Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood (26 page)

Michael trembles under the weight of the sound, covering his ears. He curls on the ground, protectively, but then he angles his head to try to spot Rachel. There she is, right at the library entrance, in front of the propped-open glass doors. Father and daughter make eye contact for the briefest of moments, and then she shuts her eyes tight, burying her chin in her chest to wait out the deafening sound.

The roar seems to last for a full minute, and then it slices off cleanly, leaving the world shaking. He hears glass shattering in the distance, and Michael, filled with dread, twists to scan the library windows across the length of the building. They’re wobbling minutely in their frames, but miraculously they’re holding strong. He can see the trees rustling not from any breeze but from the energy of the roar. And in the absence of the otherworldly sound, he can now hear car alarms wailing.

“Oh no,” Bonnie is saying, positioned above Kayla protectively. “What now!”

Michael catches sight of Chrissy and the twins, sprawled on the ground, glancing up and around blearily. Just visible through the doors of the library, Rick and Mai are on the floor, dazed. Rachel is shaking her head.

“Can’t be good,” Pete says, on one knee, anchored against an exterior book-return kiosk near the front doors. “That never means anything good.”

Joel, already recovered, is rushing two boxes of ammo from the truck toward a library entrance. His footfalls on the warm concrete sound hollow, echoing off low stone walls. “Everyone get ready! It could mean anything, but expect the worst.”

“Let’s go, let’s go!” Kevin calls, also back on his feet, hauling his own armfuls of ammo.

“Don’t get too worked up, now,” Ron warns, looking over at Pete, but his gaze looks worried. “Sometimes it doesn’t mean a goddamn thing.”

“Probably not this time, though.” Scott has crept out of the library and clings to the glass door, watching the skies.

Michael gets back to his feet, listening intently to everything. He’s frozen on the concrete path. There are no new bodies rushing onto the streets, no further noises from the sky. In the wake of the alien thunder, all is calm. But there’s an electricity hanging in the air, seething, crackling. Survivors are now hustling all around him. Someone hands him two AR-15s, and he awkwardly takes them in both fists.

“C’mon, c’mon!” someone yells.             

A throbbing void seems to have settled around the library. Something is definitely different. He pops his ears, turns. The sky above the library is smoky and red, as it has been, but is it more intense? Straight above them, the drifting smoke seems to swirl under some kind of atmospheric influence. The smoke moves unnaturally, in shifting fits and starts.

“Something’s happening,” he breathes uneasily.

Bonnie is also staring skyward. “Oh God.”

Behind her, Chrissy and the twins are trembling with an awed fear, Chrissy clutching a charm at her breast. Michael is sure it must be a cross.

A chirping noise sounds from the cab of the Thompson brothers’ truck almost immediately. Jeff is already struggling with his bulk toward the truck, and the chirp lights a fire under his hefty ass. He hefts himself up to the cab and grabs a squawking walkie talkie off the driver’s seat.

“—read, do you read?!”
a voice crackles.

“Jeff here.”

“Jeff! Get the fuck out of there!”
The voice comes through full of static and panic.
“They’re coming—fast—go—get the fuck—”

Several screams echo across the square.

“Holy shit!” Pete yells, and pushes himself away from the wall. He jostles into an unwieldy jog.

Jeff keys the walkie talkie. “How long, over?”

“Now, now, they’re coming fast, leave now—!”

“What’s going on?”
Kevin is asking, using the truck to stand. “What? Who is that talking?”

“That’s Trevor on the ridge,” Pete calls over his shoulder, his voice high and tight. “He’s watching our back. Bastards are coming, and they’re coming fast. Are you coming or going? We gotta go!”

“Trevor?”

“We’re leaving! I suggest you do the same! Follow us. We’ll go for high ground!”

“Where?” Ron says, uncertain.

Jeff is already firing up the truck.

“What’s happening?” Scott calls from the doors.

