“Is that enough?” Chloe is sobbing at the sight of the wretched man on the floor.
“That’s plenty. Any more than that, and his respiratory system will explode.”
“From the looks of him, that’s already happened,” Joel says from somewhere behind them.
“Can we stop that bleeding?” someone asks.
“I don’t know,” Bonnie says miserably.
Someone shoves Michael brusquely in the back, and he peers over his shoulder to see Kevin squeeze through the doors and make his way toward the Broncos fan’s body.
“Guys!” Joel says, too late to stop Kevin. “You can’t be this impulsive! It’s dangerous out there. We gotta use our heads.”
Michael, watching Kevin retrieve the body, abruptly realizes that he’s still breathing far too quickly. He can’t seem to get hold of his respiration, and adrenaline is spiking through him with each breath. He glances around wildly, reaches for Rachel’s arm.
“Daddy?” she says, seeing the expression on his face. “Daddy! Are you okay?”
Michael can only shake his head, which is threatening to throb with pain again. It is fear that has bloomed inside him, belatedly, and even as he recognizes that he’s in the grip of a panic attack, a sort of delayed reaction to what just happened outside, he can’t stop it. Black spots begin to appear in his vision.
“Sit down!” Bonnie yelps. “Rachel, sit him down there,” she directs, and his daughter guides him to the bench just to their left, and shooing Zoe aside.
“Put your head down.”
Michael sits and follows her instructions—gentle even amidst chaos—feeling instant relief under her touch. He focuses on slowing his breathing, sucking in long, slow, deep inhalations. He closes his eyes, trying to think of something else. His first thought is the money in his closet back home, and the meaninglessness of it all, and he shakes away that thought. Shakes his head, embarrassed with himself more than anything.
Kevin has arrived with the other body. The Broncos jersey that had been barely hanging off this young man now flags the spot on the concrete where he became human again.
Voices are sounding all around him. When Michael regains his composure, he sees that Bonnie is attending to both bodies to the left of the doors, checking for egregious wounds. She’s using wetted towels and tape to stop bleeding. People are running back and forth at her bidding. Men are returning from their window-buttressing duties, and the lobby is suddenly a riotous scene. Liam and Brian, breathing heavily, are popping dislocated shoulders back into place, much to the consternation of the younger women in the lobby. Kayla is curled up against the far wall, unable to look away, but an expression of disgusted alarm is etched across her features. Michael has to admit that the sight makes even him feel vaguely nauseated.
He turns away, realizes Rachel is speaking.
“… don’t have to be such a hero!”
“What?”
She sighs dramatically, right in his face. “In case I wasn’t clear when I saved your life—twice!—I’d like you to live, okay?”
“Someone had to get him.”
“It didn’t have to be you.”
“I think it did,” he says.
“What are you talking about?”
He shakes his head, which is beginning, again, to feel as if his brain is dislodged from the linings of his skull. The sloshing pain makes him gasp.
“I don’t know.”
“Ugh,” Rachel moans, rolling her eyes as only she can. “Dad!”
Bonnie has the grizzled man’s mouth propped wide open, and she’s examining it with repulsion. Every once in a while, she’s reaching in and yanking out a bloody splinter or a mound of sodden, red mulch. She’s directing Chrissy to do the same with the younger man’s mouth, and Chrissy is surprisingly composed as she does so.
In the middle of all this, Kevin speaks up over the general chaos of voices.
“Well, we learned that the blood darts work—and at really low levels.”
“How low?” Joel says.
“Basically the smallest amount I could put into a dart—1cc.”
Michael speaks up. “I think the body was slower to turn than it might have with a larger amount, though. Turn back human, I mean.”
“Yeah,” says Rachel, “like it took longer for the blood to flow through it.”
“No point wasting any blood if the end result is the same,” Joel says.
“I guess so.”
Michael notices Scott fidgeting against the same wall where Kayla is cowering. He appears to be chewing the insides of his cheeks again. He’s watching Bonnie tend to the bodies.
