Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood (9 page)

Michael moves on.

After ten minutes of careful driving, winding his way around and through collisions, he is crossing the main thoroughfare, College Avenue. A glance to the right, up the street and into the heart of Old Town, shows him a scene of blackened devastation, of ash and drifting smoke, of broken glass and stalactites of splintered building foundations upheaved like claws. The tail end of a jet is plainly visible, blackened by fire. There’s an abandoned fire truck, its hose snaked out and forgotten.

He consciously looks away, instead locking on the street ahead of him. He can’t fathom a world in which buildings would be left to just burn until there was nothing left to burn.

The gray sky is filled with ash, drifting like snow, and the smoke is on the edge of oppressive. With the Pilot’s vents closed, he continues forward along the deserted street.

A pulse of adrenaline hits his bloodstream when he realizes how close he is to home now. He has to force himself to slow down and not go barreling through the occasional wreckage.

He is not under the illusion that Susanna might be alive, or that he might even find her body at their home—but a part of him feels a trill of urgency, as if he might save her if he would only rush, now, to her aid. Too many days have passed. But there is knowledge to be had, and for that he feels an almost tangible pull.

Michael takes the turn onto Jackson and is facing a scene that is at once intimately familiar and completely alien. This is the beginning and ending of every journey he has ever taken from his home. It is his route to work; it was the beginning of his mad dash with Cassie to the hospital to give birth to Rachel, and the start of every trip to that same hospital to attend oncology appointments and chemo treatments for his wife. It was the address from which he drove to meet Susanna at local hotels or her cramped, messy apartment near the old Holiday Twin drive-in.

There’s the home of the Powells, longtime over-the-fence friends and occasional drinking companions; the house is now dark and creepy in the slouch of its lumber. His mind doesn’t want to imagine the fate of those good people, but he knows they’ve been no luckier than the multitudes. Over there at the edge of Olive is the Kaufman home; Daniel was an accomplished artist, and now his skill has no doubt been obliterated under this incomprehensible intelligence.

There’s a body at nearly every conifer tree—sometimes two or three at the same tree. As he turns onto Magnolia, he catches sight of poor Mrs. Carmichael, the stunningly obese woman from down the street, a woman he has never actually seen beyond her porch until this moment. Her corpulent body is twisted around an Australian pine, her blue patterned muumuu hanging off her, revealing great doughy expanses of white flesh. Michael looks away.

He pulls into his driveway and twists the ignition off.

He sits there for several moments, watching the neighborhood. He can’t see any movement anywhere. He’s paranoid all of a sudden, feeling as if every darkened window is hiding someone—or some
thing
—surreptitiously watching him. In particular, he is eyeing the Sanders home next door to his own. The living room curtains there are hanging askew, and as he parked, he could have sworn they moved—but probably not. More likely, that was his mind playing tricks on him. He’s darkly curious about what might have happened to Darin and Sally, casual friends for over ten years but now, more than likely, somewhere out there doing something ungodly to a fucking tree.

Finally, he eases the Pilot’s door open and steps onto his driveway. He pulls Rachel’s backpack over his shoulder and takes hold of the shotgun. He’s watching every direction, but there’s nothing out there. He doesn’t think he’s ever heard this measure of silence in his life. The city is empty of all noise. He can practically hear bits of ash striking the pavement at his feet.

He hurries now to his porch, climbs the steps, and grasps the door handle. Taking a breath, he tries the door, and it opens into a humid house. The door handle knocks against the interior wall, echoing.

“Susanna?” he calls, hoping against hope.
“Suze!”

Nothing.

He stands in the foyer surveying the room—tense, shaking. Everything seems in its place, but his eyes land on a browned, mostly dried apple core sitting on the living room table to his left. He frowns at it for a moment, then moves forward.

He stops.

On the air is the scent of death.

Something plummets inside him.

His eyes close involuntarily, and he feels emotion at his throat. He becomes aware of his heartbeat, his breathing. He focuses on keeping them calm.

He opens his eyes, carefully turns around, and clicks the door shut. He finds that he is unable to move toward the bedroom. He is afraid. Afraid of what he will find. Afraid of what he will not find.

