Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood (3 page)

“I need food. And sleep.”

The large man says, “We should start organizing trips to Safeway, grab whatever food we can find. The cafeteria is already almost wiped out of water.”

The cop doesn’t appear to hear them.

“But what about the way they move? Suppose that’s how they move wherever they’re from? On their planet, or whatever? Like their original bodies are used to.”

What in the hell?
Michael thinks as he watches three younger women—all of them exhausted, leaning against one another—follow in behind the more matronly woman.
Is this some kind of joke?

“But that’s their mistake, maybe. They aren’t familiar with our bodies, they don’t know how to work them. And something is keeping them from using them right.”

“Like what?” one of the younger women says tiredly.

The three younger women appear to be the same age, and in fact two of them seem to be twins. They’re young; perhaps younger than Rachel. The twins are tall, gangly, and athletic—basketball players at CSU, perhaps. They both have shoulder-length brown hair, moistened by perspiration and then dried in tangles. The other is smaller, meek, blond. She looks wrecked.

“Well, I don’t know, but it’s probably the same thing that prevented them from knowing that a certain kind of blood would make some of us immune to them.”

One of the twins says something unintelligible, and the cops shoots back:

“No, it’s not! Come on. That’s not
all
it is, anyway. I mean,
look
at it.
Look at that
.”

The cop has about-faced in the lobby, at the window, and gestured out toward the two bodies at the pine tree at the edge of the parking lot.

Silence, followed by the shuffling noise of the small group coming to a stop in front of the admissions desk.

“And you heard it. You can
still
hear it. I’ve never heard anything like that in my life.”

Michael catches only a few words of what the older woman says. “—is it—when—”

“I think they’re communicating,” the cop says. “I think that’s what that is. You remember—Bonnie, you remember—when that happened before. When all those bodies were up there, right up there.” He gestures up the stairwell. “Just scowling down at us, ready to jump down and attack, or whatever they had in mind. And then this—this sound happened, and every one of those things stopped. The mood changed. Right? I’m telling you, they’re communicating.”

The big guy says, “I feel like Scott again when I say that, yeah, if these things are alien, well,
of course
they’re communicating. I doubt they’d try to take over the world without a plan.”

The woman named Bonnie says, after an exhausted pause, “If they’re communicating, what are they saying?”

“Yeah, that’s the question. And I have no clue.”

Bonnie lets out a shaky sigh, and she says, “Where’s Rachel?”

Michael feels a rush of relief at the mention of his daughter’s name, and yet something is keeping him from revealing himself. For a long moment, he can only hold his breath, trying to make sense of the strange conversation he just overheard. He shakes his head, unable to process. And then the imagery conjured by their words brings back the image of Rachel blasting through the door to find him. Did that really happen? He still has the sensory memory of the shattered door handle; he can still see the shredded veneer. The tacky blood smeared across the floor, starting to stink.

And now these words.

He almost feels that, if he could only slink back to Rachel undetected, he could steal her away from this crazy place, and go home. Go back to where things might still make sense.

Finally he clears his throat and calls out, “Hello?” The word comes out raspy and not loud enough to be heard in the lobby. He tries again. “Hello! I’m unarmed!”

The group is startled, each person wearily frozen in his or her tracks, watching him emerge from the hallway. The cop has some kind of large weapon at his side, loosely at the ready. It appears to be a police-issue patrol rifle. As Michael makes his way fully into view, the cop relaxes into an odd expression of resigned satisfaction. He’s a clean-cut young man, former military, Michael is sure.

“Oh my God, look who it is!” Bonnie has a look of glad surprise on her dirty, lined face. Michael sees relief, surprise, and also melancholy in this stranger’s expression.

Patches of the woman’s skin and great swaths of her clothing have been splattered and even drenched with blood. The same is true of all of these people.

“Rachel’s dad!” the large man says, stepping forward. He brings up a meaty hand holding a red ball cap, secures it on his head, then reaches for a handshake. Michael tentatively lifts his own hand and returns the gesture. His hand is engulfed. “Name’s Kevin. It’s good to see you alive, brother.” The man is sweaty and filthy, obviously fatigued, and after only a brief moment of gladness, his features bend toward a stark solemnity.

And then Bonnie is embracing Michael, hard. He grimaces not only at the jarring clinch, and the way it seems to clang his loose skull like a bell, but also at the smell of her. He detects the sharp tang of sweat, but also a coating of blood—wiped at but still evident in the creases of her flesh—and what he imagines to be the stink of an awful experience. Perhaps the same experience that Rachel went through.

