Blood Red (4 page)

“Mrs. Duncan!” she shouts, going to the
woman’s side.

Maggie’s face seems peaceful and alive, as if
in slumber, but the same red light is glowing from her cheek and
peeking out of her half-open mouth.

“Oh god,” Rachel whispers, moving up and
away. She knows only too well what will happen if she tries to
touch that light or even get near it. What can it possibly be? She
has never seen anything like it in her life.

She stumbles a little on a book that’s tented
open on the floor and moves to the window. She yanks back the
curtain there and stares over the low backyard fence, out into the
street. She didn’t notice it in her mad dash across the street
moments ago, but a car has laid down skid marks across the west end
of the street and ended up propped at a slight angle against a
tree. No one seems to have approached the wreckage, and she can see
no movement from inside the car. She peers further west and east,
and although she sees a couple of frantic figures out and about in
the distance, the street appears horribly desolate. She avoids
looking at the bodies in the driveway to the east, preferring not
to have to deal with that.

Rachel turns away from the window, and her
eyes land on Mrs. Duncan’s purse atop a tall, narrow table next to
the door. She crosses the room and takes it in her arms, rifling
through it, quickly finding a cell phone in a scuffed blue
protective case. Feeling a surge of adrenaline in her veins, she
presses the power button, watches the display turn on. Rachel
whispers an earnest entreaty to whatever force in the universe
might govern this madhouse of a world, and dials 911.

The phone’s display stutters and immediately
flashes the words
No Service
.

After a brief, enraged pause, Rachel throws
the phone with all her might at the wall, and it explodes into
plastic and metal shards. Even as the pieces settle to the floor,
she realizes that she shouldn’t have reacted so rashly, but there’s
no time for second-guessing.

She needs Tony.

Rachel leaves Mrs. Duncan’s room and reenters
the hall. At Tony’s door, she knocks and calls again for good
measure—hoping against hope—then tries kicking at the wood to force
it open. It doesn’t budge. She throws a more forceful kick into the
door and hears a splintering crack. Encouraged, she kicks and kicks
at the door, the twin sheets of flimsy veneer finally giving way.
Her foot punches through and lodges in the hole. Screeching her
rage, she yanks her leg free, claws of wood scratching harshly
against her denim-covered calf, and then she’s reaching her hand
through to unlock the door from the other side.

She gets the door open and lurches into the
room, limping.

Tony is spread out across the bed, face down.
Splayed out beneath his face is the red glow, fanning out like
ghostly fingers. A sob catches in Rachel’s throat, and she falls
forward to the ground next to the bed.

This bed, on which she and Tony have made
love countless times.

She grasps the brown bedspread and pushes her
face into it, and then she screams into the cloth, screams until
her voice is ragged and her throat feels full of hot gravel. She
squeezes her eyes tight against whatever this is, whatever has
happened. In the wake of her screams, she finds herself mewling,
slobbering into the cloth. She’s shaking her head, denying it,
refusing it.

The memories of their lovemaking atop this
old bed are far too fresh to push aside in favor of this horror.
Behind her clamped-shut eyes, she yearns for the sensory
recollection of his body against hers, of Tony urgently entering
her, the hot tremble of his flesh, of their playful laughing and
exploring, of even the humid aftermath, the sweaty closeness. She
tries desperately to hold on to these things even though she
understands somewhere deep inside that they’re forever gone.

She’s crying openly now, wanting to reach out
to touch Tony, to turn him over and see his face, but she keeps
pulling her hands back, only to reach out again—and stop. She feels
helpless against this infuriating, otherworldly luminescence and
whatever it might mean.

It can’t be real! This can’t be
happening!

She slumps against the mattress, facing away
from Tony. She brings her arms up and clamps them around her head,
denying the sounds from outside, denying the world. It’s too much,
this thing, whatever the hell it is, it’s too much to take. Her
thoughts jag hopelessly. Fat tears are streaming down her face, and
she can’t seem to stop herself from shaking. Her wrists are
practically knocking against her ears, but she wills them to
calm.

After some long moments, she feels that she
has slowed her heart rate and gotten past the worst of the panic.
She opens her eyes.

