The Resort (47 page)

But the minister did not stop in his oration. “. . . He whose heart is pure will be revered by The Founder and will reside within him for all eternity . . .”

“Where is my son?” Rachel screeched, and she was shocked at how loud her voice was, but she kept screaming anyway. None of the parishioners even looked at her. “Ryan!” she called. “Ryan!”

Lowell knocked the minister down and turned on the seated flock. “Where?” he demanded, but they stared up at him blankly, and he grabbed Owen's arm, running back down the aisle, both boys in tow.

All four of them ran out of the chapel.
Sacrifice.
They were going to kill her boy, her baby, in some stupid primitive ritual in order to keep Jedediah Harrison and his hellish resort alive for another hundred years or so.

But it wasn't stupid, it wasn't primitive. The ritual worked, they all knew it, and that gave their quest an even greater urgency.

“Ryan!” she continued to cry at the top of her lungs. “Ryan!”

The twins took up the cry as they hurried down the chapel steps. “Ryan! Ryan!”

“Waters . . .” Lowell said, thinking aloud. “We were just at the pool, so that's not it. Where—”

They were no longer being ignored. In the time it had taken them to run in and out of the chapel, seemingly every being at the resort had been gathered together and now stood in a crowd before them, filling the open area in front of the church and spilling over into the pathways between the rooms. At the front of the mob was the manager, still fat and bearded but nowhere near as jolly, flanked by five nearly identical men who could have been clones, impersonators. They were glaring at the four of them, and though their faces weren't rotting or disintegrating, there was something very old about the eyes of the men, something very unnatural in the stillness of their positions. Elsewhere, she saw members of the office staff she recognized, as well as the hostess from the Saguaro Room. The gardener, standing by himself, grinned at her, holding up a pair of pinking shears.

Managers, desk clerks, hostesses, gardeners. She was being tortured by service employees. There seemed something appropriate about that, but she had neither the time nor the inclination to think about the irony. She briefly noted that none of the workers at the bottom of the totem pole, the maids or janitors or laborers, were here. They were all back at the other resort. Like the concierge, they had been left behind. Harrison had used them to take care of the day-today grunt work of The Reata, but they were not part of it. They were not
of
it.

Behind the managers and the few people she recognized were scores of others, not only the original guests and employees of Harrison's Reata but the people who had come after, generations of individuals who had worked here, who had stayed here, who had somehow become part of the Founder's flock.

Where was Harrison himself?

Sacrificing Ryan,
she thought, and she looked quickly over at Lowell, met his gaze, and saw in his eyes the same despair she felt.

They both glanced around, searching for a way out but not finding any. The crowd before them did not move, did not change, and neither did they. Both sides remained frozen. She saw Lowell glance back into the chapel to make sure no one was coming out from there.

All of a sudden there was screaming and shouting from the area in front of the lobby, great war whoops and gratifyingly modern cries of “Let's roll!”

It was the cavalry. Rand Black and too many others to count, all streamed into the resort, weapons at the ready, led by the concierge. The old man was clutching what looked like a broken bottle on the end of a stick. Anger limned his features, granting him the appearance of an avenging angel. The Reatans turned at the sound of the ruckus, but too late. They were already being hacked and stabbed, attacked from behind and on the right flank, and those capable of doing something about it were in the wrong position, awkward locations.

“Go!” Black yelled at the top of his lungs, and though they had no idea at whom the command was directed, Lowell grabbed Rachel's hand and they ran.

 

They left in the thick of it. In the midst of the fighting, in the chaos of battle, Lowell grabbed Rachel and the twins and herded them off to the side, around the edge of the chapel. He had no idea where they were going or what he was doing, but they'd been given a break, granted a reprieve, and if they were ever to find Ryan—

—he was going to have to act fast and act now.

The desert was dark behind the chapel. The lights stopped here. The moon had temporarily disappeared behind a cloud, but he remembered from the last visit that there was a barn and corral out this way. A slaughterhouse was inside the barn, according to the kids. And the Founder's throne.

Rachel and the kids moving right with him, Lowell hastened over the shifting sand, using the concierge's flashlight to avoid the desert pitfalls of cactus and rock. The moon reappeared from behind the clouds, and he saw the barn, saw the corral next to it, holding horses that weren't
quite
horses, but there was another building illuminated as well. A house. Not a small cabin or low ranch-style home, but a tall gabled mansion bathed in darkness that not even the moonlight could penetrate.

It had to be Harrison's, and Lowell increased his speed, heading straight for it.
Yes,
he thought. The man would build his home directly over the spring that brought forth the water that kept him alive. And if the spring needed to be rejuvenated with some sort of ritualistic sacrifice, this is where it would occur.

Ryan was in that house.

He glanced up as he ran at the black façade.

Lowell thought of what the concierge had told him and was grateful for the knowledge. Forewarned is forearmed, as the old saying went, and he knew that he was ready for anything they were planning to throw at him. Old girlfriends, bullies from his school days, his parents . . . Whatever Harrison and his minions conjured in order to throw him off track, he would ignore. He would remain focused.

They reached the house and stormed up the porch steps, but the front door was locked. Lowell threw his weight against it, motioned for the twins to do the same, and all three of them slammed sideways into the wood at the same time. The door did not budge.

“Lowell?”

They were about to take another run at the door when he heard Rachel's voice, heard the fear in it and the confusion. He turned. She was looking back toward the lighted buildings, and when she saw that she had his attention, she pointed to one he hadn't noticed before, one situated between the chapel and a series of stand-alone bungalows, one that didn't match at all with the others, one not in the primitive style of the original Reata or the hodgepodge of ersatz western structures that had been incorporated into the restored resort around it.

The exercise center.

