Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood (15 page)

And yet their basic underlying humanity is undeniable. One of them is an athletic teen sporting a blond buzz cut; Michael can’t help but imagine the boy’s trip to the barber, his after-school workouts, his celebrations with whatever team he belonged to. The other is a woman around fifty, her hair long and gray, all her clothes gone, her otherwise toned body splayed wide, the joints inflamed; and yet there’s kindness hiding in her features, beneath the alien rage. These observations—occurring within the space of mere seconds—cause Michael’s breath to catch. He sees what Joel intends, and there is a part of him that is compelled almost beyond restraint to reach over, grab the wheel, and veer them off course.

Somehow he resists the urge.

Ten feet, five, and—

“Hold on!” Joel shouts.

The impact jars Michael forward, and Joel and Rachel let loose with emphatic
ooomph
s.

The lower extremities and pelvises of the teen and the older woman are crushed between the vehicles, and a terrible, tormented gasping fills the air. The third body—that of an older businessman in a torn suit, his tie flapping uselessly—slides across the Hummer’s massive hood and comes to rest against the windshield, flat on its back. Its head is right there, the flat eyes darting from Joel to Michael as if to gauge which of the two men is the greater threat—or the more vulnerable target. Its hands and bare feet clamber across the slick hood, quick and sure, the fingers grasping the barrier between the hood and the windshield, the bare toes finding the grill in the center of the Hummer’s ridiculous expanse of hood.

Michael rears back, shielding his face, despite the safety-glass barrier.

Both bodies at the truck’s tailgate go down to the asphalt, falling out of sight, and then the Hummer is bouncing roughly over them. Rachel makes a kind of mewling noise.

Kevin’s truck goes swerving to the right, free of its attackers, and Michael has a glimpse of the three girls in the back, exhausted but safe, holding on tight, watching the drama on the Hummer’s hood—or perhaps still trying to determine who has come to save them.

Joel continues straight north, and as they slow to swerve through a collision immediately adjacent to the CSU track, the body on the hood takes the opportunity to jab its head straight at the windshield. There’s a horrid thump, and the head stays riveted there as if attached.

Joel rounds the wheel in a vicious swerve, but the thing stays anchored right where it is. “Damn!”

There’s a vibration now at the dash, and a throbbing heat, and impossibly the glass begins to fog.

“Holy shit!” Scott cries from the back. “It’s melting the glass!”

“Can it do that?” Joel says, and there’s a dark awe in his voice.

The face of the thing is a human parody, its mouth a mocking slash. Michael can definitely sense intelligence there.

“Get that thing off of there!” Scott cries.

“Hold on!” Joel shouts, and plants both feet on the brakes.

The Hummer shudders violently, and the former businessman’s face snarls as the limbs struggle to maintain their backwards grip. Finally, the body goes sliding across the hood, stopping at the front grill, half of it hanging down toward the bumper.

Michael sees only the head and thrashing limbs.

“Die, you bastard!” Joel shouts, then punches the Hummer forward again.

Right in the center of the windshield is a plate-sized blob of bruised glass, not shattered or broken, but partially sagging, as if molten. Even as he’s thrown back against his seat, Michael can’t help but stare at it with frank curiosity.

Joel swerves the Hummer mightily, left and right, trying to dislodge their unwelcome parasite.

“Crush it against a tree or something!” Scott yells.

“I don’t want to wreck this thing!”

The body manages to gain a sturdy foothold and leaps onto the hood again, sliding directly toward Michael.

“Truck!” Rachel calls. “Here it comes!”

The Chevy surges in from the right, revving hard. Michael risks a glance, sees Kevin’s sweaty face, and Bonnie next to him, hysterical.

The body scrabbles for a grip on the slippery surface, continuing its awkward slide. It reaches for the edge of the hood, misses. It clutches at Michael’s side mirror, does a heavy flip, and lodges itself on the side rail directly next to him. The thing’s head is bent over in a neck-cracking position, the eyes staring into the vehicle with dead, red-rimmed ire, and the body is bowed so severely backward that it hardly seems human at all. Michael leans as far from the door as possible, frantically gesturing Kevin closer.

The head lunges at Michael, thumping mercilessly on the nearly shattered window, and Michael somewhat pointlessly reaches over and locks the door. The dead eyes react to the proximity of his hand, darting at it, rapping the glass loudly. Michael sees mottled, bruised skin where it comes into contact with the window, but the thing seems to be suffering no pain.

