Blood Red (7 page)

Rachel gets behind the wheel again, scanning
the street for any new movement, any new horror. Everything else is
desolate. She starts up the car and gets back on her way.

“I’ll go through Old Town, see if we can find
someone who knows anything.”

On the little armrest control pad on her
door, she brings down all the windows. Even before 9:00 a.m., the
summer day is getting warm. The air is smoky, but not suffocating
yet. She keeps an eye on Alan and Sarah in the back. The little
girl is emitting wet, damaged sounds from her nose and mouth, as if
her tongue is bloated or she’s experienced significant oral trauma.
Rachel’s pulse thuds with heartbreak for this child.

“Your family…?” Alan ventures after some
silence, almost too quietly for Rachel to hear beneath Sarah’s
sounds.

Rachel looks into his dazed eyes through the
rearview mirror. “My stepmother is dead,” she says. “I don’t know
where my dad is. His car was gone this morning.” She hesitates
before telling him about Tony. “My friend across the street,
too.”

“My Jeannie is gone,” he says faintly,
repeating himself from earlier. “She just… wouldn’t wake up. Died
in her sleep. Very peaceful.” He pauses. “Except for that…that
red…”

Rachel doesn’t know how to respond to that.
“I’m sorry, Alan,” she says, knowing her words are insignificant.
“I think a lot of people are gone.” She tells Alan about the cars
she’s found on the side of the road, the occupants who all appeared
to suffer the same fate as Susanna and Tony and Jeannie and Sarah’s
parents.

“What does it mean?” he says in a soft tone,
wondering aloud. “This …this red glow coming from inside?” Rachel
watches him frown deeply. “It doesn’t make a lick of sense.”
Embarrassed, she sees a tear flow down his left cheek, sees him
wipe it away. “Not a lick of sense.”

Whatever it is, Rachel senses that it’s
beyond human understanding. When her mind veers in the direction of
that otherworldly illumination, shining from underneath flesh and
bone, she encounters an insurmountable block in her thinking. Her
mind simply turns in another direction, say, to contemplate some
other terror—some terror that is itself a symptom of the red glow.
She can handle only the symptoms, and those only barely. She can’t
handle the source. Not yet. She doesn’t know how to put all that
into words.

So she drives.

“Look,” she says after a minute, and Alan
glances up.

There’s a man sprawled in the road up ahead,
right at the edge of Howes. Dressed in shorts, a tee-shirt, and
athletic shoes, he’s simply lying there. He’s facing their way, and
when Rachel pulls up beside him, she can see that his eyes are
half-open, dead-seeming. She pauses there and studies him. Behind
her, Alan leans over and looks down on him. The sun has risen, and
she can’t see evidence of a red luminescence, but she knows it’s
there. Alan settles back into his seat, cradling Sarah, and Rachel
motors on, leaving the jogger where he lies. He recedes in the
rearview mirror. It seems wrong to leave him, but what else can she
do? How can it be that in the short space of this single morning,
she has come to a place where she could do such a thing—just drive
on?

She keeps moving toward the center of
town.

There are more crashed vehicles. She has kept
count since that first one on Magnolia. She has seen twenty-three
cars and seven trucks angled into curbs or trampled across lawns or
crashed into homes, and she has seen four bicycles lying in the
streets and crumpled against parked cars, their riders slumped at
odd angles over aluminum-and-rubber wreckage.

“I’m scared,” Rachel says meekly, surprising
herself. She can barely keep it together.

Alan is breathing in quick breaths. “Me
too.”

She maneuvers through the small, meandering
business district that precedes College Avenue. There are dozens of
crashed vehicles, most of them off to the side of the road, some of
them stopped right in the middle, and then she’s facing the main
thoroughfare. The traffic signal isn’t working. The large pillar of
black, stinking smoke is just to the north, but the smoke is heavy
here too, so heavy that Rachel reverses her decision and brings all
the windows up. She presses the button on the dash to restrict the
cabin air to recirculated.

A woman appears directly in front of them,
running south to north, straight up College Avenue toward the fire.
She’s harried, crazed. Her gaze touches on Rachel’s for the
briefest of moments, but there’s no recognition, and she keeps
running toward the smoke.

