Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood (27 page)

“What are they doing?” Bonnie cries, really seeing the bodies against the glass for the first time now. “Why are they—”

But her words are cut off by the crack of Pete’s rifle and the crash of shattered glass at the left door. There’s a collective gasp from the survivors, the loudest of which come from Liam and Chloe flanking the door.

“What the hell are you doing?”
Joel yells at the large man.

Pete can only mumble. “It was about to give.”

Bodies are immediately surging in through the hole, their upside-down, angular movement seeming more than ever like a throng of agitated spiders. Joel, Michael, Kevin, and Ron raise their AR-15s simultaneously and fire. The bodies squeal as the bullets hit them, tearing through their flesh, but they continue toward them inexorably. They scream and flinch but keep coming. Michael stares at them, appalled, unconsciously bringing down his weapon.

“God!”
Rachel yells from somewhere.

“The heads!” Joel calls. “Aim for the heads!”

Michael aims and misses. He screams his annoyance. He focuses, aims again, and delivers a headshot to the closest body, whose luminescence immediately sparks out as the skull explodes out behind it in a red mess. The body falls limp at the vestibule. The others follow suit, and more bodies fall, but they’re climbing through with increasing rapidity.

“Need help in the lobby!” Ron calls loudly. “Now!”

“Like fucking immediately!” Kevin yells.

Pete seems to snap out of his daze, and begins firing into the churning tumble of flesh.

The lobby is soon a maelstrom of lead, rifles firing ceaselessly at the bodies squeezing through the gap. Bodies crash to the floor, extinguished in a messy, red tangle, piling up, and yet more bodies keep pushing through. Muzzles strobe in the claustrophobic dimness of the lobby, and the sound of gunfire is like an endless string of deadly firecrackers.

Scott screams incoherently, backing away toward the bathrooms.

“Hold the line!” Joel calls. “They’re slowing down!”

Michael can’t believe it, but it’s true: The pile of bodies across the front entrance is growing, becoming more and more of a roadblock against easy entry. The things are slipping on blood, fumbling as they climb atop the mountain of corpses. They’re hissing and leaping, straight into rifle fire. But they’re not mindless. In fact, most of them are disturbing in their intelligence and ferocity. One of them, a lean young woman in ripped jeans and a white tee shirt, rises over the pile, eyes Michael with a vicious sneer, and prepares to leap, angling her body strategically, but before he can even take aim, her head is obliterated by Ron’s weapon. The body goes tumbling backward toward the door, partially blocking it.

“Thanks,” Michael coughs.

He sees only a look of terror on Ron’s face—a quick flick of
Not doin’ this for you, pal
—and then he’s reloading and firing once more.

Michael hears Joel yell something, but he can’t make it out over the gunfire. Someone grabs his shoulder. It’s Joel at his ear.

“Be efficient! We’ve already gone through a lot of ammo!” The cop shows him a new magazine, sets it at Michael’s feet.

Within minutes, the pile of bodies is so great that the influx has slowed significantly, and Michael backs off, listening for other cries of alarm from other sections of the library. The bulk of the survivors are right here in the lobby, breathless with amazement at what has just taken place, and eager to pitch in if the wall of bodies breaks and more of them flood in. But it seems to be holding, and only the occasional boom of gunfire breaks the creepy, shifting silence.

“Watch your fire!” Joels yells in the relative silence. “Conserve your ammo!”

“Can they get in?” Bonnie asks from the back of the room, trying and failing to push back on her panic. “Are we safe? Are we safe? Joel? Michael?”

“Take it easy,” Joel says, breathing heavily.

“What are they doing?” Scott’s voice is near hysteria.

“Obviously they’re trying to get in,” Kevin says. “Finish us off.”

“Christ, man!” Scott yells. Eyeing an unused AR-15, he strides across the lobby, grabs it, and finds a full magazine. With some uncertain effort, he shoves it in place. “Why am I even here? I shouldn’t be here. And now I’m buried beneath a million of those fuckers!”

Michael watches the pile of bodies at the entrance, aiming his rifle, waiting for movement. The rear of the pile seems to have effectively crammed the shattered door—or at least the pile in combination with the bodies’ weird compressing motion from the outside.