The dark room remains quiet, and she casts a
blurred glance around, trying to ground herself in the familiar—the
dusty electronics of the far wall where Tony would play his music;
the concert posters plastered across the walls with thumb tacks;
the dresser drawers like his mom’s, spilling clothing. Even the
weirdly bright-blue carpet, worn and old, but so comforting
somehow.

The noise from the street has quieted. The
city alarm has stopped, at least for the moment. Still, there’s
that odd buzzing, and she hears a shouted exchange, perhaps south
on Magnolia. But no explosions or screams.

She takes a few more moments to collect
herself, then pushes up to her knees to examine Tony. She dissolves
again, briefly, into sobs, then composes herself. She pushes at his
side to roll him over on his back. It takes her a few minutes of
effort, keeping her hands away from the red glow, but she finally
shifts his deadweight to the right position, and he’s facing the
ceiling. Tony doesn’t appear to be breathing. His eyes are closed,
and his mouth hangs slightly open, the glow lighting his cheeks
like a crimson lantern. She places her ear against his bare chest
to listen for his heartbeat. His flesh is warm, but the heartbeat
and breath are gone. She wraps her arms around his midsection, not
wanting to let go of him.

Wait…warm?

Her head snaps up and back. If Tony is still
warm, he’s still alive somehow, right? But no pulse, no breath ...?
She peers at his face again, trying to make some modicum of sense
out of the luminescence there, trying to figure how she can
possibly help him. Whatever she did with Susanna was the wrong
thing to do—and at the too-recent memory, she nearly chokes with
the emotion that threatens to throttle her—so what’s the right
thing?

“Wake up! Wake up!” she screams at him,
punching at his chest. “I don’t know what to do!”

She’s flailing away at his chest, and she
notices something odd. Her fists loosen, and her arms quit their
assault. Rachel pauses, staring at Tony’s body. She doesn’t think
it was her imagination that his flesh felt ... softer ... under her
blows. There was more give in the flesh. She pushes at his chest
again, and the bone and musculature do seem more pliable than usual
beneath her fingers. Repulsed, she pulls back her hand. She quickly
angles herself closer and studies his face, the source of the red
glow. Without moving into the organic heat of the glow, she watches
Tony’s expression, looks for signs of movement or simply the heft
of life. Unlike with Susanna, there’s definite evidence that Tony
is still there. Susanna slipped into death only after the light
fled from her.

Like a soul
, Rachel thinks.

She remembers seeing an old photograph once,
depicting a man in repose on his apparent deathbed, and his soul, a
ghostly half-image of the man, with closed eyes and solemn
expression, was departing his body, lifting upward, away from life.
She was perhaps nine years old when her dad showed her that
photograph, and it haunted her beyond words. She still remembers
the nightmares that followed in her little bedroom across the
street. Only years later, when she learned how double-exposure
photography works, did she come to understand that the notion of an
actual manifestation of a soul was fantasy. However, the mythology
is potent, and to think of this strange, otherworldly light as a
soul, with the potential of leaving—or remaining inside—the body,
is breathtaking to her.

She studies Tony’s features for what seems a
long time. She sits beside him, regarding him from different angles
or touching his hands or shoulders, willing him back to
consciousness. Then she hears another more distant, booming
explosion, and she also hears the rapid footfalls of someone
sprinting across Tony’s front yard, yelling, “It’s a plane! It’s a
fucking airplane!” The voice cuts away, leaving that persistent
keening.

Then there’s a new sound, and it is perhaps
most disturbing of all.

It’s an organic flutter, a fleshy roiling
sound, and it’s coming directly from Tony’s mouth. It’s far from
the innocent noise of a swallow, or even the movement of tongue
against palate, and indeed she notices no involuntary muscle
movement in his throat or face. No, it’s deeper, and it’s enough to
make Rachel recoil. Grimacing, she leans forward again to look
directly into Tony’s open mouth. Although she can see nothing but
moist flesh and teeth in front of the weird glow, she knows that
something is happening to him, inside him, something unnatural and
unprecedented.

