And the second thought was only two words. A location, in fact: New York.
Some desperate part of his mind tried to ignore this. It did seem like a stretch. But if that was the case, why was the age-old reptilian part of his brain demanding that he run? Why was there suddenly so much fear coursing through him that he could actually taste it, odd and bitter like blood in the back of his mouth?
Giving the weird silver object one last look, Sheriff Toby Hudson took off running. He stumbled on an old, charred plank of cedar and nearly fell on his face but regained his footing just in time. He depressed the button on his shoulder mic as he ran and did his best to communicate what he’d found.
“I want someone on the phone to the State Police right now,” he said. “I’m out at that old furniture shop. That noise complaint…I found something that might be bad news. Very bad news.”
He had nearly reached his car before he got a response. It was not the voice of Beatty or Nyles, but the pleasant and sleepy-sounding voice of the woman that sat at the dispatch desk for the night shift.
“I’ll make the call right now, Sheriff,” she said. “What sort of bad news do I tell them you found?”
“A possible bomb. It may be a—”
The last words Toby Hudson ever spoke were cut off cleanly, like someone removing a needle from a record. He heard himself speaking and then a rumbling noise that he not only heard, but felt inside of him. There was one blistering, tiny moment where he felt a sudden rush of pain, something hot and impossibly forceful wrapping around him, throwing him forward and tearing his body apart all at once. Something heavy and hard struck him in the back and he thought he might have been torn in half. Something else went rocketing by his head, taking off his ear and carving a deep furrow into the side of his head, but he barely noticed any of it. The entire world was thunder, fire and a fierce illumination as his body was torn and unknitted while the world came apart all around him.
Chapter 25
The hallway was cold and there was what looked like thick ropes of mold growing between the carpet and the walls. When Paul looked straight ahead, there was no end to the hallway; it stretched on forever, not even interrupted by a horizon line. The walls simply touched one another at some impossible point in the distance, closing the scene off.
But between Paul and that point there were countless doors. Hundreds of thousands of them. Overhead, installed within a ceiling that was far too low to his head, fluorescent lights flickered a sickly white, creating a hectic strobing effect. Paul stepped forward, the carpet thick and sticky under his feet. When he came to the first door, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a dozen or so key cards. He selected one at random, slid it into the lock, and opened the door.
The room was empty, but the bed was unmade. It was also soaked in blood. He could see more blood splattered on the walls and ceiling. He did not step inside the room and as he let the door close slowly in front of him, someone laughed from the other side. Paul went to the next room and when he opened the door, he saw the woman from Reid’s Drug and Sundry. She was standing behind the bed as if it were the counter to her family-owned drugstore. She was holding the same 9mm she’d been holding when Paul tried to help her. He pushed the door further open to enter but it would not open all the way. When he looked down, he saw a body. It was the man he’d watched the woman shoot. He was dead, his face covered in blood, but his cracked, peeling lips still moved slowly to form a smile.
Paul slammed the door shut and went running down the hall. After a few stumbling strides, he came to a door that was already open. The black mold that was growing along the corners of the wall and carpet was caking the door, covering the golden number in its center as well as the lock. Paul stepped inside and saw a man sitting on a very large bed. When Paul entered, the man turned around.
It was Ogden. His eyes were missing and there was all manner of filth around his mouth. His flesh was reddened and when he spoke to Paul, his voice came out in a sound like someone walking through thick mud.
“The virus got me. You sent me off by myself and the virus got me.”
“No,” Paul said. “I thought you could…”
“And now you really think you can help this woman and the girl? Really? Get real, Paul. You can’t help everyone. You can’t save everyone…”
“I know, but I—”
“You sure couldn’t save them!” Screaming this, Ogden stood up on the bed and pointed behind Paul. When Paul turned, he was no longer facing the flickering, moldy hallway. Instead, he was standing in the bullpen area of the Union Township police department. All of the bodies he’d seen inside were all there, all still dead. But they were moving around, going about their daily lives as if the world was not ending, as if they had not all been killed by a senseless tragedy.
“Couldn’t help me, could ya?” a voice said from his right.
It was the officer from Union Township that had taken his own life. Most of his head was missing and when he spoke, Paul could see his tongue moving freely below his jaw. “Couldn’t save me and you won’t save them.” The man reached out and took Paul’s arm. “Might as well take the easy way out like I did. Might as well—”
“Paul?”
Paul let out a shout as he sat up in bed. His heart was slamming in his chest and he was drenched in sweat. He jerked his arm away, thinking it was still trying to be grasped by the fingers of a dead man. But the only figure he saw beside him was a more familiar one. He gasped, collecting his breath as he tried to make his frantic mind understand that he was now back in the room Joyce had unlocked with the card key—that it was only Olivia now reaching for him rather than a mostly-headless corpse.
“Paul, are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he gasped, doing everything he could to shake the terror of the nightmare away. “Just a really bad dream.”
He looked to the bedside table to see what time it was but the green digital numbers that he’d seen just before falling asleep at 10:17 were gone. In fact, the room seemed much darker than it had when he’d laid down.
