The Holocaust Engine, page 26
Lindsey stared at the well-dressed lunatic. “What?”
“We have standards, young lady.”
“You have... what?”
The last part of the run took place in a Cuban restaurant attached to the museum. The Indian man and the bellhop took possession of a full crate of Caribbean spices from two women and an old man.
The Rats covered, and snarled to each other about the loss of the gun.
When they got to the van, Shawn lifted the blanket, held with ropes, which covered the side panels. “It’s cookies,” he said in wonder. “It’s a cookie truck.”
“It’s a hotel transport van with the back two rows removed,” said the prim little business man. “Now filled with five bottles of liquor, four boxes of confectionary chocolates, napkins, replacement dishes, and, thanks to your help, a crate of spices that should keep my cook happy for at least the rest of the month.”
Lindsey MC fixed him with the look of disbelief she’d carried since the moment she was told the run had nothing to do with drugs. “Why?” she said in a voice that was both question and accusation.
“Because, my dear. I have a hotel to run. Now,” he said, mopping his brow from the afternoon heat. “How do we get back to the Grand Key?”
“Dude,” said Shawn. “If your lips were purple this would make a lot more sense.”
“Shawn? Billy?” asked Hunter.
“Yeah,” said Billy. “The Grand Key still has people in it—bunch of kids with guns running the show inside.”
“Not exactly,” said Patel, “but you certainly have your ear to the ground.”
“Boss?” The bellhop looked frightened.
“I think our problem might be solved, William,” said the hotel manager.
“All right,” said Hunter, his voice weary. “As to moving the van across the island, the nail gun is out of play. Ideas?”
Lacewood and Face looked at each other, and Face turned a full circle. “Too many eyes on us.”
“I don’t know what’s happening in the shipwreck hall,” said Shawn, “but the Weston is bad. Whatever we do, we better get on it.”
“I can only think of one way that’s not going to get us jacked,” Face said, looking at Lacewood.
Lacewood shook his head. “This sucks.”
Billy and Shawn explained to the hotel manager that the best way to not get attacked was to look like you had nothing worth fighting for.
So the Wharf Rats took the painted blankets off of the vehicle, put the van in neutral, and pushed it from the far northeast side of the island, all the way down Southard Street, which was not closed off, then down White Street, which was. The boys took turns pushing it, while one of them ran alongside with the shotgun. They found out that everyone except the Indian man called the bellhop Will, that he spoke little, and that he did not have the stamina for much pushing.
The Rats pushed, thoroughly discouraged. It did suck, and for the last several days of nomadic wandering, it seemed that everything Wharf Rat had sucked—waking up each day after having slept on hard ground, never knowing what the day would bring, helping people who were ungrateful, or worse. They all felt a growing despair.
When they neared White Street, the Indian man walked to the back where Hunter and Thyroid were currently lurching the van forward, while Billy and Shawn were pushing from the sides and Lacewood walked offset, covering with the shotgun. The man placed one hand on the back of the van beside the boys.
“At this rate, we won’t be back before nightfall,” he said, not really pushing, and using his free hand to remove a handkerchief from a shirt pocket and pat at his neck. “My name is Sri Patel, by the way. I’m the hotel manager.”
Hunter nodded. “A pleasure. Don’t worry about the time. The south side should be okay. Once we clear Flagler, we can jump in the van and hightail it.”
“Your lady friends told me we are about to barter our way through a barricade.”
“They owe us,” said Hunter, straining to speak.
“And letting my van pass will compensate for this debt? You will want to add this to our tab, I assume.”
“That’d be nice.”
“May I ask what you are desiring for payment?”
“Our normal fee is one day of food supplies for the group, but I’d say we’ve gone over and above on this run. Wouldn’t you?”
“I have a counter offer,” said Patel, not fazed by the harsh tone of Hunter’s question—and still not pushing. “Not three days, or even four.... How about food every day for the duration of our confinement?”
At this Thyroid nearly slipped.
“And room, and board. I don’t mean a roof and walls. I mean electricity. I mean maid service. I mean air conditioning.”
“Sounds great,” Hunter barked out, fighting not to laugh. He didn’t buy the pitch.
“When I came here,” Sri Patel said, “there were seventy five hotels in operation on this island. The Double was not the only economy lodging on the island, not even the only place owned by the Best Western Corporation, but now it’s the only one left. The others are all abandoned.”
“Not exactly.”
“By the management, I meant. I know their conditions.”
“Bet you don’t.”
Patel looked a question, and Hunter explained, “Take the one back there, for instance. Used to be The Weston. Now it’s a bunch of nuts that paint their faces and go out every night hunting like they’re on a damn safari.”
