The Resort

by Bentley Little

  “Okay,” he said. “But if I’m not back within two hours . . .” He trailed off, unsure of how to finish the sentence, not knowing what she should do if he didn’t return.

  “You’ll be back,” she said, and gave him a quick kiss. “Go!”

  He caught up to Black and his crew just down the sidewalk. “Hey,” he said. The five of them looked at him suspiciously. They’d obviously been talking about him, and the fact that they didn’t trust him made him pretty sure he could trust them. “Sorry,” he said. “About back there. The electricity’s off, the water’s off, we have no food. It’s a bunker mentality.”

  Black nodded, satisfied. “Glad to have you.” He introduced the other men. Scott and Rick, the other Cactus Wrens, he already knew. Elijah, a CPA from Wisconsin who seemed befuddled by everything that was happening, had somehow avoided getting drafted into the tournaments, but Mike was a former Coyote, although Lowell could not recall having seen him before.

  Strange, Lowell thought, how he had started classifying people by their team affiliation. He didn’t like the fact that he was doing that. He thought it was something The Reata probably wanted.

  “Glad you’re okay,” Black said after introductions had been made and hands had been shaken. “A lot of people aren’t.”

  “How many . . . ?” He couldn’t bring himself to complete the sentence.

  “A lot,” Black said. “Too many.”

  “And some of them either aren’t in their rooms or aren’t answering their doors,” Rick said. “So we don’t know what’s up with that.”

  Black nodded.

  “Well, where are we going now?” Lowell asked.

  “We’ve divided the resort into quadrants and are making a systematic search of each area, starting with this one.” Black held up a map of The Reata he’d taken from his Welcome packet and marked up with a pen. “Now we’re going over to the physical plant and employees’ quarters. After that, we’ll go down to the next set of buildings and check each room.”

  “Okay.”

  “But we’re not splitting up. We stay together. It’ll take us longer, but there’s safety in numbers.”

  As always, the morning was hot, but the heat and sunlight and blue skies did nothing to dispel the atmosphere of darkness and death that hung over the resort. Even animals seemed to have abandoned the place, and the circling of hawks, scuttling of lizards and other sounds of the desert that Lowell had almost gotten used to over the past few days were nowhere in evidence. Following Black’s map, they walked down a sidewalk running next to a narrow service road that wound behind a block of guest rooms.

  “What the fuck?” Rick said.

  A small city of tents made from linens and towels stretched along both sides of a man-made ditch in front of a series of small duplexes. The doors to the duplexes had been ripped off their hinges and thrown into the ditch along with clothes, furniture and other personal belongings. Windows to the apartments had been shattered and tendrils of smoke curled from most. It looked like The Roadrunners had ransacked the workers’ lodgings, taken what they wanted, burned the homes and then fled, leaving the employees to construct makeshift accommodations out of whatever they could find in the maids’ supply closets.

  This was confirmed when Laszlo the mechanic emerged from one of the makeshift tents, holding a heavy wrench in his hand. A man crawled out of another tent clutching a hammer. Two standing Hispanic women carrying mop handles thrust them forward as though they were spears. From behind them, Lowell heard a loud bang, and he turned to see two strong, dark men holding metal trash can lids and barring the way they’d come.

  “We want no trouble,” Black announced. “We’re just taking a tour of the resort to see what’s what. We’re not here to fight with you.”

  “You destroy our homes,” Laszlo said angrily, his eyes narrowing to slits. “And for that you must pay.”

  “We didn’t destroy anything,” Elijah tried to explain.

  “We don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Lowell said.

  “You not know? You burn out our homes, wreck our furniture and you don’t know?”

  “Those were the Roadrunners,” Black said. “We’re the Cactus Wrens.”

  “What’s that to me? You’re guests. You’re all guests.”

  “But we’re looking for those guys, too,” Lowell told him. “And all guests are not the same. Those guests killed some of us. They’re looking for the rest of us. That’s why we’re here. We’re trying to find them first.”

  Some of the belligerence dropped. “Why you try to find them?”

  “So we know where they are. So we can hide from them or fight them or do whatever we need to do to protect our wives and children.”

  Laszlo looked at the man with the hammer, then glanced back at the women. Other people were peeking curiously out of their tents but had no weapons in their hands and did not appear eager for a confrontation. “They are probably in the Winner’s Circle,” he said.

  “Don’t trust him,” advised Scott. “He works for The Reata. He’s part of it.”

  Lowell ignored him. “What and where is the Winner’s Circle?”

  The man with the hammer spoke up. “It’s a private club for the winners of the tournaments. A lounge. My wife worked there.” A catch in his throat made Lowell realize that the man’s wife was probably missing. Or dead. “I can take you.”

  Laszlo shook his head. “Jose . . .”

  “I have to know.”

  The mechanic looked from Lowell to the other five guests. “You have no weapons?”

  Black pulled out a pocket knife.

  “We go with you.” He nodded at Jose, who turned and spoke rapidly in Spanish to one of the maids, a young girl in her teens whom Lowell assumed was his daughter. The girl nodded, then glared at the guests and spit angrily on the ground.

