Blood Red (12 page)

“What
is
that?” Jenny squeaks.

“I don’t even want to think about it,” Rachel
whispers. “Let’s get this done.”

“Where does your dad work?”

“Down by Harmony,” she says. “About five
miles.”

Rachel drives through a rough patch of
collisions, then finds a clear path south on Lemay. She picks up
her speed and glances over at her friend.

“I never really asked you about what happened
to you,” she says. “How did you end up at the hospital?”

“I…I brought my sisters in.” Jenny is staring
down at her lap. “I live with them. Nancy’s fifteen and Helen’s
twelve. My parents let me watch them when they go on vacation.”

“Oh my God, I’m sorry.”

Jenny shakes her head. “Everyone lost someone
today.”

Rachel flashes on Tony, and even Susanna, and
for the first time—unbelievably—she thinks about her extended
family. Her aunt and uncle and their teenaged children down in
Denver. Her stillliving grandparents in Michigan. Her other
friends, mostly from high school. Most of them could be lying
unresponsive somewhere, their minds contaminated by some kind of
inconceivable glowing presence.

“Were they both…?” Rachel says.

“They were gone. I found them at the
breakfast table. I thought they were messing with me at first.” She
laughs a little. “They’re like that, silly as hell.”

Rachel reaches over wordlessly and places her
hand on Jenny’s thigh.

After what seems an hour maneuvering Lemay
and then continuing west on Horsetooth—encountering only three
other moving vehicles, headed in the opposite direction—they’re on
College Avenue and approaching Harmony Road. Rachel feels herself
getting anxious, and she’s driving perhaps more recklessly than she
should.

Out of nowhere, Jenny asks, “Do you have a
flashlight? He works in an office, right? We won’t be able to see
anything. We need a flashlight, or a lantern, or something.”

“I don’t. Shit! Check the glove
compartment.”

Jenny reaches up to flip on the cabin light,
rifles through the glove compartment fruitlessly. “I should have
grabbed one at the hospital. Dammit!” She fumbles through the
backpack. “We won’t be able to see a foot in front of us.”

“You’re right.”

“We can go back.”

“No.”

Rachel’s thoughts swirl in fear and in
frustration, and she slows for a group of cars, moving carefully
around them. The Honda’s headlights sweep left and right as she
maneuvers, and almost by fate, they illuminate a familiar
red-and-white circular logo.

“Okay, new plan.”

“What?

“We’re going to Target,” Rachel replies,
looking straight at Jenny.

Rachel pulls over to the right lane. She can
see the Target entrance partially obstructed by a wrecked tanker
truck. She angles into the bike lane instead and comes to a
stop.

“Let’s go.”

After stepping out and locking the car, she
and Jenny gaze out onto the night. This far south, the smoke is
sparser, and they can see stars in the night sky. The darkness is
still oppressive, but the starscape provides some relief. They’ll
be able to navigate the parking lot.

They walk directly in front of the tanker
trunk, and Rachel notices that the driver has slumped to his left,
his head hanging out of his window. She can’t look away from the
glow emanating from his cheek. She stops for a moment to observe
it, waiting for the man to move—to jerk awake and stare at them. It
doesn’t happen. There’s no movement at all. Perhaps Bonnie was
right.

The light reminds her once more of when she
was a kid and would play with the family flashlight in the dark,
under her covers. She would fasten the wide end of the light flat
against her palm and closed fingers and marvel at how the light
would make the back of her hand glow red. It was almost like an
x-ray, this illumination of her flesh, this jack-o’-lantern
effect.

“Fucking spooky,” Jenny whispers. She takes
Rachel’s hand and squeezes, breaking her daze.

They carefully make their way up a grassy
embankment to the sidewalk, then step into the Target parking lot,
which contains perhaps twenty vehicles still parked neatly in their
spaces. The young women move through the dark lot, their footfalls
seeming loud and hollow.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” Jenny
breathes. “It’s too quiet!”

“I don’t think there were people shopping
when it happened,” Rachel says. “Target opens at 8, I think, so
whatever it was happened before that. These cars probably belong to
employees.”