“Where are they coming from?” Joel says, looking around wildly. “I don’t see anything!”

“There’s nothing out there!” Kevin says.

“They’re a mile away, though, aren’t they?” Michael says, not sure what to do. “Right?”

“I don’t—” Joel is staring around wildly, from the faces at the library entrance to the trucks sitting idle just yards away.
“Shit!”

Michael hears them first, the mad scramble of thousands of bodies scraping across asphalt, tumbling over one another, gasping in seeming anticipation. Inadvertently, he raises his arm in that direction—due east—pointing, but he’s unsure what’s happening. The incomprehensibility of the sound roots him to the spot, unable to form words. He glares back at Rachel, finds her poised at the entrance between Joel and Kevin, staring at him and beyond him. Her eyes are bulging with fear but show a grim determination.

Everything is stuttering into slow motion.

And then there they are, pouring down Elm Street, heading straight at them. The bodies form a great wall of flesh, like an organic thing, choreographed and synchronized, a mass of giant teeming spiders. Limbs clutch limbs for leverage, for balance, fluidly, in concert, all in service of propelling this impossible conglomeration forward. There are housewives and businesswomen, morning joggers and bicyclists, shop owners and cops, couch potatoes and senior citizens. There are ninety-year-olds, and there are three-year-olds. There are representatives of every race and religion, every body type, every age—all manner of human beings—their eyes enraged, their inverted mouths stretched wide, crooked and gasping.

They’re leaping and sprinting, their collective, roiling breadth filling the entire street, from porch to porch.

A chorus of screams erupts from the library’s interior, and the thought that bursts through his own mind is—

This is happening
.

“Aw
fuck!”
Jeff yells from the truck, and revs the engine brutally. The horn blares. “Let’s go! Let’s go!”

Pete is stunned motionless for a moment, holding his rifle in his hand like some useless stick, watching the flood of bodies flow down Elm like a rushing tide.

“Pete!”
Jeff screams, honking in mad, staccato bursts. The truck lurches forward and stalls. Jeff lets loose with a barrage of profanity that Michael can barely hear under the alien cacophony.

Right next to him, Pete very clearly says, “Fuckers were just waiting.”

“What?!” Joel yells.

“They were waiting for us to come here,” Pete says unsteadily, managing only to take one lurching step backward, away from the sight. “They were watching.”

Michael understands somewhere inside himself that he can’t move his feet. He’s as planted to the spot as Pete. Standing ten feet from Jeff’s truck, he’s torn between leaping into the relative safety of the cab and making a dash up the concrete toward Rachel, toward the questionable safety of the library, and the indecision has frozen him.

Everything is chaos.

Rachel is screaming his name, and then Joel is grabbing his shoulder.

“We have to get inside!”

Wordlessly, he lets Joel yank him backward, away from the truck, but despair clutches at him.

The two men sprint toward the library, and as they race across the last few yards of hot cement, Michael sees the tide of bodies reflected in the window glass. It’s a huge, teeming flood of distorted humanity. It has reached the corner of the library commons and is about to crest over onto the concrete. In seconds it will swallow the trucks.

Joel is yelling as soon as they cross the threshold.

“Go! Go!
Take the rifles! Bonnie, I don’t know what good the blood can do, but get it out here! Get those tranq rifles ready, and be ready to get them where we need ’em! Now! Go!”

Most of the survivors are already stumbling around in disarray, but now a measure of focus takes hold. Bonnie rushes toward the refrigerator in the book-return area, closely followed by Mai and Zoe, screaming nervously about collecting the blood canisters. Kevin shouts over her about the more traditional weapons at the front doors, and Michael flows in that direction with Joel and Ron and Liam and Scott.

Chrissy and Chloe remain at the front doors, backed away from the men, their hands cupped at their mouths, screaming for Pete.
“Get in here! Get in here!”

