Night of the Living Trekkies (15 page)

“Fine, but how do we get past
them
?” Leia said.

She pointed in the direction of the landing door. It rattled under the blows of the zombies on the other side.

“Why are they so riled?” Jim asked.

“The noise from your one-man battle brought them all down here. Maybe you can dream up a way to get rid of them.”

Jim walked to the bottom of the stairs, recovered the ax, and trudged back to Leia. He sat down beside her, the gore-covered weapon at his feet.

He put his head in his hands. He felt unspeakably tired. Not for the first time, he wished for some help. The killing and the running were easy. He and Leia could take care of that themselves. But to what end? Was there any way out of this mess? He wished he were smarter, wished he had access to someone like Dr. Sandoval, the exobiologist from Harvard. Maybe he knew of some weakness in the zombies that could be exploited.

But that was nuts.

Still thinking like a Trekkie
, Jim thought grimly.
Still looking for a silver bullet to settle the problem before the credits roll. Sandoval is almost definitely dead by now. And an ivory-tower egghead wouldn’t help much, anyway. He’d just slow us down.

“Are you okay?” Leia asked, jolting him out of his reverie.

“I’m trying to think of a plan.”

A minute crawled by.

Finally, she asked, “Is this just a ploy to get me alone?”

Jim forced a weary smile.

“I
am
glad you’re here,” he said. “Gladder than you probably know. How are you feeling?”

“I’m maintaining. Why?”

“It’s always rough the first time,” he said. “Your first kill.”

“Who said it was my first?”

Jim’s surprised expression made Leia smile.

“I’m kidding. Besides, I don’t think these count as real kills. How can you kill something that’s already dead?”

“Good point,” Jim said.

“And I’ve got a hunch this isn’t
your
first time,” Leia said. “How are
you
holding up?”

Jim took a deep breath, as if he were about to speak at length. Then, at the last moment, he seemed to change his mind.

“Army snipers have an old saying,” he offered instead. “The only thing I feel when I pull the trigger is recoil.”

“I take it you’re not very big on sharing.”

“Trust me, you can’t grasp the stuff that happened over there unless you lived it. Until you’ve actually been in battle and seen people die in front of you . . .”

His words trailed off in midsentence. He looked into Leia’s eyes.

“Under the current circumstances, I guess that sounds stupid,” he said.

“Yes,” Leia answered. “But I’ll forgive the oversight if you answer one simple question: How do you go from working as a first-rate soldier to working in a third-rate hotel?”

“It’s easy,” Jim sighed. “First you join the army right out of high school and pull two tours in Afghanistan—the second as a platoon squad leader. You win a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star, big freaking deal, but soon the responsibility gives you insomnia. Because in spite of the medals and the uniform, you’re just twenty years old and you still don’t know shit. And maybe, the night before a raid, you start puking blood and they put you in the infirmary. And while you’re lying on your back instead of walking in the field with your troop, your squad goes into a booby-trapped house, two guys die, and one guy loses his sight. And when this news gets back to the infirmary, you
know
you could have prevented it. You
know
you would have smelled the trouble and avoided it. But you
weren’t
there, because you were laid up with what turns out to be a pansy-ass bleeding ulcer. A stress-induced stomach lesion brought on by your fear that you might let your people down. Talk about irony.”

Jim tapped the end of the ax handle on the floor.

“So I finished my hitch and got out. I didn’t want any more responsibility. I wanted a bullshit civilian job where I was free to screw up without consequences. Which the Botany Bay offered me. Until tonight, at least.”

“Tonight, everything changes,” Leia agreed. “They’ll be rewriting the history books after this one. Assuming we survive long enough to need them.”

“Now I’ve got a question for you,” Jim said. “What compels a smart, attractive young woman to spend her weekends pretending that she’s Carrie Fisher in what is arguably the worst film of the original
Star Wars
trilogy?”

Leia laughed. “You want the short answer or the long answer?”

Jim glanced at the fire door. It shook from the constant onslaught of zombies on the opposite side. “I’m in no real hurry to go out there,” he said.

Leia pulled her legs up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them.

