“He’s right,” Nick said.
“Sure, okay. He’s right, maybe. But whatever they are, I bet they’ll be easier to see when the sun’s up. Harder for them to sneak up on us. Right?”
Jamie agreed, but with an ulterior motive. “So we might as well grab a cat nap. All of us, if we can. What are we going to do now, anyway? We’re stuck here and we’re more or less safe. If the river keeps rising, and they keep on coming, then we might not find ourselves in such a choice position for long. I’m going to make the hike back up to Becca’s place and turn in.”
“What? No way,” I argued, but he put out his hands and waved me into submission.
“It’s straight uphill from here, away from the water. It’s dark, but it’s not too far and there are plenty of living, breathing, non-zombie people between here and there. It’s fine. I’ll be fine. I’d be a selfish cad if I tried to score a spot here anyway.”
He left us shortly thereafter, and I couldn’t blame him or stop him. He was in better physical shape than the rest of us, or so I wanted to think. Maybe he’d gotten more sleep, or had consumed more coffee; but he looked good enough to walk the distance to Becca’s place, which couldn’t have been more than a mile.
The rest of us agreed that there was nothing else to agree on. Christ fell asleep on the spot where he sat, and a paramedic said he’d keep an eye on him. Nick and I were too tired to ask precisely what that meant, so we didn’t.
Nick’s phone rang, and it turned out to be the producer from the studio again. He wanted to know if the news SUV had ever made it back down to the Read House, and Nick didn’t know.
“The hospital people said they’d leave it down at the shelter if they could get it here,” he said.
“Fat lot of good it would do us.”
He rubbed at his eyes and then turned off his phone altogether. “It’s got a pretty roomy interior. More roomy than any patch of carpet we’re going to find in the hotel. And I’ve got the keys. If we can find it, we can sleep in it. If you want to,” he added without any embarrassment or reproach.
I looked up at the Read House, or what I could see of it from beneath the canopy. It was a big brick thing, solid and sturdy looking, with the weight of history and expensive renovations holding it up and holding the masses safe inside. It struck me as infinitely more secure than an SUV filled with video equipment parked haphazardly outside in the rain, where there were—let’s be honest—zombies.
But at every hotel window I saw people crushed and tangled, sleeping however they could cram themselves, with lights, televisions, and radios turned on and turned up in every room.
I looked back out into the rain and still saw no sign of a river lapping its way up onto the cement walkways. And though there were crashes, sirens, and far-flung wails of engines and alarms, the darkness on the street looked quieter.
“All right.” I hardly had enough energy to squeeze the words out. “If you can find it, I can sleep in it.”
He dashed off into the rain and I waited. Twenty minutes later he reappeared to lead me back behind the hotel and up into the parking garage. Up on the second floor, pinned and squished between a Hummer and a minivan, the Channel 3 SUV was less parked than abandoned.
We wrung out our hair and our clothes.
He reached inside and threw all the expensive equipment out of the back area, into the driver’s and passenger’s seats. He unloaded the rear a piece at a time, and then, when it was as clear as it was going to get, he reclined the back seat until it lay flat and open.
I crawled into it and stretched out beside him, then curled into a ball.
And then I guess we went to sleep.
17
Picture Show at the Paper Plant
Nick was snoring beside me, which was a decidedly peculiar way to wake up.
I came to sometime after dawn, to a sky still gray and a city still heavy with rain. The parking garage had become a temporary camp like every other near-dry place downtown. People were sleeping and sitting in cars, around cars, on top of cars, and in some cases, underneath them—laid out flat like children do when they play under the bed.
Inside the news SUV, the windows were foggy and everything smelled like wet carpet. My clothes reeked. My hair had conspired with the mud and rain to give me dreadlocks that would’ve done Medusa proud.
The intrepid reporter was out cold, with one leg crooked up on the rear wheel well, and the other stretched out straight. He was using a Channel 3 windbreaker for a pillow.
I didn’t see any point in getting him up, so I didn’t. I opened
the back door as quietly as I could. He didn’t budge, or break his routine of soft snores.
I closed the door behind me and stretched.
Things were quieter outside, in the shelter of the concrete parking garage. Everyone was crowded together there, sure—but with the open air things didn’t seem quite so oppressive. One thing I wasn’t imagining, though—I needed a bathroom.