Scott is the kind of perpetually pissed-off guy who will never find satisfaction in any situation. Michael knows the type. Steven at work is—was—that kind of character: pessimistic, sarcastic, entitled. As if the world has wronged him, and from now on he’s in it just for himself. Fuck everyone else. Give me what’s mine.
Scott meets his gaze, and Michael breaks the contact.
His thoughts drift back to the notion of Steven in the past tense. He visualizes the large man unconscious, splayed back in his office chair, the way he was the last time Michael saw him. Except he knows, now, that Steven is probably no longer in that building but rather wandering the streets—perhaps even searching for Michael, among all other survivors, searching, searching, wanting to end him. Carol, too. They’re just like these two bodies were, ravaged by an insane presence, probably beyond help. He imagines his colleagues in this state, and he shudders. He wouldn’t wish this “cure” on them.
Now Scott is at his side.
“I hope you all know what you’re doing,” Scott says. “This is fucked up, I hope you understand.”
Michael feels a stab of irritation. He opens his mouth, then closes it.
“I’ll ask again: Do you have any other ideas?” Rachel says.
“Yeah, sure, I have an idea: How about we leave them alone?”
“And just sit here and twiddle our thumbs?”
“Yes!” Scott sees he has an audience again. “Look, if those things out there can sense us, why not just let them have what they want? Who cares about a bunch of goddamn trees, anyway?”
“Hell yes,” Mai says, watching the proceedings from afar, over by the counters. “This shit is freaking me out.”
“Let them suck on the things, get everything they need, and then leave us alone,” Scott says. “If we just let them do whatever the fuck they want, we’d probably be safe! Did anyone think of that?”
The room is silently frenetic for a few moments, working on the bodies in the doorway, and Michael can sense everyone forming responses. He decides to break that silence.
“Because that’s not what we’re about.” He shuts one eye against the pain that results from his speaking loudly. “I’m not really into letting those things make the rules. I don’t want them to just take what they want. And who knows what they really want? Right? This could be just the beginning. We have a solid chance at putting the hurt on these things, and at the same time saving a lot of people. Why wouldn’t we take that chance?”
Michael can feel Rachel’s gaze, but he opts not to meet it.
“He’s right,” Kevin says, glancing over at Scott. “How do you keep turning up, anyway?”
“I’m not the only one thinking this.” Scott gestures to Mai, who’s nodding emphatically. “Okay, let’s say you’re right. It’s an alien invasion. Whatever’s up there is sending down directives to all these former humans, telling them to eat these trees and, oh, attack us if we get to smart for our own good, and, well, then back off for whatever reason.” He shakes his head. “So, okay, given all that, what if the aliens can sense that you just did that?” He points at the bodies. “The truth is out there, right? And the truth is, they know exactly what you’re doing, and they’re gonna send down another directive, and they’re gonna wipe us out! When, all along, we could’ve just waited till they were done and gone.”
“That�
�s the thing, Scott,” Joel says in a reasonable voice. “We don’t know that after everything, they’ll be done and gone. We have to assume they’ll be coming after us until we’re all dead. Or on the run.”
“We shouldn’t assume anything,” Scott says pointedly. “There’s not one person in here that knows what’s going on. Yes, theories are flying wild, but no one really knows. Why are we messing with them? Are we trying to piss them off? I’d rather make the choice that keeps us alive. And maybe that’s just to be quiet and survive another day.”
Mai has been watching him. “Gotta admit, that’s the side I’m on.”
“Scott, Mai, I don’t want to just scavenge for the rest of my life,” Joel says, “while they make the rules. I want to live again.”
Scott puts his hands up in surrender. “Fine, fine. I’m done.”
“As a human.”
“I said fine.”
“All right, can I ask a favor, then?”
Scott glares into space.
