Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood (7 page)

“Where did they go?” he says after a moment. “Those things.”

“They’ve—most of them have massed in the foothills, where most of the trees are. I don’t know what they’re doing. You saw them, right? Out front? At the trees? We live in a world where everyone is dead, doing this thing that’s—that’s—that’s just incomprehensible.”

According to Bonnie, there are groups of armed survivors burning the forests, torching the bodies, denying whatever force is inside them from achieving its strange goal. And now the forests of the foothills are on fire, thousands of corpses going up in flames alongside the trees.

“We aren’t all that’s left, I hope you didn’t think that,” Bonnie says. “We ran into some men, and they were hell-bent to burn every last one of them. In a bid to survive. They had live grenades, flame throwers. They were armed to the teeth. Just destroying them.”

Now Michael can grasp the moral weight of the situation—particularly as it falls on Rachel’s shoulders.

“My God, just the thought of what to do next!” Bonnie closes her eyes, and when she reopens them, there are tears there. “That girl—Rachel—your daughter is going to need you.” She’s staring down at the floor. “Yeah, she needs you. I’m so glad you’re awake.”

“Have you been in to see her tonight?”

“I have.” Bonnie looks troubled as she stands up.

“Is she all right?”

“She was awake, yes, but—she’s not very responsive. She’s just lying there, on her side.”

“I’ll go see her.”

“She needs to stop blaming herself.” She’s brushing the front of her blouse, straightening up, looking ready to leave. She goes to the counter and opens a packet of Tylenol, brings the two tablets back to him. He swallows the pain relievers dutifully. “Anyway, you need your rest. You’ll need a lot more. I know you want to jump right in to help, but you should be careful with that concussion. Don’t overdo anything.”

He smiles his thanks at her. “What about you? Going to sleep?”

“I realized last night that I haven’t slept in about 72 hours. Is that even possible?”

“Seems we’ve had opposite experiences.”

“Yes.”

After a moment, Bonnie turns to leave.

“One more thing,” Michael says, a thought occurring to him. “What about animals? Is this happening to them? Have you seen any dogs? Birds?” Ever since he woke, he can’t recall seeing or hearing evidence of any kind of animal—either outside his window or out the front doors.

Bonnie considers him, her eyes still moist. “I’m actually not sure that’s occurred to anyone.” One hand on the door, she yawns terrifically. “There was a lot going on.”

After Bonnie excuses herself, Michael sits with his head in his hands, waiting for the Tylenol to work.

Michael knows his skull is healing, thanks to Bonnie. When he first woke, he was in a state of confusion. But now he feels more and more grounded, even though it’s inside a reality that he’d rather not be a part of.

He’s beginning to think he has Bonnie as much as his daughter to thank for his survival. She has been incredibly attentive, treating his wound when Rachel brought him in, and later treating him for the resulting concussion. Bonnie reminds Michael of Cassie, strongly now, and so submitting to her care was easier than it perhaps might have been.

Bonnie … Cassie … Susanna … Rachel …

If Bonnie is to be believed—as well as the evidence all around him—his daughter is a broken, exhausted shell of herself; the sky is filled with the stinking smoke of an uncontrolled pyre of cremated human beings; and most of the world is dead—including Susanna.

He stares at the ceiling, listening to the silence.

Michael pushes himself out of bed, past a wave of dizziness, and goes to the already open window. He stares out toward the burning foothills. Along the western horizon, licks of flame brush the dark orange underbellies of smoke clouds drifting northeast, and behind everything are weird flashes of purple and red, atmospheric and alien. He can’t quite see the mountains to the south—Longs Peak and the neighboring summits, so familiar, so reliable. They’re blocked by the homes and businesses down Lemay. But he doesn’t
want
to see them in the context of this new reality.

Michael is startled by a noise that he has never heard before. It’s a deep, rumbling roar, vibrating the walls—throaty and yet almost … electronic. As soon as it begins, it starts to fade away.

Bonnie is back at the door, new alertness in her eyes. Right behind her is Joel, still up, still on alert.

“—what I was talking about,” Joel is saying. “Hey Mike.”

They join him at the window.

“This has happened a few times,” Bonnie explains to Michael. “Joel thinks it’s how they’re communicating. This is the quietest one we’ve heard.”

“It doesn’t seem to have any rhyme or reason,” Joel says. “The volume of it, or the frequency. At least, to
us
, it doesn’t. But I think it makes sense to
them
. ”

“I think you might be right,” Bonnie says. “I know it happened right as all the bodies raced out toward the foothills.”

Michael watches the horizon carefully. Did the smoke react to the low roar, shivering in the sound wave seemingly originating from above it? He voices the question, and Bonnie and Joel agree silently.

After perhaps ten minutes, as nothing further has come of the comparatively quiet phenomenon, Michael is left alone at the window, both Bonnie and Joel giving him separate pats on his shoulder.

