Blood Red

by Jason Bovberg

  “What is that?” Jenny squeaks.

  “I don’t even want to think about it,” Rachel whispers. “Let’s get this done.”

  “Where does your dad work?”

  “Down by Harmony,” she says. “About five miles.”

  Rachel drives through a rough patch of collisions, then finds a clear path south on Lemay. She picks up her speed and glances over at her friend.

  “I never really asked you about what happened to you,” she says. “How did you end up at the hospital?”

  “I…I brought my sisters in.” Jenny is staring down at her lap. “I live with them. Nancy’s fifteen and Helen’s twelve. My parents let me watch them when they go on vacation.”

  “Oh my God, I’m sorry.”

  Jenny shakes her head. “Everyone lost someone today.”

  Rachel flashes on Tony, and even Susanna, and for the first time—unbelievably—she thinks about her extended family. Her aunt and uncle and their teenaged children down in Denver. Her stillliving grandparents in Michigan. Her other friends, mostly from high school. Most of them could be lying unresponsive somewhere, their minds contaminated by some kind of inconceivable glowing presence.

  “Were they both…?” Rachel says.

  “They were gone. I found them at the breakfast table. I thought they were messing with me at first.” She laughs a little. “They’re like that, silly as hell.”

  Rachel reaches over wordlessly and places her hand on Jenny’s thigh.

  After what seems an hour maneuvering Lemay and then continuing west on Horsetooth—encountering only three other moving vehicles, headed in the opposite direction—they’re on College Avenue and approaching Harmony Road. Rachel feels herself getting anxious, and she’s driving perhaps more recklessly than she should.

  Out of nowhere, Jenny asks, “Do you have a flashlight? He works in an office, right? We won’t be able to see anything. We need a flashlight, or a lantern, or something.”

  “I don’t. Shit! Check the glove compartment.”

  Jenny reaches up to flip on the cabin light, rifles through the glove compartment fruitlessly. “I should have grabbed one at the hospital. Dammit!” She fumbles through the backpack. “We won’t be able to see a foot in front of us.”

  “You’re right.”

  “We can go back.”

  “No.”

  Rachel’s thoughts swirl in fear and in frustration, and she slows for a group of cars, moving carefully around them. The Honda’s headlights sweep left and right as she maneuvers, and almost by fate, they illuminate a familiar red-and-white circular logo.

  “Okay, new plan.”

  “What?

  “We’re going to Target,” Rachel replies, looking straight at Jenny.

  Rachel pulls over to the right lane. She can see the Target entrance partially obstructed by a wrecked tanker truck. She angles into the bike lane instead and comes to a stop.

  “Let’s go.”

  After stepping out and locking the car, she and Jenny gaze out onto the night. This far south, the smoke is sparser, and they can see stars in the night sky. The darkness is still oppressive, but the starscape provides some relief. They’ll be able to navigate the parking lot.

  They walk directly in front of the tanker trunk, and Rachel notices that the driver has slumped to his left, his head hanging out of his window. She can’t look away from the glow emanating from his cheek. She stops for a moment to observe it, waiting for the man to move—to jerk awake and stare at them. It doesn’t happen. There’s no movement at all. Perhaps Bonnie was right.

  The light reminds her once more of when she was a kid and would play with the family flashlight in the dark, under her covers. She would fasten the wide end of the light flat against her palm and closed fingers and marvel at how the light would make the back of her hand glow red. It was almost like an x-ray, this illumination of her flesh, this jack-o’-lantern effect.

  “Fucking spooky,” Jenny whispers. She takes Rachel’s hand and squeezes, breaking her daze.

  They carefully make their way up a grassy embankment to the sidewalk, then step into the Target parking lot, which contains perhaps twenty vehicles still parked neatly in their spaces. The young women move through the dark lot, their footfalls seeming loud and hollow.

  “I don’t know if I can do this,” Jenny breathes. “It’s too quiet!”

  “I don’t think there were people shopping when it happened,” Rachel says. “Target opens at 8, I think, so whatever it was happened before that. These cars probably belong to employees.”

