The Resort (36 page)

The filters were off, he realized. Whatever had been dampening their interest in what was happening around them, keeping them from speaking out about what they saw or heard or felt, was gone. No longer needed, probably, and that idea scared him.

“That was the girl from your high school?” his mom asked.

His dad nodded. “Yeah.”

She turned to Owen. “How do you know her?”

“He met her by the pool on Friday,” Ryan offered, and though it was the truth and needed to be said, Owen was a little put off by his brother's tattletaler tone. “They like each other.”

“Liked,”
Owen said, attempting to inject a little humor into the situation.

His attempt was not appreciated. “What did you do with her?”

His face reddened. “Mom!”

“Was she telling the truth?”

He looked at his shoes.

“Well?”

Reluctantly, he nodded. Glancing over at his brothers, he saw respect and a tinge of jealousy in Curtis's face. Ryan looked disgusted.

His mom turned back to his dad. “What
is
she?”

“I don't know,” he admitted, and his voice was quiet, frightened. “I really don't know.”

Vicki got out of bed, wincing. Her ass still hurt from the vigorous bout of anal sex they'd engaged in last night, and she crouched down and hurried awkwardly across the room toward the bathroom.

She was getting too old for this.

Conventional wisdom said that women were at their sexual peak during their thirties, but Vicki had desired sex much more often in her early twenties than she did now, a decade later. Back then, she'd been up for almost anything, and if her night didn't end with an orgasm she felt as though she'd wasted an evening. But these days, once or twice a week was plenty, and sometimes even that was too much.

She closed the bathroom door, sat down on the toilet.

To top it off, she had diarrhea.

She didn't know if it was related to the sex, but she assumed it was and she vowed that next time a guy wanted to use the back door, she was going to tell him that entrance was closed for business and steer him around to the front.

Even if he was someone famous.

Vicki smiled to herself. It
was
kind of cool to have been bedded by someone like Patrick, although she'd practically had to throw herself at him to get him to do anything. He was smart, cool, cute, and his celebrity status was the icing on the cake. She wasn't a groupie by any means, and she certainly wasn't shallow enough to sleep with someone just because they'd been on television, but she had to admit that having seen him on TV before meeting him had probably raised his standing in her eyes.

From her right, from the bathtub, came a thump, a noise as if something had fallen, followed almost immediately by a scratching, scuttling sound. The image in her mind was of a rat falling into the tub from a hole in the ceiling and scrambling to get out. Though she wasn't done and hadn't even wiped, she stood before turning to look.

“Oh my God!” she cried. “What's that?”

A naked little man, completely hairless and barely bigger than a Ken doll, was trying in vain to scale the rounded slippery sides of the bathtub. He was craning his neck like a baby bird and the strained expression on his face reminded her of the terrible visage of the human-headed fly in the original version of
The Fly,
that tiny toothless horror who screeched, “Save me! Save me!” before Vincent Price crushed it with a rock.

She didn't pause to look longer or to think about what was happening but bolted from the bathroom, grabbing her underwear and pants from the floor, putting them on as fast as she could while she kept one eye on the lighted bathroom. Patrick was nowhere to be seen, and she couldn't remember if he'd been next to her in bed when she'd gotten up; she'd been too groggy and preoccupied to notice or care. It was conceivable that that thing in the tub
was
Patrick, and she looked around until she found her top and then dashed out of the room, still slipping her arms through the sleeves.

Outside, the grounds were quiet. Too quiet. She didn't know why, didn't know how, but while the world was usually hushed this early in the morning, there was a different quality to it today, as though some underlying buzz, some subliminal noise that was always there but never recognized, had been taken away.

She hurried as fast as she could down the sidewalk to her room, trying not to think of that little hairless man in the tub, trying not to imagine him creeping over the bathtub's edge, running through the bathroom and bedroom and dashing out the door to race crazily along the pathways of The Reata.

Had she closed Patrick's door?

She couldn't remember.

Vicki increased her speed. She didn't see a single soul on the way back to her room, didn't hear any noises other than the slap of her own bare feet on the cement. Small rocks dug into her heels and soles and she wished she'd stopped to put on her shoes, but that would have taken too long and, besides, her shoes were next to the dresser . . . which was against the wall right next to the bathroom.

She made it back to her room, took the keycard from her pants pocket and unlocked the door.

Her friends were gone.

Their clothes still hung in the open closet, suitcases lay on the floor, but neither bed appeared to have been slept in, and the room had an unfamiliar air of emptiness. She had a bad feeling about this. “April?” she called. “Madi?” She checked the bathroom—even the tub, although she was prepared at a second's notice to leap out of the way and run—but it too was unoccupied.

Vicki sat down on her bed, looking over at her friends' suitcases. April and Madi were gone. Not just gone as in left for home, but gone as in dead. She didn't know how she knew this but she did, and it suddenly occurred to her that she might be next.

There was a knock at the door. A single loud rap that sounded like a baseball bat striking the wood.

Silent, holding her breath, she waited for a follow-up, the giggles of her friends, perhaps, or a call of “Maid service!” but there was nothing.

The knock came again, even louder this time, and there was something threatening about it. Vicki was suddenly filled with the conviction that if she opened the door, she would meet the same fate as April and Madi.

Death.

Another loud bat-against-the-door crack.

There was no other way out of here. The room did not have a rear exit, and all of the windows opened out in the same direction as the door. Why hadn't they gotten a room with a patio? Why had they been so damn cheap?

