Sleep Tight (27 page)

 

Mr. Ullman was almost glad that the president had declared a state of emergency and ordered the evacuation of the Loop. It saved the general manager the embarrassment of explaining to the guests that they were being kicked out of the hotel so the management could exterminate a colony of bedbugs. This way, he could simply spread his hands in mock impotence and point to the official orders coming from both Washington and Chicago’s City Hall. It was all the government’s fault.

Not the hotel’s.

Not the bedbugs’.

In fact, he didn’t have to mention bedbugs at all. Most of the guests were more than happy to check out, and couldn’t get on the hotel’s shuttle buses fast enough. A few, though, were refusing to leave immediately. They were either waiting for their own limos or thought the whole thing was a hoax or wanted to simply sleep through their hangovers. Some of the guests didn’t answer their room phones.

Mr. Ullman guessed he had at least an hour or two before the soldiers entered the hotel and forcibly ejected the stragglers, something the TV newscasters breathlessly told their viewers would happen with each and every building in the Loop.

Since there were still guests inside the hotel, he gave strict orders for what was left of the staff to remain. They weren’t happy, but it wasn’t his job to make sure his employees enjoyed their jobs. It was his job to make sure the hotel was in the best possible hands, and therefore, he wanted everyone on hand in case the guests needed anything. He suspected that many of them had already left before being given the official green light.

He decided that he would give them the benefit of the doubt, and when all of this nonsense was over, he would welcome them back to start with a clean slate. The only problem, a minor irritation really, was that the ineffectual little man from the pest exterminator company, Roger Something or other, had never checked back in with him. He had probably run off with all the rest.

Mr. Ullman rode up to the top floor alone in the elevator. He was determined to verify that every single door to every single room in the hotel was not only shut, but locked as well. He did not trust the officials, some of whom were trying to quell panic by reassuring the city that this evacuation was only for twenty-four hours. The possibility of looters was very real and he couldn’t stand the thought of someone soiling the image of this pristine hotel. So he started at the very top and worked his way down.

On the fourteenth floor he came to room number 1426. The door was still open, forgotten in the chaos. The detectives poking around had suddenly been called away, and even the uniformed officers had vanished, pulled by more pressing matters.

Mr. Ullman couldn’t help himself; he had to step inside and look around. The room was still a mess. The shattered window had yet to be repaired. White fingerprint dust filled the air and formed a fog that clung to the floor and roiled in the ebb and flow of the hot wind.

He made a note to get on the phone immediately and get this window replaced. He could only imagine the shots from the helicopters, zooming in on the lone shattered window in a high cliff of glass, occasionally catching a glimpse inside the sad, empty room. Those soulless producers would die for a shot like that.

The last thing he wanted was that kind of image to linger in everyone’s minds.

He stepped around the bed, calculating the damage. The room was in such a state of destruction that the amount needed to repair everything staggered even him. His initial reaction had been to start the process of billing the estate for the damages, but he’d reconsidered after someone had mentioned the negative publicity he would attract by charging the family of the suicide victim.

He edged around the couch, watching the space under the bed. He bent closer. He couldn’t see any bugs, but Roger had assured him that that didn’t mean anything necessarily. The image of their fecal matter filled his thoughts, no matter how much he wanted to pretend the clotted droppings didn’t exist.

His gaze landed on the corner, behind the nightstand. He pulled it away, shining his flashlight at the partially peeled silicone, the painted trim that had been pried away from the wallpaper. Nothing moved in the light. The dead bugs from Roger’s insecticide were still there, as if someone had scattered wet coffee grounds. Once again, he couldn’t help himself; he had to expose the worst wounds of the hotel, and tapped the silicone with the toe of his wingtips. Living bugs erupted around the floor trim in the hundreds. Thousands. It was as if the building itself had vomited the tiny parasites into the room.

The bugs spilled over themselves in an almost liquid movement as they oozed from the cracks. The carpet grew alive under his shoes. They swarmed up the legs of the nightstand. His leg brushed the mattress and he flinched as bugs gushed from the seams.

Mr. Ullman didn’t waste any time getting back to the doorway. He slammed the door shut and locked it. He hustled down to the elevator and hit the button and fought the urge to hit the button again. That little shit Roger was going to hear about this.

Mr. Ullman checked back down the hall. The shadows around the door seemed to grow. He blinked, ran one hand through his thinning hair. The only thing he could hear was the thrumming of the cables and the rest of the elevator, but his eyes caught movement, down at the door to room 1426.

Shadows dripped from under the door. They grew along the corner of the hall. Flowed down the carpet at Mr. Ullman. He punched the down button, over and over.

The darkness grew, still utterly silent. Millions of the bugs flooded the hallway, washing across the carpet in waves of foul-smelling tiny bodies. He heard the elevator come to a slow stop on his floor.

