In the Heart of Babylon

by S G D Singh

  He felt what happened next before he saw it, as if a freezing wind swept through the room, the party's air changed. Conversations halted as something caught the attention of every person facing the stairs. People turned to see what their companions gaped at, then gasped in turn. Following their gazes, Nadifa saw a girl about his own age coming down the stairs, looking like something straight out of a horror movie.

  She swayed lazily, kicking bare feet out with each step, like a little girl at a forest picnic. She wore what had obviously once been a very expensive gown but now looked like it had been through a shredder. Her hair was hacked off in a cut more violent than his own, leaving her nearly bald in some places, with tufts of blonde hair that stuck up from her scalp like a badly-plucked chicken. Crumpled orchids stuck to her hairline over one eye, and her pale face was covered in some kind of purple warpaint, the color smeared around her eyes, two single lines running down from them to her jawline like a crying doll.

  He had never seen a woman so terrifying.

  And then she laughed, and Nadifa recognized the sound. It was her, the girl who'd spoken through the hallway wall, he was sure of it. What the hell is she doing?

  Nadifa saw Mitch stand at the main table, his face a mask. He nodded almost imperceptibly, and three boys rose from a table near where Nadifa stood. Without a word they circled the girl and tried to lead her from the room. When she didn't cooperate, they dragged her between them.

  “Really, Father?” she called over her shoulder. “Oh, am I no longer presentable? How unfortunate for you. Don't worry, though.” She looked around at the other guests. “Our rotting bones all look the same in the end.”

  Nadifa blinked in surprise. Father? She was Head Nazi Psycho's daughter? What the fuck?

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Mitch said, his tone a practiced-soothing one, raising his glass, and not once looking at his daughter. “Hormonal teenagers, what can you do, am I right? Please, remember our Lord's infinite forgiveness and continue to enjoy the night.”

  Nadifa was following the girl before he consciously realized what he was doing, pushing through the doors behind the staircase before he could think. He found himself in some sort of sitting area—all overstuffed chairs around small tables, plants, mirrors, false windows, and paintings of Confederate soldiers under chandeliers. Two doors led to restrooms. Nadifa realized the women's room was where the girl had been when she'd spoken to him.

  “What in the ever-loving hell is wrong with you, Hanna?” the tallest of the three boys demanded. He shook her violently by the shoulders, then slammed her against the wall, and she slid to the floor with a laugh.

  “Hey!” Nadifa shouted, and the three boys turned, their expressions going from surprise to outrage.

  Two of them—a stocky dude who'd gone the color of a ripe tomato and a blond who looked like a model for Nazi recruitment except for his pimples—came straight for Nadifa as if they'd been waiting to beat his ass all night. Nadifa threw his arms up to block their fists, but just when he expected pain, they staggered back instead, clutching their faces, then doubled over as Luk and Darnell's fists landed in their stomachs.

  “What the fuck are you doing, man?” Luk hissed at Nadifa. “This shit was not the plan.”

  “She's the girl,” Nadifa panted. “She's the girl from last night.”

  Luk looked skeptical as he glared down at the girl—Hanna. The flowers had fallen off her face, and she sat leaning against the wall with her eyes closed, her demeanor calm, as if she were simply tired.

  Nadifa never knew what Luk was about to say, though, because Pimples made another rush at Darnell, who stepped aside and tripped the dude. Pimples flailed past, punching at nothing but air, and then fell, landing flat on his face. His head hit the marble floor with a sickening crack, and a pool of blood spread out beneath him.

  Stocky turned an even deeper shade of tomato. “Oh, my god,” he said. “You killed him. You fucking killed Garrett!”

  “Oops!” Hanna said, fluttering her lashes and bursting into creepy-as-fuck laughter again.

  The tallest boy, the one who'd shoved her, stood over her, pale as a ghost, gawking at Hanna as if she'd grown some kind of deformity.

  Stocky made some kind of garbled battle-cry noise then and came at Darnell, swinging wildly, but Luk cut him off, punching him in the side of the head, sending him reeling as Darnell crouched to the bleeding boy's side and retrieved an iPhone from his back pocket.

  “Don't you touch him, you filthy—”

  Luk stepped forward and punched the guy again, right in the nose. “Go ahead, motherfucker,” he growled. “Say it.”