“You and Bonnie are the only hospital personnel we have left here, and I need you two to head up this whole effort with the blood. We need to be armed for a full-on assault. I’m talking about defense, okay? I think we can all agree on that. We need to be ready for every single one of those things attacking this library. I want you two taking blood from every survivor. Bonnie, can we draw blood straight into the tranq darts?”
She considers that.
“And how many tranq canisters do we have, anyway?” Joel looks around for an answer.
“We scrounged up maybe two hundred in that box,” Kevin says. “They’re reusable … not that we’ll be able to retrieve many …”
Bonnie says, “To maintain a sterile environment, we really need to keep the blood draws and the weaponry separate. And there’s the question of the anticoagulant. It’s not like I have a jug of it. It’ll only take us so far.”
“Fair enough, well, I’m relying on you two to find the most efficient way to make this work. Bottom line is that we need all those darts filled and ready.”
Bonnie and a reluctant, almost petulant Scott join at the edge of the messy scene, along with Kevin, while at least ten survivors have crowded around the two unconscious bodies at the doorway. Everyone is in a state of nervous inactivity now, glancing around uselessly. The ground is spattered with deep-red wads of mulch, which has caused several survivors to back away from the scene, nauseated. But Michael notices that all three of the young women, Chrissy and the twins, are still dialed in to the situation, showing teary, red-eyed calm in the face of the horror.
The bodies are gray and devastated. Worst off is the young man, the Broncos fan. Someone has kindly pulled his boxer shorts back up, in a desperate reach for modesty, but it looks to Michael like a cruel joke. The rest of his body is scraped up, at least a dozen contusions cleaned and covered with tape. The body has obviously lost a lot of blood, and the vast majority of that has been internal. Outside the hospital, there’s very little they can do for that, but Bonnie has done her best to instruct Chrissy and Chloe how to apply a compress on the throat without obstructing air flow.
But there’s a constant trickle from the young man’s mouth that Chrissy can’t stop, and Michael can see the desperation in her eyes.
The Broncos fan will probably be dead within the hour.
Michael believes it’s the grizzled old-timer who will give them their best chance. His body is also gray-tinted and bloodied, and Chloe has taken up the task of administering pressure to the throat, but the body looks heartier. In his case, the devastation of the … possession … seems more survivable.
But, as Michael surveys the scene, he comes to a slow realization of why everyone is standing around, mostly silent. Why the increasingly humid air is filled with a hopelessness engendered by the sheer fact of these bodies’ desolation. The lobby has the feel of tragedy, of miserable dread. The bodies look like corpses at the end of a reprehensibly violent act—broken, blasted, beaten. And Michael feels that the shared consciousness of the room is understanding the wider truth: These bodies are representative of every other one out there. Beyond help. In the grip of inconceivable pain. Unable to be saved.
It’s under this fog of despair that the old man convulses once, as if in slow motion, and belches out a gout of blood. His eyes open, and he squelches out a single new word.
“Need.”
Chapter 22
It’s that single word again—need.
It seems to clarify everything. It echoes what Michael himself heard at the hospital, in the midst of that prisoner’s screams. Hearing it for the second time, he feels its significance like a blow to the solar plexus.
Whatever they’re dealing with, it has the sweaty aura of desperation, and somehow that fills the survivors with a tentative hope. If what they’re dealing with is essentially a despairing species, then might the upper hand belong to the survivors, no matter how outnumbered they are? It’s probably flimsy reasoning, considering the hundreds of thousands—possibly millions—of possessed bodies out there, but it provides a spark of hope.
The body of the old man continues to writhe in misery, with increasing fervency as the pain medication wears off, and it continues to speak that single word, the sound of it warbling and trailing off. The eyes rolling, the body spasming, as if it is in the grip of the most delirious fever. Even after Bonnie administers another dose of morphine, and the body relaxes toward unconsciousness again, that word mumbles from its broken mouth.
“It’s like an addict,” she whispers.
