Read Blood Red for Free Online Page B

smoke.
    There’s a hollow pit in Rachel’s gut that is
crammed with fear; she feels it expanding and contracting as she
takes everything in. There’s no one out there in this flat, red,
infuriating world. She turns away from the scene, not wanting to
think about what this desolation means, but she casts one last
glance toward Tony’s house.
    I’ll be back for you. I hope .
    She pulls the car out into the street and
proceeds east, toward the site of the large explosion.
    Where should she go? Police? She wants to
head directly for her dad’s office, but it’s so far south, down
there past Barnes & Noble, past McDonald’s even. At least on
the way to College Avenue, the main thoroughfare, is the police
department. One way or another, she’s going to find out what the
hell is going on.
    In the space of three blocks, she finds seven
crashed vehicles, and in all of them, she can see bodies still
strapped into the seats, their heads slumped against the windows.
Most of the cars are crooked against the curb or smashed into
parked cars, but on one street she finds a dairy truck halfway
embedded in the front of a home, which has crumbled around it. She
can see the straight path of the truck’s tires across the grass of
the front yard, as if it made no effort to stop at all, just
barreled into the home’s façade. Another vehicle—a brand-new Chevy
truck—is completely upside down, angled across a driveway. Rachel
can see the driver’s head and thick arms hanging in the
half-crushed cab, and blood has streamed down the driveway in fine
rivulets.
    The next block over, a middle-aged woman is
sitting on her front steps, her head buried in her hands. Her hair
is a messy black-and-gray tangle. Rachel is startled by the sight
of this living human, just sitting there, and she jerkily steers
toward the curb. She stops the car and calls out the open
window.
    “Ma’am? Ma’am! Are you okay?”
    The woman looks up, startled, then shakes her
head, dazed. “My … my …” Her voice sounds ghostly, defeated, and
dissolves to silence. She looks down at her hands and lifts them,
confused. Rachel glimpses familiar damage on her palms, and the
flesh of the woman’s forearms also appears mottled and pale. Taking
uncertain hold of the post next to her, the woman shifts forward,
seeming about to rise, but then she falls back and looks around
blankly.
    “Are you hurt?” Rachel asks, coughing under a
thicker wave of smoke. She opens her door and steps out
uncertainly, approaching the woman.
    The woman doesn’t appear to understand
Rachel’s question, simply sits there staring, lost in her own
nightmare.
    Rachel feels new helplessness in the face of
the woman’s mad despair. She knows how she feels. But the woman’s
confusion and inability to face the nightmare only serve to propel
Rachel to action. She has to keep moving. She will not be the kind
of person to turn inward.
    “I’m going to find help,” Rachel says,
probably unnecessarily. “I’m going to the police. You might want to
go inside away from the smoke.” She hesitates, then kneels down and
asks, “Do you want to come with me?”
    The distraught woman doesn’t respond. Her
eyes are red and wet, and there’s still no sound at all coming from
her open mouth.
    Rachel observes the woman for a few uncertain
seconds, then edges back into the street. She becomes aware of a
familiar sound, and instinctively cranes her neck to gaze into the
sky. Through the smoke she can barely see a passenger airliner, way
up there, and for an instant the sight comforts her. Soon, though,
she sees that the airliner is in trouble, doing a slow spiral in
its otherwise straight path. She loses sight of it, then catches it
again. It’s upside down, barrel-rolling, chilling Rachel to her
core.
    “No!”
    She looks to the woman for some kind of
shared acknowledgment of the horror in the sky, but there’s nothing
there. The woman is lost inside herself.
    A thick wave of smoke obscures the