by L. ROY AIKEN
Going down the stairs I realize I never did get my beer. I should probably just raid the fridge in my room. If I ever see a bill I’ll laugh until I stop.
7
On my way down the hall to my room I’m startled by the whump! of a body throwing itself at the other side of a door, roaring and snarling like a frustrated predator behind the glass at the zoo. Thank God that thing hasn’t figured out how to work the latch. Thanks again for being many doors down from mine. I don’t want to have to try and sleep with that thing’s angry, hungry yowling in my ears.
I open the door to my room, this same room I woke up in this morning. The same room on another planet, where the hotel staff is dead or food for the same. I close the door behind me and secure the latch.
The sun edges below the horizon, its orange-yellow beams blazing like a silent scream through the window. I look down onto streets that were completely empty this morning. Still no cars or trucks rolling about. Just…people?
It’s like Mardi Gras, wall-to-wall bodies and not one of them walks a straight line. I see no cars or trucks, armored or otherwise. No muzzle flashes of rifles or sidearms. All you see are these erratic, atomized little blotches, every one a stone killer.
I could get a view of the park from the other side of the building, see if the National Guard vehicles are still there, what the police are doing, if anything—that is, if I had the master key. I could take a quick trip downstairs and look. Run down the stairs, find a weapon I could use…no. Couldn’t find one in the lobby to save my life earlier.
But in the kitchen? All those knives and tools!
Christ, it’s a long way down. Why not wait for the morning? We’re leaving then, anyway. Me and Tanner. He’s got that Glock…
…with how many bullets left in it? Besides, the blasts attract others.
And Tanner?
I’m pounding down the fire stairs, the heavy base of a floor lamp cradled in one hand. Going round and around down the concrete and steel flights, the reality slams home: I’m in a 20-story convention hotel with absolutely no staff on duty. The only traffic on the street are mobs of flesh-eating pedestrians. Law enforcement and the military have been neutralized, if not eliminated altogether. There’s no one left alive but people with severely morbid luck—like me—and smooth-talking psychopaths like Tanner. And I expect the rest are plain psychopaths who don’t have Word One to say whatsoever.
The 15 flights go quickly. I take deep breaths to steady myself at the door into the lobby.
I push it open.
Cool, damp stench washes over me in a wave of climate-controlled air. God only knows how bad this would be if the power were out. I listen for movement while my eyes adjust to the darkness. I notice the curious dead have left the windows and doors about the hotel. Most of the traffic is concentrated on the streets and sidewalks. Our fountain-centered plaza outside of the front doors gives us a good buffer.
I hear noises from the back area. I spare a glance at the bodies on the floor so I can step around them. The old man in the boxers is on his back, his junk still hanging out the flap. Mercifully, all I see of the woman whose face I’d ruined are her pale, blood-and shit-streaked legs. I walk past the front desk and Angie’s still on the floor. Poor Angie. I step behind the desk, stop short when I see her face.
God!
There’s no way Angie could have made a face like that when she was alive. Not on tequila, not on angel dust, not on a dare. Her teeth are dry like her eyes; they don’t glisten so much as glow with unworldly menace. This is a monster’s face. I realize now the worst wasn’t leaving her on the floor like a pair of dirty socks. It was letting this dutiful, sweet daughter of the paved-over prairies to turn into this.
The light outside is fading. I edge around the front desk to the lounge area. The TV is still on. The screen shows a stock loop of landmark shots from around the world, implying that the SOS is going out to all the powers that matter, so remain calm (and feel free to join in the prayers if you need something to do while cowering in your shelters-in-place). There is no news on what is happening in the individual countries, let alone here in town. Just shots of large congregations, close-ups of supplicants on their knees, mumbling into their clasped hands. I’d try the other channels but that noise in the kitchen….
With the mmmm! and hnnnnn! sounds over the slurping and smacking there’s no doubt as to what it is. The question is, who is that thing eating? Did Tanner come down ahead of me and get caught?
