Blood Red

by Jason Bovberg

  “Look,” Joel says, “of course you can go. Do what you need to do. But let’s consider the hospital to be our home base, okay? You say you’re going back for your dad? Let’s just say we’ll meet you back there. Deal?”

  “Yeah,” says Rachel. “Yeah, okay.”

  Bonnie is suddenly hustling out of the car, her arms outstretched to embrace Rachel. At first, Rachel’s instinct is to start running, but she stops and lets Bonnie take her in her arms. The hug is nearly suffocating, reminding Rachel instantly of the corpses’ tree-clutch, and she hurries to disentangle herself from Bonnie, despite the twinge of emotion she feels.

  “Be careful,” Bonnie whispers, her hands resting on Rachel’s shoulders. “I’d go with you, but I—I need to feel safe. I need to feel safe now. You know?”

  “I know.”

  “Promise me you’ll get back to the hospital.”

  “You can count on it.” Rachel gently removes Bonnie’s hands. “I need to go back for my dad, after all.”

  “Okay.”

  Rachel takes in the group of survivors one last time, nods to the three girls in the flatbed of Kevin’s truck, who are watching her curiously. Chrissy gives her a melancholy little wave. The middle-aged man and woman in the cab aren’t even paying attention to her; they’re still staring out into the red, shifting mists of City Park. Kevin and Joel are watching her stoically from the cruiser.

  Without a word, Rachel pulls the backpack on fully, then turns and begins walking east on Mulberry.

  Chapter 20

  Holding the shotgun tightly in her right fist, Rachel gets to the sidewalk and keeps a close eye on the nearest group of bodies. At a medium-sized pine, about half a dozen corpses are crammed against the base, their bodies angled up, their limbs wrapped crazily backward. The limbs of the tree are similarly twisted and splayed to allow the things to get closer and closer to whatever essential thing is inside that tree. Rachel feels her lip curl at the sight. She has the shotgun steadied in their direction now, but they don’t seem to notice her.

  She picks up her pace and jogs to the first turn at Jackson. Just before she takes the left, she glances behind her and can see the two vehicles standing there at Sheldon, about the midpoint of the large park’s south edge, and she can just make out the figures of Bonnie and Kevin. The frantic police-cruiser lightbar still flashes silently in the gray smoke and mist. Rachel takes the turn and slows to a walk, breathing heavily and coughing a little. The bag on her back is heavy with bullets and blood.

  On the walk to the first block of Jackson, she is consumed by almost debilitating regret. She moves in fits and starts along the sidewalk opposite the east edge of the park. The silence is oppressive. She twice considers turning back but manages to stay her course.

  Her eyes stinging, she becomes aware of smaller masses of corpses at the conifer trees along Jackson, particularly the larger ones. Each corpse is marked by that strange red illumination, that pinpoint of crimson that she hasn’t seen so clearly since before she was at the hospital.

  She finds herself searching for Tony. She can’t help it. She’s so close to his home now, he could be anywhere. She’s certain he’s no longer sprawled across his bed, the way she found him. She knows it! As much as she wishes it were true that she had smothered him before he twitched back to unnatural life, she’s sure he’s out here somewhere, engaged in this unspeakable … something.

  A street away from her house, she begins to see that everything is exactly as she left it a day ago, except that the bodies she observed on the ground and crumpled over their steering wheels are gone. The same crashed cars sit silent and still against the curbs; the same truck is embedded in the home across the way. Where the two children lay unconscious in their driveway yesterday morning, Rachel sees only a little blue baseball cap as evidence that something happened there. The kids are nowhere to be seen, but Rachel knows what has become of them. Just like all the others.

  Tony’s house looms on the right, and she can see her own home across from it. There’s a body attached to the Bristlecone Pine in Tony’s side yard, but she’s not sure she recognizes it. She slows down, bringing up the shotgun in her grasp. She carefully edges closer to it, off the street and onto the sidewalk, then onto the grass.

