Tony’s corpse continues to gasp at her like a cornered animal.
After a while, the sobs dwindle to wet spasms in her chest. She watches Tony’s face while she takes control of herself again. She becomes aware of the shotgun still in her grip, its stock planted in the grass below it. And now she’s nodding, bringing the weapon into her lap and clicking off the safety. Rachel anchors herself on her knees, sniffling, and levels the shotgun. She brings the barrel up toward Tony’s forehead.
Tony doesn’t react in the slightest to the weapon, just continues that low, gurgly gasp.
The barrel begins to wobble and sway.
“Come on,” Rachel tells herself, but the barrel falls down and away. “Shit!”
She can’t do it, she can’t use a goddamn shotgun to kill her boyfriend. She knows there’s nothing left of Tony there, but she still can’t do it. No way.
She pulls the shotgun back to her lap and secures the safety again. She gets to her feet, watching him. She backs away, three feet, six feet, and his face slowly turns away from her. And by the time she reaches the sidewalk, he has opened his mouth and clamped it against the already-savaged pine bark, the red glow beginning again to throb.
She knows she should leave him here.
Except, she can’t.
She didn’t leave her dad to die in a dark, concrete office stairwell, and she’s not going to leave Tony to this inhuman life.
She gets to the car and stores the shotgun. She pulls the backpack out of the passenger seat and unzips it. She rummages through to the bottom and finds a unit of O-negative blood. She vividly recalls the pain and fury at the hospital admissions area. The thought of poking a hole in this bag and spraying Tony with blood, apparently scalding him, is also too much. Even in the face of this heinous and false approximation of life, she doesn’t want to cause him pain.
It needs to be quick, and as painless as possible.
She begins to put the blood back into the bag in favor, again, of the shotgun. It will be messy, but she doesn’t have to look at the aftermath. She can shut her eyes. Then her eyes stop on the nearly forgotten plastic package that includes three syringes of differing capacities. She digs it out and considers it.
One of the syringes has a large, 60-millileter tube. She unpeels the packaging and removes it. Without thinking, she presses the needle into the blood packet and uses the plunger to carefully fill the wide tube. The blood looks dark and thick.
It’s odd to think of blood as a weapon. But it’s more than that, she knows. In a way, it will save him. She’s sure of it. By injecting it rather than merely spraying it, she will ensure a quick end to Tony’s living death.
She finishes filling the syringe, and she turns again to approach Tony. She walks very quietly, not wanting to alert him. She steps onto the grass once more and comes up behind him. Immediately she sees a bulging vein in his right bicep, remembers what she has learned from Bonnie about administering injections.
“Okay,” she breathes.
She plants herself solidly at his side, prepares herself, and then gently inserts the needle into Tony’s arm. Before injecting any blood, she waits for a reaction to the puncture. Nothing. She holds her breath and begins to press the plunger.
Tony’s body jerks.
Adrenaline spiking inside her, Rachel presses hard, letting the blood rush into him. His muscles clench and shiver, and his face whips away from the tree. His mouth begins bleating—a hard, raspy noise that sounds like it’s tearing his throat apart.
“No no no no!” Rachel is screaming.
This is not what she wanted!
With most of the syringe emptied into Tony’s arm, his body is thrashing too violently for her to remain. She staggers away, and the syringe drops out of his arm to the ground. She brings her hands to her mouth and watches him. His arms disengage from the pine, and he’s still upside down but his limbs are uncertain, flailing. Rachel turns and runs for the car, reaching it quickly and grasping for the shotgun.
Tony has fallen onto his back. Under the gray sky, she can see the red illumination popping and sparking in his open mouth, splinters and mulch flying in all directions as his head whips back and forth.
She brings up the shotgun, new tears in her eyes, and trudges forward toward him, releasing the safety.
It’s the final sight of Tony’s anguished face that impels Rachel to finally pull the trigger. She can’t stand to look at it anymore, can’t stand the ragged screech coming from his mouth. The red glow behind his face winks out, and her finger convulses in the trigger guard, the blast shoving her backward, and then the world is silent again.
Epilogue
Rachel drives toward the hospital in a daze. She’s barely aware of a huge conflagration off to the west, coming from the foothills. It’s a towering blaze signaling the demise of humanity. The words of the Thompson brothers are whispering through her mindscape:
Best thing to do is set ’em on fire. We sprayed gas over a bunch of ’em and lit ’em up.
There are bursts of gunfire coming from all directions now, survivors everywhere beginning the grisly task of wiping out the corpses for good.
