Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood (17 page)

He can feel Rachel considering that, as she rocks against him.

“There’s a good chance that you … well, that you
helped
him. That you actually
did
save him.”

Rachel releases a massive sigh against him, then pulls back. She moves away from him, walking the aisles as she wipes at her face with her forearms. She does a half-hearted sweep, then about-faces, comes back his way, continues east in the dimness.

“Look,” he calls to her, “all I’m saying is that it’s not as simple as you’re thinking. As we’re
all
thinking. Whatever has happened to those bodies is deeper and more devastating than we know. I’m sure of it. You can’t punish yourself for this, when you did what anyone else would have done, and when there are so many unanswered questions.”

Michael keeps an eye on her body language. He thinks he’s said the right words, but it has been so long since he’s been able to find them that he’s not sure what they sound like. It’s been years since she embraced him like that, and equally long since they’ve had a conversation like that. A conversation that matters.

But the way she’s bounded away from him, avoiding eye contact, makes him think he should do more, say more … that everything he said was wrong.

Then she stops between two towering tables of kids’ books and appears to consider something. She turns back, walks back to him, and embraces him anew.

Then she lets go and returns to her search.

Michael feels his spirits lift like the release of an almost physical weight. He falls in step behind her, and he can tell by the way that she’s holding herself that he has—in some small way—helped her. He’s stunned to realize it, but right here, right now, in the midst of the bleakest horror, this is his finest moment with his daughter in years. It’s all wrapped up in death and misery, and yet there it is.

He wants to reach out to her, touch her shoulder, hold her back, and sit with her among these books, savor the moment.

But he doesn’t lift his hand.

“Let’s finish this up and get back, huh?” she says.

He feels his head nodding.

There are two small private rooms off the library floor, and Rachel pokes her head into the dim one with the open door. “Clear.”

The other door is closed. Michael tries the knob.

“Locked.”

“Let’s tell Joel. Probably just files in there or som—”

Then something clanks beyond the door, and Michael jumps. Rachel goes reeling backward, nearly colliding with a computer kiosk.

“Holy—!” Rachel cries.

“Shhh! Wait.”

“What if …?”

“Hold on.”

“What?!”

Michael moves back closer to the door and raps on it softly. “Hello?”

Rachel is wide-eyed, ready to bolt.

“Is someone in there?”

Silence.

“We won’t hurt you, we just want to help.”

Rachel covers her mouth with a white-knuckled hand, and they stand there listening, but there’s nothing. Finally, her hand drops.

“I’ll get Joel,” she whispers. “And blood.”

Michael extends a hand, as if to say
Wait
…

“Whoever’s in there, you have the chance right now to come out and talk to us, and we’ll help you.” He pauses, listens. “But in a few seconds, there will be weapons here, and it won’t be as nice.”

An immediate scuffling sounds behind the door, and there’s a fiddling with the knob.

“Daddy!” Rachel is batting at his arm, ready to run.

“Don’t worry.”

The knob is still jerking around.

“Wait!” comes a small voice from behind the door. “I’ll come out!”

Michael swallows with relief as Rachel’s jaw drops. She stares at him, mouthing,
How did you know?

The lock gives, the knob turns, and the door is opening inward. The room is dark, and a waft of humidity finds Michael’s face, along with a slightly tart, slightly sweet odor of sweat. His gaze darts downward to find a preteen child staring fearfully up at him. She’s a young African American girl, and she’s attached to the door, her lip quivering, but determined to show strength. It’s taking a lot of energy to hold back tears.

“Hey,” he says, automatically dropping to a crouch. “You okay in there?”

She doesn’t respond, just looks over at Rachel, who has also kneeled down.

“I’m Kayla,” she says, barely audible.

“I’m Michael, this is my daughter Rachel.”

The girl’s deep-brown eyes move back and forth between them. She opens the door a little farther, revealing herself and the darkened room behind her. Michael sees stacks of books, empty food wrappers, water bottles, and three flashlights. Kayla herself is thin and athletic, with shoulder-length hair, thick and unkempt, and a slightly upturned nose over a full-lipped, expressive mouth.

“Have you been staying here?” Rachel asks gently.

Kayla nods. “Is that okay?”

Rachel tentatively touches the side of Kayla’s head.

“Of course it’s okay, sweetie,” she says. “How long have you been here?”

Kayla swallows. “I don’t know.”

“Since all this started?”

“Since after my mom—after she woke up.”

“Where do you live?”

“Across the street.” She points vaguely out the window.

“How old are you, Kayla?” Rachel asks.

