Night of the Living Trekkies (8 page)

He retraced his steps to the hotel entrance, keeping a careful eye on the alley’s mouth. He was almost to the doors when he realized the two pedestrians were now much closer, less than a hundred yards away. They were walking so strangely. Staggering, really. Just like zom—

No
, he thought. Rayna and Gary were right. Zombies did not exist.

But these two people—whatever they were—were definitely staggering toward him. They’d seen him and were coming his way as fast as their wobbly legs could carry them.

As Jim watched, he became aware of gunshots in the distance—the
pop-pop-pop
of a semiautomatic pistol, followed by a staccato blast that could only be produced by a fully automatic AK-47 assault rifle.

All of a sudden, Houston sounded like A-Bad on a Saturday night.

Jim couldn’t remember the last time Janice Bohica greeted him with a smile. But tonight, when he reentered the lobby, she did just that. She seemed almost hysterically relieved to see him.

“You came back,” she said.

“We’ve got a problem,” he said. “Isn’t there a button under the counter that locks these doors?”

“Yes, but it’s only for emergencies.”

Jim nearly said something mean but looked into Janice’s eyes and restrained himself. Everyone in the hotel would need to stay calm. As soon as people panicked, they would be no help at all.

“This
is
an emergency,” he said, keeping his voice under tight control. “I guess you could call it a riot. And a couple of the . . . of the rioters . . . saw me and they’re heading this way. We need to secure the doors.”

Janice reached beneath the marble countertop and punched several digits into the keypad. “I haven’t used this code since the Astros lost the World Series. I think it’s 2063.”

The keypad responded with three affirmative chirps and the front doors bolted with a loud
clunk
. Jim pulled on the three interior doors. They were all secure. He assumed the outer ones were locked, too.

Trouble was, they were all made of glass.

“Should I lock the other doors, too?” Janice asked.

“What other doors?” Jim said.

“All of them. All of the Botany Bay’s exterior doors.”

“You can do that? Nobody told me there was a code for
that
.”

“Right after September Eleventh, the hotel got codes for everything.”

“Use them,” Jim said. “Lock us in.”

Janice punched another set of digits into the keypad and the machine responded with three more chirps. Then Jim escorted her to Dexter’s office. Halfway through the warren of cubicles, Janice stumbled and fell to her knees. Her breathing grew shallow and ragged. For a moment, Jim wondered if she was having a heart attack.

He knelt down beside her. “Are you all right?”

Janice pushed him away. “I just need a few minutes. “When she finally looked up again, she examined the surrounding desks as if searching for a good place to hide.

“We don’t have time for this,” Jim said, forcing his arm around her waist and helping her to her feet. “Can you walk?”

“I’m fine,” she insisted.

But he kept his arm around her waist, anyway. Her footsteps were slow and unsteady. As though she was quite literally buckling beneath the pressure.

Dexter’s office was a rat’s nest of forms, paperwork, and Dallas Cowboys memorabilia, but it also contained a few items that Jim desperately wanted. He found them sitting in a case—a case that, to his great relief, someone had opened and left unlocked.

Inside were two exotic-looking weapons. Their black-and-yellow color scheme made them look like gigantic bumblebees.

But with a much worse sting
, Jim thought as he scooped them up.

“What are those?” Janice asked.

“Taser X3s,” Jim explained. “The latest and greatest in less-than-lethal ordnance.” Dexter had bragged about their capabilities on numerous occasions; they had laser sights, built-in LED flashlights, and a triple-shot capacity so that the user could fry three different people simultaneously. Jim considered showing Janice how the X3s worked and then maybe giving her one. But the flustered look in her eyes told him that wasn’t an option. In her present state, Janice might even decide to taser
him
.

Jim located an empty black backpack and stuffed one of the weapons inside. The other he placed in a holster and latched to his belt. Then he found the black, circular Squad Charger that recharged the guns’ battery packs. It held six fully topped-off power magazines. Jim slid one into his personal weapon and put the rest into the backpack. He noticed the toy phaser sitting on Dexter’s desk and decided to grab it, too. Anything even resembling a weapon seemed comforting now.