After a pause, Jenny says flatly, “That
sounds about right. But how will we get in?”

“Well, let’s see about that.”

Rachel continues forward, her goal firmly in
mind. They make their way to the entrance and try the manual doors,
which are all locked. The automatic doors are, of course,
unresponsive. Without a second thought, Rachel begins kicking at
the glass of one of the doors, and nothing happens for several
tries. On her fourth kick, however, the glass shatters. She widens
the hole carefully with her foot, glass pieces tinkling to the
concrete. Then she reaches in through the hole and finds the
twistable lock and opens the door. The inner doors beyond the
vestibule are already unlocked.

Then they’re standing on the worn tiles at
the front of the store, staring into an absolutely pitch-black
darkness. All they can see are the indistinct forms of three bodies
in the near distance, their skulls glowing faintly.

“Okay, I can’t do this,” Jenny whispers.

“You want to wait here?”

“No!”

“Look, I have a cell phone that can at least
get us to the right aisle.” She digs it out of her pocket, stabs
the power button, holds it up. The screen’s illumination casts a
ghostly glow, vaguely illuminating a few steps ahead of them. “You
were right, okay? We need light—a lot more light than this. I know
exactly where the flashlights are. We can run in, grab them, and
we’ll be set.”

“Okay,” comes the trembling reply.

They start forward, and as they round the
register area the store seems to grow still darker around them,
enveloping them with blackness. The tiny illumination ahead of them
is pitiful, and their eyes strain to bulging. Jenny is clutching
Rachel’s arm and shoulder as they shuffle forward. That sensation
and the sheer blackness beyond their little cell-phone illumination
causes claustrophobia to wrap around Rachel like a thick blanket,
but she does her best to shrug it off and hurry forward, not
letting Jenny perceive any weakness after making the decision to
come into this store—a decision that she almost admits might have
been rash.

“See, look,” she whispers, trying to be
encouraging. “We know this store like the backs of our hands.”

By memory, they find their way beyond the
registers and into the first wide walking area. The register
counters remain to their left, ghostly and bulky like ships in fog.
They quickly encounter the first of the bodies, crumpled on the
floor, their skulls recognizable by unwavering, glowing orbs.
Rachel gives them a close look, watching for any movement, then
consciously looks away.

She moves forward into the blackness, her
cell phone clutched in her right hand, eyes peeled for what its
illumination is revealing. She comes to a clothing section, the
colorful garments appearing sepia-toned in the cell-phone light.
The section seems to extend much farther into the store than she
remembers, and she feels a flutter of panic deep inside her. She
keeps moving, feeling the constant pressure of Jenny’s hand on her
shoulder.

Just as she registers Jenny’s quick intake of
breath, Rachel sees another body off to their left. It’s facedown,
and it’s near the greeting cards, she thinks.

Now, for the first time since walking through
the door, Rachel feels real fear clutch at her innards. Her eyes
burn as she watches the unnatural glow emanating from the corpse to
their left. She can’t seem to blink.

“Rachel…”

Is it Rachel’s imagination, or is that red
illumination jittering? She can make out the edges of facial
features under the crimson luminescence inside the skull—the brows,
an ear. Did the head twitch? She becomes aware of her own erratic
breathing.

“Rachel, hold the light steady!” Jenny
whispers in her ear. “You’re freaking me out!”

“Sorry, I—”

Something clacks off in the distance, to the
far right, in some dark corner of the store, wood on metal, and the
young women freeze in their tracks. The sound repeats, louder, then
silence.

“Oh Jesus,
why are we in here
?!” Jenny
nearly shrieks.

“
Shhh!
It’s nothing, come on, let’s
get this over with,” Rachel says, trying to force a sense of calm
into her voice, but she can’t keep it from breaking. She curses
herself inwardly for letting the situation get the best of her.