She has seen seven other moving vehicles on her way back to her father, but she has pushed their existence away from her. She follows her path almost unconsciously, blinking to awareness only when she has to navigate through a maze of dead cars. And then her face goes slack again.
Because inside, Rachel has died.
Rachel!
It’s Tony’s voice inside her, calling to her, shouting at her.
“Shut up,” she answers.
Rachel!
She closes her eyes tight and screams within the tight confines of the car, the ragged sound dwindling into a hoarse, raw exhalation. She pounds her fist against the seatback next to her, hard, then harder, until her muscles give out.
She sniffles miserably and stares blankly out at the desolate road coming at her. She doesn’t want to look at anything else. She certainly doesn’t want to look at another corpse, or another conifer tree, or another human being in the world.
Except one.
“Daddy,” she whispers.
She extends her sore arm toward the backpack, feels for the opening. She digs inside, rooting around toward the bottom. In a moment, she’s pulling out her old stuffed bear. She brings it softly to her chest, beneath her chin, and cuddles it there. She feels the bear’s cloth fur, matted from years and years of sleeping with her. The tactile sensation of it nurtures something at her core.
Rachel! comes Tony’s mangled voice.
She shuts her eyes again for a long moment.
Under a bruised-red sky, filled with alien luminescence and new smoke, Rachel drives the barren streets. She knows she is alone at the end of the world.
“I didn’t kill him,” she says out loud. Her voice sounds papery and thin.
She repeats the phrase inwardly.
I didn’t kill him.
She can’t get the vision of Tony out of her head. On his back, the alien glow sparking, sputtering. The syringe falling away from him, most of its O-negative contents rushing through his veins.
They had never tried injecting the blood, had they?
They had never tested that.
RACHEL!
Rachel is crying savagely, not wanting to hear his voice, not anymore, not ever again.
Why hadn’t they tested that? On some anonymous corpse? They were too caught up in the chaos. All she can remember is stuffing that entire unit of blood into that nurse-corpse’s mouth, and watching its red glow pop and stutter. She remembers the apparent pain the corpse endured. And then the boom of Joel’s shotgun, blowing apart the nurse’s skull and the red luminescence. Extinguishing it.
No, they’d never actually seen the effect of injecting the blood. They’d never tried it.
Until now.
She hugs her bear to her chest, to her neck, against the side of her face, and the fur becomes damp with her tears. The bear brin
gs to her the comfort of her home, her bed, her family. Her dad. Her mom.
She thought the injection would bring Tony a peaceful death, away from this alien thing. It was supposed to give him an escape. Like Susanna.
The sight of him jerking on the ground comes back to her. His eyes, glazed over with sap and saliva, locked on her and blinking spastically, trying to focus. And his screams—horrible in the gray morning. Screams of pain, screams of anguish.
She couldn’t handle the sound anymore. She couldn’t bear the sight of him gone and in agony.
So she pulled the trigger.
In the split second before the shotgun barked and obliterated Tony’s skull, he uttered one final, impossible word.
“Rachel!”
There are no tears now. She’s wiping her face with her forearm. She can’t afford more tears.
It’s too big, she thinks. I can’t do it. I can’t do it alone. And it’s too late, anyway.
In her peripheral vision, off to the west, the fires are burning in the Rockies.
There’s nothing I can do now. And what would I say, even if I could find them?
Her path is clear. She turns onto Lemay from Riverside, and the hospital looms in the distance. She motors into the parking area south of the emergency entrance, angles the Toyota in front of the doors, shuts off the engine. She stares at the entrance. Then she places her bear gently back in the pack. With great weariness, she steps out of the car with her shotgun.
It cures them.
The words sting her.
The blood cures them.
The hospital is empty. Carrying only her weapon, she trudges into the admissions area, over the blood-caked tiles. Everything is quiet, save for the distant murmur of the generator. Everything is hollow.
She makes her way through the double doors and into the inner hallway. The office door that leads to her father is still closed. She tries the knob; it’s still locked. She tries kicking at the door several times, but it’s too sturdy.
She stops.
There’s noise inside the room, some kind of slow shuffling movement.
“Daddy?” she calls.
No answer.
“Daddy, if that’s you, stay away from the door.”
Please let it be you, she thinks.
She brings up the shotgun, aims it at the doorknob, and pulls the trigger. The bark of the weapon is gigantic in the dim hallway, and the knob is reduced to a mangled mass. Rachel kicks at it again, but it holds. She tries the shotgun again. The boom threatens to shatter her eardrums; the world seems to stutter into a shrill, jittery whine.
