Last Hope, Book One: Onslaught (7 page)

Blinking away the sudden change, Budd thought that the clouds were a shade darker than they’d been when he’d viewed them from the balcony. He stepped through the doorway, still holding Juliette’s hand.

Together they stood in silence, their eyes exploring the scene before them.

In the aisles between the tables were the waiters, their fallen bodies littering the floor all across the room. Some had been pushing trolleys full of fresh cutlery, while others had utensils for sanitizing the surfaces, all of which were now unattended. A few of the bodies had fallen onto tables or chairs and knocked them over, and others had collapsed into one another to rest in small mounds on the floor. Whatever the case, Budd could see that no one moved inside the restaurant.

“Are they dead?” Juliette asked, her soft voice a whisper.

The corpses in the elevator were one thing, but this... this was something else. My nightmares have always been bad, but this was a cut above the norm. I’m sure I can remember reading somewhere that peanuts give you bad dreams. Maybe I’d eaten too many…

“I don’t know,” Budd answered. His mind raced as he cast his gaze around the vast restaurant. He saw no diners, only hotel employees. Whatever had caused the waiters to drop, to die, had taken place after the restaurant had closed. He thought back to when he had first woken up; his wristwatch had stopped at 1:00 am. He looked for a clock, searching for a way to tell the time.

“Do you have a watch?” he asked Juliette.

“No,
Monsieur
Ashby.”

“Come on,” he instructed, cautiously walking deeper into the restaurant. He knelt beside the body of a young waitress. She was on her front, a pile of menus clutched in one hand.

Budd took hold of her left wrist and slid up the white shirtsleeve. Her skin was cold and unpleasant to touch; nevertheless, he found what he wanted.

A chrome-colored watch.

He looked at the glass face.

The timepiece had stopped several seconds after one o’clock. It was close enough to give weight to his theory. “Back in your suite, my watch stopped working at 1:00 am,” he said, and then raised the young waitress’s wrist to show Juliette the watch. “Whatever’s happened, I think it took place then.”

“She is dead?”

“As a dodo.”

“If this happened when you say, why has no one come?” Juliette pondered, looking up at the grey sky around the building. “It is already morning. Where are the authorities?”

“You saw the city from the balcony, buttercup. This isn’t only happening here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know what I mean. I just hope they didn’t all have the soup.”

“I want to leave this place,” Juliette said. She brought her hands up and rubbed her arms.

Budd figured it was more for comfort than warmth. “Pronto,” he said.

Budd pulled Stephen Doring’s body back into the elevator and the doors closed with their usual chime. He pressed the lowest button on the control panel and the elevator started to descend.

After a few seconds, another light on the control panel lit up.

It was the twentieth floor.

“
Monsieur
Ashby?”

“I see it.”

“Someone has called for the lift.”

“That’s what it looks like, sweet cheeks.”

The number on the small screen that displayed which floor they were passing decreased quickly. The twentieth did not seem that far away.

I wasn’t sure whether or not to be pleased. After all, the unscheduled stop meant that there was someone else wandering the hotel corridors. But did I really want to meet them? And what would they think of us riding around in an elevator with two dead bodies? I didn’t want to make new friends, I just wanted to get down to the reception and get outside…

Budd stepped in front of Juliette as the elevator stopped.

The bell rung out and the doors opened.

There was no one there. The carpet outside the door was empty, but Budd knew they were not alone.

In the distance, a man was screaming.

It was a cry of pain, of suffering, and it echoed along the pitch-black hallway.

Budd stepped out of the elevator and looked around. There was no one to be seen, but the scream continued.

A few feet away, an axe rested on the carpet. Its head was coated with a dark liquid. Budd picked it up and examined the stain in the elevator’s light.

Blood.

With practiced ease, he ran his free hand up the long, red-painted wooden shaft, studying the weight of the tool, getting a feel for it.

Now that I had my hands on the fire axe, I didn’t want to let go.

Who knew what I’d have to chop down?

Mind you, if I had known, I’d have wanted a much, much bigger one. And someone else to swing it…

The scream ebbed away.

“Hello?” Budd called out. He stepped back towards the elevator with the axe held tightly.

There was no reply. “Hello?” Budd tried again.

“What should we do,
Monsieur
Ashby?”

“We get help,” Budd answered. He nudged Juliette back into the elevator, hit the control panel button for the main floor, and waited for the doors to close.

It took several seconds before they did. When they were only a few inches apart, a hand appeared on the other side, reaching into the elevator. The fingers dripped with a thick, congealed liquid. Behind the hand was a man’s face, contorted and angry. A groan spilled from his open mouth.

Juliette screamed, but before Budd could react the scene vanished, obscured by the doors as they thudded closed.

The bell chimed and they continued down.

“Who was that man?”

Lacking an answer, Budd made no reply. He merely looked up to the display and willed them to reach the reception area faster.

To say I had the heebie-jeebies would’ve been an understatement. I had no way of knowing what I’d just seen. As far as I could tell, he could’ve been a raving lunatic, or maybe just someone who was very, very ill.

Either way, the coward in me didn’t need to know more. I’ve never been a “people person,” and I wasn’t ’bout to start with the sick.

Or the crazy…

By the time they reached the ground floor, Budd had shuffled in front of Juliette, positioning himself between her and the doors. He wanted to escape. He adjusted his hold on the axe shaft so that he could swing it two-handed.

