In Memoriam

by Matt James

  “Oh, shit…”

  I see what Andy does.

  There, just inside the alcove housing the ice and vending machines, is the gunman. He’s been slaughtered. Even his weapon, a shotgun, is still present. It’s plain to see that Farrell’s crew isn’t the only player here. The Unseen have graced the Holiday Inn with their presence and have taken it upon themselves to repaint the walls.

  “Siren,” I softly say, reexamining the pair of footprints.

  Only one set is bare. The dead man’s feet are booted, like the second set of tracks, and they’re slathered in fresh blood too. It seems that, not shortly after he helped kill everyone behind us, he was attacked and killed by one of the female huntresses. There aren’t any signs of gunfire in the hallway, either. She got the jump on him. It also means that she’s, more than likely, still close by.

  Careful not to slip in the fresh coat of crimson, I snag the man’s shotgun, holster my pistol, and check the larger weapon’s ammo cartridge. It’s got five shells left inside of it.

  Better than nothing.

  While not of the tactical variety, the pump-action 12-gauge will still be very useful. It’s a much-needed upgrade over my Glock. The wider spread and hard-hitting shells will be perfect for the tight confines of the hotel hallways.

  Heel to toe, we stalk forward in the ultra-quiet confines. We haven’t seen another living soul since we took a bullet to the Yukon. Even then, I didn’t actually see the shooter. Straight ahead are a pair of inoperable elevators. One of them is currently occupied.

  “Ugh,” Andy says, groaning in disgust.

  The person has been here for a while, or rather, the person’s pieces have been. Thankfully, someone tossed a blanket over the remains, though, the blood has soaked through the covering. The victim must’ve been chased into the lift just as the mayhem started, or possibly, as soon as the hotel lost power. She, or he, would’ve been a fish in a barrel when it happened. Caught, and with nowhere to go, the poor soul was torn apart.

  We edge out into the T-shaped intersection. To our right, further down the corridor, is a dead-end, and most likely a staircase, if I had to guess. To our left is something else. There’s a sign that reads, “Indoor Waterpark.”

  “That’s rad,” Jill mumbles. She shrugs when I look at her. “Must be new?”

  I’d like to check it out, but the stench wafting through the hall gives me pause. It reeks of rot. Depending on the size of the waterpark, there could’ve been dozens of helpless people enjoying the waterslides and splash pads when Abaddon arrived. I envision month-old bloated bodies and more flies than I can count.

  Without a word, I head right. No one argues. Jill, Andy, and Cooper are smart enough to know what awaits us in the other direction. They’re definitely thinking the same thing. Public settings are never a good place to be, nor a good place to explore. It’s why we avoided Pidgeon Forge on our way into Gatlinburg, and also a big reason we were happy to settle just outside of the city limits. Less foot traffic, and even less now.

  And yet, here we are… Right in the middle of it all.

  I’m, again, starting to regret our decision to help, but then I remember why we’re doing it. We owe Andy our lives. So, I push aside my worry—and paranoia—and march on.

  Halfway to our destination, the hallway opens up into a large common area. It’s filled with tables and chairs, another fireplace, and aluminum serving trays and burners. It’s the dining room where the hotel guests would’ve enjoyed a complimentary breakfast. I love how places describe something you’ve already paid for. There’s nothing “complimentary” about it. It’s a paid meal, asshole.

  With my internal rant coming to a close, I take in the room. A door with a picture of stairs is off to my left, in the corner of the room. There are also more bodies—fresh ones. Five in all. One of them is no more than Hope’s age. I stop and tense with rage. I find the closest thing to hit. The large, stainless-steel coffee urn feels like the right choice. So, I beat the ever-living shit out of it with the butt of my shotgun. After the fourth metallic CLANG, Jill’s hand slips onto my shoulder. I don’t pay her any attention and raise the weapon for one more round...

  “Hey,” she says, her voice calm.

  I look at her, my eyes blurred by liquid. I didn’t even realize I was crying. Shaking with rage, I blink and feel the salty water drip down my cheeks. Jill’s eyes are wet too. She smiles and squeezes my shoulder.

