“Wow, your cursing is really coming along,” he said with mirth.
She glared at him in a way he recognized as something near pouting.
Liam didn't know how to respond, so he grabbed her hand and started them toward the hotel. No use delaying. But it turned out to be a mistake, at least at that moment. They saw the base of the building.
“Oh God, no,” she said.
Liam fell to one knee as he used the railing on the side of the bridge to steady himself.
“See? This is what I'm talking about! Why in the name of all that's holy did Hayes need to lock himself up in the one tower that has a million gazillion zombies swarming around it? Oh, Liam, how are we going to get into that mess?”
She sat down hard next to the guard rail of the bridge, so the hotel was out of her field of view. Liam sat down next to her. The smell was horrific, but he was disturbed to realize it didn't affect him as much as it did a week ago.
“I know this is hard, but we can do hard things. Together. Grandma is at the top of that tower, and I can see now this has all been pre-planned by Hayes: Grandma, the massive swarm of zombies, and now us. It all ties together. We just have to figure out how. I need you, Victoria. I really need you.”
Deep down he felt something he couldn't describe; it was both new, and familiar. Maybe it was love. Maybe it was just affection. He felt a powerful, almost subliminal, emotion toward Victoria. He would kill every zombie down there with his bare hands if he had to. He would kill anyone to protect this girl. It was partially a protective instinct, in the same vein of protecting his family, but it was so much more…
“Victoria, I—I know this sounds absolutely crazy. You're my first girlfriend, I know that. But everything we've been through. Everything I know about you. I want to always be by your side. I want to fight by your side. Die by your side if I have to. I can't explain the emotion I'm feeling. I—”
“I feel it too, Liam. It's like a wave that just came over me.”
She looked at him, and he realized they were both crying in happiness as the emotion wrapped around them. The both embraced as they sat on the pavement, enjoying the feeling of loving and longing for each other.
Liam, unsure of himself in matters like this, blurted out, “Is this what love feels like?”
She seemed to remember something unpleasant, and pulled away. “Um. Yes. I mean I guess so. I uh—” she looked down at the roadway. “Oh, Liam. All I know is that I can't walk into that swarm without you by my side. Really, truly, by my side. If that is what love is, then yes, I love you.”
Liam, prone to gaffes when he was nervous, let slip a doozie. “Well, we should get married if we survive the Apocalypse.” Knowing he was likely making a huge mistake, he ended it with his telltale laugh.
To his surprise, she simply said, “Deal.”
His smarmy mind, usually quick with a retort, was dumbfounded into silence.
2
They both recovered from the emotional outburst as the sensation receded, like a broken wave dragging itself back out to sea. But the core of the emotion still remained. He felt it was like a strong trunk of a tree had been planted in his mind. One that would forever tie him to the girl sitting next to him.
“Shall we try to find our way into the hotel? I'm kind of anxious to get this thing over with now.” He wiped away his tears and gave her a starry-eyed wink. He was relieved to see she smiled back with a big natural smile.
They followed the highway overpass for a couple hundred yards, always staying away from the edge so as not to attract attention from the zombies below them. The hotel had a large flat platform on the roof, with a “Riverside Hotel and Casino” sign hanging off the side near the top. The hotel was mostly made of glass but was accented by beige stonework at the top and bottom.
“I think we just found the Riverside Operations Center.” She referenced the paperwork they'd found back at the Elk Meadow camp. “This has to be the place.”
They heard muffled gunshots coming from inside the building.
“Sounds like a real battle is going on in there. You think it's the people from the boats?”
“Your guess is as good as mine on this. But it makes me uncomfortable with all that shooting going on while your grandma is over there.” They both looked up and saw small drones in the sky above, and a larger one looping high above. Whatever was happening inside had lots of onlookers.
A few more minutes and they were almost parallel with the hotel. The rounded building was about thirty feet north of the elevated highway. Someone parked a huge green garbage truck nearby, among a handful of smaller abandoned cars. A stout metal wire was attached to a handle on the side of the truck, then it went over the side of the bridge and through a window of the hotel on a floor just below.
“I think this is how they got over there,” he said, proud of the patently obvious use for the wire.
“Yeah, it looks really dangerous, too.”
“We have our way in, though. Dangerous or not, it has to be safer than what's below.” Liam risked a look over the side and saw the crowd of zombies. There were thousands of them, probably tens of thousands. Liam didn't know and didn't really care.
“So how do we get from here, to over there?”
“In the movies they make it look easy. You just swing something over the wire, hang on, and slide in through the window.”
“And what if you aren't in the movies? How do those people do this?”
He knew he had to answer her question sufficiently for this to work. Just a cursory search of the area proved to him there would probably be no easier way of getting in than this crazy scary over-the-zombie-crowd rope ride. His probe led him to the truck, and his answer.
“We can use pieces of this truck to make handles for sliding. Piece of cake!”
“You sure like cake.” She smiled, but warmed to his suggestion.
