Night of the Living Trekkies (9 page)

It occurred to Janice that he should seek medical attention, not stand outside pounding on the glass with his brawny arms.

Clearly something had to be done.

She thought of her training, of the management seminars she attended twice a year at the company headquarters in Charleston. Then she cleared her throat and began to speak.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry to announce that your rooms are unavailable,” she told the bloody horrors clambering outside. “The Botany Bay Hotel and Conference Center was founded on the promise of delivering excellent customer service to our guests. I realize we are failing to deliver on that promise, and I ask for your patience and forgiveness as we work to rectify this situation.”

Janice was answered with more moans.

And with something else.

She heard it not with her ears, but with her mind. Not words but rather a powerful urge percolating up from the dark regions of her brain. Something was in there, telling her to do things. Implanting in her a strong, almost primal urge to unlock the doors. To allow the Botany Bay’s poor, shamefully inconvenienced guests to enter.

She wondered where the suggestion might have come from. Was someone in the mob speaking to her? She looked from one bloody face to the next. All seemed to share the same peculiar type of growth, either on their faces or shoulders or, in one case, right in the middle of the chest. The bulbous masses looked like big, white eyeballs, but with crimson pupils in the middle.

All of the hundred or so people outside seemed to have them.

And every one of those eyeballs was staring at her.

Janice observed a woman dressed in a red Starfleet uniform. Pressed against the glass by the throng, she happened to be the creature closest to her. There was an eyeball sprouting out of her right shoulder. Janice looked at it closely. Very closely.

She gazed at it for several moments, transfixed.

The eyeball was trying to make contact with her. It wanted her to do something, but struggled to find the words. Finally, by ransacking what remained of its host’s mind, it made its point.

We mean you no harm
, it whispered to Janice’s fragile consciousness.
Lower your shields.

As the elevator arrived at the third floor, it occurred to Jim that he should unclip the Taser from his belt. Just in case. He switched off the safety and checked to make sure the weapon was loaded—and found that it wasn’t. He’d forgotten to snap in a dart cartridge.

A moment later the doors slid open. The elevator emitted a
ding
loud enough to alert everyone—and everything—in the general area.

Out of instinct, he pointed the weapon anyway. Not that he could see much. Someone or something had knocked out the landing lights. He was greeted by a wall of darkness. He activated the Taser’s LED flashlight and played it across the floor. It landed on an enormous bloodstain surrounded by bloody footprints. Someone, probably several someones, had died on that spot. But where were the bodies?

Things aren’t as bad as they seem
, Jim thought.
They’re worse.

Holding the elevator door open with his foot, he continued panning the light across the floor. It landed on Dexter’s Glock 17. The hotel security chief’s much-loved sidearm lay abandoned just outside the door to room 301.

Jim poked his head out of the elevator, wondering if he should press his luck and grab the pistol. All of the hallway lighting sconces were dark, but there was enough light from the glowing emergency exit signs to determine that the hall was currently empty.

The gun was no more than fifteen feet away. He desperately wanted it.

Jim sorted through his hotel passkeys until he found the one that overrode the elevator’s computer. He pushed the card into the control panel, then locked the lift in place with its doors open.

Then he walked over to the Glock and picked it up. It was definitely Dexter’s weapon. And it had been fired. Jim pulled the clip and discovered that only seven of its seventeen rounds remained. The security chief hadn’t gone down without a fight.

Not that fighting did him any good.

Jim stood in the darkness, feeling his testicles trying to crawl up inside his body. He hadn’t felt so unnerved since combat. Back then it happened mostly on patrol. Poking around strange houses and claustrophobic neighborhoods, he’d wonder if the next corner he turned would be his last.

This was very much the same feeling, only worse. At least in Afghanistan he wasn’t alone. Now he faced danger all by himself.

Which is probably for the best, considering my track record
, he thought grimly.
If I screw up here, nobody dies but me.

“Time to boldly go someplace else,” he muttered.

He was retrieving his passkey from the elevator control panel when a voice cried out to him.

