Night of the Living Trekkies (10 page)

“Let’s see what Dexter’s packing,” he said, and rolled the body onto its side.

Leia patted his belt and came away with a heavy flashlight, a can of Mace, and another black-and-yellow Taser X3.

“Do you know how to use that thing?” Jim asked.

“I own one,” she replied as she checked the battery pack’s power level. “A princess can never be too careful.”

“What about shoes? You can’t run around this place with bare feet.”

“I don’t have a choice. Unless you feel like running up to room 911 and grabbing my bag. In which case you could also grab my jeans, a T-shirt, and the bottle of ibuprofen next to the bathroom sink.”

Jim opened up his backpack, snapped a cartridge into his own Taser, and stowed it in his bag. After a moment’s consideration, he also dropped in the toy phaser. Then he offered a dart cartridge to Leia.

“Want a spare?” he asked.

“In a second,” she said.

With considerable effort she reached underneath Dexter’s immense body, undid his gun belt, and yanked it loose. It was more than a yard long—enough to wrap around her waist twice. Instead, Leia slung it over her right shoulder and fastened the buckle at her hip. When she reholstered the Taser, it rode just below her left breast. The Mace went into a pocket at her waist.

“Good to go,” she announced.

“Works for me,” Jim said, handing over the spare darts.

“So how do we get out of here? Shoot our way past the ones in the hall?”

“I’ve got a different idea.” He pointed to the wall between themselves and the adjacent room 306. “Have you heard any noises in this room over the last few hours?”

“Not a peep unless you count all the moaning and screaming. That’s why my friend Donnie went over to investigate. And he never came back.”

Jim pointed to the opposite wall. “How about that room?”

“Silence,” she said. “Seriously.”

“It’s probably vacant. Even with the Trekkies convention, this is a slow weekend for us, and this floor’s only half-booked.”

He shuffled through his passkeys, found the appropriate one, and stuck it in the interior connecting door’s lock. He slowly pushed it partway open and shined Dexter’s powerful flashlight inside.

“Anything?” Leia asked.

“Empty,” Jim said. “No bags, curtains drawn, nothing out of place. We’re good.”

He walked toward the exterior door with Leia close behind.

“You’re just going to walk out there?” she asked. “There could be hundreds of them.”

Jim looked out the peephole. There weren’t hundreds of zombies, but there were more than enough to give him pause.

“Wait here,” he said. “And be ready to move.”

He ran back into room 308, where the creatures were still pounding on the exterior door. This time, Jim pounded back.

“Hey, you stupid freaks!” he shouted. “We’re in here! Tell all your friends!”

A chorus of moans erupted from outside. And then the pounding intensified. Furious and unrelenting. The metal portal shook on its hinges.

Jim waited a few moments. Then took several deep breaths, unlocked the bolt, and turned the handle. The door flew back instantly and slammed against the wall, pushed wide by the weight of the frenzied dead. Jim leapt away just in time to avoid the first wave of attackers. Caught off balance, they stumbled forward, falling in a pile at his feet. While others struggled to climb past them, Jim retreated to the connecting door and locked it.

He found Leia pressed to the exterior door, still watching developments through the peephole.

“Good idea,” she said. “They’re funneling right in.”

Jim handed her the flashlight.

“We go when I say ‘go,’” he said. “Once we’re outside, click this thing on and aim it down the hall. Watch where you step. There’s nasty stuff on the floor.”

“Got it.”

Jim checked his watch: it was well past nine o’clock. He could only hope that Rayna was still safe in her room. And that Matt didn’t try anything stupid.

Jim clicked off the Glock’s safety. Leia kept her post at the peephole.

“I think we’re good,” she finally said. “So far as I can see.”

Leia stepped away. Jim unlocked the door and turned the knob. He opened it a few inches—just enough to make sure the coast was clear. Then he stepped outside. Leia was so close behind that he could feel her breath on his neck.

The zombies, apparently busy tearing apart the room next door, missed their departure. Leia clicked on the flashlight and guided their steps as they raced down the hallway. Upon reaching the elevator, they discovered that two zombies had beaten them to the lift. They stood on board, clawing with bloody fingers at the glass walls, oblivious to the potential meal standing directly behind them.