“The power is out,” he said.
“Yeah,” Olivia said. “I guess it was too good to be true. I just checked my phone when your cries woke me up. It’s a little after four in the morning.”
“Sorry I woke you,” Paul said, still too frightened to feel embarrassed.
“It’s okay. That must have been a nasty one.”
“It was. Did I wake Joyce?”
“You kidding? That girl is out.”
Paul nodded and slowly made his way out of bed. He felt his way around the room until he found the bathroom door. For a moment, he felt like he might get sick. The nightmare had been disorienting and there was still a part of his mind that felt like it was still caught in the horrors of it. It was beyond disorienting.
He stood in the darkness of the bathroom, feeling the coolness of his sweat. He focused on his breathing and listened to the quiet of the room beyond the bathroom door. He could just barely make out the gentle sounds of Joyce’s slight snoring.
Gotta get it together if you plan on getting that little girl to her father, he thought.
With that thought in his mind, he wondered if he should forget about heading to his grandpa’s place. It was a little out of the way and an unnecessary diversion from their goal of reuniting Joyce with her father. On the other hand, heading to Brownstone, West Virginia had been his original plan and it still felt solid. Maybe there, up in the mountains and isolated from everything else, things would be a bit more normal. Maybe the Blood Fire virus had not reached higher elevations. Maybe they could get a better grasp on how things were going with the rest of the world. If nothing else, it would be a good break from the hellish landscape they’d been traversing these past two days.
When his brain and stomach finally felt settled, Paul walked back out into the darkness of the room. He settled down into the bed he’d chosen as his own and looked over in the darkness toward the other bed. He could not see the s
hapes of his traveling companions in the pure dark of the now-powerless room, but he could sense them there. He could hear the rhythm of their breathing and feel them there in the darkness with him.
But even with that scant feeling of security, it was a very long time before Paul fell back to sleep.
***
Olivia woke up slowly, sensing something was wrong. She rolled over and reached for her phone but her hand only fumbled around in empty darkness. Her bedside table wasn’t there—not her table, not her phone, not her keys. As her eyes opened solely to the darkness, she realized that her little electric fan wasn’t running either. What was…?
Everything came crashing back down into reality for her. Her table was not there and her fan was not running because she was not in her apartment. She was not in her own bed, the same bed she’d slept in as a girl and had somehow ended up in her apartment after college. No, she was not in her apartment, not in New York. She was in a hotel room many miles away from home with a four year old girl and a New York city cop in a world that seemed to be dying.
Olivia sat up slowly and reoriented herself. She reached to the other side of the bed and when she searched for her phone this time, she found it on the bedside table (located on the opposite side of her bed from back home). She checked the time on her phone and saw that it was 6:10. Joyce was snoring softly beside her and Paul was sprawled out on the other bed.
She placed her hand on Joyce’s forehead, checking for signs of a fever. When she felt none, she slowly slipped out of bed. Her stomach was rumbling and as she sat in the darkness, she felt that she needed to get out—that she needed to move. She would not dare leave the hotel without Paul or Joyce, but she found herself thinking of the empty halls and employee rooms down by the lobby. In their hurry to find a room yesterday, she wondered what sorts of things they had missed.
She took the card key from the table, which she could just barely see from the glow of her phone. She looked back to Joyce one last time and then, as quietly as she could, she left the room.
The moment she was standing in the hallway, she felt a sense of relief. Maybe it had been just sitting in the dark that had made her feel so stifled and trapped. Natural sunlight came in through the window at the end of the hallway, making up for the recently overhead fluorescents. She walked along the carpet in bare feet and walked out into the lobby.
While this hotel was not the sort to offer continental breakfasts and did not have a specified eating space, she did see that there was a snack and coffee bar located to the back of the lobby, opposite the check-in desk. They’d not seen it yesterday because from behind the check-in desk, it would have been hidden by the curved wall that separated the snack area from the little thin walkway that led to the restrooms.
In the snack area, she found packets of instant coffee and juices that had been left in a silver bowl with ice. The ice had melted but there were five juices waiting to be taken—three orange and two grape. There was another silver bowl that she supposed was filled with fruit on a daily basis but all that remained today were two small oranges and a mostly-brown banana.
She went behind the desk and looked around for something to pack some things up in. Finding nothing behind the desk, she then tried the little supply closet on the right side, tucked away like it was some sort of office. The door was partially open so she stepped inside and found a large room that looked to be a mix of a supply closet and a small pantry. She instantly saw what she needed when she entered. A box of small garbage bags sat on one of many shelves in front of her, the sort that went in the small trashcans in every room. She took a few of them and then also spied another little treasure on the other wall: toothbrushes and tooth paste. She got one for herself, Joyce, and Paul, along with a few tubes of paste.
Turning slightly to the right, she then saw the meager supply of food the hotel kept on hand. The first bonus find were several packages of small cereal boxes, the individual size that came in twelve-packs. Next to those were several packaged muffins in blueberry and banana nut flavors. She gathered up as much cereal and muffins as she could fit one of the bags and then turned to leave.
When she did, she nearly screamed.
