The Resort (44 page)

“What kind of tournament do you think they want to have?” Lowell asked Black.

The firefighter shook his head. “I don't think it's a ball game.”

“If you had to guess?”

He looked at Lowell. “Hand-to-hand combat. To the death.”

Lowell looked out at the awkward guests and the only slightly more agile employees, running around a makeshift obstacle course, weapons in hand. “You think we'll be ready?”

“No.”

The Roadrunners came out at night.

The crackle of six walkie-talkies across the crowded parking lot and a message from the two most recent volunteers jolted everyone into battle stance. “They're out,” Scott whispered. “They're dressed dark and going down the stairs. They'll be coming out the pool area.”

That was closer to the lobby than where they were.

“Go!” Black shouted. “Go!”

Lowell squeezed Rachel's hand, gave her an extra spear, told her and the boys to protect the others who were staying. “Keep an eye out. Watch all sidewalks and trails, keep checking behind that palm tree; it's a good hiding place. We'll be back.”

But he wasn't sure if they would, and as he ran with the other men up the hill, he realized what an untrained, unprepared, ragtag group of fighters they really were. The Roadrunners would crush them.

At least they had the advantage of surprise. The Roadrunners didn't know where
they
were, and they had spies keeping close track of the Roadrunners' movements. An ambush was still possible.

He
could
kill, he realized now.

He could and would.

It became quickly clear that they would not reach the pool area before the enemy, so Black stopped them in an easily defensible area near the employees' quarters, closing the gate that offered the only entrance here, deploying men to every side of the open space, stationing some in trees and in buildings, leaving a small volunteer contingent on the road out front as bait, telling Scott and the other watcher their exact location so they could be forewarned of the Roadrunners' approach.

Lowell stood next to Black inside a storage room, peeking out of the partially open door, feeling scared but strangely excited.

The walkie-talkie crackled. “They're on their way. They're almost there.”

The first few Roadrunners through the gate—not Blodgett—were bludgeoned with tire irons by custodians stationed to either side of the entrance, but then one of the custodians went down, and the two sides came together on the narrow sloping stretch of ground, clashing like armies on a battlefield. Lowell and Black sped out of the storage room, attacking from the side. Lowell stabbed the buttocks of a feral woman in bloody rags who screamed and ran away, then swung at an older man in a dirty summer suit, hitting him across the face. The man fell down, clutching his head and crying out in pain, and Lowell moved on. Should he have stayed to finish the job, stabbing the man through the heart? Maybe so, but he couldn't do it, and his goal became not to kill but to injure and incapacitate.

He was pretty successful at meeting his goal.

For a while, it seemed that men and women were coming after him right and left. He felt like the hero of an action movie as he swung and stabbed, tripped and kicked. He received a few blows himself, including one on the left shoulder that rendered that arm nearly useless, but overall he gave far more than he got, and somewhere in the middle of the skirmish, Lowell realized that individuals were escaping, dashing over the fence or around the buildings, running into the night. Whether they were pursued or pursuer, he could not tell.

At some point, the action wound down, he was no longer fighting all comers, and he looked around, thinking the fight was over, wanting to see which side had won. But the battle had merely moved out into the road, and he took the opportunity to stop and catch his breath. He sat down on a rock for a moment, hoping his brief respite would enable him to get a second wind, praying that it didn't cause the deaths of some of his fellow Cactus Wrens. He breathed deeply and started coughing. They should've carried water with them, he thought, and then he was throwing up, puking onto the dirt. He wiped his mouth, went out over the collapsed fence, and found not the concerted focused fighting of only a few moments before but a wild free-for-all that seemed to spread over the visible area of The Reata before him, individuals chasing each other down trails, around cactus, wrestling on the sidewalks, darting around and in and out of the extant buildings. He'd been planning to join the fight, but there was not really a fight to join, and wearily he made his way down the road toward the bottom parking lot to make sure Rachel and the kids were all right.

They were gone.

All of the families left behind were gone, in their place a broken walkie-talkie, and some bloody clothing and the speared body of a man he didn't recognize. “Rachel!” he called at the top of his lungs, not caring if he drew attention to his whereabouts. “Ryan! Curtis! Owen!” The Roadrunners had split up, he realized, and somehow Scott and the other watcher had missed that. They'd been battling only a partial contingent, which explained the easiness of the fighting. The rest had been dispatched elsewhere.

Here.

And it had cost his family their lives.

No.
He couldn't think that way. And he set off, spear in hand, down what he considered the most likely trail, which led toward the chef's garden.

The garden was trampled, but no one was there. He picked up a stone-headed tomahawk from the ground that had to be from the gift shop. The moon gave off more than enough light to see by, but there were still plenty of shadows, and he moved carefully past each one, looking for hiding combatants or dead bodies, praying he found neither.

The Reata seemed bigger than it had before. The resort was set on sixty acres, and he thought he'd been over most of it, but he found himself on trails he hadn't known existed, walking past burning rubble that had been buildings he didn't recognize. He heard screaming from somewhere —sound carried strangely here—and shouts of single words in unison, but there were other screams from other directions, other shouts, and he had no idea what was going on out there. Somewhere on the east end of the resort, standing on a tall boulder so he could see as far as possible, he spotted a group of men and women traveling up a nearby service road. The two in front were carrying torches, and there was something in the angry march of their walk that made him hop down off the rock and head immediately in the opposite direction. There was shouting from this area, too, invectives and words of anger, and he quickly stepped off the trail, ran down the slope to an oleander bush and hid.

Not a moment too soon.

