A/N - Most of this chapter came to me at 2 in the morning when I was tossing and turning because it's too darn hot to sleep. Hope you enjoy it.
Daniel looked out towards the beach in the distance, palm trees dancing as waves beat against the sand. The pink and orange of the rising sun contrasted with the black clouds forming above that would soon blot it out.
"What are you doing?" Jasmine demanded.
Daniel just kept staring out into the distance.
"I'm just enjoying a moment with my new friend Gar."
Jasmine came close enough to notice the figure leaning against the step beside Daniel. He was dressed in a hotel uniform, a half-smoked cigarette dangling between his fingers. Jasmine stepped around him to see the name badge that did, indeed, identify him as "Gary", the look of abject horror frozen on his face, and the exposed intestines dangling from his torso, everything below his waist torn to shreds by something not quite human.
"Gar is a really good listener," Daniel said. "The best I know. By half."
He pulled out his cigarette case, and Jasmine held her hand out to accept one.
Daniel stared her in the eye, pulled out a cigarette, stuck it between his lips, and then made a point of shutting it as loudly as possible before returning it to his pocket.
"Fine," Jasmine said. "I'm sure Gary will be happy to bum one of his."
She reached for Gary's other arm, still clenching a box of cheap cigarettes, and fished out a smoke before kicking the torso off the stairs and taking his seat.
"Quite the chum, Gary is," she said. "As for you. You're not at the security desk."
Daniel gasped, looking from side to side and up and down, taking in his surroundings.
"Sacre bleu! I'm not?"
Jasmine rolled her eyes as she lit the dead man's cigarette, unamused.
"I just stepped out for a little fresh air."
"This is what you call fresh air?" Jasmine said. "Smoking between a rotting corpse and a garbage dumpster?"
"Still smells better than an entire building filled with rotting corpses," Daniel said. "And that hideously sterile lab."
Jasmine looked around her, at the upside-down milk cartons surrounding the stinking dumpster, islands in a sea of discarded cigarette butts from the hotel staff's fifteen minute breaks. A single drop of rain rolled down her face and she licked it off her upper lip.
"There's no calling this an experiment if there's no one bothering to monitor the results," she said.
"You can always check the playback if we miss anything worthwhile," Daniel said. He took a deep drag and exhaled through his nostrils. "Though I very much doubt we have. No one is going anywhere for a while. And I for one could use a moment to catch my breath after Oliveira and that thrilling wedding reception. Quite the party, n'est-ce pas?"
"Meanwhile, Miss Valentine made quick work of a perfectly good horde of various types of Lickers and Hunters. What a waste."
"There are plenty more where those came from," Daniel said. "I hardly expected them to be much of a challenge for her. But she has just picked up two hundred pounds of dead weight. That bloated fool will only slow her down. Her compassion, even towards a complete stranger, is the one weak link in her armor." He inhaled deeply again before blowing a smoke ring. "It is a weakness that you or I, fortunately, do not share."
Jasmine huffed indignantly.
"The difference between you and I," Daniel continued, "is that I won't pretend I am ashamed of it."
She was feeling the drops of water more frequently now. They were making a soft pitter-patter on the asphalt.
"My hypothesis is that Ashley Graham and her friend will be the earliest to fail," Jasmine said. "What are you chuckling at?"
"I just find it amusing how you use the word 'hypothesis' to make a simple wager sound scientific," Daniel said. "Professional. Like you're doing your job. It's halfway charming, really."
The rain was rapidly increasing in tempo, the pitter-patter turning into a heavy rattling sound. Jasmine flicked the remainder of her cigarette to join the others on the asphalt and climbed the steps out of the rain.
"Smoke break's over," she said. "Time to get back to work."
Carlos still had the blueprints his informant had slipped him, with the room numbers of notable agents he'd want to investigate.
But Jill had the master key to unlock the rooms. Along with the necessary skills to access rooms the keys wouldn't necessarily let them into. Carlos was trapped wandering the hallways, carrying only half of an equation.
So he was suspicious when he found the door to the nearest room indicated on the blueprints wide open, a wooden wedge shoved under the door to ensure it stayed that way.