“I’m twelve.”

The girl is warming to them already, venturing out, inch by inch, hanging onto the knob, swaying a little.

“But I’m okay.”

Michael knows she’s certainly not okay, but he smiles despite himself, admiring her pluck.

Rachel says, “Well, it’s been
very
hard for me, and I know I could use a hug from a pretty girl.”

Michael is startled by how quickly Kayla lunges for Rachel. The poor girl practically plows into her, eager for human contact. As Michael stands from his crouch, he touches the girl’s head, and then Kayla is sobbing into Rachel’s shoulder, strangely mirroring the moment he shared with Rachel moments ago. The emotional synchronicity strikes him sharply, briefly, pricking him with a feeling of loss for what he’s missed out on with Rachel over the past few messy years—and then he moves away to check the rest of the room while Rachel and Kayla embrace, talking softly.

Michael makes his way to the edge of the room, peers down the corridor, sees Bonnie sitting on one of the benches, her posture beaten down.

“Bonnie!” he calls softly.

She turns.

“We found someone.”

“One of
them
?” she whispers, alarmed.

“No, no, a girl. Where’s Joel?”

“I’ll get him.”

Michael knows Bonnie will keep it quiet for now. He doesn’t want to overwhelm the poor girl with a throng of sweaty survivors. As Bonnie hurries off in the opposite direction, Michael watches from afar as his daughter soothes this unlikely newcomer. There’s something immediately … almost sacred … about the contact. He lets them have their moment.

“What’s up?” says Joel, arriving with Bonnie, as well as Chrissy and the twins.

“Found a girl,” Michael says, gesturing.

“Really?” Chrissy says, excited but utterly wiped out. She cranes her neck to see beyond the small clutch of survivors. For the first time, Michael notices that she has a tiny nose ring, glinting in the semi-darkness.

“Yeah, looks like she holed up in a storage room there.”

Now Rachel is looking at them from Kayla’s doorway, and she waves her arm for everyone to come over. Kayla is smiling, wiping her eyes.

Michael leads them over to Rachel, and it turns out he needn’t have worried about bombarding Kayla with survivors. Now that she’s had her moment with Rachel and found herself embraced by humanity again, she’s remarkably poised at the center of attention. She’s gesturing into the room where she’s been hiding.

“—had plenty to read!” she’s saying.

Her voice sounds almost enthusiastic now, and Michael can detect an edge of overcompensation: He’s sure she’s still scared out of her mind, he can see it in her eyes and in the twitch of her mouth, but she’s already trying hard to be the girl she was before.

Bonnie asks Kayla where she found food and water, and Kayla answers with a politeness that sounds almost nostalgic.

“That’s actually how I—how I ended up in there. See that little refrigerator there?” She gestures behind her. “It was full of bottled water, and people had left their lunches in there, I guess. I ate those. There’s still water, though, if you want some.”

As the group murmurs, Michael cranes his neck to read the titles of the books Kayla has been accumulating. There are several teen fiction titles in there—unsurprising. But one of the titles does startle him:
Deciduous and Coniferous Trees of the Rocky Mountains
.

Michael breaks away from the group, moves past Kayla into the room, and picks up the book. He takes the opportunity to scan the small space, sees the fridge, notes the small sleeping area that Kayla has fashioned out of towels, both cloth and paper. He brings the book out.

“Oh, yeah, that one,” Kayla says.

The small group exchanges glances, and then everyone is focusing on this twelve-year-old kid.

“You’re really reading that book?” Rachel asks.

“Kind of,” Kayla says, her gaze flicking from one survivor to the next. “You’ve seen what those people are doing, right? They’re eating the—”

“No, yeah, we’ve seen it.”

“I still don’t get it, but they want something in those trees. And they’re only interested in the pine trees—the coniferous ones.”

She pronounces
coniferous
a bit oddly, too carefully, as if she’s never said the word aloud before.

Rachel can’t help but laugh at the things coming out of Kayla’s mouth.

Michael is flipping through the book’s pages.

Joel says, “Kid, you’ve just appointed yourself head researcher. Nice to have you with us. You up for telling us what you’ve learned?”

“I guess so.” Kayla has a wide-eyed look of innocence about her, but there’s also a flintiness there that’s unusual for a preteen. The kid is sharp.

“Okay, we’re gonna have a little Town Hall meeting right now out there in the lobby. We’re gonna lay everything out, see where we stand. We’ve got two groups coming together here—we’re from the hospital, and Ron’s group in there came from CSU. We learned some things at the hospital just as you learned here, so we’re all gonna start sharing things with each other.”

