Blood Red (25 page)

Rachel turns back toward Alan, sees him
standing next to Bonnie. He looks frail, but when their eyes meet,
he seems to stand straighter, taller. He nods at her. And Rachel
feels something swell in her. It’s one of those heightened-reality
moments when everything seems stark and clear.

“I think she’s right,” Alan says.

Joel, armed and bloodied, sweat-stained face
under his military-cut brown hair, eyes ablaze and ready, says,
“What the hell does that mean?”

“What’s your blood type?” Rachel asks,
directing the question at Joel but addressing the room.

“O-negative,” Joel calls, wincing at a
clatter from beyond the stairwell.

There are murmurs of agreement coming from
the small crowd. Rachel looks at each one of the remaining
survivors. And all voices are silent, amplifying the rustling bumps
coming from above. Bonnie, exhausted and glassy-eyed, is slumped
next to Alan against a drinking fountain. She’s taking it in,
processing this new information. And Scott, off to the right next
to a plastic tree, his expression a mix of confusion and fury, is
chewing the insides of his cheeks. His hands furrow through his mop
of hair, his gaze ratcheting up that ominous stairwell. At that
moment, Rachel guesses that he’s an addict of some kind. It would
certainly explain the morphine.

The four others in the room also seem to be
processing her words. Kevin off to her right, standing next to a
petite blond-haired young woman in pajamas and bare feet; a
middle-aged housewife type; and finally, the businessman in unkempt
attire. Greg, the young man who accompanied Scott to the roof, is
nowhere to be seen. He probably took off into the night, like most
everyone else.

Minutes ago, it occurred to Rachel that she
would probably be spending the final moments of her life with these
people. The flashing thought had shocked her into self-defensive
action. Now, even in the midst of this carnage and impending
violence, a weird flame of hope is sparking through the room, and
she has a very different concept of the humans around her.
Together, with this knowledge, they might survive a bit longer.

“Okay, so what does that mean?” shouts Joel.
“What can we do with that?”

She can see Scott looking down, thinking.
“That could mean anything,” he says. “This group is tiny.”

Rachel says, “I’m guessing the same is true
of everyone who’s still alive.”

“You’re
guessing
,” Scott spits.

Alan pushes away from the wall, tries to
string a sentence together in spite of the chaos coming from above.
“There must be a reason why our blood, our bodies, won’t work for
whatever has happened to everyone else.”

“You’re saying that—” Joel says, but Alan
cuts him off.

“Maybe whatever is inhabiting these bodies
... maybe they don’t like our blood,” Alan says. “O-negative
blood.”

“So maybe our blood can hurt them,” Rachel
finishes.

Scott snorts. “That’s a big fucking leap!
Just because these things might not like the taste of our blood
doesn’t mean this is an answer! Besides, O-negative is the
universal donor, that’s what’s unique about it, it gets along with
all the other blood. Didn’t all you O-negative types learn that in
school?” He’s looking right at Rachel. “If there’s one blood type
these things
shouldn’t
object to, it’s the universal donor.
That’s basic.”

“What’s your blood type, Scott?” Rachel asks
pointedly.

“Oh, fuck off.”

“Don’t you think that’s a little more than a
coincidence? That all of us here have the rarest blood type?” She
points in the direction of the double doors beyond the admissions
area. “Including my dad?”

“I’m O-negative, too” says the thin young
woman across from Rachel. There’s an urgency in her face. She
clearly wants this to mean something. “I remember when I was
little, when my doctor told me how unusual it was—how rare it
was.”

Rachel’s heart is thudding. Thoughts are
careening too quickly around her skull. She has a similar memory,
except it was her mom who told her. “Same here,” she says, letting
the memory play itself out even further. She remembers her family
joking that she and her father had the special blood type, but that
her mother did not.

What’s the significance?

“How rare is it?” Joel asks, taking a few
steps up the stairwell and glancing up into the second-floor
hallways. “Do you remember? Like, percentage of the
population?”

“I don’t remember,” Rachel says, “but it was
small.”

“It’s something like five or six percent,”
Kevin says. “Which would make sense, right? Considering how many
other survivors we’ve seen?”