It had to be a trap, but Carlos was so used to assessing every room he entered for threats, his suspicion barely altered what was already becoming a dull routine. Even if something in the room wasn't wired to explode on him, the wide open door would make it a perfect area for the undead to wander in and congregate.
When he managed to circle the room and open all the doors without anything trying to end him, Carlos removed the wedge from under the door and pulled it closed behind him.
Then he rolled up his pants leg to assess the damage. He grabbed a clean wash cloth from the bathroom counter, dabbed at the wound, then reached into the minibar and unscrewed the lid of the first tiny bottle he touched. The liquor stung as he poured half of it over his leg, then wiped it away with the rag.
It wasn't anywhere near as bad as he'd feared. The bride with barely any control over her muscles absently poking through his thick pants with the tip of the sharp knife barely made a scratch. He'd had worse scrapes in the jungle as a revolutionary back before he was old enough to drink. Legally, anyway.
Speaking of . . .
He poured the rest of the bottle on to the scratch, then grabbed the next bottle and poured it down his own gullet, shaking it off before grabbing another clean towel and tying it around his leg to help clot the little bleeding there was before rolling the pants leg back down.
He made his way over to the desk, where he found a carefully laid out lanyard with an ID badge and a keycard. The ID card identified Dr. Cassius Carver, attending a pharmaceutical conference. The picture was of a Black man, face like granite under a small, thin layer of dignified gray hair. There was a framed photograph nearby. Same man, but with a vastly different expression. The stony face was softer, shining white teeth in a broad smile, the eyes that were so stoic on the ID badge half-closed in contentment in the photograph. He was standing next to another man and a small child.
The phone rang. Carlos was hesitant to answer, but realized the sound might attract unwanted attention if he simply continued to let in ring.
He took a breath, lifted the receiver, and calmly answered.
"Hey. What's up?"
"Corporal Oliveira?"
The voice was a not unpleasant baritone.
"Dr. Carver, I presume?"
"Come meet me. Convention center. Hall H."
"And why should I do that?"
"Your reputation precedes you. And you're the only one who can help me reunite with my husband and son."
Carlos took another look at the photograph.
"Okay. Keep talking."
"No. No time to talk. Come find me."
Click.
Carlos shrugged. Again, it obviously had to be a trap. But it was at least a lead he could follow. Better than wandering the hallways aimlessly waiting for something to try to kill him. More pro-active.
He pocketed the lanyard and left the room.
Ashley was barely audibly shooting off a series of cuss words as she fired at the Hunter, walking backwards through the connecting door to the adjoining room with Will while shooting bullets at its scaly hull. She pulled the door shut behind her, then slammed the connecting door to the other room against that one, turning the lock and bolting it.
"I am so sick of this."
She heard a moan behind her. She spun on her heel and fired in panic at the zombie. The shots hit it in the chest, sending it staggering back and tripping over the pile of suitcases behind it.
While the zombie struggled to get back up, the Hunter thudded its body against the connecting doors. Ashley peeked out the room door, trying to judge the length to the stairwell.
"Over there!" Will whispered. He pointed to a room marked "Staff Only" "Let me borrow that key card!"
Ashley almost objected, but then she handed Will the card and ran with him to next door. He jammed the key in the reader, grabbing the handle at the exact moment the light turned green and pulling Ashley into the linen closet with him.
"The key might only work on guest rooms on the floor that maid was assigned to," Will said. "But it works on all the 'employee only' areas, too."
He found a small brass key dangling from the end of the key card and inserted it into the laundry chute door in its panel on the wall.
"I kinda always wanted to do this," he said, looking down the laundry chute after he'd opened it.
"But you didn't," Ashley said. "Probably because you realized you'd break your neck."
"That seems better than getting mangled by the thing hunting us," Will said.
"Point taken."
Will gestured to the shoot.
"Ladies first."
"Perfect gentleman," Ashley said, climbing up into the opening. "Even in the face of near certain death. I like that."
Then she let herself slide down the chute, Will following soon after.
"What are you doing here, anyway?" Pierce asked Jill as they walked down the hotel corridor.
It was a loaded questions. What was she doing here? If this had been official BSAA business, she'd have had plenty of backup and resources at her fingertips. But, no. She had to be here as part of Carlos' personal vendetta.