  “Some workers gone too,” Laszlo said.

  “Did the Roadrunners take them?” Black asked, and Lowell knew what was going through the man’s mind: if they had, those people were probably dead.

  “Some,” the mechanic said. “Others . . .” He fluttered his fingers in the air as though imitating smoke.

  “Others disappeared with management,” Jose explained.

  Laszlo nodded. “They are one of them.”

  The Winner’s Circle was in a building Lowell did not remember seeing, though he had walked past this spot dozens of times the past few days. A tall modern structure adjacent to the low southwest-style building that housed the Saguaro Room and the Grille, it would seem impossible to miss, but he could tell from the expressions on the men around him that they had not noticed it before, either.

  Jose led them to a door of smoked glass which, surprisingly, was unlocked, and they walked into a huge round room. Loud music assaulted their ears, though there’d been no hint of it a second before, so good were the soundproofing qualities of the lounge. It seemed to be the backing track of a popular song, and Lowell thought of the karaoke in the Grille. The electricity obviously wasn’t off in here.

  Maybe it had its own generator.

  The place was empty, save for the bodies. The nude forms of several men and women, all chained to a central post, lay in twisted positions about the floor, blood on their buttocks and genitals indicating that they had been sexually abused before being killed. There were other bodies here as well, and Lowell recognized a Coyote he’d played against in the basketball game tied to a chair, eyes bulging from his head, and tongue lolling as though he’d been strangled. His brown hair was coated with semen. A sunken section of the floor, a smaller crescent within the larger circle of the lounge, was filled with blood, and in the red liquid floated a woman’s head and several writhing rattlesnakes.

  Next to him, Elijah let out a frightened moan, obviously recognizing the other Coyote as well. “Jackie,” he said.

  They moved carefully around the perimeter of the room before circling toward the center, on guard for boobytraps or ambushes. From the opposit
e side of the lounge, near the bar, Lowell saw a karaoke screen. On it was one word, scrolling over and over again: Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck . . . Behind the counter, the bartender lay among a pile of broken bottles, his head pummeled into something that resembled a squished pumpkin.

  “My wife’s not here,” Jose said when they finally reached the post in the center of the room, and Lowell could hear the relief in his voice.

  “What was this place?” Black wondered, looking around.

  “I told you,” Jose said. “It’s a club for winners of the tournaments.”

  Scott turned toward him. “Did you work here?”

  “I cleaned the floors sometimes. After.”

  “After?”

  “It was never like this,” he said quickly. But Lowell could see that Scott did not believe him, and Lowell himself was not sure the maintenance man was telling the whole truth. He thought of those ordinary German citizens who supposedly saw the trains leading to the concentration camps, who smelled the black smoke that belched out of the incinerators, but asked no questions. Rick, Elijah and Mike remained cowed, shocked into silence by the gruesome depravity on display.

  “They’re obviously not here,” Black said.

  Jose nodded grimly. “But they were here.”

  Laszlo cleared his throat. “Maybe they . . . disappear.” He made that fluttering motion with his fingers once again.

  As strange and horrible as that prospect was, Lowell wished it was true. But he had the feeling that Blodgett and his buddies were still around somewhere, waiting, biding their time.

  “It’s gonna be a hot afternoon,” Black said. “It’s hot out there already.” He gestured around the Winner’s Circle. “These bodies are going to be pretty ripe by this evening. And by tomorrow . . .” He shook his head.

  “What do we do?” Scott asked. “Bury them all?”

  “That’d be tampering with evidence,” Lowell pointed out.

  Black nodded. “Assuming the law ever makes it out here.” He sighed. “I guess we just seal this place up and hope for the best, tell everyone to stay away.”

  Rick said what Lowell was thinking. “What about all those bodies on the driving range?”

  “It’s not my call to make,” Black said. “But I’d say leave them there.”

  “We have turkey vultures here,” Jose said. “And crows and coyotes.”

  Black shrugged. “Let nature take its course.” And Lowell realized that he was right. They’d tire themselves out and waste several days if they tried to provide a proper burial for all of the corpses that littered the resort grounds.

  “The authorities better get here fast,” Elijah mumbled. “That’s all I can say.”

  They were silent as they bisected the round room on their way to the door, and Lowell felt the bile rise in his throat as he got a closer look at one of the dead chained employees and the damage that had been done to the man’s genitals. He kept himself from throwing up by concentrating on the rectangle of light that was the door outside.

  In the open air, he breathed deeply. All of those people in there, he realized, as well as all of those dead bodies on the driving range and elsewhere, had families and friends, coworkers and acquaintances, other people in the outside world who cared about them. In a day or so they’d be bloated beyond recognition or picked apart by scavengers, while their loved ones would be going on with their lives, blithely assuming they were having a fun relaxing vacation and would soon be home. The thought made him feel incredibly sad.

  “So what’s next?” he asked. “Where do we go from here?”

  “Any ideas?” Black took out his map to show Jose and Laszlo. “We’ve divided The Reata into quadrants and have covered this area here and here. We were going to go this way next. But if you have any other ideas . . .”

  The two men looked at each other. Laszlo shrugged and Jose shook his head.