“Good lord,” Bonnie says, one hand at her
brow. Even from across the room, Rachel sees that the hand is
shaking almost uncontrollably. “So, you’re saying ninety-five
percent of …” She can’t seem to finish the thought.

“It’s been so long since I really thought
about my blood type,” Rachel says. “My dad read me an article or
something about it when I was fourteen or fifteen. I think he
brought a brochure home from the hospital after donating. What was
it he said?” She searches her memory, squinting.

“O-negatives are natural leaders,” Alan says,
almost at a whisper. The edge of his mouth twitches up a bit, and
he glances at Rachel.

“Oh for Christ’s sake,” Scott says, pacing
the length of the far wall. “I gotta get out of here.”

This conversation is met with another charged
moment of relative silence. Then the room is shocked back to the
present, as Joel breaks the sudden tension. “Okay, let’s get on it,
then,” he says, coming back down the stairs two at a time. “Anyone
here know where we might put our hands on some O-negative blood, by
any chance?”

Bonnie says, “Well, I know—”

“Good, how ’bout you three figure out a way
to work that to our advantage?” He gestures to Rachel, Bonnie, and
Alan. “Because now that we’re all keeping our heads—” Significant
glance at Scott. “—we need to block these stairs
now
.
They’re not gonna waste much time up there.”

Even before he’s finished talking, there’s
another clatter at the stairwell, closer now, along with a chuffing
gasp.

“There’s another one coming down!” cries
Scott superfluously.

The petite young woman in the corner screams,
her hands flying to her face, shaking uncontrollably. It’s the
scream that startles Rachel more than whatever is coming down the
stairs. This girl has finally reached her breaking point. She
appears to have been crying for hours, her whole face enflamed but
particularly around the eyes.

“You!” Joel yells, pointing at her, stunning
her from her fear. “What’s your name?”

The young woman stares at him, hollowed out.
“C-Chrissy,” she says in a small, uncertain voice.

“Well, Chrissy, and all the rest of you, get
the fuck in gear!” Joel gestures toward the small group beyond the
old-man corpse. “You want to live, right?”

Even as he speaks, a reluctantly rejuvenated
Chrissy and Kevin have together grabbed the largest piece of
furniture in the room—a solid row of four plastic chairs—and are
carrying it to the stairs, casting wary glances up toward the
second floor. The housewife and the businessman have launched
themselves toward another set of chairs.

“I’ve blocked the entrance with my cruiser,”
Joel says, “but we need to block every other door in this place.
Windows would be the next priority. I think we’ll be in pretty good
shape, as long as we’re barricaded. Our most pressing problem is
keeping them—” Joel gestures to the ceiling, “—up there. I mean,
there are three floors of those things about ready to flood this
place. Outside, everything is open, but in here there’s only one
direction for them to go, and that’s down.”

Scott is pacing in front of a drinking
fountain, looking on the verge of either sprinting away or helping.
“Why don’t you just shoot the fucking things?” He brings up his
thumb and starts gnawing at the nail, then spits at the ground. “I
mean, you’re armed like a fucking cartoon.”

“Dude, if it’s these four or five weapons
against the world, we’re in deep shit, so we gotta figure out
another way.” There’s a loud clatter at the stairs. Joel leaps
again toward the stairwell, casting a glance back at Rachel. “You
hear me? Get to work on the blood thing.”

Before Joel is even halfway to the stairs,
chaos erupts again. Rachel has been backing away, toward Bonnie and
Alan, but she freezes, watching Joel flinch at what he sees. And
then Rachel sees. The room is suddenly filled with shouts and
screams.

Three or four corpses are angling down the
broad stairs, all knees and elbows, their movements quick and
already more fluid and sure than before. For the first time, their
appearance looks completely alien to Rachel; they look clearly
other
. Repulsed, she can only stare. A male corpse leads the
pack, jaw upside down and unhinged, clacking and hissing
gutturally. He appears to have been a doctor. His sky-blue
button-down shirt is torn at the shoulders to permit the awkward
spider-like movements.

