“It’s all right,” Rachel whispers in her ear.
Chrissy shakes her head. “It’s not, it’s not.”
“Nobody’s going to—”
“What about …” Chrissy pauses, swallowing, slicing off her words. “What about Chloe and Zoe? They’re the ones I …”
“They’re worried about you,” Rachel says, mostly lying, but telling her what she needs to hear. Better that than the truth: The twins were so caught up in the aftermath that they weren’t even thinking of Chrissy.
“They are?” Chrissy says with the voice of a child.
“Of course they are.”
They listen to the sounds downstairs and watch each other for a moment as the darkness deepens.
“Is it bad down there?”
“It’s not very good.”
“Did anyone … did anyone die?” Her face implodes with quiet tears. The emotion is powerful, and Rachel knows the girl is blaming herself in anticipation of the news of any violence visited upon the survivors.
Rachel isn’t sure how to answer. One by one, the faces of Bonnie, Brian, and then—vividly—her dad strobe in her mind, jagged, like photos ripped violently apart. But then she concentrates on her dad, smiling at her, his love gigantic, unconditional. She closes her eyes tight, tighter, wanting to keep that image close to her heart. Her chest convulses.
Chrissy sniffs, pulls back, and stares at her.
“Who?” she squeaks.
Rachel can’t seem to open her mouth. Her lips won’t work.
“Who?”
“It’s not your fault,” is all Rachel can say.
“Oh no.” Chrissy dissolves again. “I can’t …”
Rachel composes herself, pulls away from the embrace, wipes hastily at her face. She lets Chrissy cry for a moment, then begins to feel annoyance. It’s hot up here, and there’s the constant clamor downstairs of the others helping the formerly infected. She can’t afford this time. The emotion startles her, and she finds herself able to consider it from the outside. It’s as if she feels the urge to blame Chrissy for these losses but understands how wrong-headed that would be.
“Listen,” she says, weighing her words. “You have nothing to apologize for. Truly. But I mean this as a friend: Get over this. The longer you stay here, the worse it will be for everyone.”
“I want to go back down,” Chrissy says, defensively, voice warbling, suppliant. “I need to help.”
“I know,” Rachel nods. “Just … don’t dwell on this anymore. I mean, it happened, but you’re human. We’re all human. You’re strong, okay? But it’s time to get your ass back down there. Okay?”
“I want to clean myself up first.”
“Take one of the flashlights and use the bathroom up here. There’s still some water.”
“Okay. Thanks.” A pause as Chrissy sits up fully. She nudges aside a small pile of books. “I’ll be down in a minute.”
Rachel is already on her way toward the stairs, but she turns to face Chrissy, walking backward. “I know you will. And hey—”
“Yeah?”
“I’m glad you’re still with us. Really.”
A small wounded smile takes hold of Chrissy’s lips, and then Rachel runs for the stairs.
CHAPTER 14
Rachel takes the stairs down two at a time, ready to dive into the bloody fray, anxious for this awful day to end. She needs a conclusion, for darkness to come, and then ultimately a new day to dawn, a day that does not hold the death of her father.
“Did you find her?”
The voice startles her, coming at her softly, barely discernible above the racket emanating from the lobby. It’s Scott, waiting at the foot of the stairs, watching her come down.
“Yeah,” she says, intending to fly right by him. “She’s fine, She’s shook up.”
He makes an awkward half-step toward her, and she hesitates.
There’s something haunted behind his eyes, and Rachel knows what it is, of course.
Bonnie is gone because of him.
She saw what happened at the edge of the lobby, in the frenzy of the attack, and he knows she saw it. Scott is bearing the emotional brunt of Bonnie’s demise because she died in the act of pulling him away—in the act of saving him.
Selfless to the last.
Was Scott worth that?
He knows how much Bonnie meant to Rachel.
