the mortis (15 page)

The infected start to come soon after.  Noiseless except for their padding footfalls.  From his position he is completely blind—he has no line of sight on the corridor—so he just stays huddled low, waiting.  He says something to himself that vaguely resembles prayer, and then he takes the set of keys in his palm and slots four key-blades in between his fingers, and he balls the hand into a fist. 

One of them staggers drunkenly into the alcove with him.  A man, alone, peeling away from the pack, drifting wayward.  Right away, the man sees Park huddled between the fallen vending machines, and they make direct eye contact, but the man simply trudges past him and then collapses into a seated position.  His back is flat up against the wall in the corner.

For a while the man is motionless, posted there on the floor like a woeful panhandler, and Park tries to stay completely still, staring forward, watching the man in his peripheral vision, but after a few moments the man lifts his arm up from where it rests at his side.  He brings the arm to the level of his teeth and gazes at the inside of his wrist almost longingly, as though he’s been waiting for the chance to find himself alone with it, and then he leans in and widens his mouth to a terrifying degree and bites down, breaking skin.  He begins gnawing at the site of the wound, and Park can’t bear to watch it, so he closes his eyes.

Soon h
e hears liquid splashing heavily against the tile.  A smell like hot gunmetal—the man must have tapped into something turgid, a life-giving conduit.  Everything vital is rapidly ebbing from him.  Before long, the alcove is completely silent. 

Park forces himself to stand and take a few tentative steps out of the space between the machines. 
He passes a pool of blood; in the darkness, it looks a lot like spent-up engine oil.  He glances down at the sick man on the floor, just long enough to see that he’s motionless—either dead or unconscious—then he moves to the hallway and looks both directions.  There’s no one.  Without hesitation, he starts in the same direction that the group took, the direction of the main lobby area. 

He moves as quickly as he
’s able to.  More and more, his legs are feeling rigid and weighted, similar to the way his mind has felt lately.  Every moment is becoming a struggle against some implacable inertia, strong as the pull of a current. 

He pushes past the
defunct elevator bank, and as he approaches the Makoa lobby he hears the sound of Nil’s voice roaring out monosyllabic commands.  Doors opening and closing forcefully.  One of the women in masks is shouting out a string of inspired profanity.  From every direction,  the echo of hurried footfalls. 

Park takes the corridor that leads to the conference rooms.  The hallway is barren—all of the clamor is coming from behind him, from the wing that branches eastward off the lobby, the part of the building that houses the guest room he was given. 

He comes quickly to the Calanthe, and for a brief moment the door looks the same as the rest of them, like any one of the faceless doors in any given hallway of the Makoa, but then he sees a single metal hasp installed across the frame gap.  The U-shackle of a padlock is threaded through the eyelet.   

Immediately, he
takes out the ring of keys and pages through them, skimming one after the other along the arc of the split loop.  His hands are shaking.  He studies the bow of every key but there is no label that matches the Calanthe.  Halfheartedly, he tries a few of them, but nothing takes.

There isn
’t time for this.  He lifts his shirt hem and pulls the hand-trowel from his waistband—the pointed scoop blade and the wooden handle.  He raises the trowel and bores the tip of the blade between the hasp and the wood, working it in.  Gouging a wide track into the fiber.  Once the blade is positioned deeply underneath the hasp, he levers the handle upward, steady and hard, prying the screw threads from their settings.  Up and down, up and down.  Finally the hasp breaks free and falls to the carpet, padlock and all.

He replaces the trowel and finds the white master keycard on the keyring.  Quickly, he slots it into the reader mechanism and pulls it out again.  The green pinpoint light flashes and the door lock clears.

He jacks the L-handle down and pushes open the door.  Knife in hand, he enters the darkness of the Calanthe, and he holds the door open to welcome in whatever light the hall can offer, but it doesn’t make much of an impact.  It’s nearly black inside; he’s all but blind. 

Near the entryway, he finds a desk chair on casters, same as the chairs in the Jumellea, and he takes it by the back, rolling it toward him and positioning it in front of the open door as a prop.  It catches and holds. 

Park moves further into the room, committing himself, and as his vision adjusts he begins to see the scope of the man’s possessions, the way that Nil has taken precious time to arrange these scavenged objects over every available surface.  The conference table, a chest of drawers, a mattress on the carpet, a nightstand.  Everything Nil calls his own—everything taken by him, hoarded here—has been thoughtfully organized.  Jewelry sorted according to its proper place on the body.  A pile of women’s undergarments—the blacks and blues and reds—folded, next to the mattress.  Wallets and handbags and watches.  Photographs of couples, entire families, a few white-bordered school pictures of children wearing their level best.  In the far-right corner of the room is a bank of travel luggage, dozens of suitcases and duffels stacked together. 

Park goes to the luggage pile and pulls down a battered black roll-aboard with a loop of pink yarn knotted around the grip.  He unzips the main compartment, and the inside is completely filled with alkaline batteries, all sizes and types.  AAs, mostly, but there are others, even a few watch cells the size of shirt buttons.  Most are still in the retail packaging.  He pushes the suitcase aside and he takes the handle of the next one.

Park goes through the contents of the bags—opening one after the other, spending just enough time to check for pill bottles—pausing only to shoot glances toward the entryway.  He finds a golf-club travel caddy filled with long-handled garden tools.  Suitcases entirely dedicated to travel-sized soaps and shampoos and toothpaste tubes.  Nail clippers and a set of jewelry screwdrivers.  He comes across a sheathed Leatherman, and he threads it through a belt that he finds in one of Nil’s many piles, and when he finishes he puts the belt on and cinches it, notching the last hole.  He opens a full-dresser trunk and finds a collection of thirteen fossa skulls, skinned and dried—utterly clean and stark white.  He closes the lid.  He takes down a luxury garment bag containing an assortment of packaged snacks, hard candies and chocolates, and he stuffs his front and back pockets full of them. 