He feels Rachel join him, grasping his forearm. He glances down. One hand covers her mouth in dismay. She’s staring at the pile of bodies. He matches her gaze, and whereas before he saw them as monsters, it takes her expression to see what she sees: broken and bleeding human beings, destroyed victims of this horror show.

“Oh Daddy,” she whispers.

“I know.”

An oppressive quiet returns to the library. The survivors are panting, jogging from room to room with their weapons, double-checking their ammo, their eyes large with fear. The library is utterly surrounded, packed in by thousands of those monstrosities. At every window, Michael glimpses upside-down faces and twisting limbs, torsos and hands and feet, squirming minutely, caught under the weight of the bodies on top of them, and the bodies on top of those bodies, all vying for entrance.

He doesn’t dare get too close to any of those windows, but he does watch them. He remembers all too clearly the way that red luminescence softened that glass of the Hummer’s window, allowing one of the things to steal that boy. Danny.

Michael isn’t exactly relieved to see some fogging of the glass, but at least there are no signs of softening, of the glass giving way.

“What are they trying to do?” Mai says, striding in from the north annex, red-faced. “They can’t just push in like that. They can’t even move, the way they’re pressed up against the windows. I mean, look at them.”

“I don’t want to look,” Kayla says.

But it’s mesmerizing. In the absence of the generator lighting—nobody has made a move to turn anything on—the only luminescence is coming from the rare gap between the compressed bodies or the multitude of glowing orbs in the throats of the bodies themselves. The heads continue to stab at the windows, all around the library, lending a rhythmic thumping to the red throb of the glow itself. In the claustrophobic heat of the late afternoon, the library feels like the pit of Perdition.

“We need light!” Michael calls to whoever will listen. He can hardly see anybody. “That generator’s on, right?”

No one answers at first, but then Brian speaks up from the south hall. “Not a whole lot of fuel up there, but should be okay.”

“Someone flip a switch, for Chrissakes!” someone says. Michael doesn’t recognize the voice.

“Where?” Mai says.

“Anywhere!”

Just as Michael starts searching the lobby, he notices the overhead lights flickering softly as if struggling, and then finally turning on. “Got ’em,” Chrissy calls from somewhere.

A measure of relief filters through the lobby, but it is short-lived. Both Pete and Ron utter exhalations of surprise and lift their weapons. One of them fires, Michael isn’t sure which.

“What?!” Joel yells, twirling.

Michael doesn’t see it at first. But a gasping noise reveals it: Three bodies have managed to squeeze through the gap and are poised at the top of the corpse pile, staring down at them.

Someone else fires, and the top of one of the bodies’ skulls jerks in a red mist. The remaining two bodies are abruptly rushing down this side of the pile. They’re both thin, nimble bodies, and in the midst of his horror—fixated on their angry, intelligent, focused gazes—Michael understands that these cursed things have achieved an awareness of the human body, a sense of athleticism, a strategic notion of which kinds of human bodies are best suited to certain kinds of attacks.

“Look out!” he yells.

One of them lands directly atop Pete, crumpling the big man to the floor, and the other clambers into Mai, sending her sprawling. It’s the seasoned hunter who lets out a whimpering yell, though, panicking as he falls and using his rifle to batter the body on top of him. Joel and Kevin leap into action, kicking at the body—that of a young man in gym shorts and a roughed-up tee shirt—but it holds firm, wrapping its arms backward around Pete’s upper torso, the head stabbing mercilessly at Pete’s face while simultaneously snarling at the two combatants above it. The rifle clatters to the ground.

“It’s strong!” Kevin screams.

Pete emits a long string of muffled syllables, and Michael quails at the sight of the thing’s head stabbing repeatedly at his face.

“Watch the door for more!” Joel yells, kicking and battering with his own rifle.

Michael and Rachel have descended on the second of the bodies, which has bounced off Mai and landed in a wreck against a book display. It attempts to scramble back up, but Michael delivers a vicious strike to the bridge of its upturned nose, and a geyser of blood sprays his forearm. A throaty screech escapes the thing’s mouth, and it locks its flat eyes on Rachel, whom it perceives as the lesser threat. It makes a leaping move for her, and Michael kicks savagely at the body, knocking it off course, but it clutches at her lower leg, behind itself, blindly but with preternatural assurance.