Rachel carefully makes the turn onto College,
and there are so many cars wrecked along the thoroughfare that
Rachel loses count. Not crumpled hunks of metal, steaming or
smoking, but gentle impacts, fender benders, the cars seeming to
have lost power and drifted into their accidents. The parking rows
lining the center of the avenue constitute a weird scene dotted
with untended collisions every few meters. In every car, human
beings are slumped against the wheel or smashed against the window.
In the gray dimness, she can discern the ubiquitous red glow—it’s
everywhere under the smoke, coming from hundreds of bodies, inside
vehicles, lying motionless on the sidewalks, crumpled in the
roadway next to bicycles. It’s a haunting scene, desolation amidst
bedlam, and Rachel can only stare numbly.

Now she sees another moving car off in the
distance, coming from the east on Mountain, turning north toward
the blast, and then another, maneuvering north along the southbound
lanes of College, also approaching the smoke.

When Rachel crosses Mountain, she’s facing a
scene of chaos. She stutters the car to a stop. Alan and Sarah bump
forward, and Alan emits a grunt of surprise. Rachel gapes at the
sight of the broken airliner in flaming pieces across the avenue,
great blackened chunks of it scattered into the burning buildings
on the east side. A giant, crumpled FedEx logo is plainly visible
along the fuselage. Thick plumes of smoke rise from several
structures and from the destroyed plane itself. The impact has made
a crater of College Avenue south of Laporte. Perhaps thirty
businesses—some of Rachel’s favorite stores, concert venues, and
restaurants—are completely burned out.

A helpless group of survivors has assembled
in a wide perimeter around the wreckage, there to help but unsure
how to begin. It’s a frumpy, unkempt bunch; they all appear to have
recently tumbled out of bed. To Rachel’s amazement, there is only a
single police cruiser in the vicinity, lights flashing. Rachel
believes it to be the one she saw speeding east on Magnolia
earlier. The officer is in uniform, standing by his cruiser,
two-way radio in hand. He’s repeatedly speaking into it and
listening, and it seems he isn’t getting a response. Even from her
car fifty feet away from him, Rachel can see it in his worried
expression.

“Stay
back
!” he calls abruptly to the
crowd, then goes back to his radio.

Flames have engulfed half the street. Small
explosions continue to pop inside the buildings, and Rachel can
tell the fire is spreading. Windows at the edge of the flames are
blowing out, throwing glass across the sidewalk.

Five or six people have gathered around the
cop: two older women in nightclothes, a young man in shorts and no
shirt, and two pre-teen children, who are backed against the car,
looking scared out of their minds. The woman Rachel saw running
north on College has arrived at the cruiser, has planted her hands
on the black trunk, and is now catching her breath. No one pays her
any attention. All she needed was the comfort of the flashing
police car’s appearance of control.

Perhaps thirty more people are closer to the
plane, getting as close as they dare, pointlessly looking for
survivors in the cockpit. The policeman calls out to them again,
but this time Rachel can’t hear his words. Most of the people are
more cautious, farther back from the wreckage, some turning away
and finally hurrying back toward the cop.

“I want to talk to him,” Rachel says. She
turns back to face Alan, and Sarah, who is clutched to him. “Do you
want to wait here?”

“I’ll wait,” Alan says, unable to take his
eyes from the nightmare of College Avenue. “I think she’s okay, but
her breathing is still labored. Please hurry.”

“We’ll get her to the hospital, I just—”

“Go ahead,” Alan urges.

Rachel pulls the car forward and parks close
to the cruiser, switches off the engine. She jumps out, immediately
coughing under the assault of the thick smoke, and runs toward the
police officer, who looks over at her. His face is drenched with
sweat, and his bloodshot eyes are ravaged from stress. He’s a
close-shaven, serious man. Despite his youth, he has an air of
military authority that he seems desperate to preserve in the face
of pandemonium.

The others see Rachel approach as well,
giving her no more than a glance before they go back to their
panicked study of the disaster that has befallen their town.

The policeman tosses his radio on his seat,
giving up on it. “Nothing,” he announces. “There’s no one. I don’t
fucking believe it.”

