Suspended In Dusk (32 page)

The room was already soaking up the equatorial warmth. She opened the balcony doors, and swung them to move some air.

The beach had gone dark. Only a few dim lights shone at the resorts lavish enough to have generators, the rest of the town pitched into darkness. The mountaintop glowed, reflecting its fire off the underside of ash clouds.

The clock flashed twelve; her fancy dive watch had failed in the deep water; her phone sat on her pillow back in New York—a condition of their retreat.
He’s got a condition, all right. Or a disorder.
She yawned.

Rob’s form sprawled across the whole bed. There was no space left for her—not unless she wanted to spoon up next to him. She didn’t. She slipped out onto the balcony, shut the door, and settled into the plush deck chair, her head spinning into sleep as she listened to the splash of the ocean two floors below.

* * *

A shrill screech shattered her dream and she flung her eyes open.
Santino…?

A sepia morning glow had settled over the ocean. Sunlight filtered weakly through smoke, its peace cut through by the sound of something scraping at the glass behind her. She spun around in her chair.

Rob crouched on the floor inside the glass door. He clawed at the glass, his nails folded back to the raw quick. His jaw hung slack, saliva stringing from his lips.

She leaped from her chair and reached for the door handle.
Is he hurt?
She flinched back. He banged on the glass, but the shrieks continued behind her. His breath did not fog the glass.

What’s wrong with him, Jesus, what’s going on?

She backed away from the door, reached behind, and grasped the balcony railing. Her eyes slid to the side, over the low wall.

Below, the ground seethed with bodies. Men in reflective jackets fled coral-crusted skeletons that dragged their slick black bags behind them. Tourists ran as shuffling, grey-skinned creatures leapt at them. Blood sprayed from tan flesh that squirmed as the grey figures fell on them and ripped them with rows of serrated fangs.

Andrea puked sweet and sour rum over the rail. She fought for breath against the tide of nausea and the tightness in her throat.

There was a bang against the balcony door and Andrea spun to face Rob again.

A web of cracks spread across the glass door. Rob’s mouth pressed against the center of the spiral fissure, gnawing. A tooth dropped to the carpet trailing pink froth behind it, and a bloody fang burst through the gum in its place, spraying the door in a fine mist of blood.

Andrea screamed and pressed her back to the low cement barrier at the balcony’s edge. There was a privacy wall separating their balcony from the one adjacent and she sidled along and leaned around it. She planted one foot firmly in the corner of the balcony and hugged the dividing wall. She reached her other leg over the edge—over the bloody chaos below—then swung it around into the neighboring balcony.

Rob’s hand burst through the door in a coruscating shower of glass and her stomach churned at thought of the drop to the pavement below.

Oh god. Now, Andrea. Now!

Jump.

Andrea threw herself over the wall and slammed into a deck chair with a crash that sent her sprawling. As she scrambled to her feet, Rob’s bloody arm reached around the dividing wall, tattered, bloody fingers grasping at the air.

“Not today, asshole! Or ever again.”

She picked up a wooden deck chair, and threw it through the glass door. Fragments of glass fell around her as she leapt through the jagged hole.

She crouched—waiting, listening. The room was silent. Bathroom empty. Fresh sheets folded on top of a bare mattress. She should be safe for a minute.

Andrea sat on the bed. Rob flailed and grunted wetly but made no progress.
What the hell had happened to him?

There was a loud thud in the hallway and Andrea ran to the door and pressed her ear against the crack.

A door slammed in the distance. A scream.

The hinge on the bar bolt screeched as she rammed it in place.
I’ve got to find help; I’ve got to get out.

She grabbed the phone receiver from the nightstand and pressed it to her ear. The line was silent, but for a slow buzz of static. She pressed the button for the desk, and held her breath. It rang.

A voice burst through the line, a staccato of rapid Spanish.

“Hello? Santino, is that you?” Andrea said.

“Mrs. Renato! You’re alive!” Santino’s grin slid through the phone, the way it had slid up her legs the first night she stretched out on the beach. The way his fingers slid over hers when he handed her a drink.

“I am
not
Mrs. Renato. Santino, what’s happened? What’s going on out there?”

“You were right, Miss Andrea. They just walked right up out of the sea.” He laughed.

“Santino, are you drunk?”

“Yes, I am, señorita. Locked myself in the store room behind the bar.”

“How do we get out of here? Rob is… I climbed over the balcony to the next room…”

“Stay where you are. Get drunk if you can! One got me last night, but I’m still myself. Not like the others. I think it’s the tequila!” He cackled and hung up the phone.

The line clicked back to static. Andrea slammed the receiver down.
So much for her knight in shining armor.
The cut on her thumb itched.

Rob’s arms still waved around the partition, his throaty moans floating in through the broken door.

She sat on the bed. Her stomach growled. The screams outside grew distant.

She raided the mini-fridge, and washed down a tube of peanuts with a fist-sized bottle of scotch. A tiny wheel of shortbread was her dessert.

She stepped out onto the balcony, and hugged the wall away from Rob’s bloody reach. His movements grew more erratic in her presence, his moans frantic. She stepped within a few inches of his fingertips, watched him grow rabid as he clawed the air for her.

“Some things never change.”

The strip of boardwalk below the balcony lay in ruin. Scattered garbage, crushed bicycles, and bloody piles of bones littered the paths. Sharks threw themselves at the shore after the gory piles. Desiccated segments of ships that had risen with the Fenix bobbed in the waves, covered in rough corals. Calcified bodies streamed from their fissures, marched up onto the beach, and poured around the resorts into the city. Where they stepped, bright corals bloomed. Distant sounds of chaos ebbed and flowed with the wind. The world smelled like the dead insides of a shell.