Ron’s group has started filtering in toward Kayla, but Joel directs them back out to the lobby.

There’s a cool cleanliness and order to the library, thankfully, but Michael can tell that’s going to be a brief pleasure. Perhaps a day or two. The group—now sixteen people strong—has a sweaty, animal humidity to it that is already spreading, and Michael knows that these books are soon destined for the floor as their heavy shelves are shoved against the windows. It’s only a matter of time.

Joel’s group—as Michael thinks of it—heads for the lobby in a loose, nervous cluster, and Rachel falls in next to him, her arm around Kayla. The two are already close pals. Rachel looks up at him, then briefly places her head against his shoulder—a reminder of the moment they had before the discovery of Kayla.

Michael allows himself an uncertain smile, and then Joel calls out to the two men at the front doorway.

“What are you seeing out there?”

The sweaty guy speaks up. “A whole lotta nothin’. There are a few clamped to trees, way off over there. But they don’t seem to be interested in detaching.”

“I don’t get it,” Joel says.

“They had no trouble sniffing us out at the hospital,” Bonnie says.

“Okay everyone, let’s settle in, grab a quick seat.”

The groups come together amiably, finally nodding to one another in tentative companionship, and there’s an eerie quiet over everything. Michael likes to think it’s the communal remembrance of being at a library, but he knows it’s merely the shared exhaustion, the common grief for the lost friends and family that every single person here is feeling, the dark uncertainty of the future. Heavy things like that—they can’t have surmounted them during the time he was unconscious. In fact, they’re probably only now just coming to terms with them. Or will in the near future.

At this moment, Michael would rather feel the soft pressure of his daughter’s head against his shoulder than deal with the fact that every other aspect of his life and identity has been devastated.

Most of the assembled crew has collapsed to the floor, looking as if they might at any moment crash into slumber. The young women, in particular, look useless in their exhaustion: Chrissy and Chloe have slumped against each other like a couple of drunken sorority sisters.

Except that their clothes and skin are blotched and swiped with dried blood.

“All right, folks,” Joel calls from the foot of an open stairwell leading up to the second floor, “we have a fairly secure perimeter, as long as those things can’t break through the heavy glass of these windows. I’m pretty sure they can’t, but then again, they’ve surprised me more than a few times already.”

There’s a murmur of dismal consent across the lobby.

“We’ve completely blocked the three smaller entrances to this building—a smaller door to the south and two employee doors to the west. Ain’t nothing getting through those. Thanks guys.” He nods to two men to his left—the young man he noticed earlier, as well as the black-haired man, who looks like a heart-attack candidate, sweaty and heavy. “I guess the biggest news is we found another survivor, this scrappy youngster over here. Her name is Kayla, she’s—how old?”

Kayla says, “I’m twelve,” in a voice that contains far more enthusiasm than it probably should, given the circumstances.

A ripple of laughter flows through the room.

“Glad you’re okay, Kayla,” Bonnie says, over on the far side of Rachel.

“Me too.”

“As you can imagine,” Joel goes on, “Kayla’s been doing some reading in here. Apparently she’s even been reading about the types of trees that these goddam things seem most interested in. So maybe she can help us get a handle on what we’re dealing with out there. Turns out we’ve got several young ladies who are pretty smart cookies. Kayla, I’m glad you found Rachel first. You two are the ones who are probably gonna figure a way out of this mess.”

Joel is striving for a tone of hope in his ragged voice, but Michael can hear the cracks. On a kind of instinct, Michael searches the room for Scott, finds him leaning against the wall over by the book-return slot. His mouth is closed tight, and there’s the slightest twitch at the corners, a grimace. Then again, Michael is looking for it, so it might just be imagination.

“For some reason, those things are leaving us alone at the moment,” Joel goes on. “Now, we can debate all we want about the reason for that—and we should—but we can’t just assume we’re safe here. That’s what we started to do at the hospital, and that was overrun.”

He nods to Kevin, who is standing side by side with Chrissy and the twins.

“We had the sliding doors open, like morons, just to let in some fresh air,” the big man says. “That place got incredibly rank, with all the spilled blood and the bodies—Jesus! But yeah, while we were cleaning up, they creeped right in, four of the motherfuckers. Sorry. We lost two people, and Bonnie was hurt.”

Michael, surprised, turns to Bonnie. Rachel does, too. Bonnie doesn’t appear to want the attention. Timidly, she shows her hands and forearms, which appear as if they have been splattered with bleach.