Now there’s a hole in the door where the knob used to be. Rachel kicks at it once again, and the door splinters and swings open.
She drops the shotgun to the floor and enters the room, looking left and right.
There’s no threat.
She comes to a stop at the foot of the bed. Her father is awake. His eyes are wide, and he’s staring at her in confusion.
“Rachel! Good God! What in the—?”
Rachel lets out a long exhalation, as if she’s been holding her breath for a whole day.
“Hi, Daddy.”
“What on Earth are you—?” He blinks his eyes carefully, squinting beneath his wound. “What happened? Where are we?”
“We’re at the hospital.” She can’t take her eyes off of her father, awake and aware. “I’ll explain everything.”
He appears mildly confused.
“Did I fall?” He’s exploring the wound at his forehead, poking at it gingerly. “I remember…” He’s trying to recall something, but it won’t come to him.
Rachel shakes her head. “Better not mess with that wound.”
He removes his hand, watches her curiously. “Listen, Rachel, I’m sorry about last night. I didn’t mean to take all that out on you.”
Rachel looks at her father with an abundance of love in her heart. She walks around to his left, looks down on him. “No, I’m sorry, Dad.”
He seems to focus on her more intently. “Hey, you’re all scraped up. You’re bloody!” His confusion evolves into worry. “What happened? What’s going on?”
She leans over him and embraces him. A single tear drops into his hair. She shuts her eyes tight, holding him. She shuts out the rest of the world.
And she says, “I saved you.”
Acknowledgments
In many ways, Blood Red is a return to my roots. When I was a wee lad, horror was huge. I devoured King, Barker, Straub, McCammon, Lansdale, Laymon, Bloch, and Matheson religiously. Trying to follow their lead, I wrote savage and often pointless tales of extreme horror. Then I explored other genres, tried new styles, and came away unsatisfied. Only recently—after becoming a father, weirdly enough—have I returned full-force to the horror genre. (Perhaps it was all those dirty diapers.) But I like to think that fatherhood has softened me up and given me a perspective from which to instill my tales of terror with genuine warmth and heart. For that, I want to thank my family: my ever-supportive wife Barb and my little ones, Harper and Sophie, who are being raised meticulously to be discriminating horror aficionados.
At the heart of my writing is the inspiration of my own father, John Bovberg, who taught me how to write, and gave me the passion to work hard and keep at it. He didn’t quite live to see this book’s publication, but he read the manuscript and bragged about it till the end. He was my number-one fan. My number-two fan is my fabulous sister, Missy, who promises to keep the bragging tradition moving forward. You rock, sis. Thanks also have to go to my mom, Brenda, for her admittedly biased but excessively proud and loud cheerleading.
Major props to James W. Powell and Kirk Whitham for substantive advice throughout the writing process. You guys have been there to offer sound criticism for twenty years, and I can’t thank you enough. Thanks also to my other early readers, Darin and Sally Sanders, Corey Edwards, Justin Bzdek, Alli Oswandel, Lisa Pere, Dawn Cyr, Bob Kretschman, Dan Kaufman, Lavon Peters, Jeff James, Mark Minasi, John Savill, and my tech advisor, Michael Dragone.
A special note of thanks to Jacob Kier for giving Blood Red a home at Permuted Press. I never really got to know him before the Permuted reins were taken over by Michael L. Wilson and Anthony Ziccardi, but I wish I had. For their part, Michael and Anthony have been fabulous new stewards, and I look forward to a long working relationship. My gratitude to Felicia Sullivan for putting the finishing touches on the book, and to Roy Migabon for the cover. And finally, warm thanks to several “hero” authors for taking the time to read Blood Red—some weird manuscript by this new guy—and help me push it out to the world: Joshua Gaylord, Tom Piccirilli, Richard Lee Byers, Grant Jerkins, Brian Hodge, and (most of all) my old pal and mentor, Robert Devereaux.
About the Author
Jason Bovberg is the author of Blood Red, the forthcoming sequel Draw Blood (also from Permuted Press), and an as-yet-untitled concluding volume in the Blood trilogy. He is also the author of The Naked Dame, a pulp noir novel. He was the founder of Dark Highway Press, which published Robert Devereaux’s controversial Santa Steps Out, as well as the highly acclaimed weird-western anthology Skull Full of Spurs. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with his wife Barb, his daughters Harper and Sophie, and his rabid canine, Cujo. You can find him online at www.jasonbovberg.com.
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