“Then I’m going to do something I rarely do,” she said. “I’m going to confide in you. Normally, I keep this story to myself, but since we’re likely to be eaten alive before midnight, I feel like I can share this with you.”

“I appreciate that,” Jim said.

Leia sighed, rocked back and forth on the step nervously, then began.

“I grew up near Amarillo. I was a pretty normal kid until I turned eleven. That’s when my father decided to leave my mother and me. You know that Springsteen song,’Hungry Heart’?”

“‘I went out for a ride and I never went back.’”

“Bingo. Dad went off to work one day and didn’t come home that evening. Can you imagine? I thought he was dead. Then we got a postcard a few weeks later from San Diego saying he was done with us. He actually wrote ‘done with us.’ I can recite the entire message if you’d like.”

“Why did he leave?”

“I was a kid. I figured it was my fault. And when I finally screwed up the courage to ask my mom, I learned that I was right.”

“How?”

“I wasn’t actually his kid. My biological father shacked up with my mom for a one-night stand. My pretend father found out and split. I guess he didn’t want a pretend daughter. Which is too bad, because the pretend daughter really liked him. Loved him, I guess.”

“What did you do?”

“What could I do? I toughed it out. Mom married a new ass-hole, and this one abused her. She wouldn’t leave him. So one night at the dinner table, I put a steak knife through his hand. The para-medics had to pry it out of the table. That worked out well, actually. They sent me to a boarding school two hundred miles away. After that I went to Ohio State and graduated premed. And that’s how I wound up here at GulfCon in a Princess Leia costume.”

“Wait, go back a minute,” Jim said. “I think I missed something.”

“Like I said, I graduated premed. Most of my regular college bills were covered by scholarships. But if I’m going to do medical school, I need some serious bank. So last summer I answered this ad from a video game company. They needed a model to wear shorts and a sports bra and carry a big fake gun at a convention. That was the day I discovered my calling. Now I do these things almost every weekend.”

“Is that how you got into science fiction?”

“No, I came by that naturally. Other worlds are better than this one, you know?”

“I do,” Jim sighed. “I used to watch
Star Trek
and dream about being on the
Enterprise
, half a galaxy away from my mom, from our poor-ass existence, from pretty much everything.”

“Same here,” Leia said. “Only I fantasized about being half a galaxy away from my mother and stepfather, surrounded by people who really were decent and honorable, and not just pretending. People I could count on in a jam.”

“We’re a match made in heaven. No wonder you didn’t want to stay behind on the eleventh floor. You thought I’d ditch you.”

A peculiar look crossed Leia’s face.

“Actually, no,” she said. “I never thought you were going to ditch me. I just figured my chances are better with you than with the last surviving member of the West Texas Red Tunic Club.”

A hideous moan from the hallway interrupted their discussion.

“Though it doesn’t change the fact that we’re trapped in this stairwell,” Leia said.

Jim’s face suddenly brightened.

“We’re not trapped at all,” he said. “I just figured out what to do.”

“You see?” Leia said. “I knew you wouldn’t let me down.”

Jim took out his walkie-talkie and toggled it on.

“Gary, this is Jim,” he said. “Come back.”

“Where the hell are you?” Gary responded. “We thought we heard a gunshot. Is the princess safe?”

“She’s fine. Where’s Matt?”

“He’s holed up in the bedroom. And still acting really strange.”

“In what way?”

“I don’t know if I can explain it. But he hasn’t made one fat joke since we left the feast. No more cracks about my mom. And he’s stopped eyeballing your sister’s ass. It’s really disconcerting.”

Jim tried not to let the remark distract him from the plan. “Don’t disturb him,” he said. “I’ll deal with Matt later, but right now we need your help. Can you go over to the atrium window?”

“I’m standing there right now,” Gary said. “Where are you?”

“We’re in the east fire stairwell on the seventh floor. There’s about a million zombies standing between us and you. We need something to draw them off. I want you to check the four atrium elevators. Where are they?”

“One’s down in the lobby,” Gary said. “Plus one on the second floor and one on what looks like the fifteenth floor. They’re all full of zombies. But the one you rode to eleven is still empty.”

“Like I figured,” Jim said. “Now here’s where it gets tricky. Do the room phones still work?”

“Yeah,” Gary said.

