by Jon Sauve
"What should we do then?" Beth asked.
"What any normal person would do, I guess. Run until you find a phone. Call the cops. Tell them everything. Don't leave anything out. If you do, they'll find out. Don't try and help me. You'll just make yourselves look suspicious."
Beth stared at him. Her eyes were wet. She would never leave the guy under her own power. Mary would have, she was healthily selfish in that way, but not in her current state. It would have to be me, just like it had been all night. I stood up and let my chair tip over and slam against the floor. Good, solid wood had never made such a sick, muffled noise. The chair was as rotten as everything else in this dump.
"Time to go," I said.
As I was walking toward Mary, I remembered something.
"Ben," I said.
"Please," said Beth, "don't say his name."
"Sorry," I replied, and I really was, for Ben and for her and for myself. "He has a phone in his car, though. I saw him throw it on the seat."
"Keys?" Elden asked.
He had me there. They would still be on his body. Unless they had been confiscated during the pat down, which I was pretty sure they hadn't been, since Luke had still had his keys. Getting them would have been easy enough for me just a little while ago, but now that things had calmed down all my normal reservations were starting to reform. Going to rifle around in a dead guy's pockets did not seem particularly fun. Then again, neither did walking all the way to the gas station.
I climbed the stairs. I have to admit, it took me a moment at the bottom. I paused again halfway up and looked down at the others. Beth was bent over next to Mary, rubbing her back and saying something into her ear. Elden was sitting like a mall Santa at the end of a very busy day, slumped and motionless.
I went up again, took a left turn at the landing, and continued on. I still had my lantern, but I waited to turn it on; the dark felt soothing just then.
About halfway down the hall I seemed to strike a solid wall of ice. I was suddenly drenched in cold fear. It stopped me utterly. After a moment, it passed. I shook it off like a nightmare and kept going. Pretty normal to feel paranoid under the circumstances, I thought.
When I was getting close to the death room I flicked on the lantern and squinted my eyes. The pale white light, stark and weak, brought a second minor wash of fear. I'm pretty sure I'll never be able to use a lantern again. Too many bad associations. Imagine I'm in the dark woods on a camping trip, I turn a lantern on, and then I'm back in the hotel for just a moment. Back in these dark moldy halls with a killer stalking me. No thanks.
I went in, feeling weak and shaky. Under his bloody sheet, Jeremy was totally still. I hesitated again before going into the bathroom.
Ben wasn't covered. His dark eyes stared ahead, and his fingers were still curled as if he were holding the ax. His throat resembled an overcooked black pudding. I sidestepped across the tiles, my feet crunching in particles of old grouting, and reached with exaggerated care to stick my fingers down into Ben's pockets. He was in a seated position, propped against the tub as Jeremy had left him, which made it hard to get access. But I wasn't about to move him. The thought of my hands closing around his ankles, hard and cold as ice...
The keys were there. It was a struggle to get them out, but when I did I saw why Max hadn't confiscated them. A whole ring of keys would have been a decent weapon, but Ben's set was sparse. A key to his car, another that was probably for the house or apartment where he lived, and a third that seemed to be for a bike lock. The keychain itself was a cheap souvenir from Cancun, the covering plastic scratched and clouded with age.
I got halfway through the bedroom before I experienced an emotional breakdown. The thing that brought it on was an abrupt and unbidden imagining, which came into my head fully formed; an image of Ben in Mexico, living it up on the beach, happy and carefree. Another picture came immediately after; Ben's mother or father or cousin or friend or anyone really, also in Mexico, at a little gift shop and a smile coming to their face as they thought, "Hey, doesn't Ben need a keychain?"
That was somehow worse, that Ben had people out there somewhere who cared about him enough to buy a keychain.
I don't know how long I lay there on the bed. All I know is, I suddenly lost the paltry amount of strength left to me and collapsed. I didn't care about the filthiness of the bed anymore. It was a soft thing, no matter how much shit and piss and jizz and blood was soaked into it, and I needed that.
