Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood (14 page)

“Here we go.”

The Toyota lurches to a stop next to the Hummer, whose door is barely clicked shut. Rachel jumps fluidly from her side and leaps up onto the huge vehicle’s sideboards, pulling at the heavy door. It swings open and she slides in. She quickly gives a thumbs up, and the ignition turns. She knows enough to start up a manual transmission and idle in in neutral. The battery is a little sleepy, but the engine fires.

“Okay, out,” Joel calls.

The three remaining doors fling open, and the survivors make a run for it. Danny is inside the Hummer before Michael can barely edge past the Toyota’s rear bumper, and even Joel is already climbing in to replace Rachel at the wheel.

Michael’s heart is at his throat, his pulse rushing at his ears. His eyes twitch in all directions, anticipating any attack. The area is wide open, and he feels like the largest, most lumbering target in all of Fort Collins.

But no bodies rush him. The ones behind them, in the distance, have veered off into a neighborhood.

Rachel rolls down the window on the rear passenger side. “Take the front, Dad.”

He pulls himself up into shotgun and lets out a grunt as the door slams.

The Hummer rumbles forward confidently, like a tank. Under his headache, Michael rolls his eyes but even he recognizes the vehicle’s value in the current situation.

“Little over half a tank of gas,” Joel says, scanning the dash.

“Good, that should give us a few miles anyway.” Michael can’t help it. “Okay, I’m done.”

“This is a nice car,” Danny says, smiling.

Joel tosses Michael a smirk, then takes the immediate right onto Prospect, heading west toward the Wildlife office. Between here and there lies about a mile of residential streets leading into quiet neighborhoods. But now every street appears poised to let loose with scurrying bodies. All eyes are on alert, watching for movement—and they soon find that most of the streets appear deserted. Danny even spots a few bodies still wrapped painfully around the bases of evergreens, as if they simply haven’t awoken to the “scent” of nearby survivors. That, in fact, becomes the working theory: that the bodies are only becoming active and aggressive when they sense that they have an opportunity, nearby, to take out a surviving human being.

The most haunting image reveals itself as they pass a church just west of Robertson, where a group of the things is swarming beyond a small parking lot, at the building’s curved front entrance.

“There’s people in there.” Rachel’s voice is hard and sad. “Survivors. Or there were.”

“Can we go get ’em?” Danny asks.

Joel brings the Hummer to a stop, considering. He glances over at Michael.

“I think the boy’s got a point. Let’s see what this bastard can do.”

He lurches the heavy vehicle toward the parking lot, and as if they’ve passed over a kind of psychic barrier, all the turned-over heads of the scurrying bodies swivel to face them.

“Wait!” Rachel says, understanding dawning.

“I wanna see what those things are capable of, too,” Joel adds.

“Joel …” she says warily.

“Don’t worry.”

As he enters the parking lot, Joel mashes down on the horn, jolting everyone in the car. The blatting sound is surprisingly weak for a suburban tank, but it does its job of causing a stir. All of the bodies in front of the church position themselves as if to pounce, their limbs jittering. Michael’s breath has stopped in his throat.

“You’re gonna attract a thousand of those things!” Rachel cries.

“What are you doing?” Michael calls loudly, grabbing for his
oh-shit
handle.

“Watch the doors, see if you can spot anyone in there. I’m gonna try to attract a bunch of these assholes, lure ’em away from the entrance.”

Joel rips through the parking lot, which is empty of vehicles, and the bodies follow the Hummer diligently. Michael avoids meeting their snapping gazes, instead focusing on the windows of the church. At first glance, he sees nothing but dim emptiness beyond them, and then Danny shouts, “There!”

“Where?” Rachel says.

“Next to the—to the right of the front doors.”

That window is already fading behind them, but yes, there is a face there, in shadow, and hands pressed to the glass.

“He’s right,” Rachel says. “One person.”

“Okay, I’ll head back around, maybe we can grab him. Or her.”

Just as Joel blats the horn again, a small crab-like body, a female, scurries from the sidewalk off Ellis, directly in front of them. Joel makes a token effort to swerve, but immediately the body—a bright yellow tattered nightgown trailing at its naked limbs—goes under the Hummer’s huge tires, and Michael can’t help but look away, back at Rachel, in time to see her curl up into a ball on her seat, slapping her hands to her ears, shutting her eyes.

