Night of the Living Trekkies (17 page)

Willy ran up to him.

“I got the gun,” he said, handing over the Glock.

Jim used it to put a bullet in the skull of the first zombie. He did the same to the second. But three more had found the door and were on their way in.

Rayna, Willy, and Leia helped Gary to his feet and through the connecting door. Jim expended five more rounds, dropping five more zombies. Yet still they came.

“Come on!” Leia screamed as she grabbed the kar’takin.

Jim retreated along with the others through the connecting door. Rayna and Leia were struggling to push a dresser in front of it because Jim’s kick had broken the lock. There wasn’t much time.

“Give me five seconds,” he said.

He ran to the opposite side of the suite, to the other connecting door. He unlocked it, opened it a crack, and looked around. He found nothing but darkness. Jim pushed the door open and then felt around the wall for a light switch. The space seemed oddly warm.

“Hurry!” Rayna shouted.

The dresser was only waist high, and the undead were piling in, trying to get over the top. Leia took out her Mace and fired carefully aimed shots at the alien eyes. The first tier of undead writhed in pain, obstructing the ones behind them.

But their sheer weight began to tell. The dresser slowly slid away from the doorway.

To his immense relief, Jim realized that the next suite over was empty. The air conditioner was broken. The environmental unit under the window lay partially disassembled on the floor, where a repair worker had left it.

He ran back to the other suite, where the others were losing the battle to hold back the zombies. The doorway was a writhing mass of bloodied heads and waving arms.

“Let’s move!” Jim shouted as he pulled Gary off the bed.

Gary looked around blearily. “What?”

Jim dragged him into the next room and lowered him into a sitting position on the floor. Rayna and Willy followed a moment later. Leia, carrying Jim’s backpack, came last.

Jim slammed the door, locked it, then pushed another dresser in front of it.

As soon as he finished, Rayna hugged him.

“I can’t believe it,” she said. “I can’t believe you’re here.”

“I told you I’d come,” Jim reminded her. “Are you okay?”

“I’m not hurt, if that’s what you mean,” Rayna said, her eyes filling with tears. “But none of us are okay.”

“I know. I know everything.”

“How?”

“We found T’Poc in the stairwell. She’d been bitten, but she hadn’t turned yet. She told us what happened. She said Matt could have helped her, but didn’t. She warned us that he’d gone nuts.”

“How could she know that?” Gary asked.

“The things inside her . . . told her. They seem to have some sort of telepathic ability. They share information.”

“Great,” Gary said. “Cloud-computing zombies.”

“Exactly,” Jim said. “T’Poc even used the word ‘network.’These things are connected to some kind of central information hub.”

“What did you do with T’Poc?” Rayna asked. “Where is she now?”

Jim was still fumbling for an answer when Leia stepped in. “She’s in a better place now,” she said. “She’s lucky she ran into us when she did.”

“So it’s just like in the movies,” Gary said forlornly. “If you’re bitten by a zombie, you become one.”

“Except for the eyeballs,” Jim said. “Based on what T’Poc told us—and some other things we saw—I think it’s a parasite. It gets into our bodies and takes over. T’Poc sort of confirmed that. She said she sensed alien thoughts inside her, controlling her.”

“What did she mean by ‘alien’?” Rayna asked. “You mean ‘alien’ as in ‘strange’ or ‘foreign’?”

“No,” Jim said. “I’m pretty sure she meant ‘alien’ as in ‘not from Earth.’”

A long interval of shocked silence followed. Gary finally ended it.

“Da, da-da da-da,
da da
,” he sang.

Rayna, Leia, and Jim looked at him reproachfully.

“What the hell was that for?” Rayna asked. “I’m just trying to break the tension,” Gary said. “If this were a
Star Trek
episode, we’d totally be going to a commercial break right now.”

From the just-abandoned next-door suite came a few not-very-determined moans. Occasionally, there was a scratching sound, or a loud thump against the door, but for the moment they appeared safe.

Jim used the opportunity to study his surroundings in detail. After facing so much blood and chaos, the room’s orderly decor was disorienting. There was the bathroom on their left; a door leading to a private bedroom on their right; in front of them a kitchenette with a table; and against the far wall a seating area, complete with two chairs, a couch, and a coffee table. Rayna and Willy sat across from Leia and Jim while Gary hovered anxiously near the door. Whatever injuries he’d sustained vanished in the presence of the princess; he seemed in awe of her.

