Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood (13 page)

“All right, Mike, I’m just a little pissed off about the way it went down. I lost my cruiser, goddammit.”

“Yeah, well, I lost my wife.”

Michael regrets the words immediately.

“Did you find her?” Joel asks.

“Yes, I did.”

“Was she—”

“Dead.”

“Like—not like one of those things?”

“Not like one of those things,” Michael repeats. “Just—dead.”

Rachel interrupts. “Look!”

Racing toward them, south on Mathews, is a boy, about nine years old. A still-human boy. His eyes are nearly popping out of his head with fear. Behind him is a group of perhaps eight scrambling bodies, two of them riding the boy’s shadow.

“Stop, stop!” Michael shouts.

Joel is juddering to a stop and furiously stabbing at buttons to roll down his window. He finds the right one, and the window squeaks down. Immediately they can hear the boy’s frightened squeals and the bodies’ throaty exhalations. He’s twenty feet away and closing fast.

“Mike, it’s up to you,” Joel calls back. “I’ll be ready to soak those bastards.”

Rachel is already handing Joel her half-f Soaker. Michael lets his empty weapon fall to the floorboards.

He opens his door and gets ready to receive the boy. He holds out his arms.

“Come on, little man!”

Joel lets loose an arcing spray of blood, aiming for the two bodies directly behind the boy. He’s a sharp aim, nails them in the eyes, sends them tumbling away, squalling. In one fluid motion, the boy dives into the car, Michael flings the door shut, Joel hits the gas, and the two bodies collide clumsily with the rear bumper as the Toyota shoots forward. The other bodies in the near distance react with a frenzy of gasping grunts, and then they recede behind the car.

Michael gets the boy settled next to him. He’s wearing a soiled white tank top and gym shorts and smells foul.

“You all right?”

The boy is nearly hyperventilating. “Thank you,” he says breathlessly, then to Joel and Rachel, “Hi.” His chest is heaving. He appears to be bravely holding back tears.

“Catch your breath, son,” comes Joel’s voice, sounding like the cop he is—or was.

“Okay.” He’s gulping for air.

Michael locks eyes expectantly with his daughter, and there’s some kind of spark there, something passes between them, but Michael catches only the ghost of it. It feels significant, though. He’s certain about it now: She’s not telling him something.

“What’s your name?” Rachel asks the boy, breaking the eye contact.

“Danny.” His breathing is slowing but still ragged. “I live over there.” He points back toward where he came from. “My sister is one of those ….”

Michael can tell the kid is in shock and running on fumes. “It’s all right, Danny, you’re safe with us.”

“Do you have any water?” The boy’s eyes are still wide as saucers.

Michael thinks of the backpack sitting on the floorboards of the Pilot and feels suddenly very thirsty himself.

“I’ve got some,” Rachel offers. “There was one in the car, half empty.” She takes it from a compartment next to her and hands it back to him. “Here you go.”

Danny twists open the cap and drinks greedily.

Rachel is watching him carefully. “Have you been hurt at all?”

Danny just looks at her, drinking.

“I mean, have those bodies hurt you? Your family, maybe?”

The bottle comes away from his lips. “I still don’t know where my mom is, she was supposed to come right home after work. She works the night shift. My dad is—”

Silence finishes that thought.             

Rachel is still looking him over. Michael knows what she’s searching for: the pale spots on the skin. To Michael, Danny appears unblemished.

“Are your dad or sister still back there?”

Danny prefers not to acknowledge that question. He looks away, takes another drink, then lets the empty bottle fall to the floor. He finishes swallowing.

“I’m sorry, Danny, I didn’t mean to—”

“Dee Dee was chasing me.” Danny is flattened against the cloth seat, legs akimbo, palms up, exhausted. “But I don’t know where Daddy went. I sure wish I did.”

Joel makes the turn onto Riverside. Michael keeps searching all vantage points, watching for movement. There’s nothing for a quarter mile.

“He went to work in the morning, and he usually calls me on my phone. I have a phone that he calls me on to make sure I’m up. But he didn’t call me. He didn’t call. But I thought that was because my phone was broken.”

“Danny, we’re gonna take you somewhere safe, okay?” Rachel says. “There’s more people there, and there’s plenty of food and water and places to sleep. I don’t know what happened to your folks either, but we’ll make sure you’re okay.”

All he does is nod.

Rachel is watching him over the back of her seat. “So you’ve been in your house all this time? Waiting for your parents?”

He nods again.

“What have you been doing?”