“Hello? Is someone there?”

Jim was so startled he dropped the passkeys on the floor. He quickly gathered them up before stepping back into the hallway.

“Where are you?” he called.

“Room 308.”

Jim’s heart sank. The room was more than halfway down the hall to his right.

“Are you hurt?” Jim said.

“No, but I can’t move. It’s complicated.”

Jim pointed the Taser’s piercing beam down the hall. It was so intense that he feared it might give away his position. And he was already worried about running down the batteries. Then he remembered the plastic phaser. He removed it from his backpack and squeezed the trigger. The toy produced a less piercing but still helpful beam of amber light.

He holstered the Taser and then advanced with the pistol in his right hand, the phaser in his left. As he passed the doors to the intervening rooms, he could hear the occupants on the other side, groaning and gurgling and scratching at the doors. In their current state, they obviously lacked the smarts to work the doorknobs and get out.

Someone had used a room service tray to prop open the door to room 306. Jim paused before the threshold and peeked around the corner. He saw a middle-aged man in a bathrobe milling around list-lessly between the room’s two beds. A man with two bloody stumps where his hands used to be. And a grotesque third eyeball perched, somewhat impractically, on the top of his bald skull.

The creature seemed to notice Jim. It turned in his direction and bowed—presumably to give the eye on its head a better look. Jim didn’t wait for the moaning to start. He reached inside and pulled the door closed.

Then he advanced to room 308 and discovered that this door was also slightly ajar. He wondered, briefly, if this was a setup. Maybe some of the zombies were smarter than others.

But he knew he had heard a human voice. Its desperation couldn’t be faked.

Before entering, Jim pointed the phaser to his right and left, down both lengths of hallway. Still no contacts.

He shouldered the door open a few inches. It made a creak that Jim imagined could be heard all the way to Dallas. He pushed it open a couple more inches. Then a couple more. Then he slid in, the Glock leading the way.

The room was profoundly dark, save for the light from Jim’s phaser. From the doorway he could see the end of the first bed.

A woman’s bare legs lay across it.

Pistol ready, Jim walked down the short entry hall and played his light over the mattress. He found the legs’ owner—a beautiful woman dressed in a golden metal bikini and a red silk loincloth.

“What the hell?” he said.

“Shut the door,” she hissed.

Jim turned back to close the door and tripped over a tripod, knocking it and the attached camera to the floor. Then he pushed the door shut, locked it, and turned on the bedroom lights.

“Is there a key?” he asked.

“Right here,” she said. “On the nightstand.”

Jim grabbed it, climbed onto the bed, and inserted it into one of the cuffs. As soon as he unlatched the first cuff, the woman pulled her hand free, grabbed the key, and unlatched the second herself. Then she jumped off the bed in one athletic bound.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Where do you think?”

She disappeared into the bathroom and closed the door.

Jim tucked the phaser back into his belt, set the pistol on the end of the bed, and looked around the room. Aside from the video camera and the tripod, he didn’t see any personal belongings—nothing, that is, except for an eight-foot length of chain that was draped across a dresser. He lifted one end, expecting a plastic prop, but the links were genuine steel and very heavy. Martock would have approved of its craftsmanship.

He turned on the television but there was no picture—just static. Then he turned it off and tried the telephone instead. He was still pushing buttons when the woman emerged from the bathroom.

“Anything?” she asked.

“No,” Jim said, hanging up. “Not even a dial tone.”

“We need to find someone who works for the hotel,” she said. “Something weird is happening. You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff I’ve heard in the last three hours.” She went over to the window and opened the curtains, but all this revealed was a partial view of the parking garage across the alley.

“I
am
with the hotel,” Jim said. “My name’s Jim Pike and I—”

“Tell me what’s going on.”

“I could tell you, but you’d never believe me. You need to see for yourself, Ms. . . .”

The woman stood in front of the mirror over the dresser, quickly weaving her long, raven hair into a ponytail.

“Call me Leia,” she said.