“Is that thing even working?” a soot-smeared
woman behind him asks in a surprisingly even voice.

The cop glares back at her. “Radio’s fine,
just no one receiving.”

“Hey,” Rachel says.

The officer nods at her. “You okay?”

“I’ve been better,” Rachel says. “What the
hell is happening?” She asks her question to the policeman but
loudly enough for everyone to hear.

The cop lets out a weary sigh. “I don’t have
any answers for you, except that there’s a cargo plane crashed in
the middle of Old Town, with zero emergency response except yours
truly. This fire is going to take out half of downtown. There’s
about a thousand vehicles crashed within the few square miles I
know about, and most of the goddamn people in this town appear to
be dead—
dead!
—right in their goddamn beds. If they’re not
dead in their cars, that is.” He gestures toward the airliner. “I
picked up some chatter on the CB, and a guy on Mulberry way out
near the interstate said he was seeing explosions like this in
every direction, especially down Denver way. Airplanes falling from
the sky.”

“I saw one,” Rachel blurts out. “A passenger
plane, to the north. It just broke up and fell.”

He glares at her, dry-swallowing
involuntarily, then looks back at the devastation in front of
them.

“It’s some kind of attack, I’m sure of it.”
This comes from the thin, shirtless young man behind the policeman.
He has to practically yell under the crackling whoosh of the
flames. “I was out running before dawn, and way ahead of me I
watched two cars swerve and crash into the curb. I mean, one
minute, they were just people on their way to work, and the next,
it was like they both fell asleep at the same time, right in their
seats.”

“Everything happened at once?” comes another
voice, panicked, high-pitched.

The young man is nodding, his eyes darting
around.

This revelation jibes with what Rachel has
seen so far. At some point before dawn, something happened to this
town. Possibly more than this town. People just turned off. No
pulse, no respiration, nothing. For all intents and purposes,
dead—simultaneously. It was some kind of cataclysmic event,
culminating with that red … presence … beneath the skin.

“But what kind of attack?” Rachel yells into
the maelstrom of flames and booming clatter. Her first thought, she
remembers, had been terrorism.

“I ... I don’t know. Biological?” the young
man says.

“You’ve seen what’s happening to all the
people, right?” She asks this of the loose group around her.
“You’ve seen the bodies? You’ve seen what’s happening under the
skin?”

There are a few nods.

“I saw it,” says one of the bleary-eyed kids
at the cruiser, a middle-school kid with a mop of brown hair.

“Wait, what?” the cop says. “What are you
talking about?”

“Red,” says a woman off to the left, a
grimace of painful memory slashed across her mouth. “Red light
coming from…from inside them, inside their bodies.”

The cop looks confused and flustered.
“
What?!
” He shakes his head. “I don’t even know how to begin
to deal with
that
right now. Jesus Christ. All I know is I
got this fucking plane burning a hole in the city. I need to deal
with
that
right now
.
”

One woman calls out, “Where’s the fire
department?!” and then moans raggedly when the answer is reflected
in the small crowd’s silence. During the silence, minor heat
explosions continue to burst from a dozen buildings beyond the
crashed jet. The woman’s outburst causes a couple of women in the
near distance to begin crying, and at the sound, Rachel’s own tear
ducts well up. Others are reacting with silent dismay. A crushing
hopelessness settles over them. Rachel can feel the collective need
for some sense of control, and fortunately the cop senses it
too.

“Okay, the closest firehouse is on Remington
by the library,” calls the cop. “I need volunteers!” Most of the
group surges toward him at the suggestion. “Let’s go there and get
a truck. I won’t know what the fuck I’m doing, but I can give it a
shot. Let’s go!”

Rachel feels the same urge to help, to do
something, to be a part of recovery. But Alan and Sarah are waiting
for her in the car. She needs to get the little girl to the
hospital. Rachel can handle a young child and an old man. She
thinks she can. What she can’t handle is a city in ruin.

She finds herself backing away from these
suddenly scrambling people. They’re crowding around the cruiser,
and the cop is singling out a few of the hardier survivors. “You!
And you two!” They’re climbing into the back of the cruiser.