Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood (28 page)

The boy and the wet-eyed women, reluctantly lurching forward, take the rifles into their hands and study them with varying degree of hopelessness. Michael hurriedly gives them a primer on loading the canisters into the chambers, and then the shooters are ready, their pockets filled with small payload darts.

“Those are gonna save our lives,” Bonnie says, “so shoot straight. Right, Michael?”

“Could be.” He gestures to the box. “Kayla, are you fast?”

“Yeah.”

“You’ll run darts to anyone who needs them, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Whoever runs out, okay? They’ll call your name.”

Kayla nods.

“We’ll back up the tranq guns with these syringes,” Michael says. “I need Bonnie, Zoe, and—Rick, here take these!—I need anyone who doesn’t have a rifle to grab these syringes. Get over here!”

Michael searches for Scott and fails. But now there are louder voices coming their way. Ron sprints in from the north end of the library, where rifle blasts are diminishing and a fleshy commotion foreshadows the man’s words:

“They’re inside.”

“Oh God,” Bonnie cries.

“We should get to the roof.”

“I’ve got one more idea,” Michael says. “Here, help us out.” He shouts the plan to Ron, hands him two syringes. “Remember, each body needs only a small amount. Get it in, plunge, get it out, and go on to the next one.”

In the distance, Brian and Bill are in the act of falling back. Michael can see them swinging their rifles in the dim distance. Gunfire has dwindled away under the alien throb, and now even Joel is backing away from his windows, letting his rifle clatter to the floor. “That’s it! I’m out!”

“This has to be coordinated,” Michael shouts. “We’ll start shooting at the same time, all at once, on my mark. And once we start, we give them all we have until we’re out of blood. Clear?”

“Aw, fuck, let’s do this!” Mai cries.

“Okay, go, spread out! Tranq guns first, syringes backing them up! Go! Wait for my word!”

Michael takes the windows near the front doors, and the survivors spread out in a loose line. Chloe is ten feet from Michael, just beyond Rachel, and Liam is beyond her. Chloe brings her tranq rifle to her shoulder, aiming at windows just south. “I’ve seen so many officers firing these,” she says brusquely. “Never thought I’d be doing it.”

“You’ll do fine,” Michael says. “Here they come.”

Chloe takes aim at the body pushing through her window. It’s an older woman in a shredded nightgown, scowling directly at the survivors as it climbs forward, pushing through the glass as if through a birth canal. Chloe casts fearful glances at Michael, and he nods frantically, continuing to encourage her.

“Wait,” he says to her. “Wait for it to come through a little more.”

On the north side of the lobby, several bodies—having gained entrance through windows in that annex—have given the men chase, and now, as Joel and Bill and the others clamber into the lobby, those come to a halt, regarding the survivors assembled there. Their skin is bloodied from squeezing through the glass; one is literally dripping in syrupy rivulets. Their throaty gasps rise and fall, wary.

The survivors are surrounded.

“Everyone ready?!” Michael calls. “Find a target!”

There’s a long moment of held-breath silence, during which both the survivors and the reanimated bodies have paused in a state of uncertainty. Michael catches the briefest glimpse at his window of an upside-down face—a young woman, her otherwise beautiful features cranked into villainy—her dead eyes regarding him, taking his measure, along with the other survivors around him. He sees something in her expression that he can’t place, but it boosts him.

“FIRE!”
Michael screams.
“Keep firing!”

His tranq gun
thunks,
sending a dart into the young woman’s strained neck, and in his peripheral vision, he can see Chloe reacting backward, having fired her own rifle. The body at Michael’s window is already flailing, gasping, stuck in the window frame, landing on its back on the hard, jagged metal. Michael is watching it, watching for the next body, and yes, the next body is there immediately—another older woman, this one larger, uglier, meaner. Blood and sap is smeared down the forehead, and the black hair is twisted in all directions, Medusa-like.

“Reload!” Michael calls, laboriously inserting a new dart into his own rifle.

“Trying!” Chloe shouts.

