Something shattered against the inside of the door. It sounded like one of the room’s glasses.
Roger said to the clerk on the phone, “I think the guest in Room 1426 might be having a problem.”
Two more tinkling crashes against the door. There went the rest of the glasses.
Daisy barked.
“Shhhh,” Roger hissed.
“I’m connecting you now, sir. I will try and contact the guest.” A click, and Roger heard ringing inside the phone, then inside the room.
Mr. Ullman picked up on the second ring. “What?”
A wavering scream erupted from inside, echoing the electronic ringing of the room’s telephone. A deep, thudding crash. The screaming did not stop.
Daisy gave another worried bark.
“Where are you?” Mr. Ullman asked.
“Fourteenth floor,” Roger said, horrified at the violent sounds from within. “Tell them to stop trying to call this room. I don’t think the ringing is helping.”
Mr. Ullman gave a curt order; the telephone in the room went silent. The heavy banging did not stop. In fact, it grew in volume. Underneath it, Roger could hear sobbing.
Roger said, “Listen, somebody better get up here like right now. Something is terribly wrong in there.” He realized he was talking to a dead phone. The connection had been broken. Roger dialed the front desk again. “Have you called the police yet?”
“I’m sorry, who is this?”
Roger repeated his information and said, “Listen to me, dammit. Someone is in trouble in there. If you won’t call nine-one-one, then I will!”
“The proper authorities will be notified once we have ascertained the problem,” Mr. Ullman said as he rounded the corner down by the elevators, moving swiftly and silently on the thick carpet. “Many of our guests do not wish to involve any authorities unless it is absolutely necessary. It is our responsibility to respect their wishes.”
From inside the room, they both heard a final, crunching crash, then nothing.
As Mr. Ullman got closer, he produced an electronic key card. “Please step back and for God’s sake, get that dog out of here.”
He inserted the key card into the slot above the door handle. There was a click, and the light flashed green briefly. Mr. Ullman swung the door open, sweeping the broken glass aside. From the doorway, they could only see down the short hallway, past the bathroom, and the edge of the bed. A breeze stirred the rumpled sheet that hung off the bed.
There was no sign of the room’s occupant.
Mr. Ullman called into the room. “Hello? Hello? This is Mr. Ullman, general manager of the hotel. I hate to trouble you, but we have had a number of calls regarding the volume of activity in this room. I’m afraid I need to speak with you. Hello?”
Still nothing. Just the corner of the sheet fluttering.
Roger could feel warmth. He held out his hand. Warm air was definitely flowing from inside the room. Had the guest turned on the heat?
Mr. Ullman took one step inside, knocking one more time.
“Hello? Hello?”
Before Mr. Ullman stepped fully into the room, Roger realized why the room felt warm and why a breeze was moving the sheet when skyscraper windows do not open.
The room was demolished, as if the occupant had been given a shot glass of cocaine and a sledgehammer. The bed frame had been ripped away from the wall. The plasma television had been driven through the glass coffee table. Something had ripped great tufts of stuffing out of the chairs. And the desk chair had been used to shatter the floor-to-ceiling window.
A hot wind surged through the room, pushing aside the ripped curtains and making the sheet billow out a moment, before settling back against the corner of the bed. Roger stepped toward the window, saw blood on the edges of the glass. He got close enough to the edge to see the deep shadows on the building across the street when vertigo dropped into his gut like a bomb and he clapped a hand over his mouth, afraid he might vomit.
He screwed his eyes shut and tried to breathe through his nose. He kept imagining the fall, throwing yourself out over the abyss, feeling nothing but the humid summer air as the windows streaked past, faster and faster, the sidewalk rushing up in a brutal embrace. With his eyes closed, it was almost worse; he imagined he could feel the building swaying gently in the wind.
He popped his eyes back open and stumbled back to the couch, where he collapsed. He put his head between his knees and focused on his breathing. Daisy came up and licked his face. He scratched behind her ears and that calmed him.