She reaches up to touch his
forehead—
careful!
—to test the limits of the facial
structures. The bone doesn’t seem as solid somehow, nor the flesh
as resilient. Or perhaps it’s her imagination. Yet another teardrop
spills down her cheek as her fingers run slowly through his hair
and over his ear. She touches his skull lovingly. Tony feels not
just warm but very warm—hothouse warm—and now the thought of that
warmth, coupled with the lack of heartbeat and respiration, makes
her catch herself again. She wipes away the tear and stands up.

She has to leave him. She has to go outside
and find someone, someone who is still alive like her, who can help
her. She has to find a way to make sense of this madness.

“I can’t do it,” she whispers.

She sits there breathing heavily for several
more minutes, coming to terms with the fact that whatever
impossible thing happened to Susanna isn’t confined to her own
home. It’s much larger than that. She’s coming to the realization
that it’s happening all over the place.

She has to find out what it is. She has to be
strong. She can hear her dad’s voice in her head, encouraging her
the way he would years ago, before and especially after her mom
died, encouraging her to find the strength to move on after the
loss, and reminding her nearly every day that he would be with her
every step of the way. Where was he now?

Of course you can do it!
he would say.
You’re the strongest person I know!

She has to do this alone. And she knows she
can do it.

Without looking back, Rachel leaves behind
the splintered destruction of Tony’s doorway and makes her way to
the kitchen. Only after pausing in the kitchen to get her bearings
does she realize that something is amiss. Oh yes, the power is
out.

“
Think, think, think…
” she
murmurs.

The next step is to find her dad. Whether
he’s scrambling around like her, trying to understand what has
happened, or lying on the side of the street somewhere, a glowing
redness inhabiting his skull, she’s got to find him. In spite of
the loud, childish voice inside her telling her to hide away inside
this house or her own, to crawl back into her bed—or, yes, even
into Tony’s bed, to cling tightly to his still-warm body—she has to
venture out.

She has to find answers.

Where to start? She’s filled with panicked
indecision.

Not knowing what else to do, Rachel goes to
the bathroom, pushes down her jeans, and relieves a bladder she
didn’t realize was so full. She checks her lower leg and finds that
the splintered wood of the door did manage to barely draw blood,
even through the denim. She flushes the toilet. Standing there with
her jeans pooled at her feet, she finds a hand towel next to the
sink, wets it, and bends to clean her leg. In the mirrored medicine
cabinet, she finds some first-aid cream and massages some into the
wound. The blood isn’t flowing, so she goes without a bandage. She
pulls up her jeans, becoming aware once more of the numbness in her
hand.

She sits on the toilet again and squirts some
of the first-aid cream into the afflicted palm. With shaking
fingers, she works the stuff laboriously into her skin. Long
minutes pass. She feels herself rocking atop the toilet seat,
actively pushing herself away from the new realities outside this
tiny room. After a while, the oily liquid has mostly absorbed, and
she inspects her hand. Still pale, but no longer dry, her palm
appears to have been clumsily splattered with bleach.

When she stands again, her eyes lock on her
reflection in the full-length mirror on the wall. Her raw face
beneath unkempt dark hair looks decimated, the hazel eyes ravaged
from tears and smoke, her skin a lined mess.

She casts a glance down the slowly
brightening hallway leading to Tony’s bedroom. She wants to say
goodbye to him. She makes her way toward his bedroom, and there’s
another distant explosion; it has the feel of something massive,
earth-rattling. The sound is a deep, rumbling hopelessness. She
tries her best to tune it out.

Tony hasn’t moved an inch. She goes to him
and touches his hip, feels its familiar warmth. His body tugs at
her, nearly demands that she lay with him and close her eyes, lose
herself in a full-body embrace of denial, but she pushes gently
away from him.

“I’ll be back,” she promises.

Rachel opens the door and finds that a layer of
smoke has settled over the neighborhood, heavy and oppressive. She
coughs into her sleeve and squints at the scene before her. She
scans the ground in all directions, holding her breath against the
possibility of a body that matches the description of her father: a
tall, wiry, athletic man, possibly in casual business attire or
gray workout clothes, depending on what he decided to do this
morning. The only bodies she can see from this vantage point are
the three lying motionless on the far driveway, and she prefers not
to dwell on those.