In short order, Liam was able to put his pocketknife to work cutting carpet and pieces of plastic to make something to throw over the wire which would allow them to slide down and into the hotel without burning their hands. He wasn't prepared to say it would be as easy as in the movies, but he felt more confident than he did walking up to the garbage truck in the first place. Victoria didn't look worried, though he thought she looked about as wary as anyone would be who was about to ride a thin wire over a deadly horde of zombies into a hotel which had the welcoming aura of a hive of hornets.
He discovered her worry was placed somewhere else entirely.
“Liam, what we said back there, I don't know if it was real or some weird side effect of the plague or the end of the world or what. But—”
“No, I get it. It did seem too good to be true. I understand—”
“Let me finish!” She stomped her foot. “I was going to say that even if what happened to us was fake, my feelings for you are real. I know we are young and all, and that we are in the fight for our lives every day now, but I truly do love you. I've seen your love this whole time we've been together. The way you treat your grandma, the way you treat your parents, and the way you treat me. I've watched you searching for answers about God, which is also very important to me. With a sniffle, she continued. I've realized that things are never going to be the same. Big weddings, the white picket fences and the apple pies—those are things of a past era. We've embarked on a new journey, in a new world, with new rules. I believe in my heart you are the person with whom I want to share this journey. My consideration was complete before we had that—whatever it was—back there. It just amplified that feeling, is all. But I want you to know my true heart was already made up. That this is real.”
Liam had never felt happier in his entire life.
“I love you, too!”
He then grabbed his makeshift handle, slung it over the wire, gave her a big smile, pushed himself over the bridge, and whooped it up as he slid over the horde and into the dark broken window of the hotel like he owned the place.
Only after he was inside
did he comprehend how dangerous it was and that he'd left his wonderful girlfriend out on the overpass without so much as a lick of instruction.
“And the winner of boyfriend of the year is...”
3
Liam ran back to the third floor window and was relieved to see Victoria toss her handle over the wire. Like him, she sat on the bridge railing, held onto the crude handle made from the truck's gutted interior, then pushed off. In moments, she was heading for him at a slow but steady pace.
He looked down.
What the—
He didn't appreciate the size of the zombie horde while they were walking on the raised highway. From his new vantage point he could see the zombies took up every bit of space around the base of the circular hotel, and they packed every street leading up to the hotel. They were unnaturally quiet for such a large crowd of zombies.
Victoria gave an exclamatory yell as she arrived. He wasn't able to tear himself away from the zombies to help her.
“You could have at least helped catch me, though I'm glad someone put that mattress there,” she said as she came up behind him. She too saw the endless sea of the dead.
“I'm glad I didn't look down.”
“Why do you think they're so quiet? Are they all looking at us?”
“They probably heard you whooping like a teenager at the amusement park,” she giggled.
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Let's keep moving.” She tried to pull him away from the window. He resisted at first, but then relented.
After he vacated the window, the distinct moans and yelling of the zombies went back up to level 11. He had an inspiration to pop back to the window to see if they fell silent again, but when he did so, they just continued moaning. Some did look up at him and appeared to reach for him, but it seemed random. He thought he was seeing “normal” zombie behavior now, though he still couldn't identify what that might be.
He followed Victoria out the hotel room door, and finally noticed the ripe stench in the confined space. It made the background nausea of the horde outside—and the Arch bird feast—seem almost pleasant.
“Wow!” His quiet exclamation mimicked the look of shock on Victoria's face.
They ran back into the room with the open window and went to work ripping up the bed sheets, trying to fashion makeshift masks they could use to fight the deathly fumes.
Victoria came out of the bathroom with a little bottle of hotel shampoo. “We can rub this on the sheets we put on our face. Maybe it will hide the smell. Even a tiny bit can make a difference.”
In a few minutes, they were back out the door with their olfactory defenses bolstered. It did help, but didn't come close to completely hiding the smell. Liam's eyes wanted to water.
All the rooms of the tower were on an outer ring on each floor. The interior of the hotel was hollow, with about fifty yards from one side to the other, giving the appearance of the inside of a smokestack. They were on a circular walkway ringing the entire floor. From the railing, they could peer down to the ground floor. Normally it would have been an enchanting garden. Many plants, shrubs, and small trees tastefully decorated the atrium. They were being trampled by hundreds of zombies milling about down there. Yet, the truly disturbing feature of the lobby was the large pile of bodies.
“May God forgive us.” Victoria's voice was muffled by her scarf, but Liam concurred. Only humans could have created the huge pile of bodies.
“Those are all elderly people—” Liam's voice cracked as he tried to voice the obvious. “Do you think?”
“No. I'm absolutely sure Grandma isn't down there.”
Liam searched his feelings. He, too, felt she was still alive, though he wasn't sure why he had such faith. Looking at the pile of people just like Grandma, he realized he felt anger more than anything else.
“Let's keep moving.” He swung Moses off his back and showed Victoria that he was clicking the safety off. She did the same.
Time to get serious.