The doors opened to show that the reception area was well lit by natural means, with the large windows at the front allowing the dawn to fill the room.

Budd poked his head out and looked around. The large foyer was quiet and still. Nothing living occupied the space. There were, however, lots of bodies, those of guests and workers, strewn around the black and white floor tiles. Cautiously, Budd dragged Stephen Doring’s corpse between the doors.

Don’t get me wrong; I didn’t wanna go back up. No way, Jose! But I wanted to keep my options open…

“What has happened?”

“I’m a Chinese oracle, not a doctor. Remember?”

“Are they all dead?”

“Either that, or they do really bad-taste impressions.”

“This is no time for jokes,
Monsieur
Ashby. How are you coping with this?”

Coping? Ha!

I wasn’t coping, I was in denial and I was running. How should I know what was happening? It was like nothing I’d ever heard of.

I just wanted to get the hell out of Dodge…

“Right,” Budd said, starting towards the Tropical Walkway, “I have a car down in the basement; I think we should get outta here. The further away we are from this place, the better.”

“What about that man upstairs? Maybe he needs our help,
Monsieur
Ashby. Should we go back?”

“Sweetheart, he’s either sick or he’s a nut, and either way we’re better off without him. If he’s sick, we could risk catching whatever has done this to everyone else. And if he’s crazy, well… I’ll tell you what, once we’re away from here, we’ll find help and have someone come back and poke around? Yeah?”

“Perhaps you are right,
Monsieur
Ashby.”

“I’m right, sugar. Come on.”

Budd looked around at the sofas and coffee tables positioned in the corners of the room. The areas were littered with bodies. There were two women in casual clothes slumped across a coffee table and a mauve-suited employee surrounded by a set of matching blue suitcases. Other people had collapsed while walking and were sprawled on the ground, while five bodies in a line formed a small, dead waiting-line at the reception desk. High above them, mounted on the wall, a large clock with Roman numerals had ceased to run. The time on its face was one o’clock.

“Hey, you two, wait,” called a voice that stopped Budd and Juliette and spun them around.

A mauve-suited hotel worker was standing in a doorway on the rear wall of the reception. The man’s jacket was unbuttoned and his flat cap was gone. His blond hair was untidy. “Have you seen anyone else?”

“What is happening?” Juliette asked.

“I don’t know,” the hotel worker answered. “My name’s Frank. There’s a group of us sheltering in the bar.”

“How many of you are there?”

“Maybe ten or fifteen, but there’s more coming down all the time. You should come with us.”

Budd shook his head. “Sorry, Frankie, but we’re using my car to get outta here. Wanna come?”

The hotel worker paused, waiting as Budd started to move. “If your car’s down in the basement, you can’t go anywhere. The garage doors aren’t on the emergency power circuit.”

Budd looked at Juliette, using his eyes to question her as to what she wanted to do. After a few moments, and a couple of glances at the hotel worker, Frank, she nodded her head.

“You said the others are holed up in the bar. That’s the floor above, right?” Budd asked, turning back towards the elevator car.

“You don’t want to use that. No one’s ever tested how reliable the back-up generators are. There’s a staircase here in the employee section.”

Budd shrugged his shoulders. “You’d better show us the way.”

Frank used a battery-powered flashlight to navigate the narrow corridors of the employee-only section, his light illuminating countless notice boards and signs on the white walls. After a couple of turns, passing several collapsed hotel workers who had their faces turned to the shadows, he reached a door on a spring-return, which had been latched open to a hook on the wall.

“Keep following,” he said as he strode up the stairs. With every twelve steps there was a half-landing, from where the next steps started in the opposite direction. There were four flights between the two floors.

“Have you heard anything from outside?” Budd asked.

Frank was slow to answer the question, and instead kept walking. When he stepped off the staircase and through the doorway into the shop-filled corridor that circled the bar, he stopped and licked his lips nervously. “The TVs aren’t working and neither are the phones, even the secure lines are down. So far the only thing we’ve heard is from the radio, but even that’s just a few snippets.”

“What has it said?” Juliette asked.

Frank turned his attention from Budd to look Juliette straight in the eye. “That this is happening all over the world.”

“Everywhere?” Juliette said.

Budd placed his arm around her shoulder, moving his head so that they were face to face. He smiled at her. “That’s impossible, kiddo. Let’s get to the bar.”

Frank set off once more and they rounded a corner to see the bank of elevators. Across from the brass-plated sliding doors was the bar, which had its own wooden double doors propped open with red fire extinguishers.

Although the power for the room was obviously not on the backup generator’s ring, someone had found a supply of candles and had placed several of them on each table. The multitude of tiny flames flickered and danced across the walls and ceilings, casting shadows that seemed to be alive, ceaselessly moving and changing shape in the corners of the room.

Remembering that the maître d’ had told him the bar did not close, Budd’s quick examination failed to reveal the bodies he expected to see. The bar was only occupied by the living, and from the raised voices and uncomfortable atmosphere, he got the feeling that they were struggling to get along.

Frank pointed to where the group was gathered around a large table in the center of the room. It was the brightest place in the barroom, as its surface was covered with more than an equal share of candles. “I’m going to go back down and keep a look out. Make yourselves comfortable,” he said, spinning on his heels and hurrying away.