“Shit,” Jim whispered.

“Double rat shit,” Leia replied, reaching for the elevator call button. “Let’s find another way down.”

Jim grabbed her wrist, stopping her. “For all we know, the other elevators have more. We need to get rid of these two.”

They heard a distant moan. They gazed down the hallway they’d just fled and saw nothing. But then Jim glanced at the opposite end of the hallway—the area he hadn’t considered when formulating his escape plan—and spotted a half dozen zombies doddering toward them.

“We need to get rid of these two
right now
,” Jim said.

“All right,” Leia shouted. “Listen up!”

The two zombies ceased their clawing and turned as one. They began, ever so slowly, to stagger out of the lift.

Jim raised the Glock. It had been a long time since he had fired a sidearm at a moving target. He sighted the first zombie carefully and pumped a single round straight into its chest.

Nothing happened.

“You missed!” Leia said.

“I didn’t miss,” Jim said. “He just doesn’t care.”

He fired three more slugs into the creature’s central body mass. Blood and black goo sprayed out its back, splattering the glass walls of the elevator, but the creature continued lurching forward.

“Do something!” Leia screamed. Jim could feel her fingers digging into his right shoulder.

The creature closed the final few feet between them. Arms outstretched, it drew near enough to smell.

Just as it prepared to lunge, Jim raised the Glock about a foot and fired a round into the monster’s temple. It went down and stayed down.

“It’s just like in the movies,” he said. “You need to shoot the heads.”

The second creature came close on its heels. Jim sighted its head, then changed his mind. Leia saw him waver.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said. “Gonna try an experiment.”

He fired at the eyeball protruding from the zombie’s left shoulder. The round struck home. The creature collapsed just like the first one.

“Excellent,” Jim said.

“What?” Leia said, her eyes riveted on the hallway zombies. “What’s so excellent?”

“We’ve got two different ways to kill them,” he said. “Things are looking up.”

There was a shuffling sound behind them. Leia turned just in time to see the remains of Donnie Trill closing in. The once-chatty videographer now couldn’t even manage a moan, having been relieved of his tongue and most of his nose and cheeks. Instinctively Leia pulled her Taser and fired. As soon as the electrodes connected, she turned on the juice. The creature collapsed, twitching violently, then lay still. The bulging eye on its right shoulder exploded in a burst of green goo.

Jim and Leia stared at it, slack-jawed.

“
Three
ways,” she said, holstering her Taser.

They stepped aboard the elevator. On the sound system, Brent Spiner was singing “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie,” with Jonathan Frakes and LaVar Burton doing the backup vocals.

“We need to go to the lobby,” Jim said as he frantically worked the elevator controls. “I left the only other person I’ve found alive down there, and she’s in a bad way. Mentally, I mean. We need to pick her up.”

“Oh my God,” Leia said, as she gazed out one of the glass walls. “Is that her?”

Jim peered through the streaks of blood and gore left by the zombies. He saw Janice standing in front of the main entrance doors, in full view of the monstrous, undead horde outside. A horde that had swelled to a horrific size.

There were no longer just dozens of zombies howling and clambering to get in. There were hundreds. Maybe thousands.

And Janice seemed to be talking to them.

Jim didn’t grasp the full scope of the horror until he ripped his gaze away from the main entrance and studied the windows of the rooms overlooking the lobby. Floor after floor, in one bedroom after another, he saw freshly risen zombies pressed against the glass, pounding furiously, driven to a frenzy by the sight of Janice.

“We’ve got to stop her,” he told Leia.

He punched the elevator’s lobby button.

“Hurry,” she said. “Those doors can’t hold.”

“They’ll hold,” Jim said. “They’re tempered glass. And if they break through the first set they still have to deal with the second.”

“Who’s she talking to?” Leia said.

Jim looked out the window. Something about Janice’s body language, and the way her head bobbed, suggested that she was indeed having a conversation. But that was impossible. There was no one to talk to. No one even capable of speech.

“What’s she doing?” Leia asked.

