Night of the Living Trekkies (2 page)

“Hold up,” Jim said.

But his soldiers didn’t seem to hear. They bunched up at the entrance, ready to begin.

“Hold up!” Jim yelled.

No one listened. One soldier kicked down the door and charged into the blackness. Two more followed.

An explosion rocked the street. Dust and flames poured out of the doorway. The concussion blew one of the soldiers out of the house. He lay on the ground, clutching his face.

The other two didn’t come out at all.

Jim rushed into the burning building, trying to locate the missing soldiers in the choking blackness. He staggered around for what felt like forever, walked for what seemed like miles. Slowly, it dawned on him that he couldn’t possibly still be in that tiny, bombed-out dwelling on the fringe of A-Bad.

That’s when he found his soldiers.

The missing were privates Eric Willman and Lou Jones. Both were new to the 3rd. Both were covered with blood, their uniforms shredded and blackened. Yet both were on their feet, standing calmly at parade rest.

“Why didn’t you listen to me?” Jim asked.

“We couldn’t,” Lou said. “You weren’t here.”

The two, Jim realized, were dead. Yet there they stood, giving him looks that could have burned holes in stone.

“We were your responsibility,” Eric said.

“Where were you?” they both asked.

Jim tried to answer, but no words came out.

“Where were you?” they asked once more.

Again, Jim struggled to speak.

“Wake up,” someone else said.

The darkness lightened, the faces of the dead soldiers faded. A new, only slightly less insistent voice replaced theirs.

“Wake up!” it shouted. “Some kid’s going nuts with a phaser.”

Jim sat up. The newspaper draped over his lap fell to the floor. He rubbed his forehead and looked around. Afghanistan was gone. So was 2009. Instead, he found himself sitting in a heavily upholstered chair in the lobby of the Botany Bay Hotel and Conference Center in downtown Houston. It was late afternoon on a Friday.

And he was asleep on the job.

The owner of the voice stood over him, a disapproving scowl drawing tight lines across her sun-worn face.

“Hey, Janice,” he grunted. “How’s it going?”

“You’re lucky the GM likes you,” replied Janice Bohica, placing her hands on the sides of her head as if to steady a throbbing brain. “But why, I have no idea. You’re the last person in the world I’d trust with responsibility.”

Jim had heard this spiel before. He suspected that Janice honed it on a long string of underlings during her oft-referenced seventeen years as the hotel’s daytime manager.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

“How about getting your act together and behaving like a grown-up? In case you haven’t noticed, we’re shorthanded today.”

Jim glanced around the lobby, which was uncharacteristically quiet for a Friday afternoon. “Looks like everything’s under control,” he said. “Aside from two or three hundred Trekkies, we’re pretty much empty.”

“We have precisely 262 registered GulfCon guests,” Janice said, “but we’ll have north of three thousand walk-ins for the convention. These people can be very high maintenance. You’re going to be running all weekend.”

Jim sat up in the chair and yawned.

“What were you saying about a guy with a Taser?”

“Phaser,” Janice corrected. “One of those handheld ray guns from
Star Trek
. There’s a kid on the second floor and he’s pointing it at guests. Scaring people.”

“Where’s our chief of security?”

“Dexter’s busy. Someone from the seventh floor reported a drunk mime. The guy actually attacked someone.”

“A drunk
mime
?” Jim said.

“A man in a leotard with his face painted. Tried to jump Dexter, too. But Dexter laid him out with his baton, cuffed him, and brought him down for the cops.”

“Crap,” Jim said. “He’ll be filling out forms for hours.”

“Exactly,” Janice said. “Which is why you’re dealing with phaser boy.”

“You can count on me.”

“I’ve heard that before,” Janice said. “But I know you don’t mean it. Your goal in life is to
avoid
being counted on.”

Jim felt his discomfort level rising. Janice was bitchy. She was officious. But the thing that irritated him the most was that she totally had him pegged.

“Look, enough of the psychotherapy, all right?” he asked. “I get it; I’m a drag on your existence. Why do you want to spend more of it cataloging my shortcomings?”

Janice looked him up and down.

“Because you could be more than this,” she said, gesturing at his hotel uniform. “It really doesn’t become you.”