There’s a sudden boom, Joel having decided to
dispatch this one with his weapon. The man-corpse deflates briefly
against the wall, crippled, his right arm blown apart. He’s
spitting and hissing in anger, trying to reestablish some kind of
balance and locomotion. The barrel of Joel’s shotgun bucks again,
booming, and this time, the head explodes like a melon, its inner
light extinguishing like a blown flame. The body collapses,
partially blocking the path for the other corpses. There are three
left. One is a little girl in a dainty dress, and Rachel feels
something tug at her heart, a flash of little Sarah. There’s also a
grizzled black man, old and slow, crippled somehow, dragging cords
and tubing with him.

And then Rachel’s breath catches.

The final corpse is a naked pregnant woman,
her belly hideously distended, her heavy thighs splayed wide around
the bloody, crowned head of her dead, half-born child. The stunted
baby’s head is purple, almost black, veined and dry and caked with
mucus. Rachel catches only a glimpse of it as the woman corpse
spins and scrabbles itself down the stairs behind the little-girl
thing.

“Dear God!” Bonnie cries from behind her.

Her words turn to a breathless scream when
the little girl launches herself over the barricade into the middle
of the room, still upside down, landing deftly in the center of
everything, staring about, her little mouth open obscenely, her
small voice hissing, black tongue waggling. Joel ratchets backward
to face it, fumbling with the shotgun to reload.

“Scott!” he yells. “Scott!”

“What!?” Scott is rooted to the far wall.

“Take care of it! Smother it!”

“I’m not getting near that fucking
thing!”

The little-girl corpse growls and leaps
again—straight at Rachel. Helpless against instinct, Rachel hears
herself scream. She throws up her arms to ward off the thing. She
feels the impact of the girl on her left side, a dense weight, and
it half-spins her, enough to watch the small corpse skitter away
from her, beyond her, toward the double front doors. It moves madly
across the tiled floor there, searching for the exit, and beneath
its weight, the doors slide sluggishly open and it maneuvers its
way through them, squeezes past the cruiser, and is gone. Rachel is
left with the after-image of its gasping, barking, upside-down
mouth, and the searching, peeled-wide eyes beneath it.

There are screams at the stairwell, and
Rachel turns to see that all attention is on the pregnant
thing.

Scott is screaming,
“JESUS FUCK—JESUS
FUCK!”

The old-man corpse seems to have caught
itself on something on the stairwell—the tubing is stretched taut,
holding it back. But the pregnant thing is near the bottom,
stepping heavily, its hideous belly mountainous above it. Its
breasts hang to the sides of the chest, deflated. The thing’s eyes
are watching them warily, flicking from person to person, its mouth
open impossibly wide, emitting that same groany hiss.

Joel has loaded the shotgun and is aiming it
in the thing’s general direction. His face is in turmoil. “I—I
can’t—”

“Kill it!” Rachel yells. “Just kill it!”

The barrel of the shotgun is wobbling, and
the corpse is now watching Joel most closely, and it is with a dark
amazement that Rachel realizes there’s an intelligence behind those
blackened eyes. There’s an awareness that Joel is its greatest
threat.

It spiders its way down the rest of the
stairs, swollen and awful. Its mouth seems to take up its entire
face, the eyes an afterthought beneath and under it. Rachel can see
silver fillings in the thing’s lower jaw, gleaming in the strange
luminescence glowing from the throat. The woman-thing turns in a
half-circle, like a cornered animal, and Rachel glimpses the
purple, crowned head of the stillborn infant again. It has pushed
out a little more from its mother’s birth canal, the newly exposed
flesh slick and shiny with blood. Rachel feels her gorge rise
inside the depths of her panic.

Abruptly the shotgun finally fires, and
there’s splatter everywhere. The corpse falls to its back, its glow
extinguished.

And it’s not finished. In the silence that
drops on the room, amidst the gasping breath of the survivors,
there’s a sound of wet struggle. The group can merely watch as the
purple baby twists with impossible musculature out of its dead
mother’s birth canal, coming clear of that dark maw already
alien—on its back, its weak pudgy arms attempting to find purchase
on the floor but only slipping and failing. The slick umbilical
cord slithers around it like a slack leash. There’s an unmistakable
red luminescence radiating from its little mouth and nostrils.

“No!” Bonnie sounds from the edge of the
room, a plaintive cry with an echo that Rachel feels in her
soul.