  After a pause, Jenny says flatly, “That sounds about right. But how will we get in?”

  “Well, let’s see about that.”

  Rachel continues forward, her goal firmly in mind. They make their way to the entrance and try the manual doors, which are all locked. The automatic doors are, of course, unresponsive. Without a second thought, Rachel begins kicking at the glass of one of the doors, and nothing happens for several tries. On her fourth kick, however, the glass shatters. She widens the hole carefully with her foot, glass pieces tinkling to the concrete. Then she reaches in through the hole and finds the twistable lock and opens the door. The inner doors beyond the vestibule are already unlocked.

  Then they’re standing on the worn tiles at the front of the store, staring into an absolutely pitch-black darkness. All they can see are the indistinct forms of three bodies in the near distance, their skulls glowing faintly.

  “Okay, I can’t do this,” Jenny whispers.

  “You want to wait here?”

  “No!”

  “Look, I have a cell phone that can at least get us to the right aisle.” She digs it out of her pocket, stabs the power button, holds it up. The screen’s illumination casts a ghostly glow, vaguely illuminating a few steps ahead of them. “You were right, okay? We need light—a lot more light than this. I know exactly where the flashlights are. We can run in, grab them, and we’ll be set.”

  “Okay,” comes the trembling reply.

  They start forward, and as they round the register area the store seems to grow still darker around them, enveloping them with blackness. The tiny illumination ahead of them is pitiful, and their eyes strain to bulging. Jenny is clutching Rachel’s arm and shoulder as they shuffle forward. That sensation and the sheer blackness beyond their little cell-phone illumination causes claustrophobia to wrap around Rachel like a thick blanket, but she does her best to shrug it off and hurry forward, not letting Jenny perceive any weakness after making the decision to come into this store—a decision that she almost admits might have been rash.

  “See, look,” she whispers, trying to be encouraging. “We know this store like the backs of our hands.”

  By memory, they find their way beyond the registers and into the first wide walking area. The register counters remain to their left, ghostly and bulky like ships in fog. They quickly encounter the first of the bodies, crumpled on the floor, their skulls recognizable by unwavering, glowing orbs. Rachel gives them a close look, watching for any movement, then consciously looks away.

  She moves forward into the blackness, her cell phone clutched in her right hand, eyes peeled for what its illumination is revealing. She comes to a clothing section, the colorful garments appearing sepia-toned in the cell-phone light. The section seems to extend much farther into the store than she remembers, and she feels a flutter of panic deep inside her. She keeps moving, feeling the constant pressure of Jenny’s hand on her shoulder.

  Just as she registers Jenny’s quick intake of breath, Rachel sees another body off to their left. It’s facedown, and it’s near the greeting cards, she thinks.

  Now, for the first time since walking through the door, Rachel feels real fear clutch at her innards. Her eyes burn as she watches the unnatural glow emanating from the corpse to their left. She can’t seem to blink.

  “Rachel…”

  Is it Rachel’s imagination, or is that red illumination jittering? She can make out the edges of
facial features under the crimson luminescence inside the skull—the brows, an ear. Did the head twitch? She becomes aware of her own erratic breathing.

  “Rachel, hold the light steady!” Jenny whispers in her ear. “You’re freaking me out!”

  “Sorry, I—”

  Something clacks off in the distance, to the far right, in some dark corner of the store, wood on metal, and the young women freeze in their tracks. The sound repeats, louder, then silence.

  “Oh Jesus, why are we in here?!” Jenny nearly shrieks.

  “Shhh! It’s nothing, come on, let’s get this over with,” Rachel says, trying to force a sense of calm into her voice, but she can’t keep it from breaking. She curses herself inwardly for letting the situation get the best of her.

