by Kate Morris
“Got it,” Cory says, all thoughts of joking around now gone.
“Paige,” Derek says, addressing her directly, “if you get separated from Cory, you need to make it down to this floor and to this exit. John will be there to get you.”
“’Kay,” she says softly.
Beside him, Paige’s nerves start to set in. She takes a deep breath, and Cory nods to her to give her courage.
“Don’t worry,” Cory says to them. “I’m not letting her outta’ my sight.”
“Contingencies, brother,” John says. “Plans change. That’s the one thing that’s consistent about this crap.”
“Once you get in, try to take in your surroundings,” Derek instructs. “The ultimate goal is to get the mother, spread the message to the women, and get the hell out.”
They spend some more time going over everything again, and Cory leaves with Paige, Lucas, John and Dave’s sniper. Derek stays behind in the restaurant with Dave in their makeshift command center.
As a group, they jog to the movie theater where he’d worked with Paige before. John, Luke, and Dave’s sniper separate and leave them. He and Paige will go in without them while John’s group takes up positions on the roof of the theater. Dave has a whole team of other men waiting up on the overpass, as well as a group of men across the street at the church, and another team across the river ready to move in if need be.
It is thundering again. The fact that they are doing this tonight with such horrendous weather is not an accident. The additional noise outside will help to cover them. The foggy, rainy atmosphere will provide extra camouflage.
“Stay close,” he tells her.
“Ya’ think?” she jokes.
Cory smiles in return as they jog across the parking lot toward the Gaylord, using the cover of abandoned vehicles as they go.
Neither of them is using a backpack tonight. Paige had made that recommendation. She told him this morning that she remembers all too well one time when she’d taken a pack and had gotten hooked on a piece of metal sticking out of a wall and had almost been discovered by looters. After that, she’d carried a messenger bag if she was going into a place where there would be people who might hear her if she accidentally ran a cumbersome pack into something.
“We’re moving in,” Cory whispers into his mic.
“Roger, proceed slowly,” John orders.
Cory squats and picks the lock on a side door that employees would’ve used after parking in the employee lot. Once they gain entry, Paige pulls the rag from her jeans pocket and wipes the soles of her wet shoes to cover her tracks. Then she hands it to Cory, who does the same and pockets the rag again. They are trying to go at this as sneakily as possible.
They walk down the end of the six-foot-wide entryway-hallway and pause. Then he presses forward into the wider and much longer hall. Cory draws up his rifle with the silencer and pauses, listening. There is a faint pinging echo somewhere ahead as if metal has clinked against metal. The place seems deserted and empty, but he knows from the boy in town that there are a lot of workers doing jobs on the first floor like sewing, gardening, and what limited medical work they can handle. He said that they have a doctor, a woman they took captive, which came as a surprise to them. Cory has no idea how these people have survived without a full medical clinic.
He uses hand signals, which is how they’ll try to communicate until they’re back out of the compound, to tell her they are going to their right. There is just the slightest hint of light at the end of the hall to their left and pitch darkness to their right. Paige follows close behind him, tiptoeing and carefully treading so that she doesn’t bump something or accidentally kick rubble or trash on the ground. He appreciates that she has experience in this method of clandestine work.
Behind them, the lighting grows dimmer and dimmer until they are walking in the dark. Rooms off to their right and left let him know that this end of the hotel was clearly only meant for employees. There seems to be a breakroom on the right, locker room next, and lastly a small kitchen where they probably prepared their own meals for lunch breaks. On the left are rooms that are marked on the outside with placards labeling them for various storage spaces. Cory turns to his right and goes through a door that swings in. The emergency exit sign above the door is unlit. The alarm that is supposed to signal is apparently not in working order, either. Paige follows him and shuts the door behind her ever so softly so that it does not even click when the mechanism finds home again.
Cory flicks on his flashlight and adjusts the beam so that it barely illuminates the ground in front of him. He knows they can’t afford to be discovered here. They would either be taken prisoner or killed because they’d quickly be outnumbered. He also doesn’t want their friends outside to have to engage with this group tonight just to rescue them. It could get a lot or all of them killed, and he’d rather not have to explain it to Reagan why her husband is dead. Worse still would be Simon, who would kill him if something happened to his sister.
Somewhere down below them, which must be a lower level basement space, storage area, or perhaps even a parking garage, a shrill noise sends a warning shiver up his spine. It sounds like the scraping of metal against metal as if someone were keying a car but with a giant, thick key alongside a full-size van. Then rattling chains comes next. It’s even worse than the car vandalizing sounds. Cory doesn’t move. Three or four seconds go by before he finally nods to her. Paige pulls from the front pocket of her jeans a small tube the size of a lip balm and removes the lid. If he didn’t already know what it was, he would think it was just a ChapStik, but it’s not. It’s a marker of sorts made of a waxy balm about the same consistency of lip balm that glows in the dark. It is one of the things Kelly told him he found in the bottom of one of the many boxes of supplies that Robert McClane sent with Parker for them. He doesn’t like being indebted to Parker for anything, none of them do, not even for a crust of bread, but Cory does appreciate the waxy stick in this moment. She squats and rubs it on the corner of the door at the base closest to the hinge. This will let them know they’ve been here and that the area is safe, and it also shows the way back out. Since they have never explored the hotel before, not on missions or as tourists of the area before the fall, they have to be extra cautious and not get lost or confused.
