Blood Dawn (Blood Trilogy Book 3)

by Jason Bovberg

  They’re all young.

  It’s a common denominator that makes sense. Their bodies are more resilient, their bones and muscles more malleable. They stand the best chance of surviving what the strangers have done to them. But they’re not superhuman, particularly when it comes to the vulnerable flesh of the mouth and throat. To say nothing of the stomach.

  At that moment, Abby vomits up a great gush of bloody green mulch, coughing it out onto the carpet, her eyes letting loose a stream of tears.

  Their mindscapes join in a chorus of—

  —Help me!—

  —and Felicia is all tentative gestures and indecision. What can she do? Why are they looking at her like this? She takes one of the towels—swiped from the staff room upstairs—and uses it to wipe Abby’s face, taking care of the abraded lips. The girl is shaking and wide-eyed with pain. They don’t share any words, but—

  —what happened? why did this happen to me? where’s my mommy? who are you? WHO ARE YOU?—

  —Abby’s frightened little soul blares at her, pure, simple, innocent. She can barely move her limbs. It’s too much. Felicia stumbles backward as the young people stare at her. Their mindscapes are a clamor of hope and fear; they’re caught between infected and eradicated, suffering the effects of both and not knowing who to blame or turn to. Felicia can’t make sense of what she’s sensing. There’s too much to process.

  She stands, steadies herself on the counter.

  A hundred souls are shouting at her, and a hundred more are succumbing, facing a bitter, confusing demise. She watches them, one at a time, wink out like fireflies, their husks left strangled and shattered. Felicia has a dream-like conception of the web of souls she experienced while infected, and this is an atrocious parody of that, a web filled with clotting blood and screams. She pushes back at the fusillade of agonized voices, and then she’s running back to the book-returns room.

  “Felicia!” calls Zoe, arriving with a new body—a young man, straining and screeching. “Wait!”

  But Felicia can’t take it anymore, at least not yet. The pain in her joints and muscles and bones is growing again, and she reaches blindly for the bottle of Tylenol atop the fridge as she rushes past. She finds her corner of the room and tumbles to a fetal position, desperately swallowing five pills. She grinds her teeth, thunderstruck by the sensory overload.

  Everything goes bleary.

  The chaos continues around her, but they leave her alone. Or she won’t let them in. She doesn’t even know which is true.

  Nicole! I need you!

  Nicole is the only person she would let in right now. Where is she? What happened to her? She wants desperately to be with her. Did she survive? Is she still at their apartment, sleeping?

  Felicia pushes tentatively outward with her mind, searching for Nicole. She feels as if she can sense her out there in Fort Collins, if only she could search in the right direction. She pushes outward farther, straining, seeing nothing. Tears stream down her cheek onto the carpet.

  Help me! she whispers inwardly, echoing the bodies in the lobby, the bodies she herself can’t help. Or won’t.

  It’s a half hour later when she stirs from a ragged sleep and opens gritty eyes. People are still screaming, but not as many. Regret and shame burst through her, a blast of cold through her limbs. She swallows heavily, then struggles to her feet. She makes her way to the melted-out window and stares out at the library grounds. Survivors are still hurrying about their tasks, and Felicia catches sight of Mai, helping Liam. For a moment, their eyes meet, and Mai pauses, eyebrows knitted, as if considering a puzzle, and then she bends again to her task. Joel has taken Ron and Pete to the police station.

  Fewer voices are bombarding Felicia now, and there’s a sense of relief there, despite the fact that it means more death. She shakes her head, feeling a self-loathing as she acknowledges the relief.

  Something occurs to her, and she snaps her attention southeast.

  Rachel is coming back.

  Something has happened. She senses Kevin in pain.

  She steps to the shattered glass and peers out, one hand clutching the thick metal window frame. The truck is not in view yet, but she feels it coming, feels Rachel struggling with the transmission, feels her determination amidst fear and loss. And Kayla’s.

  CHAPTER 12

  “Look at that,” Rachel says, beholding the face of the library again.