Michael looks at the two brand-new AR-15s in his grip, remembering that he’s holding them, and at that moment, Joel takes one from him, frantically helping him load a magazine into the remaining one, thumbing off the safety and shoving him hard on the shoulder.

“Get ready to barricade these front doors! You too, Kev!”

Outside, Pete is shambling toward the front doors, spinning to judge the distance of the threat. Seeing Pete launch himself toward the library, Jeff has fired up the truck again and leaps the big vehicle forward, turning sharply away from the entrance just as forty bodies seem to envelop the truck bed, slamming it down with their collective weight. Other bodies careen underneath the tires, jerking the vehicle to a shuddering stop. The wheels spin uselessly atop flesh that goes instantly pulpy, spraying the concrete with red mud.

As Pete rushes through the doors, the truck is completely swarmed, invisible beneath the bodies.

“Jeff!” Pete wails, and then the doors are shut, and Bill and Rick are locking them, moving large tables against them.

“No way those will hold!”
Scott yells.
“For fuck’s sake!”

“Move back!” Michael yells, grabbing Scott’s shoulder. “Get away from the window!”

The horde sweeps up the path, a mass of gasping anger and hyperactive limbs. Michael holds his breath, staggering backward with the rest of the group, holding Rachel and Kayla to him—and then the bodies crush against the thick windows, battering, darkening the lobby. The scrabbling things are all panting and thumping, their dead eyes staring in, their mouths open, their red glows perilous and bright and flashing from their throats.

“It held!” Chloe cries from Michael’s left. “It’s holding!”

“Shit, shit, shit …”
Kevin is repeating endlessly, but he responds to Chloe: “Yeah, but for how long?” He’s backing away from the doors, unsure what to do.

Michael tries to get a glimpse through the throng to determine Jeff’s fate, but it’s impossible—it’s body on top of body on top of body. The lobby darkens further, and now the collective luminescence from the things’ throats is like an evil red fog surrounding them, swallowing the lobby, a poisonous radiation that promises to consume them at the slightest wrong move. The things’ heads are stabbing at the windows, mercilessly, and the library is filled with a discordance of knocks and thuds. Their collective gasping is like a sustained, gravelly hum. At the lobby doors, the glass is already fogging, smearing under the radiation, but it’s remaining resilient.

“Listen for breaking glass!” Joel calls. “Everyone!”

Chloe is staring at the front doors, beyond the makeshift barricade. “The glass here isn’t as thick. This glass at the doors.” She has surprised Michael, keeping her cool in the face of unimaginable horror, but she’s just a kid thrown into a warzone. “If it’s gonna break, it’s gonna break right there.” She gestures with her heavy rifle at the entrance.

Joel is right next to her, aiming. “I think you’re right.”

“Those bastards!” Pete is shouting, fiddling with his rifle.
“Bastards!”

“How many of them are there?” Kayla says meekly from under Michael’s right arm.

“Thousands?” Rachel says, a hard swallow cutting the word in half. She glances up at him as she pushes away.

Michael can see tears in her eyes. He can sense his daughter’s conflict—the weight of responsibility she feels to save as many human beings as she can, and the realization, even as she cradles her own rifle, that that responsibility is about to be dealt a massive blow.

The bodies continue to press against the side of the building. Michael can hear shouting from the south and north wings: The things are swarming on all sides of the library, blotting out the world, their limbs scratching at the walls and windows, searching for entrance. The thumping becomes an oppressive and unnerving racket. Michael is waiting for one of those thumps to become a crash of broken glass.

Bonnie and three others emerge from the north end, carrying boxes full of blood-filled canisters. “Here! Here!” she’s calling. “This is our best defense.”

“Yeah, from what? A hundred of these things?” Scott says, sweaty and visibly shaking. “What about the ten thousand after those? He backs up against the drinking fountains by the stairwell and grasps at it for balance. “We gotta be ready to lock ourselves in the bathrooms or something! I’m just saying we need to be ready!”