“This feels like a dream,” Janice said. “Can we go now?”

“One last thing,” Jim said.

He went to the desk, opened the bottom drawer, and reached all the way to the back to the place where Dexter—in flagrant violation of hotel regulations—hid a 9mm Glock 17 pistol.

Usually, that is. But tonight all Jim found after an increasingly frantic search was a spare 17-round magazine, which he stuffed into his backpack.

“When was the last time you saw Dexter?” Jim asked.

“A few hours ago. There was a disturbance on the third floor, but he never came back.”

“What time was that?”

“Just after five, I think.”

Jim checked his watch. It was eight thirty, which meant Dexter had been out of contact for three hours and change. Maybe—hope-fully—he was incapacitated somewhere. The alternative was too horrible to consider.

“Dexter, can you hear me?” he said into his walkie-talkie. “Are you okay?”

He tried twice more, and then put out a general call for someone, anyone, to respond.

There were no replies.

Jim closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. He had to get upstairs and find Rayna. He needed to see if perhaps, just perhaps, Dexter was still around. And then together they would set up a defensive perimeter and figure out a plan.

He offered a silent prayer that things wouldn’t get any worse. A prayer that was immediately and decisively rebuffed.

“What’s that noise?” Janice asked.

It was coming from the lobby. Someone was pounding on the doors. Pounding so hard that they rattled.

He glanced over at Janice. Her face had gone pale and her pupils were dilated. Her reason was now in full retreat, routed by the din in the lobby. There was no way to bring her along, not unless he was willing to carry her.

“Janice, I need you to do me a favor,” Jim said calmly.

She nodded ever so slowly.

“I want you to lock this door when I leave and wait for me. Don’t go out front, don’t wander around. Just sit in this chair and wait. Will you do that?”

Another slow nod.

“Great. I won’t be long, all right?”

No nod this time. Just a stare.

“Okay,” Jim replied on her behalf. “I’ll be right back.”

He shouldered the backpack and walked out the door.

“No,” Janice whispered after he departed. “You won’t.”

As Jim walked through the hotel’s offices toward the front desk, the banging from the entrance grew louder and louder. He got down on his hands and knees, crawled to the end of the check-in counter, and peeked around the corner.

He could just make out what he figured were the two pedestrians he’d seen on the street—a young man and woman, both fairly well dressed, looking something like a couple that had been out on a date. Now they pounded on the glass with bloody fists, creating large, smearing circles of red and black. Their loud, strange moans made Jim’s neck hair stand up.

But that wasn’t the worst.

There weren’t just two of them anymore. There were at least a dozen, all in roughly the same sorry condition as the first pair.

One, a middle-aged man wearing the remnants of a UPS uniform, had taken what looked like a point-blank shotgun blast. A vast, bloody crater had been scalloped out of his chest. Another seemed to have extricated herself from a flaming car wreck. Her clothes were charred and smoking, her hair singed away, her body covered with livid-red burns the exact shade of barbecued brisket. Crawling underneath them was a corpse with no legs, dragging itself along on its hands.

No such thing as zombies, my ass
, Jim thought.

He knew now that his instincts had been right all along. Something had happened. This
was
Dawn of the Freaking Dead. The end of the world was upon them, and his poor kid sister had no idea.

He forced himself to focus his thoughts. One thing at a time. First, find Dexter and secure the perimeter. Then get the remaining guests—especially Rayna—into a safe position where they could plan their next move.

Jim scuttled down to the far end of the check-in counter. He took a deep breath, calmed himself, then stood up and walked, as nonchalantly as possible, toward the elevators. They were only about a hundred feet away, but it felt like a hundred miles.

Maybe they won’t notice
, he thought as he stepped out into the open.