“No!” Michael roars, kicking again, but the head nearly catches his foot in its open mouth.

A rifle fires once, then a second time, and there’s a screech, but Michael isn’t sure where it came from. All he sees is his daughter in peril, and he screams at the body, hammering at it repeatedly with the butt of his own rifle.

Then the body spasms, a gaspy grunt launching from its throat. It falls to its back and squirms for a moment, then stops thrashing. Rachel kicks away from it, panting, leaving it there on the floor. The thing whips its head around three times, and the eyes begin blinking rapidly, almost violently, and it occurs to him what has happened.

Bonnie is standing apprehensively above the body, an empty syringe in her fist, the other hand steadying herself against the book display to her left. Behind her, a rifle has ended the threat of the other body, and Joel and Kevin are tending to Pete. But Michael only has eyes for Bonnie.

“Nice work,” he wheezes, gulping air.

“It’s the blood,” she says, shrugging but breathing heavily. “Like Rachel says—it’s our best defense.”

Kevin, Ron, and Bill—who looks once again on the verge of a heart attack—have heaved the two new bodies on the pile at the entrance, effectively sealing the gaping hole in the glass door. Pete, for his part, has regained his clumsy feet, although he has sustained obvious injuries. He’s gasping, almost choking, working his jaw. He stands proudly, though, his big trembling fists checking his rifle. He’s monitoring the area with eagle eyes, occasionally shaking his head—presumably at his own stupidity. He’s murmuring to himself, sweating profusely, pacing. There’s no further movement at the doors, except for a slow twitching among the bodies; it doesn’t appear alarming.

The twins are tending to an apparently unharmed Mai, and Michael kneels next to Rachel, making sure she’s unharmed.

“I’m fine,” she keeps repeating, shrugging him off. “Dad!”

Michael backs off, noticing that her hands are shaking with near-spastic tremors, and despite her toughness he sees a despairing fear behind his daughter’s eyes.

She softens a bit, letting him help her up.

“All right,” Joel says, taking advantage of the stunned lull. “We are seriously low on ammo. But we’ve got six tranq guns. I need six good shooters to take those and spread out with—” He glances around, then, his eyes red-rimmed and twitching. He’s seeing the doubtful, sullen glances that everyone is exchanging. “What?”

It’s Scott—backed up against the drinking fountains again, clutching his rifle, aimed low—who speaks up.

“There’s a thousand of those things out there,” he says. “And no matter how many of them we blow away, there’ll be another thousand right behind them. Just waiting. Do you honestly see a way out of this with six tranquilizer rifles and a few more boxes of ammo?” He glares around. “Does anyone?”

In the center of a lobby strewn with the bleeding dead, claustrophobically shut in by countless reanimated corpses, not one of the exhausted survivors says a word for a long moment. The silence intensifies the sense of doom. The library pulses with crimson light, and Michael notices almost subconsciously that it’s rhythmic. He can feel it in his chest. He imagines the collective red luminescence drifting, throbbing, in columns toward the sky, toward whatever influence guides these things’ motives.

Under everything is the sound of weeping—Michael thinks it’s one of the twins—and now, in the silence, Michael can hear only occasional thumping … the things’ heads attempting to gain entry at any point possible. But that has subsided, and in its wake is that turgid and still rhythmic pulse. There is an inevitability to it—the overwhelming sense that the survivors never really had a chance. Michael feels it like an almost tangible weight.

“
Are
they doing something to the glass?” Chrissy says. “Are they melting it?” She’s watching a pane closely. Faces are mashed against it, upside-down, furious, their mouths moving around an impossible crimson glow.

Kevin is glaring at the same pane of glass with contempt.

“So what do we do?” Mai says. Her voice has a defiant kind of sturdiness, but Michael can tell she’s having trouble keeping it that way. “What
can
we do?”

More silence.

“Can we go to the roof?” Mai asks.

“Maybe,” Kevin says, “but for what purpose?”

“Time?” Ron says miserably. “Last stand?”

“Just … shut up, okay?” Scott says, doing his own pacing. He looks gaunt and defeated.