He sets the backpack on the couch and stares into the hallway’s early-morning blackness. He can just see the edge of his own bedroom doorway, a dim maw leading to an unthinkable mystery. The house around him seems to press in on his ears, throbbing. His mouth is acrid, his teeth close to chattering.

Shotgun at the ready, he begins creeping into the dark hallway.

As he approaches his bedroom, he can see muted sunlight slanting across the floor from the window. He arrives at the doorjamb, supporting himself against it, and stares in.

For a moment, he doesn’t see her—or perhaps he just doesn’t want to. He sees bedsheets in disarray, and white pillows, their pillows, thrown aside.

Then he sees the flesh of her bare thigh.

No.

A sound escapes his mouth, something caught between a cry and a cough.

No, this can’t be.

Susanna is sprawled across the bed. Naked. Dead.

He can’t move farther in, and yet he can’t look away.

He’s shaking uncontrollably now. Frozen between impulses to rush to her and flee this place, he can only stand there staring at anything but her. His gaze locks on a flaw in the wood at the jamb, a scuff mark where the vacuum cleaner has scraped repeatedly over the years. After long moments he’s breathing evenly and deeply.

He turns from the door and goes numbly to the kitchen. He sets the shotgun on the kitchen table—location of so many drowsy breakfasts, the beginning of so many days—and numbly opens the refrigerator. The innards are just about room temperature, and the contents are on the verge of spoilage. A subtle odor of food decay touches his nostrils. Nevertheless, he roots around and comes up with a can of Coke, pops it open, and downs it. The sweetness seems to help the ever-present throb in his temples, and the carbonation helps with the undercurrent of nausea. Or maybe it’s just the sense of comfort that comes from drinking this soda after the end of the world.

Susanna is dead.

He can’t process it.

He tosses the empty can across the room, and it clatters against the wall, wide left of the trash can. He barely notices.

“Suze, Suze, Suze ...”
he’s muttering.

She can’t be dead, can she? She can’t be sprawled across their bed. It’s impossible. Not his Susanna.

He closes his eyes and listens. The house is utterly silent, and that silence seems to extend out from him in waves, out into the neighborhood, the town, the state, the nation … how far?

Wait, but there is a sound, a steady hum under all that silence, a low bass note that’s almost too low to hear. It might even be his imagination. He moves his jaw, pops his ears. No, it’s there. Something is there.

For some reason, there are no tears springing from his eyes. He feels as if he should have tears for Susanna, but they won’t come. Perhaps it was because he half-expected to find her like this. He expected the worst. Some variety of worst.

No, you did not expect this. You didn’t expect to find her here. You expected her to be gone, to be lost in the wilderness somewhere, engaged in some unspeakable act, among a hundred thousand other ruined human beings …

He takes deep breaths, then steels himself to return to the room. He moves past the doorjamb and inside. Everything is gray and hollow. He reaches his wife’s side, looks down on her, and now emotion comes erupting from his throat, raw, hitching.

He lets a shaking hand descend to Susanna’s shoulder, her face, lets his fingers trace the contours of her lips.

Cold.

Tears fall from his eyes to the sheets, darkening them.

Susanna’s body is fully exposed to him, as if in cruel spite, her breasts deflated, her taut belly sunken, her labia dry and cold. She’s pale, lifeless, bruised. He grabs at the sheets, then, quickly covering her stony nakedness. He doesn’t want to see her like this. He tucks the cloth around her stiff limbs, providing as much dignity as he can muster.

He stands back and regards her.

For a long moment, he’s perfectly still.

Then more tears come. They leak out of his squinting eyes.

In the crushing quiet of a bleak morning, he stands in the middle of his bedroom and weeps.

He feels as if nothing has been real until this moment. His angst-ridden teen daughter has transformed overnight into a leader, a survivor, and the entire world has shrunken to the space of a barren hospital. And the event that caused everything is lost beneath this ridiculous concussion. And everything else, every hobby and desire and routine, it’s all gone, all meaningless. But now …

Susanna is dead.