  Stocky just backed away then, shaking and blubbering like an overgrown baby.

  “Maybe he's alive?” Nadifa suggested. “You might want to, I don't know, get help?”

  “Fuck this,” the tall boy said, glancing at the door. “The longer we stand here, the worse this looks. Get up, Hanna.”

  He took hold of the girl's arm and yanked her roughly to her feet as she giggled again.

  Nadifa stepped forward but Luk put an arm out to stop him. He quickly discovered that the girl didn't need his help, anyway. Twisting out of the tall dude's grip, she elbowed him in the face, then turned and kneed him in the nuts.

  “Don't handle me, Connor,” she said. “You have no fucking idea who I am.”

  She strode back toward the banquet and Connor followed, glancing around, obviously nervous. Whatever he was meant to do to “handle” the situation, he had not done it. Stocky trailed behind them, wiping his bleeding nose on the inside of his tuxedo jacket with a loud snort, and pretending Nadifa, Luk, and Darnell had ceased to exist.

  The boys looked at each other, not sure what to do next. Since there was no other way out of the room, they followed.

  The first thing Nadifa noticed as they approached the banquet hall was the silence, complete and absolute. The sounds of human voices, the laughter, the scraping of silver against china, the clinking of crystal, even the boring as hell violin music—all of it was gone. As he turned the corner into the banquet hall itself, Nadifa nearly bumped into Hanna, who stood like some ragged statue with a look of utter disbelief on her painted face.

  Beyond her, everyone was dead.

  Bodies lay in heaps of silk and chiffon on the floor, slumped across tables, or slouched back in their chairs. At first Nadifa thought that they'd all been shot in the eyes, and for an insane moment he wondered why he hadn't heard the gunfire. But on closer look, he realized there were no exit wounds. The blood was coming from inside them and pouring from their eyes, leaving red tears along their pale faces and pooling at their necks like open wounds.

  “Get out of here,” Hanna whispered. “Now, before security—”

  Luk and Darnell were already across the room, gathering Malik, Kevin, Jamal, and Mike—who stood clustered against the wall, looking shell-shocked. With one last look at the girl, Nadifa followed them toward the kitchen.

  He saw Stocky opening and closing his mouth like a dying fish. He started to move as if he would rise from where he sat on the floor next to a woman in white, and Nadifa wondered if it was his mother.

  Hanna snapped, “Don't,” and Stocky sank back to the floor.

  Connor was in the middle of the room, on his knees by one of the dead men, rocking back and forth and making little whimpering noises that did not help ease the stress of the situation.

  Nadifa turned back to ask Hanna if she was okay. It seemed inhuman to leave her like that, looking at her dead father. But when she turned to meet his gaze she seemed composed, with no hint of manic laughter. “Go,” she said.

  She looked back at her father once, took in the hair matted with blood from his destroyed eyes, and Hanna's expression was unreadable beneath her makeup.

  And then she was gone, running across the room and up the stairs, disappearing from sight.

  “I told you, Lukango. I don't know what the fuck happened, okay?” Kevin was saying as Nadifa caught up with th
em in the corridor. “One second, the Imperial Wizard, Grand Cyclops motherfucker was making a toast, talking some shit about true economic prosperity for the master race through political freedom—”

  “And how unfortunate it was that The Resort would be shutting down for good,” added Mike.

  “Right,” Kevin said. “He kept going on about how ‘in spite of this unfortunate setback, we will continue to resist the catastrophic threat of soft-minded liberals destroying nature's rules of racial selection,' bullshit about, ‘we will continue our fight to prevent this rise of the idiot masses.’ It was rough, man. Real genocide shit.”

  “And I got the feeling this isn't the only Klan Resort, either,” said Mike, glowering. “There was talk of next summer options.”

  “Get to the part where they all fucking died,” Luk said, losing patience even though Nadifa thought Kevin's impression of the guy was pretty impressive.

  “That's what we're telling you, man,” Jamal said. “After the guy's whack-ass speech, they all drank these little shots of something fancy. Even the security guards, all of 'em cheering and shit. And then their eyeballs just started bleeding, like they were melting or exploding or some shit. And then they all just fucking died. That's it. That's all we fucking know.”

