Novel & Cerita Dried Blood On Concrete

I wanted her to know I was still here. Blood dripped steadily to the ground between us, making small, dark spots on the marble floor. And I looked right back at her.

"There is b—blood down there." "What?" She back away from the hole, pointing at it with a shaky finger. "Blood, Val. There's blood in there." I walked up to the hole to take a look. And sure enough, there was blood on the surrounding floor boards. Dried blood. "I was trying to scrub the floor and the board moved." Veronica explained, her voice still full of fear.

Maybe she was inside and couldn’t hear me because of some sort of soundproofing, even though the house didn’t look like it had soundproofing. I opened the door to one room. It was empty. Then I moved to the next room. When I opened the door, I saw a pool of blood on the floor at the center of the room. It had seeped through some clothes on the floor and the floorboards and was spreading rapidly. I took a few steps closer to it, crouched down, and slowly touched the blood. When I did, the blood was wet, dripping back from my fingers onto the floor—not dried and sticky, like someone who had been left there for days. This was a very recent occurrence.

Inside, I turn on the light and, pausing in the doorway, I look. Sand lies scattered in a thin layer over the concrete floor in an elaborate pattern of swirls and whorls. Not obviously so. The casual eye would take it as spillage from the open sack propped in one corner, scattering its contents. But I know better, comparing what I see to the image on my phone, taken as I locked up last time I was here. No footprints. No shifting of the small grains. There's nothing out of place larger than a few mouse droppings.

Corey threw out words of protest, but I tuned him out and motioned the others to drag him outside. Once the bar was emptied out completely, I went back to the spot that’s been nagging at me all this time. Behind the bar, right in front of the door to the kitchen, was what appeared to be a pool of dried blood staining the floor. I knelt down, my eyes fixed on the dark stain. “Jun. Collect a sample. Now. Send it for DNA testing.” He stepped closer, glancing at the trampled area. “Sir, with all these footprints crossing through it, the sample might be too contaminated to get clear results.”

It is thick, metallic, and hot. “Do you smell what I smell?” I ask Jane to be sure. “I might be smelling something worse than you are,” she responds, her face twisted in disgust. We take one careful step onto the block, and our boots stick to the floor. We look down and realize the concrete is flooded. We pass glances, inhaling sharply before we look up. My stomach drops, there’s blood everywhere. It splashes across the high windows, blocking the morning light; it runs down the grey walls in long, dark streaks. It is smeared over the iron bars. The entire block is painted red.

The deep red liquid spilled onto her shirt, staining it and spreading outwards like a macabre halo. The blood had already started to dry on her skin, leaving a dark, crusty trail that extended from her neck down to her chin. The sight of it made me feel sick to my stomach. As I looked closer, I noticed that the blood had also trickled down onto Clara's face, leaving smears of red on her cheeks and forehead.

“It’s me, Elijah. Are you home?” No answer. I moved deeper into the shop, past shelves of herbs and crystals, past bookshelves and bottles of strange-colored liquids. Something was wrong. I could feel it in the air. Suddenly, a glint on the floor caught my eye—something dark and flaky against the worn wooden boards. I knelt down, leaning close to inspect the substance. Something coppery wafted through my nostrils. Blood. Dried blood, days old by the look of it. My stomach tightened.

Into people. Room 209 sits half-open in front of me while I kneel on the cracked linoleum outside it with a brush in one hand and a bucket of filthy gray water beside my knee. My jeans are already damp where they’re pressing into the floor. There’s a stain spread across the carpet inside the doorway, dark around the edges where somebody tried to scrub it before giving up halfway through. Blood. Old now, turned brown because nobody bothered to touch it until my shift started.

But it was in the kitchen that I noticed it. There was a dark spot on the floor near the back door, barely visible in the moonlight streaming through the window. I crouched down, squinting at it in the darkness. I brushed my fingers across it; it was dry and flaky, but when I sniffed my fingertip, it smelled metallic. Blood. “Mom,” I said quietly. “Look at this.” She knelt beside me and inhaled sharply. I looked up, stomach churning, and scanned the floor around us. A few feet off, in the direction of the exit, I saw another droplet. I moved over to it and scanned again. Another, closer to the back door.