The elevator doors split in half and he fell inside. He leapt for the
CLOSE DOOR
button, and jumped up and down to activate the capacity indicator, anything to close the doors. Bugs spilled inside.

The doors slid shut.

Mr. Ullman stomped on the bugs, grinding them into the thin carpet. He hit the basement button. He planned to deactivate all of the air systems throughout the hotel, all of the air intake and circulation, anything he could think of. He hoped that it would at least stop the bugs from spreading to different floors. The only way to accomplish this task was to gain access to a secure terminal in the basement, behind ten inches of steel. There were only three keys. Mr. Ullman had one. The facilities manager had a copy. One of the elected officials of the board had the other.

He stepped back to assess the bug situation in the elevator. He couldn’t tell how many he’d killed; if you scraped it all together it might be enough to butter a slice of toast. More were still crawling around the doors, about three inches off the floor. Mr. Ullman stepped in close, bent his toes on the door just above the bugs, and slid his shoe down, crushing the bugs with the ball of his foot.

The floor numbers flashed. His ears popped.

Once he shut the air circulation down, his next move would be to visit each of the remaining guests’ rooms. They could either leave under their own volition, or be removed by the soldiers who were even now marching through the city. After his encounter with the bugs, he did not care.

Once the guests were no longer on the premises, he would inform the staff and they would file out in an orderly fashion. Of course, being the general manager, he would be the last out of the building, handing the operations key over to the emergency personnel.

The elevator slowed, stopped.

The doors opened and Mr. Ullman stepped into the basement, full of visions of handing the damn key over to somebody else. He was four or five steps down the corridor before he realized he was walking through an inch or two of the bugs. They were up his pants before he had a chance to even register the sounds of all of them under his shoes. He tried slapping at them with his clipboard, but he might as well have been trying to stop the rain with fresh laundry in a Midwestern thunderstorm.

He went to his knees.

The virus was already slipping into his brain, slinking into the cells, corrupting everything exponentially. He didn’t know that he was already infected, and still fought as he fell forward. Waves flowed to him, as if the tide of bugs had been lovingly called to the moon. They covered him, crawling over his face, into his hair, down his suit, fastening those horribly efficient tubes to every inch of his skin. He held on to the key until it was nudged aside by bugs looking for a place to feed.

 

Ed tried to turn right on Randolph and head west between City Hall and the Thompson Center, but found himself face to face with the imposing grille on the front of a CTA bus. All three lanes of the street were blocked by buses, all them going the wrong way, streaming toward Grant Park and the lake. The sidewalks were full of civilians, lining up to climb aboard. Soldiers stood back near the buildings, watching everything.

Ed spun the steering wheel back to the left, drove through the intersection, and pulled over. He killed the spinning lights and said, “This is as close as I’m gonna get to that hospital. It wouldn’t do you two any good to be seen driving up with us. Be a good idea to get in quiet.”

“No shit?” Qween said. “They must pay you extra to figure shit like that out.”

Dr. Menard opened the door and climbed out. Qween followed, making popping noises with her tongue. She slammed the door.

Sam lowered his window. “You’re a cranky little minx, you are, so go easy on any sonofabitch you come across.”

Ed looked them over one last time, this old woman who had been living in the streets, the haggard doctor with the broken glasses, gave them a solemn nod, and pulled smoothly away. He wound down Clark, threading his way through the sandbags, Strykers, and trucks full of soldiers, and hit the siren again.

 

 

Qween pulled Dr. Menard close and spoke very quietly. “Look around. They’re gonna haul everybody’s ass they can find out of here. Right now, try and look like we’re jus’ waiting for the bus, like ever’body else.” She took a moment, turning slowly, taking everything in, as people ignored them and flowed around them like water around the remnants of an ocean pier.

She sensed the panic seething just under the surface. Their eyes spoke volumes. Too wide and uncomprehending for people that had lived and worked in the Loop for years. These people looked like Midwestern tourists who had found they had been mistakenly dropped off in downtown Baghdad.

It wasn’t just the expressions. One woman had bottles of water stuffed in a bulging purse, a man carried three briefcases, and another man awkwardly carried the large hard drive of a desktop computer. Nobody was flat-out running, but they looked like they wanted to. Instead, they formed shuffling lines until the next empty bus rolled into place.

Qween figured the soldiers and the guns helped some in keeping thing orderly.

Whistles broke the grinding monotony of diesel engines and buses halted at the Clark crosswalk. Soldiers cleared the intersection as a covered truck rumbled up to the intersection.

“Gonna be movin’ quick. Get ready,” Qween said to Dr. Menard without looking at him. “You stick to me like syrup on flapjacks.”