Standing in front of Scott, all Rachel can think is how much she wants to call for Bonnie. Right now. Rachel wishes urgently that Bonnie were still here in this miserable world, but she’s gone. Rachel can’t believe she’s gone. The benevolent woman who took her under her wing days ago at the hospital, who reminded her so much of her own mother, who endured so much right at Rachel’s side … she can’t be gone. But with her own eyes, Rachel watched her die at the hands of the monsters in the library lobby. Perhaps Bonnie is in a better place now—that’s what they always say, isn’t it? And maybe that’s more appropriate now than ever before.
Rachel opens her mouth, closes it.
She wishes she trusted Scott more, or respected him even a little—not least of which because he sneakily hoarded (and, by all accounts, abused) morphine straight from the essential hospital supply when they needed it most.
And because he’s generally just a dick.
Rachel dislikes him mostly for that latter trait. She saw it firsthand at the hospital when they first met, then later at the library. He hasn’t grown on her.
“Listen, Rachel … I’m sorry about your dad.” He wipes his hair back over his forehead and stares at her.
She takes a deep breath, sighs.
Part of her, a small part, wants to fall into him for an embrace—that human contact in the wake of tragedy. Multiple tragedies. In the absence of Joel, this man would do. Even this man. She’s not blind to how Bonnie’s death must have affected him. There’s even a part of her that wants to comfort him for that. But she can’t quite reach out to him.
She feels herself nodding, not wanting to say anything, enduring the awkwardness of the moment.
Just as he reaches a hand out to her, she glances over to find a pair of eyes staring at her from the shadows of the book-returns room, shining eyes vaguely tinted red. Rachel gives a start, and Scott follows her gaze. There in the growing gloom, Felicia is staring at them.
“Oh …” Rachel says, squinting to see the young woman more clearly.
Finally, Felicia’s face gains clarity, and Rachel can see the troubled expression there. It’s not the expression she expected, for some reason. Rachel recalls the sight of Felicia staring defiantly out at the sky from the busted-out window, corpses at her feet, looking for all the world like their savior.
Scott right behind her, Rachel steps toward the door. The hallway reminds Rachel of the hospital. There’s so much blood that her shoes squelch in the carpet. It seems as if every place they go ends up drenched in the blood of the living and the dead. Mostly the dead.
She reaches the open doorway to the makeshift triage room.
Felicia has backed deeper into the room, toward a shadowy corner.
“How are you?” Rachel asks her.
No answer.
Rachel glances around. The first thing she notices is that a light rain is falling outside the blasted window. Then she sees five bodies lying supine on the floor. Two are obviously dead, and three are gasping, almost hyperventilating. One of them, the closest, is one of the former monsters that she remembers bringing back with a tranq dart full of O-neg blood, days ago, when they were testing the blood cure. It’s a teenaged boy wearing a ravaged Broncos shirt.
His watery, somehow muddy eyes dart to hers when he sees her.
“Hel—hel—help,” he whispers. The sound of his whispered voice is mangled. His eyes close tight, and a flood of tears squeezes out between the trembling lids, runs down the sides of his face.
She goes to him, bends down, places a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “Oh God, okay, yes, hold on.” She turns to
Scott. “We need pain relief in here right away.”
“Right, yeah.” His voice goes to a whisper. “He’s been on a heavy dose of morphine since we turned him back, I’m actually surprised he’s still—” He stops, then nods. “Give me a sec.” And then he hurries toward the lobby, bumping the door jamb with his shoulder on his way out.
Rachel turns her attention back to Felicia, who’s standing in the corner, in relative darkness, still staring at her. Her hands are extended outward at an odd angle, and Rachel’s first thought is that there’s still a remnant there of what inhabited her. It’s in her eyes, mostly. A shadow of something. Felicia’s limbs are trembling slightly, as if she’s undergoing an internal struggle to remain human. At least that’s how it appears to Rachel.
“Felicia?”
The woman doesn’t respond.
“Are you all right?”
Nothing.
Rachel begins to approach her.
