Free Blood Red by Jason Bovberg

Alan is weeping, one hand still
caressing her hair, his cheek pressed against her head.
    Rachel slumps to her knees next to the car,
hardly aware that she has fallen.
    “Not fair,” she whispers. “This isn’t
fair.”
    She reaches out numbly to touch Sarah’s leg,
one of the few areas on the girl that was left unmolested by the
red luminescence. Alan’s eyes are closed, but there are tears in
his eyelashes. A thought flutters through Rachel’s mind— This is
a good man —and then she’s rising, supporting herself on the
doorjamb, looking around, feeling hopeless again.
    Anger rises inside her, and she feels a sneer
taking hold of her mouth. She glares down at Sarah’s corpse, at
this unmoving, gone little girl, and she feels a sharp, empty pain
in her heart, a hatred for the cause of this nightmare. It’s an
inky hatred that feels like a hot stain through her ribcage.
    “Fuck!” she yells out. “Fuck! Fuck!”
    Her voice catches on the last exclamation,
and her throat constricts with new emotion.
    There are more people at the hospital
entrance, and here comes another vehicle, a minivan, into the
parking lot. It parks near a security fence, and the lanky young
male driver locks eyes with her briefly as he steps out. He slides
open the van’s side door and carefully extricates the lifeless body
of an older woman in a nightgown—clearly his mother. Cradling her,
he hurries to the entrance. Rachel can see him pause in the
vestibule, then go further in, out of sight.
    With effort, Rachel swallows down her angry
grief.
    “Let’s at least get her inside,” she says.
“We can show them what happened.”
    Alan doesn’t speak for a moment, then, “All
right.”
    They bring Sarah out of the car almost
reverently, handling her gently between them. Alan stands and takes
the girl fully into his arms again.
    “You got her?”
    He nods, and they make their way to the
sliding doors of the emergency entrance. Alan is slow, shuffling
with the burden that he has claimed as his own, but she lets him
take his time. They step through and see perhaps a dozen people
attending to various situations. Two of them hover over a mewling
woman who is sitting in the waiting room; the woman’s face is pale
and subtly disfigured, obviously suffering from the same kind of
affliction that claimed Sarah. There’s almost a melted quality to
the flesh, as if it has been superheated and left to cool too
quickly. The two people help her into a wheelchair. The woman is
drugged, and now Rachel can see the hypodermic needle that one of
the two apparent volunteers—a nervous, scared-looking young man—has
used to calm her.
    It’s terribly hot in here already, sticky and
foul-smelling, no movement to the air. The main waiting room to the
right of the administration area is filled with people, half of
them stationary in rows of plastic seats, a bunch more standing
against the walls talking in small groups. The ones standing are
restless, moving in and out of a set of double doors to the left.
Rachel assumes that the bodies of their loved ones have been taken
back there. The large waiting area is loud and humid, a
pressure-cooker if Rachel ever saw one.
    There are a multitude of voices coming from
beyond the scuffed-metal inner doors that lead further into the
treatment area. She watches the doors, getting occasional glimpses
of gurneys and bodies beyond them, and notices Alan heading to the
reception desk, where several people seem to be arguing. Rachel is
about to accompany him, when—
    “Rachel?” The voice comes from her right.
    She turns her head and sees a familiar face.
It takes her a moment to place her. The young woman’s dark-rooted
blond hair is flat and disheveled—again, straight from bed—and
she’s without makeup. The girl’s glasses throw her off, too.
Planted in one of the green, plastic waiting-room chairs, the young
woman immediately rises when Rachel turns, and then it’s clear, the
way she moves her body. It’s