Jim felt a keen desire to change the subject, so he knelt and gathered up his newspaper—that morning’s edition of the
Houston Chronicle
. He surveyed the front-page headline before placing it neatly on the chair’s side table: Johnson Spaceflight Center Locked Down.

“A gas leak caused an explosion,” Janice explained. “It’s been cordoned off for the recovery crews. They’re going over the whole place with tweezers.”

“Sounds like you’re following the story pretty closely.”

“Current events are important, Jim. Especially current events happening fifteen miles away. Now, please go fetch that phaser kid.”

Janice turned abruptly and walked back toward the front desk.

Jim stood up and ran his hands through his close-cropped chestnut hair. He kept it only slightly longer than the buzz cut he’d worn in the army. But his hotel uniform was radically different. Instead of desert camouflage, a helmet, and body armor, he wore black boots, black khakis, and a white mock turtleneck under a red double-breasted jacket. It wasn’t exactly the best choice for Houston in August, but inside the hermetically sealed Botany Bay, where the hyperactive climate-control system chilled everything to a crisp sixty-eight degrees, it was tolerable.

Certainly, it was more tolerable than the place he’d just come from.

He walked quickly through the hotel’s sunlit seventeen-story atrium. The side and rear walls were lined with hotel room windows. The north-facing wall held the main entrance—a battery of glass doors. Across from it was the front desk—a long, black marble check-in counter.

Just past the front desk sat a bank of four glass-enclosed elevators. Jim pressed the call button and then fished a walkie-talkie from his jacket’s interior vest pocket. Someone had written “Property of BBH&CC” on its back with a Sharpie.

“Hey, Dexter, are you there?” he said.

“I’m in my office,” came the reply.” Administering first aid.”

“To who?”

“To myself. That clowny son of a bitch sank his teeth into my arm.”

“You’re serious? You were bitten by a mime?”

“It’s not funny, Pike. I’m bleeding. I just poured a gallon of hydrogen peroxide on this thing.”

Jim was tempted to reply that he’d seen worse wounds in his lifetime, but there was no point in trying to explain it to a civilian. “I’m going to pick up this phaser kid,” he said. “You want me to bring him down to your office?”

“Hell, no, just bring me his toy,” Dexter said. “I don’t want to call the cops again. It took forever for them to pick up Marcel Marceau.”

The elevator on the far right of the bank dinged. Its doors opened and Jim stepped inside. “I’m on my way,” he said as the doors closed. “See you in a few minutes.”

Jim slid the walkie-talkie into his jacket, stepped aboard the elevator, and pushed the button for the second floor. Playing on the hotel audio system was a scratchy recording of William Shatner singing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. “The GulfCon organizers had prepared an entire playlist that was tailored exclusively to Trekkie conventioneers; there were pop songs covered by Leonard Nimoy, film scores by Jerry Goldsmith, and the occasional warbling song of a humpback whale. Jim guessed this last bit was a nod to
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
, but really it was anybody’s guess.

A moment later, the elevator doors opened, revealing a wild-eyed teen wearing a T-shirt that read “There Can Be Only One Kirk.” He pointed a plastic phaser at Jim and squeezed the trigger. The toy emitted a blast of bright red light.

“Toh-pah!” the kid shouted.

Jim’s hand darted out and grabbed Mr. Phaser by the wrist—then yanked him into the elevator and pressed him up against the wall. The move was all reflex. He didn’t even need to think about it.

“You shouldn’t point guns at people,” he said. “The last person who did that to me ended up in a rubber bag.”

The teen, thoroughly terrorized, dropped his toy.

Jim reached down to pick it up, ashamed of himself for over-reacting. It’s not like this high school sophomore was a threat to anyone. He just needed a little discipline.

“Look, why don’t you just go to your room?” Jim suggested. “Go watch TV or something.”

“TV’s busted.”

Wonderful
, Jim thought.
Another problem
.

He asked the kid for his room number and then tried to clarify the issue. “You mean the TV’s broken? Or you’re not getting a clear picture?”

“It’s static,” the kid explained.

Jim promised to send up a maintenance person by the end of the day. “And you can get your toy back after the convention. Ask for it when you check out.”

He was back in the lobby a minute later and emerged from the elevator to find a pretty, young woman waiting for the lift. Judging from her navy-blue suit and Coach handbag, he guessed she’d arrived on business.

The woman smiled at him. “Nice costume.”