Michael catches a glimpse of Liam in the south hall. The sweaty young man has one hand planted on a bookcase behind him, and his right hand is placing his AR-15 on the ground, gently, as if any sudden movement might cause the things at the window to thrash about more wildly and break the thick glass. He makes a gesture that tells Michael he’s out of ammunition. Kevin looks Michael’s way from his left, shaking his head in stark, red-tinted disbelief, and the two men share the briefest of glances until Kevin looks down, for some reason unable to maintain the human connection.

“Christ!” Joel barks abruptly. “Don’t let this asshole get to you! Scott has been ready to give up from the start! Get off your sad-sack asses! It’s the only way we’re gonna survive this thing!”

Scott’s voice is reasonable, receded in red shadows. “No one is under any obligation to follow my lead, cop. They can do whatever the hell they want. But you can have this rifle.” He makes a show of leaning the AR-15 against the drinking fountain. “I won’t be in the line of fire anymore. I’m going upstairs.”

“Bastard’s gonna lock every door, barricade himself up there,” Kevin says.

“You can’t do that, asshole,” Joel says. “You can’t lock us down here.”

“Christ, I never said I
would!
What is with you people?!”

Michael grits his teeth and tunes the voices out. He has latched his attention on his daughter, who is standing wearily next to Bonnie at the main checkout area. Kayla is buried into her side, not crying but in a kind of denial, and Rachel is petting her dark hair. For a reason that Michael can’t quite pinpoint—or perhaps for many reasons—he feels a fat lump develop in his throat. His eyes blur.

Rachel eventually meets his gaze, and after a moment she beckons him toward her. As men shout behind him, he makes his way to his daughter, and Bonnie, and before he knows it, he’s engulfed in an embrace. Arms fold around him, and he’s not even sure who they belong to. He can smell his daughter’s scent, and he can feel Bonnie’s warmth, and he can sense Kayla’s innocence—a reminder of Rachel in childhood, a remembrance of a very different time—and he tries consciously to lose himself in it, closing his eyes tightly against everyone and everything outside this circle.

It’s not the loud voices that finally pull him away. It’s not the sound of rifles reloading, or the clamor of survivors hustling back and forth, or the roar of something atmospheric spelling their demise.

It’s the silence.

The racket of those bodies’ heads against the glass. Earlier, he thought that the sound had subsided. It has. In fact, it has subsided dramatically.

Michael is in the act of opening his eyes and glancing toward a window for a closer look, but then Ron hurries in from the south hall.

“They’re coming through the windows.”

“What?!” Joel says, moving immediately.

“Oh God,” Bonnie breathes.

“What do we do?!” Chloe says, seemingly ready for anything. “What do we do?”

“What do you mean they’re coming through the windows?!”

Michael hurries past Chrissy to the closest window, hopping over two sprawled bodies, nearly slipping in a large splatter of blood. He comes to an uneasy stop next to the massive pile of bodies at the front doors. Outside, several of the things’ heads are pressed firmly against the smeared glass, and now all the dead eyes swivel almost lazily and lock on his. The red pulse in the things’ heads is only too apparent, and it seems to be working at something: It seems to be the utter focus of the otherwise still bodies.

And then he sees that the glass is fogged not by breath—as he originally, unconsciously assumed—but by whatever weird radiation is being emitted from that glow. It
is
working on the library window glass. Despite the thickness and strength, it
is
working.

Michael’s first instinct is to touch the glass with his fingers, but he snatches his hand back, wary. Instead, he lifts his rifle and—

“Wait, don’t!” Pete cries, beginning to maneuver his bulk toward him.

“I’m just—”

With the muzzle at the end of the AR-15’s barrel, Michael nudges at the glass, and it gives sickeningly, like half-molten plastic.

“He’s right,” Michael calls over his shoulder. “They’re coming through. They’re coming through all the windows.”

The effect of Michael’s words is instant, galvanizing the group back into action.

“Shit!” Joel shouts. “Okay, this is it, people, spread out! Arm up! If you don’t have a rifle, try a tranq gun! If nothing else, use the end of the rifle to batter the head. Extinguish that fucking light! Get ready! Be smart!”

Michael backs away from the window, watching it, watching every window in the vicinity, every window that will at any moment fall away and allow the entrance of countless things intent on ending the lives of all the survivors. Commotion reigns behind him, voices shouting, feet pounding in all directions.

Wait,
Michael thinks, the word repeating into an inner echo.

