“At least she found her way back,” the cop says.
Bonnie’s expression holds a mixture of relief and a haunted kind of emptiness—almost a hopelessness.
“Are you hungry?” Joel asks.
Michael pauses to think about that, and at the suggestion, he realizes that he’s ravenous. “Yes.”
“We have a little bit of food rounded up from the cafeteria, stuff that’s gonna start going bad pretty soon, so we might as well eat it while we can.”
Food that will go bad soon?
“Okay.”
“I’ll get that, and I’ll leave you to Bonnie.”
Michael feels that his agitation is palpable in the air around them. He needs answers to the riddles he’s hearing, but at the same time, he feels as if those answers are the last thing he wants to hear.
As these people start losing interest in him, he finally turns to Bonnie and whispers, “What the hell is going on?”
Bonnie seems to brace herself for an explanation.
Michael swallows heavily and tries, again, to focus on specific moments in the past: rising from bed, his breakfast, his rituals before going to work. Susanna murmuring from bed. The early morning drive. His work.
“I—I can’t remember anything. I mean, there are fragments, but … not much. How did I get here?”
“I’m not surprised some of your memory is gone.” She squeezes his forearm. “But it’ll come. Maybe best not to force it.”
“All I know is I have a hell of a knot on my forehead. Maybe I fell, but I have no idea why or where I could’ve fallen.”
She touches the skin around the wound again, feels for warmth. “Did you talk to Rachel about this?”
He’s shaking his head. “I’m afraid we both fell asleep.”
Bonnie’s hands are moving expertly.
He watches her face, coming to a realization.
“You treated me?” Michael says.
“After Rachel brought you in, yes. I just took care of you once you got here. Rachel’s the one who saved your life. Did she tell you?”
Michael can’t help but let out a murmur of surprise. “She said … I don’t—”
“Quite a young lady you’ve got there.” Her smile looks incongruous beneath dark-ringed eyes. “Rachel thinks you might have fallen down a stairwell at your office. That’s where she found you.”
“This morning?”
“I wish. No, that was two days ago.”
Michael gapes at her. “You aren’t serious. I’ve been out for two days?”
“Yeah,” Bonnie breathes. She looks at him with a kind of longing. “Wow. Part of me wishes I could be waking up only now, like this. To not have been through the past two days at all. You’re lucky, in a way. But then … to wake up to a world that—that—” She casts her eyes downward.
“What?”
When she lifts her head, her eyes are glistening. She appears to give up on restraint. “Everything has changed. Everything is … horrible.”
Emotion twists her features, and she slowly recovers. He doesn’t know how to respond. He opens his mouth, closes it, then opens it again.
“What is it?”
She’s shaking her head miserably. “I don’t even know where to begin.” She glances around, as if for help.
The dead-eyed middle-aged couple, now huddled at the abandoned admissions desk, peer at Michael as if they feel sorry for him. The man nods vaguely at him, but the woman looks away, down at her feet. Michael turns to stare out the big front windows again. There’s no movement out there.
“Where is everybody?” he whispers.
Bonnie can only stare at him.
Then, “Let’s check on Rachel, okay? I need to clean up a little bit first, and then let’s see if she’s okay. I’m worried about her. She went through so much. So much.” She offers a sad smile. “And then we can both fill you in on everything.”
At that moment, Joel comes striding back through the double doors, hefting his rifle. He’s all business. He looks straight at Michael, accusatory.
“I think we got a live one.”
Chapter 4
He knows, Michael thinks again, irrationally.
“What do you mean?” Bonnie asks Joel, her voice descending into near-petulance.
“I found Rachel. One of those things is moving around right above her, second level. Did you hear it in there?” he asks Michael.
“I did.”
“You checked every room, right? Before we left?” Joel asks Kevin as the big man hurries back into the lobby.
“Far as I know, it’s cleared out, yeah. There were a few locked or closed doors that I didn’t have time to check. But I guess anyone could have wandered in here from the street while we were gone.”
