He replaces the trowel and finds the white master keycard on the keyring. Quickly, he slots it into the reader mechanism and pulls it out again. The green pinpoint light flashes and the door lock clears.
He jacks the L-handle down and pushes open the door. Knife in hand, he enters the darkness of the Calanthe, and he holds the door open to welcome in whatever light the hall can offer, but it doesn’t make much of an impact. It’s nearly black inside; he’s all but blind.
Near the entryway, he finds a desk chair on casters, same as the chairs in the Jumellea, and he takes it by the back, rolling it toward him and positioning it in front of the open door as a prop. It catches and holds.
Park moves further into the room, committing himself, and as his vision adjusts he begins to see the scope of the man’s possessions, the way that Nil has taken precious time to arrange these scavenged objects over every available surface. The conference table, a chest of drawers, a mattress on the carpet, a nightstand. Everything Nil calls his own—everything taken by him, hoarded here—has been thoughtfully organized. Jewelry sorted according to its proper place on the body. A pile of women’s undergarments—the blacks and blues and reds—folded, next to the mattress. Wallets and handbags and watches. Photographs of couples, entire families, a few white-bordered school pictures of children wearing their level best. In the far-right corner of the room is a bank of travel luggage, dozens of suitcases and duffels stacked together.
Park goes to the luggage pile and pulls down a battered black roll-aboard with a loop of pink yarn knotted around the grip. He unzips the main compartment, and the inside is completely filled with alkaline batteries, all sizes and types. AAs, mostly, but there are others, even a few watch cells the size of shirt buttons. Most are still in the retail packaging. He pushes the suitcase aside and he takes the handle of the next one.
Park goes through the contents of the bags—opening one after the other, spending just enough time to check for pill bottles—pausing only to shoot glances toward the entryway. He finds a golf-club travel caddy filled with long-handled garden tools. Suitcases entirely dedicated to travel-sized soaps and shampoos and toothpaste tubes. Nail clippers and a set of jewelry screwdrivers. He comes across a sheathed Leatherman, and he threads it through a belt that he finds in one of Nil’s many piles, and when he finishes he puts the belt on and cinches it, notching the last hole. He opens a full-dresser trunk and finds a collection of thirteen fossa skulls, skinned and dried—utterly clean and stark white. He closes the lid. He takes down a luxury garment bag containing an assortment of packaged snacks, hard candies and chocolates, and he stuffs his front and back pockets full of them.
Eventually he comes to a blue canvas sport duffel with a professional team logo stitched into both ends—the kind of bag that a child would use to tote gear around. It lifts easily by the nylon straps, and as he pulls the bag down from the pile, the contents shift and there is a clatter like pebbles shaken in a plastic cup.
He drops the bag and kneels and unzips it, and the interior is filled with prescription pill bottles, smoke-orange and white-capped—hundreds of them. Whole courses of antibiotics and anti-virals, blood pressure meds and oral contraceptives and erection pills. More than a few SSRIs, all the major ones. There are over-the-counter medicines mixed in also, some packaged in bottles, some shrink-wrapped in press-through foil. Ibuprofen and acetaminophen and an antihistamine with pseudoephedrine, the real thing. Generic and name brand medicines, both. Everything.
Park re-zips the bag—there isn’t time to scan the label of every bottle to look for hers. He tosses the duffel aside and delves back into the heap of luggage, picking up a few of the smaller bags and shaking them, listening for the telltale rattle of tablets, but he doesn’t hear anything. After a few tries he gives up the search, convincing himself that all the salvaged medication must be in one place—the man seems too meticulous with his possessions to do otherwise.
He needs to go. He reaches for the duffel, but as he straightens, there is the sound of the chair moving in the entryway, the sound of the swivel bearings in the caster wheels. Friction between the metal long-pins and cylinders in the door hinges. What little light there is in the room is quickly fading out.
He turns around and the door is already falling closed, nearly there, and then he hears a low voice, disembodied, coming from the dark.
“You will be made civilized, wild one,” the voice says.
The door closes, and Park is completely sightless. Immediately he pulls the steak knife by the wooden grip and stands frozen, terrified. Before he can act, he hears the sound of the man wending through the room in his direction—a slow, plodding gait. No sign of hurry. And then it occurs to him that this man has made himself blind intentionally, that he is far more interested in making this experience memorable—something worthy of the effort it will take—than he is with getting it over with, rushing through it.
Park winds the duffel once around his wrist by the handles, taking in all of the slack of the nylon, and then the bag is flush against his outer forearm. He raises it as a sorry, makeshift shield—it’s all he can think of doing. The knife-arm is cocked with the blade at the level of his shoulder. He waits for what’s coming his way.
The last few steps the man takes to reach Park are soundless, and then the man abruptly charges, driving into him with a lowered shoulder. Park is able to buffer a small share of the impact with his outstretched arm, but the force still bulldozes his entire body backward, sending him reeling. He goes down hard, landing flat on his back, and right away the man is standing above him, gladiatorial, straddling his torso, one foot on either side at the level of the ribcage.