Sitting on the floor just behind the opened door, was a man in a suit. He’s been positioned behind the door so that when Oliva entered, she had not seen him pressed between the back of the door and the far shelf against the wall. The man was dead, his head hanging limply to the side. His dead hand clutched a cellphone that would never be of any use again. The hotel nametag on his left breast said his name was Tobias.
Olivia had seen countless corpses in the past twenty-four hours or so but this one, for some reason, struck her hard. Maybe it was the surprising element to it, or maybe the almost intimate nature of the discovery. For whatever reason, she found it hard to take her eyes away from him. Even as she made her way back to the door, she could not look away. And as she drew closer to poor Tobias, she began to understand why.
Some maddening part of her fully expected Tobias to get up, slam the door, and keep her trapped here forever. She knew it was ridiculous; she could tell from his pale color and the scarecrow-like way his shoulders were slumped that he was dead, almost certainly a victim of the virus.
She stepped by him quickly, a little whine of fear crawling out of her throat as she did so. At the very last moment she convinced herself that she saw him moving. And as she reached for the door to slam it closed, she was certain his cold, dead hand would land on her ankle and drag her back into the pantry. Of course, that did not happen and she slammed the door with a grunt and a little moan of grief.
She did not waste another second before she dashed back toward the hallway. She did veer off long enough to grab the juices, coffee, and oranges from the snack area but that was it. She’d had enough early-morning exploring. And even as she finally hurried to the hallway and back to their room, she dared not look over her shoulder, fearing that Tobias would be back there—that he would be following her, trying to understand why the world had taken him but spared her.
Chapter 26
The next time Paul woke up, it was to the sound of Joyce’s voice. She was sleepy, irritated and despite Paul’s own lack of sleep, sounded impossibly cute.
“’Livia, the TV’s broke!”
Paul turned over and opened his eyes. He saw Joyce standing in front of the television, and Olivia hovering between the living area and the bathroom. She was brushing her teeth and giving Joyce the most sympathetic smile she could muster.
“Well, the power is out,” Olivia said through a mouthful of toothpaste. “No electricity means no TV, or lights, or music.”
“Oh,” Joyce said. “So the TV is dead, just like all of the people?”
It was a morbid statement, but sounded almost innocent coming from Joyce. It was enough to make Paul sit up and look to both of them. It was somehow encouraging to see Olivia brushing her teeth. Any of them doing anything resembling normal was a plus; it was a reminder that there might somehow be a light at the end of this dark, terrible tunnel.
“Good morning,” Olivia said, looking over to Paul.
“Same to you. Any idea what time it is?”
Olivia checked her phone and showed it to him. “Ten after eight. I got a nearly full charge before the power went out, it seems. I tried calling Joyce’s father this morning, when I saw a single bar of service but the line just wouldn’t connect.”
“Did you try making an emergency call. Maybe something local?”
“I did. Nothing. I even tried sending a text and for a minute, I thought it worked. But it came back as undelivered.”
Paul slid out of bed, trying to remember if he’d thought to pack his toothbrush. As he walked to his bag to get his answer, he saw a few small boxes of cereal sitting on top of the little counter that ran along the wall beside the TV and dresser. They were the tiny individual sizes that were often sold in twelve packs.
“Where did those come from?” Paul asked.
; “The pantry downstairs,” Olivia answered with a bit of guilt in her tone. “I woke up around six and couldn’t get back to sleep. So I went exploring. I found cereal, muffins, juice, and instant coffee. It’s also where I found this toothbrush…and the one I got for Joyce,” she added, giving Joyce a stern look.
“You went out?” Paul asked, surprised.
“Yes, but no farther than the lobby. I thought about going outside to find a car I could get into, hoping to get another station with some news, but decided not to.”
Thinking of Olivia wandering around the hotel was terrifying as far as Paul was concerned. Of course, that could easily be because he could still not shake the imagery of his nightmare from his head.
“That was dangerous,” Paul said. He felt a lecture coming on but figured he had no right to deliver it. He barely knew the woman; if she was brave enough to wander through a hotel that had recently lost its power in the midst of an apocalyptic virus scenario, maybe it meant she had more courage than he’d originally assumed.
“I know,” she said. “But I couldn’t just…I couldn’t just sit here in the dark.” She then quickly looked back to Joyce and said, “Get in here and brush your teeth, please.”
Joyce did as she was asked while Paul dug for his own. Something as small and mundane as brushing his teeth seemed sort of foolish in the face of what was waiting for them outside but it all went back to that feeling of normalcy. It was odd how well it worked; the moment he had the new toothbrush Olivia had snagged for him in hand, he felt a bit more confident that they’d have a productive day—that Brownstone and Joyce’s father were just around the corner.
After a breakfast of dry cereal, hotel muffins and orange juice—all courtesy of the Red Roof Inn—Olivia and Paul hefted their packs over their shoulders and started back out towards the lobby. Joyce followed along obediently enough but when they came to the automatic doors at the front of the building, she let out a deep sigh.
It Falls Apart Series | Book 1 | It Falls Apart Page 22