  It’s a new perspective on the site of the survivors’ last stand, and it remains a landscape of human agony. As she gets closer, she can hear the screams of the blood-converted—anguished and throaty and desperate. The mountain of bodies that Rachel remembers from the end of the assault has been diminished. Most of the bodies—the dead ones—have been dragged out of the way. She can tell they’ve been dragged by the vivid blood paths on the concrete leading away from the front doors. There’s blood everywhere, reminding her of those final moments at the hospital a few days ago.

  Rachel angles Kevin’s truck to the right, avoiding the bodies still dotting the library grounds, and she acknowledges that Joel has moved her father’s body. She can’t see her dad, and for that she exhales her relief, then quickly looks away to the right and spots Felicia, who is staring in her direction, arms rigid at her sides, her posture unmoving. As she watches, Felicia’s gaze moves toward the sky. Rachel cranes her neck to look upward through the windshield, sees only great clouds of smoke and what appears to be crimson atmospheric lightning.

  What are you seeing? she wonders.

  There are other survivors still hurrying about. A sort of triage scenario has taken effect, and now Rachel can see that at least a couple dozen corpses have been lined up along the library perimeter in the shade. Scott, all red-faced exhaustion, is hauling a body out through the library’s main doors, toward a spot to the left. Mai is running in the opposite direction with what appears to be blood-soaked towels hanging from her fists. Liam is wading through the remaining mountain of bodies, apparently still looking for survivors. He is caked with both fresh and dried blood. Rachel thinks he’s been crying.

  He turns his head and spots her, gives a relieved wave with a dirty brown hand. He calls out to the others inside the library, gestures toward the truck.

  Rachel pulls the truck in next to the Hummer and lets it stall. Her head falls briefly against the wheel, and she closes her eyes for a moment. A relieved tear squeezes out, slides down her cheek. She wipes at it, then looks to the right, toward Felicia again.

  Felicia is back at the blown-out window of the book-returns area—eerily reminiscent of how she looked in the immediate wake of the attack. It’s a strange sight, Felicia standing there, overseeing everything, as if challenging the state of the world. It’s oddly disquieting, but there’s something else there, too. Rachel feels it strongly. What is it?

  Is it safety that Rachel feels?

  It is. The reality of Felicia there—it makes Rachel feel safe.

  “What is she looking at?” Kayla says, also trying to peer up through the windshield to see if something new is happening in the heavens, something they haven’t seen before. But it’s the same alien unrest.

  “That’s what I want to know.” Rachel unfastens her seatbelt, cranes her neck to peer back at Kevin in the flatbed.

  The big man appears sweaty and irritated but more awake and aware. He offers a half-hearted grin etched with pain.

  “C’mon, let’s get him taken care of,” Rachel says.

  Just as the two young women jump down from the truck—Kayla following Rachel out the driver’s side—Scott and Liam come jogging their way. Scott, in the lead, offers a weak nod. He’s obviously exhausted, his drenched red hair matted, his freckles standing out like pinprick wounds. None of the survivors have had much sleep in the past five days since everything began, but Scott has gone through his own hell.

  “What have you got for us?” Liam says with something approaching desperation. “Whatever it is, we need it all.”

  The young man seems
to have aged ten years since she met him a few days ago, when they all congregated at the library and hashed out a survival plan. He was still young and cocky then, a fresh survivalist shocked by everything that had transpired, but now he’s been beaten down—exhausted, sleepless, nearly broken. His eyes are red, smeared, glassy.

  “I’m swimming in supplies,” Kevin says from the back. “It’s all covered with blood, but hell, we’re used that that.”

  “Did something—?”

  “Kevin’s hurt,” Rachel says. “Concussed, I think, and shrapnel wounds.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know, something new.”

  “Someone shot at us,” Kevin calls. He tries to lift himself over the side of the truck bed. “Or tossed a grenade. That’s all I can figure.”

  “Hey, slow down, man,” Liam says, heading toward Kevin, who is gripping the truck’s side wall as if to jump down to the ground. “Lemme give you a hand.”