  They finally find a clear path through to the big center aisle that leads toward the rear of the store. Rachel sees a couple of bodies along the way in the near distance, their skulls glowing steadily. Rachel only glances at them. She actually prefers to face away from them now, but they remind her of the afterimage the sun makes behind her eyelids after she glances directly at it. This time she consciously narrows her vision while giving them a wide berth. She doesn’t linger on these glowing bodies, but she can’t help but wonder if their flesh is jittering, whether their eyes are moving, like the motorcyclist at the hospital. She’s already trying to convince herself that what she saw there was some kind of stress-induced waking nightmare.

  But she knows it wasn’t.

  “Are we almost there?” Jenny whispers, half-whimpering, almost like a young child in a too-long car ride.

  “No.” Rachel twists her cell phone to the left so that it illuminates the wall of greeting cards. “Almost halfway.”

  She’s steering them toward the hardware area, a straight line from here then off to the left. They proceed carefully along the white-tiled floor, making their way past the home furnishings, past the art items. Red-and-white Target price tags hang from shelves, still and dark. Sale signs poke up colorfully from tables, the tops of them lost in blackness.

  Rachel pushes hair away from her face with her left hand. She still feels that flutter of panic in her chest, and she takes a deep, yawning breath to settle it down. If there were any more light in here, she would take off sprinting toward the rear of the store, but no way will she let herself stumble blindly over a sprawled body or crash into the corner of a metal shelving unit. So she takes it slowly.

  When they reach the center of the store, the tiny illumination of Rachel’s phone gives out, plunging them into total darkness.

  Jenny lets loose a ragged whine, and Rachel inadvertently crouches to the floor, bringing her friend with her. Jenny stumbles over her, banging her limbs hard on the tile.

  “Turn it on! Turn it back on!”

  Rachel frantically stabs at her phone, but the display has gone completely dark. She tries the power button repeatedly. Nothing. She slips the phone back into her jeans pocket.

  “It’s dead,” she barks, her voice far more high-pitched that she intends. “The battery’s dead, okay?”

  “No!” Jenny screams, the word trailing and echoing hollowly through the store. She cuts her sound short, as if afraid her screams might awaken demons in the dark.

  “Don’t!” Rachel says, her own voice filled with warbled uncertainty. “It’s okay! We can do this, we know the store.”

  “Why the fuck did we come in here? Why didn’t we just go back to the hospital?”

  “Quiet! It’s okay. Let’s go.”

  “We have to get out of here!”

  “We’re almost there, Jenny.”

  “I can’t see!”

  “I can’t either.”

  Rachel gets awkwardly to her feet and urges Jenny up. “Come on, the faster we go, the quicker we can get out of here.”

  Jenny takes a moment to respond, but finally she lifts herself up and calms her breathing. “Okay,” she says, a little more confidently. “Fuck!”

  Holding tightly to each other with one hand, reaching out blindly with the other, they move forward into the inky blackness. Jenny is emitting soft whimpers, and just as she seems to have gained some semblance of control over her fear, she lets out an ear-splitting scream.

  “What is that?!”

  Rachel’s heart leaps to her throat, she stumbles, and then she discovers the reason for Jenny’s outburst.

  There’s a body at their feet.

  “Rachel!”

  Rachel drops to one knee, reaches down, feels a bare leg. She searches the darkness for the telltale glow and finds none. The leg is warm and unmoving. She feels like her heart might burst through her chest plate, that its beat must be loud enough to echo through the store. The leg is slender, long, and hairless—a woman’s leg.

  Rachel wonders almost hysterically, Why is there no glow? She marvels for an instant in the midst of her panic that something altogether unnatural—even supernatural—has become her new normal.

  Jenny continues making her shrill noise, and Rachel feels with her searching hands that the dead woman’s body is twisted around the edge of a display, the head out of her field of limited vision. Leaning over a little, she can see that the skull is indeed glowing with the red luminescence. When she sees it—too close!—she flinches backward, wary. Then she stops.

  The glow is moving. Twitching. Trying to rise.

  Disbelieving, Rachel sees the woman’s head, underlit with glowing red, attempt to rear itself backward on an uncooperative neck.

  Rachel scrabbles backward away from it, against Jenny.

