“I wouldn’t be able to feel or move my fingers,” Nash said.
“It will be a lot safer.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“Maybe I should do it. I’m used to handling this.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing. No offense, you just don’t.”
“None taken. We’ll do it together.”
Steele led Nash past Nadia’s collection of Christmas lights and Christmas tree ornaments, all boxed up and ready for the season, but left in storage this time around. There would be no Christmas decorations upstairs this year.
The room ahead was locked. Dead-bolted from the outside. The door didn’t come that way, of course. Steele had added the deadbolt himself.
He paused when they reached the door to give Nash a moment to brace himself. Nash would only be the second person in the world to see what was on the other side. Nadia refused. Steele tried to convince her that it would be good for her, but she said it would destroy her.
Steele opened the door.
Nash gagged when the stench hit him.
Charles Norton Steele was born nine years earlier, on December 26th, the day after Christmas, in Lander Regional Hospital. His parents, Joseph and Nadia Steele, felt like the happiest couple of earth.
Joseph Steele was then considering a run for mayor and had a decent shot at the job. He had a law degree from the University of Colorado in Boulder, served eight years on the school board and four on the city council. He and Nadia had spent two years in a Victorian-era house with high ceilings, crown moldings, built-in cabinets in the dining room and a front porch bigger than some people’s living rooms.
Whether he’d win or lose the mayoral job, the Steeles couldn’t be happier, especially with baby Charles in their lives.
Nobody called the boy Chuck. It sounded too working class for the son of a politician and lawyer. Joseph and Nadia hoped the boy would go even further than his father, so they planned on moving to Cheyenne or Denver as soon as Charles reached his teenage years so they could enroll him in a private school and get him on track for an elite university.
His ninth birthday was coming up and it would not be a happy one.
Not down in the basement.
When the infected stranger from Pinedale came to the playground, Charles didn’t run fast enough. His guard was down. Everyone’s guard was still down. The infection, at that point, was something that existed only on television before the stations went off the air.
When the school called Joseph and Nadia and told them their son had been bit, they knew exactly what would happen next. Charles himself knew exactly what would happen next. He’d seen the television reports. His parents had made sure of it.
It was Joseph Steele’s idea to lock Charles down in the basement. What else was he supposed to do? Have his own boy shot?
“Maybe they’ll cure this thing,” he’d said to Nadia.
“Who can possibly cure this?” she’d said.
She refused to help her husband secure their son in a cell. She refused to go down there for any reason at all.
She didn’t even want to stay in the house anymore when Charles started screaming. Their infected son didn’t sound like her son anymore. He sounded like a wounded and furious animal trapped in the basement. Nadia slept with a pillow over her head the first night and with tranquilizers the second night. She threatened to move to a hotel, but Charles had abruptly stopped screaming.
The boy was still alive. His infected mind grew accustomed to being contained, fed and watered, to living in the dark and the cold, to the rope tied around his neck on one end and to a support beam on the other.
He wasn’t happy down there—that was for damn sure—and he was dangerous, but he was quiet most of the time, though not reliably quiet enough to invite company to the house.
So Nash was the second person after Steele himself to see Charles tied up and rabid.
Steele’s on-site security team knew about it, of course. Steele had to tell them something. They could hear Charles screaming down there.
Charles looked at Steele and Nash with malevolence in his eyes. He did not recognize his father. That was clear. His facial muscles were all bunched up. He looked like a predatory animal in a boy’s body.
“Jesus Christ,” Nash said.
The room looked like a cell in a dungeon, and the stench was unbearable. The boy had not been washed in more than a month. He had no change of clothes. He could not have been any more filthy. He had no toilet and wouldn’t have used one anyway. Dirty kitchen plates and bowls were on the floor.
Nadia hated her husband for doing this. Give the boy up to God, she’d said. Steele couldn’t do it and he was right not to do it. Here was a doctor with a blood serum taken from a naturally immune woman, there to resurrect his son like a baby Lazarus back from the dead.
Steele held Charles’ arms behind his back with one hand and turned the boy’s head to the side with the other as Nash inserted the needle into Charles’ neck and depressed the plunger.
They both stepped back. Charles lunged at Nash with his baby teeth bared, but the rope around his neck stopped him short.
“How soon will we know if this works?” Steele said.
“I wouldn’t expect any change at all for at least two or three days,” Nash said. “It might not even work. You have to understand that, okay? We’ll know for sure one way or another after a week.”
“Come back in two days,” Steele said.
“Of course,” Nash said. “Until then, I think you’d be well advised to keep your wife out of this room.”
“She’s never coming down here.”
“She probably shouldn’t.”
9
Hughes went down for a nap around 6:00 in the evening and got up at 9:12 exactly. He wanted to rest until midnight so he could stay up until dawn, but his body would not let him sleep more than three hours outside his regular schedule.
He didn’t expect any trouble the first night in the motel, but he was going to stay up and wait for it anyway. If something bad—aside from detaining Annie at the hospital—was going to happen on Day One, it probably would have happened already, but Hughes couldn’t be sure of that. He had no real information. All he knew for sure was that Steele would not let Annie go and would therefore almost certainly see Hughes, Parker and Kyle as problems to be solved one way or another, if not immediately then soon enough.