“I played Nintendo for a long time until the battery wore out, and then I found Momma’s old phone with Temple Run on it and I got six million points. And then …”

Michael listens to the boy talk, lets his head fall back against his headrest. He swallows dryly, craving water. He can wait until he’s back at the hospital, where Bonnie can tend to his head. He dreads her admonishments, but he deserves them. He doesn’t regret going home to find Susanna, but at the same time … he does. His head is just a thick dull throb now; it has gone beyond sharp warning pains and into some kind of hushed panic mode.

“… I have a lot of books, too, and I’m the best reader in my grade, and I mean all three classes at the school …”

Rachel, propped there in her seat, listening almost raptly to this boy, is like a stranger to him. Without her makeup, without the trappings of her old teenage life, she has emerged as if from a chrysalis into a new being. Hair slicked back, jaw set, she exudes purpose and initiative and confidence. Michael feels a weird resentment that it took the end of the world to bring out these qualities.

“Were you scared?” Rachel asks now, pulling Michael from his thoughts.

“No,”
Danny says, as if not appreciating the question.

“Well, I would have been.”

“I wasn’t
scared
. But—why are they all mad now? Why are they running around like that? They didn’t chase me before. I even went to other houses, I went to Jake’s house next door, and the people next to him, and I found food, and they didn’t bother me at all, they just kept on chewing those trees. Now it’s like they want to chew on
me
.”

He’s playing with his empty water bottle, letting it twirl between his fingers.

“I don’t know, little dude, but we’re trying to figure that out.”

Joel takes the turn onto Lemay, and the road begins its rise toward the hospital. Michael watches Culver’s pass by and thinks he has never felt hunger for a cheeseburger quite as poignantly as in this moment. As the road levels out near the hospital parking garage, the emergency entrance comes into view.

“Shit!” Joel shouts.

The car comes to a quick stop.

Scores of bodies are flowing toward the hospital entrance, and there’s no telling how many are already there. The urgency of their movement fills the car with held-breath horror.

“We’re out of blood!” Rachel reminds them loudly, clutching the edge of her seat, her empty, blood-stained Super Soaker impotent in her lap.

Danny has leaned forward to gawk at the hospital entrance.

“The bags are in the cruiser.” Joel checks his own weapon, tosses it in front of Rachel. “And so is the portable.”

“The portable?” Michael says.

“The radio. Kevin’s got one, but—”

“My pack is back in that Pilot. So is your shotgun, Rachel. And my Colt.”

“Grandpa’s gun?”

“Yeah.”

The car idles as they watch the frenetic activity at the entrance.

“Think everybody’s still inside?”

“I’m thinking these bastards wouldn’t be in such a frenzy if they weren’t,” Joel says. He’s staring at the mass of former humanity, his jaw working, thinking, thinking.

Michael realizes that he’s clutching the side of his head with his palm. Now that everything has effectively paused inside the car, he realizes that his skull is throbbing like a drumbeat and his eyes are watering as if he’s been sobbing.

With a strange sense of detachment, he flashes on Susanna’s corpse and feels more tears pulse at his eyes. Through blurred vision, he glances at his daughter, who hasn’t looked at him for the bulk of this entire insane journey.

“We need a better vehicle,” Joel announces.

He reverses the Toyota in a rush for twenty yards, then makes a tight left onto Doctors Lane, behind the hospital.

“Do you think any of those things saw us?” Danny says, falling back into the seat.

“I don’t think it’s a matter of seeing us, Danny,” Joel says. “I think they sense us some other way.”

“Like they smell us?”

“Maybe.”

“I know I stink. Our shower isn’t working anymore.”

“I think it’s something else,” Joel says. “Something inside. Just the fact that we’re different.”

He circles around the north side of the hospital, hoping for a view of the emergency exit from the east. Michael is leaning forward anxiously, still clutching his forehead, and Danny is right there with him.

In the expectant silence, Joel says, “I just want to see if we can spot Kevin’s truck. If it’s still there, they’re in trouble. If not, maybe they got out.”

“But those things are targeting something, right?” Michael asks, under a prolonged wince. “Someone’s in there.”

“Yeah. Shit. Well, I still want to see if some of them got out.”

They make it to the east parking lot, winding through parked and silent cars, only a few minor collisions, and then they see the relentless activity at the emergency exit. Kevin’s truck is gone.

Joel brings the Toyota to a stop and drapes his arms over the steering wheel.

“Okay, so I’m gonna assume that most of them got out. Where would they go?”