"Trying to take care of all of this," she said, gesturing to the open hallway wildly. "But right now, my priority is to find some place you'll be safe while I get everything else sorted out."
Then she put a hand out to stop Pierce from walking further. She thought she'd seen something, out of the corner of her eye.
Sure enough, a figure streaked by, darting to a door labeled "Staff Only" and struggling to insert a keycard into the reader.
Jill ran in before the door could close all the way. The figure curled into a ball in the corner of the closet.
"Madre de Dios!" she moaned. "Por favor. No me lastimes. Por favor."
Pierce aimed a gun at her. Jill grabbed his arm and forced it towards the ceiling as it went off.
"What?" Pierce said. "She was making those strange noises!"
"It's Spanish," Jill said. "You moron!"
"First you were mad at me because I was too scared to shoot the monsters," Pierce said. "Now you're mad because I'm not too scared to shoot at the help. What do you want from me?"
"My gun back," Jill said, holding her hand out for it. "Obviously trusting you with it was a mistake."
Pierce handed the gun over and turned to the girl.
"Donde es la biblioteca?"
"What?"
"I took a year of Spanish in community college. It's the only phrase I ever actually learned."
Jill knelt down and the girl looked up. She was a cute young thing. Dark skin, wide eyes, dimples, and a figure that was obviously enviable even beneath the frumpy maid uniform.
"Hola," Jill said, struggling to remember her own very rusty Spanish. "Mi llamo Jill. Que es . . . ?"
"It's okay. I speak English," the girl said. "I'm Rosita."
"Rosita," Jill said. "We need a place to hide. Not just from the monsters. There's a tropical storm headed our way."
Rosita nodded and rose to her feet.
"I can show you the way to the laundry room."
Ashley and Will were gasping in to each other's faces as they caught their breath, their fall broken by a giant mountain of soiled linens beneath them.
"Bet you're glad I went with the blueberry instead of the everything bagel now, huh?"
"Huh?"
"Can you imagine this moment if I had garlic and onions on my breath?"
Will rolled over so he was lying next to her.
"I don't want to think about what's probably all over these towels and bed sheets," Ashley said.
"No," Will concurred. "You don't."
Ashley descended the heap of linen and fished her cellphone out of her pocket.
"No WiFi or bars, but at least the last few minutes of battery will be good for something," she said, switching on the flashlight function.
The circle of light created by the phone illuminated the washers and dryers along the wall.
They were startled by a loud pounding sound.
The light fell on Will's scared expression. Then Ashley tried to train it on the direction the sound had come from.
She found the dryer right as the door burst open and a zombie crawled out of it.
She shot it several times in the head while it was still on the floor, then reached into her pouch for another clip.
"We're almost out of bullets."
There was a glow coming out of the dryer the zombie had just emerged from. Ashley reached in and pulled out a cellphone.
"Poor girl," she said. "Her last text wasn't even able to send. To her mom. 'I've bolted the door to this area of the hotel to try to keep the things that bit me out. The others locked themselves in the break room and won't let me in. If I don't make it, I want you to know that . . . '"
Ashley's voice trailed off as the text became to personal for her to feel comfortable reading aloud.
"Poor girl," she muttered again.
The light fell on two doors nearby, one marked "Housekeeping Manager" and the other "Maintenance."
Ashley tried the door to the manager's office. There was a woman slumped back in the chair behind the desk, knife in hand, blood pouring from the gash in her throat. Ashley briefly skimmed through her suicide note, then turned to the woman's necklace of brightly colored beads, a ring of several keycards dangling from the end. As she grabbed for the keys, she noticed the bite wound where the manager's blouse was hanging off her shoulder.
The zombie gnashed its teeth and lunged for her, and Ashley responded by swinging her phone as hard as she could, knocking the housekeeping manager and her desk chair both to the ground, the necklace breaking and leaving the keycards clutched in Ashley's hand.
As she left the office, the light shifted to a heap of towels that Ashley could swore she saw move.
The moving pile of linen fell to the side, revealing a six foot long brown oval, with black stripes, crawling on six spindly legs, antenna twitching atop its oscillating head.