  “Poisoned?” Nadifa said. “Their drinks must've been poisoned. But, why the hell…”

  “Okay,” Luk said. He shook his head. “Let's play it cool in the kitchen, get back to the others, regroup, and—”

  “What about Ayeeyo?” Nadifa demanded. “What if the tunnel stays closed in the morning because of all this? What if the train never runs again? She's not in the prison, so she has to be down here somewhere.”

  “Breathe, man,” Luk said.

  “Don't tell me to fucking breathe, man!” Nadifa snapped, panic pushing aside his self-control. He could not—would not—leave his grandmother.

  “We'll figure it out, okay? In the meantime, we do not want to be here when the rest of these Nazi motherfuckers find their entire Grand Council of Yahoos dead.”

  They all looked at each other in silence, and Nadifa nodded. Luk was right. Taking a deep breath, Luk led them the rest of the way down the hallway to the kitchen, only to stop sharply at the door. “Shit,” he said. “More bleeding-eyeball dead crackers.”

  “What the hell?” Nadifa said again. He pushed past Luk into the kitchen and looked around. There was an empty whiskey bottle—Michter's Single Barrel—on the counter and he picked it up, sniffing at it.

  “Man, put that shit down,” Mike hissed, snatching it from him and shoving it at the dead cook.

  “Let's get the fuck out of here.” Darnell knelt, finding the cook's phone. Nadifa waited with the rest of them to see if by some miracle the phone was unlocked—if there was a signal. Darnell shook his head, but took phones from two more bodies on the floor—the assistant cooks.

  Nadifa stepped to the counter and picked up two carving knives. He would not go through this nightmare unarmed, at least. The others followed suit, finding knives that had sheaths where they could, holding the weapons carefully where the blades remained exposed. Malik picked up the largest butcher knife in the room and held it at his side, ignoring the others' raised eyebrows as he led the way back to the train.

  “Crackers better watch their asses now,” Mike said. “Somebody's about to lose a hand in a minute.”

  But they didn't see a soul on their way to the train, and when they got to the platform, they found only three dead security guards, a bottle of the same whiskey sitting half empty between them.

  “Shit,” Mike declared.

  Darnell began collecting phones again, and Luk shook his head.

  “The train won't go without one of these motherfuckers entering the passcode,” Kevin said, as if stating out loud just how bad the situation was would somehow help. “The gate won't open until 8:00 tomorrow morning for the automated housekeeping train.”

  “So we walk the tunnel,” Luk said. “We hang out by the gate until it opens.”

  “Or we find Hanna and ask her to help us.” Nadifa held up his weapon. “We have to get Ayeeyo, anyway. She could show us the way out—maybe let us use her phone?”

  Luk faced him. “What the fuck do you think, Nadifa? You think this is some kind of White Savior story?” He crouched next to one of the guards and twisted the man's limp wrist around, checking for a pulse, then dropped it. “No. No way, man. I'm not about to ask some crazy-ass Klan chick for help. I'd rather fucking die.”

  “She'll do it,” Nadifa insisted. “The way she looked at her father before he died? She was ashamed of him—disgusted. She'll help us. I know it.”

  Kevin laughed. “You know it? Do you even know where you are, man?” He turned his back on them, moving toward the tunnel. “Fuck this. I'm gonna get to the camp and wait for the gate to open. Y'all can hang around here arguing if you want, I'm tired.”

  Jamal and Mike looked at Nadifa and shrugged, then followed Kevin.

  Luk made a sound of irritation and stood, but Malik stepped forward with his giant butcher knife.

  “The train might work with his fingerprints,” he said. “We should at least try it before we walk for miles.”

  The boys stopped walking toward the tunnel, and Nadifa and Luk just looked at each other, neither caring enough to protest.

  Then Darnell screamed, “Oh, shit!” The hysteria in his voice caught everyone's attention. “Did you see that?” He was pointing down at the guard. “His hand. It moved! It just fucking moved!”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Kevin called, turning back to the platform. “The man is dead.”

  “There! Look! It moved again!”

  They all gathered around the dead guard and stared down at his hand.

  Eventually, Malik said, “So… Should I cut it off now?”