“They just … rammed into me, with their heads. I shoved at them, but they were stronger.” She drops her arms, hiding them behind her as if ashamed. “They’re a little numb. Those monsters would’ve killed me if it hadn’t been for Kevin.”

“Monsters?” comes Rachel’s voice, hardened. “Is that—” She composes herself. “—is that how we’re talking about them?”

“Yes,” Scott says from the edge of the group. “Yes it is!”

“Well, you haven’t seen what we’ve found.”

Kevin and Bonnie exchange an uncomfortable glance.

“Because they’re still—well, they’re still
people
, right?” Rachel is looking around sharply for support. “Underneath it all? We know that.”

A few survivors start talking at once, but it’s Joel’s voice that’s most forceful.

“Rachel, I can’t see how you can go through something like what we just saw in that Hummer, and think there’s any humanity left in those things!”

“But you saw it yourself, at the hospital.” Rachel is defiant, and her pose suggests a protective shielding of Kayla. “The man in that bed came back. The blood turned him back.”

Kevin steps back in. “Rachel, that dude is dead. He’s dead.”

“How?”

“He was in pain,” Bonnie says. “The worst pain I’ve ever seen, even worse than Jenny.”

Michael doesn’t know who Jenny is, but the words have a stinging effect on Rachel, who closes her eyes and brings her head down.

“Whatever is inside them …” Joel says, “… it has changed them irreversibly.”

Rachel shakes her head.

“I have to believe,” she seethes, “that we can cure them. That we can fix this.” Her eyes come up blazing. “Otherwise, we’re doomed, aren’t we? As a race! I mean, we’ve found this solution, and it’s a solution inside all of us. We’ve found what it can do. We can’t just ignore it! I don’t believe that it’s … that it’s irreversible! It can’t be. How did he die?”

Kevin takes a moment before answering. “Those things got him—”

Michael is suddenly aware that Chrissy is crying. “He was—he was screaming.”

“All ri—” Joel tries to cut in.

“So you’re not even sure?” Rachel says. “You left him to die? I know none of us knew him, but … you left him in that room and they just swarmed him?”

“He was the only reason we were able to get away,” Bonnie says, and Kevin gives her a reproachful look.

“That’s terrible,” Rachel murmurs.

“He was gone, Rachel,” Kevin insists. “Too far gone.”

“Well, Rachel has a point,” Joel says. “If nothing else, the blood—injecting the blood—has the effect of destroying what’s inside them.” He turns to Ron. “I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves, though. I’d like to fill in Ron’s group about what we’ve discovered, and vice versa. So now seems as good a time as any to share some names. I’ll start with the hospital crew …”

Joel introduces Rachel, Kevin, and Bonnie, even gives an inclusive nod to Scott. He points to Michael, and makes special mention of Rachel’s desperate search and successful retrieval of him south of Harmony. He finishes off the introductions with Chrissy, Chloe, and Zoe, and Kevin mentions the two other survivors at the hospital—Karen and Jerry—both of whom were injured and took off in their own vehicles for other locations.

Mostly, Joel summarizes Rachel’s discoveries about the blood, and as he does so, Michael feels a weird pride for his daughter. He’s learned that she was the first person to discover the temporary solution of smothering out the strange luminescence from those bodies’ heads, in addition to being the first to find the common link between all survivors—O-negative blood. She’s proven herself to be an honest-to-goodness survivor, seeking answers in the face of outright horror. Yes, she made mistakes, but she’s capable of thinking in a way that Michael doubted even he would have been able to in the same circumstances.

Joel finishes with an account of their blood test on the prisoner in the upstairs room. The story has Ron’s crew riveted, and they ask a few questions in disbelief, not daring to hope that the fate of these bodies everywhere might actually be open to reversal.

“Holy shit,” says the small, wiry Asian girl.

Joel gives her a glance, then goes on. “You’ve probably gathered by now, but this is Ron here,” Joel says.

“Hey.”

“Ron and his group were at the college, holed up in the student center. Do you want to …”

“Sure, yeah, I’m Ron, but you guys from the hospital know me as the voice on Joel’s radio.”

A murmur of quiet laughter among the survivors.

“I don’t have any affiliation with the school, just ended up there through circumstance. Started with Mai over there.” The young Asian woman gives a pert salute from her perch atop one of the checkout counters. “We ran into each other on Drake, near the Walgreens, just, you know, bowled over by everything. And then we just started gathering people. We saw Old Town in flames, and we started in that direction to see if we could help, but then we met this other guy, Randy—he’s dead now—but after we met him near the Chuck E Cheese, we saw another big fire west of there, so we headed that way. That was at the Varsity Apartments—where we found Bill and Rick, trying to stop the fire.” Ron nods toward the door. “See anything yet, guys?”