  Scott joins in, opening the tailgate and lending an arm. Rachel has never seen him so quiet. Supplies are everywhere, spotted with dirt and bloody grime, making it seem as if Rachel careened and bounced recklessly back to the library.

  “Attacked you?” Liam says.

  “Some kind of attack, I don’t know.” Kevin winces through pain, his arms now draped over Liam’s and Scott’s shoulders. He’s still working his jaw as if trying to pop his ears. “I’m fuzzy on that.”

  “What time is it?” Rachel asks. “How long till sunset?”

  Liam looks confused for a moment, then checks his watch. “Almost 5:30. I think we have a couple hours.”

  Rachel enlists Kayla in quickly collecting the supplies and throwing what they can into postal bins. Rachel catches the girl peering off in the direction of the home, across the desolate street, that she shared with her mother.

  “So, the attack, was it right after—?” Liam starts.

  “Right after sky split apart again?” Kevin says. “Yeah.”

  “Well, we heard the same thing here—how could we not?—but it was a big nothing,” Liam says. “No change in behavior that we could see. No attack. I wonder if Joel saw anything.”

  “And it was, like, coordinated—something killed those two things,” Rachel says. “Expertly. And not only those, but a couple more on our way back.”

  “Did you get a look at anybody?” Liam asks. “I mean, did you see any movement around you? Cars, other people …? Something from above?”

  Rachel jumps down from the truck bed, shaking her head, helping Kayla down.

  “It just … happened,” Kayla offers.

  “Yep,” Kevin manages. “Outta nowhere.”

  The group moves as quickly as they can toward the open, blasted front doors of the library, near which a few dozen bodies still lay piled, splayed, destroyed, some groaning, feeble, decimated. When Rachel glances to the right, she sees that Felicia has receded back into the library.

  “What’s the story here?” Rachel asks no one in particular. “What can we do?”

  “Joel took Ron and Pete to his station to collect ammo,” Liam says. “He left not long after you did.”

  Rachel visualizes the sheriff’s department. It’s closer than the hospital, across College off of Mountain. In her previous life, she’d driven by the station frequently, almost every time she went to Old Town in Tony’s car.

  As they enter the lobby, Rachel is struck by the stinking humidity and the moans. Here is the hellborne chorus, mournful and anguished. As her eyes adjust, she can see that the entire lobby has become a makeshift emergency room, burdened with death. Lined up against the checkout counters are some young survivors, their bodies small and relatively unscathed. But corpses are still mashed along the east walls in piles, their limbs crooked, their faces frozen in outsized expressions of anger or fear, their skin thrashed and sticky with sap and splinters.

  “Jesus,” Rachel whispers.

  The still-living bodies are in extreme pain, writhing and gasping, and her heart plunges. She immediately regrets every spare moment she took in her journey to the hospital and back, every pause, every stall of the truck. These suffering people, the living corpses for whom they’ve used O-negative blood to expel the alien parasite, are human again, but in no way are they in the clear. Most are hideously damaged.

  Liam grimaces at the scene, as if seeing it for the first time through Rachel’s eyes. “There are more dying than living, and I don’t envy those who might make it.”

  Kayla drops her postal bin and breaks from Rachel, sprinting off toward the north end of the library—where Rachel found her days ago.

  “Kayla!” she calls, but stops herself.

  She knows where Kayla is going, and she can’t blame her. She watches her run, disappearing around a corner. Her footfalls dissipate, and eventually a door slams shut.

  “Poor kid,” Liam says, hobbling a little under Kevin’s weight, still supporting him with Scott. “Will she be all right?”

  “Yeah, let’s give her some time. I’ll check on her after a while.”

  “She handle the hospital okay?”

  “Like a trouper.” Rachel takes up Kayla’s bin, moves both bins to the floor next to the checkout area. “What else?”