Lowell stared at the low squat building. That was the first place he'd experienced the supernatural at The Reata, and from the beginning he'd had a bad feeling about the facility. But why was it here? How had it gotten here? What made it so important that it, out of everything from the new resort, had been saved?

He put an ear next to the door of the house, listening. There was no noise inside. It could have been soundproofed, but he thought not. The house was empty.

Ryan was in the exercise center.

Again, they were wasting valuable time. “Come on!” he yelled. They could see a gravel pathway now, and the four of them ran quickly, no longer having to negotiate the unstable sand. The fight was still raging, and though there were bodies on the ground, most of them appeared to be old and decrepit.

The good guys were winning.

Lowell was surprised. A ragtag group of hotel guests and low-level employees wielding homemade weapons made from sticks and stones and broken tools would seem to be no match for supernatural creatures a hundred years old, but perhaps the recuperative powers of the waters were waning even now, leaving the recipients of their magic in weakened states with fading health. He would not have guessed that to be the case after seeing the Reatans frolicking in the pool and massed before him in front of the chapel, but
something
had to account for their surprising in-effectiveness before their attackers.

Still, he cut a broad swath around the combatants as he led his family to the exercise center. He had mixed feelings about this. He had no doubt that it was dangerous, and he worried about exposing Rachel and the twins to unnecessary peril, but at the same time he was wary of leaving them by themselves.

Besides, they wanted to get Ryan back as much as he did.

So they approached the building together. And at the last minute, they were joined by the concierge. The old man appeared out of the darkness to their left, breathing raggedly and sweating profusely. “I saw you,” he managed to get out between gasps of breath. “I came to help.”

Lowell wasn't sure how much help he would be, but the concierge was carrying a new weapon, obviously something he had taken from someone else: a rusty sword.
That
might be some help.

“Where'd you get it?” Lowell asked, nodding at the weapon.

“Took it off a dead man,” he panted. “It's one of theirs.”

Lowell was not sure if that was good or bad, if it would help them or hinder them. But a steel blade, no matter how old and rusted, was bound to be more effective than their own pitiful sticks. “Let me have it,” he said.

Jim shook his head, drawing back. “It's mine.”

“That's my son in there!”

The concierge looked at him. “Then let's go get him.”

There was no time to argue, so Lowell let out a frustrated “Shit!” and opened the smoked glass door, leading the way into the building.

It smelled differently than it had before. That was the first thing he noticed. Before, there'd been the strong modern odor of rubber mats and newly unpacked equipment overlayed by the scent of pine disinfectant, a subtle whiff of chlorine beneath it all. Now there was a musty smell as of old attic trunks, combined with the aroma of . . . some type of food. Stew, maybe? Wafting about was another fragrance nowhere near as pleasant, a gaseous rotting odor that could come only from something dead. Not something recently killed or something that had been dead a long time, but something intermediate, when decay had started to set in and the flies were buzzing.

The fat man was in the weight room once again.
Had he come with the building?
Lowell saw him instantly, on the same machine as before, and he gave a small start as he entered the exercise area, thinking for a moment that there was an army of obese men waiting for him as he saw the multiplied images in the mirrored wall. But there was only the one man, and he grunted and grinned as he lifted an amazing amount of weights. Behind him, the twins gasped.

He didn't know how or why but he didn't have time to find out.

“Guard him,” Lowell ordered Curtis and Owen. He didn't want the fat man following him into the pool room, cutting off his only avenue of escape. “Yell if he moves. Stab him if you have to.” He met his sons' eyes, saw them nod, noted the look of grim determination on each.

“I'll stay with them,” Rachel offered, and for that he was grateful. She motioned toward the doorway and the corridor beyond. “You two go.”

Lowell and Jim moved forward quickly without another word.

He should have told her he loved her, Lowell thought. He should have told the boys. Just in case. That's what people did in movies and books when they went someplace from where there was a very real possibility that they might not come back. But real life was messier than fiction, and in it you didn't always have time to do or say the right things.

There was noise up ahead. And both the stew smell and that disgusting odor grew stronger, competing and combining in a way that made him afraid he'd vomit. Lowell was in the lead by a single step, and he moved sideways to block the concierge, wanting to make sure the old man didn't just barge in. If they were to have any hope of success here, they would need all of the advantages they could get.

The light in the pool room was even more wan and sickly than it had been before and nowhere near as constant. Candles or torches, he assumed, and as he crept forward he saw the weird way the flickering light reflected the movement of the water, making shadows and shapes on the wall directly in front of the doorway that looked like creatures, monsters, beings that had never existed or had lived so long ago that their forms were not even recorded in genetic memory.

The sounds inside the pool room were louder, clearer than they had been a moment earlier, but they made no sense. He heard mumbling and chuckling that seemed to be coming from a crowd of people, accompanied by liquid gurgling and occasional clicks.

He poked his head carefully around the corner of the doorway.

Well-dressed men and women surrounded the pool in a framing rectangle. The Reata's elite. Not the people who worked at the resort—no matter how high their station, they would not have been allowed in
this
company—but the moneyed men and society matrons who'd kept it alive financially, who'd brought Harrison the cash he needed to expand his holdings and supplied him with the bodies he needed to satisfy his unnatural cravings.

At the head of the pool, surrounded by these ladies and gentlemen, was The Reata's chef, dressed in a stereotypical white apron and puffy hat. The water was roiling and heat steamed upward, making the inside of the room almost unbearable. Lowell saw vegetables bubbling up in the pool: carrots, cauliflower, zucchini. He saw, as well, parts of human bodies: fingers, legs, hair. He pressed forward, Jim at his side, still unseen by the gathered Reatans, who were completely focused on the pool in front of them. He wasn't sure what he was going to do, but he moved ahead with careful steps along the dark edge of the wall, keeping his eye on the chef, who was pinching salt onto something directly in front of him.