They all feel a hideous bump and lurch as the body is crushed beneath them.

“That was a little girl!” Danny shouts.

“That was no little girl,” Joel responds, revving it at the top end of second gear and bouncing onto Ellis. A quick, arcing turn gets them back onto Prospect, where Joel brings the vehicle to a shuddering stop.

“Oh God, that’s terrible,” Rachel squeals. “Joel, we can save these people, you can’t just crush them like bugs!”

“The hell I can’t!”

One of the bodies broadsides the Hummer, making the heavy vehicle jerk on its treads. There’s a shrieking gasp outside.

And then the rest of the bodies are on them. And coordinated. Three or four of the bodies position themselves against the Hummer to provide the next wave leverage to jump higher. Two inverted male heads hit the left windows simultaneously—
hard
—the one next to Michael cracking into two long lightning-shaped fractures.

“Jesus—!”
Joel shouts.

He floors the gas, and the Hummer leaps forward. Two bodies go under the tires, and this time Rachel moans in frustration, twisting to peer through the bleary rear window. The two bodies are squashed like giant bugs, trying furiously to manipulate their broken limbs.

Joel rumbles back into the church parking lot and pulls up close to the door, honking his horn. All eyes go to the window next to the church’s front door. There, peering out miserably, is a face that both Rachel and Joel react to with identical gasps.

“I don’t believe it,” Rachel says.

“Believe it,” Joel manages, wrestling the steering wheel and coming to a heavy stop directly adjacent to the front doors. “It’s him.”

“Him who?” Michael says.

“A grade-A asshole,” Joel says. “Rachel, open the door quick. We’ve got ten seconds.”

“His name is Scott. Caused all sorts of problems at the hospital. He was an administrator there.” Rachel pushes the door open. “What if he doesn’t want to come with us?”

“Then that’s his problem.”

The Hummer’s occupants stare at the face behind the glass. Scott’s red hair is matted, and he appears gaunt, troubled. He looks desperate.

Joel waves him forward impatiently.

“Get your ass in here if you want to live!”

Michael turns to judge the distance of the bodies scrambling toward the vehicle. Thirty feet … twenty-five.

“Joel,” he warns.

But Scott is now scurrying out the door, leaving it wide open and racing to the car. He’s hobbled, favoring one leg, and he appears slightly hunched over. Rachel has scooted into the middle, next to Danny, and her face scrunches with distaste as the man hauls himself inside and heaves the door shut.

The Hummer roars forward, gasping bodies tumbling in its wake.

Scott’s face is pale and sweaty, and Michael can already smell his sour breath.

No one has said anything.

Michael breaks the silence.

“Were you in there all alone?”

Scott raises his head, looks at him miserably, doesn’t answer.

Joel bounces down onto Prospect again and heads west, shifting into third. He casts one glance through the rear-view mirror, then returns his eyes to the road.

“We’re not going to the hospital?” Scott finally says.

“Are you all right?” Rachel asks.

“Oh, peachy.”

“What do you need?”

“What I need, frankly, is at the hospital.”

“Well,” says Joel, “we’re not going there.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know if you noticed, but things have changed in the past couple hours.” Joel swerves around a Jeep that is crumpled against the median. “Hospital is overrun.”

Scott is silent.

Michael can sense that he wants to say something else, but the tension in the air is tamping it down. Rachel is still sneering at Scott, but she asks, “What is it you need?”

“Forget it.” He clutches his stomach.

“I think a detox is what you need.”

“Oh, for fu—” Scott stops himself, possibly for Danny’s benefit, and just stares out the window. “I just need pain meds. Did it ever occur to you that some people might be SOL because of preexisting conditions? Pharmacies are kind of a free-for-all now, that’s just the way it is.”

“Hey, you want to watch the tone, pal?” Michael says.

“Who the hell are you?”

“That’s my dad,” Rachel replies, hard.

Joel slows down and maneuvers the large vehicle through another collection of stray cars, inching through one collision and simply shoving the smaller vehicles aside.

