Rockne, holding the basketball and acting as referee, grinned.
The whistle was blown, the ball was thrown, and Lowell jumped as high as he could, feeling a strange and unwelcome sense of satisfaction as he hit the ball to Black and bumped the old lady to the ground. The cries of the crowd that accompanied his action were not of outrage but approval.
That seemed to set the tone for the game.
There were elbowings and kneeings, trips and punches, but Rockne, the lone ref, did not call any fouls. Lowell himself the high scorer for the first quarter, got involved, delivering a hard elbow to the tit of that old bat who’d jumped against him, and she went down in a hail of obscenities to the delight of the roaring crowd. In the front row, he spotted an elderly couple who had left the sunrise service shocked and horrified by the so-called minister’s shenanigans screaming at the top of their lungs, cheering him on. “Kick her!” the old lady yelled. “Kick her in the twat!”
Something snapped within him, like a rubber band stretching and then whipping back to its original shape. Seeing that old couple screaming crazily brought him back to reality like a slap to the head.
He was himself again.
That didn’t mean he went soft on the court, however. His game was on today, and though he hadn’t played basketball in quite some time, he was a lot more coordinated and in a hell of a lot better shape than most of his opponents. Not to mention taller. He and Black, the two best athletes on the team, developed a kind of rhythm, and by halftime they were up by twenty points. By the end of the game, they’d beat the Coyotes by forty-eight, and it was Lowell’s idea to retire as champions.
“We’re not playing,” Rand Black declared when the referee announced the beginning of the second game. All of the Cactus Wrens stared defiantly at the activities coordinator.
“You . . . have to.” For the first time, the man appeared flustered; he’d obviously never encountered a refusal to play before.
“We don’t have to do anything!” Garrett Reynolds piped up. The gangly man had scored ten points in the last quarter and his confidence was high.
“The Roadrunners would have an unfair advantage,” Black said calmly, logically, offering a rationale Lowell wished he’d come up with. “We’ve just been running around, playing our asses off for the past forty minutes. They’re all rested and ready to go.”
The activities coordinator—Rockne—did not have a comeback.
The crowd was starting to disperse, rows of spectators carefully making their way down the aisles at both sides of the bleachers, and more than anything else it was the defection of the audience that seemed to signal the true end of the tournament.
“We want to play!” Blodgett bellowed from midcourt.
It was the perfect opportunity, and Lowell couldn’t resist. “Play with yourselves!” he shouted. “You’re good at that!” There was laughter from the departing spectators, a response that seemed to diminish the activities coordinator and enrage Blodgett.
“Right now!” Blodgett yelled. “Right now!”
Calmly, dismissively, Lowell turned away. He saw supportive grins on the faces of his fellow Wrens.
“The Cactus Wrens forfeit!” Rockne announced. “The Roadrunners are our basketball tournament champions!” But no one was listening, no one cared, and his voice barely carried above the varied conversations of the dwindling crowd.
Lowell found Rachel waiting for him by the home team basket. “Take off that ridiculous uniform,” she told him, “and let’s get the hell out of here.”
The kids were still out when they returned to the suite, and though the boys might return at any second, Rachel wanted sex. Once more, she was aggressive in a way that Lowell found disturbing and more than a little off-putting.
“My pussy’s dirty,” Rachel told him, and she flipped up her skirt. She wasn’t wearing any underwear. She spread her legs wide. “Lick it,” she ordered. “Lick it clean.”
Dutifully, he lowered his face between her legs and began swirling his tongue in the circular motion he knew she liked. Her hands held his head down hard, and she ground her crotch painfully into his face until she achieved satisfaction. Afterward, she sucked him with a fierceness he had never experienced before, and though it was arousing on a purely physical level, inwardly he recoiled. Grunting like an animal, she sucked harder, faster, more furiously, and then he came, exploding in her mouth, and she greedily gulped it down, holding him between her lips until he was completely spent. She squeezed out the last few drops then let him go, licking her lips like a cat and smiling, a look of complete satisfaction on her face.
Who is this? he thought. It sure wasn’t the Rachel he knew.
Then he was pulling up his pants as she walked over to the dresser, took out some underwear and put it on, and suddenly she was the Rachel he knew. She seemed embarrassed by what had just happened, though neither of them mentioned it, and he thought of his own suddenly reactionary reactions at the beginning of the basketball game. They were being played by whatever force or power lurked in this resort, and the feeling was extremely unnerving. He felt as though they were stepping across a minefield, never sure when their next movement was going to blow off a leg or kill them dead.
He had still not heard back from AAA, and he called back to complain. They should be leaving here by now, halfway on the road to Tucson. The representative on the phone looked up his name and number, then explained that a series of accidents in Tucson had taken up the resources of the towing service that was supposed to pick up his car. As his situation was a low priority, and The Reata was so far out of the way, it would probably be tomorrow morning before a truck arrived to tow their vehicle.
They were trapped here for another night.
The boys returned shortly after. They didn’t say where they had been, and neither he nor Rachel asked, but their manner suggested they had seen something they did not want to talk about, something that had made a profound impression upon them.