He turns away from her but catches a glimpse of Susanna’s purse, splayed open on the floor. It looks as if it has been rifled through. Her cell phone is on top of the bed, near Susanna’s feet, having fallen from the sheets when he wrapped her up. What happened here? His hands are still shaking, and he feels faint. He steps slowly backward, finally falling into the chair next to their dresser.

Wait, wait, wait …

His blurred gaze lands on Susanna’s purse once more, then shifts to Susanna’s covered corpse. As he wipes his eyes, he tries to imagine what happened to her. What her final moments were like. Was this a struggle? Why is she dead and not … turned? Why
isn’t
she among the multitudes in the foothills?

It’s only after long moments of considering several insane scenarios that he can look away from the scene and focus on the closet on the other side of the room. Synapses are firing in his skull even as he glances at its closed doors. He wipes at his eyes, composing himself.

In the throbbing silence, he makes his way past the bed to the closet, opens the door. Near the back, in the corner, there’s a section of wall that is removable. It’s hidden seamlessly behind a false section of laminate. He slides the loose drywall away, and stares dully at the combination lock that is revealed. He twists the combination and opens the small, heavy door. Then he lets his weight fall to the floor and just sits there, half-inside the warm closet, the hidden safe blatantly displaying its contents. At last count, he had one hundred thirteen thousand, four hundred dollars sitting there, in neat stacks.

It all means nothing now.

But now his memory of the end of the world has returned.

When Michael woke the morning of the apocalypse, he made love to his wife. He always felt a surge of friskiness on these Saturday mornings when he knew he would be making money.

Even as Susanna moved languidly beneath him, he cast occasional glances toward the closet, feeling a perverse thrill about the cash stacking up in there, savoring the itch of paranoia surrounding it—paranoia that he might be caught at any moment, this gradually building dream dashed by carelessness. It felt good to tempt fate.

And it felt delicious to be flesh-to-flesh with this amazing woman, drowsy at the start of a new day, the sun already warming their skin through the curtains.

He thought of the money again and smiled.

Michael had all kinds of plans for the cash, despite Steven’s ribbing, accusing him of inaction in the face of good fortune. It’s just that Michael’s plans were more about the future than about the now. Steven, the building’s morbidly obese IT guy who had started all this nonsense, was quietly and quickly building a world-class home theater in his basement, filled with obscure, ludicrously expensive audio/visual components. He probably had a hundred thousand invested in that man cave already. With his share, Steven was hell-for-leather. He also talked about a certain massage parlor over on Lemay that offered happy endings, if you asked the right way. Maybe Steven was kidding, but Michael always shuddered at the image.

Michael hadn’t spent a dime of the pilfered money. Perhaps it was because some part of him believed—silly!—that if the three of them were caught or even suspected, he could just quietly insert the money back into the hundreds of accounts they had unobtrusively slipped it from. Once, he had whispered this rationalization to Carol, the third leg of their little embezzlement tripod, on the elevator at work, carelessly, and she had just stared at him, slim hip cocked, then left without a word when the doors opened, off to the parking lot.

The money gave him a sense of stability—a sense of calm power—that nicely counterbalanced the paranoia of the theft.

Before long, Susanna was more participatory, less drowsy from sleep, and she had flipped him over and mounted him. The position always reminded Michael of their first time, in his office chair at work—that forbidden night, before Steven’s game-changing idea, before Cassie’s downward spiral, and long before the end of the world. It was that night, maybe, when Michael had started down a path from which there would be no easy return. He often wondered whether he would have found himself wrapped up in Steven’s scheme had he not wrapped himself up with Susanna that night.

She’d started as an intern, doing the busywork of filing the promissory notes in the firm’s vault. She’d worked her way up to legal secretary, getting closer and closer to actual client relationships until she was a bona fide paralegal, landing contracts that veteran lawyers had failed to secure. Everyone attributed it to her demeanor—spunky, a little flirty, clear-eyed, and of course naturally attractive in a Boulder kind of way. That wasn’t where she was from, but she might as well have been.

Michael, on the other hand, attributed her success solely to her body. Right on the edge of voluptuous, it was tight and plump in all the right places, and toned in a way that Cassie had never been. A pang of regret always tweaked him deep inside when he thought that way, but he couldn’t deny its truth. After Rachel was born, Cassie never regained her shape and never seemed really motivated to do so.

