Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood (18 page)

“Gotta say,” Mai says, “I’m kinda siding with Scott on this one.”

“Little Miss Contrary,” Rick mumbles from the door, looking away, and Michael can sense a little history there.

“Fuck you, limp dick,” Mai says, hopping off her little table and glaring lasers Rick’s way.

Rick consciously looks away, preferring the view outside to staring Mai down.

“Guys, guys!” Ron says. “Come on, now. Whole new place, whole new start, right? Let’s be nice.”

Mai is still glaring at Rick.

“Mai, it was you who suggested some kind of invasion at the school!” Brian challenges her.

“A girl can change her mind.” She twirls back toward the checkout desks. “Maybe it’s the government. Maybe a
foreign
government. Hey, maybe it’s some whacko religion.” Michael hears glee in her voice.

Scott fidgets, as if he can sense the conversation getting away from him.

“It could be anything. Anything
on Earth
. Occam’s razor.”

“What’s that?” Mai says over her shoulder.

“Forget all the wild theories. The simplest explanation is probably true.”

“What’s your simple explanation, Scott?” Rachel asks.

“We did this! Man-made! Yes, maybe a government somewhere fucked up. Foreign astronauts in the ISS let an experiment get away from them. Hell, I don’t know.”

“Exactly,” Rachel says.

“God, you’re—” Scott starts, then his eyes land on Michael and he shuts up.

Rachel is gearing up for an attack, but Joel cuts her off before she can start.

“Rachel,” Joel gives her a look, “take it easy.”

Michael wonders what might have caused such a rift between Scott and his daughter, but he supposes that’s a discussion for another day. But he speaks up:

“It doesn’t really matter where they’re from or what’s driving them, does it? All that’s important is that they’re a threat. A very weird threat. ”

“It would be nice to understand it even a little bit,” Bonnie whispers gloomily. “To get some kind of … I don’t know … starting point.”

Bill speaks up uncomfortably from his bench. “Has anybody considered …?”

“What?” Joel says.

“Well, the Rapture.”

One of the twins—it’s Chloe—giggles, and Chrissy gives her a sharp glare.

“He’s right, how come no one has talked about that?” the unassuming young woman asks the room quietly.

“I don’t know,” Mai says, “how about because it’s a fairy tale?”

There’s a cough and a gasp.

“And last I checked,” Scott says, “everyone is still, you know, on the planet. They haven’t been whisked away to paradise. Just the opposite, I’d say. Hell on Earth.”

“Who says it has to be that literal?” Bill says. “What if it’s just the souls that have been snatched away?”

“Jesus, we’re not gonna get far if we start bringing the Bible into this mess,” Scott says.

“See, I think you’re perfectly wrong with that statement,” Bill says, his face pinched again. “It might be
exactly
the thing we need to be talking about. And stop being an asshole about it, huh?”

“He’s right,” Chrissy says, more confident than Michael has seen her before. “No one here has spoken a word about God except to curse.”

“And what about all those tree chompers out there?” Scott says. “Leftover sinners partaking of the Trees of Life?”

“Okay, I see this isn’t quite the right crew for this kind of talk,” Bill says, looking at his hands. “But when I hear all this nonsense about aliens and evil governments and scientists, I’m thinking your Occam’s razor might just be pointing at the wrath of God.”

“End of Days,” Chrissy says solemnly. “It could be.”

Michael finds himself tuning out of this conversation. His has never been a God-fearing soul; he has always found the notion vaguely unpleasant. He determined long ago to spend his life searching for meaning rather than succumbing to predigested answers based on a Golden Age text written by ignorant farmers. He put a certain amount of pride in the fact that he raised Rachel unhindered by predisposition.

It’s her voice that pulls him from his thoughts.

“My dad’s right, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t even matter if it’s the Rapture or whatever. All we have is what’s left. Right now, we need to come up with a plan to survive, and that plan would be the same no matter what caused this. As far as God, well … here’s what I think.” She glances around at all of them. “When I think of God, I think of helping my fellow man. Or woman. Right? And it can’t be just a fluke that we’ve found a way to bring our fellow men and women back—”

“Rachel—” Joel starts.

“I’m serious!”

“Your point is well taken.”

The lobby is buzzing with a kind of indecision. Is more going to be made of this, or have Rachel’s words mollified them?

“Scott did bring up the trees,” Joel says, obviously eager to steer the conversation back down to Earth. “They’re still a mystery.”

“What could they possibly want from trees?” Bonnie says, almost a whine. “Has anybody figured that out?”

All eyes seem to land on Kayla now.

“Did you learn anything about that?” Rachel says quietly.

Kayla locks eyes with Rachel for a moment, waiting for a nod of encouragement, which she gets. Then she turns her gaze outward.

“Well, they’re all doing something really … strange … to the pine trees,” Kayla says, her voice starting a little shyly. “And they’re not just eating the bark. They’re, like, really getting in there deep, into those inside layers, and—” Her mouth curls with revulsion. “—they’re wrecking their own mouths. I was watching four of them outside the windows. It’s gross. I don’t even like to look at them.”

“I don’t either,” Rachel says. “Did you find anything in the book?”

“I don’t know, it’s kind of hard to read. I didn’t know a lot of the words.”

Michael senses the girl’s shyness overtaking her.

“It’s okay, honey,” Rachel encourages her again. “I know you found something, you told me a few minutes ago. All these people here are friends.” Her eyes fall on Scott. “Even that guy.”

“Nice,” Scott says.

Kayla laughs a little. “Well, I was just curious why they only wanted the pine trees. That’s why I looked for that book. You know, what makes them different from regular trees.” She stops talking, shy again.

