Still there was no movement.
“She might be dead,” I said. “If she came in here while the power was still on this room would be freezing.”
“We need to make sure.” Clara crept forward and reached out, touching the woman on the shoulder.
The woman spun sharply around, glaring at us with red, bloodshot eyes. Gobs of thick spittle frothed at the corners of her mouth and trickled down her chin.
“Oh shit.” Clara squealed and pulled her hand back, half falling out of the cooler.
The woman pulled herself up, mouth open, baring bloodstained teeth. She made odd grunting sounds, deep and guttural, inhuman. A badge attached to her soiled uniform sported the name Alice.
And then she lunged.
Alice shot forward so fast it took me a moment to realize what was happening. Her hands flailed at me, her nails grazing the skin of my cheeks, fingers clutching for the collar of my shirt.
I twisted free, leaving a ripped clump of material in Alice’s possession. I stumbled backward, at the same time reaching for the cooler door, and slammed it closed with all my might.
It almost worked. At the last second an arm shot through the gap. The door bounced off with a sickening crunch of bone, preventing it from closing.
Emily screamed.
I put my shoulder to the door and pushed back, holding it in place, ignoring the slightly rubbery resistance provided by the trapped arm.
I gritted my teeth and set my feet, determined not to let her out, but unsure exactly what to do next. If I eased up on the pressure, she would slip through the gap, but I couldn’t latch the door again with Alice’s arm pinned the way it was. I looked around, frantic, for something to wedge the heavy door in place, thus freeing me to make my escape, but there didn’t seem to be anything suitable.
“What now?” I said to Clara, hoping she would have some idea what to do next.
The door shuddered as Alice threw herself against it, determined to escape her impromptu cell.
“I don’t know.” She looked confused.
“Well we need to come up with something. I’m not sure how long I can hold on here.” I could feel my shoulder going numb.
“Why don’t we cut the arm off,” Emily said, eyeing a nasty looking meat cleaver hanging from a hook above a prep station. “That would fix it.”
“What?” Both Clara and I looked at her.
“If we chop it off, we can close the door. Problem solved.”
“And who’s going to do that, you?” I retorted, bracing as Alice slammed her body against the door again with a bellow of rage. “Because I sure as hell have no intention of cutting anyone’s arm off.”
“Well–” Emily bit her bottom lip.
“Exactly.”
“We’re going to have to let her out,” Clara said, summing the situation up. “We don’t have a choice.”
“There must be another way.” I was being stubborn, I knew, but the last thing I wanted to do was let this madwoman loose. I still remembered the run-in with Walter back at the gas station, and somehow Alice seemed even more insane.
“You can’t stay there forever. Eventually you will get too tired to hold her back.”
“I know.” The same thought had occurred to me.
“Forget the door. Leave it.” Clara pleaded. “We need to get out of here. We need to run. It’s our only chance.”
“Fine. When I say run, we run.” I wished I had never opened the cooler, but it was too late for that. “Ready?”
“Ready.” Clara gripped my arm.
“Me too.” I could sense the fear in Emily’s voice.
“Okay then,” I said, keeping my eyes fixed on Alice. “On three. One, two, three- Run.”
I jumped away from the door just as Alice hit it once again. She flew through, stumbling to stay on her feet, seemingly oblivious to the way her mangled arm now hung at the wrong angle. The pain should have been incredible, but she ignored the damaged limb and fixed her gaze upon us instead.
Not waiting to see what she did next, I turned and fled, following the girls, who were already racing back the way we’d come, toward the swing doors that opened into the dining room.
Alice let out a shriek of anger and gave chase, her flailing arms sending food and plates and bowls crashing to the ground.
I caught up with Clara and Emily just as they reached the doors. Alice was coming up fast from behind, running with a weird lopsided gait. She was gaining on us with a speed that was as shocking as it was surprising given her age. Under other circumstances, she probably would have given an Olympic sprinter a run for their money.
We barreled into the dining room and sprinted toward the front door, with the crazed waitress right behind us. Just as we were about to reach the door a voice called out to us.
“Not that way.” I turned to see a tubby kid in his late teens waving at us from a set of doors at the far end of the restaurant. A sign on the wall next to the doors read, To Hotel Lobby.
“Over here. Quick.” The kid was practically jumping up and down. “This way.”
Clara and Emily had seen him too. They veered to the left, barely avoiding the manic Alice, and ran in his direction. I was not so lucky.
Alice flew toward me, screeching and growling.
If she caught me I would be dead, of that there seemed no doubt. Even though she was probably forty pounds lighter, and thirty years older than me, the sheer scale of her rage gave her the advantage. I plucked a chair from the nearest table and rushed forward. The legs caught her square in the chest, sending her reeling backward. She lost her balance and fell.
Clara and Emily were already at the door. They hovered there, waiting for me to catch up.
“Come on.” Clara motioned for me to run. “Quickly, before she gets back up.”
I didn’t need to be told twice. I darted forward, leaping clear over the stricken Alice. She reached upward to grab ahold of me, but her hands closed on the empty air where I had been a second before.