At first I just stared numbly at the shadow of my foot cast on the wall, from the lantern that had somehow found its way behind my dangling left leg. Then my lip started to shake, I started to whisper over and over again the question that all suffering people ask, why god?, and then the tears started to come.
I cried for a while. Then I remembered that Beth and Mary were waiting downstairs, anxious and terrified, and I forced myself to stand and wipe the salt off my cheeks.
Time to get the phone.
As I left the room, I felt a sudden pang of fear. It took me a moment to realize it was the same old social anxiety. What would I say to the cops? I already knew I would stutter, stumble over my words, fail to communicate the severity of the situation. I wouldn't be able to just say it; people are dead, come now, we're at the Allnighter Hotel, it's a fake name but it’s out past the gas station.
I sighed to myself, wiping my forehead and finding a syrup of drying blood there. I had no idea whose. The saying really is true. When we bleed, we bleed the same.
I reached the laundry room door and stopped there without really knowing why or even that I would stop, as if my legs had brakes and they had been applied by some unknown circuit in my brain.
The anxiety was back, pulsing behind my eyes and inside my ribcage. I shut my eyes and shook my head to dispel the bad thoughts, thoughts of the cops laughing at me, thoughts of the cops showing up and somehow believing that I was at fault for all this. When I opened my eyes, the thoughts had gone away, replaced instead by a resolve to just get this shit over with. But the anxiety was still there, without a known source.
I stared down the hall, a tunnel of gradually increasing darkness, a gradient of white to platinum to silver, all the way into the deepest graveyard black, a darkness so profound it seemed to howl with the voices of everyone who'd died here. Or maybe that was just my pulse, screaming in my head.
I turned right and went down the stairs. Halfway down my legs made me stop again, but this time the odd sense of subconscious warning was accompanied by a shiver that spread wool-like across my scalp. I turned, squinting into the darkness at the top of the steps, which the lantern light did almost nothing to dispel.
"Orin?" Beth called from below. "Did you get the keys?"
I was about to turn back around when new fear stabbed up my spine and clapped like thunder in my skull. A part of my brain had registered the movement before I was conscious of it. Something was forming out of the dark; it seemed to pull individual photons of light from the weak glow of the lantern and stitch them into itself, so that it grew in a single instant from being nearly imperceptible to being fully formed, cast in white light, available for all of us to see.
A funny thing happened in my brain, probably because it had been turned to jelly. I knew who it was at the top of the stairs, but for a moment the fact of it was too much for me to accept. I opened my mouth, and the words came out without a stumble.
"Who are you?"
Shaun grinned at me.
"Jeremy's insurance policy," he said, and before anyone else could even breathe he was flying down the stairs.
I was back in battle mode instantly. Without thinking, without even needing to think, I took the only course of escape available. No way I would be able to back away faster than gravity could deliver Shaun into my face. So I went to my left, flinging myself over the banister.
Problem; I had one hand on the lantern. Solution; I let go of it.
I regretted the decision as the lantern dropped away, falling seven or eig
ht feet to the floor. I had just enough light before it hit to grab one of the supporting posts of the banister in both hands. Then came the crash, the plunge into total darkness, the waft of wind against my face as Shaun continued down the steps.
Either Beth or Mary screamed. I couldn't tell who, because the sound was barely even recognizable as human. There was a chaos of movement, feet falling and chairs toppling and things going bump in the night. And through it all, Shaun was laughing.
I could feel a huge empty void of air under my feet. Someone who was actually athletic might have negotiated this drop without breaking something, but athletic I was not. No, my nightly walks didn't count.
What I did was loose my grip just a bit, so that my weight slid me down the pole I was holding on to, then dropped when I thought I was low enough.
Wouldn't you know it, my left foot landed directly on the lantern. It was even on its side, so that it rolled out from under me. I went down like a sack of shit, slamming onto my elbow. My left leg was flung out to the side, which prevented the ankle from twisting, but the same luck did not apply to the other side. My right ankle bent, I felt a pop, and then I was back on my feet. The foot still moved which seemed like a good sign, but it was already going stiff.