“The college?” Rachel asks. “You and Kevin were talking with Ron over there.”

“Would they have gone looking for me, too?” Michael asks reluctantly.

“I don’t think they know where you lived.”

Joel’s casual use of past tense hits Michael hard. He lets his hand drift down from his brow and cover his clamped-shut eyes, and he grits his teeth. He really has awakened into a dark new existence, and there’s no way he’s ever going to return to his previous one. A few days ago, he had firm hold of his destiny. His marriage was strong in all the right ways. He had managed to work through not only his own grief but his daughter’s profound grief over the death of Cassie, and sure, even though Rachel had her own complications and rebelliousness, she was a good kid, so much better than her father. Hell, you could see her basic goodness right now, in the way she had responded to this madness. And he was amassing cash toward—what, something better? He had so much going for him, and was on the verge of so much more, and now it’s all gone, replaced by this new and brutal truth.

Everything, like the money at the back of his closet, is worthless now.

When he opens his eyes again, Rachel is staring back at him. Father and daughter finally share a meaningful look, and then she breaks it, returns her gaze to the bodies swarming at the emergency entrance.

“Looks like one of them is on to us,” she announces.

Sure enough, one of the bodies has sensed them in the car, and is advancing across a knoll to the asphalt a hundred feet away. It’s an old man, scrawny, in long johns. His face, hanging from a straining neck, is full of craggy, red anger. And now a second and third body have joined the first.

“Interesting,” Joel breathes, leaning back and preparing to leave.

“What?” Rachel asks.

“It’s like they’re keying in on us when we’re stopped or when they’re right on top of us. If we’re in motion, maybe they don’t sense us?”

“Well, I wish you’d get in motion right now. Those things freak me out.”

“Just a sec.”

There are now five or six of the bodies approaching. Fifty yards, forty. Michael can see the exaggerated fury in their eyes, the rivulets of sap stuck to their foreheads, plugging up their nostrils, and sticky in their hair.

“They’re swarming,” Joel says. “Like they’re—like they’re all of one mind.”

“You’re right,” Michael says.

“What does that mean?” Danny asks. “Like bees or something?”

“Except a bit more aggressive.” Joel spits out the words.

He hits the gas and pulls a U-turn, heading out of the parking lot. Michael and Danny crane their necks to watch the scrabbling mass give futile chase.

“Okay,” says Joel, “last thing Kevin talked to me about was getting over to the Wildlife office off Prospect, seeing if we could get our hands on some tranq guns and darts. I figure, even if they’re not there, we can round up the supplies and head elsewhere. Maybe join Ron at the school. Sound like a plan?”

“You think those tranquilizers could work?” Michael asks.

“What, cure them?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, especially the way those things are now, no way do I want to get close to them. Tranq rifles will let us pump in the blood from a distance. Rachel is right, blood is our greatest weapon against these things. I’m just not sure …”

Rachel pipes in: “Not sure of what?”

“Look, girl, I’m all for saving lives, but I’m just not sure these lives are worth saving. You saw that body at the hospital. Once the blood was pumped into it, it was screaming in pain. Broken bones, hyperextended everything, who knows what kind of tissue damage.”

“Bodies heal,” says Rachel.

“And that was a body that never went outside, never attached itself to one of those trees. It didn’t have woodchips and splinters tearing up its entire digestive works.”

“Are you suggesting we don’t bother?” Rachel’s voice is confrontational. “That we just sit on this cure and let them suffer? You don’t think it means anything that the blood flowing through our veins can reverse all of this?”

“I’m just wondering what I would want if that had happened to me, that’s all. Don’t take it personally.”

Rachel doesn’t respond, just stares forward.

“I’m the one championing the tranq darts, remember,” Joel says. “And anyway, we might not have any choice in the matter. Things are changing every minute around here, and right now those goddamn things are monsters.
Monsters!
Let’s just see what happens, huh?”

The car is silent as they make the turn back onto Lemay, heading south toward Prospect—and back toward the emergency entrance.

“Uh …” Michael says. “I can’t help but notice that you’re—”

“They’re distracted on the other side now. Should be clear.”

Sure enough, only a few stragglers are out in front of the emergency entrance. Joel slows the Toyota to a crawl, and the survivors search the area for any evidence of struggle or escape. Everything looks fairly calm. Michael sees no bodies lying dead on the ground and feels a distinct relief. But who knows what lies farther in? He does see movement in there, but it’s the crooked crab movements of the infected.