“Hold on!” Joel cries, and Kevin’s truck comes heaving at them broadside.

But the thing is aware, leaping up and above the window just as the truck clanks hard against the Hummer’s side panels. Joel maintains his hold on the wheel, and the thing clangs and batters the roof above them. Michael remembers seeing a luggage rack up there and knows it’s got just what it needs now to hang on.

“Watch the windows on all sides!” Joel yells. “Lock your doors!”

He swings the Hummer wide, left and right, but the body on top of them hangs tight. Joel straightens out to maneuver between two substantial collisions, and the body swings over the opposite side of the vehicle—effortlessly, as if it has learned from what happened at Michael’s window—and positions itself at Danny’s window.

“Look out!” Michael calls. “Rachel, watch it!”

Anchored tightly on the luggage rack, the thing has the leverage to swing its head down against the window, savagely, and the glass spiderwebs in a quick
thwack!

“Danny!” Rachel cries, reaching over the boy protectively.

What happens next occurs too quickly for Michael—or any of them—to comprehend.

The head comes swinging at the window again, with a dexterity that fills Michael with outright terror. Elbows angled and framing the shattered window, the head pokes through, gasping. Its flat, dry eyes swivel madly in their sockets, regarding all of them in an instant and landing on its closest target.

Rachel is already yanking Danny backward.
“Noooo! Get the f—”

Danny’s seatbelt locks, and Rachel loses half her grip.

The gasping head jabs at Danny, at his face and his desperately stretched-back neck, and the boy makes a terrible wet squelch in his throat.

Everyone is yelling.

“GET OFF HIM, YOU BASTARD!”
Rachel is screaming, angling her hips to kick at the inhuman face, but the head receives the blows with the merest of flinches, then dives back at Danny, lunging, lunging, and Rachel is shrieking.

Without even realizing it, Michael is shouting and angling his body to kick at the head, too, but the thing is relentless, and now he can feel the tips of his toes going numb as his foot makes repeated contact.

“Don’t touch it!” he cries, yanking his leg back. “Rachel, don’t touch it, it’ll hurt you!”

“I don’t care!”

Joel has tried everything with the Hummer, jerking it violently, and now he comes to a sudden halt, heaving his passengers forward. Rachel, unbuckled, goes flailing against the large center console, screeching in fear and anger. Scott thumps the back of Michael’s seat, cursing. Some part of Michael is aware of Kevin’s truck sailing past them.

Danny is now fully in the thing’s grasp. The boy’s eyes have rolled back in his head, and Michael gets an awful glimpse of melted skin across his face. Just as Michael is reaching out to grab the boy with one final desperate grab, the thing yanks Danny’s small body through the destroyed window—glass scraping the boy’s flesh cruelly—and flings him to the asphalt. The body of the businessman then drops nimbly to the ground like some obscene crab and falls on Danny, the stabbing head working frenetically.

Rachel squawks raggedly in despair.

“He’s gone!” Michael cries, appalled.

“No no no no no!”
Rachel is repeating hoarsely.

“For fuck’s sake!” Scott says, his voice trembling and pitched high. “Get us out of here!”

The Hummer is already moving, and Kevin’s truck is fifty feet to the north, idling. Kevin’s head is down on his chest, and Bonnie has her hands over her face. The girls in the back are all perched at the tailgate, staring at them with horror.

Joel clears his throat, doesn’t say anything.

Rachel is mewling on the floorboards.

The Hummer closes the distance and pulls up next to Kevin. Michael’s window slides down in damaged fits and starts, the glass falling away in webbed chunks.

“Who was—?” Bonnie manages.

Michael shakes his head, unsure what to say.

He acknowledges the girls in the back of the truck. They are splattered and streaked with a terrible amount of blood. Their eyes are full of exhaustion and fear, their mouths hanging open. Scattered in the flatbed are several empty Super Soakers, and there are deflated blood bags everywhere. There’s also a large cardboard box full of something that Michael can’t make out.

For a long moment, there’s just the sound of heavy breathing. Michael can clearly make out the look of shock on Kevin’s face.

“What the fuck, man?” the big man says. “I mean … what the fuck?”

His expression is full of not only horror but worry. Michael can relate.