The common room was quiet, but sounds of chase echoed from the front hall area. They weren't far gone yet. I could still catch up, fucked ankle and all. Adrenaline, baby. But I had no weapon. And Shaun... I hadn't seen a weapon on him either, but I had been afforded a brief glimpse into his eyes before enacting my absolute masterpiece of an escape strategy, and what I saw there was total insanity. No way I would best him. I needed an advantage. I just had to hope Beth and Mary could elude him for long enough. Elden was out there too, somewhere, and I was optimistic that he would help.
The ax. It flashed into my head like someone had put it there telepathically. The image of it, perfect and clear, leaning against the wall in the bedroom where Elden had left it.
I went toward the bottom of the stairs, stumbling and shuffling on an ankle that was starting to go a little tingly. Going up was hard. The foot started locking up. I could only use my left foot to propel myself, but I had the banister to push off of as well.
The hotel was darker than the darkest darkness I had ever seen. Not even adrenaline-enhanced night vision was enough. But by now I knew the hotel, or at least this upper corridor, like the back of my hand. I also had the heavy smell of blood to guide me.
The ax wasn't where Elden left it, not exactly. I was on the verge of panic - if the state I was in wasn't already panic - until I realized that it had probably just fallen over. I dropped to my knees, not on purpose but rather because of a sudden weakness in my ankle as I leaned over. The ax was there, its metal head cool and slick among the stiff fibers of the carpet. I grabbed it, used it as a crutch to reach my feet, then went back into the hall.
My ankle was burning now. I paused, lifted my foot, and used my hands to stretch it. It seemed to help a little, until I put weight on it and gasped from the pain. This was not looking good. What a terrible time to fuck up your ankle.
I used the ax to assist my walking as I went down the hall, to save my ankle for when I really needed it. It actually helped me descend the stairs quicker, in a hopping maneuver. Down, down, down. The amount of sound I made was incredible, but concerns over noise had vanished a while ago.
Speaking of noise, I was hearing none of it from elsewhere in the hotel. The immediate response was one of anxiety. Surely the lack of sound meant that everyone was already dead, that Shaun was standing somewhere, covered in blood, waiting for me to wander into his clutches. But on second thought, it could also be a good thing. Maybe everyone had gotten away, or they were hiding.
At the bottom of the steps, I turned right and scuffled around to where the lantern had fallen and subsequently almost turned me into Paul Sheldon after getting hobbled. I found it all the way against the back wall, where it had rocketed out from under me. I fiddled with it, pressing the button over and over, shaking it. An alarming rattle came from within. The plastic covering was cracked. A couple times I saw a faint spark of light. I checked the batteries, but none of them were loose. The lantern was done.
In darkness, breathing heavily and favoring my left leg, I moved toward the door into the front hall.
I listened a moment, waiting, then stepped through. No sound, no movement, only a rustle of wind scattering dust through the parking lot, a faint noise that drifted along the tunnel of darkness ahead of me.
The car was out there, just past Luke's body. I reached into my pocket and jingled the keys. I already knew which one opened the car by the size and shape of it. There was little chance of a keychain fumbling scene straight out of a slasher movie.
I looked to the left and right, maybe hoping to see one of the girls, then plunged into the darkness.
Only the stars signified when I was approaching open air. The desert night had gone suddenly and totally still. The air was cold, but it stunk a little bit less like mold and little bit more like blood. Luke's blood. I cringed as I stepped over him. He had originally been the second casualty of the night, but recent events had changed that. Talk about adding insult to injury.
Ben's car was directly off the front sidewalk. I moved toward it with confidence for a moment, then remembered the snipers and quickly hunkered down. A moment passed, and when no laser dot alighted on me I decided that they had indeed left.
As my eyes adjusted to the night, I saw that the car was blue. For some reason I had pictured it as red. Maybe because of all the blood I had been seeing.