“Good Lord.” Patel shook his head. “I’ve had to walk a fine line for the last nine weeks. Every day has been a challenge. When the power went out, I had to turn the hotel into an overflow site for the hospital to get a spot near the top of the failing electrical grid. In the absence of food trucks, I made deals with three different grocers, and over twenty different restaurants, to utilize the last of their stores.”
“So what happened?” Thyroid asked bitterly.
“What do you mean?”
“The van,” said Hunter, his tone harsh. “Nobody rolls light anymore, the hospital guys least of all. Those guys are armed to the teeth. Nobody messes with them. You’d have to have been living in a cave to think this would have worked.”
“Hunter—”
“No,” said Patel, holding up a hand to stop Thyroid. “Your friend is right. We were using the hospital personnel to get what we needed. All of my remaining people stayed on our property. But now the hospital teams are both out of commission.”
Both boys looked at Patel, wide-eyed.
“One of their crews was attacked—viciously—last week,” he said, now looking at one boy, then turning back to the other. “They’ve suspended all collection operations until they can track the hostiles. I have one of their survivors recovering right now in our patient wing.”
“Holy shit,” Thyroid said.
Patel sighed. “That’s why I had to go out myself. I can’t rely on their collection teams for the moment. Of course, you both have understood the situation correctly. I don’t know what all has been happening outside of my hotel.” Then his eyes lit up. “That’s why I need a collection crew of my own. I can’t keep up. Just providing for our current registry is more than I can manage.” At this, he took both hands off of the van and began to gesture passionately. “We hear stories, rumors. I know things are changing quickly. It’s like a different country, full of different customs every week, so I have to have my own team—full-time, room and board and any amenities that we can still provide.”
“I wish,” said Hunter, shaking his head. “Mr. Patel, you have no idea how much I wish, but we’ve been on the move ever since we freed the prisoners from the Annex.”
“Hunter,” Thyroid said. “You got to be careful throwing that around.”
Shawn scoffed from the side of where he was pushing. “What’s the point anymore?”
Sri Patel stopped in his tracks, and watched as the van moved away from him.
Hunter turned his sweaty brow to his friend. “Might as well tell him. Somebody would tell him eventually, after they found out we helped him. Too bad. Vera would kill for a shower right about now.”
Mr. Patel appeared between them again, his hands in his pockets while he walked. “You’ll pardon my doubts, but you are telling me that your group bombed the Truman Annex?”
“Bombs make you nervous?” Thyroid asked. “Then you might want to ask the guy with the blue backpack to get out of your van. He’s got four pipe bombs in it.”
“Pipe,” Patel said to himself. “My God, you’re only children.”
“Yeah, well, we kind of had to cancel the whole adolescence thing.”
“I heard those explosions. We heard rumors about what happened. Who would have ever thought,” Patel said to himself.
“So you can see why we can’t settle down.”
“No,” he said with the light of a dawning realization on his face. “No, I can’t.” His excitement started to build. “You’re more... let’s just say resourceful than I had thought, but that makes sense in the current environment. You’re still exactly what I’m looking for. You can move around the island, gGet things done, and you have... you have a sense of honor and won’t take advantage of a favorable position. One day’s food. Daily bread. No, no, no. We have to make this work, and there’s no reason why it can’t. You don’t come in with the van. You sneak in at night. I’ll be waiting. You all look distinctive—most of you. We give you a shave, a little hair gel, a change of clothes. The boy with the facial scars needs to grow out his beard. All of you need to keep those bandanas in your pockets. We can do this. We have to do this!”
Hunter looked past Sri Patel to Thyroid as they approached the White Street barricade. “What do you think?”
“Well....” Thyroid shrugged as he pushed. “At least it’s not a boat.”
Their laughter started as a chuckle, then built like a log fire until they had to stop pushing. Thyroid seemed to laugh because Hunter was laughing, a sound none of them had heard before.
Vera and Lindsey MC appeared in the Van’s rear window.
Lacewood walked up close, shotgun in hand, concern on his face.
That night, when they crawled over the car-wall that surrounded the grounds and walked through the doors under the awning, which had a huge red cross painted above them, they were met at the reception desk by an attractive brunette.
“Mr. Grant,” she said. “Welcome to the DoubleTree Resort at Key West.”
Shawn smiled at Billy. “A fucking hotel. Man, we have to. It would be so epic.”
Vera fixed them with a sideways look. “You two morons better not even think about tearing out the walls.”
For the next three days, the Wharf Rats found ways to make themselves useful, and Sri Patel could not have been happier with the new arrangement. In three days of runs, they’d traded for much of Sri’s “needs,” and the twins, hitting the streets at night, had scavenged for nearly all the rest. The hotel manager’s list of needed items was now down to a single page, with several already crossed through: Face had fixed the pump to the swimming pool, Lindsey MC helped with the nurses, Vera and her dogs played with the children who were at her table every morning at the hotel’s little breakfast asking when Cleo would come down.