  “I’m working with Scott and Mai and the twins to help whoever we can,” Liam says. “Also, Rick and Bill. But those bodies we injected … the ones that turned back … they’re dropping like flies. I think Joel tried to get Felicia involved, to help them out, but she’s still too weak. She couldn’t handle it. They’re in so much pain, and we can’t do anything. It’s horrible. They’re dying. Best we can do is give them some pain relief. The worst cases, we’re lining those up outside. Viable bodies are inside.”

  Viable bodies.

  Rachel catches sight of Mai hurrying through the library toward the book-returns area. The poor woman is working at top speed. Rachel knows she’s about to join her in that task, and she’s going to have to convince this poor kid clutched to her side to pitch in.

  “Is Felicia okay?”

  “I think so.” He gestures. “I think it’s tough for her somehow. Last I saw her, she was lying there in that little room, obviously in pain. I think she wants to help. She’s getting there.”

  “I want to talk to her.”

  “Let’s put Kevin over there,” Liam says, gesturing toward the checkout area, where Rachel counts seven bodies, covered with makeshift bandages—break-room towels, mostly—shaking with wide-eyed agony.

  The twins are there, wiping blood from the floor, preparing another area for more potential survivors. They look up, weary but eager to get their hands on the medication they’ve needed for the past hour. They rise as Liam and Scott maneuver Kevin across a tiled floor that is streaked brown with dried blood.

  “Get the rest of those supplies,” Liam calls back to Rachel, “and we’ll patch him up.”

  Mai is suddenly next to Rachel, bloody rags hanging off her forearms. She manages to pick up Kayla’s bin and rifle through it. She’s been crying, although it’s clear she’s trying to hide it. It’s not difficult to see the paths of tears through splotches of dried blood on her face.

  “You made it,” Mai says.

  “Barely,” Rachel replies as the twins descend on the postal bins. “We got every pain reliever we could find. Only a couple packs of morphine, but lots of other stuff that should help.” She doesn’t give Scott a significant glance here, but the urge is there. “Lots of cortisone and such. Creams. Wraps, splints. Two boxes over there, and a bunch more in the truck. Give me a hand with the rest, will you?”

  “Yeah.” Mai glances at Kevin. You all right, dude?”

  “Never better,” Kevin says, letting his head fall to the floor.

  “Got a big box handy?” Rachel asks Mai, who bounds into the book-returns area and snags a large empty cardboard box. Mai follows her back out the front doors.

  Hurrying across the open grounds, Rachel is better able to appreciate the amount of work
that has been done in her absence. Corpses line the shady wall to the left of the main doors, in neat rows. Even now, Bill is dragging a body from the grass toward the stone wall. He doesn’t look up. His cap is dark with sweat, his beard browned with dried blood, his face smeared with grime.

  At Kevin’s truck, the two of them are able to load up the remaining mail bin with the rest of the retrieved medicines, and the larger box with bandages and other supplies, then they turn back toward the library, walking as quickly as they can.

  “I won’t talk about what you don’t want to talk about,” Mai says.

  Rachel glances at her, makes a small gesture of thanks. “All I know is we’re still here at least partly because of what he did. I want to make the most of that. I want to survive. For him. We need to be smart about what’s next.”

  “We’ve gotta go east,” Mai says. “Like a hundred miles east. I’m not really into the idea of another sitting-ducks scenario near the foothills.”

  “It’s not my idea of a fun time either,” Rachel says.

  “They attack again, we’re dead.”

  “I know.”

  Rachel realizes that the library grounds are much quieter than when they left, almost in reverence. The truth has more to do with what Liam said: The bodies that initially survived, awakening to insufferable pain, are dying, and their screams are no longer adding to the chorus of human misery.

  At that moment, Rachel notices Rick at the perimeter of the library property, apparently searching north and south on Peterson for any sign of aggressive creatures. Rachel can see a few dead bodies baking in the sun, particularly east on Oak, from which the wall of seething corpses flowed.

  Rachel knows Mai is probably right. She has essentially echoed her own thoughts. This place is no longer where the survivors need to be. It’s not sustainable as a stronghold. And now that the monsters are on their heels—for however long that might last—it’s time to actively do something to survive. Still, there’s a nagging voice inside her head—