“I’m Bonnie,” she says into his chest. “I was afraid I’d never see you conscious.”

“My name is Michael,” he says to the group over her shoulder. “Do I—do I know any of you?”

“Oh, we know who you are!” Kevin says.

Bonnie murmurs quiet laughter and pulls away. There are actually tears in her eyes. She glances back at the cop, as if searching for what to say.

“You have no idea what happened, do you?” the cop says. It’s his turn to step forward, switch the rifle to his left hand, and shake hands with Michael. The man has that confident way of carrying himself that speaks of good upbringing and strong training, and he has a powerful handshake. Michael has never met this man, and yet the cop greets him as if he has known him for years and is relieved to see him alive.

Michael can only shake his head in response to the cop’s question.

“I’m Joel.” A small smile takes hold of his lips. “Michael, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“All this time, you’ve been ‘Rachel’s dad’.”

Kevin murmurs a laugh. “True.”

Joel gestures behind him, toward the three young women. “That’s Chrissy there—she and Rachel are pretty tight—and the twins, Chloe and Zoe.”

The young women nod to him, too tired to do anything more. Chrissy, the petite one, is in gray shorts and a blue tee shirt that is spattered with dried blood. She looks to be in her early twenties and has a dark, haunted quality to her face. Her eyes and face are red as if she’s been crying uncontrollably for days. The twins, about the same age as Chrissy, are wearing what Michael might consider nightclothes: cotton pants and white blouses, all of it filthy with blood and grime. Michael stares at the young women with increasing confusion.

There are three others just now entering through the main entrance, a man in a business suit and a woman in a drab pantsuit, both of them perhaps in their fifties. Also exhausted.

“That’s Jerry and … Karen, right?” Kevin says.

The woman acknowledges Michael with a half-hearted smile.

Michael doesn’t know what to say for a long moment. The enormity of everything leaves him speechless. Kevin lays a hand briefly on his shoulder, offers a weary smile, and then pushes away and through the double doors. The young women settle to the floor in a heap, utterly spent from whatever they were doing outside.

“I don’t remember anything, no,” he says, belatedly answering Joel’s question. He feels a tinge in his skull as the words escape him. “I’m pretty sure I’ve got a concussion.”

“I’d say that’s a safe assumption.” Bonnie reaches up to touch his bandage, begins to expertly remove it.

“I keep falling asleep,” he says.

She’s blinking exaggeratingly as if to keep her own eyes open. “Your body is trying to recover. How does your head feel?”

“Like a truck ran over it.”

“Nausea?”

“A while ago, but not now.”

“How about your vision?”

“Fine, actually.”

“I think you did suffer a concussion, but it’s healing. Just gotta take it easy. I’ll get you some Tylenol.”

He nods gratefully.

“Where’s Rachel?” Joel asks.

Michael looks at Joel curiously. “She’s back there, in the room where—where I was sleeping.”

“At least she found her way back,” the cop says.

Bonnie’s expression holds a mixture of relief and a haunted kind of emptiness—almost a hopelessness.

“Are you hungry?” Joel asks.

Michael pauses to think about that, and at the suggestion, he realizes that he’s ravenous. “Yes.”

“We have a little bit of food rounded up from the cafeteria, stuff that’s gonna start going bad pretty soon, so we might as well eat it while we can.”

Food that will go bad soon?

“Okay.”

“I’ll get that, and I’ll leave you to Bonnie.”

Michael feels that his agitation is palpable in the air around them. He needs answers to the riddles he’s hearing, but at the same time, he feels as if those answers are the last thing he wants to hear.

As these people start losing interest in him, he finally turns to Bonnie and whispers, “What the hell is going on?”

Bonnie seems to brace herself for an explanation.

Michael swallows heavily and tries, again, to focus on specific moments in the past: rising from bed, his breakfast, his rituals before going to work. Susanna murmuring from bed. The early morning drive. His work.

“I—I can’t remember
anything
. I mean, there are fragments, but … not much. How did I get here?”

“I’m not surprised some of your memory is gone.” She squeezes his forearm. “But it’ll come. Maybe best not to force it.”

“All I know is I have a hell of a knot on my forehead. Maybe I fell, but I have no idea why or where I could’ve fallen.”

She touches the skin around the wound again, feels for warmth. “Did you talk to Rachel about this?”