Rachel is smiling, urging her to go on.

“Well, so one thing I found is that those evergreen trees … what makes them what they are is that they don’t lose their leaves in the winter. You know? So that made me think of survival. Like, why do they need it? Maybe just to survive, I guess. To live longer.”

Joel looks impressed. “Told you she was a smart cookie.”

“Oh,” Kayla says, her voice rising slightly with confidence, “and most regular trees—those are the deciduous trees, I mean—they’re hardwood trees. Evergreen trees are soft wood. I thought that was interesting. Easier to eat.” She makes a disgusted face.

The group considers that, but Michael’s thoughts are still focused on the notion of evergreen trees being some kind of source for longevity. Survival. He thinks there actually might be something to that—until Kayla delivers another possible revelation.

She sounds very self-assured now.

“Oh, oh! There’s another way evergreens are different, too.” She’s actually smiling, like a confident student presenting a book report to her class. “It might be the most interesting thing, at least
I
think so. Evergreens have seeds. You know, in the cones. They’re called coniferous. That’s how they reproduce. So now I’m thinking—”

“They need it to reproduce,” Rachel finishes. “To continue.”

“Okay, okay,” Scott can’t help but jump in. “Look, this is all terrific—and you’re a sharp kid, no question, good for you—but again … and okay, I’ll say this as nicely as I can … we can’t just jump to conclusions like this. You have to—”

“Do you have ideas?” Rachel asks him. “Have you come up with
anything
as useful as anything Kayla just said?”

Scott purses his lips. “Ah, young lady, you make it hard to be nice.”

“No, I’m
serious
.”

“Well, the immediate conclusion I
didn’t
come to is that those human beings out there—those people who are our friends and our family—are actually … desperate aliens? That they’ve traveled through space to find some chemical in our trees?”

Kayla doesn’t detect the sarcasm. “Just the coniferous ones.”

At least three people in the room snicker.

Scott rolls his eyes. “Do we have any reasonable theories yet? Anything in the real world? I’m serious. Anybody?”

Kayla backs down, sits meekly next to Rachel.

“Scott, can you
try
not to be a dick?” Rachel says.

Michael still has Kayla’s book with him and has been paging through it. “I noticed something that might be pertinent,” he says, eager to cut Scott off at the knees. “It’s about
phloem
. I’m not sure how to pronounce that either.” He smiles at Kayla. “It’s a sap. Sugars, proteins, hormones, minerals, and so on. The interesting thing is … and this could support what Kayla said … is that phloem is thought to also send informational signals through the tree. It says, ‘Recent evidence indicates that mobile proteins and RNA are part of the plant’s long-distance communication signaling system.’ And there’s this picture of leafhoppers and ants feeding on the phloem. So, I don’t know, we could be looking at a situation where these things—whatever they are—are using human bodies to collect something not only tangible like food or whatever … but also … something intangible … something I can’t even imagine, but something in the cellular memory of the tree?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Brian says, “one of the first things I thought of when I saw those things bending back like that was some kind of insect.”

“Sure,
that
sounds reasonable,” Scott says. “Giant insects.”

“I’ll ask you again, Scott,” Rachel says, not bothering to look at him, “what are your theories?”

“And are you being serious?” Joel adds. “You were out on the streets, you’ve seen what’s happening to these bodies, right? You
were
at the hospital, right? You saw the light glowing from the center of their goddam heads? The way they crawl around? You’ve seen the atmospheric disturbances? The sound they make? Are you being willfully ignorant here, or should we start trying to find out if a good psychologist survived?”

Scott pushes away from the wall. His eyes are edged with red, and his cheeks are flushed, showing faint freckles.

“I’m a little tired of being talked to like that,
Joel
. Look, no offense to the kid, okay? I’m just not sold on the ‘little green men’ card.”

A look passes between Ron and Joel. Ron is the one who speaks up.

“At this point, we’re just sharing observations. Anyone can do that. Like I said, we could look directly up into the center of that thing, and it was clear that something was happening up there. Something coming down, and something going up. After all these observations, you’re still thinking it’s something else? Something manmade? Terrestrial?”

Scott lets his gaze flit from one survivor to the next. “Of
course
I’m thinking terrestrial. Has everyone gone nuts? Something horrible happens, and the first instinct is to blame space aliens?”

“That wasn’t our ‘first instinct,’ man,” Joel says.

“One of the reasons I left the hospital in the first place was this kind of thinking.”

“What?” Rachel asks. “Observing things? Testing things? You mean like ‘scientific method’ kind of thinking?”

“Yeah, and attitudes like that—all high and mighty about the ‘answers’ you’re coming up with, at least until those theories turn out to be totally wrong.”

Michael listens to the conversation devolve from there, and although he finds himself—remarkably—siding with Scott on some of his arguments, he’s had enough of the tone. He knows that if these two combined groups are going to accomplish anything, it’s going to require a sense of harmony.

“Enough!” he yells, and abruptly everyone is staring at him.

He lets the word echo out among the books, and he stands up on wobbly legs.

“It doesn’t matter! Do you get that? No matter what anyone’s theories are—and Scott, I get where you’re coming from, I really do—but it doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you what matters. Regardless of what is happening to these bodies, they’re after us, and they can hurt us. We have to deal with that. And the way we deal with that would be no different whether they’re from down here or up there. It doesn’t matter. So knock it off!”

Scott doesn’t say anything for a moment, just shakes his head, eternally frustrated by everything and everyone around him. Michael finds it an annoying trait.

“It’s a good point,” Joel says. “We’re not gonna get far biting each other’s heads off.”