Blood Red by Jason Bovberg Read Free Book Online Page A

eyelids and most of the
skin of her face are a barrage of raised marks, like third-degree
burns. Beneath the blank, ruined eyes—which Rachel can hardly look
away from—the girl’s nose and mouth seem twisted out of their
natural symmetry, the mouth in particular cocked to the left and
the tongue protruding slightly.
    “Oh, sweetie,” Rachel croaks, “what’s
happened to you? Who did this to you?”
    The girl mewls again, turning away, perhaps
not even hearing Rachel. Her ears are also disfigured, though not
as severely as the rest of her face.
    Rachel looks to the surrounding homes.
    “Help!” she calls. “Somebody please come out
and help! For God’s sake! Help!”
    Her voice echoes down the desolate, smoky
street.
    She lunges for the girl, falling to the
ground and embracing her. The girl thrashes and screeches, in fear
and misery. Rachel tries to soothe her, to pet her hair, but the
girl resists wildly. She can see now that the girl has folded her
hands into useless clubs, and the flesh there is damaged, too. It’s
only at this proximity that Rachel notices the flakiness of her
skin—the dry, bleached look of the flesh—and at the sight, she
coughs out a knowing sob.
    Still holding on to the flailing girl, Rachel
brings up her right hand and looks at the skin of her own palm. The
skin is discolored and scaly from its exposure to whatever it was
that was glowing from Susanna’s face.
    “ Shhhh ,” she breathes, pulling the
girl tightly to her, and the child is gradually weakening, though
clearly still in pain. Rachel tries not to touch her more egregious
welts.
    She imagines this once-pretty little girl
waking up this morning, as she herself had, and playing with her
toys in her still-quiet house while the day brightened around her …
perhaps growing hungry as time wore on, or merely antsy because her
mother and father hadn’t yet risen … wandering into her parents’
bedroom and finding them still asleep on their bed … jumping up
onto the sheets, perhaps giggling at the prospect of waking them.
But they didn’t wake up. Instead, they met her with stony red
silence. At first she was laughing at her parents’ make-believe
unwillingness to rise, and then more and more frightened, the girl
pushed at them and screamed at them and shrieked in fear.
    The scene plays out in Rachel’s mind’s eye.
The terrified girl pleading with her unresponsive parents, holding
their heads in her small hands, demanding that they wake up,
peering into their eyes, staring, glaring, only peripherally aware
of the crippling horror the red luminescence was inflicting on her
face and hands. And finally lurching away when the pain overrode
her need for her parents.
    The girl still writhes in her grasp, but she
is already calming, although the pain-frenzied, warbling sobs
continue. Rachel clings to her, her own tears streaming down her
face.
    Rachel catches movement out of the corner of
her eye. She jerks her head to the right to see a figure just yards
away, backlit by a smoke-filtered sun. She grunts and lurches
backward defensively, holding tightly to the girl, whose hideous
screams ratchet up anew.
    “It’s okay, it’s okay …” comes a tremulous
male voice.
    And for some reason, even though she can
barely make out the older man standing above her, merely the sound
of his voice—the calm, authoritative though querulous reassurance
there—unleashes new sobs from Rachel’s throat. She is so grateful
for his presence next to her at this moment that she’s nearly
paralyzed with emotion. She can hardly form decipherable words when
she chokes out, “I don’t…I don’t know what to do.”

Chapter 4
     
    Rachel wipes at her eyes with her sleeve. When her
vision adjusts, she can see that the man is perhaps in his sixties,
and he’s moving a little unsteadily. He seems a gentle soul in his
wrinkled khaki slacks and white tee-shirt. Wait, she knows this
man. She’s seen him before, perhaps mowing his well-manicured