They finally find a clear path through to the
big center aisle that leads toward the rear of the store. Rachel
sees a couple of bodies along the way in the near distance, their
skulls glowing steadily. Rachel only glances at them. She actually
prefers to face away from them now, but they remind her of the
afterimage the sun makes behind her eyelids after she glances
directly at it. This time she consciously narrows her vision while
giving them a wide berth. She doesn’t linger on these glowing
bodies, but she can’t help but wonder if their flesh is jittering,
whether their eyes are moving, like the motorcyclist at the
hospital. She’s already trying to convince herself that what she
saw there was some kind of stress-induced waking nightmare.

But she knows it wasn’t.

“Are we almost there?” Jenny whispers,
half-whimpering, almost like a young child in a too-long car
ride.

“No.” Rachel twists her cell phone to the
left so that it illuminates the wall of greeting cards. “Almost
halfway.”

She’s steering them toward the hardware area,
a straight line from here then off to the left. They proceed
carefully along the white-tiled floor, making their way past the
home furnishings, past the art items. Red-and-white Target price
tags hang from shelves, still and dark. Sale signs poke up
colorfully from tables, the tops of them lost in blackness.

Rachel pushes hair away from her face with
her left hand. She still feels that flutter of panic in her chest,
and she takes a deep, yawning breath to settle it down. If there
were any more light in here, she would take off sprinting toward
the rear of the store, but no way will she let herself stumble
blindly over a sprawled body or crash into the corner of a metal
shelving unit. So she takes it slowly.

When they reach the center of the store, the
tiny illumination of Rachel’s phone gives out, plunging them into
total darkness.

Jenny lets loose a ragged whine, and Rachel
inadvertently crouches to the floor, bringing her friend with her.
Jenny stumbles over her, banging her limbs hard on the tile.

“
Turn it on! Turn it back on
!”

Rachel frantically stabs at her phone, but
the display has gone completely dark. She tries the power button
repeatedly. Nothing. She slips the phone back into her jeans
pocket.

“It’s dead,” she barks, her voice far more
high-pitched that she intends. “The battery’s dead, okay?”

“
No!”
Jenny screams, the word trailing
and echoing hollowly through the store. She cuts her sound short,
as if afraid her screams might awaken demons in the dark.

“Don’t!” Rachel says, her own voice filled
with warbled uncertainty. “It’s okay! We can do this, we know the
store.”

“Why the fuck did we come in here? Why didn’t
we just go back to the hospital?”

“Quiet! It’s okay. Let’s go.”

“We have to get out of here!”

“We’re almost there, Jenny.”

“I can’t see!”

“I can’t either.”

Rachel gets awkwardly to her feet and urges
Jenny up. “Come on, the faster we go, the quicker we can get out of
here.”

Jenny takes a moment to respond, but finally
she lifts herself up and calms her breathing. “Okay,” she says, a
little more confidently. “Fuck!”

Holding tightly to each other with one hand,
reaching out blindly with the other, they move forward into the
inky blackness. Jenny is emitting soft whimpers, and just as she
seems to have gained some semblance of control over her fear, she
lets out an ear-splitting scream.

“
What is that?!”

Rachel’s heart leaps to her throat, she
stumbles, and then she discovers the reason for Jenny’s
outburst.

There’s a body at their feet.

“
Rachel!”

Rachel drops to one knee, reaches down, feels
a bare leg. She searches the darkness for the telltale glow and
finds none. The leg is warm and unmoving. She feels like her heart
might burst through her chest plate, that its beat must be loud
enough to echo through the store. The leg is slender, long, and
hairless—a woman’s leg.

Rachel wonders almost hysterically,
Why is
there no glow?
She marvels for an instant in the midst of her
panic that something altogether unnatural—even supernatural—has
become her new normal.

Jenny continues making her shrill noise, and
Rachel feels with her searching hands that the dead woman’s body is
twisted around the edge of a display, the head out of her field of
limited vision. Leaning over a little, she can see that the skull
is indeed glowing with the red luminescence. When she sees it—too
close!—she flinches backward, wary. Then she stops.

The glow is moving. Twitching. Trying to
rise.

Disbelieving, Rachel sees the woman’s head,
underlit with glowing red, attempt to rear itself backward on an
uncooperative neck.

Rachel scrabbles backward away from it,
against Jenny.