I ran toward the door, dodging tables and chairs along the way. When I reached the girls, I practically pushed them through.
No sooner were we clear, than the tubby kid slammed the doors shut and rammed what looked like a piece of old pipe through the handles.
Just in the nick of time.
The doors shuddered and flexed inward as Alice, somehow back on her feet, crashed into them in an attempt to follow us. The makeshift barricade held tight, much to her obvious displeasure.
“That was too close.” I drew huge gulps of air, trying to catch my breath, and leaned against the wall, thankful to be alive.
28
“WHAT WERE YOU doing in there?” The tubby kid demanded. “You could have gotten yourselves killed. More to the point, you could have gotten me killed.”
“What were we doing?” I replied, incredulous. “What were you doing with a waitress in a cooler?”
“That’s Alice.” The kid replied, matter-of-factly.
“No shit.” I wanted to slap him.
“You let her out.” The kid led us along a short corridor and into the hotel lobby. “Do you know how long it took me to get her in there?”
“Why would you lock her in a cooler in the first place?”
“What else was I going to do? She went crazy.” He flopped down on a sofa in a small lounge area to the right of the registration desk and put his feet up on a pine coffee table. “Name’s Darwin.”
“Well thank you for saving us back there, Darwin,” Clara said.
“No biggie.”
“You know Darwin, you could have put a note on that freezer door warning us what was inside,” I said. “It would have saved an awful lot of trouble.”
“I wasn’t expecting anyone to bust in to the restaurant and start poking around, was I?” Darwin shook his head. “Man you messed things up.”
“I’m not quite sure why you bothered locking her up in the first place,” I said. “Why didn’t you just kill her?”
“Why didn’t you?” Darwin was looking at my waist. “You do have a gun after all.”
“Good point.” The pistol had slipped my mind in the excitement. I felt a little sheepish, not that I was sure I would have been able to actually pull the trigger, if push came to shove. It was one thing to bop a guy over the head with a propane tank or knock someone over with a chair, but shooting them was a whole other ballgame.
Emily took a seat on a chair opposite Darwin and spoke to him. “Are you the only one here?”
“Yeah.” He sniffed and rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. “I was working the night shift and I must have passed out. When I awoke, everything was really weird. Been that way ever since. At first I thought it was me.”
“You?” I was confused.
“Yeah. You know.” He reached into his pocket and brought out a hand rolled cigarette, only it wasn’t tobacco. “It gets real boring here. This stuff helps me pass the time.”
“Weed?”
“Right on. You want one?” He produced a second joint and held it out. “Anyone? I have plenty.”
“No I don’t want one.”
“And neither do we.” Clara glared at him.
“Suit yourselves. It’ll make you feel better though. Takes the edge off things. If it wasn’t for this stuff, I don’t know what I’d have done the last few days. It’s been kind of lonely around here.” He glanced toward the door. “There was this one guy came around yesterday morning, started hollering to let him in. I think he might have been a guest here. He didn’t make it though. That’s how I found out about Alice.”
“She killed him?” I remembered the bloody streaks on the door, the lone tennis shoe.
“Oh yeah.” Darwin shuddered. “Not a pleasant sight. Tore him up with her bare hands.”
“Why didn’t you let him in?” I asked.
“Too late. By the time I realized he was outside, Alice was already munching on him like he was one of her meatloaf specials. I don’t think he even saw it coming, poor guy.”
He put the joint between his lips and pulled a box of matches from his pocket.
“You’re going to smoke that now?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Because there’s a crazy waitress with a hankering for human flesh running around outside, and we just might need you level headed.” I reached out and plucked the joint away, then threw it into the nearest trashcan. “Speaking of which, we need to figure out the food situation since we can’t get back into the restaurant.”
“Oh that’s easy.” Darwin looked wistfully toward the trashcan, then back to me. “I’ve got a bunch of food in the office.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. I moved most of the useable stuff out of the kitchen after I locked Alice in the cooler. It seemed like the safest thing to do. Who knows how many other nut jobs like her are out there.”
Clara grinned. “Darwin, you just might have made my day.”
29
DARWIN WOULD HAVE made a good squirrel. The office was packed with enough food and drink to keep a small army going strong. Restaurant supply boxes packed full of tortilla chips, large bottles of salsa, several varieties of soup, at least three dozen loafs of sandwich bread, and pickles galore littered the floor. There were at least a few big bags of Doritos, one of which was open, its contents spilling onto the desk, and a myriad of other goodies.
“There was meat and cheese too. I ate some the first day, but after the power went out I didn’t want to chance it,” he said. “It seemed a shame to waste it, but I didn’t want to get sick.”
“This looks like a feast after what we’ve been eating,” I said. It was true that Clay had generously shared his meal with us the previous evening, giving us a much-needed break from candy bars and assorted bags of nuts. However, with only a small pot of soup and some bread to feed four people, our hunger had returned within a few hours. This veritable Aladdin’s cave of munchies was like hitting the mother lode.
“Ooh, Coco Crispies.” Clara’s eyes alighted on a stack of cereal boxes next to the door. “I haven’t had those since I was a kid.”