And all at once it clicked into place: the chain, the metal bikini, the red loincloth. She was dressed as Leia Organa in the opening scenes of the
Return of the Jedi
, when the princess was held captive as Jabba the Hutt’s slave aboard a floating barge.

“Wow,” Jim said. “Do
you
ever have the wrong hotel.”

The woman laughed bitterly.

“Ya think?” she asked.

“We’re going to be okay,” Jim assured her. “My sister’s somewhere on the seventh floor, and once we find her we can—”

“You can do whatever you want,” she said, heading for the door. “I’m going straight to the lobby and getting the hell out of here.”

She turned the latch before Jim could stop her. Instantly the door burst open, pinning Leia against the wall. In lumbered Dexter—or rather, all that remained of him. Something had gouged huge portions of flesh from his face, arms, and legs. He lunged past Leia and made straight for Jim, grabbing two fistfuls of his red jacket and shoving him backward onto the floor.

The weight crushed the air from Jim’s lungs. He forced both of his hands around his attacker’s neck, struggling to keep Dexter’s furiously snapping teeth away from his face. But gravity worked against him. And there was something else. Something slimy on the security chief’s neck kept him from getting a firm grip. It wriggled and twitched whenever Jim’s fingers made contact.

It was an eye, he realized. An eye that had sprouted right where the Adam’s apple used to be.

Trapped between the bed and the wall, pinned by his attacker’s immense bulk, Jim knew he had only moments to live. Dexter’s ravenous jaws were less than an inch from Jim’s cheek.

And then, suddenly, they weren’t.

Through a haze of panic he glimpsed Leia above him, looping a length of chain around the undead creature’s neck. Then, straddling the two of them, she pulled with all her strength.

The force snapped back Dexter’s head, freeing Jim’s hands and allowing him to crawl out from beneath his attacker’s body. He staggered to his feet, grabbed his Glock from the bed and leveled it at the horror on the floor. Leia kept pulling as hard as she could, every muscle in her body straining.

Jim was about to shout for her to stand clear when he realized shooting the thing wasn’t necessary anymore. The creature formerly known as Dexter went limp. Jim advanced cautiously on the bloodied remains. He tapped the head, then the torso, with his foot. No reaction. Only then did he close the door and sit down on the corner of the bed, his pistol gripped loosely in his hands.

Leia dropped the chain and stepped back, gasping from the effort. “Next time . . .,” she began.

“Next time we’ll check the peephole,” Jim agreed. “It’s a deal.”

Too stunned to do anything else, Jim stared at the mess on the floor. He noticed a viscous green fluid oozing from the front of Dexter’s neck. From precisely where the third eye had been.

“Is that a zombie?” Leia asked.

“I’m afraid so,” Jim said.

“I didn’t think you could strangle a zombie.”

“I’m not sure you did. This particular zombie had some sort of third eye over its windpipe. Once you crushed it with your chain, it stopped moving.”

Leia took this information in remarkably good stride. Jim knew that most civilians would respond just like Janice—their minds, numbed by panic and fear, would simply seize up. But Leia seemed focused, not terrified.

“I suppose there are more downstairs,” she said. “That would explain all of the screams I’ve been hearing.”

“There are quite a few,” Jim said.

“And the police?”

“No police, no cell phones, no Internet, and no TV. Aside from my boss, you’re the only person I’ve seen in the last hour.”

“Then I guess we’re on our own,” Leia said.

There was a sudden loud pounding at the door.

“Not necessarily,” Jim said.

He stepped up to the peephole and looked outside. Somehow the fight with Dexter had drawn the attention of more zombies. Jim could make out three of them, pressed against the door. He guessed there were more behind them.

“What now?” Leia asked.

“I’m thinking,” Jim said.

“Some rescue,” Leia muttered. “When you came in here, didn’t you have a plan for getting out?”

“If you want to help, you can lay off the
Star Wars
dialogue,” he said. “I’ve had enough sci-fi crap for one weekend.”

“What dialogue?” Leia asked.

More pounding at the door interrupted his reply. Jim studied the lock and the hinges. It looked like it would hold—for now.