“Don’t touch anything,” Mr. Ullman said, his voice strangely calm, almost placid. He was over his shock now, and a coolly efficient crisis mode had taken over. “The police will want a word. We will conduct the interviews in my office, not in here.” He called the front desk. “The police will be arriving shortly. Please send them up to room 1426. Thank you.”
Daisy sniffed around the bed and promptly sat down.
“Get that dog out of here. Now.” Mr. Ullman was on the phone with the CEO’s secretary. “Tell him that we have an emergency situation, and he needs to call me back immediately. I will be contacting Benny Weisman myself.”
The sound of sirens from the street reached them.
Roger went to snap Daisy’s leash onto her collar and froze.
A single, tiny bedbug trundled out from under the sheet and headed for the bottom of the mattress.
“Good girl, good girl.” He patted Daisy’s head and gave her a treat.
Mr. Ullman hadn’t noticed, phone still glued to his ear. “Benny? Benny! Drop everything and get here now. I need you ten minutes ago. What? No, no. Drop it. I don’t care. This is an emergency, I—” He broke off, those detail-oriented eyes zeroing in on the bug as it wound its way down the side of the mattress and disappeared underneath. “What? Benny, listen to me. Get here now.” Mr. Ullman hit END CALL.
Roger lifted the mattress and followed the bug with the beam of his flashlight.
The Mr. Ullman ran a shaking hand through his thinning hair. “Please tell me that is not what I think it is. Please.”
Roger shook his head. “I hate to make your day worse, but somehow, they got back inside.”
“I don’t understand. We spent thousands.... How is this possible?”
Roger knelt and flashed the beam at the carpet, then the molding, following it to the corner. He fished out his pocketknife and picked at the painted silicone strip. He pinched the end between his thumb and forefinger and pulled, ripping it away from the trim along the floor for about a foot or so.
Bedbugs spilled out like clotted, reddish-black oil. Hundreds of them.
“Oh dear me,” Mr. Ullman muttered.
Roger snapped his pocketknife shut and pulled a canister of bug spray from his bag. He hit the bugs with a short burst. The effect was almost instantaneous. The bugs shuddered to a stop, then slowly curled their legs around themselves and stopped moving forever. More bugs seeped from the crack, so Roger gave them another blast. If there were any more inside the wall, they got the message.
Mr. Ullman’s wingtip nudged the silicone strip back into place. He scattered the bugs under the bed, so they almost looked like flecks of pepper from a distance. He stared down at Roger. “This stays between us, do you understand?”
Roger shrugged, and got to his feet. “This is very unusual behavior for bedbugs, I have to say. But if this is what you want, then I—”
“This is absolutely what I want. This cannot get out. You do whatever you have to do, and I will deal with the police. Find out where these godforsaken bugs are coming from and kill them. Kill them all.”
“When he was first brought in, we thought he might be a suitable candidate for . . . testing.” It was clear to Dr. Reischtal that the tech was having trouble facing certain realities about the homeless and indigent people the soldiers had been rounding up to use as guinea pigs. The tech pulled off his glasses and cleaned them with his tie. His hands shook. “The . . . subject collap
sed during intake.”
“Before the dosage was administered?” Dr. Reischtal asked.
“Yes, sir,” the tech said, hurrying to keep up as they barreled through the busy corridor. “The decision was made to quarantine the subject until tests results could confirm infection.”
“And what have these results revealed?”
The tech nodded, flustered. “That yes, he is indeed infected with the virus.”
“I still fail to see why I was summoned. The man is homeless. It is reasonable to assume that he was bitten by a rat.”
“Uh, that’s the thing, sir. We have been unable to locate any rat bites, any significant scratches of any kind.”
Dr. Reischtal stopped suddenly and the tech nearly collided with him. The doctor whirled, eyes laser sharp behind the tiny lenses. “If I understand this correctly, you are telling me that we now have an infected patient that does not bear any evidence of virus transmitted by a rodent?”
