Night of the Living Trekkies (12 page)

“You need to get us out of here,” he whispered. “I think Matt’s having trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“He’s acting funny. I’m not sure I can explain it. But he barely blinked when T’Poc went down. I’m not sure her death even registered. Like he was just playing another game of
Shopping Maul
.”

“Keep an eye on him,” Jim said. “Watch for suspicious behavior. And grab the pens off the hotel desk. If you get in a tight spot, you can use them as weapons. Eyeballs. Windpipes. Anything soft and fleshy.”

“You’re freaking me out,” Gary said.

“We’re just warming up,” Jim said. “See you soon.”

The walkie-talkie clicked off and Jim pressed the elevator button for the eleventh floor.

“What’s on eleven?” Leia asked.

“Remember how I said the hotel wasn’t crowded? It got me thinking. The eleventh-floor common areas are being painted. Which means they stink. Which means we wouldn’t put anybody up there unless we had to. And because it’s a slow weekend, we didn’t have to. I think it’s empty. We can walk to the end of the hall and take one of the fire stairwells down to seven.”

“What if those things are in the stairwells?”

“One problem at a time,” Jim shrugged. “We’ll kill the zombies if we have to, but we’ll try to avoid them. Keep moving and keep quiet. This ammo might have to last us a long time, so I don’t want to waste a single bullet. If you need to drop a body here or there, use the Taser. The Glock is noisier, so it doesn’t come out unless we’re well and truly boned. Okay?”

“You sound like you’ve done this before,” Leia said.

“Not exactly,” Jim said. “But after two tours in Afghanistan, I’ve become pretty good at sneaking around dark, dangerous places.”

The elevator arrived at the eleventh floor. Jim and Leia pulled their Tasers, walked to the back of the elevator, and stood shoulder-to-shoulder. Jim hit the button and opened the doors.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s get this par-tay started.”

The doors parted to reveal a landing filled with ladders, scaffolding, paint cans, and drop cloths. The lights were undamaged and functioning. There were no suspicious stains on the floor. The only odor was the reek of fresh paint.

Normal
, Jim thought.
Totally normal.

But he kept his Taser in hand just the same. So did Leia.

“Just like you figured,” she said, surveying the landing. “Empty.”

“I’ll bet the painters were up here just a few hours ago,” Jim said. “Probably went downstairs at quitting time and walked out to their cars, thinking it was just another day. . . .”

“Don’t dwell on it,” Leia said.

Jim holstered his Taser and poked around among the paint cans.

“What are you looking for?” Leia asked.

“These guys usually wear junk shoes at work. Sometimes they take them home, but if they know they’re coming back, they leave them. Maybe, if I can find a pair that’s not too funky . . .”

“Don’t worry about funky,” Leia said. “I’ll wear anything I can squeeze on my feet.”

Jim spotted something. He walked behind a scaffold and returned holding a pair of ratty, paint-encrusted high-tops.

“Here you go,” he said. “I hope they’re comfortable.”

“I’m a woman,” Leia said as she sat down on the floor and slipped her toes into the sneakers. “I’ve never owned a comfortable pair of shoes in my life.”

Jim watched as she tried to force them on. By his estimation they were almost an inch too short. But he said nothing. Better, and far safer, he calculated, to let Leia make the journey from denial to acceptance all by herself.

It took about ninety seconds.

“Dammit!” she shouted as she hurled the shoes across the room.

“I’ll look for more,” Jim said.

He resumed rooting around among the drop cloths, slowly making his way from one work area to the next.

“Hey,” he finally called from across the room. “I think I found another pair.”

“Do they look bigger than the first ones?” Leia asked.

“Shit,” he said. “Actually, they look like they’re attached to someone.”

Leia leapt to her feet and ran to Jim’s side, Taser in hand.

“What is it?” she asked.

Jim stood over a rolled-up drop cloth. Protruding from the end were two black, ankle-length boots.

“We may have a problem,” he said.

“Zombie?” Leia said.

“I don’t think so. The zombie wounds don’t stop bleeding. But this drop cloth looks clean. Not a speck of blood.”

“But someone wrapped him up,” Leia said. “Why?”

Jim was about to hazard a guess when the back of his neck started to tingle. Someone or something was behind him.