Felicia subtly shakes her head. No, she seems to be saying, warding off Rachel’s approach.
“What’s wrong?”
“I—don’t—”
Rachel stands still, waiting. “Can I help you? What can I do to—?”
“I don’t know if it’s still inside me,” Felicia says. “I think it might be. Everything is different. I—I don’t know if I’ll hurt you.” She coughs. “I don’t want to, but … I don’t know …”
Rachel shifts her weight from one hip to the other.
“Why—why do you say that?”
“I feel … wrong.”
“How?”
Felicia’s shoulders begin to narrow, and she glances toward the blown-out window. She appears to be considering something.
“I don’t know what I’ve done.”
Rachel takes a moment to study the young woman. Felicia is visibly shaken—to her core—and she’s trembling, almost vibrating. Pain is evident in her features. But Rachel knows this woman. She has talked with her. She can recall conversations she had with her about school as Felicia rang them up at the Co-Op. These are memories from what she thinks of, in retrospect, as their window out of grief following her mother’s death, before her father found Susanna, just Rachel and her dad finding their footing together in a new father-daughter dynamic, finding some semblance of happiness again, establishing new rituals ...
One of those rituals had been shopping together at the Co-Op, away from the usual stores they’d frequented with her mother. Because that was the most painful aspect of her mother’s death, or at least the wake of it: the reminders. The thousands of places and people and sights and sounds and scents that were wrapped around the memory of her mom. Inextricably. All those things that resisted efforts to heal.
These thoughts flit through her head as she stares at Felicia, trying to figure her out. Shopping at the Co-Op—the memories there are good, despite the reasons behind them. And her memories of Felicia are fond.
Breaking her from the flow of memory is Scott, as he whisks in with some medicine for the boy. He squeezes past her and kneels to him.
“Do you remember me?” Rachel asks Felicia.
Felicia peers at her from beneath her misery, and nods slowly.
Rachel tries on a smile. “I’m glad my dad found you. Glad you’re alive.”
Felicia turns doubtful. She moves her mouth cautiously, then says, “I don’t know if I am.”
“What … what does it feel like?”
Felicia’s eyes are haunted, wet, vulnerable. She’s working her jaw in a strange rhythm.
“I don’t know.” She swallows painfully. “It’s like … I don’t remember the worst of it. But I can still feel something in there. Like it was a … a nightmare, and it’s leaking into real life.” She brings up a shaking hand and touches her throat gingerly. “I don’t know how else to explain it. I can—”
Rachel takes a step closer to Felicia, tries touching her arm to comfort her. Felicia flinches.
“You can what?”
Felicia looks at her. “Nothing.”
“Is there anything I can do?” Rachel asks.
“I don’t know.” Her voice is on the edge of a moan. “I’m not sure what anyone can do.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean …” She looks closely at Rachel, then glances away. “I don’t know if I should be here.”
“Why not?”
“What if I—” Her voice trembles, getting quieter. “What if I brought those things here?”
Rachel glances at her curiously. She hadn’t thought of that. But as she considers the words, she comes to the conclusion that it can’t have been Felicia who brought the monsters. The survivors had been the target for days before Felicia turned.
Rachel shakes her head.
“No, I think it’s the opposite,” she says. “I think you drove them away.”
Felicia looks doubtful behind her blurred eyes.
But Rachel continues:
“When it was happening, I mean when the attack was at its worst, I thought it was my dad who turned the tide. I really did. And maybe he did have something to do with it—maybe we all had something to do with it, driving them back like that. The way he … he … he turned so many of them, all at once. But …”
Felicia waits, her body seeming restless.
“… but I think it was mostly you. Something inside you. What you’re feeling. Maybe they’re scared of it. Maybe they’re freaked out that we changed you back.”
“But you’ve … you’ve changed others. A lot of others.”