“It’s been clanging around up there for hours,” Michael offers. “I think it’s what woke me up.”
“What else did you hear?” Joel asks.
“Just something dragging around, like metal on metal. Frantic. Sounds almost angry.”
“Those things wouldn’t have come back in, right …?” Bonnie says, a near-whine.
“Not saying I understand anything about those fuckers,” Kevin says, “but I’d guess not. Why would they?” He considers something. “When they left, they left in a goddamn hurry, so …”
Joel slants his gaze up the stairs, tries to get a geographic lock on the area above Michael’s room. “Let’s check it out. Bonnie, will you go ahead and look in on Rachel? We’ve got this.”
“Of course.” Bonnie turns to Michael. “You feel okay to go up?”
Michael nods. His head still aches, but not with urgency of before, not with that feeling of alarming looseness, as if his brain matter were sloshing around. His heart is still thumping hard, but he can focus now. He takes deep breaths, trying to keep everything in place.
“Yeah, I want to see this.”
“C’mon,” Joel says, checking his rifle and handing it over to Kevin. “Here, you take this.” He pulls his sidearm from his hip and checks the magazine.
Michael watches the weapons with a new anxiety, thinking of the money again, thinking of the crime. Is it possible that all of it means nothing now?
The cop leads the way across the sticky floor and to the stairs. The three men navigate their way through a gaping hole in the barricade. Large swaths of carpet on the stairs are soaked with brown blood, but the way is relatively clear, save for occasional knocked-over furniture and toppled IV stands. Michael, aghast, can’t take his eyes off the chaos of chairs and tables in shambles all around him. Some of it has been splattered with blood. There’s an obvious shotgun blast in the wall to his right, and what he believes to be brain matter has dried in pieces around and below it.
“Will someone please tell me what the hell happened here?”
Joel and Kevin exchange a glance. “I guess you’d call it a last stand,” the cop says.
“Against what?”
“Those things. Those corpses. All those bodies upstairs? They all flowed down through here. Angry as hell. At least, that’s what we thought.”
Corpses? A last stand against corpses? What?
A bark of laughter escapes Michael’s mouth, and all he gets in return from his companions are sober reactions. Kevin and Joel glance at him for only a moment, then continue ahead. Michael flashes on the human beings he saw outside, their bodies compressed against those trees. They were like nothing he’d ever seen before, but he can’t get past the disconnect between that behavior and whatever it is that these people are talking about.
He tries to visualize this horrific scene, and fails. It’s as if these people he’s never met are asking him to accept that his life has become some insane horror film. It can’t be real. It can’t. Yes, the skies are filled with smoke and ash is blanketing the city, and yes, everyone but a small fraction of humanity has simply disappeared, and there are a thousand other pieces of evidence backing up the crazed words of these sweaty people, but it can’t be real.
<
br /> Kevin gives voice to his thoughts.
“Gotta be weird, waking up to this.”
“You missed all the fun,” Joel says as they reach the landing and proceed cautiously west along the carpeted hallway. The three men step past fallen IV stands and assorted tubes and cables. “The only bodies left in this hospital are the corpses we managed to kill for good. Or the people those things killed from the start.”
The image of the stacked corpses downstairs flashes through Michael’s head. Those were victims of … reanimated bodies?
“We tried to give those people as much … dignity … as possible.” Joel peeks inside an open door, then moves on. “But the really active ones? They’re all out there now.” He gestures up and away from himself. “Outside. Doing God knows what. And the one exception appears to be the one we’re about to—”
Michael comes to a halt, hands out, wincing under new pain in his head.
“Okay, wait—wait—stop—!”
The other two men slow to a stop, turning toward him expectantly but almost reluctantly. Michael waits for a wave of dizziness to pass, then considers these two relative strangers. There’s no denying the horror in their expressions, and evident in the blood and filth on their clothes, caked in swaths on their exposed skin. The lack of sleep in their eyes. The fatigue. These men are near collapse, and yet they keep going.