The infected.

It’s the first time that word has passed through his mind in any natural kind of way. He can’t recall it being uttered by any of the survivors, but his concussion is probably to blame for that. He quietly considers the word, its implications, but the line of thought dwindles away into pain-threatening contradictions. His mind refuses to even acknowledge the notion of some otherworldly infection.

Or perhaps
possession
is a better term.

The thought makes him shudder.

The whole scene in front of the hospital has the feel of an area attacked and then hastily abandoned.

“I think everyone got out,” Joel says.

“We can only hope they had time to grab blood and medicine,” Rachel adds.

“Right.”

“I hope they’re okay.”

As Joel picks up speed, Danny speaks up.

“Is there any … any food?” The words comes out quietly, meekly.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Danny,” Rachel says, twisting her body to look him in the eyes. “You’re hungry? When’s the last time you ate?”

“I’ve been making peanut butter sandwiches every day, and I never ran out, but I got a little tired of those. There’s cereal, but the milk went bad. So did all the turkey.”

“Meat’s gonna be tough to come by, little dude,” Joel says. “But right now everything in the supermarket is free, so I’m sure we can find you something. Can it wait an hour or two till we get a better idea what we’re up against?”

Danny bows his head and seems to dig himself in for a wait.

Michael’s right hand is aching in its clutch of his forehead, and now he realizes that the pain has eased enough to let go. He brings the hand down and blinks hard. Perhaps it’s the relative rest his body has received, sitting here in this seat, or perhaps it’s just being reunited with his daughter, but either way, he feels a gratitude to … to whatever small benevolent force seems to be on their side, letting them escape the awful fate of the bulk of humanity.

“So let’s say we get the tranquilizers and build up some blood supplies …” Michael says. “And Bonnie gets everything in order with the anticoagulant, and we can reliably weaponize ourselves. What about after that? Are we gonna—”

At that moment, another vehicle, a large late-model BMW, comes careening out onto Lemay from Pitkin, a residential street to their left. Joel curses loudly, stamping on the brakes. The BMW swerves, missing them by inches. Michael can see the sweaty red face of a middle-aged man, for a split second, and then the car rights itself just as two scrambling bodies come surging out of the neighborhood in pursuit. But as the BMW roars south, wildly twisting around the wrecks that dot the street, the bodies immediately sense the four survivors in the Toyota and come leaping toward them instead.

“Jesus Christ, man,” Joel whispers, and Michael can hear a helplessness there that doesn’t exactly fill him with optimism.

He jerks the car forward as two of the bodies hit the side panels, almost in unison. Michael is staring right into the wide, dry, dead eyes of a woman who might as well have been the BMW driver’s wife—a hideous mockery of a suburban housewife. She gasps at him, her jaw poking at the window, and then she’s gone, receding into the background.

“Just keep moving,” Rachel says, obviously shaken.

“Ri—” Joel starts, then pauses, reacting to something ahead of them. “Hey, hey! That’s what I’m talkin’ about.”

“What?”

He nods his head forward.

About three hundred yards ahead, crooked against the curb next to the flower shop, is a bright yellow Hummer.

“Oh brother,” says Michael. “Seriously?”

“Fuckin’ A—sorry kid.”

Danny doesn’t seem fazed by the language.

Michael lets out a humorless laugh. “And environmentalism was rendered pointless in the blink of an eye.”

“Goddamn liberals.” Joel’s laugh is more vocal. “Okay, I’m gonna stop quick right next to it, and Rachel, you’re gonna jump out and check that thing for keys, see if it starts up. Got it?”

Rachel releases a whiny sigh. “You sure we need that?”

“Yes. I am sure.”

“Wait a second,” Michael interrupts, “I should do that, I can jump out and get it started.”

“No you can’t, man, not yet.” Joel scans the area and hones in on the Hummer, then checks the rearview mirror. “We’re clear. No shame in it, Mike. You’re still recovering. Just be ready to climb in.”

“I can do it, Dad.”

Michael flashes back four years to when he tried to teach Rachel how to handle a stick shift in his old beat-up Volkswagen Rabbit, that clunker he hung on to just for her, knowing it would be her first car, and believing that it was essential to teach a first-time driver how to handle a manual transmission. Her heart had never been in it, though. She’d never really wanted to learn it, and had sold that car to save up for a dreamed-of newer VW that never happened. Michael feels a deep twinge of something like loss when he realizes that here, right now, is when that stick-shift lesson would have paid off.