by Cesare, Adam
Now in the morning light she could see the blood that dotted her new gown. Eden had been so nice to make it for her and she’d made a mess of it.
She frowned but only for a moment, until she realized how nice her jewelry must have looked.
The best building material she could find had also been the most problematic.
The branches she used had thorns. The pain and blood had been worth it, though, because the ensemble had worked out brilliantly.
Allison used the thorns to hold the flowers in place.
She stood by the fire, pirouetting along with the embers to music that she imagined.
There was no one left in camp, so she danced with abandon. Her necklace and crown infrequently caught on the fabric of her gown or her flesh and tore a small hole.
She could hear Davey’s footfalls before she saw him.
Allison stopped dancing and watched him enter the camp. His tall shoulders were stooped, but even slouching he was handsome.
He straightened up and smiled when he saw her.
“You look beautiful,” he said and gave her a dry, light kiss on the mouth.
“Do you really like it?” she asked and gave him a quick spin. It was a motion she’d remembered doing for her then-boyfriend after her first spray tan. She might have been paler now, but she felt so much better to be away from all that stuff.
“I love it,” Davey said, checking his watch. He was just being silly to amuse her, because he didn’t wear a watch. “Is it about time to go, you think?”
“Oh yes,” she said only just able to contain her excitement.
He offered her one long arm and she took it.
“Your kingdom awaits, my queen.”
Her blush must have outshone the bright droplets of blood dribbling from her scalp.
*
Tobin and his Chosen Few stayed low and wove through the cars as they crossed the parking lot and entered the back door of The Brant.
The four of them waited in the hallway that led to the lobby for a minute and waited for the signal to sound.
Tobin had been allowed to put together his own group for the overthrow of the hotel. Davey had suggested Jeb, but Tobin did not want to be outshone by the big bastard. He’d taken Sissy, John and Billy, all good soldiers who could follow orders and shoot straight.
They stood in a rough semicircle, holding their breaths. The boys watched the lobby in front of them, Sissy kept her eyes on the parking lot through the glass door.
Tobin had opted not to wear the gown and wore his plain clothes. The other three were dressed in their white gowns, makeshift duct tape bandoliers around their shoulders to hold their ammunition.
The first shot sounded from upstairs, followed almost immediately by one outside.
Jeb, Tobin guessed. Recklessness. That was another reason why he hadn’t brought him along.
Tobin took the lead down the hallway and peeked around the corner before waving the rest of them towards him. Daisy was seated at the front desk, her brow knit with worry, her hand on the telephone.
“Start on the rooms,” he said to John, “I’ll deal with her.”
Tobin walked into the lobby, bringing the Winchester up and shooting Daisy low and in the side. She fell off her chair as she screamed.
The shot might have been enough to kill her, might not have.
Sissy and Billy made their way up the stairs to the second floor, not stopping to look at Daisy crumpled behind the desk.
“Move,” John yelled, from behind them, “don’t let anyone get by you.” Tobin imagined that the teen was relishing the opportunity to be the second-in-command, the illusion of power.
Tobin knelt over Daisy. She moaned as he dug a card key out of her front pocket and tossed it to John over the desk. The teenager wiped the key against his gown, cleaning the blood off it, and then followed the rest of his strike team upstairs.
Tobin stayed behind with Daisy.
“You were always so sweet Daisy,” he said. “Why?”
She just breathed and whimpered in response, so he made his question more specific.
“Why did you choose to stay here? You’re not much older than me, you’ve got nothing in common with them,” he said. “Why do it? You must have known that it was going to come to this. Your team losing.”
She swallowed hard, it sounded like there was more than saliva and mucus in her breath, there probably some blood.
“You haven’t won anything,” she said. Moments from death, it seemed like her lisp had finally been fixed.
There were screams and the sound of gunshots from upstairs.
“Hear that?” he asked. “That’s victory. By any means necessary.”
“Fuck you,” Daisy said. It was the first time he’d ever heard her curse, it sounded so unnatural that it may have been the first time she’d ever cursed.
He glanced at her wound and then noted that the puddle under her was so dark and deep it was almost black.
“Are you going to kill that girl?” Daisy asked, launching into her own set of questions. Her voice was so weak that it sounded like she was fighting off sleep. “Did she know anything about this? Does she know what you are?”
Tobin ignored her questions, just stared at her and waited for her to stop.
“She doesn’t,” Daisy said, sounding confident that she’d guessed the right answer.
“Sorry, but don’t want to waste the bullet on you,” he said. “These are expensive. But I can’t leave you here like this.”
Tobin stood, sucked on his upper lip in frustration, and kicked Daisy’s face in with the heel of his boot.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Hugh Mayland was not going to be able to kill the old woman.
Not only that, but he was going to die while cradled in her arms, her tears dripping off his head like a baptism.
These realizations seemed to make the blood pump faster out of the hole in his neck.
He would also die without ever knowing who shot him.