“We can’t stay here,” Joel says, his voice sounding hollowed out.

Kevin is nodding his head slowly, distracted by the horror.

Neither man cares to directly address what has just happened.

“Have you heard from anyone?” Joel asks. With shaking hands, he reaches into his pocket, finds a cigarette back. It takes him a moment to realize that it’s empty, and he lets it drop to the asphalt.

Rachel lets out a sob.

“Ron at the school,” Kevin says. “They were driven out of there. They weren’t prepared. There were maybe a dozen of them there, a dozen survivors. Lost a few of them, like we did.”

“Who did you lose?” Michael cuts in.

“Karen, for one, and I’m embarrassed to say I don’t remember the other one’s name. The dude.”

“We gotta get out of here,” Joel says. “We need a place to go, we can’t just keep driving around. We need a location.”

“The library,” says Kevin.

Joel stares at him.

“That’s where Ron went. He’d been thinking about it for a while, I guess. Easily defendable. Two stories. Good views out of thick windows, upstairs and down. And a generator on the roof.”

“How’s he know that?”

“Someone in his crew did janitorial there a while back.”

“Well, let’s check it out.”

Kevin pauses, eyeing Scott. “I guess you found someone.”

Joel glances into that back seat. “Oh. Yeah.”

Kevin sighs raggedly, firing up the Chevy. “All right.”

No one says anything then, and the only sounds are weeping and tires on asphalt.

The downtown Fort Collins library, southeast of Old Town on Peterson, is the oldest and largest library in town, and right now its mass of accumulated knowledge means almost nothing. Its books sit forlorn on the shelves. Instead, the library is the focal point of two groups of rattled survivors at the end of the world.

Joel rumbles the Hummer effortlessly over a curb and tears up the recently manicured grass, heading toward the front entrance. Kevin’s truck bounces onto the lawn behind them. Two vehicles are already parked next to the entrance, and there are faces in the dark glass of the library’s front sliding door. There’s no activity on the expansive lawns surrounding the library, but Michael knows it won’t be long before those damn things sense them and begin approaching.

The Hummer lurches to a stop, and Joel twists off the ignition. Just as he does so, the sky lets loose with another atmospheric roar, and everyone flinches, craning their necks to stare out their windows, up into the mottled sky, until the sound rumbles out into a strange crackling. Through his window, Michael notices a subtle red brightening in the sky to the west, above the smoke, above the blocky corner of the library roof. For a fleeting moment, it looks like great sheets of blood cascading down from the heavens. And then it’s only dark clouds and smoke.

Michael shakes his head, hoping against hope that these things he’s seeing are merely products of his imagination.

Then everyone is moving again.

“Let’s go,” Joel says.

Rachel is still curled up, crying over the loss of Danny. She can’t seem to stop the sobs. Michael touches her shoulder, briefly, and she flinches, lifting her wet-eyed gaze.

“Those goddamn fucking things!”
she screeches. Her face is filled with red-streaked anger.
“Why? Why are they doing this?”

Michael opens his door, jumps down from the Hummer to the ground, and goes straight to the rear passenger door. Scott is already out of the vehicle, pushing roughly past Michael, and jog-limping toward the library’s front sliding doors.

“Come on, Rach,” Michael says as gently as he can, taking her by the upper arm and urging her out. She comes as if reluctant, shrugging him off, embarrassed of her tears.

Michael’s eyes dart everywhere as he leads Rachel toward the library. Kevin, carrying the large cardboard box in his arms, shuffles in their direction. Bonnie is right ahead of him, along with the girls; they’re all carrying empty, blood-smeared Super Soakers, and—to Michael’s surprise—several units of plasma.

“Do you need help?” he calls to the women.

“We got it,” Bonnie says miserably. “This is the lot of it.”

“Come on, come on!” Joel calls from the doors. “Before they see us!”

They’re a ragged crew, slogging the short distance across the concrete sidewalk. Michael nods to Kevin as they come abreast of each other, and the big man gives Rachel a double-take, no doubt never having seen the young woman so vulnerable. He glances at Michael, then moves ahead and through the open doorway. When Bonnie catches sight of Rachel in distress, a new energy quickens her step.

“Rachel, dear!” Bonnie cries. “What—”

“It’s the boy,” Michael breathes, urging the kind woman forward.

“Oh my,” Bonnie whispers, ducking her head and continuing on.

