Blood Red Read Free Page B

fall to the floor.
    She becomes aware of the sounds from outside
again. Now she definitely hears a siren, or several of them. And
there are other noises too, perhaps screams, but she doesn’t want
to hear them.
    She presses her palms to her ears and closes
her eyes.
    “ What’s going on?!” she screeches,
blocking out everything she can so that only her voice thunders
inside her muffled head. She lets the words dissolve into a
prolonged exhalation of sound.
    She tries to escape to some tiny place inside
herself, and she succeeds for a fleeting moment, but the world
insists on crashing back. Her thoughts edge back to the bedroom
where Susanna sprawls still and silent and gone. She tries to yank
back those thoughts, but she keeps seeing Susanna’s naked,
unconscious body sprawled across the sheets, and she keeps seeing
the impossible red luminescence bleeding from her mouth and
nostrils. She sees it like the afterimage of a bright light against
her eyelids.
    Is she still in the grip of a nightmare?
    There is a moment when Rachel knows, quite
consciously, that she has a choice. To either shrink inside,
regress, and turn away from whatever horror has taken hold of her
life this morning, or face it headlong and attempt to make sense of
it. She is facing the illogic of a nightmare, but she knows that
now is not the time to give in to inaction. Everything depends on
her choice.
    She opens her eyes, uncovers her ears. The
kitchen remains quiet, but the sounds from outside are still
there.
    A huge crash of thunder jolts the house on
its foundation, and she can feel the percussion of it in her chest.
She whimpers as trinkets throughout the house jangle with the
terrific jolt. Then she comes to the crushing realization that
these terrible sounds have never been thunder at all.
    They have been explosions.
    Rachel races to her own bedroom and strips
out of her nightgown. She takes up the wad of jeans from the floor,
separates her panties from the denim and pulls them on. Then she
steps into the jeans and hurriedly grabs a tee-shirt from her
second drawer and throws it on over her bare breasts. Then she’s
hopping on one foot at a time, slipping her tennis shoes on.
    She catches sight of her cell phone on the
dresser and lunges for it. She picks it up and stabs it on. The
readout displays the time: 6:52 a.m. She dials 911 and puts the
phone to her ear, but nothing happens. She looks at the readout
again. She sees three service bars, but the phone is silent. She
turns it off, and turns it on again. Nothing. It’s unresponsive.
And the battery is very low.
    “Fuck!”
    She shoves the phone into the front pocket of
her jeans.
    Have to get across the street. Tony will
know what to do.
    She tears through the house. Nearing the
front door, she casts a single glance toward the large front room,
where her already-browning apple core sits forlornly on the coffee
table, and she feels an instant ache for that lost peaceful moment.
An image of her mom relaxing there comes to her again, then
vanishes. A mewling sound catches in her throat as she grabs hold
of the front doorknob.
    When she steps outside, Rachel sees that the
entire world has gone insane.

Chapter 2
     
    In the near distance, off in the direction of Old
Town, a great plume of roiling smoke is billowing into the sky, the
result of some kind of massive explosion. It’s so close that Rachel
imagines she can feel its shockwave against her face as she steps
onto the porch. A scorching waft of hot air. This is surely the
source of the explosive noise she heard moments ago, inside the
house. The black smoke is like a solid thing, thick and ropy,
undulating and urgent.
    “ Holy ... shit!” Rachel mouths,
staggering back, eyes wide.
    She can only stare at the smoke, caught
between awe and horror. She tries to connect the sight with what
has happened inside her house, but cannot. The disconnect stops her
in her tracks. Her consciousness feels jammed, incapable of
processing. Everything