  “Come on.”

  I nod and take a deep breath. Then, I grab a napkin from the dispenser next to the ruined urn and wipe my face. Feeling better, I’m about to toss the napkin into a nearby trashcan but stop. Something inside the can doesn’t seem right. There’s a soft red glow emanating from within. Slowly, I creep up to it and see something I dread.

  “Uh…” I say, dumbfounded.

  “What is it, Frank?” Andy asks.

  I look back at my friends, mouth hanging open. “Bomb.”

  The others almost fall over one another before sliding to a stop next to me. We give the wastebasket a healthy berth and stare in terrified awe. The explosive comes complete with a tripwire too. If the napkin had hit the ultra-thin wire, this room would’ve gone up in flames, and the four of us would now be dead.

  Cooper readies his FN SPR and turns, scanning the room again. “We need to leave.” He looks over his shoulder and meets me eye to eye. “This place could be full of those things.”

  “What about Farrell?” I ask, glancing at Andy.

  She bites her lip in thought before answering.

  “Cooper’s right,” she says. I can see the anger burning within her for agreeing with him. “We don’t even know she’s here.” She motions to the trashcan. “That could’ve been planted days ago.”

  “And the person shooting at us?” Jill asks.

  I answer. “It could be someone that left Farrell’s crew for greener pastures. He was probably just telling us to stay away.”

  Nobody argues. Nobody agrees with me either. There are just too many unknown variables to make an educated guess. As of right now, it’s all hearsay. Seeing the bomb makes me terrified of what other surprises Farrell has left for us.

  “So…” Cooper says, letting the obvious question hang in the air.

  What are we doing?

  “We stay,” I say, feeling back to myself. “Regardless of who the guy upstairs is, we need to get rid of him before someone else is murdered in cold blood.” Jill’s about to say something, but I quickly add. “By protecting Gatlinburg, we are also protecting Sanctuary.”

  She closes her agape mouth and ponders my thought process.

  “He’s right,” she agrees. “Plus, there might be more survivors in the hotel that need our help.”

  Andy nods. “Okay, then… We stay and finish the job.” She activates her shoulder mic. “You guys have anything?”

  “Besides more of the creatures,” Tara replied, “no.”

  “It’s really cold,” Jack says, getting a laugh out of everyone.

  I sigh. I needed that. It feels good to laugh.

  Andy and Cooper finish up with Jack and Tara, but I don’t pay them any attention. I reach around my back and turn down my radio until their crackling voices are nothing more than muffled white noise. My legs take me over to the nearest window, and I pretend I’m actually here on vacation.

  No monsters. No death.

  It’s just Jill and me and some peace and quiet, sipping on cocktails out by the pool...in the summer. The kidney-shaped body of water is completely empty, barren. So is the deck surrounding it. The hotel had already packed everything up for the incoming winter weather.

  In my vision of the life that could’ve been, Hope’s at home with Grandma and Grandpa, loving every minute of her pampering. I frown because I understand that Abaddon actually saved my family…by exterminating more than my stomach can handle. I hope I never learn the official death toll. This kind of life is already a lot to deal with. Still, the meteor was responsible for giving us the
daughter Jill and I were never going to have.

  This beautiful getaway, the Gatlinburg summer vacation, would’ve never happened, no matter what. Jill and I would’ve split long before ever coming here.

  To my left, a door rattles from the winds. The annoyance gets me out of my trip down memory lane.

  Jill slides her hand into mine and lays her head on my shoulder. Quietly, we stare into the winter wonderland, I mean, hellscape.

  “You ready?”

  We release our hands and turn around. Andy and Cooper both have their rifle stocks jammed into their shoulders. I swing my shotgun up onto my shoulder like I’m carrying an axe and I smile.

  “Let’s roll.” I voice a thought about the stairwell. “But we go through the waterpark.” I point to the door leading to the stairs. “We don’t know what’s behind door number one. Could be another bomb.”

  No one suggests anything else, and we get moving, heading back toward the elevators to our left.