“Bonnie!” Michael says.

Lip curling, Bonnie leaps forward with her syringe before the body can get fully into the window frame. She plunges the needle into the woman’s face just as the body skitters across the floor, swiping at Michael and smacking him straight in the balls. Michael falls back helplessly, his rifle nearly falling from his grasp. Through squinted eyes, he sees Bonnie flailing backward too, the syringe apparently undepressed.

They know our weaknesses!
The thought whisks through his head.

“I got it!” Chloe says, sending another tranq dart flying. It embeds itself below the young woman’s left eye, and immediately the head begins to whip into a frenzy. The body partially blocks the window frame, but here comes another—a young man in sleep shorts—twisting around the metal frame to gain partial entrance. His inverted face peers at them with red malevolence.

Michael grits his teeth against the pain and clambers back up.

“Reload!” he manages, loud enough for everyone to hear. “Reload!”

“I’m trying!” comes Liam’s voice from somewhere.

Now Bonnie steps forward again. She jabs the needle into the new thing’s shoulder, and before the body can react, she has injected a squirt of blood and yanked the syringe back violently, nearly breaking it off in the flesh. The young man pauses, as if shocked, and then begins to gasp and writhe. His top half crumples atop the now-screaming young woman below him.

Another body—a raven-haired woman, dead eyes flashing—surges through the glass, its head stabbing at Bonnie’s arms as if to knock the syringes from her grip. Bonnie lets out a helpless scream as the radiation throbs against her arms.

“Bonnie!” Rachel cries.

Somewhere, Kayla is crying.

Michael reaches out to yank Bonnie away from the threat, and out of nowhere, Scott is battering the new body down with the butt of an empty AR-15. Some kind of growl is coming out of his throat. The body is gasping at him, strategic with its lunges. It’s attempting to launch full-bodied at this new red-haired threat, but Scott is ruthlessly crushing the skull, and after a few moments, the inner light sparks out from sheer violence, the head bleeding out. Scott is left breathing heavily, watching the gap.

He releases a savage bark of triumph.

The moment he tears his gaze away, yet another body is squeezing through, a gangly man, obscene in his crabwalk. The thing uses its spindly legs to launch itself against Scott, whose next brutal swing with the rifle whiffs over the body. The thing clutches onto Scott with its long limbs, elbows and knees moving frantically, and Scott relinquishes the rifle and begins punching at the thing’s gut and its inverted, raging face.

“No!” Bonnie cries from Michael’s grasp.

“Keep firing!”
Michael calls to anyone who’s listening.

And then Bonnie has wrenched free of Michael’s grip and is diving into the fray with her syringes.

“Scott!”

She plunges one needle straight into the gangly-limbed thing’s abdomen, yanks it free, and then starts shoving her foot at the head, which is twitching and gasping deep in its throat. It collapses shortly, straight atop Scott, who is already crawling backward on his elbows, scurrying away. He kicks at the sparking head with desperate fury and loathing, and the body goes reeling backward and up, colliding with Bonnie, who yelps in surprise.

Before Michael realizes what’s happening, Bonnie has fallen straight toward the open window, directly into the cranked-back grasp of a new crawling body. Her syringes fall uselessly to the floor.

He reaches for her, but it’s too late.

The thing glares at Michael as it stabs at Bonnie’s face in a series of livid, strobing bursts.

Both Rachel and Scott screech raggedly, a chorus of despair.

Michael sends a dart into the thing’s gullet, and it bleats like a shocked animal, twisting away from Bonnie’s slack face.

Oh Jesus.

Michael numbly reloads. All around him, the corpses are closing in.

“BONNIE!”
Rachel screams.

“Keep firing!” Michael shouts, finding strength in a reserve that he’s unaware he had.

He can’t look at Bonnie’s body, which twists and writhes like a ragdoll underneath the approach of further monstrosities. He half-sees Scott, emotion coughing out of him, pulling at Bonnie’s body, dragging her out of the maelstrom.