  The head is bent backward, its jaw working at the tree’s bark, so she can’t see the face, but it is a massive woman wearing a blue patterned muumuu. She knows who this must be. It’s her neighbor from three doors down, Mrs. Carmichael, whom she’s never before now seen leave her property. As a little girl, Rachel would catch glimpses of the fantastically large woman behind her porch—always friendly, moon-faced and shy. Rachel feels sad for the woman, wrenched by this affliction outside of her home and now hideously attached to a tree, of all things.

  In sadness and pity, Rachel lets the shotgun’s barrel drop. She can’t seem to take her eyes off the massive body, which has wrapped itself around the base of the pine. The layers of fat are concealing a lot of the hyperextended strain and stretch of the bones and skin she’s seen on the other bodies, leaving this one to appear perhaps the most alien of all of them, simply because it appears more comfortable. But it is absolutely bent backward upon itself, all the while depositing a brown splatter of masticated bark below its head.

  While Rachel studies it, it abruptly stops its chewing, and the head swings around on its big shoulders to stare at her.

  Startled, Rachel nearly falls to her knees. Yes, it is indeed Mrs. Carmichael, although the inverted face is a disaster of wet splinters and sap, which has streamed stickily into the hair, making it hang down in stiff cords. The mouth is full of chewed bark, but it manages to emit a low growl like an angry feline. The eyes are flat and dead, though there’s some kind of awareness there.

  Rachel brings up the shotgun and watches her.

  Mrs. Carmichael makes no other movement, just continues growling, so Rachel eases back away from the scene. Once she has moved perhaps eight feet from the large woman’s body, the head returns to the bark and begins again to chew at it.

  Rachel regains her path and rounds the corner to Tony’s house. She scans the street in every direction, her gaze darting from tree to tree. She sees perhaps a dozen corpses clamped to them, but none of them appear to be Tony or even his mother.

  Rachel’s own home, despite what happened there yesterday, looks extremely inviting. In spite of everything, her bedroom is in there, after all. Her bed with its covers, her bathroom with a probably still-working shower—the notion of showering and falling into her bed fills her with a longing so profound that Rachel nearly swoons. She loses herself in an impossible daydream for a few moments.

  The lure of self-delusion is powerful, and she very nearly gives in to it, nearly begins walking toward her front door. The overriding image is of herself buried under her covers, her pillow over her head. Even now, this image seems the most ideal path for her future.

  What snaps her out of her daydream is the sounds of shots fired. Apparently the Thompson brothers are back to their campaign to rid the world of the reanimated corpses, one at a time. Or perhaps it is another group—her own?—beginning a similar campaign. The thought sickens her a little now, even though she herself is guilty of the same kind of execution. Not only the family in the van but also the countless corpses she smothered at the hospital.

  She closes her eyes as she turns, and heads by instinct straight toward Tony’s house. She doubts he’s there, but she has to be sure.

  The front door is open wide. Rachel knows she didn’t leave it open earlier. Glancing left and right, she brings up the weapon and enters the home. It is dim and very quiet; no movement whatsoever.

  “Hello?” she calls.

  Silence.

  She makes her way through the dark front room and into the kitchen. It’s impossible that she was in this room 30 hours ago, when this nightmare began. She sets the shotgun on the counter, opens the dark refrigerator. It’s still relatively cold inside. She marvels at how the world has
utterly changed in less time than it takes for a refrigerator to lose its chill. She finds a single bottle of water in the fridge door. She opens it and drinks it down without stopping, some of the water spilling down her chin and onto her shirt. Her throat and sinuses feel raw and painful from all the smoke in the air. She tosses the empty bottle into the trashcan to the left of the refrigerator, then grabs the roll of paper towels from the counter, tears one off, and rids her nose of a dismaying amount of blackened mucus. She wads up the paper towel and throws it away.

  She opens the fridge again, gives it a quick scan, and finds some leftover pizza. She takes it out and eats two pieces cold. She’s ravenous. She has to consciously slow herself down. When she’s finished, she tears off another paper towel and wipes her face.

  Finally she glances down the dark hallway toward Tony’s bedroom.