A deep roar filled her ears. Waves began to flow backward, curling back toward the sea. The balcony swayed, the bright concrete cracked, and crumbled away from its rebar ribcage.

Andrea stumbled back through the doorway. She fell on the bed. Pictures tumbled off the walls.

A deep explosion rattled her teeth. All the glass in the room shattered. The sky grew dark, the air ripe with sulfur.

Andrea buried her face in the pillow, coughing, until the shaking stopped. Her own trembling shook the bed long after the earth had stilled. The roar of the volcano continued; the sky grew darker.

A low moan sounded from the balcony. The shelf of concrete hung by warped strands of metal. The partition had crumbled. Rob was scraping his way up the slope of debris toward the empty doorframe.

Andrea jumped to her feet. Sharp glass fragments pierced the soles of her feet.
No time for pain.

She reached up and grasped the ornate brass wall sconce by the bed and hung from it, tugged on it till it ripped free from the wall.

Rob’s twisted fingers wrapped around the metal frame of the door. He dragged himself forward over the crumbled concrete and shattered glass. His skin had faded to a sickly grey, painted over with his expensive rusty bronzer.

Andrea cleared a path of carpet and found her footing. She stretched her shoulders.

“Fucker,” she whispered. “You want to finish our fight here in paradise?
Here I am.
”
Rob pulled himself up, shuffled into the room, and stumbled toward her.

She lashed the sconce at him and raked it across his face. Teeth and blood flew, scattering across the far wall. He turned back to her, eyes rolling. Sharp yellow triangles sprung from the empty gums, spraying her face with blood.

She swung again. The impact shocked her arm, and she felt his bones give.

When his face whipped back to hers, his jaw hung below his nose, swinging from pale tendons. Serrated teeth ran in rows along the meaty crescent. His left eye bulged over a concave cheekbone.

Andrea struck him again. He staggered back. His reaching fingers brushed the fabric of her shirt. Thick, dark blood ran down his twisted neck. He spun, looking for her. His head was wrenched, stuck around backward. Bloody arms grasped again, reached the wrong way. A frothy growl bubbled from his throat. Dark, necrotic flesh spread from the wounds the broken glass had left on his rear.

Andrea lunged, and brought the sconce down hard on top of his head. It punched through the bone and sunk deep. The air filled with the scent of spoiled oysters and he dropped to the ground in a crumpled heap.

She lay back on the bed, panting, and listened to the rumble of the mountain and the silence of the boardwalk. Her feet throbbed. Her heart skipped.

This time
I
finished it—for both of us.

Blood seeped from shallow cuts across the calloused soles of her feet.

No no no.
She sat up and looked at the small cuts.
Running is going to hurt but I can’t stay here. I need to get to Santino.
She stood and yelped at the pain in her feet.
I need my shoes. I need supplies.

She ripped a pillowcase from the pile of sheets on the bed and stumbled to the mini-fridge. She snapped the lid off a tiny bottle of vodka, clamped it between her teeth, and tipped her head back to slosh the liquor over her tongue as she scooped the contents of the fridge into the pillowcase.

The balcony platform sloped away from the shattered glass door. The deck chair dangled, caught in the rebar of the crumbled barrier. She spat the empty vodka bottle out. It tumbled, and splintered on the ground two floors below. Her head spun.

Her sticky fingers curled around a steel spoke that stuck from the wall and she stepped out onto another metal spine. She whimpered as her cuts wrapped around the gritty metal. Powdered concrete fell away from the walls around her. She scrambled over the rubble and into the room she’d shared with Rob, stepping over the pool of blood where he’d burst through the glass. She ran straight to the hall door and slammed the bolt in place.

Their mini-fridge was still full. Rob hadn’t let her touch it—told her it was all fattening garbage.
It’s the last thing you need,
he’d said.
She grabbed a bottle of liquor and downed it.

The water in the sink turned red as she scrubbed at her feet. The skin around the cuts had darkened. She poured weak yellow beer over the wounds. They stung and foamed, hissing.

“Damn it,” she said, scraping slivers of glass from the cuts. She limped to the phone and dialed the desk.

“Miss Andrea! You still kicking,
macha
? Staying
jumo
?”

“Santino, I cut my feet. Will that do it? Am I fucked?” She wrapped her feet in strips of bed sheets.

“How should I know? Either way, stay drunk.”

“I’ve just got the mini-fridge.”

“You’re fucked.”

“You have more there?” She pulled her sneakers on over the bandages and cinched them tight.

“Yeah, I’ve got the whole store room. If you can get here. I’m not coming up there.”

“Right. Asshole. See you soon.”

“Sure,
macha
. My love to you. Bye.” He sounded sober.

* * *

Rob’s backpack bulged with mini-fridge snacks, travel-sized toiletries, and a blanket from the bed. She’d drunk two more mini bottles of booze and refilled her empties with water from the bucket. The pockets of her jeans stretched around the sconces pulled from the wall. She leapt around corners, swinging half a curtain rod in each hand. She gritted her teeth with each footfall as the insoles grew spongy with blood.

The halls were dark tunnels, lit only by dusty corner windows. The loud hum of the generators rattled the walls but lit only the exit signs above the stairwell doors.

Andrea crept along the wall. She peered through a rectangle of glass in the stairway door. The space beyond was empty, but the single naked bulb that hung over each landing didn’t do much to illuminate the long slopes of stairs between.

She pressed the bar and slipped through the opening. A siren shrieked through the stairwell. Her feet echoed off the concrete stairs.

At the ground floor, on the last landing before the dark pit of basement, lay a pile of slick skeletons. At least three skulls poked from the nest of bones in the putrid puddle. Andrea dropped the curtain rods. She cupped her hands over her nose and mouth. Jagged fragments of a gnawed pelvis crunched under her sneakers as she edged toward the door.