Blood Trilogy (Book 2): Draw Blood Read Online Free PDF Page A

abandoned cars, at skewed angles down Lemay Avenue. Ash drifts from the sky. It’s warm out there, and inside the hospital it’s humid and foul.
    Worst of all, just beyond the small parking lot are two more human beings crammed beneath a pine tree, whose needled limbs have been splintered out of the way to make room for the bodies. The bodies—both of them doughy, nearly naked men—are painfully bent backward, the limbs wrenched out of their sockets, so severely that the position almost seems natural—as if these people have been, under the force of some cruel god, remade into an entirely new monstrous species. Their mouths are locked against the bark. Michael sees movement at the throat, and a slow drip of splinters and saliva and sap has created mushy stalagmites of mulch below their inverted, sap-caked faces. Michael feels a gag forming at the back of his throat and has to force his gaze away.
    He’s breathing very quickly, and he feels a knot of emotion building at his chest.
    He’s summoning the courage to try the stairs when he catches movement out of the corner of his eye. South on Lemay, a police cruiser is heading north, toward the hospital, winding its way around two wrecks in the middle of the street.
    “Oh shit,” he breathes, feeling as if his worst fear has come true. It has come down to the money after all. Even as the thought slashes through his brain, he understands its irrationality, and yet it’s potent enough to fill his veins with acid.
    He braces himself to bolt, his thoughts immediately turning to Rachel.
    He can’t leave her. No way will he leave her.
    And then he sees, following in the wake of the police cruiser, a large blue Chevy truck. A civilian vehicle. Both are headed this way.
    Michael is frozen to the spot, caught between impulses to run outside and wave them down or to get back to Rachel and gather her up and get the hell out of here. Can he even trust that the police car is occupied by an actual policeman? Why is a civilian truck following it?
    He moves to the edge of the window and watches the vehicles approach, straight north along an otherwise deserted street. In a moment, he sees that the man driving the cruiser is indeed wearing a police uniform. The sight fills him with despair.
    The cop’s passenger is a woman, in her forties maybe. She looks exhausted, her head lolling against the window. He can’t tell if anyone is in the back seats. The driver of the truck is a large man with a determined expression on his face. Next to him is a young blond woman. And now Michael notices several people in the back of that truck. They also appear exhausted, sprawled out and heads bowed.
    The vehicles pull into the emergency parking lot. Michael decides to fall back to the double doors leading toward Rachel, see what these people decide to do. He walks purposefully across the destroyed lobby, nearly slipping and falling in front of the registration desk but finally making it. He maneuvers behind the door. He touches his head wound carefully, relieved to find that the pain there has subsided by several orders of magnitude. He still feels a bit blurry and thick, but the dizziness is gone for the moment. He watches the entrance.
    The vehicles rumble straight up to the door, and their engines shut off. Car doors clank shut.
    Voices just outside the wrenched-open outer doors.
    “—not something I ever thought I’d say seriously.” This voice is pitched authoritatively. It’s the voice of someone in charge. It must be the cop. “I mean, in real life.”
    “Me neither.” A female voice.
    “It’s ridiculous,” comes another male voice—the driver of the truck? “But I keep trying to think of a less batshit idea, and I can’t. And then I start arguing with myself, and I sound like Scott.”
    Michael watches through a gap in the doors, and now the men appear at the entrance. Yes, the cop is leading the way in, wrenching the doors back further. Michael is amazed by his haggard