She joins him as he ascends the concrete staircase, avoiding more litter on the landing. A shadow moving in front of him causes him to startle. Cory stops, taps her shoulder, and indicates with two fingers that she should look past him. She sees what he means. They’ve made it to the second floor. Lighting flows more easily through the nine-by-twelve-inch glass square on the door that would take them onto that floor. Cory motions for her to stay put. Then he walks without making a noise to the door and peeks through the glass. A few seconds later, he swiftly moves back and flattens against the wall behind the door. The shadow he’d caught in his peripheral vision was that of a person. Paige hunches down behind the stair railing. Three men walk by the door noisily talking, laughing, and making no attempt at silence, not like them.
He exhales as the men keep right on going without realizing she and Cory are so close. He looks down the stairs at her and nods. Then a noise up above causes her to jump slightly. It sounds like someone making popcorn or tapping out Morse Code. Something doesn’t seem right about this. He wonders if they were given the wrong intel. Maybe that kid was a liar. Perhaps he was a plant to throw them off, lure them in, kill them. He’ll die a painful death if he did. He takes a calming breath and reminds himself he is just on edge because she is with him in the enemy’s lair.
Cory joins her and indicates they should continue upward, so she follows. He reserves his opinion on their situation until he can learn more. Once they come to the third floor, things seem to be more like what the kid described. The lighting coming through the glass slit this time is very dim. Adam said that they did not like the women’s ward to use electricity. It makes sense because this was the side of the hotel that they
surveilled last week from the theater, and there wasn’t much light coming from the inside. Cory had questioned whether or not they even had electricity.
He pushes the door slightly ajar and looks through. They have to be especially careful now. If a woman spots them and gets scared, she may scream for help, which would alert their guards.
Cory motions for her to follow him, and Paige slips through the opening and shuts the door quietly. Then she squats and smudges the bottom corner with a dime size smear of the neon green wax. Cory stands guard while she also jams a small stick about four inches long in the crack to keep it from shutting in case it doesn’t open again from this side. Many hotels relied on swipe cards in the past which employees would use to get from one area to the next. He’s not sure how that would work without electricity or the hotel’s system up and running. And they are definitely not sure how much of the hotel’s electronic devices are operable.
To their right is the end of the hall, which expands in both directions down other corridors. Cory turns to face her, indicates she should stay put, and that he’s going down there to check it out. She nods and presses back into the recess of the door’s overhang. To his right is another alcove that goes even further back in, so he motions for her to hide there. She slides around the corner. It’s a place for the ice machine and soda dispensers, which were looted long ago. She steps back and squats to keep an eye out on the direction to her left to watch Cory’s back while he investigates the other way.
He moves swiftly but quietly, scouting out the area, looking to his left. He doesn’t see anyone. There is a dim light coming from somewhere down there. Cory presses on until he reaches the end of the hall. He still doesn’t see anyone. He keeps his rifle in front of him as he jogs back to her. She hadn’t wanted a rifle tonight, so she’s only carrying a pistol and three extra magazines for it. She said she’s not used to this sort of work while carrying a long rifle. Stealth and silence were more critical, and she rarely had guns anyway when she was on her own. She said sometimes they’d have a gun but no bullets or vice versa. Cory couldn’t even imagine.
Cory taps her shoulder, and she jumps and rises. He steps into the space with her and takes her farther back into the darker corner.
“There weren’t any guards that way. I think they’re gonna be the other way. There also wasn’t any light, and I didn’t see any women down there. I don’t think that wing is open. I think we’re on the wrong end of where we needed to be.”
“Should we go back down and find another way?”
He shakes his head, “No, let’s keep moving. I think we’re going to come out on the opposite end of the women’s quarters. That room across the hall has a number three-oh-eight on the door. He said his mom was in room three-forty-seven. She’s gotta be that way because the numbers the way I just went were three-seventy-five and up.”
“Right,” she agrees and follows him out of their cubby.
Cory goes at a slower pace, pausing every so often when he hears a noise. The thunderstorm outside picks up with intensity, and lightning illuminates outside the windows of an open room they pass. It is empty like the others and clearly has never been occupied since the fall.
Then he hears a man’s voice and freezes. His hand shoots up to halt her, but Paige has already stopped. A radio crackles next, and someone speaks into it stating that their area is clear. He must be the women’s guard on this end of the third floor. They probably have to check in every so often. This is good to know. Cory looks at his watch to mark the time that it is one a.m. Then he ushers her into the room behind them that had a door standing ajar.
“What do we do?” she asks.
“I need to get us past them.”
He can tell she doesn’t like this idea. She stiffens up and shakes her head.
“I wish we would have gone back down and circumvented the floor and came up on the other end,” she whispers fervently.
Cory touches her arm. “We don’t have the time. Hide in the closet, over there,” he indicates. “I’ll handle it. Stay in there. If I’m killed, wait until they leave and get out of here the same way you came in. The doors are marked.”