  “Then I guess we’ll continue on. You’re welcome to join us.”

  “I think we’d better get back,” Jose said. “Just in case.”

  They parted, the employees promising to find them if the Roadrunners showed up again, Black promising to let the employees know if they discovered where the Roadrunners were staying.

  “That’s weird,” Mike said, and they all turned to look at him. It was the first time he’d spoken.

  “What’s weird?” Black asked.

  “The way we’re all acting. We should all be banding together. Instead, we’re—” He moved his hands apart. “We’re still the guests and they’re still the hired help.”

  He was right. In movies, in fiction, people always came together against a common enemy, putting aside personal differences. But it didn’t work out that way in real life, and again Lowell thought that The Reata had known that . . . maybe even counted on that. The resort was playing them, and their only hope was to thwart its expectations and behave in ways that were unexpected.

  Black seemed to realize the same thing. “You’re right. We need to stick together.”

  “Besides,” Elijah added, “they know more about this place than we ever will. We should be able to do something with all that information if we put our heads together.”

  They were walking, heading down a gravel path toward the next block of rooms. Lowell saw something large just off the path ahead. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing.

  It was a man sleeping under a bristly bush, practically curled into a fetal position. He whimpered when he saw them, and when they tried to pull him to his feet, they saw that he was wearing only bloodstained jockey shorts and tennis shoes. His skin was intentionally covered with dirt and on his face carefully applied war paint had smeared, making him look like a retarded clown.

  A Roadrunner.

  The men next to him stiffened, and Lowell felt his own muscles clenching. He expected the man to yell for help at any moment, to call for reinforcements, while they were attacked from all sides by savage Roadrunners, and his first instinct was to take offensive action and make sure that cry for help never got out of his mouth. If he’d had a weapon of some sort he probably would have used it.

  But instead of alerting his companions, the man burst into tears. “I’m sorry,” he wailed. “I’m sorry.”

  Lowell’s heart softened, and he saw the man not as a Roadrunner, but as some poor schlub who’d come here for a luxury vacation at a bargain price and wound up playing sports that were supposed to be fun but instead ended in death and destruction.

  The man looked at them, tears rolling down his face, un-wiped snot dripping from his nose. “I didn’t mean to . . .” he cried. “I didn’t want to . . .” He reached out for the closest person, who happened to be Lowell, and threw his arms around him, hugging him tight and sobbing into his shoulder. Lowell heard the remorse in his cries, felt the desperate need to reconnect in his unstinting hug.

  Maybe there’s hope yet, he thought.

  Thirty-five

  The survivors pooled their food and water. Rachel made cold Cup Noodles soup for the boys, who gagged down the crunchy noodles and freeze-dried vegetables only because they were starving, while she and Lowell had a Butterfinger apiece. Their dinner might not have been the world’s most nutritious, but at least they had something in their stomachs. The maids and maintenance men and other on-site workers had had efficiency rooms with stoves and refrigerators, so there would have been more food, but The Roadrunners had cleaned out the pantries and ice-boxes when they trashed the help’s homes, stealing it for themselves.

  Rand Black’s original idea had been for all of them to move into a single block of adjoining rooms, circling the wagons as it were, but when he, Lowell and a couple of other men went up to the lobby to see if they could find keys, the building had been sealed shut—doors bolted and windows covered with wood from the inside.

  Rachel had the feeling the killers had barricaded themselves in there.

  Maybe they were even using the torture chamber.

  So the survivors had been forced to
spend the night in their existing rooms, although the remaining workers agreed to move their tents in the open spaces near inhabited rooms for security. Most of the guests had offered to let employees sleep on the floors of their rooms, but there remained suspicions on both sides—the workers not comfortable with the idea of sleeping in a Reata room, the guests not comfortable with the idea of sharing space with Reata employees—and they’d decided to stay near each other but not together.

  Rachel stood by the window and looked down, comforted by the sight of three white tents on the grassy area below. She remembered the first night when she’d seen the gardener there, carrying his rake like a weapon and then doing his psychotic little dance.

  They should have left the next morning.

  While they still could.

  Did she really think they would be trapped here forever, that they would die here? Surely someone had to be looking for at least one of the guests who hadn’t called or come home when he or she was supposed to, surely someone’s boss or friend or spouse or parent or child would get worried and call the police, who would then come out to investigate. But how long would that take? And would they still be alive when it happened?

  Or would they be dead, their ghosts trapped here for eternity, a part of The Reata?

  She shivered. Hokey as it might be, the thought was a little too close for comfort.

  Rachel looked out, above the tents. From their room, she could see an orangish glow behind the buildings farther down the hill, a gentle radiance that threw the southern portion of The Reata into reassuring silhouette, making it appear once more like a bastion of civilization in the wilderness.

  Lowell noticed it, too. “It’s coming from the amphitheater,” he said. “They must be doing something there.”

  They.

  How had it come to this? Us versus Them. Shouldn’t they all be in this together? Shouldn’t it be all of them against the resort?

  Lowell came over, stood next to her, put an arm around her shoulder. From their room, she heard the boys talking in low worried voices.