Blood Red

by Jason Bovberg

  They are classmates from middle school years ago. After weepy reintroductions, and introductions to the other survivors, Chrissy finally leaves the cruiser with her old friends, Zoe and Chloe, and climbs into the back of Kevin’s truck. The three young women are suddenly a knot of energy, feeding off one another for new strength in the face of an incomprehensible darkness. Rachel wishes she could lose herself in the teary embrace of that little group. Most of all, she feels a pang of loss for Jenny.

  And then they are moving on.

  In a span of perhaps ten minutes, Rachel sees only two moving cars in the distance. One is accelerating too fast on Riverside, heading southeast; she sees it as they approach the intersection. The man driving the car doesn’t even seem to notice the cruiser. Not a minute later, she glimpses a station wagon wandering carefully through the neighborhood just to the south of Riverside as they traverse it northwest toward Mulberry.

  “What time is it?” Bonnie asks wearily from the back seat of Joel’s cruiser.

  Joel checks the dash. “It’s almost eight.”

  “I guess I should ask what day it is.”

  This rhetorical remark is met with silence, and Rachel herself hesitates, pondering the answer. It seems like far more than a single day has passed since she woke up to a different world.

  Rachel occasionally glances at the sky. The red rumblings on the unsettled horizon seem to pull at them. It’s like nothing she’s ever seen. When she was 12, she traveled with her family to Alaska, and one of her only sharp memories of that trip was beholding the Northern Lights—a green, shimmery curtain of luminescence that she couldn’t look away from. Nestled back in her father’s arms, she watched and watched, filled with wonder.

  This sight before her now only fills her with dread. Although the Aurora Borealis is the first thing this throbbing atmospheric thing reminds her of, it’s nothing like it. It’s the difference between wonder and despair.

  She forces herself to look away.

  The monotonously hollow scenery blurs by—automobiles abandoned and askew, empty homes slouched beyond their sidewalks, a gray skein of smoke over everything—and she finds herself pondering numbers. If, as Bonnie said, this thing wiped out as much as 95 percent of the population, that means there are fewer than five thousand survivors in all of Fort Collins. That estimate reflects only the number of survivors as of dawn yesterday morning. How many more died in the initial confusion of the aftermath, when doomed survivors tried to rouse their loved ones and got too close? Rachel has seen enough of those, starting with little Sarah, and all the others in rooms 109 and 111.

  An involuntary shudder passes through her.

  There could be fewer than a two thousand people in the entire city. The fact that they have come across so few supports Rachel’s grisly math.

  Joel seems to wake from his own daze. Perhaps he was pondering numbers, too.

  “Okay, here’s Mulberry,” he says quietly.

  The intersection that leads to the large avenue is surprisingly free of crashed vehicles, but as Joel makes the turn onto Mulberry, heading due west, a wide-open and desolate landscape of abandoned cars reveals itself.

  “They’re all empty,” Rachel remarks.

  “Yeah.” Joel is nodding, his voice high and tight.

  On this stretch of urban concrete and structures, there are few corpses in sight. Rachel spots only five in a quarter mile, all of them clamped to the bases of conifers. In one case, Joel passes a corpse in the median. In the midst of its clutch against its chosen tree, the dead eyes roll toward them, its expression clenching into something like hate. The glow at its mouth is as rhythmic as its chewing.

  Joel pulls up next to it. “Look at that,” he whispers. “I could probably get out of this car and stand right next to it, and it wouldn’t care.”

  Neither Rachel nor Bonnie responds.

  “What you said earlier … about outer space,” he says. “I’m wondering if you’re right. These damn things come down here, inhabit us, take us over, whatever … Maybe their goal was never really us, but something in these trees.”

  Rachel ponders that. “They never expected us to survive,” she whispers.

  “They never expected to have to fight.” He looks over at her, then out at the red sky again.

  “What could they possibly want in a tree?” Bonnie says behind them, almost mournfully.

  “That’s the question,” Joel says as he pulls forward again. “Who knows? Chlorophyll? Some particular kind of algae? Something missing from wherever they’re from?”

  Silence, then Bonnie asks softly, “Why us?”