“Yes, sir. Uh.” The tech studied his shoes, unsure of how to phrase the next piece of information. “The attending found . . . something else.” He felt the cold glare from Dr. Reischtal and refused to look up. “It might be best, sir, if you were to see for yourself.”
Dr. Reischtal gritted his teeth, biting back a savage response. With this unprecedented level of incompetence, it was little wonder the virus was still spreading out in the streets. “Very well,” he managed. “Where is the subject?”
The tech led him farther down the corridor. Dr. Reischtal followed without another question. The tech pointed to a door that, despite the urgency in the hustle of the passing techs, nurses, doctors, and soldiers, everyone still managed to avoid any close contact with, instead choosing to walk along the far side of the corridor. This created a bottleneck, which further enraged Dr. Reischtal. Even the tech wouldn’t get any closer than fifteen feet.
Dr. Reischtal stopped outside the closed door and willed himself to ignore the ineptitude and downright superstitious nature of the personnel, letting them squeeze along the wall behind him. Without any further ceremony, he opened the door and stepped inside.
An old, naked, black man was strapped to the bed. A bundle of ragged clothes had been piled over a sharp pair of wingtips in the corner. Dr. Reischtal took in the long, stiff hair, the dirt under the fingernails, the grime of the streets that had settled in the lines that shaped the man’s oddly beautiful face. Clearly, he was homeless scum and nothing more. Dr. Reischtal felt his anger building. This was a waste of time. Someone had lost their nerve, and had failed to locate a bite mark. Or, at the very least, a scratch. Whoever was responsible was about to find themselves permanent guests on the sixth floor. And he would start with the tech outside.
But then he saw the tiniest hint of movement in the man’s long hair. A bug, so small it might have been a slow moving freckle, crawled from the top of the man’s ear over to hide in his wiry eyebrows. Dr. Reischtal cocked his head.
Another bug crawled out of the man’s surprisingly thick patch of pubic hair and disappeared over his hip. And still another wandered out from the man’s armpit, appeared to test the air, and retreated back the way it had come.
The old man moaned once and shivered. He did not awaken.
More bugs scurried across the dark, cracked skin.
Dr. Reischtal took a step backwards, eyes suddenly flicking around the room, the ceiling, the walls, the floor, tuned to any tiny movement. A storm of understanding gathered behind his eyes, threatening the feeble dam that he and the rest of the team had erected in their rush to understand and explain the virus. He left the old man alone in his room and shut the door securely behind him.
The tech was waiting with wide eyes. “You saw them?”
Dr. Reischtal did not respond at first. He was too busy reorganizing the information that he had believed, up until thirty seconds ago, to be reliable. The new pieces fell into place, revealing the inescapable path of the virus. Several parasites had been found on the animal smuggler’s body, as well as the bats themselves. Except, of course, for the missing bat. He had read reports that detailed how bat bugs and bedbugs were nearly identical, and would invariably mate if one colony came into contact with another, since both used traumatized insemination. Only one in sixty would produce living offspring. However, the offspring of that mutation had been known to be eighty-six percent successful when producing offspring of their own.
He was no arbovirologist, but as far as he understood, the supposedly established fact within the scientific community that bedbugs could not transmit diseases was hypothetical, nothing more. In fact, bedbugs had been discovered to be infected with MRSA. It was entirely possible that the mutant offspring of bat bugs and bedbugs could carry a new virus.
If it was true, then he had been hunting the wrong species. In many ways, he wasn’t surprised. This new revelation fit what he knew about the Ancient One. Why hide in rodents when he could disguise himself in something even smaller, something even more insidious? Dr. Reischtal thought about the Black Plague, and how all the holy men had blamed rats, when in reality it was the lowly flea that had spread the devastation.
He spoke without looking at the tech. “Please tell me a sample of . . . these organisms has been obtained.”
“Yes, sir. Identified as Cimex lectularius, the common bedbug.”
“And was the virus present?”