And where the hell were the cops? Was Steele even Lander’s real mayor?
Hughes had staked out houses a number of times as a bail bondsman when he had to trace skips. Cops loved to complain about the boredom of stakeouts. Hughes didn’t mind them. If you’ve got a comfortable place to sit, a thermos of coffee and a little light jazz on the radio, you’re good to go.
Hughes had no kind of radio in his room, no light jazz and no coffee. His room came with a cheap coffee maker with a stained and chipped flask, but the single-serving packets of grounds were long gone. He doubted Max, the motel manager, had any more in the office. Hughes wouldn’t go down there and knock even if he knew for a fact that Max still had some coffee. His motel neighbor, Andy, clearly didn’t like or trust Max, which was reason enough to stay clear for now.
Hughes had no real reason to trust Andy either. They’d only talked outside in the parking lot for a minute, minute and a half tops, but Hughes was good at reading people. Andy was friendly and open and Max didn’t seem straight. Hughes picked up a vibe from the guy, a slightly sinister odor.
Rather than sit in his room all night, Hughes wanted to go for a walk and get a feel for the town, but that would have to wait until morning. Surely the motel was under some kind surveillance, and he wanted to make an initial impression of complacency and compliance.
So he kept the curtains open and the reading lamp on until a few minutes after midnight, then clicked it off, stuffed some extra pillows from the closet into the bed so it looked like he was asleep, and sat in one of the uncomfortable dining chairs as f
ar away from the window as possible. If anyone approached his room, he’d see them coming.
And he would be ready. All the heavy weaponry was in the Suburban, but he had a claw hammer in his backpack. He took it out and kept it on the floor next to him.
If anyone came, he’d have a couple of options. He could meet them head-on, or he could escape out the back. There was a window in the bathroom that opened behind the motel. It was a small window and made of pebbled glass for privacy, but he could get through and out. He’d already made sure of that.
He waited in the dark and watched. The motel’s exterior lights lit up the parking lot just fine. Hughes could see inside his own room okay and he knew nobody outside could see in. Their eyes would be adjusted to the lights outside. They’d be blind to anything in the room that wasn’t right in front of the window, and Hughes was sitting all the way in the back.
For a long time, nobody came. Nothing happened at all outside in the parking lot. He heard no sounds on the other sides of the walls, only the hiss of the radiator inside his room. His immediate neighbors, Andy and Parker, were at least in bed if not asleep.
Hughes’ eyelids grew heavy. He nodded off a couple of times and woke when his head fell forward and snapped back up. He needed light. The near-total darkness signaled to his brain that it was time to sleep now, that the day was over. He pinched himself, bit his tongue and held his breath. Anything to stay awake.
It was nearly 3:00 in the morning when he heard someone bang on one of the doors toward the street. More of a thump than a knock, maybe even a kick. Just a single one, followed a few moments later by another.
Not someone knocking on somebody’s door. Not a friendly rap-tap-tap, nor an authoritarian police-style open up right now kind of demand. This was something else.
He stepped up to the window—nobody was out in the parking lot who could see him—and he heard a door burst open all the way down on the motel’s far end nearest the street. Max’s office door, probably.
Hughes was wide awake now.
He retreated again to his invisible place deep inside at the back of the room.
Outside, Max shuffled into view like he was drunk.
He moved slowly, dragging his feet, with one of his shoulders hunched and his head cocked at an odd angle.
Not like he was drunk.
Like he was infected.
Max couldn’t be infected. How could he be infected?
Max had his back turned and couldn’t see Hughes, so Hughes picked up the claw hammer, crept up next to the window and mostly concealed himself behind one of the curtains. Max was still shambling around out there, not really paying attention to anything in particular.
No way was he actually infected. He had to be drunk or whacked out on Quaaludes or some shit. Hughes had half a mind to just open the door, step outside and say, “Hey, Max, what’s up?” He didn’t. His spidey sense told him, don’t you dare.
Instead, he stepped completely out of view, claw hammer in hand, and tapped the glass just once with his knuckle.
He heard Max spin around at the sound. The guy was probably now facing the window. Hughes crept over his bed to the back of the room where he’d be invisible again and looked outside.
Max stood thirty feet or so from the glass, one of his shoulders still awkwardly hunched. He looked straight at Hughes.
Hughes knew he was still invisible in the back and the dark, but the motel’s exterior lights lit Max up like he was standing up on a stage. And Max looked all kinds of wrong. His facial expression was flat and blank, like his mind wasn’t there at all. He was clearly in an altered state of consciousness. If not infected, then drugged to the gills.
Hughes slipped unseen into the bathroom and groped in the dark on the counter for his tube of toothpaste. He found it, unscrewed the cap, stepped unseen back into the main room and tossed the cap at the window. It hit the glass with a small plastic plonk.
Max rushed up to the window like he’d been sprung from a trap, placed his face against the window and slapped the glass with the palms of his hands.
He slapped the glass again, harder this time, and made an awful sound half-way between a grunt and a moan.