“Here they come!” someone shouts from the north end of the library, and Michael flinches at the sound of gunfire.

“
Go, go, go!”
Joel is yelling.

Kevin and Ron sprint in that direction, but Michael stays put. He’s staring at the canisters of blood that Bonnie hauled out to the book-return area. Chloe is fidgeting a few feet away from it, considering it, not understanding how it can help her. She’s grabbing at Zoe’s forearm while her sister is in the midst of dissolving into horrified tears.

Michael finally breaks from his paralysis and goes stumbling toward them. The unassuming box is loaded with the small pressurized canisters, each with a small protective cork on its end, waiting to be loaded into one of the six tranq guns scattered around the library.

Something deep inside him clicks.

Coordination.

Just like them.

In his mind’s eye, he sees the bodies sweeping up the street toward the library—the synchronization of movement, the horrifically fluid choreography of limbs, all working in concert toward one objective. He doesn’t need to glance behind him to see them working toward a different common objective now, all their heads stabbing in unison against the glass to achieve entrance.

The lobby is in chaos, but Michael grabs Chloe’s shoulders. “Who knows how to fire these tranq rifles?” he yells loud enough for everyone in the lobby to hear.

Eyes wild, he acknowledges the twins, and Rachel and Kayla, and Bonnie, who is enduring a full-body tremble, on the verge of collapsing into shivering sobs. Chrissy has backed against a wall, her weapon empty, and can only watch as the window glass fogs. Her eyes are unblinking, her mouth slack. Liam is running toward them, seeking the safety of a group at the center of the lobby, giving up on his station.

No one answers at first. They’re succumbing to horror.

“Hey!” he screams. “We’re not done yet! Bonnie!”

Bonnie, her face a ruined mess of tears, manages to meet his gaze.

“This is our last shot. And it’s not about the guns. I don’t think the guns matter anymore. It’s about this blood right here.”

All eyes move to the unassuming box at Michael’s feet, weighing its balance against the awesome, gasping threat literally pushing in at the library windows.

This? Against that?

“We gotta hit ’em with this blood all at once!” he yells. “We have to be coordinated! Just like they are! We need to grab everything! All the blood!
Everything
with blood in it. I’ll take care of the tranqs, but get everything else. Bonnie!”

Bonnie pushes herself away from Rachel and Kayla, still sobbing, but determined. She rushes toward the book-return area.

“Chloe,” he says, looking straight into the girl’s eyes. “And you too, Zoe. Get the tranq guns. All of them. Bring ’em here. Chrissy, you too, we need all six!
GO!”

Chloe, haunted yet willing, and Zoe, dazed and barely hearing him, follow his orders without question, immediately locating two of the four tranq rifles leaning against the main counter. Chrissy is unable to hold back gasping sobs as she joins in, constantly wiping at her eyes, so Mai—dry-eyed—takes charge, yanking the woman toward the main checkout area.

“Liam!” Michael calls. “Get ready to fire. Take some canisters here.”

Bonnie crashes into Michael.

“Here!”

It’s another box, labeled INGRAM, and it’s full of various hospital supplies, including the final unit of O-negative blood, and about two dozen syringes fat and dark with cold blood. She has cleared out the little fridge. It’s everything. At the realization, Michael looks into her eyes, and there is a bottomless fear there.

“If we get out of this,” Michael says, forming a strategy while staring into the box, “you’re gonna be the hero, you know.”

Bonnie can’t take her eyes away from the front windows, to the right of the pile of destroyed human beings. One of the bodies outside is reaching a knobby forearm through the glass, which is half-stretching and half-breaking around the limb. The hand is scrabbling around, intermittently reaching out toward them as if independent of its body. The glass is pushing inward like tempered-glass taffy, close to falling away.

“I don’t want to be a hero,” Bonnie says. “I just want to be alive.”

Against every instinct to flee—up the stairs, into inner rooms, even into the non-functional elevator—the small band of survivors surges forward into an inner circle, surrounding the new blood. They’re mostly women, as the rest are at the windows in other parts of the library, expending the last of the metal ammunition or using the rifles themselves as last-ditch blunt instruments. Michael and Mai take two of the tranq rifles and hand the remaining four to Liam, Chloe, Chrissy, and Rachel.