“Quiet,” says the younger man on the left. He’s a good-looking fellow with bright blue eyes, an easy smile, and crooked teeth. “Hey, I’m Rick.”

“Joel, Rick was the one who picked you up on the portable CB that first time. Anyway, it was a small private aircraft, a Cessna, embedded in one of the apartments. Scariest thing I’d ever seen—at the time, anyway. Man, I wish now that’s
all
I’d seen. But that whole place was full of bodies. All of them dead … glowing out of their heads. We thought we were gonna get that fire under control, with the four of us throwing buckets of water on it, but it was just too far out of hand. That whole thing went up … all those people.”

“You tried, at least,” Bonnie says. “That’s all you could do.”

“Wait, wait, wait—I’m sorry, can I say something?” Scott says from the edge of the group. “I mean, yeah, ordinarily you’d want to save people from a fire—of course!—but considering what they’ve become … isn’t it more like, I don’t know, good luck that they burned?”

Next to Michael, Rachel stiffens. “Didn’t you hear what I just said? We have a way to save these people—”

“Okay, okay, you two, you’ll get your turn,” Joel says, and Scott just shakes his head. “Go ahead, Ron.”

“Right,” Ron says, eyeing both Rachel and Scott curiously. “Well, after that, Mai led us through the college, and we found …” He cranes his neck around to locate two more survivors. “ … Brian and Liam there.” The two men are on a bench by the stairs. Brian is the stocky heart-attack candidate, but he’s calmed down how. Looks to be in his forties, appears devastated, haunted; he very probably lost his whole family. Liam is younger, with angular features and a sharp gaze; might have been a student. “Brian had the keys to the student center, so that’s how we managed to dig in there.”

The two men give unenthusiastic nods to the rest of the group.

“At its largest, our group had about thirty people, but a few of them left to try to find family, or they were just restless, and at one point we had a group venture out to Old Town to try to help out, but it was too far gone, and those things were starting to come back. We got your word about smothering them to kill them, and we did that to a few of them in the building, to clear it out.”

Rachel appears to hang her head in private shame.

“We were all prepared for some zombie-like attack.” He offers a mirthless laugh. “But they just crawled away.”

“Never saw that coming,” Rick grumbles from the door.

“Yeah, well, now they’re definitely after us, and here’s where we might have something to add to the discussion. Those huge goddamn roars coming from the sky? They’re communications.”

“I knew it,” Joel said, “but tell them what you saw.”

“We had windows that looked straight out onto a big mass of those things west of the Lory Student Center, in a park. Every time that roar happened, it was like the sky opened up, and all this red light came rushing downward. Immediately after that, there would be some kind of change in behavior in the bodies, whether it was as small as a twitch or an angle of the head, or a movement from tree to tree or from area to area. Something synchronized. The biggest roar was this morning, and that’s when a bunch of the bodies broke away from the trees and started targeting us.”

“And there was another one when we got here,” Chrissy says in a small voice.

“Which is about when, if you noticed, they suddenly stopped targeting us. At least for the moment.”

“Why would they stop?” Michael asks. “They had us on our heels.”

“That’s the question.” Ron lets that sink in. “But the communication goes both ways. Whatever those things are getting out of those trees, we think it’s being sent—” He jerks his thumb skyward. “—up.”

“I’m sorry, I’ve gotta jump in here,” Scott says. “Are we really talking about aliens here? I mean, yes, things are fucking weird—all those people are doing things that I don’t understand at all, and yes, there’s something going on in the sky, but we’re not seriously saying that the obvious conclusion is little green men … right?”

Ron pauses, glances around. “I actually don’t think there’s any question about it at this point.”

For a long moment, the band of survivors react mutely to Ron’s certainty. A sort of dumbfounded acceptance. Then Scott releases a scoffing laugh, shaking his head.

Liam says, “If you’d seen everything from the perspective we had, you’d get it.”

“Oh,
then
I’d get it?” Scott says.

The young man just eyes him coolly.

“Because as far as I can see,” Scott says, “no matter what those things are doing, they’re still people. Just because we don’t understand it, well … maybe that doesn’t automatically mean they’re from outer space.”

“Scott,” Rachel says, “I think you’re forgetting that a lot of the time we were learning about these things, you decided to make yourself scarce.”