Max was infected.
Hughes had no idea how that was possible. When did Max get bit? Had he even left the office? Hughes hadn’t heard any kind of commotion outside. Surely Hughes would have known if Max had been attacked anywhere near the motel.
It had happened somewhere else.
Max slapped the glass again.
Hughes heard a faint sound from Andy’s room. It was barely detectable, but it was there. Hopefully not Andy’s feet hitting the floor.
Max was waking up the motel, and no one else had a clue what was happening. Andy might open his door and pop his head outside to find out what the ruckus was all about.
Hughes could open his own door and smash Max’s head in with the claw hammer—no problem—before Max could hurt anyone, but then what? What would Steele and his militia think about the motel manager being murdered in his own parking lot barely twelve hours after the new guys showed up in town? They wouldn’t believe for a second that Max had been infected, that bashing his brains into the pavement was an act of self-defense that made the whole damn town safer.
No way they’d believe that unless they saw it happen.
Maybe they would see it happen.
Hughes wasn’t awake at 3:00 in the morning because he had insomnia. He was awake at 3:00 in the morning because he was all but certain the mayor put the motel under surveillance in case the newcomers thought they’d hit the hospital and take Annie away. Hughes was also awake because it didn’t take some kind of a genius to figure out that getting rid of potentially troublesome and hostile newcomers in the dead of night would be a whole lot easier and safer than doing it in the middle of the afternoon.
The Soviet secret police never knocked on doors to take people away at lunch time. They always moved at 4:00 in the morning. Hughes had read about a guy, some big shot whose name he couldn’t remember, who’d defected from Russia to the United States during the Cold War and lived the rest of his days peacefully in Maine or Vermont. The guy stayed up all night for the rest of his life. He could not have been safer, but he still couldn’t sleep until the first rays of dawn streaked the skies because it was the only way he’d know for certain that they wouldn’t come for him in the night.
That story made an impression on Hughes. He never forgot it. So he was awake at 3:00 in the morning.
Surely Steele had men out there somewhere, even if they weren’t going to yank anyone out of bed at 4:00 in the morning, but nobody was coming. Even though an infected motel manager was banging on the glass, nobody out there seemed to notice or care.
Max—or the diseased version of Max—slapped the window again. Hard. He might break the glass if he hit it much harder. He might even hurl himself through it if he got hopped up enough. Hughes had seen it happen a couple of times. It happened at his own house in Seattle when Sheila stepped in front of their living room window on the last afternoon of her life.
Hughes would have to brain Max with the hammer. No choice.
Even if Max didn’t break through the glass, he’d wake up everyone in the building if he hadn’t already. Andy or Parker or Kyle could open their doors any second to find out what the fuck was going on out in the parking lot, and Max would be on them in seconds before Hughes had time to respond.
Hughes could bang on the walls, wake up everyone up, and shout to let them know what was happening and warn them to stay inside. It would probably drive Max into a dangerous screaming frenzy.
Instead, he crept into the bathroom, slowly slid the window open and slipped out.
His feet landed on frozen dirt. A cement path ran behind the motel and alongside the boarded-up tax attorney’s office next-door.
Hughes wasn’t wearing his jacket—just black jeans, hiking boots and a huge fleece pullover—and the night air was beyond freezing. He felt the heat
leaving his body within seconds. He crept toward the front corner of the motel and peered up and down Main Street.
He saw a black Range Rover parked in front of a muffler shop two blocks up and away from downtown pointing toward the motel. It was parked facing the wrong way on the opposite side of the street with two guys in it. The motel’s surveillance, just barely out of sight. Darkness obscured their faces, but Hughes was pretty sure they were awake. They were sitting up straight. They’d see if anyone left the property, but they couldn’t see inside the parking lot. They had no idea what was going on.
He stepped into the street with the claw hammer concealed behind his legs so the guys in the Range Rover wouldn’t know he was armed. He crossed the street to get a little distance between himself and the motel parking lot and to make sure the guys in the Range Rover saw him. No way could they miss someone crossing the street in the middle of the night two blocks down and right under the street lights.
They didn’t miss him. Hughes could see them stirring in their seats.
He couldn’t see Max yet. He heard nothing from the parking lot either. Max wasn’t banging on the window anymore. No one in the motel had opened a door yet. Nothing was happening.
Hughes reached the sidewalk on the other side of the street, waved at the guys in the Range Rover, and walked toward them as casually as he could, like he was just out for a casual stroll. The guys in the Range Rover didn’t wave back.
The motel’s parking lot came into view. Hughes saw that Max was still standing in front of the window but no longer with his face pressed to the glass. He was losing interest and perhaps had forgotten that he’d heard anything in the first place. No one else in the motel was making any noise to arouse his attention. He seemed to be returning to staggering and shambling mode and waiting for some kind of stimulus. He hadn’t turned and noticed Hughes yet.
Just twenty more seconds, Hughes thought, and he’d call out, rouse Max back into predator mode, and lead him up the street toward the Range Rover before putting him down in clear view of Steele’s security men.
Resurrection (Book 2): Into the Wasteland Page 8