(Goddamnit I don’t want to do this I don’t want to do this I don’t want to do this!)
I push through the swinging doors.
I see the dark mass on the floor before me. The creature—Jesus, what do we call these things?—doesn’t look up until I turn on the light. She was a woman once, younger and somewhat more attractive than the scrawny cougar I defaced earlier. She looks up at me from where she sits carelessly on the floor, like a toddler plopped on her butt to play with something. She doesn’t see me, of course, but she knows I’m there. She sniffs. Smell must be a major factor in how they register living flesh.
This lady’s problem is she’s got a scabby VanDyke around her mouth from feasting on the cooling remains of Officer Dalton. Registering new scent is difficult with her current meal literally under her nose.
I stand as still as possible. After a while she resumes noshing from a rip she’s torn through Officer Dalton’s exposed man-boob. I take a step back.
With a triumphant roar she rises quickly, facing me as if she really sees me. Her arms thrust forward, fingers clawing. I swing the floor lamp stand and she grabs it with blood-freezing force, the metal support pole warping in her grip.
I let go of the stand and duck behind the hot table. She slings the stand away, stumbling over Dalton’s body as she comes for me. I’m casting about the room, looking for the—there! The chef’s station.
A heavy, cleated meat tenderizer. A cleaver.
She has animal sense enough to brace one arm against the hot table to hold herself upright as she takes large strides to close the distance between us, her blue-gray hand gliding along the brushed steel of the grill table. But I have two working legs and a righteous fear for my life.
The cleaver is in my left hand, the meat hammer in my right. She rounds the edge of the table. Her arms stretch to take me, her flesh-clotted teeth bared to her blue-black gums as she moans in anticipation of fresh meat. I bring my left arm across my body and swing out.
One arm falls just below the elbow; the other dangles by a strip of flesh. The woman yelps, more in rage than pain, and lunges at me with her legs. My right arm comes up, around, and brings the hammer square between her eyes.
I can’t tell if she’s truly down or just stunned. Recalling the reporter’s admonition that the lower brain must be destroyed I bury the cleaver in the back of her skull where she lies face-down on the floor. If that doesn’t do the job I don’t know what will.
“Unnnnh?” says Officer Dalton, and I’m so glad he spoke up or I wouldn’t have seen him. I pull at the cleaver.
It’s stuck. I step out of the way and end up tripping over the woman’s body. Officer Dalton reaches down for me and I roll away just in time. He falls across the woman, his hand pushing at the blade in the back of the woman’s skull. It squishes to one side, prying up a section of bone. Best of all, it’s loose.
I can’t reach it without being grabbed. Dalton’s hands flail and grasp at me across the remains of the woman who turned him. I think of how that Guardsman’s flesh bulged in the grip of that fat woman, of the lampstand in that girl’s hands. Once those things have a hold on you, that’s it. You’re done for.
It’s probably what happened to Dalton. No telling what he was doing with this woman in the first place but it’s a safe bet he didn’t think something so inconsequential as a woman could take his fat Trained Professional ass down. All she needed was a couple of handfuls of clothing and flesh and her jaws did the rest.
I scramble to my feet.
Knives of varying lengths hang from the wall behind the chef’s station but they’re not long or thick enough to sever hands. Not as fast as I need to do it. The world’s largest iron skillet sits to one side. I swipe at it with one hand and nearly dislocate my shoulder. I grab at it two-handed and swing as hard as I can at Dalton’s hands. I hit one; with luck I broke the bones in it.
Like the woman before him, though, mere injury only enrages him. He lunges for me. I sidestep. Dalton’s foot catches between the woman’s ankles and he goes down face-first. The muscles in my chest and arms sing as I raise the skillet, dropping the broad black iron on the back of his skull as hard as I can. The shock buzzes clear through my elbows. Between the tile floor and the swift impact of broad, flat, heavy-as-hell iron skillet, his head is…okay, we’re done.