They all spent the rest of the afternoon together, playing cards on the patio of their suite. They should be talking, Lowell thought, opening up with each other, communicating, but he didn’t know how to get them to do it and, besides, the impulse was more of a general notion than a conviction.
They ate dinner early, room service again, and stayed inside after dark, the boys in their room, he and Rachel in theirs, each of them watching their respective televisions. It felt to him like they were hunkering down in their bunker, hiding from whatever was going on outside their door and hoping it would not touch them until the sun rose again in the morning.
He supposed to some extent that was exactly what they were doing.
By ten o’clock, Rachel was already asleep next to him, and out of curiosity, he used the remote control to turn down the sound on the TV and flip to the resort’s information channel. He didn’t know what to expect, but what he saw was an infomercial for The Reata that was far more honest and realistic than anything on their Web page or in their brochures. There was a shot of today’s basketball game, with one of the Coyotes gleefully headbutting a Cactus Wren, and a scene of a bottomless woman in a Reata T-shirt singing karaoke at the Grille. He turned the sound up slightly: “Here at The Reata you can play all day and party all night in our luxurious surroundings amid the natural beauty of the Sonoran Desert.” The picture shifted to what appeared to be a vulture pecking the eyes out of a dead human baby lying motionless in the sand.
Lowell turned off the television. They needed to leave. They needed to get out of here.
Tomorrow, he promised himself.
Come hell or high water, tomorrow they were getting away from The Reata and never looking back.
MONDAY
Thirty
Lowell awoke early. He sneaked carefully out of bed so as not to disturb Rachel, grabbed the cell phone and took it into the bathroom to call AAA. A beep and a message told him that the phone was out of range, but he didn’t see how that was possible since he’d just used it yest
erday. Another try in the bedroom and another outside yielded exactly the same results. Rachel was still sleeping—snoring, in fact—so he was quiet as he lifted the handset of the room phone to call out.
The phone was dead.
Lowell hung up, tried again, jiggled the little catch in the cradle, but there was no dial tone, no noise, nothing.
He had a bad feeling about this, and he quickly dressed and put on his shoes.
“Wha—?” Rachel said groggily.
“Nothing,” he told her. “Go back to sleep. I just need to check on something.”
There was no newspaper on the welcome mat outside their room, and while the world was usually quiet this early in the morning, today it seemed too quiet. He wasn’t sure what that signified, but he didn’t like it, it worried him, and he hurried down the steps and up the sidewalk toward the lobby. Something was wrong. He could feel it. No, more than feel it, he could see it, although it took him a few moments to realize what it was exactly he was seeing.
Empty parking lots.
He stopped walking. He’d reached the first group of rooms above their own, and the parking lot in front of the building was empty. Either everyone had checked out and gone home or everyone’s car had been stolen. He continued on, sprinting up the cement to the next building and the next until he reached the lobby and the main parking lot.
Jesus Christ. All of the cars were gone. Overnight, each of the lots had been emptied. Even the little carts that the staff rode around in were nowhere to be seen.
He walked across the bare asphalt to the guardhouse to find out what the hell was going on, but the little shack was abandoned, its doors locked, the gates blocking the road closed.
Now he really was worried. He ran back across the parking lot to the main building, opening the door himself since no attendants were there to do it for him. The lobby was empty. Not only that, but it appeared to have been empty for some time. He felt like Rip Van Winkle, as though he’d fallen asleep and a great amount of time had passed. There was dust on the front counter, and the ornate mirror behind it was cloudy, the carpeting on the floor worn and thread-bare. Looking through the windows at the patio outside and the pool below was like looking at a ghost town: chairs and tables were overturned, the cabana bar boarded up, the pool filled with visible debris. Only the well-landscaped grounds gave any indication that this was not the way it had always been, that yesterday this had been a thriving luxury resort with an extensive staff.
Since there was no one around, he placed his hands on the dusty countertop of the front desk and hopped over. The computers were gone, all shelves and drawers empty, but the phones were still in place and connected. He picked up one. Then another. And another. Until he’d tried all five.
The phones were out.
Just in case, he tried his cell again, but it still didn’t work, and he had the feeling that the same would hold true for all of the guests’ phones.
If there were any other guests.
The anxious feeling within him was not panic, not yet, but it was on its way, and he quickly left the lobby and hurried down the sidewalk to the closest set of rooms. He knocked on the door of the first one he reached. Putting his ear to the door, he heard the welcome sounds of movement and voices from inside.
He and his family were not the only people who had been stranded here.
He breathed an inward sigh of relief, and when the door opened a moment later and a tired man in a bathrobe squinted at him and said “Yeah?” Lowell could have kissed him.
“Sorry,” Lowell said. “Wrong room.” He’d considered telling the man what had happened, explaining that they’d been abandoned here, but decided against it right now. There’d be time for that later. If it really did turn out that there was no way to leave, all of the guests would have to get together and map out a strategy. Until then, he wanted to make sure he made every effort to find a way out.
The helicopter!
He’d forgotten about that, and once again he found himself running down a sidewalk, this time toward the heliport.