The fall takes the air from him—Park is gasping, mouth wide, his throat clicking. Even in the dark he can see that the man is reaching down, descending, but before the man’s iron hands can take hold of him, Park brings up the blade of the knife and drives it into the man’s left leg. Again and again in quick succession, with as much force as he can generate from a prone position. The calf, the back of the ankle above the heel where the tendons are strapped, and once more behind the kneecap. The blade breaks cleanly from the handle. The man’s leg buckles and he collapses hard to one side.
Park stands up and blindly staggers forward—the duffel is cradled in both of his arms. He uses the thin wire of blue light underneath the door as a compass, picking his way past the opened baggage. He is still struggling for air. Behind him the downed man is bellowing, writhing, spewing curses.
Park ratchets the door handle and tries to rush out into the dimly lit hallway, but he is stopped short—the corridor is completely filled. The infected are scattered up and down the passageway, blocking him in; every lost soul that he emancipated from the upstairs floor is gathered here, standing motionless in a seemingly specified place. It’s as though they’re waiting for some kind of cue, an external signal that the time has come to animate, to serve an externally defined purpose.
Park hesitates for a few beats, just staring, but then—lacking any other option—he wades into them. Surrounding himself willingly. The embrace of a walking death, the longest of all the slow processions.
He edges past a pallid older woman, completely unclothed. At this point she’s been reduced to little more than skinned-together bones. Her hand is missing at the wrist, and she is staring straight ahead as though this is the middle of a commute and she is waiting for an everyday form of transport.
As Park moves through the hallway, he tries to ignore the proximity of them. The sights and the feral smells and the memories that are unearthed. The feeling of the remnants of their skin against his own as he passes. His only saving grace is that none of them seem to notice his presence—all of their eyes are focused on the Calanthe.
He picks his way through the fold, and when he catches sight of the lobby entranceway—the glass-paned front doors that will open into a night just like any other sweltering night in the Torluna wilds—he desperately wants to run to it, to throw hims
elf into the outside, but he can’t do anything to draw attention to himself. He keeps his presence small, his movements deliberate and measured, consistent. He emerges from the corridor, the duffel pressed hard against his stomach, and as he comes to the lobby doors he sees the five-foot chain laced through the two handles, binding them closed. The thick padlock at center.
Without hesitation Park sets the bag down, carefully pulls the keys from his pocket and skims through them. He angles the bows, squinting at well-worn labels, and he pauses to glance over his shoulder now and again, glimpsing the backs of some of the infected, still standing like crumbling statues in the corridor. After a time he finds a key marked Main. He tries it in the keyway and it takes—he turns it and the U-shackle snicks open. He sets everything down with care and starts the process of quietly unraveling the heavy chains.
Before the bindings are all the way undone, Nil’s voice sounds out from behind him—guttural, near roaring. It’s in a language Park doesn’t understand. He sees Nil shouldering his way through the ranks of the sick, dragging the bloody leg, pushing to the front line like a wounded officer rallying the forward edge. Directing commands at them, pointing his finger.
None of the infected move, and after a short time the man’s tone softens and his words start sounding more like a petition, as though he’s trying to appeal to a long-dormant center of reasoning or affect—to tap into a group consciousness—and as the man speaks his foreign-sounding tongue, the infected gradually begin to turn their eyes toward Park. For a brief moment he can see the reflection of the dim light in all of them. The cold, blue retinal glow. They seem to have come around to the man’s way of thinking.
All at once, the crowd begins to move, bearing down on him. Park scrabbles frantically at the chain until it’s free, and it slithers down into a coil at his feet. He snatches up the duffel and rips open the door and runs, throwing himself into the dark. High-stepping over debris, over decomposition, feverish. The moon is sharply slivered overhead.
Park tears down the paved path that leads away from the Makoa, toward the atrium, and even though he doesn’t look behind him, he can hear their footfalls mixed with his own, the sound of a manic footrace, prey and pack. Otherwise their movements are soundless. No attempts are made at formulating words or vocalizing anything at all; his pursuers are altogether mute.
His legs are already cramping up. It feels as though they could lock into one position at any moment, seizing like machinery without a lubricant, and then he would fall to the ground and they would descend on him. Forcibly drag him further into this mass hysteria, the collective delusion—he would be entirely consumed by it.
Park bursts into the open-air atrium. Tota Sao. The sweat is pouring from him and he’s gone lightheaded—defocused, as though everything in his mind is softly lit. The duffel is strapped tightly around his fist and he can feel his hand throbbing from the constriction. He forces himself to continue on; he tears past the black wrought-iron cage at center, the bodies. Their crushed repose. The silent structure of the waterfall. Ahead of him are the main lobby doors of the Hotel Lavelha.
He rips the doors open and finds enough ambient light to distinguish the burned-out registration desk and the mahogany valet stand and the station for the bellhop cart, and then he’s through the front doors and into the open. The front facade of the hotel proper. The white fountain, barren, the turnabout for vehicles, the parking lot. The long promenade lined with liana palms. He’s broken himself free from the Lavelha, but they’re still behind him—the hunt party, frothing. Maybe fifty yards, maybe closer than that; he has no way of being certain.