I stand over the stilled bodies, fighting my gag reflex. I’m aware of a terrible shit-and-spoiled-meat odor and it’s not helping my adrenaline hangover. I marvel at how readily—and with a force I didn’t even know I had—I slashed at other humans with sharp blades and swung blunt objects into their skulls.
I barely make it to the sink. The projectile force of my vomit covers the distance for me. I turn on the spigot and work the spray hose to rinse my mouth and clear the sink.
I turn to face the bodies. Of course, they’re not human; their drive to eat living flesh is fucking nasty, fuck them! Still. This came so easy. Not that I’m ungrateful for this opportunity to second guess my own success.
Tanner be damned, I know I rate a weapon. And whaddya know, I have a minor gold mine at my feet. Officer Dalton, and his full urban paramilitary battle-rattle, bleeding between my shoes.
The stick? Jesus, that’s hilarious! I think it’s a safe bet everyone who’s surviving this so far—especially the ones who will make it through until morning—has guns. There are more than a few chewed-over National Guardsmen and police to pick over once someone drops their turned carcasses. If I can forget my squeamishness long enough to drop a zombie cop there’s a good chance someone else—someone with no squeamishness to forget—is doing it even better.
The Taser? No. The only thing I can really use is the 9mm and the holster. Three shells in the magazine, but an extra full mag on the belt. Loud, but definitely lethal. I’ve got a flashlight, too. I take the cleaver and hammer to the sink to rinse them off and it occurs to me I might not have access to running water for a while. Might as well make use of it.
I find the blade sharpener. It’s one of the better ones, as befits a chef who works at a hotel important enough to rate its own police officer. I stuff it in my pocket as I walk around the back of the kitchen, looking for the back door where deliveries are taken. I’m guessing he came in this way, but I can’t be sure, no more than I know what he was doing with that young woman. A rape in progress? Or maybe he really was playing hero to some scared young thing hurt by one of the monsters.
Yeah, right. Seriously, though, didn’t this Trained Professional see the same things I did on TV, only much worse, and up close and in person? After watching Guardsmen with body armor and M4s go down, what made him think his XXL uniform would shield him?
I’m no detective, I can’t tell if they came through this way. The door is closed, and (should be) locked from the outside. I put my ear against the metal. Then, cleaver in one hand, hammer in the other, I lift my foot and push the door open at the bar with my leg.
Clear. Even better, the dumpster at the far edge of the loading dock is open. I let the door fall closed. I make sure it’s latched and locked before I run back to drag what’s left of Dalton and his lady friend here.
The door braces open with a hinged foot at the bottom, enabling me to half-carry, drag the bodies out and sling them into the dumpster. The dumpster lid leans against the lip of the dock so I don’t have to go down to street level to close it. I find the mop and bucket, fill up the bucket and clean the gore from the tile.
I’d rather not look at the bodies in the lobby, let alone manhandle them outside, but they won’t smell any better come morning and I’m going to want breakfast. I find a luggage dolly and start rolling the bodies two at a time to the dock. Then I find some disinfectant and get the blood and shit up as best I can. Poor Angie….
In any event Tanner doesn’t need to know what I just learned I’m capable of. Not while I’m still trying to make sense of it myself.
God help me, this is actually kind of thrilling.
8
Tanner gamely pretends he didn’t get punked this morning. “I thought you’d gone ahead and left,” he says.
“I figured I’d sleep in,” I say, walking past him to the kitchen behind the bar. The look on his face when I came around the corner behind the stairs was priceless. At least he’s not wearing those silly tennis shorts.
“You realize it’s a long way to Colorado from here.” says Tanner, following after. “We’ve got a lot of Kansas to cross. Six hundred miles!”
“I’d allow for some leeway on our ETA. You said it yourself; we don’t know who’s waiting out there for us on the road. Or what.”
“Okay,” he says. “You’re right about that. That’s why I was hoping we could go scouting on foot. I suggested that last night, too, if you’ll remember.”