They noticed. Jim’s sudden appearance set off a chorus of moans. The glass took an even more vigorous pummeling, but he knew it would hold. It was bullet-resistant and half an inch thick. The zombies could beat on it all day to no effect. The only thing capable of breaking the glass would be a moving vehicle, but driving one seemed beyond the capabilities of the gang out front.

Jim’s legs felt like noodles as he closed the last few steps to the elevators. He pressed the call button and waited.

And waited.

At first he tried not to look at the entrance. But curiosity—and his own sense of self-preservation—won out. If one of those things somehow got through, he didn’t want to have his back to it.

So, while the elevators took their sweet time descending to the ground floor, he looked.

When he did, his stomach rolled.

It’s the gang from the alley
, Jim thought.
It’s all the people who went out to smoke or to make a phone call and never came back.

Among the crowd he recognized Kai Opaka—or rather, a middle-aged woman dressed in the elaborate vestments of Bajor’s supreme spiritual leader. She wore a purple robe and headdress, but the lower half of her jaw had been torn away, opening her neck and exposing the knobby ridges of her spine. And there was the boy who’d been playing with the toy phaser, the one who complained about the bad TV reception. Someone had plunged a carving knife into the side of his neck, and yet still he walked.

An elevator announced its arrival with a ding. Jim could barely hear it over the noise from the crowd.

He stepped aboard and hit the button for the third floor. Glancing around, he found everything was still as it should be. No broken glass, no blood on the floor, no abandoned personal items.

The doors slid shut, silencing the moaning and the pounding. In its place, all he could hear was Nichelle Nichols singing her cover of “That’s Life.”

Everything felt normal. For a moment—and for the last time—Jim allowed himself the luxury of imagining that perhaps things weren’t as bad as they seemed.

That feeling lasted exactly as long as it took the elevator to reach the third floor, and for its doors to open.

Back on the first floor, Janice sat in Dexter’s office, impatiently tapping her foot. She stared at the clock on the wall, watching the second hand sweep through minute after uneventful minute.

The interlude allowed her time to think. Which, in her current state, was the most dangerous thing she could do.

The hotel staff had vanished. So had most of the guests. The phones didn’t work. There were riots—or something like riots—in the streets. And now Jim had left her alone.

She looked at the clock again. Every time the red second hand reached the top of the dial face, the minute hand snapped forward with a pronounced
click
. She’d never noticed that sound before. How could she have never noticed?

As she stared at the clock, her subconscious mind made a decision. Instead of trying to make sense of the whirl of events, it simply pushed them away. The evening’s growing list of horrors and mysteries were gathered into a tight ball and sealed inside a brittle shell of denial.

Denial and delusion.

“I’m the day manager,” Janice told herself, as if suddenly remembering. “I’ve been doing my job for seventeen years and I’ve got a hotel to run.”

Everything else was deleted.

She turned her attention to the racket in the lobby. People wanted in. Paying guests. They were probably angry. And it was her responsibility to help. Or at the very least explain what was wrong. Communication was often the key to soothing unhappy guests. People were surprisingly forgiving of subpar service when they understood the circumstances. The best way to earn lots of one-star reviews on travel Web sites was to keep your customers in the dark about problems.

Yet here she was, the day manager, parked in a chair because some kid told her not to move.

It didn’t make sense. None of it made any sense.

All she had to do was take charge.

Janice got up, took a deep breath, and gathered herself.

“Everything will be fine,” she thought. “I just have to face the problem and deal with it.”

She left Dexter’s office, walked slowly through the Botany Bay’s abandoned administrative center and into the lobby. Her arrival set off a thunderous round of moaning and pounding.

She walked up to the interior doors. Close enough to get a good look at the crowd outside. She saw several of the costumed Star Trek people. They looked like they’d been in some sort of accident.

Her mood improved a bit when she spotted Oscar.

“Oscar!” she shouted over the din. “Are you all right? Where have you been?”

Oscar, she plainly saw, was not all right. There was blood all over his face, and something had opened up his torso and caused his intestines to spill out. The gray entrails dragged behind him like a tangled garden hose.