The door was a clunker to get open. It crunched and grinded, squealed and moaned, fell toward me with a dead weight and bumped against my stomach. The phone was on the passenger side floor. Not where I expected it to be. I decided it must have bounced off the seat when Ben tossed it in.
I grabbed it, moved around the back of the car, and plopped down onto the cold asphalt, my back against the rear bumper. There was a nearby seam of gummy tar running along an old crack, the remnant of some ancient repair job. I stabbed at it nervously with my thumbnail while I lifted the phone close to my face. I could tell by the scratches and scuffs and the faded numbers that it had been in use for quite some time. It was one of those old phones with a tiny square screen and a vast field of buttons below it.
I hit the 9, moved my thumb over toward the 1, and stopped. The screen hadn't lit up. I was suddenly aware of how weightless the phone felt in my hand. I set it down on my leg and pried the rear cover off. The battery pack was gone.
Without a sound I chucked the phone across the lot. I heard it crack and shatter, the pieces scattering. After thinking about it for another moment, I said a few bad words and then punched the ground with my left hand. The pain and immediate regret of the punch made me even more angry; I stood up and started hammering the trunk of the car with both fists. The ax, which I had propped up straight after sitting, fell over and landed with its handle across my injured foot. I tried to shove it away, kicked the rear tire instead, and promptly fell onto my ass with tears flowing from my eyes. The pain receded immediately, but for just a second it was one of the worst things I'd ever felt. In fact, I would put it second, right after "killing someone."
I laid down. The asphalt was very uncomfortable under my shoulder blades, but I didn't much care. I just stared up at the stars, recalling in a foggy kind of way all the other times I had done the same thing. Out on my nighttime walks, angry or depressed, suddenly losing all strength and laying in grass still moist from the sprinklers. Just lying there on my own at one or two or three in the morning, everything silent, feeling totally numb and apathetic. Thinking; "What's the point of all this?"
Mary. Beth. Elden. That was the point tonight. The thought gave me just enough strength to sit up, to grab the ax, to finally stand with my other hand against the trunk of the car. I caught my breath, shook the kinks out of my foot and hands, and went back toward the hotel.
Oper
ating on a whim, I headed for the side entrance by the kitchen. Once inside the door, I stopped to let my eyes adjust. As they did, I became aware of a faint glow from somewhere, around a corner perhaps. I lifted the ax. Stumbling and crazed like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining, I marched onward.
I went through the kitchen, empty and silent. The source of the light was somewhere ahead of me, diluted and refracted by the barriers that stood between. It became clear, as I pushed through the kitchen doors, that the source of the light was moving. The realization made me more cautious. I slowed down and kept close to the wall, in case the person holding the light came into the ballroom.
When I was halfway to the door into the common area the light went out. My night vision was gone; the dark was as impenetrable to my eyes as a solid wall would be. But my ears picked up the slack, and I heard clearly the sounds of movement in the other room.
It sounded like someone trying to be stealthy and failing, probably because their vision was similarly affected. From our little encounter on the stairs, I was pretty sure Shaun wouldn't give a shit about stealth. And I also wasn't in the mood to weigh risks. I went straight through the door, walked until I hit the table, and climbed on top of it, the logic being that the higher ground would be advantageous.
I walked until I thought I had reached the middle of the table. I searched around with my feet and didn't feel an edge. Good enough.
I heard nothing more. I must have made enough noise to warn the other person I was here. A moment later, the most feeble voice ever called out of the darkness.
"Hello?" it said.
It could only be Mary, though she sounded considerably more distraught than before. I hopped off the table, quite clumsily I might add, and moved toward her voice.
"It's me," I said. "It's Orin."
It still felt weird to say my own name. Do people say their own name a lot?
Mary said nothing more, but I heard a huge breath escape her. And I felt it, stirring the fuzzy hair on my arms, which meant she was near. I could also tell the direction. It's weird how sensitive you become when you can't see.
