Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood by Jason Bovberg Read Free Book Online Page A

alert.
    “Goddamn,” Michael says, still trying to make sense of the scene before him. “What’s he doing?”
    “He’s got that thing inside him—that light.”
    Michael wrenches his gaze from the impossible sight of this human being, and looks straight at Joel, then at Kevin.
    “Uh,” Michael says. “What?”
    “That’s the thing,” Joel says. “Whatever is happening to these corpses, it’s all because of this insane … presence … inside their heads. It’s like a … an illumination. A radiation. Inhabiting them.” He murmurs a dark laugh. “I know that sounds crazy as hell, and that was our first reaction, trust me. That was everyone’s reaction. But it’s true.”
    Michael doesn’t see anything like an illumination.
    And he still can’t get Joel’s word out of his head.
    Corpses.
    But this man isn’t dead. Far from it.
    Except for the eyes.
    At that moment, the man lunges for Michael, and Michael nearly falls while scrambling backward out of the way.
    “Whoa, whoa, yeah, watch out,” Kevin says. “You don’t want that thing to touch you. That light can fuck you up.”
    “I don’t see any light,” Michael says, composing himself.
    “Oh, it’s there.”
    Michael considers that silently, just watching the bald man—the bald man’s corpse?—flail about, seething.
    “Show it to me,” he says.
    “Show you what?”
    “Show me this light you’re talking about.” He clutches his throbbing forehead, feeling the need for that Tylenol that Bonnie spoke of.
    Joel takes a look around the room.
    The man is on the floor to the left of the bed. His upturned face is still contorted in an animal fury, and as Joel steps to the other side of the bed, the man watches him warily, upside down, snapping out at him once, teeth clacking. The man’s blunt chin has become his most prominent feature, like the end of a proboscis.
    Joel reaches the window and draws the shades. The room falls into relative darkness, and now Michael sees the crimson glow coming from the man’s face—or, rather, behind the man’s face. His breath catches. It’s an unwavering luminescence coming from the area behind the nose, visible from the nostrils and open mouth, and just barely beneath the skin of the cheeks.
    “What—” he whispers. “What’s happened to him? Why is he—”
    “Not just him,” Kevin says soberly behind him. “Everyone.”
    “ Everyone? I mean, are we talking—”
    Joel sees where he’s going. “We’ve had no interaction with anyone for hundreds of miles, no communication, no glimpses of flights, no evidence of life anywhere,” he says in a low voice. “Nothing. We think it’s worldwide.”
    Mike swallows thickly, doesn’t know how to digest that. Finally, he decides not to. He turns back to the man’s body.
    “This same thing is in—”
    “Every damn one of them.” Joel opens the blinds again and goes back to the doorway, keeping his pistol trained on the bald man. “We were able to see inside one of them the other day. A motorcyclist whose head had been broken open. Not a pretty sight. But this thing inside him, it was like a—a sphere. A bright ball of light. A ball of energy.” He curls the fingers of his left hand as if he’s holding a baseball. “About that big, in the middle of the head. Strangest shit I’ve ever seen.”
    Michael feels himself shaking his own head slowly back and forth.
    “And the weirdest part?” Joel says, coming to Michael’s side. “These bodies are dead. They don’t breathe, there’s no heartbeat. Look at the eyes. The pupils are dilated. They really are walking corpses. These bodies were just lying around dead for a whole day before that thing in there started bringing them back.”
    Those words hang in the humid air for a moment, and the thing on the floor continues to watch them warily.
    It is a profoundly alien sight, Michael has to admit.
    “How did this happen?” he asks. “What happened? I mean, my God!”
    Both men are shaking