  Luk opened his mouth to answer, but at that moment the guard's entire body convulsed. The seven of them leapt back, cursing. The body lay still again, and they all held their breaths. Then with one shuddering movement, the guard sat up, swaying slightly. He turned his head slowly toward Malik, bleeding eyes unseeing as he made a wet, gurgling noise.

  “Oh, fuck,” someone said as the boys backed up, each of them holding out their knives.

  “Run,” Kevin whispered. “It's a fucking zombie.”

  “There's no such thing as zombies,” Luk snapped, lowering his knife. “The man needs medical attention for his fucked-up eyes, that's all. He must've been unconscious. This is good news. Now he can start the tr—”

  Jamal shouted in alarm as another guard jerked suddenly to life and grabbed onto his ankle. Jamal kicked, but the thing held on, pulling itself forward across the floor, and before they could stop it, the man bit into Jamal's leg.

  Jamal screamed.

  Malik was the first to react. He rushed forward and chopped his butcher knife straight through the guard's neck, pulling his teeth from Jamal's leg and kicking the severed head onto the tracks.

  Jamal's hands were shaking as he lifted his pants to reveal torn and bleeding skin beneath.

  The sitting guard began struggling to stand then, his movements jerky, arms and legs convulsing as if from electric shock, and as the seven boys watched in dumb horror, the third guard began twitching where he lay face-down along the brick floor.

  Luk stepped forward and cut off the twitching guard's head, kicking it after the other one, where it landed on the tracks with a crunch and rolled to a stop facing the domed ceiling.

  The third guard began crawling toward Nadifa, his blood-smeared face dragging the floor.

  “Okay,” Luk said. “Run.”

  Hanna's hand trembled as she reached into the bodice of her destroyed dress for her key card, but she didn't need it. Her door was already open when she reached it. Aunt Chastity was crossing the room carrying one of Hanna's suitcases. She turned, almost managing to cover her confusion at the sight of Hanna fast enough.

  What's the matter, Aunt Chastity? Surpr
ised to see me alive?

  “Hanna! Darling!” Chastity's smile was full of mournful sympathy, her arms outstretched as if Hanna would rush to her embrace and cry on her shoulder. “What happened? It was all so awful. Oh, just simply awful. How could something like this happen here? Someone in the kitchen will answer dearly for this, mark my words. But don't worry, sweetie, I won't ask about your… dress.” She waved a hand around. “Or your hair. You grieve in your own way. Really, it's for the best.”

  She stilled, focusing all her attention on Hanna in a way that made Hanna take a step back as Aunt Chastity brought her hands to her chest as if from sudden pain. “Oh my god,” she gasped, and Hanna nearly rolled her eyes. “My own dear brother has passed on to heaven. Just think! It's all so heartbreaking and horrible I'm at a loss for words. My broken heart has stolen my words, Hanna, it's true. I don't know what to say—what to think with all these overwhelming emotions. It's just too much, Hanna darling. Too much!”

  “Yeah,” Hanna managed, feeling hysterical laughter bubbling up within her again at Aunt Chastity's idea of a loss for words. “This year's banquet sucked for sure.”

  And where were you, darling Aunty? Where was Katelyn?

  Hanna shuddered. She didn't really want to know the answers.

  She didn't want to think about the fact that her father was dead. Dead before she'd had a chance to… what?

  Anything.

  Before she'd had a chance to do anything. To say anything.

  Adam had tried to warn her about Banquet Night. It seemed someone had warned Aunt Chastity, as well.

  Hanna only wanted Chastity to leave so she could change her clothes, arm herself, find Adam, and get the fuck out of The Resort. She would think about everything after that.

  “I know this entire situation must be extremely difficult for you, sweetie,” Aunt Chastity continued. She'd dropped the grieving sister act and switched over to her usual syrupy voice. “Your father was a great man, one of the very best. But now we have to be strong and move on, understand? Appearances matter in situations like this, and it is now our solemn duty to face our colleagues with our heads held high.” She placed Hanna's suitcase on the bed, opening it with quick, efficient movements. “Hanna? Are you listening to me? Pack your things and meet Katelyn and I outside my suite in ten minutes. We'll catch the next transport home. Let the lawyers and shutdown crew figure out this mess from here, okay? Things will work out for the best, honey, you'll see.”