Park is running in the center of the graveled murram. He comes to the front gate of the hotel property, the tall white bulwarks like gun turrets on either side of the opening. The heavy black iron gate is open. He knows what waits on the other side of the gate, but there isn’t another choice, so he plunges through.
He skirts down a short unpaved drive and almost immediately is surrounded by the sundry shops and markets and souvenir stores of the Trap. He pulls up and stops in the middle of an intersection. Bent double, hands on his knees, the duffel slung over his shoulder. Heaving. He spits in the dust of the murram and then wipes his eyes. He glances up and sees the phalanx of devils closing the distance between them. He gathers a handful of gravel from the road surface at his feet, straightens, and waits.
When they’ve come within twenty yards, he bolts in the direction of the park fountain—heading to town center, to the heart. When he looks over his shoulder, he can see them single-mindedly following.
The fountain is surrounded by stairs, five or six on each side of the pedestal, and members of the fossa pack are draped across every tier. Every landing. There are probably fifty of them, and even in the dim light he can see their black forms showing starkly against the white concrete like fissures in the structure itself. Park keeps running, heading directly toward them.
The fossa, all of them, raise their heads at his approach. Electric. Instantly galvanized. Tails lashing. Several flash onto all fours, and he is close enough to hear the rumbling in their throats, to see the display of incisors and the long cuspids.
Ten yards from the fountain he banks left, and at least half the pack bolts for him—snap-triggered, automatic. The sound of spit-backed snarling behind him. Claws snicking against the hard-packed stretches of the murram. There’s no way to outpace them, and he doesn’t try to. As they bridge the distance, he abruptly pulls up and stops running, wheels around and casts the handful of gravel behind him at the oncoming rush, causing the front line of the pack to blanch instinctively, rearing back. They immediately scatter, and when the rear guard sees them scatter, it’s enough of an impetus to make them do the same. And it’s at that moment that the lurching mob of the infected first reaches the fountainhead.
Without hesitation, the group shambles straight into the churn of the fossa. No defensive postures, no avoidance. Their hands are still below their waists, and even as they’re surrounded, penned in, they try to plod onward, to push through, staggering. It’s as though they’re so used to a clear path in front of them that they can’t even conceive of the existence of obstacles.
The animals swarm them—nipping at fingers, testing, sampling—and when no resistance is offered and they taste warm fluid, they turn frenzied, blood-charged. Leaping wildly, dragging the unfortunate souls down by the shoulders, the arms—feasting on the bodies—and the infected seem almost grateful for the excuse to fall, to be done with it. There isn’t a single scream. Park turns away from the sight and he runs.
After a long while, Park cuts through a broad stand of trees and emerges on a beachfront. The look of it is familiar to him—the same stretch of desolate sand, the mottled surf washing to the wrackline, the seemingly recognizable pattern of corpses, like a tessellation you could decipher if you cared to spend the time.
He turns around and re-enters through the treeline and backtracks, and after an hour spent wandering, lost, he manages to reach the mouth of the culvert—their culvert—the shared hole in the damp earth. The galvanized steel corrugate walls and the natural floor. All of the feeble cover he’d arranged over the opening is scattered, cast off. He hurries to the shelter, ducks inside, and immediately sees that everything is gone—even the supplies he left with her—every damn thing.
He waits there in the entranceway, but when he unshoulders the duffel and tries thinking about it all for a while, his mind isn’t processing anything correctly anymore—not like hers always can—so he quits. He just tosses the bag in where she used to lie. He looks around again, as though he may have missed something during the first pass, and then he says his wife’s name out loud, though it feels foolish to him even in the moment, even given the condition he’s in.
Some time later, Park opens his eyes and finds himself sitting knees-to-chest on the sand at the wrackline near the surf’s end, the extremity of its reach inland. His arms are wrapping his shins, holding them in. He blinks a
few times and the feeling is similar to slowly waking, the world spreading open. A low-slung sun and the full panorama of the ocean. He doesn’t know how long he’s been here or why he came or why his forearms and wrists are leaking red. He doesn’t understand how the holes formed there.
He looks out at the water and sees a group of young children standing in the surf around thirty yards downshore—he hadn’t noticed them until just now. Maybe five or six of them, boys and girls. Water at the level of their chests, licking at their collarbones, the slender throats.
There is no organization to their assembly, no discernible structure—just a loose gathering being held at some invisible meridian. All of them are motionless, standing there together gazing downward like a knot of solemn worshipers. The scene is almost baptismal. The sunlight. Children so glowingly pale that they could be enrobed in a white cloth. Breaker after breaker washing over them. Or maybe he’s wrong; maybe it isn’t baptismal at all, and it’s a remembrance instead. Something sacrosanct, like siblings coming together to release their father’s ashes.
Park watches them stand in silence, and then he glimpses the boy—the same boy, his baby boy—at the periphery of the group, and he can’t believe the child is still breathing. This is the reason he couldn’t find the boy’s body, because there was no body. The boy is still living. Park watches the boy, his boy, for as long as he can, but soon his eyes start to feel heavy and he doesn’t fight it. He lets them close.
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