  “Wish I had my bat,” Jill mutters.

  I didn’t even notice she wasn’t carrying it.

  “Left it back in the car.”

  “At least you have your gun,” I say.

  She shrugs. “Still… Would’ve been nice to take a couple hacks at that urn.”

  I chuckle softly. “It did feel pretty good.” I nudge her with my elbow. “I have a feeling you’ll be back at it with someone else's face in the near future.”

  Jill grins and turns back to the hallway.

  We retrace our steps and continue past the inoperable elevators. I've had enough of elevators for a day after the ride we took at the Space Needle.

  I gag.

  We’re assaulted by intermittent gusts of stench-filled air. Somewhere around the bend to our left is a mass of rotting flesh and a broken window.

  On our way there, we pass a gym, a resort-style sauna, and an internet lab/gaming center. Five, six, or has it been seven weeks now? Either way, this place must’ve been pretty cool back then. It seems that they had everything. Even now, besides the blood and bodies, the hotel is impressive to look at.

  Lost in my thoughts, I don’t realize that we’ve entered an ample, three-story-tall space. I’m brought back to the present when another sharp, gust slaps me in the face. Unfortunately, so does the stink of a hundred, meatless cadavers.

  It’s worse than the Last Supper room back at the Jesus museum. It’s even worse than what I experienced back in the Flanagan’s restaurant in Wellington. It is, however, eerily similar to both.

  The only thing I can think of to say is, “Oh, my God…”

  18

  Of the hundred or so bodies I see, and yes, there are that many, the one nearest to me holds my attention the longest. It, and I say it because I can’t tell whether the person was a man or woman, is missing all of its skin and meat. All that’s left is a strange puddle of green-yellow ooze, bones, and a shotgun.

  My brain catches up. It allows me to say, “It’s one of them!”

  Whatever killed all of these people, it stripped them cleaned to their bones with some sort of acid or something. The thing also helped itself to one of our enemies, not just the people that were staying here.

  Hang on, I think. If there’s a man-eating monster living inside the Holiday Inn, why in the world would people be willingly living beside it?

  The waterpark itself is neat, minus all the death, of course. There’s a central tower that almost reaches the thirty-foot, glass, pyramidal ceiling. At one point, it did too. Now, the uppermost section has been sheared off, by a feat of brute strength.

  That’s where the air is coming in from too.

  Directly above the busted tower, a handful of large, square panes of fogged glass are broken. The van-sized hole allows the December air to rush inside unperturbed. The water that should’ve surrounded the tower is frozen solid, easily hardening because of its shallow depth.

  At least, I think that’s why.

  Connected at different angles are slides of all shapes and sizes. Even a little kiddy slide can be seen off to our left. The room itself is shaped like a Y, and we’re standing just inside its base.

  As far as the victims are concerned, they’re scattered all over the place. Whatever is responsible for the carnage, it isn’t as calculating as the Conrad brothers. This thing eats wherever it wants and drops the remains of them in the same manner.

  Possibly feral?

  A few of the oddities I’ve seen so far have still retained their human thinking—their highly developed thought process. They’re monsters, through and through, but they process things more slowly than say a goblin would. It’s closer to how I’d describe a siren. Cunning, yet still incredibly savage.

  The sound of a thousand shaking maracas almost brings me to my knees. Jill, Andy, and Cooper appear to be affected in the same way. Like me, each of them winces as the sound builds up to a crescendo. I do a three-sixty, shotgun up, but I can’t find anything to shoot.

  “What?” Andy shouts.

  No one said anything, I think, about to ask her who she’s replying to.

  She’s not talking to anyone in the room, though. She’s speaking into the microphone on her shoulder. Dammit! I turned mine down back in the dining room and never readjusted the volume. I do so now and hear Jack screaming in fear on the other end.

  “Look up!”

  We do—and holy shit, what’s that?