But Michael can’t hold it in.
“The ‘corpses you managed to kill for good’? Look, guys … Joel, Kevin … just be honest with me here. We can’t be talking about …” He eyes them carefully, waiting—hoping—for grins to crack broadly across their faces. “… I mean, you don’t expect me to believe that—”
The two men watch Michael for a moment, then Kevin is nodding slowly.
“Did … uh, didn’t Rachel tell you anything?” Joel asks.
Michael brings a hand to the bridge of his nose and squeezes. “No. No, unfortunately, no, this is all new to me.”
There’s a moment of quiet indecision, broken only by distant movement and voices downstairs and then—serendipitously—the sound of metallic dragging, coming from somewhere ahead. All three men turn abruptly in that direction, trying to locate it.
“Well,” Kevin says, “I think you’re about to get a crash course in what you missed while you were knocked out.”
“Yeah, let’s just take a look, huh? A lot of shit is about to get real clear.”
Michael just looks at him, feeling a chaos of emotions.
“Let’s go,” the cop says. “Trust me, okay?”
Not waiting for Michael, Joel starts moving again, firearm at ready position.
Kevin follows, and Michael takes a deep breath, taking up the rear.
They approach a new hallway to the right and pause. The sound has stopped, but now a brief clamor informs them that the sound is coming from down the new hall. Joel urges them forward. It’s close.
“You don’t remember anything, huh?” Kevin whispers next to Michael. “You don’t remember what you were doing when—”
“I remember just flashes … nothing concrete. I don’t even remember driving to work. Nothing about that morning.”
“Maybe not a bad memory to lose, I guess,” Kevin says. “… when the end of the world happened.”
“The end of—” Michael starts.
Joel slows abruptly and gestures Michael and Kevin forward with his pistol. “It’s that room there.”
Michael sees a closed door. To the right of the door, directly below a small metal rectangle designating the room as Room 278, a chair sits empty and crooked. Joel moves quietly to the door and takes hold of the handle. He glances at Michael and gestures for him to position himself behind him. Michael takes his place.
“I think I know what’s happened here,” Joel whispers.
“What?” Kevin says.
Joel quietly moves to the door and tries the handle. It’s unlocked. It opens soundlessly inward. He takes in the scene, nods quickly.
Michael feels his veins pulsing. A low gasp comes from within the room, raising the hair on the back of his neck.
“Yep, we got one,” Joel says, grimacing. “Come take a look.”
Michael steels himself, then steps forward with Kevin.
The room appears to be a typical ICU recovery room, with hulking machinery dark and silent in the background. There are whiteboards everywhere, scrawled with barely legible notes and incomprehensible numbers. But Michael’s eyes go immediately to the bed, which has been dragged to the far edge of the room, and the body on the floor right at the foot of that bed.
The body is that of a heavy, tattooed bald man. He’s half covered by a hospital gown, and much of his exposed skin is loosely swathed by bandages. The man is bent over backward, straining, on all fours. Cords in his neck are standing out in stark relief, and the expression on the upside-down face is one of pure torment—red, furious, eyes bulging. Michael, appalled, notices something right away about the eyes: The pupils are wide and black. The effect is like a shark’s eyes. There’s malevolence there.
“Oh my god!” Michael can’t help but blurt. “What’s wrong with him?”
The man locks dead eyes on Michael, then on Joel, and unleashes a dry, throaty gasp. He thrashes once, mightily, and drags the bed’s metal legs a few inches across the floor.
“Same thing that’s wrong with mostly everyone,” Kevin says.
Michael can’t take his eyes off the man. He can’t comprehend what he’s seeing. The bodies at the trees were one thing, but this is something entirely different: malevolent and almost completely alien despite the humanity underneath the features.
“He’s locked to the bed,” Joel says. “See?”