“Try to sleep, okay”? Bonnie says.

He continues to stare at the foothills, mesmerized. The longer he watches, the more apparent it is that there’s a great red fog rising into the night. And there’s a relentlessness to it, paired with the columns of smoke rising from the burning hills. It’s a constant pulse. And it’s all too clear that the two forces—the red fog and the roar—are somehow related. Michael tries to understand it, to connect these phenomena with what has happened to humanity.

He comes up with nothing. Only more questions.

At just past 1 a.m., Michael pulls open his door and peers up and down the empty hallway. A contingent of survivors has spent some time cleaning up the blood on the floor, but there’s just no way they could erase all trace of it—and the proof is in the stench. It still smells rotten, and he knows it’s only going to get worse with those bodies in the basement.

He steps into the dimly lit hall, makes his way to Rachel’s door, and pushes into the room, which is softly illuminated by a night light. He looks at his baby girl.

Baby girl.

It’s odd to think in those terms now, he knows, in light of everything that has happened. But seeing her there, curled into a protective ball, holding that old bear—it’s apt. And he can’t blame her. Can’t blame her for going fetal, escaping within herself to heal. He would probably be this way, too.

He steps over to the complicated metal bed and sits on one of the three chairs next to it. At the sound of the chair squeaking on the floor, Rachel snaps awake with a momentary look of absolute fear on her face. Michael calms her, and she closes her eyes, sighing.

“Daddy,” she whispers.

“Hey Rach.”

She brings her hand to her brow, closes her eyes hard for a moment.

“How are you doing?” Michael asks.

She squints her eyes open. “Can’t shake this headache.”

“I know the feeling.”

She manages a weak smile, and crinkles her nose. “You stink.”

Michael glances down at the clothes he’s been wearing for three straight days. He’s sure they’re more odiferous that he even realizes. The tan polo shirt has sweat stains at the armpits, and even dried blood splotches that probably came from him, but he’s not entirely sure.

“I imagine showers are tough to come by,” he says.

“Almost as tough as ice water.”

“What I’d give for a tall glass.” He reaches over and touches her sweaty hair, the side of her face.

She stays silent, stares straight ahead as he curls her hair behind her ear. In the humid silence, her eyes begin to fill with tears. She lifts an arm toward him, beckoning for an embrace, and he stands and bends over her, holding her. She begins sobbing into his chest, shaking, her muscles clenched. Both of her arms are now around his shoulders; she’s not about to let go.

He lets her cry.

Finally her embrace slackens a bit, and he gradually draws himself away. Her arms fall, and she wipes at her wet cheeks, refocusing her eyes. She looks at him with a rueful smile.

“Sorry Daddy.”

“You don’t have anything to be sorry about.”

“But I do! I do!” And the tears threaten again as she shakes her head savagely. “You don’t know—” Her voice hitches loudly. “—you don’t know what it was like, you don’t know—you—”

He doesn’t know how to help her. In the silence that falls between them, he simply touches her hand and watches her.

When Rachel’s mother died five years ago, Rachel and Michael became very close. They weathered the pain together, and they recovered together. He was so in tune with what she needed emotionally then! Maybe the reason he focused so intently on Rachel in that horrible aftermath was to deflect his own reaction to his wife’s death, but the upshot was that it was his proudest moment as Rachel’s father. It’s a terrible notion, perhaps, but it’s true: His best moments as a father came in the wake of his wife’s death.

For a year, he and Rachel were closer than they ever were. When she retreated from her friends at school and was in real danger of becoming a melancholy loner, he didn’t let it happen. He became Ultra Dad, arranging sleepovers and chaperoning trips to the mall and hosting impromptu parties and simply keeping Rachel’s friends close to her. He wanted to make sure that his 14-year-old enjoyed—at least, for the most part—the teen years she deserved to experience.

Often his efforts were in vain. Maybe too often. Sometimes, despite all the energy he could muster, Rachel folded inward upon herself, disappearing into her bedroom for long hours, collapsing onto her bed, sleeping or reading or staring at the wall. Michael didn’t deny her those periods, knowing that she had to endure what she needed to, but he would always quietly suffer on the other side of the house, wanting to help but powerless to do so.

One day, after another six or seven hours spent in solitude in her silent room, she emerged a bit dazed and found Michael in the kitchen nursing a beer. It was his fourth of the evening, and he was in his own daze, but he remembers watching her shuffle into the room to stare at him. They just looked at each other for a long moment. Then she said:

“I miss Mom.”

Michael felt a familiar stab straight in the gut. “I do too, Rach.”

“No, I mean—I mean, I miss her, but … but I—I don’t know—I don’t want to cry about it anymore.”

“Okay,” he said.

“I mean, not for a while.”

“All right.”