  Through the stinging wind, I spot the biggest snake I’ve ever seen. The tip of its tail—body—shakes furiously. Do snakes actually have tails? Regardless, it reminds me of a pissed-off cat. A rattlesnake! It even has a rattle on the tip of its lengthy, uh, tail. The front end, however, is even more horrifying.

  A man looks down at us, and like the serpent’s body, he’s much larger than he should be. His skin is covered in armor. In reality, they’re thick scales, and I’m not sure our weapons will do much against them. The man-snake also has a human’s chest, waist, and arms. His eyes, as you’d guess, are missing. He’s an Unseen, for sure, but something extra special.

  Everything about this creature is completely fucked up.

  Then, his followers shamble into the room from all directions.

  “They’re people?” Cooper asks, nervously panning the barrel of his SPR back and forth. “But how?”

  The monster above us gags and hocks up a sizeable loogy, unhinging his jaws as it slides forward out of his gullet. The grotesque globular falls thirty feet to the waterpark floor where it explodes, ripping open to reveal a steaming, putrid skeleton.

  “Well, that explains the bodies,” I say, aiming at an older lady as she creeps closer to us.

  Her still-intact eyeballs are yellow and milky, glazed over like she’s high on something. I’m about to shift my focus to the next closest guest, but I see that the elderly woman is injured. The skin on her forearm is slashed and torn. The injury seeps the same goop as the skeleton’s mucous sack.

  “They’re infected,” I say, looking up, “by that.”

  Our new, scary friend slithers in through the busted windows above the waterpark. I’m not sure how it’s holding his weight, but it does. While hanging upside-down, the man-snake makes his way to the nearest wall and changes direction with ease, scaling it to the floor within seconds.

  The first person he sees—one of his own—he lashes out and engulfs him. Like before, his mouth unhinges, and his lower jaw splits in two, making it even broader.

  “I think the venom not only infects its host, but it also prepares them to be his next meal.”

  “How do you know?” Andy says, backing up. She stops when six of the creature’s creepers move into position behind us.

  “What do we do?” Cooper asks.

  Jill turns and fires two quick shots. Both rounds strike a creeper in the head, dropping them where they stood. They didn’t even try and dodge the bullet!

  “That!” I say, spinning and taking aim.

  We all turn and take care of the rest of them, and with our
way clear, we haul ass as fast as we can. Moving back toward the elevators—again—we take down two more of the snake’s minions as they show up around the corner.

  “I guess it’s safe to say that the people we saw in the lobby weren’t living here willingly,” I suppose. “They were his slaves.”

  “Duh!” Andy says. Her M4 Carbine barks third-round bursts as she fires from the hip.

  The revelation brings the hotel into a whole new light. The gunmen—whether it was Farrell and her crew, we don’t know—probably saw a couple of “civilians” from the street and came rushing in to loot the place. Instead, they found a horde of zombified creepers.

  Okay, let’s face it, “creeper” isn’t my best name to date. It fits, though, and I’m a little busy and don’t have the time to come up with a better moniker. They shuffle, hunched like a goblin, but they’re not Unseen. They are, quite literally, creeping.

  “Where are we going?” Jill asks, taking pots shots at the growing mass of drones.

  Hmmm, shoulda called ’em drones!

  So, I will.

  The snake-guy’s drones are almost on us, but he, himself, hasn’t joined the hunt. I’m not sure why, nor am I going to complain about it. His scales looked pretty damn tough. I’m not even sure Cooper’s powerful SPR would’ve done much of anything.

  “Front door!” I shout over the gunfire.

  We slide past the T juncture—and keep on going. Another group of drones is waiting for us halfway down the corridor. We can’t risk running out of ammo. Not now! Plus, we have no way of knowing if the drones are contagious. So, we sprint onward. As we do, a crazy plan comes to fruition.

  Pretty sure this is going to suck.

  “Cooper, with me!”

  Luckily, he doesn’t question my instructions. The CPD cop is on me like white on rice. I throw my shotgun over my shoulder and carefully grab one side of the boobytrapped wastebasket.

  “What are you doing?” he asks, stunned.

  “Shut up and help me!” He does. “Easy does it.”

  “Where—?”