“Look out!” he shouted as he spun and pointed his Taser. Leia went down on one knee and brought hers to bear, too.

They found themselves pointing their stun guns at a thin, sandy-haired man in his mid-twenties. Eyes wide with surprise, he stood with his right hand extended, as if he’d been about to tap Jim on the shoulder. He wore a Star Trek uniform from the original series—black pants with a red tunic.

“What are you doing to Olson?” he asked.

Jim and Leia maintained their stances a moment longer until realizing that—since the kid could talk—he couldn’t possibly be a zombie. And since he wasn’t a zombie, there was no reason to shoot him.

They sheepishly holstered their weapons.

“Who’s Olson?” Jim asked.

The kid pointed to the body on the floor.

“We came for the convention,” he explained. “I’m Ensign Willy Makit.”

“Willy . . . Makit?” Jim asked. “I’m guessing that’s not your real name.”

“Of course not,” Willy said. “It’s my character’s name.”

“What are you doing all the way up here? I thought we had most of the GulfCon guests on the lower floors.”

Willy’s shoulders rounded as he dropped his head.

“The hotel said it was a simple mistake, but I believe we were intentionally segregated,” he said. “We wanted to be with everyone else, but I think word of our group got around and no one wanted to stay near us. So the hotel put us here. We didn’t find out until we arrived.”

“I don’t understand,” Jim said.

“I do,” Leia said. “Are you part of a red-shirt group?”

“I’m the last surviving member of the West Texas Red Tunic Club,” Willy said. “A once-proud organization formerly boasting a membership of eight.”

“Where are the other seven?” Leia asked.

“Dead,” Willy replied, his voice cracking. “They’re all dead. One insane, stupid accident after another.”

“There’s nothing accidental about these zombies,” Jim replied. “Once you understand their behavior, it’s very easy to predict everything they’re going to do.”

Willy shot him a puzzled look.

“Zombies?” he asked. “What zombies?”

The question hung in the air for a moment. He appeared to be serious.

“Oh boy,” Leia whispered to Jim. “This is bad.”

“Have you been up here the entire evening?” Jim asked.

“Yes.”

“Have you, at any point, glanced out a window and seen the lobby?”

“Yes.”

“So when you saw that the hotel was filled with bloody, mutilated, reanimated corpses, did it occur to you that there might be some sort of emergency?”

“I figured it was a costume party,” Willy shrugged. “Or maybe a flash mob? The truth is, I had bigger things to deal with. Like seven of my friends dying in one day.”

Jim looked around the hallway, astonished. “Are you telling me that you managed to lose seven people while holed up in the only secure space in this entire building?”

To Leia and Jim’s extreme unease, Willy covered his face with his hands and began to cry. For a long, long moment it was the only sound on the eleventh floor.

“It’s these uniforms,” he finally choked out between sobs. “
They
killed us. They’re cursed. And I’ll be the next victim.”

“You need to back up a minute,” Jim said. “You think you’ve angered some kind of Star Trek deity by wearing a red uniform?”

Willy took a moment to compose himself.

“In the original
Star Trek
series,” he explained, “the characters dressed in red tunics were always doomed. If one beamed down to a planet with Kirk and Spock, the guy in red would always,
always
die. So my friends and I decided to, you know,
celebrate
that by forming a club. It seemed like a good idea at the time. We’d all come to GulfCon in matching red shirts. We’d say we were the crew of the USS
Expendable
. It would be hilarious, because in the real world nobody dies just because they wear the wrong costume to a sci-fi convention, right?”

“That’s right,” Jim said impatiently. “Here in the real world, people don’t die just because they wear a red shirt. That’s crazy.”

“I thought the same thing when I woke up this morning,” Willy said. “I drove up for GulfCon with Olson, Carlisle, and Henderoff. The rest of our club was driving up a few hours later because they had to wait for Leslie to finish her shift at Best Buy. We were all going to meet at the Klingon Feast. But after we arrived and settled in, I got a message saying that our second crew was killed in a highway accident. A tractor-trailer collision. They hadn’t been on the road fifteen minutes when it happened.”

“Oh, my God,” Leia said. “I’m so sorry.”