He’s shaking his head. “I’m afraid we both fell asleep.”

Bonnie’s hands are moving expertly.

He watches her face, coming to a realization.

“You treated me?” Michael says.

“After Rachel brought you in, yes. I just took care of you once you got here. Rachel’s the one who saved your life. Did she tell you?”

Michael can’t help but let out a murmur of surprise. “She said … I don’t—”

“Quite a young lady you’ve got there.” Her smile looks incongruous beneath dark-ringed eyes. “Rachel thinks you might have fallen down a stairwell at your office. That’s where she found you.”

“This morning?”

“I wish. No, that was two days ago.”

Michael gapes at her. “You aren’t serious. I’ve been out for two days?”

“Yeah,” Bonnie breathes. She looks at him with a kind of longing. “Wow. Part of me wishes I could be waking up only now, like this. To not have been through the past two days at all. You’re lucky, in a way. But then … to wake up to a world that—that—” She casts her eyes downward.

“What?”

When she lifts her head, her eyes are glistening. She appears to give up on restraint. “Everything has changed. Everything is … horrible.”

Emotion twists her features, and she slowly recovers. He doesn’t know how to respond. He opens his mouth, closes it, then opens it again.

“What is it?”

She’s shaking her head miserably. “I don’t even know where to begin.” She glances around, as if for help.

The dead-eyed middle-aged couple, now huddled at the abandoned admissions desk, peer at Michael as if they feel sorry for him. The man nods vaguely at him, but the woman looks away, down at her feet. Michael turns to stare out the big front windows again. There’s no movement out there.

“Where is everybody?”
he whispers.

Bonnie can only stare at him.

Then, “Let’s check on Rachel, okay? I need to clean up a little bit first, and then let’s see if she’s okay. I’m worried about her. She went through so much. So much.” She offers a sad smile. “And then we can both fill you in on everything.”

At that moment, Joel comes striding back through the double doors, hefting his rifle. He’s all business. He looks straight at Michael, accusatory.

“I think we got a live one.”

He knows,
Michael thinks again, irrationally.

“What do you mean?” Bonnie asks Joel, her voice descending into near-petulance.

“I found Rachel. One of those things is moving around right above her, second level. Did you hear it in there?” he asks Michael.

“I did.”

“You checked every room, right? Before we left?” Joel asks Kevin as the big man hurries back into the lobby.

“Far as I know, it’s cleared out, yeah. There were a few locked or closed doors that I didn’t have time to check. But I guess anyone could have wandered in here from the street while we were gone.”

“It’s been clanging around up there for hours,” Michael offers. “I think it’s what woke me up.”

“What else did you hear?” Joel asks.

“Just something dragging around, like metal on metal. Frantic. Sounds almost angry.”

“Those things wouldn’t have come back in, right …?” Bonnie says, a near-whine.

“Not saying I understand anything about those fuckers,” Kevin says, “but I’d guess not. Why would they?” He considers something. “When they left, they left in a goddamn hurry, so …”

Joel slants his gaze up the stairs, tries to get a geographic lock on the area above Michael’s room. “Let’s check it out. Bonnie, will you go ahead and look in on Rachel? We’ve got this.”

“Of course.” Bonnie turns to Michael. “You feel okay to go up?”

Michael nods. His head still aches, but not with urgency of before, not with that feeling of alarming looseness, as if his brain matter were sloshing around. His heart is still thumping hard, but he can focus now. He takes deep breaths, trying to keep everything in place.

“Yeah, I want to see this.”

“C’mon,” Joel says, checking his rifle and handing it over to Kevin. “Here, you take this.” He pulls his sidearm from his hip and checks the magazine.

Michael watches the weapons with a new anxiety, thinking of the money again, thinking of the crime. Is it possible that all of it means nothing now?

The cop leads the way across the sticky floor and to the stairs. The three men navigate their way through a gaping hole in the barricade. Large swaths of carpet on the stairs are soaked with brown blood, but the way is relatively clear, save for occasional knocked-over furniture and toppled IV stands. Michael, aghast, can’t take his eyes off the chaos of chairs and tables in shambles all around him. Some of it has been splattered with blood. There’s an obvious shotgun blast in the wall to his right, and what he believes to be brain matter has dried in pieces around and below it.

“Will someone please tell me what the hell happened here?”

Joel and Kevin exchange a glance. “I guess you’d call it a last stand,” the cop says.

“Against what?”