A squadron of soldiers in hazmat suits jumped out of the truck and a collective gasp rippled through the crowd. The orange figures carried a variety of weapons, from the standard assault rifles to mundane pesticide canisters to what looked like flamethrowers with heavy tanks on the soldiers’ backs.

As the squad headed for the front doors of the Thompson Center, and everyone was watching the soldiers, Qween tapped Dr. Menard’s hand and said, “Now.” Then she was off, not running exactly, but moving quickly. She led him into the street, scuttling through a break in the buses, and instead of crossing to the other side, she turned up Randolph and they moved west, using the buses to hide them from the soldiers on both sides of the street. They travelled two blocks this way, fighting against the inexorable current until they reached Welles without being stopped.

Once under the El tracks, Qween led Dr. Menard back to the sidewalk, where they slipped through the crowd and into a massive parking garage. They went up six flights of stairs, taking it slow, and came out onto an empty roof, into the muted, hazy sunlight.

Qween didn’t stop until she leaned on the edge and could look over. Dr. Menard sagged gratefully into the low wall and caught his breath. The east–west streets were jammed with buses, all headed toward the lake. The north/south streets were full of soldiers, funneling civilians out of buildings to the buses.

A short, guttural cry caught everybody’s attention. A bike messenger, wielding his U-lock and a switchblade, stumbled out from between the parked cars. Soldiers kept their distance, but they eventually formed a ragged half-circle around him. One of them, apparently some sort of officer, edged forward and shouted, “Cease and desist!” The kid moaned at the harsh sound and leapt forward with the knife and the lock, and the officer squeezed off a quick three-shot burst. The kid flopped backwards, landing hard on his butt, missing his nose and the back of his head.

The civilians on the sidewalk flinched away. One of the soldiers stepped out with a bullhorn and his inflated voice boomed out into the street. “Everything is under control. The federal government is in charge of the situation. Everything is under control.” Without the constant rumble of the El trains, his amplified voice exploded in the space under the tracks and sent the fragmented echoes bouncing down the bus-filled streets. The rest of the soldiers marched up the street, shooting out the tires of the parked cars. Other soldiers sprayed the white chemical foam over the body, then slipped a heavy black bag around the bike messenger and hauled him away.

The mournful cry of the tornado sirens pierced the unnatural stillness and Qween felt a chill, despite the stifling heat and humidity. She had grown accustomed to hearing them for a few moments every first Tuesday morning of every month when they tested the sirens. Now, in the middle of a blistering August, the sound was eerily out of place, as if a child laughed in a morgue.

News and military helicopters filled the sky above the Loop, endlessly circling, like lazy dragonflies.

Qween spit over the edge and watched the soldiers. They were concentrating on setting up roadblocks and arranging sandbags, but soon they would be watching for any civilians left behind by the buses. There was nowhere to hide. Nowhere to blend in. She took Dr. Menard’s arm. “’Bout half an hour, we gonna stick out like a busted big toe.”

She sank heavily to the concrete, back to the wall. Since the soldiers had shown they had no problems shooting people, she didn’t want to be seen. Here was a place to rest out of sight. She didn’t know if any the helicopters were relaying information down to the soldiers, and wouldn’t be surprised if they were, but they should be fine for a few minutes at least.

She got winded easily these days, but her body was conditioned to moving at a steady clip. Qween moved fast because she had a lot of practice. She had been through most every building in the Loop and had discovered that even when she was crazy-ass drunk, nobody usually hassled her if she kept moving. She couldn’t just crawl through a place as if she was looking for a warm place to crash, because then they’d be on her ass immediately. If she kept moving though, at that steady chugging pace, as if she was in a hurry to get to somewhere important far from here and this was the fastest her body could move, which wasn’t far from the truth, nobody would fuck with her. She figured it was because if she kept moving, she automatically became someone else’s problem. She wasn’t accosting anybody. She wasn’t scaring anyone. She wasn’t costing the city money. She wasn’t damaging anything.

She was, however, taking it all in, remembering everything. She knew, for example, over at the elevator in the corner of the parking garage, that if you pried off the locked cover between the floor buttons and the emergency button, you could press a button that would take you to the sublevels, where the garage sold private parking spots for a steep monthly fee.

Down there, once you got past the storage area where they kept the snow blowers and salt, you could open a door to an access tunnel that led under the street, connecting to a maze of fire tunnels, forgotten corridors, and dusty storm shelters.

Qween explained her plan. “We can go blocks without them soldiers seein’ us.”

“It’s not the soldiers I’m worried about down here,” Dr. Menard said. “It’s the bugs.”

Qween shrugged. “Maybe. I’ll take my chances stomping on dem bugs any day over tryin’ to stomp on a bullet.”