Night falls before anyone realizes it, and by full dark, half the survivors have drifted to sleep among piles of fallen books, in the various anterooms of the library. Michael, still feeling that jarred-loose vulnerability in his skull, welcomes a sleep shift around 9 p.m., settling into a quiet nook near the Mystery section. He drifts away immediately but wakes in fits and starts through about four hours of slumber.
At one point, he wakes to the murmured sounds of lovemaking nearby, feels captivated by it, the fact of it happening in the middle of the apocalypse. He glances around a tower of paperback mysteries to see Mai moving her body rhythmically atop someone—he thinks it might be Liam—then leaves them to their privacy and falls away into unconsciousness again.
Before he knows it, Ron is shaking him gently awake. Michael checks his watch.
3:00 a.m.
He’s gotten a total of nearly six hours, and although his eyes are gummy and gritty, and he feels as though he could sleep six more, he feels grateful for the lack of pain in his head. Even before his concussion, sleep has always been the most effective balm.
“Trade ya,” Ron whispers.
“Sure.”
And now Michael is at the library’s front doors, one of three early-morning sentries positioned at the building’s perimeter so that the rest of the survivors can get some much-needed sleep. Including Rachel. On his way toward his lookout point, he found his daughter curled up on a blanket with Kayla spooned against her, Rachel’s arm thrown over the girl’s midsection protectively. He stood there and watched them sleep for long moments, feeling something like sadness in the midst of hope.
Michael can see no movement outside except the slow wheel of stars, partially obscured by smoke from the foothills. With no electricity out there, the city is pitch black, save for the illumination from the heavens—the star field is unprecedentedly bright, especially to the southeast, where no smoke obscures it—and a quarter moon drifting across the southern hemisphere. He knows that to the west, the scene remains breathtaking: columns of fire and the atmospheric horror that seems to instruct whatever is happening to the bulk of humanity.
He’s glad he’s guarding the front doors instead of the delivery doors on the west side of the building. The relative peace is a relief—despite the fact that the blood-turned bodies are in the next room, occasionally groaning and sending chills down his spine. That room once held dutiful librarians quietly processing returned books, and now it hol
ds this impossible deathscape.
Otherwise, Michael can hear very little sound. There’s only the distant thrum of the generator on the roof, which is mainly powering the break-room refrigerator now, full of blood units and tranq canisters. All the canisters have been prepared with 1cc of O-negative blood each, with its attendant drops of Heparin. Joel made sure each survivor had a chance to check out the refrigerator and learn how to prepare and fire one of the six tranq rifles.
Joel also made everyone drank their share of water, and root out some kind of minor sustenance from the break-room cabinets, which were stocked here and there with an assortment of crackers and an occasional peanut butter jar, some cookies. Michael knows the food will, if necessary, last a couple days, but a trip to a local grocery store or at least the 7-11 will have to be on the horizon if they have any hope of surviving.
But those considerations will wait for another few hours. Michael’s belly is reasonably satisfied, the early morning is quiet and black, and it’s all he can do to keep from falling into unconsciousness again on this bench.
His thoughts keep veering into disconnected memory: the recent image of Rachel and Kayla overlaid with pictures of Cassie with a young Rachel curled in a motherly embrace … an image of Susanna alive and resisting the thing that would inevitably overtake her, struggling in their bed while he was across town stealing more useless cash … an image of Earth embattled and imprisoned … and jagged imaginings of enraptured souls drifting skyward, red and gleaming.
He can’t sleep. His body is practically buzzing. And yet his eyes keep gritting toward slumber, his mind pulling him down a dark hole, only to release him, then grab at him again.
“Hey,” comes a whispered voice.
Michael starts violently, turns to see Bonnie approaching.
“Sorry,” she says, placing a hand on his thigh as she sits next to him. “I know it’s my turn to sleep, but it ain’t happenin’. Thought I’d keep you company a bit.”
He gives her a smile. “Til I bore you, anyway.”
“Right, then I might just fall asleep against your shoulder.”
Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood Page 23