“Those things. Those corpses. All those bodies upstairs? They all flowed down through here. Angry as hell. At least, that’s what we thought.”

Corpses? A last stand against corpses? What?

A bark of laughter escapes Michael’s mouth, and all he gets in return from his companions are sober reactions. Kevin and Joel glance at him for only a moment, then continue ahead. Michael flashes on the human beings he saw outside, their bodies compressed against those trees. They were like nothing he’d ever seen before, but he can’t get past the disconnect between that behavior and whatever it is that these people are talking about.

He tries to visualize this horrific scene, and fails. It’s as if these people he’s never met are asking him to accept that his life has become some insane horror film. It can’t be real. It
can’t
. Yes, the skies are filled with smoke and ash is blanketing the city, and yes, everyone but a small fraction of humanity has simply disappeared, and there are a thousand other pieces of evidence backing up the crazed words of these sweaty people, but it
can’t
be real.

Kevin gives voice to his thoughts.

“Gotta be weird, waking up to this.”

“You missed all the fun,” Joel says as they reach the landing and proceed cautiously west along the carpeted hallway. The three men step past fallen IV stands and assorted tubes and cables. “The only bodies left in this hospital are the corpses we managed to kill for good. Or the people those things killed from the start.”

The image of the stacked corpses downstairs flashes through Michael’s head. Those were victims of … reanimated bodies?

“We tried to give those people as much … dignity … as possible.” Joel peeks inside an open door, then moves on. “But the really active ones? They’re all out there now.” He gestures up and away from himself. “Outside. Doing God knows what. And the one exception appears to be the one we’re about to—”

Michael comes to a halt, hands out, wincing under new pain in his head.

“Okay, wait—wait—stop—!”

The other two men slow to a stop, turning toward him expectantly but almost reluctantly. Michael waits for a wave of dizziness to pass, then considers these two relative strangers. There’s no denying the horror in their expressions, and evident in the blood and filth on their clothes, caked in swaths on their exposed skin. The lack of sleep in their eyes. The fatigue. These men are near collapse, and yet they keep going.

But Michael can’t hold it in.

“The ‘corpses you managed to kill for good’? Look, guys … Joel, Kevin … just be honest with me here. We can’t be talking about …” He eyes them carefully, waiting—hoping—for grins to crack broadly across their faces. “… I mean, you don’t expect me to believe that—”

The two men watch Michael for a moment, then Kevin is nodding slowly.

“Did … uh, didn’t Rachel tell you anything?” Joel asks.

Michael brings a hand to the bridge of his nose and squeezes. “No. No, unfortunately, no, this is all new to me.”

There’s a moment of quiet indecision, broken only by distant movement and voices downstairs and then—serendipitously—the sound of metallic dragging, coming from somewhere ahead. All three men turn abruptly in that direction, trying to locate it.

“Well,” Kevin says, “I think you’re about to get a crash course in what you missed while you were knocked out.”

“Yeah, let’s just take a look, huh? A lot of shit is about to get real clear.”

Michael just looks at him, feeling a chaos of emotions.

“Let’s go,” the cop says. “Trust me, okay?”

Not waiting for Michael, Joel starts moving again, firearm at ready position.

Kevin follows, and Michael takes a deep breath, taking up the rear.

They approach a new hallway to the right and pause. The sound has stopped, but now a brief clamor informs them that the sound is coming from down the new hall. Joel urges them forward. It’s close.

“You don’t remember
anything
, huh?” Kevin whispers next to Michael. “You don’t remember what you were doing when—”

“I remember just flashes … nothing concrete. I don’t even remember driving to work. Nothing about that morning.”

“Maybe not a bad memory to lose, I guess,” Kevin says. “… when the end of the world happened.”

“The end of—” Michael starts.

Joel slows abruptly and gestures Michael and Kevin forward with his pistol. “It’s that room there.”

Michael sees a closed door. To the right of the door, directly below a small metal rectangle designating the room as Room 278, a chair sits empty and crooked. Joel moves quietly to the door and takes hold of the handle. He glances at Michael and gestures for him to position himself behind him. Michael takes his place.

“I think I know what’s happened here,” Joel whispers.

“What?” Kevin says.

Joel quietly moves to the door and tries the handle. It’s unlocked. It opens soundlessly inward. He takes in the scene, nods quickly.

Michael feels his veins pulsing. A low gasp comes from within the room, raising the hair on the back of his neck.

“Yep, we got one,” Joel says, grimacing. “Come take a look.”