  Joel is shaking his head. “I don’t know—the right kind of brain? It’s weird, though, it’s like they don’t know how to use our bodies. Like—like they only know how to move that one way, the way they move wherever they’re from, and they don’t know how to adapt, or something.”

  Rachel looks over at him. “More sci-fi novels?”

  He laughs desolately. “Yeah, maybe so.”

  The streets are eerily deserted, save for the vehicles once inhabited by drivers who died at the controls and eventually reanimated into strange consciousness. Whatever force that was, it allowed all of them to reason their way beyond the closed doors of their automobiles. They knew how to open and even unlock doors.

  The car has gone quiet, and Rachel understands the weariness inherent in the silence.

  She twists to look back at Bonnie, who has positioned herself at the edge of the hard plastic bench and is actually nearly asleep. She must be uncomfortable, on this bench intended for arrests, but Bonnie also has been awake for at least twenty-six hours. Like all of them.

  Just glancing at her, Rachel feels the pull of sleep. Her eyes are gritty, feeling hollowed out, the sockets receding into her skull. She remembers the hangover headache she woke up with yesterday morning. The headache she has now is a very different, duller ache, one that begs her to treat it simply with unconsciousness.

  She shakes her head in an attempt to clear it, marveling that she could feel the grasp of sleep after everything that has happened. She supposes it’s only because she’s sitting still.

  With all the windows down, Rachel listens to the world outside the car, and there’s really nothing beyond the drone of the cruiser’s engine. It’s an odd disconnect. They’re driving into the busiest section of town and yet it sounds like they’re merely drifting along a country road. Rachel has fond memories of doing that with her mom before she died, of cruising those roads east of town and talking, nursing cold cans of soda as they laughed. But they’re in the middle of Fort Collins, where on any normal day the sounds of human activity would provide a constant thrum and buzz.

  “There’s another one,” Joel says.

  A lone, gangly man is walking along the edge of the road, up and to the right. He’s stepping past a crashed silver Honda Civic, peering warily inside, and continuing on. A long gray curtain of hair swings around when his head jerks to see the approaching vehicle. Now they can all see that the lanky man has a handgun in his grip. The snub nose rises to point directly at them.

  “Whoa, whoa,” Joel says, braking the car. Kevin’s truck comes to a rumbling stop behind them.

  The man stares at them, his wild eyes belligerent and threatening. Rachel instinctively ducks behind the dash. She peers over at Joel, who remains in control. Calmly, he flips on the cruiser’s lightbar—no siren. Rachel risks a look above the dash to watch the man almost comically stumbling backward along the gutter, then racing away into a ditch and up it on the other side. He glances back once, twice, and disappears into a gas station.

  They continue east along Mulberry. Rachel becomes aware that they’re gradually approaching her neighborhood. They leave the steel and concrete behind, and homes begin to appear, along with more trees and more bodies. When they pass College Avenue, she sees the Good Times burger place on the southwest corner where she went with Tony the day before yesterday.

  Tony.

  A r
ealization nearly stuns her.

  She hasn’t thought about Tony for hours now. Her eyes close, and her chin falls to her chest. What is she feeling? Survivor guilt? She brings a hand to her forehead and massages her temples. Images of her boyfriend flash before her: Tony laughing in that full-bodied way of his; his unlikely, nerdy studiousness in the classes they shared; the way he would exaggerate his politeness to Susanna; the secret communication of distaste for her stepmother that they shared. The onslaught of images is too much; she opens her eyes.

  They pass house after house, and Rachel finds herself scanning the occasional bodies on the lawns, any section of landscaping that features evergreen trees, whether pine or spruce or fir, and it takes her a moment to understand that she’s watching for Tony. She has turned her gaze more keenly through her open window, searching the bodies for familiarity. For that mop of dark hair, the olive skin she knows so well, the dark clothing he was wearing yesterday morning atop his bed, when she found him afflicted, like everyone else.

  She realizes they’re five blocks from the turn that would take her home. And at that thought, she thinks of Susanna, dead in her bedroom, in the bed that she shared with Rachel’s father. Really dead. No coming back for her. No unnatural life.

  And perhaps, after everything else, that was for the best.

