazed and terrified. Their identical faces are ravaged by a flow of seemingly constant tears, pale devastated faces haggard under the muted sun.

  “Help us!” one of them cries. “Stop!”

  Joel pulls over, and Kevin comes to a stop behind them. Both engines remain running, and Joel’s eyes dart in all directions, watching for any threat.

  “What’s happening!?” the other twin says as they come up to the cruiser. “Everyone was dead, and now…” Her voice devolves into a loose warble.

  “Wait, wait!” Chrissy whispers hotly toward Rachel. “I know them!” She leans over Bonnie and pokes her head out the window. “I know you!”

  The twins’ faces show confusion for a moment—then a dawning realization and a relief so profound that Rachel feels a knot of emotion fatten in her throat. She watches enviously as Chrissy throws all caution to the wind, reaches outside to open the door, exits the cruiser on her side, and races around the back of the car to the twins, who embrace Chrissy almost desperately, clawing at her.