Janice nodded one last time, then walked back toward the reception desk. The elevator reached the lobby and its doors opened.

“Stay here,” Jim said, passing his backpack to Leia.

He ran out of the elevator as Janice felt beneath the reception desk for the security keypad.

“No!” Jim yelled. “Wait!”

She didn’t hear. Aroused by the sight of another fresh meal, the undead created a storm of noise that drowned out everything else.

Jim remembered the pistol in his hand, raised it over his head and fired. The noise echoed off the hotel’s marble-floored atrium. Janice heard the shot and finally glanced his way. She saw him and frowned reproachfully. Her lips moved:

Where were you?

Jim tried to speak. Nothing came out.

Then she said something else. Something that didn’t make any sense.

The hotel’s front doors sprang open. A tidal wave of bloody monstrosities surged into the Botany Bay. Janice, grinning as if she were welcoming a busload of charter tourists, stood her ground until the dead washed over her.

“No!” Jim yelled.

The wave broke over the hotel’s front desk, submerging Janice beneath a sea of ravenous dead. The stench of decomposing flesh filled his lungs. Jim pointed the Glock into the crowd and squeezed the trigger. All he heard this time was a
click
. The gun was empty. He was still staring down at it when a hand grabbed his left shoulder and spun him around.

“Come on!” Leia screamed.

He ran on unfeeling legs back to the elevator, which was propped open with a plastic, potted ficus tree. He kicked it out of the way. The doors closed just as the first of the zombies smashed against the clear panels that surrounded them on three sides.

“Get us out of here!” Leia shouted as face after hideous, hungering face pressed against the glass.

“It’s okay,” Jim said matter-of-factly as he locked the doors. “They can’t get to us. On the ground floor we’re surrounded on the see-through sides by a thick Plexiglas sheathing. It’s to keep people from getting crushed by the elevators. It also makes a pretty good zombie barrier.”

Then he slumped down onto the floor, dropped the Glock and put his head in his hands.

“There was nothing you could have done,” Leia said, trying to ignore the horrors surrounding her.

“There’s never anything I can do,” Jim said. “Never a goddamned thing.”

“What happened?”

“She let them in. She unlocked the doors and let the zombies in.”

“Why?”

“Maybe she got tired of waiting for me to come back,” Jim said.

“What did she say to you?”

“The last thing she said before she opened the doors was, I believe, ‘I have to lower the shields.’”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure. What the hell does that even mean?”

The zombies slammed against the Plexiglas with enough force to make it shudder.

“I don’t know,” Leia said, a look of mounting panic in her eyes. “All I know is that if you don’t get this damned elevator off the ground, I’m going to go as crazy as she was.”

Jim glanced over her shoulder to the zombies. He recognized several faces. One of the Klingons from the feast, his snapping-turtle headpiece now wildly askew. A uniformed member of the Botany Bay’s housekeeping staff who had obviously made her last bed. The guy who brewed him a double latte every morning at the hotel atrium’s coffee kiosk. Different people from different walks of life, but now with one thing in common. Each had a third eye located somewhere on the head or shoulders or arms or chest. An insane-looking eye with a crimson pupil.

He also noticed, in a detached way, that the ocean of horrors surrounding them seemed to mount higher and higher. The first arrivals, the clumsy bastards, were tottering and falling as new monsters pressed in. The newbies stood on top of the first wave. As the mound of the fallen grew, the zombies who stayed on their feet gained altitude.

It wouldn’t be long, Jim mused, before they surmounted the elevator’s protective sleeve and climbed onto the box itself.

And once they were
on
the elevator, they would be
in
the elevator.

Jim looked up at the access panel in the ceiling and wondered if he should prop it open and help the zombies along. Dying, even at the hands of flesh-eating ghouls, might be preferable to seeing Rayna and Janice in his nightmares. More accusers, asking him night after night why he let them down.

But Leia clearly had a different view. He could see it in her face—her beautiful, terrified face. She was still talking to him, and he tuned in for a moment.

“. . . can’t make the buttons work because you’ve frozen everything with your passkey!” she screamed. “You need to get your shit together before they climb on the roof and trap us!”