  She reaches for the shotgun again, cradling it securely in her arms. Directing it ahead of her, she moves forward into the hall. There are a bunch of crooked frames containing family pictures on the wall, showing all the stages of Tony’s life. She laughed at these once, but now they make her want to cry.

  “Tony?”

  Just as she calls into the dark hall, a grenade blast sounds in the distance.

  Tony’s door is wide open. She swallows painfully at its edge, and peers around the doorframe. The bed is empty. She stares at it for a long moment without breathing, then lets out a long, shaky exhalation. She’s not sure what she was expecting. What, for him to still be there? For everything to be back to normal? For this all to have been some weird dream?

  She enters the small bedroom, leans the shotgun against the wall, removes her backpack, then falls onto the bed. There are no tears. She buries her face into Tony’s pillow, gathering in his scent, losing herself in it. She curls into a ball and brings his sheets and blanket over her. She closes her eyes and feels the hard pull of sleep and comfort and forgetting. She could drop away to sleep in an instant. She bolts back up.

  “No.”

  She climbs out of the bed and hurriedly pulls on the pack. She takes up the weapon and strides into the hall without looking back. After ensuring that Tony’s mother is gone, too, she walks into the bathroom and relieves herself. She can’t take her eyes off the medicine cabinet that she raided earlier for supplies. She remembers that version of herself with a deep sense of loss. That Rachel hadn’t yet seen the extent of what the world had become. If she could become that Rachel again, perhaps she would bury herself in Tony’s sheets and just stay there. Let Tony’s light consume her so that she could go with him to whatever dark destiny lay in wait for him.

  Soon, she’s out of the house and onto the porch. Under dark gray skies lined with red like static lightning, she scans the street again, miserably.

  She can’t put it off any longer.

  She walks across the street to her house, her eyes carefully watching for any sort of threat. The shotgun remains at the ready, but there’s nothing to be afraid of anymore. She knows that.

  She opens the door and steps into the house. The first thing she sees is her apple core on the table by the front window. It’s browned but still relatively moist. She has to force herself to look away. She’s starting to get irritated by her mind’s tendency toward longing for a too-recent past.

  Without hesitating, she proceeds down the inner hallway to her father’s bedroom. It comes as no surprise to Rachel that Susanna is still sprawled naked across the bed, precisely where she left her—

  —where I killed her—

  —and the room is humid and slightly sour. Rachel stops at Susanna’s bedside, staring down at her dead stepmother. She lets a long moment of silence pass, in which a jangle of emotions pass through her. They are difficult emotions, and she weathers them stoically.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispers, feeling something like sparking flint inside her. “I didn’t mean—I didn’t mean for you to…”

  She lets her words fall dead in the hollow room. Suddenly she feels that she has nothing more to say to this woman. Ever since she found her father unconscious in that stairwell at work, knocked out but alive, it’s like she’s been waiting for this moment, waiting to come back here. Working up to it. She feels she should have words to scream at Susanna, pent-up words, some kind of juvenile comeuppance, but in this new world, everything from the past is dying in her throat.

  “Bye,” she says flatly.

  She turns and leaves the room. Directly across the hall is her own bedroom, and she enters it slowly, her heart beating hard. The bed is unmade, and clothes are still flung here and there, evidence of both her night out with Tony and her harried escape yesterday morning. The battery-powered clock on the wall is still ticking; it reads 9:34 a.m. She scans the room, takes in the smallness of it, the school honors and the athletic trophies, the pop-culture posters and all the toys left over from her youth. There’s even her ratty stuffed bear near her pillow, the one she has slept with since she was tiny. She nearly about-faces and leaves the room, but rushes to the pillow, picks up the stuffed animal, and stuffs it deep into her pack next to the units of O-negative blood, the syringe packs and the shotgun shells.

  When she emerges into the living room and goes to the kitchen, she hears a staccato burst of more gunfire in the distance. She stands in the middle of the open area, glancing around at everything. She wanted so badly to come here, to leave the rest of the survivors in favor of returning to this place, and now she knows she’s done here. She’s not really sure why she came back, but there must have been a reason somewhere inside her. Because she feels different now.

  She’s ready to move on.