  Yes. It’s for the best that Susanna is dead.

  She glances over at Joel unconsciously, and as she does, he lets out a grunt, and the cruiser begins to slow.

  “Shit.”

  Rachel looks out onto the street.

  They’ve come to a blocked portion so severe that there’s no way to inch around it. There are perhaps a dozen cars abandoned in a haphazard line; they appear to have slowly collided with each other in the aftermath of the event. The vehicles are weakly gleaming under the red-tinted sun. Most of them are empty, their doors flung wide open. But one of them—

  Rachel sees it just as Joel speaks.

  “See that?” Joel says.

  One of the vehicles, a Toyota van, has been blocked in by its neighbors, crammed tight, metal to metal. The doors won’t open. Inside the van, what appears to be a family of three is whipping about insanely, attempting to find a way out of their metal-and-glass prison. Rachel can see that the driver’s window is cracked and bowed out, and one of the family members’ legs is caught in a jagged, spiderwebbed hole there, torn and bloodied.

  Joel kills the engine, and now it’s clear that the corpses are screaming and gasping as if caught in a trap. Their limbs are flailing, their mouths open and straining. Rachel feels revulsion and anger, and her fingers tighten around the shotgun.

  Joel steps cautiously out of the cruiser and makes his way back toward Kevin’s cab. The sound of the truck’s engine dies, engulfing the world in oppressive silence punctuated only by the sounds of the obscene family. Kevin steps out with his own rifle held in his fist, and the two men try to assess the situation. Looking left and right, Rachel sees that the blockade is a perfect storm of angled vehicles and mailboxes and driveway-parked cars and trees, all of them impeding their progress.

  “Think you can push through it?” Joel asks the larger man.

  “Yeah, but I’d rather just drive a couple of those cars out of the way. The keys are probably in every one of those cars.”

  Joel laughs a little. “You’re right.”

  “I can do it.”

  Rachel keeps glaring at the minivan full of corpses, feeling a sneer take hold of her upper lip. While the others start to break down the blockade, she reaches for her door handle and steps out of the cruiser. She hears Bonnie call her name in a sleepy voice, but Rachel feels almost like she’s outside her body. She leaves the door hanging open and approaches the van holding the trapped family of corpses.

  “Rachel!” Joel calls. “What are you doing?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  She gets to the van, and at her arrival, the things inside stop moving and stare at her through the large windows, their peeled-wide eyes red and angry below their yawing, upside-down mouths. Rachel raises the weapon and aims the barrel directly at the closest one’s forehead, the corpse of a blond suburban mom. The mom-corpse doesn’t even flinch, just continues to glare at her warily, defiantly. Rachel presses forward threateningly, but the thing doesn’t move. She can see that frothy saliva has dripped down from the thing’s mouth, filling its nose and running in rivulets down the forehead and into the hair, which is matted in stiff disarray.

  They’re animals, she thinks.

  “Rachel!” comes a distant voice; she tunes it out.

  In her mind, she can hear only the final breaths of all the people she has lost, like agonized whispers in her ear. Wheezing in death throes, calling her name desperately. And her father, dwindling away in a coma, on the verge of leaving her forever, orphaning her in an impossible future.

  The shotgun barks, the glass of the rear window implodes, and the closest corpse’s head takes the damage with a red jerk. The body falls lifelessly onto its back. The two remaining corpses—a heavy bald man who was clearly the father, and a preteen boy—react in a frenzy, thrashing their limbs at the windows and squealing. The father is the one whose leg is caught in the glass of his window. Blood continues to stream down the glass and the door’s gold-painted metal. Rachel moves to him next, climbing atop the bumper of an Audi. The corpse, again, stares her down. The look gives her pause, but as bile surges up her throat, she pulls the trigger again, throwing the father-corpse’s head backward. Her own vomit spills out of her mouth; she heaves it out, coughing.

  Suddenly a hand is pulling at her shoulder, and she yanks it back angrily, facing down Bonnie.

  “Stop,” Bonnie says.

  “No.”

  She reloads the shotgun laboriously, the way Joel showed her at the hospital entrance before leaving. Then she climbs to the other side of the van; all the while, the boy-corpse watches her, growling. Rachel perches herself against the fender of a gold Subaru, takes careful aim, and kills the remaining corpse. Its small limbs give way, and the van is silent.