“May I bring Your Highness a bottle of water?” he asked. “I bet the minibar is full of them.”

“Why don’t you bring us all some water?” Jim said. “Since you’re offering.”

Gary practically skipped across the room and returned with five chilled bottles of Aquafina. After distributing them to the group, he remained standing at the princess’s side, as if awaiting further instructions. Leia glanced at him and then pointedly turned her head. Finally, Jim stood up and whispered in Gary’s ear.

“Sack,”
he said.

Gary’s face turned an alarming shade of red. He violently adjusted his uniform.

“Sorry,” he said to Leia.

Leia raised her water bottle in a toast. “To Gary,” she said. “For saving our lives.”

“Me?” Gary replied. “What did I do?”

“When Jim and I were in that elevator, all alone, I thought he was ready to give up. But you figured out how to reach us, and suddenly we knew we weren’t alone. We got our act together and found our way here.”

Gary seemed to relax a little. But only a little.

“I guess I did my bit,” he said. “I just wish I’d picked up on Matt sooner. He’d been acting weird ever since we got to the suite, but I didn’t realize he’d gone nuts.”

“Before he holed up in the bedroom, he walked around calling himself ‘Commodore,’” Rayna added. “Only he actually seemed to believe it. And he was really, really upset about you guys. Especially you, Jim. He kept saying that we couldn’t afford to take on passengers because it could disrupt the chain of command. He came out of the bedroom while you were heading down the hall. Didn’t say a word. Just grabbed Gary by the arm, slammed him twice against the hallway wall, and tossed him aside. Then he pulled me away from the door and shut it. He held it while you tried to get in. It’s like he went crazy.”

“This was not crazy,” Jim said. “He lost his hand and didn’t make a sound. He head-butted me across the room and knocked a steel-frame door off its hinges with his shoulder. That’s not crazy.”

“You’d be surprised,” Rayna said. “We study this stuff in my psychology classes. In cases of extreme agitation and psychosis, patients can perform feats of strength not unlike what Matt accomplished.”

“He didn’t seem all that agitated,” Leia said. “I looked at his face while he was strangling me. There was nothing there. Murdering me was just a chore. Something to check off his to-do list.”

“And his hand kept shooting the gun after it was cut off,” Jim said. “How do your psychology classes explain that?”

“Look, I’m only a junior,” Rayna shrugged.

“Maybe he’s a runner,” Gary said. “One of those super-zombies from
28 Days Later
. They move like they’re in the Olympics or something. If we’re up against runners, we’re dead. Actually,
I’m
dead. I can’t do much running. I . . . don’t have the right shoes.”

Leia put her feet on the coffee table, showing off her gigantic Star Trek slippers.

“You and me both,” she said. “But don’t worry. All the zombies we’ve seen are slow as Gorns.”

Gary sighed with relief.

“We’ve got another thing going for us,” Jim said. “Lights. Wherever the zombies go, they knock out the lamps. This hallway’s dark. So was the third floor. The only reason the atrium’s still bright is probably because they can’t reach anything. The fixtures are too high.”

“Why would they hate light?” Rayna asked.

“I’m not sure,” Leia said. “But have you ever seen those third eyes of theirs blink?”

“I’ve been too busy hauling ass to notice,” Gary said.

“You’re right,” Rayna said. “They just stare at you.”

“This could come in handy,” Gary said. “Maybe a bright flashlight could disorient or temporarily blind them.”

“My point,” Jim said, “is that these particular zombies seem to function best at night. So if we can last until dawn, we stand a much better chance of getting out of here.”

“Who says we have to get out of here?” Rayna asked. “Maybe Matt was right. Maybe we just need to stay put. If the people in
Dawn of the Dead
could survive in a shopping mall, we sure as hell could do worse than staying in a hotel.”