“Excellent. I want you to contact a guy named Willy in room 1120. Tell him to go to the elevators and push the call button. The one on the eleventh floor should open right up. I need him to send that elevator to the seventh floor and then hop back out, understand?”

“Got it.”

“Once you’re finished, call me. We want to be ready to move when the elevator arrives. Hopefully it will make a nice, loud ding, which the zombies will mistake for a dinner bell. Then we’ll sneak down to you.”

“Genius,” Gary said.

“Make it so,” Jim replied.

He clicked off the walkie-talkie.

“You have your moments,” Leia said. “Not many of them, but you do have them.”

Jim sighed, closed his eyes, and rubbed his temple. “
Empire Strikes Back
,” he said.

“What?”

“That’s a line from—”

The walkie-talkie crackled to life, cutting him off.

“Jim, it’s Rayna,” the voice said. “I just got off the phone with your new buddy, Willy. He’s going to the elevator now.”

“Perfect,” Jim said. “We’re ready to move.”

“But he wants you to wait for him.”

“What?”

“He said he’s changed his mind about staying behind. He wants to join us. He’s going to send the elevator, then run down the fire-escape stairs and connect with you.”

Jim swore under his breath.

“He better run fast. We’ll give him one minute, but that’s it.”

“Listen for the ding,” Rayna told him. “The elevator’s moving. Tenth floor, ninth floor . . .”

Jim stood up and shouldered his ax. Leia got up, too. They walked down to the landing and picked their way past the bloody corpses to the fire door.

“Eighth floor,” Rayna said.

Above his head, Jim heard a door to the stairwell open. Ensign Willy was on the move.

“Seventh floor,” Rayna said.

Jim put his head to the door and heard a faint, distant
ding
.

“Suppertime,” Rayna said. “It’s hard to tell for sure, but I think they’re going for it.”

“See you soon,” Jim said, clicking off.

Moments later, a completely winded Willy clambered down the stairs.

“Welcome to the party,” Leia said.

Willy waved halfheartedly, then doubled over and put his hands on his knees. He stayed that way through breath after ragged breath.

“We have to go,” Jim said.

Willy held up one finger. Then he took several more breaths. Then he stood up, his face still beet red. His eyes landed on Jim’s weapon.

“Nice kar’takin,” he said between gasps.

“Huh?” Jim replied.

“Your ax,” Willy said. “It’s the primary melee weapon of the Jem’Hadar shock troops of the Dominion. From
Deep Space Nine
.”

“So that’s what it’s called,” Jim said. “I didn’t know. I guess I was never that big of a Niner.”

Willy inspected the blade more closely.

“Ugh,” he said. “It’s got zombie stuff all over it.”

“It’ll be worse in a minute,” Jim said, then pushed open the door.

The zombies, the nearest of which were perhaps twenty yards away and stumbling farther down the hall toward the elevator, didn’t notice.

Suddenly Leia grabbed Jim’s face and kissed him. For half an instant, there were no zombies, no horrors, just soft lips and an effortless sense of togetherness. Then she pulled back and they both drew a breath.

“For luck,” she said.

“That’s from . . . never mind. Here we go.”

They started their careful, cautious journey down the hall.

Matt lay motionless in the darkness, sprawled across his hotel bed. He was so exhausted when he lay down that he hadn’t bothered to pull back the bedspread.

He’d stayed there for what seemed like days. He was tired, but he never slept. Not for a moment. Instead, he listened to the sounds outside his door. This was remarkably easy. His hearing had grown superhumanly acute. When Rayna asked Gary if there was any bottled water in the minibar, he heard it. When some sort of melee erupted down the hall, he heard it.

And just moments ago, when Jim announced over the walkie-talkie that he was standing at the door of the seventh-floor fire escape, waiting for just the right moment to rush down to the suite, he heard that, too.

The news made Matt very, very upset.

I run a tight ship
, he thought.
I won’t have some insubordinate, shoe-shining, room-service-tray-fetching primate undermining my authority.

He quietly sat up and lowered his feet to the floor. He looked around. His vision was so sharp that the pitch-black room didn’t seem all that dark anymore. His sensitive eyes observed its every feature.