Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood (11 page)

Michael takes a stutter-step toward the kitchen phone, stops, remembers that phone service is still knocked out everywhere, then goes ahead into the kitchen and yanks the receiver out of its cradle anyway.

Gotta try.

Nothing.

He sets it gently back, then stands there, weighing his options, chewing the insides of his cheeks. Sweat beads on his forehead. He swipes it away angrily.

Michael left the hospital under a certain assumption—that whatever had happened to these poor people didn’t constitute an overt threat to the survivors—and now that assumption is being seriously challenged. Worse, when he left the hospital, the only person he told about his destination was Kevin, and he might not have told anyone where Michael was going, out of a sense of some kind of confidentiality. Yes, Michael left a note in his room, but now he’s worrying that he didn’t put the note in a place where it would be immediately found.

Michael moves back to the front window, peers outside. On the otherwise barren street, three more of the things are crab-hobbling toward the house.

Christ.

He shoots his gaze toward the Honda, which is parked diagonally across the driveway. Can he get to it? Can he just walk out there, unharmed? Maybe those things aren’t so dangerous after all. But if they
are
dangerous—if they’re all as aggressive as that cornered prisoner was at the hospital—then would Michael even be safe inside a vehicle?

Safer than outside, that’s for sure.

If he wants to make a run for the Honda, he knows it has to be soon, before more of them come.

Even as that thought moves through his consciousness, he remains rooted to the spot.

Are they really coming for me?

Maybe they’re not, maybe they’re just streaming around the house in search of something else. In search of whatever the hell they’re here for in the first place? He doesn’t have any pine trees in the back yard, just a couple of ash trees and a barbecue and some junk. A vegetable garden that Susanna was tending half-heartedly. But there’s that big pine hanging over the fence, near the back.

At the thought, he turns from the window, barks his shin on the edge of the coffee table, and sends the lonely apple core tumbling to the ground. He curses and proceeds through the room, limping gingerly at first, through the hall and into Rachel’s bedroom, where the window looks out onto the back yard. At her dresser, he pushes aside some old trophies—from one of which a white bra dangles, inexplicably—then edges the blinds aside. Three of the things are back there, angling past one another, all of them glaring at the house with their dead eyes, as if searching for a way in. None of them is paying any attention to the pine tree.

“Goddamn!” he whisper-shouts against gritted teeth. “How did they get
back
there?”

Michael feels absurd and stupid, having abandoned the relative safety of the hospital for this dangerous seclusion. He checks to ensure that his firearm is loaded, and as he does so, his head snaps up.

Garage!
he thinks.

His Acura is at the office, of course, but Susanna’s Civic should be parked in there—unless Rachel took it. And he has an extra box of ammunition in the locked toolbox. Even if the car isn’t there, he needs to bulk up his defenses. He’s got the shotgun with its half box of shells, and he’s got the Colt, with perhaps a box and a half—seventy-five rounds?

He sprints for the kitchen, and abruptly his vision goes blurry. He braces himself on the edge of the sofa at the entrance to the living room, steadying himself. It’s the concussion, he’s sure.

There’s an abrupt thud against the back door, then another.

With eyes squeezed nearly shut, he forces a look in that direction, toward that recessed hallway, sees shadows playing there.

And now the front door rattles in its hinges underneath what sounds like a full body blow.

Michael staggers over and peers out the side window. The naked girl has crashed into the door and is now on her back, scrabbling around like an overturned snapping turtle. Her face is full of fury, beneath its glaze of woodsap and injury. There are superficial wounds all over it, and blood is caked in her hair. The head juts forward rhythmically at the air, the mouth clacking so hard that the teeth must be breaking. Michael shrinks back from the sight, but not quickly enough. The dead eyes lock onto his.

The head goes still at the visual contact, and a cold horror fills Michael.

They’re after me.

He’s sure of it now.

Another crash into the back door, and this time Michael hears something splinter deep in the jamb.

“What do you want?!” he calls out to them uselessly.

And why now? What did he do to cause this? No sooner did he return home and dig up his now-useless pile of pilfered cash, than this happened. As he stands there gripping the bridge of his nose, trying desperately to calm the blurry pain, he can’t help but think that the two phenomena are connected. Mere moments after he recalled the crime he was committing that morning, and held the stolen money in his hands, this horror came down upon him.

Coincidence?

He blurts out a constricted laugh—and feels wetness on his palm and wrist. He brings his hand away from his nose, looks at it.

“Shit!”

On top of everything, he’s got a bloody nose.

He winds his way to the kitchen and rips a paper towel from its roll, blots at his nose. He crumples a small bit of another sheet into a tiny ball, and stuffs it up the nostril. Then he uses the rest of the sheet to wipe the blood off his hand.

He makes it to the door to the garage, pulls it open. The Civic is gone.

“Dammit!”

Think, think
.

“Okay,” he breathes.

He steps down into the darkness of the garage anyway, on instinct flipping the switch repeatedly. He pauses briefly in the humidity, letting his eyes adjust. There’s just enough light to get to where he needs to go. He steps over to the yellow DeWalt tool chest and roots into his pocket for the keys, pulls them out. He finds the key and quickly turns the lock. The lid opens, unlocking the lower drawers. In the third large drawer is the second box of .38 rounds. He removes it and sets it on the ledge next to the doorway to the kitchen. Then he grabs the hammer and an old box of 16-penny nails left over from the shed he built out back three years ago.

A wave of dizziness passes over him, and he nearly falls. He clutches the edge of the tool chest for balance. At that moment, something slams into the garage door, and Michael’s heart nearly leaps out of his ribcage. He’s sure it’s a body. He can hear its raspy gasp now. The damn thing has sensed him inside the garage. Michael coughs, shakes his head.