She outlined a plan with several very attractive possibilities. The first order of business would be to sneak down to the lobby and somehow find a way to reseal the front doors. Next they would pick off the zombies one by one and room by room. The corpses would be hauled to the roof and dropped off one side of the building. Then they would take their residence on the opposite side, somewhere near the Gweagal Room, for easy access to the hotel’s abundant supply of food, canned soft drinks, and water. There had to be enough resources for them to survive three months, six months, maybe longer—certainly long enough for the rest of the world to sort out the apocalypse.

“That sounds like a good plan to me,” Willy said. “Better ‘the devil you know’ and all that. At least here, we have some control.”

Jim shook his head. “You guys don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “To take the hotel, we’d have to eliminate hundreds, maybe thousands, of undead. I doubt I could accomplish that with a full platoon of Rangers. Certainly not without high casualties.”

“They did it in
Dawn of the Dead
,” Rayna shrugged.

“The
other
problem,” Jim continued, “is that you’re assuming the power stays on.”

“I’m not assuming anything,” Rayna said. “If the lights go out, we’ll use candles. People survived for centuries without electricity.”

“If the power goes out,” Jim continued, “all of the electronically controlled doors are programmed to open. This is a basic tenet of fire safety. In the event of an emergency, you don’t want to trap anyone inside the building. So we could spend all week following your plan—but as soon as the grid goes down, it’ll be open season at the Botany Bay.”

Rayna went over to the window and opened the curtain. Like Donnie’s room on the third floor, this one didn’t feature a view of anything beyond the adjacent parking garage. “I wish we knew what was going on out there.”

“I’d like to say there are millions of National Guard soldier mowing down zombies with M-16s, but that seems pretty unlikely,” Gary said, sighing.

“There’s one way to know for sure,” Jim said. “If we can get to a corner suite, we’ll have a great view of downtown Houston. We’ll see everything happening outside. We’ll see neighboring buildings. Maybe we can wave to someone and signal for help. And, most important, we can watch the zombies at dawn. See what the sunlight does to them. If they start to retreat when it gets light outside, I think we need to take our chance and get out while we can.”

“That sounds fine,” Rayna said. “But how do we get to the corner suite?”

“Using the interior connecting doors. There are three rooms separating our current position from the objective. Even if they’re all full of zombies, we’ve got enough ammo to push our way through.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Gary asked.

“Leia and I,” Jim said. “Or at least that’s what I’d planned.”

Jim turned to her.

“Are you up for this?” he asked.

“Not really,” she said. “But I’ll go anyway.”

“I enter first, followed by Leia,” Jim said. “Rayna waits at the door. If things go south, she lets us back in. Understood?”

“Understood,” Rayna said.

“What about us?” Gary and Willy asked.

“You wait until the all-clear, then join us. Maybe later I’ll give you some training tips. But right now, there’s no time to teach you how to sweep a building for unfriendlies. So just hang back. Got it?”

“No problem,” Gary said.

“Seems smart to me,” Willy agreed. “Red shirts usually lead the way, and we all know how that works out.”

Leia picked up her gun belt and put it on. Jim examined his Taser and checked to make sure it carried a cartridge. Then, a moment later, he checked again.

“So how are
you
doing, soldier?” Rayna asked.

“Edgy,” Jim said. “Can you blame me?”

He watched Leia click her spare cartridge into her Taser.

“Maybe we’ll get lucky again,” Rayna said. “Maybe all three of these rooms will be empty.”

“This floor is packed,” Jim told her. “I looked at the check-in schedule. Odds are, we’re going to meet some very unhappy guests.”

As if to confirm their fears, a scratching noise wafted through the wall.

“What’s that?” Gary asked.

“I’m pretty sure it isn’t housekeeping,” Jim said.

Next they heard a muffled moan. Then another. There were two distinct voices—one low and masculine, the other higher. Jim listened intently.

“Sounds like at least a couple of them,” he said. “They’re to our right. I think, based on the scratching, that they’re trying to get into or out of the bedroom or bathroom.”

“Are they after someone?” Leia asked. “Could there be a survivor?”

“We’ll know in a minute,” Jim said.

Jim quietly unlocked the door and left the keys in the knob for Rayna.

“Good luck, you guys,” Gary said. “I’ve played some intense first-person shooters, but this is on another level.”

“It’s because there’s no reset button,” Jim said.

He gestured for quiet, opened the door a couple of inches, and looked around.