  “What, what?!”

  “No—nothing!” Rachel manages, nearly swallowing her words. “We’re okay.”

  She doesn’t want to further unhinge her friend. She needs her to be functional. She extends her arms in Jenny’s direction, finding her friend’s shoulders. She pushes against her, pushes her away from the perspective that will let her see the woman’s head. The woman on the ground doesn’t seem capable of anything more than spastic neck movements, so Rachel wants to keep Jenny as calm as possible and get the hell out of here.

  “What? What?!” Jenny is whining.

  “Let’s just go.” Rachel is clutching Jenny’s shoulders now, not wanting to let go as she propels her forward.

  “Oh god, oh god, oh god.”

  Trying to soothe Jenny back to near-calm, she gets her friend back to her feet once more, but no matter what she does, she can’t stop Jenny’s uncontrollable trembling. It would help, of course, if Rachel could stop her own. Not wanting to dwell on that or anything else, she surges forward with Jenny, left arm reaching out again into the abyss. After what seems a freefall into nothingness she finds an endcap stacked with some kind of boxed merchandise. She stops, makes her best guess about where they are, then continues forward.

  She’s moving down one of the larger aisles, she believes, feeling her way from endcap to endcap. She pushes off one, takes two steps, reaches for the next. This one seems to hold glossy metallic kitchen items; the next one is perhaps a holiday display; this one is a bathroom theme—no, that doesn’t seem right. There are more endcaps than she remembers. When are the end displays going to give way to the next larger aisle, which will tell her she’s near their destination?

  Something’s not right. Did they take a wrong turn?

  The darkness seems to pull at Rachel, seems to be working in concert with gravity to squash her into the floor. She tries to force her hand to be nimble, to let her fingers brush the objects on the shelf, seeking familiarity, but they won’t obey her: Her hands keep clutching at the shelf to keep her body upright. She methodically moves down the center aisle, her eyes straining but seeing nothing.

  Jenny is breathing shallowly next to her, her hand clamped on Rachel’s shoulder. Occasionally the hand also threatens to pull her down, but Rachel bears the weight, feeling responsible for her friend being here. After a moment of wheezy silence, Jenny starts choking out some kind of mumbled prayer.

  “Don�
��t worry,” Rachel whispers, “we’re fine.”

  She brushes her fingers over objects—bedsheets, bottled items, picture frames, and other things, things she doesn’t recognize by touch—and Rachel becomes hyperaware of the shuffling sounds of their feet on the floor. She tries to focus her other remaining sense on only that and Jenny’s voice, to latch on to them as constants, as the things she’s touching seem completely random and start threatening to take her in the wrong direction. Then Rachel pushes off an endcap, takes her two steps, and reaches out to—nothingness. She’s reached the end of the row of endcaps and is left standing in empty space with nothing to hold on to.

  For a split-second, Rachel believes she might finally begin to scream. To give in. That sensation of being adrift in darkness is nearly enough to send her over the edge. The temptation to fall down and begin shrieking and sobbing nearly consumes her. Then she abruptly pushes backward, arm flailing, and reacquaints herself with the last endcap. Jenny comes stumbling with her.

  “Oh Jesus, Rachel, Jesus for Chrissakes don’t do that don’t do that—” Jenny is babbling, clutching at her.

  “It’s okay,” Rachel manages, still feeling the trill of an adrenaline jolt.

  She’s sure now that she’s reached the beginning of a perpendicular center aisle that leads to the hardware aisles. She strains her eyes and makes out two red glows in the far distance, partially obscured by something. Racks of clothing? She’s sure they’re in the direction they need to go.

  Rachel lets Jenny’s hand go and begins madly touching the hanging packages. She comes across what feels like lightbulbs, then an array of swaying tools and boxes.

  “Okay, we’re almost there,” she breathes.

  She takes her first step along the aisle, and at that moment, the clack of wood on metal sounds again, far closer than Rachel would like it to be, followed by what sounds alarmingly like something dragging.