Michael watches the desolate streets to the left and right. A few of them aren’t so empty anymore. North on Whedbee, he catches a glimpse of a young man sprinting across the street, from one home to another, three bodies scurrying after him, their heads stretching toward him, one woman’s hair whipping at the ground. Michael points, urgently, and Joel is in the act of making the turn when the young man disappears in the opposite direction, between houses, racing into some kind of shadowed greenbelt. Just like that, he’s gone from view, and the animated bodies disappear in his wake.

Joel pauses, glances back at Rachel. She continues to watch the street. Joel continues on.

“We can’t save everyone.”

“But—” Rachel starts, then deflates.

There is a long moment of guilty silence. Danny is glancing around, searching their faces expectantly. Finally, he looks away, back outside.

“I’m glad you stopped for me,” he says.

The kid has a quality about him that is quite endearing: an innocence that can’t be torn away, even by the end of everything he’s known all his life.

As they pass Peterson, Rachel notices a body on the asphalt that is clearly the corpse of a former survivor. “Oh no.”

“What?”

“Wait, wait, slow down, look.”

The Hummer rumbles to a slower pace, and Rachel looks past Danny, out his window, at the body. It’s a dark-haired woman, heavyset, unfortunately face-up. Her features are hollowed out, bleached, desolate, as if every ounce of life has been sucked away from her. Michael takes one look and has to turn away.

“What happened to her?” he says.

“Those things,” Joel says. “Those bodies happened to her.”

“How?”

“That’s what they do, isn’t it?” Rachel breathes. “Even from the start. Whatever it is that’s inside them, it’s a weapon. Or at least, they can use it as a weapon. It’s what happened to a lot of people we saw coming in to the hospital that first day. It happened to my hand,” she says, lifting her palm to show the skin there: off-color, pale … subtly damaged. “And this was just a little bit. That—” She pauses, settling back. “—that’s what happens when they really want to hurt you.”

“That light inside them?” Michael says, his eyes still on the destroyed body.

“It’s more than just light.”

At that moment, a large body slams into the passenger side of the Hummer, rocking it on its wheels.

“Fuck!” Scott screeches through gritted teeth. “Why did I get in here?”

When Michael jerks his head around to see what has collided with them, he finds a round face glaring up at him, its mulch-crusted mouth a jowly oval of rage beneath the sap-smeared chin. It’s the body of a gigantic man in a tattered flannel shirt. As Joel punches the Hummer forward, the huge body recedes into the distance, still lumbering toward them.

Michael settles back into his seat, bringing one hand up to clutch at his forehead. During moments of relative calm, the ever-present ache reminds him that it’s still there, waiting to be dealt with. Behind closed eyes, images clank and clatter, his too-recent memories of this day already splintering and scattering. It takes him a full minute to recall the circumstances that led him from the hospital to home to here, and when he opens his eyes again, the awesome sight of the burning foothills at least brings back the awful, solid truth of the immediate present.

“… hell are we going anyway?” Scott’s loud voice filters into his consciousness, but he lets it drift away, as well as Joel’s steely-edged response.

Michael is simply staring forward, losing himself in the monstrousness of the blaze before them, and the atmospheric phenomenon above it. Great columns of white smoke, streaked with black, drift northeast, and above it all, there’s that almost purple sky-throb.

The tendrils of pulsing light that reach down into the smoke remind him of the morning it began, when Steven and Carol dropped to the floor behind him, and vehicles along College veered out of their lanes and coasted to stops, their drivers slumped over the wheels. And the appearance of the sky, when it happened … the shards of light raining down on the earth, defying reason, defying his very grasp of the meaning of the world. Even now, the sight fills him with a dread that reaches beyond bewilderment and into a kind of numb disconnect. It seems to have that effect on everyone in the car: They all cast occasional bleak glances skyward, and then look away, their faces reflecting a kind of futility.

But the sight also sparks something deep within … more pieces of memory—

—at his window at work, mesmerized despite his fallen colleagues—

—the dark red pulse within the columns of light—

—the huge atmospheric phenomenon above everything—

—something shifting there, at the zenith of it all, something roiling above the blue Colorado heavens, casting cosmic shadows, something larger than his comprehension, something searching and … watching—

—and his mad dash toward the stairwell, crashing into desks, stumbling—

—his only thoughts of Susanna and Rachel …

The memory of that … whatever it was … something mind-boggling shifting above the sky … fills him with new dread, and he leans forward to search the heavens, but he sees nothing but blue sky streaked with smoke. The jagged memory leaves him feeling infinitesimal beneath the sway of a malevolent presence that can only pound and bellow.