They reach the doors and hurry inside. Immediately, Michael feels relief as the relative cool of the indoors wafts against his face. And there’s the somehow extremely clean, welcome scent of books—quite a contrast to the intensifying summer heat and smoke outside.

The library’s lobby is dotted with people watching them enter—in all, there are only six new people in addition to the hospital crew, about fifteen in all. Two unfamiliar men—one heavyset and middle-aged, the other hale and hearty, in his thirties—are poised on either side of the sliding doors, ready to shove them closed.

Joel is talking wearily but alertly with a young man near one of the check-out kiosks, and Michael knows this must be Ron, whom Joel has been in touch with over the radio. Ron is a lanky, tall man with poor posture. Bookish. Steel-rimmed glasses over a narrow nose. He has a certain low-key intensity to him, like a first-year teacher, maybe. Michael automatically associates him with the college, although he probably just ended up there by chance.

Michael helps Rachel to one of the vinyl benches lining the room. His daughter’s breathing com in sharp hitches, but her sobs are gradually subsiding, giving way to a trembling anger. She appears on the verge of lashing out.

Suddenly Bonnie, minus her burden, is sitting next to Rachel, petting her forearm.

“Poor girl.”

“Crazy out there,” Michael murmurs.

Bonnie just shakes her head, watching Rachel.

For the first time, Michael notices that Bonnie is also covered with patches of both tacky and dried blood. He finds the three young women across the room—Chrissy, looking small and fragile, and the athletic twins, breathing heavily still. They’re hanging off each other, still trembling, tears and dark astonishment in their eyes. Their limbs, particularly their forearms, are painted with blood.

“Hard to know what might happen next,” Bonnie whispers, tears threatening her voice.

Michael turns to the older woman, finds her eyes shiny, and then she’s leaning toward him and pulling him into a trembling embrace. He lets one arm return the gesture, leaving the other reassuringly on Rachel’s thigh. And Michael is stunned to feel a cough of emotion coming up out of his throat and hot tears of his own stinging his eyes. His chest convulses helplessly. He lets his eyes close, and—

—she feels just like Cassie, long before disease claimed her, long before their daughter morphed from angelic child to surly teen, long before his career turned from professional to criminal, and for a moment all the ensuing years dissolve, and this ridiculous, horrific reality is just a strange nightmare, and they’re a family again—

—he clears his throat, shakes his head, pushes away from the embrace.

Because flashing behind his closed lids is the image of Susanna, urgent, as if shouting at him, and as he returns to the present, the recollection of her corpse on their bed is vivid, too vivid, and wrong, and yet all his questions about that, all his stunned grief—it all feels like it’s on hold while he deals with this preposterous reality he’s found himself in.

He realizes that Joel is speaking.

“Obviously things have gotten out of hand, so we need to establish a stronghold here in a hurry—that is, unless anyone can think of a better location. I’m open to ideas, but they better be goddamn quick. And good. Because I’m not exactly thrilled by the prospect of going out there again.”

“I’m not going out there again,” Scott calls from the corner, where he appears to be hugging himself in an odd clutch.

“Figured,” Joel says. “Anyone else?”
              “I’m with that guy,” says a young Asian woman near the checkout counter. She’s got her hip thrust forward jauntily, and she’s rubbing one eye with her knuckle as if to remove an eyelash.

Michael glances back at the front doors. The two men are still poised there, watching the immediate grounds. But Michael isn’t considering them; he’s focused on the glass of the doors and remembering the way the body on the Hummer pressed its head to the glass and distorted it …

“Uh,” Michael speaks up, “I don’t have an alternative in mind, but I’ll just point out that the perimeter of this library is dominated by glass. Big windows.”

“Right, I was just talking to Ron about that.” He gives the lanky fellow a nod. “These are very thick windows, even at the entrance. Heavy, reinforced double-pane panels. They look an inch thick to me. I know what you saw out there, in the Hummer, I saw it too. But windshields are more like an eighth of an inch. I’m willing to bet we’re safe behind these panels, but like I said, I’m open to ideas.”

“Wait,” Ron speaks up. “What did you see?”

“Those things, whatever is in their heads?” Michael says. “It basically melted that glass and was eventually able to punch through.”

Bonnie stares at him in anguish.

“Jesus.” Ron says.

“Yeah.”

“What is it? Heat?”