“I remember. And since this is the last place we’ll have ready access to food for a while I suggest eating the biggest, heartiest breakfast we can come up with.”
I bang through the swinging doors behind the bar into the kitchen. He bangs through after me. “We don’t have the time for that!”
“You don’t have time for that. Me, I figure I’ve got the rest of my life to starve to death.” I take off my suit jacket, hang it up where Angie had put it yesterday. “For however long that is.”
“We can find food on the way!”
“Oh, you’ll let me stop to eat? When?”
“I thought you’d want to see your family tonight!”
I laugh. “You were honestly going to let me see my family first? My apologies, Mr. Tanner. All this time I’d presumed you were passive-aggressively carjacking me.”
“All I’d asked was whether or not you want to come with me to Highlands Ranch. I’ve got guns and supplies there. I thought I was doing you a favor.”
“That’s what you want the man with the rental vehicle to think while he does all the driving, puts all the gas on his credit card, and takes nothing from you but orders.” I’m turning the dials on the fryer and grill. “By the way, how were you getting around while you were in town? Didn’t you have a rental of your own?”
“I had a driver.”
“You’ll want to call him up, then. I’m running my own itinerary here.”
I go into the fridge for eggs. Tanner is still standing by the grill when I come out. “You gonna eat all that?” he says, watching me crack eggs on the grill.
“Not right now. I need to find something to carry the rest with me.”
“Look, I understand if you don’t trust me,” Tanner says as I check the fry vats. “I imagine you figure you had a pretty good reason to move from your room.”
“How did you know I’d moved?” I say.
“You weren’t answering; what else was I going to do? I had the master key. I looked in. Everything was gone; I figured you’d left already!”
I go to the freezer and get some breaded chicken tenders. I wish I’d thought to put these in the refrigerator to defrost last night but moving all those twisted-faced corpses turned me off all thoughts of food. I was too happy to grab my new gear and get out. Last night was no good until I got a fresh, non-corpse-carrying luggage carrier up to my room and moved everything down to the second floor. Then I could finally work on my growler of high-end draft before passing out.
“Look,” Tanner says. “Like it or not we need each other. Our best chance for surviving is to have someone on shotgun at all times. Alone, we don’t stand much of a chance. We have to sleep. Those things don’t.”
I pull my large oval plate close for t
he eggs. Something’s missing. Orange juice? I drop the first round of chicken tenders into one fry vat, a bag of onion rings into the other. The crackling and steam causes Tanner to step back.
“There’s probably an optimal number of people who could expect to make it safely through the swarms of dead and bands of marauders,” Tanner says as the racket dies down. “Right now it’s just you and me. But we need to build on this. We’ve got to trust each other!”
“It doesn’t occur to you that trust might have gone out the window when you let that zombie cougar have at me last night?”
“What? You’re going to hold that against me?”
“Unreasonable as it sounds to an arrogant, sociopathic fuck like you, Tanner, yes.”
“Okay, okay! Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about but I obviously crossed a line somewhere. I’m sorry! It won’t happen again. Will you accept my apology?”
“No.”
“You’re not accepting my apology, then.”
“I just said I wasn’t. That you don’t know what you’re apologizing for renders it invalid.”
“All I heard was cursing and my name.”
“Then we’re done! Look, this might be the last time any of us will see eggs, bread, and fried cheese sticks, and I’d like to say a proper goodbye! So—” I jerk my head in the direction of the door.
Tanner opens his mouth to say something but shuts up. He turns and leaves the kitchen. I hear the TV come on in the lobby.
I’ll give him credit. He could have pulled his gun. And the more I think about it—goddamnit, he’s right. We both need a wingman. The hell of it is someone like him won’t entirely have my back. And you could fill a fleet of Luxury Tanks with the fucks I don’t give for him.
Which brings home how long it might be until I have eggs again. The monsters were eating the family dogs at the mass burial; will chickens survive this? Cows?