"What's that?" Ashley screamed.
"It's a bed bug," Will said immediately.
"Really?"
"Yeah," Will said. "I had to check for them at the hotel I worked at. And I found them, way too often. Never forgot what they looked like. Of course, those ones were about a million times smaller."
As Ashley reloaded her gun and trained it on the giant bug, she heard a skittering nose. She waved the flashlight around the corners of the room. There were several more crawling along the tops of the walls and the ceiling.
"I always thought that whole 'Good night, sleep tight, don't let the bed bugs bite' thing was just an expression," she said.
A giant bug emerged from a huge pile of dirty laundry beside them, its front legs immediately wrapping around one of Ashley's. She raised her free foot and brought it down on the bed bug's head as hard as she could, crushing it.
She cringed with her whole body.
"I can feel its guts through my sock, Will."
Another bug dropped into their path as they made their way to the door at the other side of the room, Ashley quickly stomping on that one as well.
They made it to the door, throwing themselves in to another small corridor. A set of double doors had been chained and padlocked shut.
Ashley pushed at the door frantically before trying to fidget with the lock.
"I don't suppose the girl in the dryer or the manager happened to include the combination in their final notes?"
Ashley shook her head. At the other end of the corridor, they could look around the corner and see the employee break room, zombies attempting to batter down the door from the inside. Ashley didn't know how many had barricaded themselves in there, and she didn't want to find out. She could tell it wouldn't be that much longer until they had the door broken down.
"There's got to be a bolt cutter or something in the maintenance office," Ashley said. "I'll cover you."
Will looked through the door of the laundry room, at the giant bugs skittering up the walls and between the mounds of dirty linen, then back to Ashley.
"Just go," Ashley said. "I've got you."
Will nodded and burst through the door. Ashley stood in the doorway, watching him through her pistol sights. He jumped out of the way of one bug, but then stumbled. Ashley fired at the bug crawling up to him, splattering it as Will got back to his feet.
Another bug wrapped around his legs, and Ashley could see its long nose looking for a place to start draining the blood from his body. She fired again, and, as it splattered, Will disappeared into the maintenance office.
He emerged a moment later, dragging a long sledgehammer. He struggled to raise it over his head, but he was able to awkwardly swing it, splattering another bug blocking his path. Then the next one. Then swinging it to knock back the zombified manager, who'd just managed to push through her office door.
That's when the bell on the service elevator by the chute chimed, and the doors opened wide.
Ashley's pilot stumbled out, the exposed muscles appearing to have doubled in size since their last encounter, its tentacle fingers appearing more supple than before, and its human characteristics even less recognizable.
"This guy again," Ashley said with a groan.
She immediately shot him in the head. The bullet didn't seem to bother him, but it at least irritated him enough to turn his attention away from Will and towards her.
Ashley kept firing as it came further,
Then the sledgehammer swung through the air, knocking the monster to the ground.
Will's movements with the hammer were still awkward and staggered, but he managed to strike the pilot's head repeatedly until more grossness splattered across the floor, adding to the filth and slime Ashley could feel between her toes.
"He's gotta be dead for real this time, right?" Will said, between pants for breath.
That when what looked like a giant millipede slithered out of the pilot through where his head had been.
"That's the last thing I wanted to see," Ashley said.
"Las Plagas?"
"Not like the Plagas I saw, but close enough that they've probably attended the same family reunions."
Will smashed at the padlock with the hammer as the monstrous form twitched behind him, Ashley still keeping her gun trained on it. When the lock finally exploded, sending pieces of the lock through the air, he and Ashley quickly worked on unwrapping the chains and opening the double doors, back into the hotel lobby.
The pilot-monster was now standing back up. Ashley and Will darted for the one spot they saw cover, the reception desk.
From crouched behind the desk, Ashley reloaded and fired at their pursuer. Several shots hitting in that large, glowing eye, seeming to cause it some serious pain. And making it angrier.
"That was our last clip," Ashley said, when the gun clicked empty.
She pulled her combat knife from its sheath.
"We're screwed, aren't we?" Will said.
"I don't need that kind of negativity in my life right now," Ashley responded.