Blood Red by Jason Bovberg

reach room 109, the source of the wailing.
    This new set of double doors opens into a
large room filled with beds that have been wheeled in from storage.
Most of the beds are occupied, but not all of them. The beds are
much more numerous and closer together than Rachel figures they
would be outside an emergency situation like this. After only a
moment, she can see that this room has been reserved for those
people who have experienced injury from whatever radiant energy it
is that’s coming out of the afflicted bodies.
    Most of these people are alive, and only a
very few are accompanied by someone. There are perhaps twenty
people here suffering varying degrees of deforming injury, and by
and large, they are doing it alone. Two people are wandering from
bed to bed, clumsily administering pain medication. They don’t
appear to know what they’re doing.
    Alan says, “Over there,” in an even, low
voice, gesturing.
    On the far side of the room is a collection
of corpses covered by more sheets. They’re lined up in a row
against the wall, body against body.
    “Okay,” Rachel nods.
    She stands there while Alan shuffles over to
say goodbye to his little neighbor, and a man is wheeled in behind
her, moaning. Rachel moves quickly out of the way. The
plain-clothed “nurse” takes this man directly to one of the few
open beds and helps him gently onto it. His moans are already
halfway subsided, and by this, Rachel can tell that he was sedated
before entering the room. By the time the woman gets him settled
into the bed, he’s unconscious, but even in that state, his wounds
are plain. His hands are curled as if the fingers have been burned
together into a claw, and his face is blistered and scarred like
Sarah’s. Not as bad, but close.
    The woman gives the man a parting touch on
his shoulder, then rises, coming toward Rachel.
    “Ma’am,” Rachel says, feeling bad about
interrupting this woman’s work but needing some scrap of new
information.
    “Yes?”
    “Please, do you know what’s happening?”
    The woman, an attractive older woman who
reminds Rachel of her mom before she died, seems at first reluctant
to pause but comes to a stop next to Rachel, beside the doors,
wiping perspiration from her brow with her forearm. She takes a
deep breath and lets it out shakily, seeming grateful now for the
pause of Rachel’s interruption. Her eyes show an exhausted
kindness.
    “That’s the question of the day, isn’t
it?”
    Rachel nods, watching peripherally as Alan
kisses Sarah’s ruined forehead and lays her gently on the
floor.
    “I don’t know, dear.” She looks around
wearily. “All I do know is when I woke up this morning, the world
was going crazy around me. The same thing happened to you, I’m
sure.”
    “Uh huh.”
    “I’m so sorry. I’ve never seen anything like
it. Something just…happened. Last night or early this morning.
Something, all at once. A whole lot of people fell unconscious.”
Her mouth works silently for a moment. “Dead.”
    Rachel nods at her, looks around the room at
all the misery. There are perhaps thirty bodies at the edge, all
covered with sheets; the smallest and newest body is Sarah’s. And
then there are a couple dozen people at various levels of
injury.
    “But,” Rachel begins, unsure of herself,
“are…are they really dead?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean, what’s happening inside them?”
Rachel’s voice wavers despite her efforts to control it. “What’s
happening inside to cause this?” She gestures toward the victims
that surround them. “When I found my stepmother this morning, she
had no pulse, she wasn’t breathing—same with the other bodies I’ve
seen—but something’s alive inside them. That light —as crazy
as it sounds, that light is alive . The bodies are warm,
and…I mean…something’s happening inside them.”
    This woman is obviously weary, but she’s
looking into Rachel’s eyes with a heightened sense of
understanding. She touches her