The Resort

by Bentley Little

  The Coyotes’ punishment for losing the game was death, and though deep down Lowell had known that from the beginning, it nevertheless terrified him. He felt at once relieved that they’d won the game and guilty that doing so had resulted in death for others.

  They were spearing the injured on the ground, and Lowell scanned the driving range until he found the old lady. Blodgett himself was pounding on her head with a baseball bat. Not content with merely crushing her skull, he kept pounding until her head was little more than a pulpy red spot on the grass. Another woman, trying to flee, was taken down with a golf club to the stomach, and she shrieked in pure agony as a good-looking well-built man with a knife grabbed her hair and hacked off her scalp.

  The Coyotes, Lowell realized, was the only team to have women on it.

  He was not sure what that meant.

  The fight, if that’s what it was, was mercifully short. Part of it was the fact that so many Coyotes were already injured and the able-bodied Roadrunners simply overwhelmed them, although even if the Coyotes had been in peak form the outcome still would have been a foregone conclusion. In a matter of minutes, the Coyotes were either dead or had fled, and several Roadrunners climbed the tall fence to go after those who had escaped the same way.

  The activities coordinator had been watching from the sidelines, and he strode purposefully to the middle of the grass. He raised his hands for silence but didn’t get it this time. The Roadrunners were out of control and some were still beating on the dead bodies while the others laughed and high-fived each other and patted each other on the back, moving impatiently and excitedly around the center of the field.

  Lowell did not like where this was going, and he quickly and surreptitiously backed up against the fence and made his way along the inside of it toward the gate, praying it was still unlocked.

  “That is the end of today’s tournament!” the activities coordinator announced. There was very little response. Would he be giving out awards this time? Lowell wondered, and shuddered to think what they might be for.

  “Tomorrow—” Rockne began.

  And was felled by a blow to the head.

  “Shut the fuck up!” yelled Blodgett, and a cry of triumph went up from his fellow Roadrunners.

  The activities coordinator collapsed in a spray of blood. Lowell tried to watch what happened to the man, but after he fell, Lowell could no longer see his body. He thought at first it was due to all the movement—Blodgett’s angry pacing, the other Roadrunners’ back and forth jostling—but it became clear almost instantly that Rockne was no longer there. He had disappeared.

  Somehow Lowell was not surprised. On some level, he supposed he had even expected it.

  Rockne. The Reata. One hundred years.

  He crept along the edge of the fence. What was going to happen now? He was under no illusion that the activities coordinator’s disappearance meant an end to The Reata’s reign of terror—whatever power lay at the heart of this evil place was still here—but Blodgett and his minions no longer had any checks on them, and Lowell had the feeling that was intentional. The Reata was using them all as pawns, playing with its guests to see how this would turn out.

  Lowell knew exactly how it would turn out. Mob rule, a Darwinian nightmare. The Roadrunners would run roughshod over everyone else and turn the place into their own private playground, an anarchic melee.

  Was that The Reata’s goal? He thought of the abandoned resort in Antelope Canyon and the way it was changing. “Fixing itself up,” as Ryan said. Maybe the boys were on to something. Maybe that was the key to everything that was going on. Maybe that resort was the real power and was somehow feeding off this one. As the current Reata devolved, the old one in the canyon strengthened, growing younger, like some architectural Dorian Gray.

  There were too many possibilities to consider, and all of that could be done at a later time. The priority now was getting out and getting away. He reached the gate and, keeping his eye on Blodgett and the Roadrunners immediately about him, opened it, sneaking through. There was no outcry, no one chased after him, and he was suffused with gratitude that he’d made it. Rachel and the boys had obviously been watching him, and they were there to meet him, taking him quickly back out through the crowd. Other Wrens were sneaking along the edge of the fence behind him—he obviously hadn’t been nearly as secretive as he’d thought—and their families were silently motioning for them to hurry up. For now, the Roadrunners remained oblivious.

  Lowell wished them well as he and his family, David still with them, crouched down and sped up the sidewalk away from the driving range, using the standing crowd of onlookers as cover. Once around the corner of a building, he hastened them back to their suite, locking the door when they arrived, using the chain and the deadbolt though he knew that neither could keep out a determined mob. He propped a chair under the doorhandle. David was silent and pale, and he wondered if the boy suspected his parents were dead. Lowell was almost certain of it.

  “So what do we do now?” Rachel asked. Her voice was low and frightened.

  Everyone was waiting for his answer, but he didn’t have one. “We wait,” he said, closing the drapes and turning on the television. CNN was airing a White House press conference, and he was grateful for this window to the outside world.

  Sometime before dark, the electricity went out.

  Patrick hid in the limbs of a cottonwood tree, peeking through a screen of fluttering leaves, safe for the moment. The Roadrunners were still roaming the resort grounds, looking for stragglers, and he knew that if one of them caught him he would be killed.

  He’d seen Tony Lawson, the Coyotes’ captain, beaten to death with a spiked club.