  Rachel goes to her own refrigerator now and cleans it out of whatever food she can. She has a feeling that fresh food is going to be hard to come by in the near future. She opens the vegetable crisper to find an assortment of apples and oranges and pears. She looks at them for a long moment, appreciating them. Then she tosses them into her backpack. She also grabs a few more bottles of water.

  She steps out onto the porch and then down into her front yard. The shotgun is heavy in her arms, and she’s increasingly convinced that she doesn’t need it—at least not constantly in her arms. She kneels down, clicks the safety switch that Joel showed her, and secures the weapon against her backpack, barrel pointed skyward. She pulls the heavy backpack onto her shoulders, then practices shrugging out of it and rearming herself. She tries four times, learning the most expedient motion. Finally, she moves off, scouting for a vehicle.

  She starts moving south again, through the desolate neighborhood, this time intending to head southeast, back toward the hospital and her dad. She’s striding down the center of the empty street, watching cars and corpses alike. None of them are moving.

  A block away, she finds an abandoned blue Toyota Camry. It’s angled against a curb and doesn’t appear to have suffered any damage at all. She approaches it with a shade of wariness and leans into the open door. The keys are still in the ignition, complete with a dangling Mountain Dew logo keychain. She takes off her pack and steps fully in, dropping her gear in the passenger seat. In moments, she’s driving east on Magnolia toward Shields.

  She makes it only a couple hundred yards before stopping abruptly, the Camry’s engine juddering to silence. Her foot is jammed on the brake, and she’s staring out her window.

  In the yard of the corner house is a giant Australian Pine, and at its base is a single corpse. That corpse appears to be Tony. She knows those shorts, that dark gray tee-shirt, and she knows those feet. She can see the lower portion of his flat belly, and his dark hair hanging down. Her brow creases at the sight of his awkwardly clamped limbs, the obvious pain of dislocation.

  No, she thinks. Not Tony.

  She opens her door. She barely registers a large explosion from the west, followed by more random gunfire. Before leaving the car, she unfastens the shotgun from her pack, a feeling of great emptiness blooming at her center.

  She crosses the street, glancing o
nly occasionally left and right. Her focus is on Tony, and she’s sure it’s him now. Closer, she can see the shape of his chin, the three or four days’ growth of beard there. Emotion clutches at her, but she coughs through it.

  “Oh, Tony,” she whispers.

  She edges closer, noting the rhythmic, muscular motions of his jaw. There’s almost no movement left for his hyperextended limbs. They’re twisted back tightly, and she can’t imagine them moving any farther without submitting to multiple, debilitating fractures. A mash of splinters and bark has puddled below his head atop a small mound of pine needles. She cranes her neck slowly to see his face, which is nearly unrecognizable behind a mask of sap and mulch.

  Without meaning to, Rachel collapses at Tony’s side, sitting awkwardly with the shotgun against her shoulder. She stares at him bluntly, and she realizes that she wishes she hadn’t found him. Better to have never seen him again and forever wonder about the fate of his reanimated corpse, whether in the mob at City Park or as part of the teeming multitudes of bodies seemingly amassing in the foothills. She would rather embrace that mystery than be forced to say this brutal goodbye.

  In the shadow of the large pine, whose lower branches have been cracked aside to permit Tony’s proximity to the base, Rachel observes the red illumination quite clearly. It’s pulsing from his mostly plugged nostrils and barely visible from beneath the skin of his jaw.

  She stares at the illumination with contempt.

  “Fuck you!” she says loudly.

  At these words, Tony’s mouth ceases its chewing, and the head swivels upside down to consider her. Rachel scrambles backward a few feet, bringing up the shotgun. A wad of moist, woody chaw falls out of Tony’s mouth, and he emits a congested wheeze. He is now facing her fully. She sees his eyes, gummy with sap, and emotion takes her.

  There’s no recognition in those dead eyes. She’s not sure what part of her expected it, or hoped for it, but now that she sees the complete absence of Tony in this horrible corpse, she begins to sob almost uncontrollably. She tries to stop the tears and keep her eyes focused, but they keep coming. She swipes them away on her sleeve, angry at herself.