A pair of handcuffs secures the man’s left hand to the bed railing. The wrist is obviously broken, and the flesh is mangled, twisted. In fact, Michael realizes, the man is on the verge of dismembering his own hand to escape. The skin is taut and torn, and the bones appear to be nearly separated. Soon, the only thing keeping this man tethered will be tendons and skin.
“He’s a prisoner,” Kevin whispers.
The room stinks of the man’s sweat, a heavy scent that mingles with the smell of shit and piss, which have stained the bed and his clothes.
“Fuuuuuck, that’s rank,” Kevin says. His rifle is pointed down and away, but Joel is on high alert.
“Goddamn,” Michael says, still trying to make sense of the scene before him. “What’s he doing?”
“He’s got that thing inside him—that light.”
Michael wrenches his gaze from the impossible sight of this human being, and looks straight at Joel, then at Kevin.
“Uh,” Michael says. “What?”
“That’s the thing,” Joel says. “Whatever is happening to these corpses, it’s all because of this insane … presence … inside their heads. It’s like a … an illumination. A radiation. Inhabiting them.” He murmurs a dark laugh. “I know that sounds crazy as hell, and that was our first reaction, trust me. That was everyone’s reaction. But it’s true.”
Michael doesn’t see anything like an illumination.
And he still can’t get Joel’s word out of his head.
Corpses.
But this man isn’t dead. Far from it.
Except for the eyes.
At that moment, the man lunges for Michael, and Michael nearly falls while scrambling backward out of the way.
“Whoa, whoa, yeah, watch out,” Kevin says. “You don’t want that thing to touch you. That light can fuck you up.”
“I don’t see any light,” Michael says, composing himself.
“Oh, it’s there.”
Michael considers that silently, just watching the bald man—the bald man’s corpse?—flail about, seething.
“Show it to me,” he says.
“Show you what?”
“Show me this light you’re talking about.” He clutches his throbbing forehead, feeling the need for that Tylenol that Bonnie spoke of.
> Joel takes a look around the room.
The man is on the floor to the left of the bed. His upturned face is still contorted in an animal fury, and as Joel steps to the other side of the bed, the man watches him warily, upside down, snapping out at him once, teeth clacking. The man’s blunt chin has become his most prominent feature, like the end of a proboscis.
Joel reaches the window and draws the shades. The room falls into relative darkness, and now Michael sees the crimson glow coming from the man’s face—or, rather, behind the man’s face. His breath catches. It’s an unwavering luminescence coming from the area behind the nose, visible from the nostrils and open mouth, and just barely beneath the skin of the cheeks.
“What—” he whispers. “What’s happened to him? Why is he—”
“Not just him,” Kevin says soberly behind him. “Everyone.”
“Everyone? I mean, are we talking—”
Joel sees where he’s going. “We’ve had no interaction with anyone for hundreds of miles, no communication, no glimpses of flights, no evidence of life anywhere,” he says in a low voice. “Nothing. We think it’s worldwide.”
Mike swallows thickly, doesn’t know how to digest that. Finally, he decides not to. He turns back to the man’s body.
“This same thing is in—”
“Every damn one of them.” Joel opens the blinds again and goes back to the doorway, keeping his pistol trained on the bald man. “We were able to see inside one of them the other day. A motorcyclist whose head had been broken open. Not a pretty sight. But this thing inside him, it was like a—a sphere. A bright ball of light. A ball of energy.” He curls the fingers of his left hand as if he’s holding a baseball. “About that big, in the middle of the head. Strangest shit I’ve ever seen.”
Michael feels himself shaking his own head slowly back and forth.
“And the weirdest part?” Joel says, coming to Michael’s side. “These bodies are dead. They don’t breathe, there’s no heartbeat. Look at the eyes. The pupils are dilated. They really are walking corpses. These bodies were just lying around dead for a whole day before that thing in there started bringing them back.”
Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood Page 4