“Where’s Tobin?” the voice shouted. The girl must be closer now, hovering over Brant and Hugh. He imagined that she was still brandishing the gun, possibly pushing it into the old woman’s skull the way she’d put the tip to Hugh’s neck.
Who the fuck is Tobin? Hugh thought. There was an entire drama that he was not privy to. He tried to construct a narrative that could have lead to this point.
“I told you that I don’t have him,” Brant said. “They’re killing everyone, don’t you understand? Can’t you hear?”
Hugh was unclear on what that last part meant. He couldn’t hear anything outside of this room. It could have been a made-you-look feint on the old woman’s part. He hoped that the girl wouldn’t fall for it.
Shoot her, he thought. Please!
Even though she’d shot him, Hugh had nothing but love for the girl.
He even had the time and concentration to make up a story about her. In his version of events, she and her husband, Tobin, had been staying at the hotel. Something had happened to Tobin and this girl had figured out that Brant was responsible.
In his mind, the girl was an avenging angel, the gun-toting vigilante that Hugh Mayland had often dreamed of becoming himself since his stay here began.
If she’d also been instrumental in putting Hugh out of his misery, so be it. As long as he got to hear her put a bullet in the old woman, he would die happy.
“This is your last chance, tell me where Tobin is,” the girl said to the old woman.
“He’s with David! This is all David’s work! Don’t you understand that, you thick little—” The old woman’s words were cut off by another gunshot, this one sounding like it came from the opposite end of the room, but that could have just been a trick played by Hugh’s near-deafness.
The old woman’s arms twitched and then disengaged themselves from Hugh. He fell back against his pillows and into a pond of his own wetness.
“Why did you do that,” the girl cried out. Hugh thanked God th
at she was still alive, but he was still confused as to what had happened, who had shot who.
He put his hand out in front of him and reached over the bed. Hugh tried to exercise them every day, but still his arms and legs were weak. He was beyond tired, but the adrenaline pushed him forward.
Slipping in his silk pajamas and blood, he slid onto the floor, hitting a familiar softness that wasn’t the carpet.
There was muffled conversation elsewhere in the room, but he couldn’t make out the words and probably would have been too excited to focus.
He moved his hands around the shape on the floor, trying to make an image in his mind, wanting to savor this moment before he lost consciousness.
It was Brant’s body, all right.
Even though the familiarity shamed him, he knew every wrinkle and contour.
When he reached her face, he couldn’t stop himself from giggling, the childlike joy flowing up from his throat. He coughed and felt blood try and fail to clear out of his lungs.
One side of her head was missing, the skull jagged like a broken terracotta pot.
He pressed both hands into Brant’s face, feeling the warmth leaving her body.
He’d outlived her.
Hugh Mayland felt comfortable enough to slump back against the bed and allow himself to be done.
He hoped that the afterlife looked like London.
He couldn’t wait to see Hannah again.
He embraced the blackness, hoping that later there would be light.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Claire’s father had taught her not to lie, but if she was going to lie, he’d said, make sure to stick with it.
Brant was sticking to her lie.
“I told you that I don’t have him! They’re killing everyone, don’t you understand? Can’t you hear?”
Claire held the gun tight. Each gunshot caused her to spiral deeper into confusion, so she held on to the one thread that still made sense.
“This is your last chance, tell me where Tobin is,” she said. She was no longer afraid to get close to Brant. If the woman tried to attack her, the woman was going to die. That was the decision Claire had made.
As Ms. Brant started to speak again, saying something about how this had been all David’s fault, there was the familiar beep of the electric lock at the hotel door.
Claire spun just in time to see Tobin enter the room, his rifle raised.
He fired and the top corner of Brant’s head exploded. Claire’s right side was covered in warm gore as Brant slumped to her knees and fell backwards against the nightstand. Father Hayden’s water pitcher fell to the floor but didn’t break.
“Why did you do that?” Claire asked, the question coming out in more of a yell than she wanted it to. The gunshot still rang in her ears.
Tobin lowered the rifle, letting it swing around his shoulder, the strap drawing it to his back. He held out both hands for her and even though she was confused and scared, she went to him.
His arms wrapped around her tightly. Disregarding the mess of blood and specks of bone, he kissed her.
His fingers wrapped around her free hand while the other’s worked to disarm her. She let him take the pistol, only feeling a slight postpartum chill when she no longer had the familiar weight in her hand.
“Where were you?” she asked, her voice a whisper. He held both of her hands tighter to stop them from trembling.
“They had me locked in one of the second-floor rooms,” he said. “I have no idea why they didn’t bring me downstairs and end it. Their mistake, I guess.”
“Who let you out? What are those shots?”
“The revolution, baby,” he said. “That’s the answer to both questions.”
The blood on her face was beginning to cool and become sticky, she had to get it off or she was going to vomit like she had in the woods.
“I need to wash my face,” she said and pushed Tobin away. She hoped that the push hadn’t been too rough, whether he was able to tell how disgusted she was.