  Violence in real life was nothing like it was in movies. He’d known that on an intellectual level, of course, and like most of his friends he’d deplored war and aggression from a purely philosophical perspective, but seeing how quickly people could devolve into bloodthirsty beasts, he understood in his gut how deep-down horrible violence really was.

  When the activities coordinator had announced that the Roadrunners were not to play against the winners but punish the losers, Patrick had fled, deserting his team, worried only for his own safety, caring only about preserving his own life. He hoped some others got out as well, but he wasn’t going to risk his own life trying to help them.

  “I stick my neck out for nobody,” Bogart said as Rick in Casablanca, and although he’d renounced that philosophy by the end of the film, Patrick still thought the sentiment one to live by.

  Live being the operative word.

  So he’d jumped the fence, darting between cactus and behind palm trees until he’d reached the building that housed his room. Only he’d lost the key. The magnetic card had been in his shirt pocket, but it had obviously fallen out during the “game” or when he’d leaped over the fence, so Patrick quickly walked the pathways searching for someplace to hide. From around the corner of a building, he heard an old man cry “No! No! Please, God, help me!” and then the rough laughter of several other men, and that was when he climbed up the cottonwood tree, going as high as he could without venturing onto branches too weak and thin to be safe.

  And here he remained, silent, unmoving, hiding.

  Beneath the tree passed a young boy and his father, the same two he’d run into on his first day here.

  Fairy

  “Don’t worry,” the father was saying. “We’ll get them all and bring them to justice.”

  Patrick held his breath, not daring to breathe.

  “Are they all faggots?” the boy asked.

  “Every last stinking one of them.”

  And then the two of them were gone, walking around the corner of the building toward the spot where Patrick had heard the pleading of the old man.

  Both father and son saw something that made them laugh uproariously.

  Time passed. He grew hungry and his stomach growled but luckily no one was around to hear it. One unusual noise as they passed by
would cause people to look up and discover him—and that would be the end of it.

  Thunderheads rode into the desert on an unfelt wind, and though they blocked out the sun, they did not bring lower temperatures but only served to make the air more humid. For his part, Patrick was glad. It felt more like Chicago, more like home, and he was grateful for anything that could take him away even momentarily from this hellish place.

  The storm arrived just after sundown, and he crept out of the tree under the cover of night and rain, knowing he needed to get away from here but not knowing where. He took a quick piss, then ran quickly down one of the gravel paths, the noise of his passage covered by the rain and occasional thunder. He stopped at every corner, peeked carefully around every building, but came across no one else. For all he knew, The Reata could be completely abandoned by now and he the only one left, but he didn’t think so and couldn’t count on it.

  He still had money in his wallet, and he used the last of his one-dollar bills to buy two Cokes from a vending machine near the tennis courts.

  He still didn’t know where to go, but he thought of the hiking trails that led into the surrounding desert and decided that might be a plan. He’d be exposed to the elements and anyone who followed the trail would be able to find him, but his gut feeling was that it would be safer to be away from the resort itself.

  Completely soaked by the now torrential rain, he hurried up a trail that led into the mountains behind The Reata. The path led over a short hilly section of desert before disappearing between two closely aligned bluffs. For all he knew, this was a flash flood area, but at the moment it looked like a good hideout, somewhere he might be able to catch a few winks without fear of being discovered and beaten to death. He started thinking of ways he could booby-trap this entrance into the canyon or how he could hide in a place that would allow him to see anyone approaching from a long ways off. His brain was ticking off endless scenarios from classic westerns. He should write a book: Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Movies.

  To his surprise, the downpour slowed to a drizzle as he passed between the sandstone walls, and by the time the canyon had opened out around him, and he found himself in what looked like a wide desert valley between two mountains, the thunder and lightning had stopped.

  He could have halted here, but the trail kept going and he knew he’d feel safer the farther he was from The Reata, so he continued walking. The cans of Coke were feeling heavier in his hands, and as he was both thirsty and wanted to have a hand free, he popped open the top of one and drank it. He hated to litter, but he wasn’t about to carry an empty soda can around with him. But he couldn’t just drop it on the trail because someone might be able to track him that way, so he cocked his arm and heaved it as far as he could to the left of the path.

  Where he saw an orangish glow coming from behind a low rise.

  Could it be a ranch or a farmhouse? Could someone else live out here? It was possible, and though he knew he was being overly optimistic, he left the trail and slogged through the wet sand toward the source of the light.

  The rain started up again, altering perspectives and playing games with distance. Patrick kept his eyes on the now flickering shimmering light, and it was not until he was almost upon it that he realized the source of the light was an old hotel.

  Another resort.

  The blood turned cold in his veins. From up ahead, he heard the sounds of a party. In fact, it sounded like the same party that had been going on each night in the empty room next to his. His brain and whatever instinct for survival had gotten him this far were telling him to turn around, to hide in the canyon behind a rock or bush somewhere between the two resorts. But he had to know what was there, had to discover the cause of those noises, had to find out whether there really was a party going on and whether it was peopled by humans or ghosts.