He didn’t want to say more for fear that it would be the wrong thing to say.

She stood there some more. Then she meandered over to the refrigerator for a Coke. She popped the tab and fell into the chair across from him. He can still remember that moment clearly, despite his beer haze at the time. The way her shorts and tee-shirt were twisted and frumpy from bed, the way her acne reminded him that he should feed her better, the way her eyes looked blasted from crying but clearer somehow.

“So … let’s do something,” she said.

“What do you want to do?”

“Can we go to a movie?”

It didn’t happen that easily. It’s not as if one day she shook off all her sadness and became the same bright-eyed girl she was before the death of her mother. In fact, further tears came from her room later that night, after their movie, after their laughter. Maybe she felt bad for allowing herself to be happy again. But that night was a turning point for both of them. And getting to that place together—that’s what made all the difference.

They had two strong years, on their own, father and daughter. The best years of his relationship with Rachel.

He tried to introduce Susanna carefully into that father/daughter dynamic. He really did.

He waited longer than he might otherwise have, in deference to Rachel’s healing. But life happens. For a year, their courtship favored Susanna’s apartment and local hotels, but at a certain point everything felt deceptive, and so he casually hosted Susanna for a pizza dinner that included Rachel, and—

—perhaps that was the mistake. The key mistake.

Since that fateful evening, Michael remains convinced that Rachel would have had the same reaction regardless of how many years had passed since her mother’s death. For him, two years of mourning was sufficient. Yes, his wife’s death was a body blow to his soul; it was wrenching. But he felt that he had earned the right to carry on. For Rachel, it might’ve seemed more reasonable that he married for life, that he be content with later years marked by emotional and physical celibacy.

So maybe he was doomed from the start.

Michael loved his daughter, but he needed his own life, too. He just wasn’t sure when Rachel would have been ready for that. He thought the best tactic was to confront the thing head on, but in retrospect, that was the worst tactic.

Rachel considered it a breach of trust. In what seemed a single night, she turned from a healing, increasingly happy girl to a brooding, distrustful teen. He remembers now that it started the day after she got her driver’s license: His sweet-sixteen daughter from the day earlier, all grown-up and ebullient—but still so little behind the wheel of his Acura—collapsed into moody instability, and she never really recovered.

Until yesterday—here at the end of the world—when Rachel burst into his locked, disheveled hospital room, brandishing a smoking shotgun, and said, “Hi Daddy.” His miserable teenager transformed into some kind of action-movie heroine—and not only that, she embraced him as if the past two years had never happened—or had happened in an entirely different way.

His daughter has returned to him, and in dramatic fashion.

And Susanna is apparently gone.

Dead?

But now, Rachel is threatening to become that angry, insecure teen again, the demon that possessed Rachel that night he brought Susanna home. He knows this tone all too well—and for the first time, it occurs to him that perhaps he, Michael, is the key differentiator. In his absence, she took on an apocalyptic threat, bravely, heroically. Now that he has returned, she has regressed to what she was before.

She sniffs, exhales loudly now.

“You were
unconscious
, Dad, you don’t know how—how—how
terrible
it was! The things that happened, the decisions we made! The decisions
I
made! I
fucked up
, Dad, I mean I really—” She draws in a high-pitched gasp and stops talking, the muscles of her face clenching. “And I’m
still
making shitty decisions! I just—

Michael sits there helplessly, quiet, just stroking her hair while she cries. In his peripheral vision, he’s aware of someone peeking into the room briefly. He turns, sees Bonnie’s face in the shadows. Her eyes meet his very briefly—he thinks he catches a sad, understanding smile—and then she’s gone, down the humid hallway. Why is she still awake?

“Rachel,” he says, “I’m sorry I wasn’t here with you, to help you through—whatever the hell this is. But whatever has happened … no one has the answers. No one knows anything. You were incredible—that’s what everyone is telling me. And the one thing I know for
sure
is that you were there for me. I’m only here right now because of you. That’s about the bravest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Rachel can only stare straight ahead, subtly shaking her head left and right. Silence swallows up the room, and Michael can hear only his daughter’s breathing. Finally, he can no longer hold his next question inside.

“Rachel …” He swallows. “Do you know what happened to Susanna?”

The muscles of her face flinch. Her wet eyes meet his, and something flickers there, maybe the usual resentment, maybe something new.

“When I woke up, she … she had that thing inside her.”

Michael waits for more, but Rachel goes quiet.

“You don’t know what—?”

“No, I don’t know what happened to her.” Her voice is quiet, seething. “I got out of there. Everything was going to hell, okay? I saw that thing inside her, and I tried to wake her up—” She holds up her hand to show him a palm that appears as if it has been splashed with bleach. “—but that didn’t work. I got out of there to look for you.”

“It’s all right, it’s okay.”

“And then Tony was the same. And his mom. And almost everyone.”