With trembling hands, he gathers up his stuff and steps back up into the kitchen. His legs are weak and unsteady. His eyes keep wanting to cross, so he opens them wide to make them cooperate.

Spots begin appearing in his vision.

“No!”

He will
not
fall unconscious now.

He has no choice but to stop at one of the kitchen chairs, letting his load of items clatter across the table top. He needs to wait out whatever is happening in his head. He feels on the verge of nausea. He clutches his skull between his forearms and drops it between his knees and whimpers curses at the floor.

Under his voice, he half-hears another splintering thud at the back door.

He deserves this, of course. He knows that. He deserves whatever is coming to him. He probably deserves worse.

He sets his jaw and wills himself still and quiet, forcing out the racket of the continued assaults. He lets his mind go to Rachel, in her better moments, Rachel before her late teens. Her smiling innocence and her bravery in the face of her mother’s suffering. And then there’s Cassie herself; warm thoughts about her are difficult to separate from what she became in her final year, but they’re there. And Susanna, enticing and young, spirited and saucy. He lets the better memories of these women wash over him, as if they could heal.

But then his secrets and betrayals get the better of him.

He has failed all of them, in turn, and—yes—he deserves what he’s got coming.

That thought brings a kind of blank calm.

After long moments he opens his eyes. He blinks repeatedly, focusing and refocusing. The pain and blurriness have eased slightly. Enough for him to get up, to get moving. He grabs the hammer and nails.

He drags himself to the hallway leading to the back door, steadying himself along the wood-paneled walls. At the door, he moves the curtain aside and stares at the collection of human monsters that have collected on his back porch. There are nine of them now, including two middle-aged women and a rail-thin teenaged boy, an elderly woman Michael recognizes but can’t place, and a tiny blond girl, maybe four years old.

It’s the girl that freezes his blood.

This was someone’s daughter. She could be Rachel fifteen years ago.

The poor child is staring at him, her blue eyes wide and angry but flat in their sockets, her little mouth formed into a permanent sticky snarl. He can see the inner workings of her mouth and throat, the dry, wounded tongue roiling. The throat is red and convulsing. Her blond hair is muddy with mulch and her own blood. She’s rigid, tense, like a single-minded predator, her tiny body trembling with the effort of targeting him.

They’re all enraged and hobbling around, their hair hanging in thick strands. Through the door he can hear their heavy gasping. The sound intensifies as, one by one, they notice him there in the window. They glare up at him with their inverted faces, their ruined mouths twitching.

Where are they coming from?

As this question occurs to Michael, the teen tenses and leaps over the girl, throwing himself at the door, his already distended shoulder making hard contact with its lower half. Michael jumps back but keeps watching. The boy falls briefly to the cement, then scurries back into the moving crowd, apparently unhurt. His feral eyes remain on Michael’s.

“What do you want?!” Michael shouts at him.

Another of the monstrosities comes spidering into view—a naked black man, his genitals enflamed and erect but useless between his raised hips, waggling like a dark finger. The thing’s eyes are instantly on Michael, as if judging.

Michael turns away.

Why are they naked, for chrissakes?

Given the timing, many of them were probably showering when this thing hit. It was a Saturday, so many of them were just getting ready for the day. That, or they were still in bed.

He sets the box of nails on the low table to his right, fishes out a few, and begins hammering them into the door, at an angle into the jamb. He winces at each blow, feeling his head throb in time. Just as he’s beginning the third nail, one of the things delivers a vicious blow to the door, and the nail goes pinging to the floor. Michael pauses, trembling furiously. He steadies himself, then starts a new nail. He gets ten or twelve nails hammered in along the door’s perimeter, mostly on the non-hinged side, and then he stops, breathing heavily, bowing his head toward the floor.

The goddamn things are growling out there now, scrabbling at the door, their limbs thrashing at it. He watches them from under a furrowed brow, sweat streaming from his scalp into his eyes. He blinks away the saltiness, wipes at it.

A body is scaling the back fence, about to hop down into Michael’s yard. He eyes it with dark curiosity. The bent-backward pose of the thing—and the others, too—at first seemed ridiculously strange to Michael, but now it’s beginning to make a bit of sense. Somehow, they’re actually nimble this way. It’s as if they’re learning, or maybe more appropriately
relearning
, according to what they know, wherever they’re from.

What did Rachel say? Something about their flesh being too soft, too malleable. Something about the bodies reforming themselves for a new purpose?

He’s seeing the evidence of it right now. Whatever it is that has inhabited these human bodies, it’s doing something to the flesh, probably even the bones and the joints, the ligaments and the muscles. Softening the tissue, softening the bones, making it all more malleable to the instincts and preferences of the new inhabitant.

This new thing, scaling the back fence … it’s the body of a muscular young man, in his early twenties, and it’s moving deftly and assuredly over the fence. Michael hasn’t seen this yet, this level of confidence, among these weirdly animated bodies. Most of the bodies he’s seen have seemed clumsy, as if their new minds are struggling, frustrated even, with their uncooperative limbs. This is different, and it frightens him as much as anything he’s seen since he woke to this new world.

The body jumps down from the fence and lands efficiently, then scurries toward the back door. Its dead eyes find Michael. The face is slathered with blood and sap like all the others. The mouth opens raggedly. Michael can just make out the wet gasp that issues forth. And then the body leaps at him, launching from the limbs of the other bodies, and it crashes into the window, crunching the glass but not quite sending shards flying.