As he’d feared, as he’d known, it was empty. Well, not exactly empty. There was no helicopter on the target-shaped landing pad, but on the flat ground next to it was a burned and twisted hunk of metal that looked like it could have come from a crashed chopper.
From this vantage point, Lowell could see the backs of several of The Reata’s main buildings, and he glanced from one to the other, trying to think if there was something that he’d missed, some other means of escape or communicating with the outside world that he was overlooking or had forgotten, but he was all out of ideas.
There was only one conclusion to be drawn: they were inexplicably stranded here.
He made his way back to the suite, walking along the rear of one of the buildings, gratified to see open drapes behind the patios and balconies, with lights and movement in most of the rooms. One of these, he realized as he passed by, was their original room.
Blodgett was still here.
panties
It didn’t matter. The man might be a jackass, but he was in the same boat as the rest of them.
Lowell emerged from behind the building to see a crowd gathered on the road next to the pool gate. The waterfall was turned off, and he could hear the voices of angry guests. The throng was fifteen or twenty strong, many of them with sleep-tousled hair and wearing Reata bathrobes. They’d obviously discovered what had happened and seemed to be quizzing someone in authority. Had they found a remaining Reata worker?
They had, but it was a janitor, and he was apparently as much in the dark as the rest of them. Moreover, he possessed limited English skills, and most of the demands and queries made of him seemed to go right over his head.
Lowell felt sorry for the janitor, who was coming under increasing verbal fire. Leave him alone, he wanted to say. The man doesn’t know any more than you do. But the crowd was angry and vociferous, and he wasn’t brave enough to stand against them. He searched the faces of the crowd, hoping to find Rand Black or one of his fellow Cactus Wrens, someone he could appeal to, but while some of the faces seemed vaguely familiar, there was no one he actually knew.
His gaze stopped on the face of a dark-haired woman approximately his own age.
No. It couldn’t be.
Lowell squinted, cocked his head, moved around the edge of the gathering, examined her from different angles, but no matter what he did, the woman still looked like a grown-up version of Maria Alvarez, his first girlfriend from high school.
Maria Alvarez.
It didn’t seem plausible that she was avoiding the reunion, too. And that she’d chosen the exact same resort as he had in order to get away from Southern California . . . but was it possible?
Who was he kidding?
He watched her face carefully. Maybe it was someone else, someone who just happened to bear a resemblance to Maria. But she shouted “Where is everyone?” at the janitor, and it was her voice. Even after all these years, he still remembered that voice, and when he saw the way she folded her arms across her chest in an expression of dissatisfaction, the déjà vu was complete. “I want an answer!” she demanded.
He thought about Rachel’s recent aggressive lovemaking.
Lick it clean!
Fuck me! Fuck me hard!
Those were the types of things Maria used to say.
A shiver of cold passed through him. He didn’t know why he hadn’t remembered it before, but he recalled now her assertiveness, how she would coordinate their sexual encounters and make specific demands of him in the backseat of his car. She’d been the school slut, and he’d been the envy of all his friends. A motherless girl from a poor neighborhood off Main, she had zero self-confidence, was ostracized by many of the other girls, and made up for it by being aggressively sexual. All she needed was someone to believe in her, someone to care about her, and then everything would be all right. Or at least that was his theory. But she’d ended up fucking half the junior class, including his
then-best friend John Murdoch. And when he dumped her, she laughed at him.
The thing was, he hadn’t really been interested in Maria until she had practically thrown herself at him. He’d had his eye on someone else, a girl from P.E. named Brenda, and even after he and Maria had become an item, he still secretly longed for Brenda. But that had never come to pass, and by the time he was free she was already with another boy.
Something was going on here that defied explanation. A haunted hotel was one thing. Ghosts and strange occurrences and an evil power permeating everything? That he could accept. But these constant allusions to his own life, to his high school days, on the very weekend of his dreaded twenty-year reunion . . .
It wasn’t possible, it didn’t make any sense, it didn’t fit into any theory or framework he could envision.
He was staring at the woman, watching her, and for no reason her head swiveled away from the janitor and turned toward him, her eyes locking on his. She smiled, a lewd promising smile he remembered well, and instinctively he glanced away. But he recovered instantly and looked over at her again.
She was gone.
It wasn’t Maria, he told himself. It wasn’t anyone. Just a figment of his imagination. But he knew that wasn’t true. People had looked at her when she spoke, the janitor had tried to respond to her question.
Another low-level employee, a maintenance man of some kind, emerged from the walkway that led to the generating station, and the janitor told the crowd “Wait!” and ran off to see his coworker.
“Get back here!” a man called.
“Where are you going?” a woman shouted.
Lowell turned away. There were no answers to be had here. He doubted there were answers to be had anywhere. The thing to do right now was go back to his suite, talk it over with Rachel and the kids and decide what they should do next. He felt a little better that they were not completely alone here, but not as good as he had a few moments before. The mood of that crowd was ugly, and he had the feeling that if they turned out to be stranded here for any length of time, tempers would get even shorter, people angrier.
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