She nods and bites her lower lip with anxiety.
“It’s ok,” he whispers. “Go.”
Paige does as he instructs and gets in the closet, closing the louvered door as quietly as she can manage. It squeaks, and she whispers ‘sorry.’ He doesn’t care. He is busy waiting at the door to the room while she gets settled in. Then he dashes around the room checking it out, weighing his choices and decisions.
The room is fairly sizable, a suite with three sets of windows, what looks like a pull-down Murphy bed, a sofa and two chairs off to his right with end tables. The bathroom is beyond the kitchen and living space, but the king size bed sits directly across from her closet. Just beyond that is the small kitchenette that is almost bigger than his whole cabin back at the farm. This must’ve been an expensive suite to book for the night.
Cory removes a flare from his pocket, one of the many that the men and G have made on the farm. He lights it and places it in the kitchen sink. Then he goes back to the door and props it further open. He sprints to the kitchen again, opens a cupboard and brings out a stack of small pans and tosses them on the hardwood floor. It makes a terrible amount of noise, which is what he’d hoped for. He swiftly looks to the door to see if a whole herd of soldiers is going to rush it. Nobody comes yet, but Cory crosses the room and disappears into the shadows like a ghost.
Footsteps of someone running down the hall draws his attention back to the entry door. He can hear the guard speaking into his radio again.
“Probably rats again. I’m checkin’ it out.”
A second later, a man runs through it, and like a moth to a flame, he heads straight for the glow of the flare in the stainless-steel sink.
“What the hell?” he mutters to himself.
It’s as if he’s living in a horror film as Cory moves in shadows and silence up behind the man from the darkness. Only instead of being afraid of the creature in the movie, he is that prowling creature. He hopes Paige cannot see from the closet. She told him once after they’d made love when he’d asked her what kinds of movies and books she used to enjoy that horror flicks were definitely not on the list. If she were watching this with her friends in a movie theater before the fall, she would’ve cringed, probably bit her nails, and wished she’d never agreed to see a horror, slasher flick with them. Cory steps on something that makes a tiny crunching sound under his booted foot, and the man tries to swing around too late. Cory is on him. He wraps him in a bear hug and swiftly stabs the man in the chest. He doesn’t make a sound as he slumps to the floor in front of Cory. Then he drags him into the dark bathroom.
He whispers to her, “Come out and shut the door, Paige.”
She does as he instructs and closes the hotel room door. With the flare still going, they don’t need flashlights. They can see well enough, and by the look on her face, she probably doesn’t want to see it. There is a blood trail from the kitchen to the bathroom where he has dragged the body.
“Use the blankets from the bed and cover the blood,” he tells her.
She flies into movement and even messes up the sheets on the bed so that it is not so obvious the coverlet is lying in a strange position on the kitchenette floor. She places throw pillows from the sofa over the trail going to the bathroom and scatters towels around them to cover the evidence. Then she knocks a few of the chair cushions onto the floor to further give the look of just another ransacked, looted room.
Cory extinguishes the flare in the sink, waves away the sulfuric smoke and goes back to the bathroom to finish hauling the man into the tub. He comes out of the bathroom and shuts the door. Then he walks to the exit door leading to the hallway again. He pulls a tool from his cargo pocket, unfolds it, forces it into the lock and pushes hard.
“What are you doing?” she whispers, apparently ready to flee and not stick around too long in this
room.
“Jamming the lock so it won’t open anymore. I already set the lock on the inside, but they’ll have to remove the door to get it off now.”
“Oh,” she whispers. “I wish I would’ve had this knowledge when I was out on my own with my friends.”
“Ready to keep going?” he asks, to which she nods. “That should’ve been the only guard but keep an eye out.”
“Dan, you there?” comes over the man’s discarded radio, which crackles static.
They scramble to find it, and Paige finally does. It was flung under the cabinets during their scuffle. She hands it to Cory because she’s not sure what to do about it. He takes the man’s discarded radio from her and presses the long button on the side.
Cory covers the front of the radio with his hand, “All clear. Rats.”
“Ten-four. Try not to get beat up by rats, pussy,” the man on the other end says.
“Roger that, dickhead,” Cory says through the muffled receiver.
He looks at her and shrugs. Then he hooks the radio on his belt and adjusts the volume.
“Let’s move,” he says.
They sneak down the hall after closing and setting the lock for the hotel room where the dead man is stuffed into the bathtub.
The ambient lighting draws closer, and Cory hears something that actually sends a chill up his spine. It reminds him of the music an ice-cream truck would play to draw in children and their parents’ pocketbooks. It’s just about the creepiest thing he’s ever heard.
He hopes he doesn’t have to kill the ice-cream man. He’s not sure the woman he loves would enjoy watching that. That might be one horror flick event from which she couldn’t come back.
Chapter Twelve
Paige
Cory peers over his shoulder at her, and she shrugs at the odd and somehow macabre music that should bring back happy memories from her childhood because it sounds like it’s coming from a music box or a record player. He makes a face as if he finds the music disturbing, as well. Then he signals that he’s going ahead and that they should cover opposite sides of the hallway. Paige nods in accord.