“Yes we have, but they’re all in bad shape still.” She feels a catch in her throat. “It’s awful, what’s happened to most of them. To you too, but most are so much worse. They don’t even know what’s happened to them.”
“Why?”
Rachel tries to explain what most of the infected bodies have been doing—at least, those infected bodies not barricaded or trapped somehow—but her words end up sounding silly.
Felicia shakes her head minutely. Her eyes have a faraway look.
“Do you remember anything?” Rachel says. “Anything from when you were … well …”
Felicia hesitates before speaking. “I remember feeling … trapped … frustrated … alone.” Her jaw works endlessly. “And I needed it terribly.”
“Needed …?”
“Needed … needed …” Felicia is searching for a word but appears confused.
“Something in the trees?”
“Yes.” Felicia stares at her. “How did you … know that?”
Rachel realizes that Felicia hasn’t seen any of these bodies attached to trees, in their natural state. She’s only seen them here, attacking. She explains what she’s seen all over the city.
“Do you know why?” she asks her. “What is it in the trees?”
Felicia shakes her head slowly back and forth.
“You don’t know?”
The afflicted woman gives a start, as if jolted from a trance. “I don’t … I mean, it’s like … I can visualize it, I have a sense of it … it’s like a chemical, something totally unique.”
Rachel notices that Felicia’s eyes are full of tears—flooded with them.
“What is it?”
“It did something to me ...” As she works her jaw, she brings up a hand to touch her face with trembling fingers. “…and I’m not sure it’s getting better.”
“Come on, let’s get you some medicine,” Rachel says, gently guiding Felicia. “Scott? Can you help?” Then, turning back to Felicia, “We scrounged a bunch. We can fix this.”
“I don’t know … I don’t think anything on Earth can fix it.”
Rachel stares at her. “I need to clean myself up anyway. We’ll do it together.”
In moments, she has Felicia seated in the center of the room, encouraging her to relax as she finds her a cup of water while Scott gives her an OxyContin tablet. Chloe has arrived with a morphine injection for the boy on the floor, as well as the two bodies surrounding him, but Fe
licia has refused the more powerful drug, insisting that others are worse off than she is. As the bodies relax, Rachel sits in a chair, directly in front of Felicia, handing her the cup of water with which to down the pill.
“Thank you.”
“You look a lot better.”
Felicia offers a painful shrug.
“Compared to when my dad brought you in here,” Rachel says. She takes the plastic cup from Felicia and sets it on the counter behind her. “You were in bad shape. I wasn’t sure you’d make it.”
“Me neither. I’d—I’d rather not go through that again.”
“I bet.” Rachel watches her carefully, beginning to address her own wounds with some alcohol wipes. “What you’ve been through, what you did for us out there … Do you know what’s going on in their heads?” she asks.
Felicia looks off in the direction of the lobby, then out the blasted window. She nods. “Yes I do.”
Rachel gauges Felicia’s expression. “It was you, wasn’t it? They were afraid of you.”
Felicia’s gaze cuts so sharp that Rachel feels as if the woman is looking inside her.
“I’m still a part of them,” Felicia whispers. “They … they feel that. But I—I’m also not a part of them anymore. They feel that too.”
Rachel considers that, wincing at the sting of the alcohol. “What—what was that like? To have it inside you?”
“An—an invasion. Almost totally p-pushed out of my own body.”
“Are they really … alien?”
A pause as Felicia glances around again, as if she will be punished for what she is about to say. “I don’t—don’t want this to sound silly, because it definitely isn’t. Whatever this is, it isn’t from here. It is from out there. Up there.” She gestures. “It is an actual invasion. Not only my body … but all those bodies out there. And more.”
“You could feel it inside you?”
“It basically … became me.” She pauses.
Rachel shudders. She finds a box of bandages and digs out a few, beginning to place them along her side.
“And when the blood cured you—”
“It didn’t cure me.” Felicia appears exhausted from talking.
Blood Dawn (Blood Trilogy Book 3) Page 14