“No milk though,” Darwin said. “Sorry.”
“Who needs milk?” She grabbed a box and pried it open, then scooped up a handful of the chocolate cereal, eating with gusto. Then, realizing we were all watching her, she stopped. “What? You’ve never seen a girl eat cereal before?”
I grinned. “Not quite like that.”
“Well now you have.” She dug deep again, coming out with another handful of the small brown pebbles. She held the box in my direction. “Want some?”
“Nah. I think I need something a bit more balanced than chocolate cereal.” I picked up a banana and peeled back the skin, then took a bite.
“Suit yourself.” Clara dipped into the box again. “But you don’t know what you’re missing.”
30
OUR BELLIES FULL, we turned to the more serious matter of where to sleep for the night. It didn’t seem like a good idea to push on further down the road, especially with dusk approaching. It also seemed a shame to pass up the chance for a good night’s sleep in a real bed. The only problem was that the motel lacked inside corridors, meaning we would be more vulnerable than we were in the lobby. After much debate, we agreed that the best course of action would be to take two rooms on the second floor. We came to this conclusion because the ground floor rooms seemed vulnerable to attack and hard to defend, especially with Alice still on the loose.
We made sure to select rooms linked by an interior door. Even though we only intended to use one room, the connecting doors provided a second means of escape should anything happen. Needless to say, we took the time to barricade the stairs with a couple of dressers, and we made a thorough search of all the rooms on that floor lest any hotel guests were still lurking around with crazy fever.
Darwin had spent the last few nights in the lobby, sleeping behind the reception desk, but now he decided it would be safer to stick with us. Four people sharing two beds in one room was not ideal, especially since the beds were only queen sized, but I didn’t think it would be a good idea to use both rooms, and the girls agreed.
Darwin and I took the bed closest to the door, which meant that Clara and Emily would share the other bed. After the sleeping arrangements of the last few evenings, the motel room seemed like luxury. After a brief discussion, it was decided that Darwin and myself would take turns keeping watch on the balcony outside the room, switching over in four-hour shifts. The fact that Darwin was a pothead did concern me, so we made him turn out his pockets, and confiscated all the joints we found. After that, with the light fading fast, we settled in for the night.
31
THE MOON WAS HIGH and full in the night sky. I leaned on the second floor railing and looked up at it, transfixed for a moment. Were other survivors out there looking up at the same moon right now? More to the point, was Jeff looking at it all those miles away in New Haven? I hoped so.
More than once my mind wandered to the unlikely text message. Why was I the only one to receive one? Was it really from Jeff? I had no idea. It was certainly his number, but that only meant someone was in possession of his phone. Hardly rock solid evidence of his survival, especially since the connection only seemed to work one way. For all I knew there was nothing waiting for us in New Haven, or worse, we were walking into some kind of trap. What other choice did we have? We had to take the chance. We couldn’t stay where we were, and south seemed as good a direction to go in as any. Maybe they had power. Maybe things were normal down there.
“Any sign of trouble?”
I turned to find Clara standing there. She quietly pulled the door to within a crack of closed and joined me at the railing.
“Not so far,” I replied. “I haven’t heard or seen a thing in hours, unless you count a cat that ran across the parking lot about thirty minutes ago.”
“Good.” She hugged herself. Once the sun went down, the temperature had gotten surprisingly chil
ly for the time of year.
“You should probably be sleeping.”
“I tried,” She said. “I laid there for over an hour staring at the ceiling. My mind won’t shut off. Darwin’s snoring didn’t help much either.”
“He snores?”
“Like a freight train.”
“That sucks. Sorry about that.”
“Just my luck. Emily didn’t seem to notice. She fell asleep almost as soon as her head hit the pillow.” Clara paused for a moment as if trying to decide if she should continue. “What do you think about Darwin?”
“He seems okay. A little flakey perhaps.”
“Yeah.” She blew on her hands, and then rubbed them together. “I think we should be on our guard when we come across new people. We’ve been lucky so far, but there might be others out there with less altruistic motives.”
“I was thinking the same thing. When we found that barn yesterday, I was sure Clay was going to shoot us. Thank the stars he had the good sense not to shoot first and ask questions later.”
“The next time around we might not be so fortunate. If people are encountering those Crazies, they might not want to chance it.”
“Food is going to get pretty scarce too. I don’t know how many survivors there are, but at some point they are going to start squabbling over provisions,” I said.
“That thought occurred to me too.”
“We might have to defend ourselves from more than just Crazies.” I touched the butt of the pistol.
“I don’t want to think about that,” Clara said. “Can we talk about something else?”
“Like what?”
“Well, how about your book. The one you are going to get published.”
“You mean the one I was going to get published. I doubt the offer still stands under the circumstances.” I felt a pang of regret at those words. For the first time it hit me that my labor of love, the novel I’d spent countless hours slaving over for almost two years, would never sit on a bookstore shelf, or reach the bestseller lists, or even have a single reader other than me.
The Remnants of Yesterday Page 8