“We were all in shock. And the fact that we couldn’t get a decent phone connection to anyone back home just made things worse. We thought about leaving, but it was getting near sundown and we didn’t want to risk driving after dark.”

“Because you were afraid something would happen to you too?” Leia asked.

“That’s right. The idea of a red shirt curse had been funny before, but now not so much. Especially to Carlisle. He was accident-prone to begin with. Always tripping over his own two feet. So we agreed we would stick together. I only let him out of my sight once, when he went to get his stupid Snapple.”

Willy suddenly sobbed again, even more violently than before.

“We don’t have a lot of time,” Jim said.

Leia swatted him away. “Tell us what happened next,” she said. “Your friend went to get a Snapple. Then what?”

Willy extracted a tissue from his pocket, blew his nose, then put it back in his pocket.

“He didn’t come back,” he said.

“Didn’t come back from where?” Leia said.

“From the vending machines. Olson went with him to buy some pretzels, and he saw the whole thing. Somehow the bottle got stuck in the machine. Olson was rocking it back and forth while Carlisle was trying to fish out the bottle. Somehow the whole thing tipped over and crushed his skull.”

“You’re kidding,” Jim said. “That’s impossible.”

“It’s the curse,” Willy insisted. “We tried to call the front desk, tried to call 911. All we got were recordings or static. Finally Henderoff decided to go down to the lobby to get help. Olson and I stayed behind.”

“And I’m guessing Henderoff never came back, right?” Leia said.

“Right. Olson and I couldn’t decide what to do next. We were just sitting here scarfing down pretzels. Olson swallowed maybe two handfuls when he choked and turned blue. I tried to save him. Really, I did. But . . .”

“He choked on a pretzel?” Jim asked.

Willy shook his head. “Anaphylactic shock,” he explained. “Olson was violently allergic to peanuts.”

“But you said he was eating
pretzels
,” Leia said.

“He was eating pretzels that were manufactured in a factory that also processes peanuts. I looked at the bag afterward. There was a warning under the ingredients, but I guess Olson didn’t notice it.”

“There you have it,” Jim said, as if the entire story made perfect sense. It didn’t, really, but he didn’t want to waste any more time babbling about Star Trek curses. Within the context of the day’s events, there was no choice but to accept Willy’s version of the events as fact. “Why don’t you come downstairs with—”

“Excuse us just a minute,” Leia interrupted firmly. “I need to talk to my friend in private.”

She took Jim by the arm and guided him to the other side of the elevator landing.

“Were you
listening
to this guy?” Leia asked. “He’s got goner written all over him. If we keep him around, we might get killed, too.”

“You can’t be serious. You make it sound like he’s got cooties.”

“
Death
cooties,” Leia said. “Plus he’s obviously in shock. If there’s trouble he’ll just curl up in the fetal position on the floor. I say we leave him right here.”

She looked over her shoulder and waved pleasantly at Willy.

“And it’s not like we’re abandoning him,” Leia continued. “He’s probably got the best setup of anybody in this entire fleabag rattrap. There’s enough candy bars and Diet Sprite in the minibars to keep him going for months. He could start his own civilization—provided he lives through the night.”

Jim thought about it.

“You make a good point,” he said. “But there’s safety in numbers. Maybe I can motivate him to come with us.”

“Good luck,” Leia said. “I shot my motivational wad on the elevator, convincing you not to blow your head off.”

They walked back to where Willy was waiting.

“This is the situation,” Jim explained. “Cannibal zombies have overrun Houston and maybe the entire planet. This hotel is completely infested. We’re trying to reach the seventh floor, where my sister and some of her friends are holed up. If the zombies bite you, you become one. Any questions?”

“No,” Willy said, eyes wide with shock. “That’s pretty much all I need to hear.”

“But there’s good news,” Leia chimed in. “This floor, unlike the others, is zombie-free. And the zombies are too stupid to work door-knobs or use elevators. So as long as you stay put, you’re safe. Safe from
them
, at least.”

“Good, because I’m not going anywhere,” Willy said. “I’ll wait right here in room 1120 for whatever happens. With my luck, the ceiling will probably fall on my head.”

Jim rolled his eyes.

“You need to come with us,” he said. “You have no weapons and no training. You’d be a lot safer with me.”