She left bloody handprints on every bathroom fixture she touched. The embossed gold faucet knobs were tarnished with blood, the brown red giving definition to the leaping rabbits etched into the metal.
The water felt good, cleansing not only her skin but her clogged mind.
“It’s been quite a long day,” Tobin yelled from the bedroom, filling the silence between gunshots. The sounds were infrequent now. The revolution must have been winding down.
There was suddenly something she wanted to know. She thought how to phrase the question as she toweled off her face. Tobin’s answer would change the course of the next few minutes.
She yelled through the bathroom door, listening for Tobin’s answers.
“How many guests has Brant killed? Do they always use the same place?”
“Don’t think about that right now.”
“I want to know,” she said while pulling at the elastic of her stockings. The baton had left a divot in her skin and the blood rushed back into it with pins and needles.
“It’s a ceremony. Part of ceremony is tradition, so yeah. I guess they use that room for,” he paused and added some weight to his voice, “everything.”
She unlatched the door, then flushed the toilet to hide the sound that the baton made.
She thought of the way that Christine and Jane had been left in the woods, thought of the way that Davey had described the scene. I think they were left like this for us to find, he’d said.
She opened the door, walked straight at Tobin and swung.
Her first hit had been crucial and she didn’t miss, bringing the bulb of the baton down on his nose, flesh and cartilage buckling and folding like wet cardboard. There was no blood yet, but there would be.
She wound up again with her backhand before he had a chance to bring his arms up to defend himself. Her next hit wasn’t as clean but there was still a satisfying smack as she clipped him on the left ear.
There was no pain in Tobin’s eyes only confusion and anger.
“No,” he said, falling to the floor. He brought his right hand up to block her while his left fumbled with the strap of his rifle.
With one swing, the three outermost fingers on his left hand broke outward, the webbing between the pinky and ring finger tearing, blood rising up from the wound.
He was never able to get the gun up after she went back to working on his head. She didn’t stop hitting him until she could no longer lift the baton.
Before leaving, she took Tobin’s rifle and looked around at the three bodies in the room.
Father Hayden had stopped breathing, his hands covered in Brant’s blood. Even without lips, she could see that he’d died with a slight smile on his face.
*
After everything that had transpired in room thirty-one, The Brant Hotel was silent. Outside there were no more gunshots.
Claire walked to the end of the hallway, unable to see much out the window other than a small swath of the empty Main Street going out of town.
Descending the service staircase, she stopped at the second floor, hearing voices. In the hallway, there stood three teenagers dressed in white bed sheets. She recognized them from camp, but couldn’t place their names.
Around them the carpet of the second floor hallway was covered in bloody footprints, the doors to all the rooms ajar.
Claire knew what had happened without being told. These three young people, kids, had killed everyone on the second floor and were now having a cigarette break before moving upstairs.
You should kill them, a voice inside her said. It wasn’t Silverfish anymore, but it wasn’t Claire, either. It was a new voice, forged and tempered in room thirty-one.
She didn’t kill them. There were too many of them and they were too used to killing. She may have gotten one or two with the element of surprise, but she’d never survive. Instead she stayed out of sight and waited for them to head upstairs before creeping down the hallway and towards the lobby.
She didn’t look behind the front desk, didn’t want to know where the blood that seeped under the wood was coming from.
“I’m sorry, Daisy,” she said to the empty lobby.
Through the glass double doors she could see the familiar glisten of a fire.
Slip out the back, you can try and escape through the woods.
“No,” she said aloud, not entirely sure why other than that she was tired and that Mission seemed too big, too populous for her to escape on foot. She approached the front door and pushed through, listening to the sound of the sleigh bells announce her exit to the outside world.
There was a bonfire on the front lawn of The Brant. Most of the kindling was made up of The Brant’s green-and-gold sign, but a portion of the burning material wasn’t wood.
Claire smelled the cooking meat and was ashamed of herself for feeling hungry.
She went unnoticed for a longer time than seemed possible. As she stood there, she watched Jeb throw Pat Dwyer’s naked body onto the fire while everyone watched and sang songs.
Davey stood with his back to her, hand in hand with a new member of the congregation, one that Claire didn’t recognize from the back. The girl turned around to look at her.
As she turned, Allison became the first of the gowned figures to notice Claire.
“There she is,” Allison said and pointed. Her friend opened her mouth wide enough so Claire could see the space in her teeth.
What have they done to you? Claire thought, a tear running down her face.
Everyone else turned, some of them still singing, some of them becoming silent.
Davey stood next to Allison, his hand resting across her shoulders. Allison was bleeding from the head where she wore a crown of thorns and flowers, but the pain didn’t seem to bother her. She just smiled an empty, unknowing smile.
A member of the crowd, his name was Josh, Claire thought, looked to Davey.
“Can we?” Josh asked Davey. The boys and girls around Josh looked at Davey too, hands tight around their weapons.
“Yes.”
Davey nodded and a moment later the bullets tore through Claire’s body.