Joel and Scott are sparring again.

“… gonna make me wish I’d just driven on by, dude.”

“Yeah, I’m wishing the same thing, Officer.”

Laughter. “Good ol’ Scott.”

“I mean, did you guys have any sort of plan, or are you just out for a leisurely drive?”

“We just saved your life, asshole!”

Rachel’s voice shakes Michael fully out of his spell, and he glances back at her. She returns his gaze, gestures with her head toward Scott with exasperation. Michael maintains the eye contact with his daughter, trying to communicate something but unsure what that is.

Her expression darkens, and her mouth opens slightly, and he realizes that a tear has spilled from his eye. He wipes it hastily away, turns forward to face the windshield.

“I didn’t ask for any rescue,” Scott says. “I was safe in there!”

“Coulda fooled me,” Joel says, “the way you were pressed up against the window, like some hungry puppy.”

For some reason, this image tickles Danny, and he bursts out with helpless giggles. Michael supposes it’s the boy’s way of releasing some pent-up emotion, finding some small measure of catharsis.

“He’s right,” the boy snickers, “you were just like that!”

And then he dissolves into mirth again.

The adults glance around at each other, smiles on their faces. Scott appears ready to explode but finally sighs out of his anger and just watches the kid. In a moment, Michael and Rachel are laughing, and even Scott cracks a lopsided grin before facing away, toward the window.

“You were just like Molly!” Danny says, the giggles starting to subside. “Just like Molly. That was our dog.”

“Glad to hear it,” Scott says, giving Danny an almost reluctant but friendly shove against his bony shoulder.

The laughter feels good to Michael, and he savors the sensation in his chest. He hasn’t laughed in days. Then he responds to Danny’s comment about his dog.

“So what happened to Molly, Danny?”

Danny comes all the way out of his laughter, then, and just starts nodding.

“Molly didn’t wake up either.”

Silence.

“I’m sorry, Danny.”

“That’s okay, she was old.”

Michael pats the boy’s knee and is trying to think of something more to say when—

“Hey!” Joel blurts.

Directly ahead, coming toward them, is a familiar truck.

“It’s Kevin!” Rachel says.

“Wait,” Joel says, trepidation in his voice, “something’s up.”

The blue truck is jerking left and right as it barrels forward. Joel slows the Hummer and they all watch as Kevin skids the truck north onto College Avenue. Michael can just make out the large man’s face contorted in alarm.

Rachel lets out a gasp.

There are several survivors hunkered down in the flatbed, and three bodies are clutched to the rear gate like spiders poised to strike. Raised voices are coming from the vehicle, echoing along the barren street, and then they fade abruptly as the truck careens out of sight.

“Holy shit!” Rachel cries. “That was Chrissy in there! And the twins!”

The Hummer lurches forward, its motor roaring.

“I take it they weren’t able to grab weapons,” Joel says. “Or any blood.”

“Or they ran out.”

“Like we did.”

“Oh, the blood again!” Scott cuts in.

Rachel throws a glare at him.

Joel clips the bumper of a Volkswagen Beetle, sending it spinning, and then they’re turning onto College.

The truck is a hundred yards ahead. Joel starts jabbing at the horn, sending staccato blasts to catch Kevin’s attention. The rear of the truck is fishtailing, but the bodies’ ability to remain attached to the tailgate is inhuman. None of them falls.

The truck is flailing around stalled cars and wrecks, and the things grasping for purchase at its tailgate keep lunging forward at the flatbed’s occupants, who seem to be cautiously warding them off with their arms and feet.

“How are those things not falling?!” Rachel cries.

“Maybe we can give them a little help,” Joel says, goosing the Hummer still more.

“Careful!”

They close the distance rapidly after Kevin hears their horn, following in the wake of the zigzagging truck, weaving between abandoned vehicles. Michael holds on for dear life, feeling as if he might crash right through the window and fall into the street. The rear of Kevin’s truck looms suddenly before them, and the three things holding on to the tailgate glare at Joel and Michael, then back at their female prey cowering in the back of the truck. The bodies’ heads swivel jerkily, insect-like. The upside-down faces are caricatures of fury.