The tech was silent for a moment. Dr. Reischtal could tell that the tech knew damn well, just as he did, that bedbugs had never been found to transmit any significant virus, unlike say, mosquitoes with malaria or even the West Nile virus. The bedbug was a nuisance; that was all.
Until now.
The tech finally took a breath and nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said in a small voice. “It appears that these bedbugs are carrying and transmitting the virus.”
Dr. Reischtal allowed nothing to show on his face. “Very well,” he said. He pulled out his phone and called Sergeant Reaves. “I want a flame thrower team up on the fourth floor immediately. Everything within Room 417 is to be burned. I want this room erased, do you understand?”
Sergeant Reaves understood.
Dr. Reischtal said, “Every single last patient is now under quarantine. No one is to enter an infected room unless fully protected by a fully enclosed hazmat suit. Contact pest management. I want every common area in this entire building sterilized. Highest priority.” He hung up and turned to the tech. “This information is to be kept confidential until if and when I decide to report this to the proper authorities. Right now, I want anyone who has touched him, anyone who sat next to him, anyone that was in the same room as this man, isolated. Starting with you.”
CHAPTER 39
4:21 PM
August 13
Mr. Ullman finally forced Roger to lock Daisy up in their animal hospitality suite. Apparently, a lot of celebrities like to be seen travelling with their pets, but have no interest in actually taking care of the damn things. The Fin was equipped to accommodate dogs, cats, birds, lizards, pretty much anything smaller than a horse. Roger left her in a crate in a quiet room on the third floor, buried back by the washing machines.
They went back up to the fifth floor to Mr. Ullman’s office. He kept his keys in a small safe under his desk. He spoke quickly; he was due back upstairs to finish giving his statement. “If you think the storage facility has anything to do with this, then have at it, by all means. Investigate to your heart’s content. Just promise me that you can kill these things once and for all.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“I shall expect this key back by the end of the day. If I do not see some results by then, please inform your employer that I will be speaking to the competition first thing in the morning.”
Mr. Ullman ushered Roger out of his office and locked the door behind them. Mr. Ullman headed for the elevators, while Roger went down the stairs, following a hand-drawn map. Mr. Ullman thought it would be for the best if Roger did not take the elevators; there was a chance
he might run into a guest or police officer. So he took the service stairwell down until he hit the basement. He worked his way through the kitchens to another service door, which led to another stairwell, dropping another four floors.
He descended the stairs all the way to the bottom. He had to unlock the door, and found himself in a narrow utility hallway. The floor was metal grillwork, and Roger could see that the pavement was wet under the walkway. His footsteps made a hollow, banging noise as he strode down the hallway. He continually had to duck under exposed pipes in the ceiling. He whistled; they must have had a hell of a time moving all the furniture down here.
The door wasn’t quite at the end where the hallway dead-ended in a spiderweb of pipes, but it was close. He fingered the key and checked the padlock. Still locked. A thin layer of dust covered the lock and the door handle. Mr. Ullman was right: no one had opened this door in months.
Roger twisted the key and the lock popped open with a click that sounded unnaturally loud in the confined hallway. He thought he heard a high, urgent squeaking on the other side of the metal door, shrugged it off. It was just water or something in all the pipes. He slipped the lock out of the hole, pocketed the keys, and grasped the cool door handle.
He felt very alone for a moment and felt acutely aware of Daisy’s absence. It gave his chest a quick ache. He promised himself that as soon as he confirmed that the furniture was still secure and sealed, he would take Daisy out to their favorite burger joint, where they let her sit with him out on the back patio. He decided he might just throw caution to the wind and order at least two beers tonight. Heck, maybe three. After the day he’d had, he felt like he certainly deserved it.
He twisted the handle.
The door popped open, showering Roger with debris, the air suddenly full of cotton snow, scraps of fabric, and slivers of wood. It poured over and around him like a soft avalanche. An awful, foul odor followed, and in its own way, was almost more powerful than the shredded wreckage. He instinctively breathed through his open mouth; it was as if a tornado had ripped through a furniture store, grinding and chopping everything and throwing all of it against the door.
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