Inside the hotel there were several large restrooms, but getting into them would be a trick. The elevators were permanently jammed and at least one was serving host to a family of six. The stairs were more promising. I took them down to the valet level and then was pointed to a back way inside the old hotel, underneath the car garage.
One of the huge public restrooms was right around the corner, and it was full, of course. But I waited, because what else was there to do? Find a quiet corner and pee on the floor?
I waited, legs crossed and breath held, until a stall opened up and I could grab it.
The toilet had overflowed and there wasn’t any toilet paper, but it was better than nothing, so I used it and pretended I knew nothing at all about germs or public sanitation. When I was finished, I gave it a flush that only partly took. Then I waited for a turn at the sinks.
People were trying to change baby diapers on the floor, or on the counters; but only a few had diapers to use. Some people were sharing and some were hoarding, and a few women were starting to fight over it. I let their argument be the background din to my time at the sink; I tried not to listen too much or I’d get too mad.
I felt like hell. So did everybody else.
I washed my face and gargled some hot water. I peeled off my shirt and it itched when the wrinkled folds unstuck themselves from my skin. Every last inch of me was pruny, but the shirt was nasty, so I stood there in my bra and washed the shirt with a palm-full of pink industrial soap. Better to be clean and wet than dirty and kind of dry.
If it hadn’t been so crowded, I probably would’ve pulled off my jeans and washed them as well; but there’s a world of difference between hand-washing a T-shirt in a sink and doing half a load of laundry there.
I was hungry, in an idle way. I was thirstier than I was hungry, though. And my head was pounding and my muscles were sore in all kinds of strange places. I felt like I’d slept on a duffle bag full of garden gnomes.
But at least I’d slept.
Out in the hall there was a clock behind the concierge desk that said it was about 8:30 A.M. I’d accrued maybe four or five hours of sleep altogether on top of the one or two I’d stolen in the Choo-Choo with Harry and Malachi.
I reached for my phone, but it was dead. Either the water or the steady battery drain of nervous relatives could have done it, and I was fortunate that it’d held up as long as it had.
I was almost relieved for the honest excuse not to answer it. It was easier to assume that all was well without me—that Harry and Malachi had been transported beyond the ridges, and that Dave and Lu had finally passed out and turned off the television.
In the hotel lobby, surrounded by dozens of interested faces, there were two televisions displaying the local and national news, respectively.
Chattanooga was the word of the day. I watched Channel 3 first. No surprise for the local news to be self-referential, and the station was on the top of a hill on the north side of town. No surprise they were still up and running full coverage, even though the anchors were looking haggard and in need of more heavy-duty hair products.
I came in at the middle of Terry Sexton’s warbly-voiced diatribe. “. . . thousands of people displaced, hundreds injured, dozens missing.”
“Dozens?” I said out loud, and I heard the word bouncing around in the crowd. Everybody knew the toll was higher than that. It had to be.
“Police are having trouble keeping the peace, and looting, rioting, and gang activity is increasing as the hours pass and people are kept away from their homes. Also, we have received some strange reports coming out of the downtown area, down by Ross’s Landing and the aquarium. Shots have been fired and barricades are being established; police are not issuing a statement at this time, but there is compelling video footage available and we’ve been running some of it since last night. Here’s a clip now, taken yesterday evening down at the aquarium fountains.”
The clip that played was grainy, dark, and shaky—it might’ve come from a camera phone or a digital camera with a film-clip mode. I weaseled my way through the crowd to watch it closer. I had to see. I had to know.
There was a man, like Nick had said. He was tall and black and burned-looking, visible only in partial profile and shadow, illuminated imperfectly by the flashing rotation of a police car’s blue and white lights.
He could have been a refugee, like the rest of us. But I knew better. I could tell from the tittering sobs that leaked from the crowd that others in the crowd did as well.
At the corner of the screen I saw a smaller figure too, about half the size of the man in shadow. Nick said there was a girl, too. This could’ve been a girl. I couldn’t tell. She moved fast, though. They both did. They moved in a jerky way—in a stilted series of lunges—like it had been years since they’d needed to move a body.
You could see it at a glance. They were dead.
And when the tall man’s shape turned forty-five degrees so that his face was almost outlined, there in the light of an aquarium lamp, I knew that they were not ghosts. Not spirits. Not haunts.
My spine crawled with a prickling dread, and the absolute silence of the room around me assured me that I wasn’t alone.