  He passed a spooky-looking totem pole and, seeing no lights in the lobby, continued on toward the source of the light and noise.

  He found it by the pool.

  Torches—not kitschy tiki torches but primitive burning branches that smelled of creosote and looked vaguely Native American—had been placed in wrought iron holders next to the doors of the rooms and were embedded in holes in the cement around the pool. There was a party underway, and the participants were doing what any normal person would do at a pool party—swim, drink, talk—but the men and women were ancient, almost mummified. By torchlight, they appeared monstrous. But when they jumped into the pool they became young again. An overweight man with the wrinkled face of a dried apple went into the water, emerging with a hundred years shaved off him, and Patrick recognized the creepy security guard he’d met Friday night after his encounter with the snakes and wolf. Once out of the pool and in the rain, the man shrivelled and turned old again, a transformation so real and recognizably organic that it could never be mistaken for a special effect.

  They all turned old when the rain hit them, Patrick noticed now, and he backed up to make sure that he remained in the shadows and did not accidentally reveal himself.

  By the deep end of the pool, where the diving board should have been, was an elaborate throne upholstered in red velvet upon which sat a tall skeletal figure with long white hair. He did not do anything, did not move, simply watched over the party like a king surveying his subjects. There was an aura of power about the figure, a deep sense of authority and ancient evil that made the hairs on the back of Patrick’s neck prickle.

  The Roadrunners, those runaway thugs who now had control over The Reata, no longer seemed so frightening or formidable.

  At least they were human.

  He backed up, moving as stealthily as possible around the corner of the building, intending to get the hell away from here as quickly as he—

  A wrinkled bony arm whipped around his neck from behind and caught him in a headlock, squeezing so tightly he could not breathe. A voice like scratching sandpaper whispered something in his ear he could not understand. He smelled dust and rancid meat.

  At least it will be quick, he thought as he was dragged toward the pool.

  But it wasn’t, he found out.

  It wasn’t at all.

  TUESDAY . . . AND BEYOND

  Thirty-four

  They awoke in the morning sweaty from the uncirculated air in the stuffy room. The smell of rotting food from the minibar permeated the atmosphere, mixed with the odor of morning breath. Lowell was the first up, and he opened the slat of the shutters slightly and peeked out. He saw nothing unusual, nothing suspicious, but that in itself was suspicious, and he didn’t trust the tranquil morning view before him. He opened the slats a little wider and stood as close as he could to the window, trying to look down at the spot directly below, but still there was nothing out of the ordinary, only some flowering desert brush and an expanse of manicured lawn.

  Rachel got up and went to the bathroom, and while she was in there the boys and David came out of their room. “Anything for breakfast?” Curtis asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Lowell said. “But see if you can find anything to scrounge.”

  Rachel emerged from the bathroom. “That water’s out,” she said. Lowell went in and checked the toilet. It had flushed properly, but there was only a small bit of water at the bottom of the bowl and the tank was practically empty. He stopped up the sink, turned on the faucet, and the only thing that came out was a small trickle and then a series of decreasing droplets.

  Great.

  “Everybody try to hold it,” he said, coming out. “If you have to pee, use the sink. Anything else, use the toilet in the other bathroom. We might be able to get two flushes out of it if we’re careful.”

  Sometime in the middle of the morning, Rand Black came by with a small group of men, two of them Cactus Wrens and a couple of others he didn’t recognize. Lowell did not invite them in.

  “They’re gone,” Black said. “Blodgett and his crew. No one’s seen them all morning.”

  Peeking at them through a c
rack in the still-chained door, Lowell was not sure he bought that. Where would they go? The other resort, a voice in his mind said, but he refused to believe it. No, it was more likely that they had put Black and the other men up to this, threatened or intimidated them into trying to draw out Lowell and his family.

  “We’re getting a search party together to see if we can find them,” Black said. “Wanted to know if you’d come along.”

  “Why would you want to find them?” Lowell asked.

  “So we can keep tabs. So we know where they are and what they’re doing. So we won’t be caught off guard.”

  It was logical, made sense, but Lowell still didn’t believe it. Besides, there was no way he’d leave Rachel and the kids alone. “Sorry,” he said, and closed the door, locking it again.

  He expected more knocking, pleas for him to join them, appeals to his team spirit, but there was nothing, and when he peeked out again a moment later, they were gone.

  What the hell was wrong with him? There was safety in numbers. He’d had a chance to get out of this suite and see what was happening in the company of five other men, and he’d chosen to stay cooped up in here, hiding. Was he now so paranoid and suspicious that he could no longer tell the good guys from the bad guys?

  Rachel was obviously thinking the same thing. “What are you doing?” she cried. “Go with them!”

  “I can’t leave you and the boys here alone.”

  “We’ll be fine,” she said in a manner that brooked no argument. “In case you haven’t noticed, we can’t eat or go to the bathroom. We’re going to have to get out of this room anyway if we’re going to survive. At least we should know where those killers are.”

  “It could be a trap.”

  “It’s not,” she told him, and although he didn’t know why, he agreed with her.