Michael steels himself, then steps forward with Kevin.

The room appears to be a typical ICU recovery room, with hulking machinery dark and silent in the background. There are whiteboards everywhere, scrawled with barely legible notes and incomprehensible numbers. But Michael’s eyes go immediately to the bed, which has been dragged to the far edge of the room, and the body on the floor right at the foot of that bed.

The body is that of a heavy, tattooed bald man. He’s half covered by a hospital gown, and much of his exposed skin is loosely swathed by bandages. The man is bent over backward, straining, on all fours. Cords in his neck are standing out in stark relief, and the expression on the upside-down face is one of pure torment—red, furious, eyes bulging. Michael, appalled, notices something right away about the eyes: The pupils are wide and black. The effect is like a shark’s eyes. There’s malevolence there.

“Oh my god!” Michael can’t help but blurt. “What’s wrong with him?”

The man locks dead eyes on Michael, then on Joel, and unleashes a dry, throaty gasp. He thrashes once, mightily, and drags the bed’s metal legs a few inches across the floor.

“Same thing that’s wrong with mostly everyone,” Kevin says.

Michael can’t take his eyes off the man. He can’t comprehend what he’s seeing. The bodies at the trees were one thing, but this is something entirely different: malevolent and almost completely alien despite the humanity underneath the features.

“He’s locked to the bed,” Joel says. “See?”

A pair of handcuffs secures the man’s left hand to the bed railing. The wrist is obviously broken, and the flesh is mangled, twisted. In fact, Michael realizes, the man is on the verge of dismembering his own hand to escape. The skin is taut and torn, and the bones appear to be nearly separated. Soon, the only thing keeping this man tethered will be tendons and skin.

“He’s a prisoner,” Kevin whispers.

The room stinks of the man’s sweat, a heavy scent that mingles with the smell of shit and piss, which have stained the bed and his clothes.

“Fuuuuuck, that’s rank,” Kevin says. His rifle is pointed down and away, but Joel is on high alert.

“Goddamn,” Michael says, still trying to make sense of the scene before him. “What’s he doing?”

“He’s got that thing inside him—that light.”

Michael wrenches his gaze from the impossible sight of this human being, and looks straight at Joel, then at Kevin.

“Uh,” Michael says. “What?”

“That’s the thing,” Joel says. “Whatever is happening to these corpses, it’s all because of this insane … presence … inside their heads. It’s like a … an illumination. A radiation. Inhabiting them.” He murmurs a dark laugh. “I know that sounds crazy as hell, and that was our first reaction, trust me. That was everyone’s reaction. But it’s true.”

Michael doesn’t see anything like an illumination.

And he still can’t get Joel’s word out of his head.

Corpses.

But this man isn’t dead. Far from it.

Except for the eyes.

At that moment, the man lunges for Michael, and Michael nearly falls while scrambling backward out of the way.

“Whoa, whoa, yeah, watch out,” Kevin says. “You don’t want that thing to touch you. That light can fuck you up.”

“I don’t see any light,” Michael says, composing himself.

“Oh, it’s there.”

Michael considers that silently, just watching the bald man—the bald man’s corpse?—flail about, seething.

“Show it to me,” he says.

“Show you what?”

“Show me this light you’re talking about.” He clutches his throbbing forehead, feeling the need for that Tylenol that Bonnie spoke of.

Joel takes a look around the room.

The man is on the floor to the left of the bed. His upturned face is still contorted in an animal fury, and as Joel steps to the other side of the bed, the man watches him warily, upside down, snapping out at him once, teeth clacking. The man’s blunt chin has become his most prominent feature, like the end of a proboscis.

Joel reaches the window and draws the shades. The room falls into relative darkness, and now Michael sees the crimson glow coming from the man’s face—or, rather,
behind
the man’s face. His breath catches. It’s an unwavering luminescence coming from the area behind the nose, visible from the nostrils and open mouth, and just barely beneath the skin of the cheeks.

“What—” he whispers. “What’s happened to him? Why is he—”

“Not just him,” Kevin says soberly behind him. “Everyone.”

“
Everyone?
I mean, are we talking—”

Joel sees where he’s going. “We’ve had no interaction with anyone for hundreds of miles, no communication, no glimpses of flights, no evidence of life anywhere,” he says in a low voice. “Nothing. We think it’s worldwide.”

Mike swallows thickly, doesn’t know how to digest that. Finally, he decides not to. He turns back to the man’s body.

“This same thing is in—”