The sound came again, and it was not just the loudness and suddenness that terrified her, it was the absence of any other noise, the fact that there was no accompanying shout or cry.

Only the sound of the door being smacked by something powerful.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Vicki started to cry. She couldn't help it. She wanted to remain silent, to try to fool whatever was out there into thinking the room was empty and no one was here, but she couldn't stop herself, and one stifled sob turned into a series of hiccuping cries that sounded especially loud in the morning's strange silence.

Whatever was out there was no longer just hitting the door, it was slamming into it, trying to break it down.

She screamed, releasing a torrent of pent-up fear that manifested itself into uncontrollable shaking and sobbing.

The door flew in on its hinges, and the big black thing that burst into the room was not at all like the creatures she had imagined.

It was worse.

It was much, much worse.

 

Patrick returned to his room confused. He was even more confused when he found his door open and Vicki gone. What the hell was this?
The Quiet Earth
? He called her name, checked the bathroom, even checked the closet just in case she'd had some sort of panic attack and retreated in there, but she was nowhere to be found.

No one
was.

He'd gone out to get breakfast when he discovered that the phone didn't work, thinking he could pick up a couple of croissants or bagels and some coffee and juice from one of the resort's restaurants as a surprise for her, but everything had been closed and looked abandoned. He hadn't seen any guests or employees anywhere along his route.

He was going to be so happy to get back to Chicago and the real world and get the fuck away from this godforsaken desert once and for all.

The next time Tucson had a film festival, McGrath could cover it.

Patrick was trying to decide what he should do when the door opened behind him.
Weren't those things supposed to lock automatically?
He turned to see the activities coordinator standing in the doorway, silhouetted by the morning sun. “You have some explaining to do, Mr. Schlaegel.” The voice was different than it had been, more authoritative, more villainous, with the same sort of overenunciated semi-robotic creepiness as Hugo Weaving in
The Matrix
movies.

“I'm busy,” Patrick said, knowing his reply would not make the man go away but attempting to retain some control over the situation and pretend, outwardly at least, that everything was normal.

The activities coordinator walked into the room, and his face looked slightly different, too, more clearly defined, more lined and angular. Menacing. “I think you need to come with me.”

Patrick was about to decline or disagree, when to his surprise the man reached out and with a vicelike grip grabbed his upper arm, squeezing the muscle. “Hey!” he said, but allowed himself to be led out the door, afraid of what might happen if he resisted. The asshole was strong.
Too strong,
a part of his brain said, and it was true, but in the litany of strange things that had been going down lately, excess strength was not exactly something that stood out.

“Where are we going?” he asked, speaking so as to not let intimidation take over completely.

“Victoria Shanley's room.”

He was filled with an apprehension so intense that it nearly stopped him in his tracks. If it wasn't for the sheer brute strength of the activities coordinator pulling him forward, he would have dug in his heels and refused to continue on. But he knew that if he did so, that painful pressure on his muscle would increase, and it was not hard to imagine the man yanking his arm out of its socket.

As with his earlier trip to the restaurants, they passed no one else on the way. The resort appeared to be abandoned, and he wondered with a growing sense of horror whether he and the activities coordinator were the only two people left at The Reata. His feeling of dread magnified tenfold.

Then they reached another building, walked halfway down an open corridor and stopped before room 561. The activities coordinator opened the door to the room, and Patrick's heart shifted into overdrive. There was blood everywhere, on the floor, on the walls and especially on one of the beds. There was meat on the bed too, or something white that looked vaguely like rent flesh, and Patrick thought of how the maintenance man had killed that monster spider. In his mind he saw the same thing happening to Vicki, saw a uniformed Reata employee hold her down on the bed with one hand while he ripped off her arms and legs with the other, blood splattering every which way.

“Wha—?” Patrick cleared his throat, tried to blink away his suddenly watery eyes. “What happened?”

The activities coordinator shrugged. “Someone killed Victoria Shanley. And in a very messy and gruesome way, I might add.”

There was almost a pattern to the spattered blood, or at least that's the way it seemed, and it took Patrick a moment to realize why he thought that, what it reminded him of. It was a children's toy, one so old he didn't even remember the name of it, where a kid placed a piece of paper in a machine with a recessed spinning disc and then dropped paint onto the paper. The paint then exploded outward in op art ecstacy, creating firecrackers of color.

This was almost like that, and the horrible thing was that there was so much blood, the gore was so completely overwhelming, that it was almost abstract. It was nowhere near as disgusting or abhorrent as it should have been because the overpowering extent of it robbed the scene of any sense of intimacy or connection with the victim.

The victim.

Vicki.

“We know you left the Grille with her last night.” The accusation hung in the air, unspoken but as clear as if it had been announced over a loudspeaker.

Patrick didn't know what to say, so he didn't say anything in order not to accidentally incriminate himself. He'd been set up, framed.

He expected to be told that the police were on the way and that the resort's security staff was going to hold him for them, but instead the activities coordinator said, “Can we count on you for the game today? The Coyotes are still one short.”

It came out of nowhere, and he stared dumbly at the man, stunned into silence.

“They could use your help this afternoon.”

The implication was obvious if insane: he would not be considered a murder suspect, the resort would suppress all knowledge of his connection to the dead woman—

—if he agreed to participate in their stupid tournament.

“I thought those games were just on weekends,” he said stupidly.

The activities coordinator grinned. “Not any more.” There seemed to be a resonance to that remark that he did not get, an intended meaning too subtle for his numbed brain to comprehend.