“You okay, baby?” Susanna breathed languidly. It was barely light out, and he knew this was just a dreamy interlude for her, that she would eventually slip off him and go back to sleep once he was gone.

Michael opened his eyes. “Uh huh.” He gave her a look as she moved atop him:
Why do you ask?

“You had a funny look on your face,” she murmured, “like it hurt or something.”

He shook his head and focused on the sensation. He banished thoughts of Cassie from his mind.

“I’m gonna go in to work for a while,” he whispered. “Not long. A couple hours.”

Susanna shook her head in mild exasperation, her hair tickling his nose. “Overachiever.” She leaned further, kissed his forehead.

“Best time to get work done,” he said, his Saturday morning mantra.

“Don’t forget we planned to get to Denver early, before the game … mmmm.” She took up a rotating motion at her hips, nearly setting him off.

He took the opportunity to think of the money again, warding off the inevitable.

“I won’t be long,” he whispered, relishing the double entendre. “Want me to grab donuts?”

She frowned, eyes closed. “Eww.”

In twenty minutes, he was in the shower, mentally preparing for the morning. His cell phone had received no warning text, and brief pings from both Steven and Carol had greenlit the morning. They would meet at the office at 6 a.m. and then head off to the three separate banks when they opened.

He stepped out of the shower and dried off while admiring Susanna’s naked body on the bed, partially concealed by the sheets. She was already drifting off to sleep again, a satisfied smile ghosting her lips. It was going to be a warm day, for sure, and she looked sultry as hell.

On his way out, he gave her a peck on the cheek, then closed the door to a crack. At the other end of the hallway was the door to Rachel’s room. It was closed. He approached it and carefully eased it open. Setting his jaw, he watched his daughter breathe steadily in deep slumber. No telling when Tony had brought her home. Her jeans were in a wad on the floor, panties still inside them. She’d essentially fallen into bed—at some obscene hour, no doubt. He let loose an inner sigh and eased the door shut.

Then something odd happened on the way to work.

Halfway there, just past Whole Foods, something flashed in the sky. At first he thought it was sunlight arcing off his rearview mirror, but whatever the light was, its source wasn’t the sun. It was a ripple of red light in the atmosphere, reminding him of the Northern Lights, and it was intermittent, he noticed as he drove.

“Huh,” he said in the confines of his Acura.

The lights in the sky recurred twice before he entered his parking lot, where the edge of the building blocked out most of the western horizon. Michael tuned them out to focus on the other cars. There were two besides his. Carol had arrived, but Steven was late. Typical. The other vehicle was the van belonging to the janitor. Michael entered the building casually, just a dedicated employee in for some extra time on the weekend. He took the stairs up, jogged them while humming a favorite tune, and entered Accounting.

“Carol, good morning,” he said, as if this was just a regular day at work.

“Mike.”

She was already at her desk, studiously avoiding eye contact. He could see only the back of her head, the dirty blond hair tied in a loose pony tail, an earthy-hued headband holding it up.

“Everything okay?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

The office was preternaturally quiet, as always on these mornings. The landscape of silent, darkened cubicles never failed to strike Michael as jarring, despite the knowledge that these early Saturdays had become fairly regular.

“Did you see the sky out there?” He walked over to the water cooler and filled his cup. “Weird.”

She was shaking her head, staring intently at her screen.

“No word from Steven?” he asked.

As the name escaped his lips, they could both hear the elevator begin to groan.

“Ah,” Michael said, and powered on his docked laptop.

Just as Steven’s devious chunk of software revved up from the encrypted thumb drive, the man himself made his appearance.

“Jesus God,” he wheezed. “It’s way too early for embezzlement.”

“Good grief, man,” Michael said, unconsciously looking about the room.

“No one else here, boss.”

“It’s not embezzlement, anyway,” Carol said.

“Right.” Michael nodded.

“It’s just skimming off the top.”

“Sure, no court in the world would bat an eye,” the large man said.

Carol finally looked up from her system. “Shut up and do your stuff, will ya? I have to get back home and get Sophia ready for a soccer game.”