“No, not heat,” Joel answers. “More like … radiation.”

The cop scans the room, and everyone stares back at him almost sullenly. It’s a scared, jumpy bunch, and they’re exhausted. These people are unwashed and grimy, their eyes sunken from stress and lack of sleep. And Michael would bet that most of them are suffering from shock.

“Okay,” Joel continues, “obviously those bodies out there have become much,
much
more aggressive than before. Everything is different now. We have to defend ourselves, and that means barricading this library—especially any entrances but also possibly these windows. Before we do anything else, I want to do a sweep of this whole damn place, check for open doors, check for any way inside those things might have. Seems to me we have a lot of opportunities as far as heavy shit for blocking entrances.”

He’s gesturing at the bookcases that surround them on all sides.

“So let’s spread out and make sure we’re okay—how about Ron’s team to the south end, upstairs and down, and the hospital crew can split up and take the north side? Most of all, check for bodies that are still in here. We found one unlocked employee door in the back, so who knows? Some employee probably came in early to do a little work. Check all offices and stock rooms, whatever,
every room
.”

He pauses, glances around, making sure everyone understands.

“Now, I’m told this building has a generator—”

“That’s right,” says a stocky man leaning against a large display of mystery novels. His face holds a naturally pinched expression beneath jet-black hair. “It’s on the roof.”

“We’ll get that in working order after we’re done, but barricading happens first. So let’s get to it, and then we’ll meet back here and get to know each other. Sound okay?”

There’s a general murmur of fatigued consent throughout the lobby.

“Good, let’s do it. I think we can make this work.” He points at the door guards. “See anything out there?”

“Surprisingly, no,” says the younger one on the right.

Joel thinks about that for a moment, then shakes out of it. “You two stay right there, keep an eye out. Do those doors lock?”

“There’s a key lock,” says the bigger, sweatier guy on the right. “Obviously we don’t have the key, but there’s also a security bar that I already dropped in place. That oughta do it.”

“All right, shout if you have a problem.”

“You got it.”

No one has moved out of the general area. They all still seem to be catching their breath. Michael has been so laser-focused on his daughter’s tears—she’s still snuffling, buried now against his shoulder—that he’s failed to recognize that two other women and a young man are also weeping. The young man, possibly a late teen, is part of Ron’s crew; the other two are Chrissy and Chloe. Michael sees hopelessness in their sodden gazes. And he catches sight of Scott again; he’s now squatting in that far corner, head down, cracking his knuckles.

Joel appears on the verge of blowing up, but he grits his teeth and releases a frustrated breath.

“Look,” he says, easing up but still intense, “if we don’t do this
right now
, chances are good we’re all going to die.
You
are going to die. Pretty horribly. Now come on, let’s pair up, right now. On your feet.”

Kevin stands up from his bench. He appears to have a moment of light-headedness and sways to his left, enough for a look of concern to make its way to Chrissy’s blood-streaked face, but he rights himself.

“Okay, who’s with me?”

Bonnie gives Rachel a squeeze, then Michael an encouraging glance, and wearily gets to her feet.

“We’ll take the south end over here,” Kevin says, and they walk off, Bonnie placing a hand on Kevin’s broad back.

“That’s the spirit,” Joel says. “Watch the windows, but don’t get too close. If you see anything threatening, give a shout.”

The rest of them get moving, with at least a modicum of purpose, and begin scattering through the building. Even Scott pairs off with someone—that young Asian woman from Ron’s group. As he leaves the room, he locks eyes with Michael, as if to communicate something, but then he’s gone. Michael frowns.

Then he nods at Joel, as if to say
Gimme a minute
, and Joel heads upstairs with Chrissy and the twins.

Rachel is breathing more evenly. Michael looks down on her, watches her face, which is still trembling as if with the effort of holding back emotion. Indeed, her grimy cheeks are striped with the paths of tears.

“You all right?” he asks softly.

“No.” The word comes out monotone, quick.

“Stupid question.”

Rachel tries a deep breath, but it falters and turns into a quavering exhale. “Let’s go, I need to stand up.”

“Okay.”

He gets to his feet and helps her up. She stands up straight, gives a sad, apologetic smile to the two men at the door who have been half-watching her, then finally manages the deep breath she wanted moments ago. Superfluously, she straightens the fabric of her bloodied shirt at her waist.