They passed by, shouting their desires and demands, Roadrunners and Coyotes and Cactus Wrens and others. They'd come together in the brush, these various factions, and like all anarchic crowds they'd decided to turn on their leaders, no longer blaming their opponents for the wrongs visited upon them but blaming their own commanders for the situation in which they found themselves. They'd turned savage in the night, and whatever their original classes or occupations—rich or poor, janitor or stock broker—they were now children of the desert, spawn of The Reata, and they returned to the ruined buildings looking for scapegoats, looking for blood.

He waited until they passed by, then headed back down the path the way they'd come.

He found Blodgett in front of what had been the Grille.

The man was whimpering, and even Lowell felt sorry for him. He'd been stripped and doused with gasoline and set afire, and though he'd managed to roll out the flames, a large portion of his body had been charred and there was about him the sickening smell of burnt skin. He was lying on the ground, curled up in a fetal position, and he looked up at Lowell with eyes that begged for release or absolution or help or . . . something.

Blodgett was not the enemy, he realized. The man was just another victim.

As was the mob that had turned on him.

But that mob was uncontrollable, and Lowell knew that if those people found him they would attack him, too. Stone him to death, perhaps. Or string him up.

Maybe they'd already done so to his family.

He hurried on, growing increasingly frustrated as he realized that he was on a trail he had already taken, that this was an area of the resort he had explored extensively. Stopping where he was, he made a beeline for the spot where he knew the tennis courts were. He had not been anywhere near that area tonight.

He found Rachel and the twins huddled together in the shade of a cottonwood tree, hidden from the moonlight in a puddle of darkness. Rachel called his name, sobbing, and he ran to meet her, giving her a hard hug, almost weeping with gratitude as he saw that she had no scratches on her face, that her clothes were still on, that her limbs were not broken. Curtis and Owen, too, gave him big hugs, both of them crying as they hadn't cried for years, like little children frightened of the dark and grateful for the saving grace of a parent.

But . . .

He stepped back, met Rachel's dark haunted eyes, and a bolt of cold shot through him.

“Where is Ryan?”

 

Ryan saw the old man. The one from the mirror, the soulless cadaver with the scraggly hair. He didn't know at first whether he was dreaming or whether it was real, but the fact that he was even asking that question gave him the answer he needed because he never questioned the reality of a dream while he was in it, no matter how absurd the scenarios became.

This was real.

The old man was striding up the nearby sidewalk like he owned the place, walking fast and sure for someone who looked like a corpse, a gait that only served to make him seem even more frightening. He'd come from Antelope Canyon, and though Ryan had no idea why he was here, the thought in his mind was that the man had arrived to survey his new acquisition. Ryan turned to his mom and brothers, but to his astonishment they were asleep, his mom leaning against the tree, his brothers on the ground. They'd been awake only seconds previously, and Ryan was filled with fear as he took another peek toward the sidewalk.

The scraggly-haired man—the Owner, as Ryan had come to think of him—had left the sidewalk and was walking purposefully across the gravel toward him, eyes trained directly on his own. Ryan wanted to run and get away, but his mom and brothers were here, and before his brain had time to do more than acknowledge that conflict, the man was here and reaching down. He grabbed Ryan, and with one hand as strong as a vice and just as cold, jerked him to his feet and dragged him away from the tree, toward the sidewalk. Ryan was too scared to even scream. His heart seemed to be beating somewhere up near his throat, and before he knew it they were down the desert trail on their way to Antelope Canyon.

He was going to die, he realized as he was dragged across the gravel, his feet stumbling over themselves to keep up. He didn't want to die. There were things he wanted to do, places he wanted to go. He wanted to be with his parents and brothers. He wanted to see his friends again back in California. He wanted . . . so much. He started crying, though no sound came out. Between the darkness and his tears, he couldn't see where they were going, but he didn't need to see. That vicelike grip held him fast and guided him surely, and he knew exactly where they were headed.

They reached it far faster than he would have thought possible, and he could see it even from the trail, so bright were its lights. The old resort had been fully restored, and when he wiped his eyes with his free right hand, he saw entire buildings that had not been there before. It looked different than he would have expected, more modern in some ways and more antique in others. It was a mixture of a lot of different eras, and Ryan had the impression that it had taken bits and pieces of other Reatas over the years, combining them all in one.

They passed by the buckboard wagon, fully restored and standing on four perfect hub wheels. In its driver's seat, staring forward with reins in her hand as though waiting for a team of horses to arrive, was a white figure, a lithe, nearly naked girl whose pale form looked ghostly in the moonlight.

Brenda?

It looked almost like her but not quite. She said nothing, did not even look in their direction as they passed, but he saw her, and he saw the load she was planning to drive as well: the dead bodies of children, all stacked like cordwood in the back. On top of this ordered arrangement was David, naked and bloody and crumpled into a ball like a used piece of scratch paper.

Then they were at the bottom of the rise and at the resort. Ryan saw lights in rooms, and though some of them looked electric, others looked like candles. The man—the Owner—dragged him to one of the buildings he had not seen before, one that looked like a haunted mansion and stood at the northernmost end of the resort, the focal point of all other structures. The two of them passed through a creaky old front door into a dark room of wood and red velvet, with trophy heads of both animals and humans on the walls. In the center of the room was a throne that was also cushioned with red velvet but was framed with bones. It was
his
chair, and Ryan expected the old man to sit down and make him do some freaky sex stuff to him, but the Owner pulled him past the chair, into another room, this one all black from floor to ceiling. There was a bed in the center of the room. Or kind of a bed. It was made out of wood, but to Ryan it looked more like an altar, like a Wild West version of those old stone tables where humans were sacrificed.

“Prepare him,” the Owner said, and from the blackness another figure emerged.

“No,” Ryan said. It was the first word he'd spoken since his abduction and it came out small and terrified, exactly the way he felt. “No,” he said again, whimpering.