A few steps later, they found the first zombie. The bath-robed woman had been shot in the head and lay sprawled on the otherwise cheery carpet. Looking ahead, they saw many more zombies had been killed on the walkway.
“Someone has been through here. Well-armed. But why don't we hear shooting anymore?”
The shooting had been constant as they walked up to the hotel, but somewhere along the way it stopped. Liam laughed inwardly that gunshots were so common now he thought nothing of them.
He observed the design of the hotel. Each level of suites was ringed on the inside by the large walkway with a metal railing. He put himself on the six o'clock position of the hotel. At three o'clock and nine o'clock, he could see dim EXIT signs above doors, suggesting stairwells. At the twelve o'clock position, almost directly across the void, he could see a pair of clear shafts; they were for elevators. The elevator cars were nowhere to be seen. Looking up, he guessed they were at the top. Studying the other levels, he was dismayed to see dark figures lurking on several floors.
“This doesn't make any sense. How could zombies get inside the hotel and up onto these levels? One closed door at the bottom and it would prevent them from reaching all these levels. Surely some of the stairwell doors would have been barricaded? Was the place abandoned and left totally open?”
Victoria drank in the view as she responded, “I think someone had to have let them in. I can see doors down in the lobby, and all the glass looks broken. Even if that were an accident, I can see at least one of the stairwell doors down there, and it has a bar or something propping it open. It's that one over there.”
She was pointing to three o'clock.
“We should go over there, to the other stairwell. See if we can go up.” He was pointing to the nine o'clock stairwell.
Victoria didn't argue. They quietly and deliberately moved that direction, staying as close to the inner wall as possible. Liam didn't want to chance being spotted by any of those dark shadows on other floors.
A couple minutes was all it took to reach the large metal fire door at the stairwell. It hung wide open. In the low light it was hard to tell why. He gripped his rifle tightly. His finger wasn't on the trigger, but it smashed the side of it just above the trigger guard.
When they reached the door, they found the blockage: a body.
It said “hello.”
4
“You kids shouldn't be here.”
The bald man wore a nondescript black uniform. He had a rifle, though it was lying haphazardly next to him. He had gore covering his leg below his knee. A nearby female zombie clad in rhinestone-lined jeans and a bloody tank top—with a detached head—was possibly the culprit.
The man followed Liam's gaze. “Yeah, that's the bitch that got me. They can chew faster than you can believe. She was searching for an artery so she could drain me. I was so mad I removed her head and threw it over the railing before I took my seat here to wait for the end...”
Then, to himself, he said, “I was planning to take at least one more.”
Victoria said, “We heard shooting in here. Did you shoot all these zombies?” She motioned back over her shoulder the way they'd come.
He didn't answer directly. “Is there a door open? How'd you get in? I thought we sealed all the doors on this level.”
Liam searched for an answer that didn't involve the truth, but he couldn't think of anything. He was just about to respond with his best effort when Victoria spoke up.
“Not sure about the doors. We came in through the window. Me and my boyfriend were driving on the highway until we found the bridge was out. We got out of our car and got chased. We were lucky to find a wire to this hotel and we had just enough time to slide down before we were eaten by the infected.”
“And the guns?”
Victoria was nonplussed. “Who doesn't have guns anymore?”
It was true enough, but given where they were, he felt he had to add some veracity to her story.
“Cost us twelve chickens for the
pair of them. We coulda used the chickens, but we're trying to get across to Illinois so we needed the artillery more.”
“Well, you can look around at this place. I think you'd have had a better chance out in the open. This hotel is crawling with these bloodsuckers. I'm gonna be one soon, too. Not for long, I hope.”
As if in emphasis, he coughed up a large wad of—something—and spit it on the floor next to him. Liam knew he was close to turning. He'd seen it before, notably when he saw the colonel from Elk Meadow change. McMurphy had the courage to kill himself when the time came. Would this man?
Seeing the bloody mess he'd coughed up, the man began cursing. Not at Liam or Victoria, but just in general.
Liam felt it was worth risking an innocent question. “How did you get here? Did you come across that dangerous wire, too?”
The man stared at the floor as he spoke. His words were slow and deliberate.
“I started my day in a warm bed with a warm woman if you can believe that. Phone rings and it's mission time. Jump in a truck. Drive. Jump in a boat to cross a river. Then we have a brilliant plan to get into this place...” He faded out for a half a minute before returning “...shoot a wire across the gap. Then seal the doors. Always running from infected. Ha! I wasn't fast enough as you can see.”
“Where were you going? Is there safety in this building?” Liam tried to paint a look of innocent hopefulness on his face, though the dim light may not have helped.
The man seemed to be fading fast. “Only the Army's fortresses are safe. Never leave a fortress if you're lucky enough to get in one. They're the only thing that went right in this bag of dicks called Doomsday.”
Liam had to risk a more direct question before the man left and the zombie arrived. He'd seen the transition happen many times, and was seldom the same from person to person. The bald man's head was now resting on his chest.
Since The Sirens Box Set | Books 1-7 Page 76