Jim looked down at his red hotel jacket—and the toy phaser—and realized she had mistaken him for a Trekkie. “I’m not here for the convention,” he sheepishly explained. “I work with the hotel.”

She stepped aboard the elevator. “Then you might want to holster your ray gun.”

Jim started to protest further, but it was too late. The doors were already sliding shut.

It’s going to be that kind of weekend
, he thought.

At the front desk, he passed a member of the maintenance crew who teetered on a ladder, struggling to hang a banner reading “Wel-come Fifth Annual GulfCon” over the check-in area. Jim stepped behind the counter and through a doorway, walking past banks of cubicles until he reached an actual office with regular walls. The sign on its closed door read “Chief of Security.” Jim used the butt of the phaser to knock.

“Enter,” came a voice from the other side.

Jim walked into the office of Dexter Remmick and tossed the toy phaser into a large box of lost-and-found objects. Dexter’s more than three-hundred-pound bulk was wedged behind his metal desk, whose surface was strewn with the contents of the hotel’s first-aid kit. A fresh bandage cocooned his left forearm.

“Well, well,” Dexter said. “The Assistant Uniformed Staff Manager has decided to bless us with his presence. How was your nap?”

“Very refreshing,” Jim said. “Thanks for sending Janice after me.”

“My pleasure. How’s that promotion treating you?”

Jim smiled grimly as he sat down. He’d spent most of his six months at the Botany Bay as a lowly bellhop. His “promotion”—now a standing joke between Dexter and himself—happened out of the blue. The general manager called him into his office one day and said he’d heard good things about his “management style” and his ability to “energize” the rest of the uniformed staff.

Dexter had guessed, accurately, that much of Jim’s vaunted “leadership style” sprang from the fact that he was six foot two and a muscular two hundred and twenty pounds. Which tended to produce excellent compliance when he asked staffers to do things. Like the time he cornered Ted, the pool guy, and warned him to stop leering at female guests while cleaning the filters. Ted seemed thoroughly motivated after that encounter.

“Any more motivated and he would have pissed himself,” Dexter had joked at the time.

“When are these people going to realize I took this job to
avoid
responsibility?” Jim said.

“You and me both, buddy,” Dexter said. “I’m having zero luck with that today. Kevin should have had my back when I collected that goddamned mime, but he’s home sick. Right now, I’m the only law west of the Pecos.”

“At least we’re not full up,” Jim offered.

“Thank God for that. If this place was hopping, we’d be screwed. People have been calling in sick all day.”

He scowled at his bandage. The gauze was starting to turn pink.

“You need to get that looked at,” Jim said. “It’s bleeding way too much.”

“I’ll take care of it after work,” Dexter said. “Things are too hectic for me to duck out of here.”

“Hectic, huh? Then I better switch to Emergency Mode.”

“What’s that?

Jim stood up to leave. “It’s where I toss my walkie-talkie down the fire stairwell and hide in the freight elevator.”

“Sounds like a plan. And say hello to Sarah for me.”

“What are you talking about?” Jim said.

“You think I’m stupid? Every time you visit me, you find an excuse to visit the new girl’s cubicle. It must be instinctive. Like those sparrows that fly back to Caracas every year.”

“It’s swallows, and they fly back to Capistrano,” Jim said. “But I get your point. I’ll tell her you said hi.”

“And watch your back,” Dexter added. “That mime could have friends.”

“I really doubt that mimes have friends,” Jim said as he walked out the door.

He found Sarah Cornell, the hotel’s recently hired twenty-five-year-old assistant catering coordinator, sitting in her cubicle.

“Hey,” he said. “How’s the food business?”

Sarah glanced up from her desk. She looked tired.

“I need thirty pounds of edible jelly worms for one of the Gulf-Con banquets. They’ll be part of an alien buffet—something called goog.”

“You mean
gagh
,” Jim corrected. “It’s a type of worm favored by Klingons.”

“Whatever, nerd,” Sarah said. “I’m driving to a warehouse club to buy some.”

“It’s gotta be a hundred and ten degrees outside.”

“Doesn’t matter. Neither rain nor snow nor extreme heat shall stay this courier from getting a bunch of fake worms for sci-fi geeks to nosh on. And then I’m sneaking home early. I really, really need to take off my bra.”