Eventually h
e comes to a blue canvas sport duffel with a professional team logo stitched into both ends—the kind of bag that a child would use to tote gear around.  It lifts easily by the nylon straps, and as he pulls the bag down from the pile, the contents shift and there is a clatter like pebbles shaken in a plastic cup. 

He drops the bag and kneels and unzips it, and the interior is filled with prescription pill bottles,
smoke-orange and white-capped—hundreds of them.  Whole courses of antibiotics and anti-virals, blood pressure meds and oral contraceptives and erection pills.  More than a few SSRIs, all the major ones.  There are over-the-counter medicines mixed in also, some packaged in bottles, some shrink-wrapped in press-through foil.  Ibuprofen and acetaminophen and an antihistamine with pseudoephedrine, the real thing.  Generic and name brand medicines, both.  Everything.

Park re-zips the bag—there isn
’t time to scan the label of every bottle to look for hers.  He tosses the duffel aside and delves back into the heap of luggage, picking up a few of the smaller bags and shaking them, listening for the telltale rattle of tablets, but he doesn’t hear anything.  After a few tries he gives up the search, convincing himself that all the salvaged medication must be in one place—the man seems too meticulous with his possessions to do otherwise.

He needs to go.  He reaches for the duffel, but as he straightens
, there is the sound of the chair moving in the entryway, the sound of the swivel bearings in the caster wheels.  Friction between the metal long-pins and cylinders in the door hinges.  What little light there is in the room is quickly fading out. 

He turns around and the door is already falling closed, nearly there, and then he hears a low voice, disembodied, coming from the dark. 

“You will be made civilized, wild one,” the voice says.  

The door closes, and Park is completely sightless. 
Immediately he pulls the steak knife by the wooden grip and stands frozen, terrified.  Before he can act, he hears the sound of the man wending through the room in his direction—a slow, plodding gait.  No sign of hurry.  And then it occurs to him that this man has made himself blind intentionally, that he is far more interested in making this experience memorable—something worthy of the effort it will take—than he is with getting it over with, rushing through it. 

Park winds the duffel once around his wrist by the handles, taking in all of the slack of the nylon, and
then the bag is flush against his outer forearm.  He raises it as a sorry, makeshift shield—it’s all he can think of doing.  The knife-arm is cocked with the blade at the level of his shoulder.  He waits for what’s coming his way.

The last few steps the man takes to reach
Park are soundless, and then the man abruptly charges, driving into him with a lowered shoulder.  Park is able to buffer a small share of the impact with his outstretched arm, but the force still bulldozes his entire body backward, sending him reeling.  He goes down hard, landing flat on his back, and right away the man is standing above him, gladiatorial, straddling his torso, one foot on either side at the level of the ribcage.

The fall takes the air from him—
Park is gasping, mouth wide, his throat clicking.  Even in the dark he can see that the man is reaching down, descending, but before the man’s iron hands can take hold of him, Park brings up the blade of the knife and drives it into the man’s left leg.  Again and again in quick succession, with as much force as he can generate from a prone position.  The calf, the back of the ankle above the heel where the tendons are strapped, and once more behind the kneecap.  The blade breaks cleanly from the handle.  The man’s leg buckles and he collapses hard to one side.  

Park stands up
and blindly staggers forward—the duffel is cradled in both of his arms.  He uses the thin wire of blue light underneath the door as a compass, picking his way past the opened baggage.  He is still struggling for air.  Behind him the downed man is bellowing, writhing, spewing curses. 

Park ratchets the door handle and tries to rush out into the dimly lit hall
way, but he is stopped short—the corridor is completely filled.  The infected are scattered up and down the passageway, blocking him in; every lost soul that he emancipated from the upstairs floor is gathered here, standing motionless in a seemingly specified place.  It’s as though they’re waiting for some kind of cue, an external signal that the time has come to animate, to serve an externally defined purpose. 

Park hesitates for a few beats, just staring, but then
—lacking any other option—he wades into them.  Surrounding himself willingly.  The embrace of a walking death, the longest of all the slow processions. 

He edges past a pallid older woman, completely unclothed.  At this point she
’s been reduced to little more than skinned-together bones.  Her hand is missing at the wrist, and she is staring straight ahead as though this is the middle of a commute and she is waiting for an everyday form of transport.

As Park moves through the hallway, he tries to ignore the proximity of them.  The sights and the feral smells and the memories that are unearthed.  The feeling of the remnants of their skin against his
own as he passes.  His only saving grace is that none of them seem to notice his presence—all of their eyes are focused on the Calanthe. 

He picks his way through the fold, and
when he catches sight of the lobby entranceway—the glass-paned front doors that will open into a night just like any other sweltering night in the Torluna wilds—he desperately wants to run to it, to throw himself into the outside, but he can’t do anything to draw attention to himself.  He keeps his presence small, his movements deliberate and measured, consistent.  He emerges from the corridor, the duffel pressed hard against his stomach, and as he comes to the lobby doors he sees the five-foot chain laced through the two handles, binding them closed.  The thick padlock at center.

Without hesitation
Park sets the bag down, carefully pulls the keys from his pocket and skims through them.  He angles the bows, squinting at well-worn labels, and he pauses to glance over his shoulder now and again, glimpsing the backs of some of the infected, still standing like crumbling statues in the corridor.  After a time he finds a key marked Main.  He tries it in the keyway and it takes—he turns it and the U-shackle snicks open.  He sets everything down with care and starts the process of quietly unraveling the heavy chains.