  “Feel better?” Joel asks, right at her side. There’s a tinge of bewilderment in his voice.

  Rachel hands him the shotgun wordlessly. She makes her way back to the cruiser, spitting the foul taste of bile from her mouth. She feels lightheaded. She barely senses that she’s wobbling, veering out of her path toward the cruiser. Bonnie catches her and guides her back to the car, settling her gently inside, and unconsciousness takes her so suddenly that even in sudden deep sleep, Rachel flinches.

  Chapter 19

  “—believe it.”

  “Good God.”

  “I don’t even know what to—what to—how—”

  “Look at that one! Damn!”

  “Oh my.”

  The words come at Rachel in a muted jumble. She thinks she also hears quiet tears. She tries to comprehend their meaning from under a deep blanket of gauze. Despite the commotion, her eyes don’t want to open; the eyelids are gummy, reluctant to surrender unconsciousness. Finally her vision comes to her, at the forefront of a headache that threatens to blind her anew. She blinks exaggeratedly, forcing herself awake.

  She senses no motion. She’s in the backseat of the cruiser, and it is stopped, its motor turned off. The cab is dim, with a foreboding red tint. Rachel focuses on Bonnie’s face, directly above her; Rachel’s head is resting in her lap. The woman’s gaze is fixed on something outside, and her right hand is clamped to her open mouth. It’s Bonnie who is weeping.

  Rachel attempts to lift her head up and feels something lurch in her skull. She drops back to Bonnie’s lap.

  Bonnie glances down, and a tear splashes on Rachel’s forehead. “Oh, dear, you’d better stay put.”

  “No, I’m okay,” Rachel mutters, surging through the pain to rise.

  She steadies herself and tries to focus her gaze outside, tries to comprehend what’s out there. It takes Rachel a long moment to realize that she’s looking at the south edge
of City Park. It’s shrouded in a smoky red haze. At first, Rachel believes she’s looking at a fog of crimson smoke rising from all the foliage in the park. There’s definitely a kind of fog in the air, a moving mist. She lowers her gaze and she can finally make out what Joel and Bonnie have already seen.

  The park is filled with bodies.

  Thousands of bodies.

  The thing that springs to Rachel’s mind is a painting that used to hang on Tony’s bedroom wall, one that she noticed peripherally for weeks before really looking at it. An odd cacophony of human behavior set against darkness and fire, the painting stopped her short in a weird post-coital moment as she made her way naked to the bathroom. She remembered grimacing at it while Tony laughed at her from the bed, introducing her to the unique horrors of Hieronymus Bosch.

  Surrounding the trunk of every tree and reaching up into the lower branches are innumerable intertwined corpses, their limbs bent at extreme angles, the skin straining and even torn. They’re impossible jumbles of flesh, and Rachel can’t tell where one body begins and the next ends. The bodies are crammed together so tightly that there’s no movement at all, they simply make up a series of dense, enflamed, unmoving masses, each mass clinging tenaciously to the base of a tree. The sight takes Rachel’s breath away, but none more so than the collective red luminescence pulsing and rising like fog through the branches into the gray sky.

  Scattered along the grass of the park, in the spaces between trees, are more human bodies, these without the telltale faint glow at their throats. These are merely corpses, perhaps having gotten too close to these strange things with their weird, urgent needs. They are strewn everywhere around the car, even in the streets, but they’re in greater numbers in the park. There’s death everywhere.

  In the dim distance, Rachel sees a corpse spider-walking straight down the center of a residential street toward the park. She can barely see it beyond the light from the red collective inhabiting the park like a hive. But she can see that it is sickeningly adept in its alien gait, covering ground quickly despite the sheer wrongness of the way it holds itself, everything turned over, everything straining and seemingly fractured. It’s a woman in a nightgown, she sees now. It clambers over a curb and enters the park, racing toward the nearest flesh-crammed tree. It finds one and climbs up the mountain of bodies in a state of near-desperation, finally clamping itself to a high, bare patch of bark, its angled mouth burrowing, chewing.