“Hey, it’s your own fault you decided to go the suburban mom route.” Carol sent him a withering gaze in response. “Mike, you got Intrepid up?”

“Yes.” Gritting his teeth at the name Steven had given his little program.

“Okay, let me get the screen sharing working through the encrypted tunnel.”

Steven sat his massive bulk at the desk of the latest intern. The chair audibly complained. His pudgy fingers danced across the keyboard, and as Michael watched, several windows opened onscreen, one full of nearly
Matrix
-like code, the other the company accounting UI, and one more showing Michael’s desktop. Michael looked away then, preferring not to understand any of Steven’s methods and thereby further incriminate himself. Michael entertained an elaborate fantasy that, were they ever caught, he could maintain a comparative innocence in this whole sordid endeavor.

Network security required that they gather during off hours to initiate these little transfers, and they’d watched the building for months on the weekends to determine the best time to come in for “overtime.” Steven demanded that all three of them actually be onsite for the transfers—no way would he take on the entirety of the risk. All three of them working off hours might raise suspicion, but no other employees ever came in at 6 a.m. on Saturdays. Ever. That made it easy for Steven to cover their tracks in the system.

There was only the janitor cleaning up the lobby, his first of seven jobs on the weekend. No getting around that, but he didn’t care about anything involving the actual businesses upstairs. Michael always greeted him openly, innocently.

In his mind, Michael had somehow convinced himself that he really was here for some extra work, doing good by the company. What kind of labyrinthine thought processes could possibly lead to that kind of self-delusion? He shook his head.

“What do you got planned for the weekend, Mike?” Steven said, as if he sensed Michael’s wandering attention.

“Headed to Denver for the Rockies game,” he said. “Playing the Dodgers. Should be good. We’ll grab some lunch down there, too. Make a day of it.”

“Rachel tagging along?”

“I don’t think so.”

Michael hesitated to talk about Rachel with Steven. He felt that the huge man had developed an unhealthy fascination with her ever since their meeting at the company Christmas party, when Rachel was just freshly 19 years old.

“Just you and Suze?”

Steven was just the kind of person to use a casual nickname for someone whom he really didn’t know at all—and even waggle his eyebrows a little. Of course, the whole office knew about Michael’s involvement with and eventual marriage to the former intern, but no one knew how long ago it had begun. At least, he thought so—Steven’s eyebrows notwithstanding.

He changed the subject.

“How about you? Encasing yourself in that basement again?”

“Ah, spoken from a place of deep envy.” Steven shifted his bulk in the chair, still typing. “But yeah, on hot days like this, I like to relax with some cold ones down there and take in a triple feature.”

“Sorry I’m gonna miss that,” Carol said from her desk. “And by ‘cold ones,’ I’m assuming you mean ice cream sandwiches?”

“All right, Miss High and Mighty, what are
you
up to this weekend? And no, my cold ones are frozen daiquiris. If you weren’t already married, I’d ask you to join me.”

Carol barely glanced at him. “Let’s just get this over with, okay?”

The coworkers made up a motley crew, that was for sure. The fellowship began spontaneously one afternoon, when all three of them happened upon each other on the patio—on the heels of an offhand remark muttered by eternally pessimistic Carol. Something about a white-collar crime film she’d seen that weekend. And Steven had cocked his jowly head, a thought occurring to him. “Shit, I actually know a way that could work,” he’d said. And then things had started happening.

Michael left the details to them: the brains of the operation and the IT guy who secured the process. Michael just provided the keystrokes. The cover. The prestige, you might say.

It was easy. Far too easy. It just added up and up and up.

The Saturday before, Michael had brought up the notion of stopping. Quitting while they were ahead. Not tempting the fates.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Steven had been flabbergasted.

“We don’t want to be greedy.”

“He’s probably right,” Carol had said.

“Screw you guys,
I
want to be greedy.”

Michael had hoped to come away from that conversation with a hard stop date, but instead they’d floated the possibility out to an undetermined horizon. He wanted to bring it up again. He just needed to find the right opportunity.

Steven was quiet, waiting for something onscreen.

“Just five more minutes, then you can pull the plug.”