Another one of the things—a lanky, hairy, nearly naked man—squeezes through the gap shoulders first, snarling, trampling over the struggling bodies, and a tranq dart suddenly appears at his shoulder. Michael didn’t even hear the gun, doesn’t know who sent it flying. The body slumps, jerking.

Gasps are turning to screams throughout the lobby, which seems to be shrinking to the size of a tiny dot, and Michael can’t tell if it’s the survivors making the sound or the increasing number of turned bodies, but he has no time to even consider it.

But darts continue to fly, syringes continue to be depressed, and as Michael’s shocked gaze swirls in chaos, he sees all the survivors delivering their payloads. Ron and Kevin are tirelessly pummeling corpses flowing in from the north end of the library. Joel has taken one of the tranq rifles and is hurriedly shooting into a gap just north of the front doors. Michael catches only a glimpse of young Liam, now holding a syringe in his fist, stabbing it into the exposed heart of a wildly thrashing female, her long hair whipping. Even Kayla is leaping over newly humanized bodies, racing new tranq darts to Chloe and Chrissy. Through it all, the knot of the survivors is closing in, and Michael feels at the center of it all, stunned and yet filled with resolve.

Another body is trying to squeeze through at his window, pressing at the remaining glass, which spiderwebs almost wetly and bends out of the way. The body reveals itself to be that of a young girl, Girl Scout age, twisting through the gap, her sap-hardened hair molded to her small skull. Chloe is reloading, so Michael hurries his own dart prep, steps forward, and jabs at his trigger, but the girl is quick, her little arm snaking upwards and deflecting the barrel. The dart goes wide, clattering off the window. The girl is suddenly right at him, stabbing her head at his hand, and he feels it go tingly, partially numb.

“Fucking hell!” he yells, losing his balance.

And that gives the Girl Scout just enough time to fully squeeze her legs through the broken glass. She falls upon Michael as he stumbles backward. Another tranq dart ricochets harmlessly off the wall to the right of the window, and he hears Chloe curse.

“No!” Rachel shouts, suddenly there, kicking at the diminutive body.

“Stay at the window!” Michael yells, warding off the gasping head with the rifle, but he can’t fully manipulate the trigger with his numb right hand. “God dammit!”

The piercing dead eyes are like lasers boring into him. The small head stabs at his neck, at his face, at his chest, and finally Rachel, screaming, makes solid contact with her foot at the girl’s chest, sending the little body clattering across the floor. The body comes to a jarring stop against the display, then is back up in its crab stance, scrabbling back toward them.

Michael twists on the floor, feeling something wrong at the skin of his face, but he manages to switch hands with the rifle—just in time to send a dart at short range into the Girl Scout’s upper arm. She goes sprawling beyond him, almost instantly braying in a very different voice, and collapsing on her back, the blue dart embedding further. She twists and screams and coughs, and her eyes fill with moisture, the pupils miraculously regaining human life. The girl blinks spasmodically, her mouth still wrenched open.

“Daddy, are you okay?!” Rachel’s voice warbles at him. Her eyes are blasted with emotion.

In the corner of his vision, he sees Chloe fire a tranq dart at point-blank range into a body at the window.

There’s shouting everywhere. Michael flops his head over on his buzzing neck, in time to see Ron firing at a window, and a body falls twitching to the library carpet. He hears screams from the north side of the lobby—more bodies retaining a semblance of human life.

Michael feels consciously on the brink of being overwhelmed by the situation. He kicks against the sensation, using the leverage of Rachel’s arm to haul himself back up. His chest and neck are tingle and spasm, and when he brushes his arm past his cheek and nose, he feels an alarming disassociation with his own flesh. He feels a sick dizziness and nearly falls over again, and then quite abruptly he feels vomit erupting from his mouth.

The vomit is filled with blood.

He’s done for.

In a flash of memory, he remembers home, he remembers Susanna peaceful and cold in death, he remembers his bloody nose …

Rachel staggers back, her hands to her mouth, and she sees something in his expression. She knows. She knows perhaps before he does.