Thyroid loved to cook and helped in the kitchen, which is where he was on the third day when the men dressed in police uniforms came to dinner. They had been there the first night while the Rats were still settling in, and were absent the next. Tonight they were back, and when Vera came and told Thyroid what they were doing, he dropped the large metal fork he’d been using to stir the reconstituted potatoes, told her to get Lindsey MC, and ran to Sri’s office.
“They’re back again,” he said, his anxiety running the words together.
“Who? Oh....” Patel sighed. “Let’s do our best to be gracious, and hope they leave soon.”
“They’re sitting next to that reporter, giving her a hard time. The way they’re acting—”
“I’ll apologize to Ms. Sanchez myself when they are gone.”
Thyroid shook his head in disbelief. How could anyone so good at giving people what they wanted miss something so obvious?
“You, you don’t understand. Hunter is going out there. They’re all going out there.”
His thick eyebrows tensed as Sri started to rise. “I don’t want any trouble with these men. I brought your group here to assist with deliveries, not to start a row with a group of heavily armed officers on my back patio. I would have thought that was clear.”
Thyroid shook his head. “He’s not like other men, Mr. Patel.”
“Who?”
“Hunter. He’s not. He’s got this line. He thinks different than you. You want to treat everyone special and just get along, and that’s fine as long as no one crosses his line.” His laugh was pained. “But they’ve crossed it. It’s over. There’s nothing anyone can say to stop what’s about to happen.”
Patel managed to finally get to his feet. He looked past Thyroid in the general direction of the patio full of guests. “What are you saying?”
“I’m sorry. I really am.”
“Christopher, what do you intend?”
“Mr. Patel, if you could just go out there. If you could just maybe distract them for a few minutes until we bring out their food... but then you need to leave us. It’ll be over quick. I think I can make it end real quick, but that’s the best I can do. It’s going to end one way or the other. This way it ends fast.”
Chris Thyroid Meyers had never killed anyone who was not infected before, let alone seven police officers. He grew up soft, the son of a corporate attorney who believed that masculinity was a sort of condition that had to be treated so that the patient could recover into something fully human. His mother divorced Chris’s father and dominated his now stepfather, Jeffrey. She told her son that she wanted him to explore his identity, but every time his exploration uncovered something male-like, she was never pleased.
His mother let him play console games, but she didn’t like it. It could be tolerated because it was not real. The only real thing he ever found enjoyment in that pleased his mother was cooking. He could watch the Food Network and make meals with his mother close by, and feel a tiny measure of purpose and creative satisfaction. It was something.
He wanted to play sports. By the sixth grade, he was 5’8’’ and stronger than any boy in his class—too strong. His mother would not let him play football and baseball, saying that they were dangerous, but soccer and basketball were acceptable. He would have liked to play basketball in middle school, but his body was all wrong; he stopped getting taller, and by then all of his growth seemed to be horizontal, especially in his hips and thighs, which became comically wide, like his puffy lips and generally swollen facial features.
His classmates made fun of him, and if he ever stood up to the jeers, his mother’s wrath was extraordinary. He didn’t even have to fight; he could simply raise his voice—or even just scowl—and if she saw or found out, she would yell things meant to shame him, and concoct humiliating punishments. He had used force, and intimidated them, and he needed to know how that felt. He had to put himself in their shoes. He had to feel what they were feeling. He had to see the world through their eyes.
At first he just cried, but then, one day, he did it. Almost.
Chris, his mom, and Jeffrey were driving back down from Sandspur Beach on Highway 1, with its beautiful views and its two crowded lanes, and he was sitting in back of their Infiniti staring at the Prius just a few feet off of their back bumper. He thought about what it would be like to be inside that driver’s body, to be looking forward at lumpy Chris Meyers, who could not do anything right, who would never amount to anything. What did failure look like? And for a split second, it happened. Chris felt dizzy. He saw his mother’s car from the outside. His vision drifted to the Prius and he saw—he was sure—through eyes that gazed out of a front windshield, beyond a steering wheel, with a man’s hands at the ten-and-two.
It ended as soon as the shock of surprise hit him. He tried it again and again, but could never make it happen. He had not imagined it. He was sure of that. Yet even though he could not place his consciousness inside another host, the mere consideration of the thing gave him a remarkably different perspective.
He began to truly believe that he could feel what they felt. He began to understand the people around him. He realized that his mother had been hurt and had come to think of manhood as a universal evil because it was men who had hurt her. He understood that Jeffrey let his wife control him because doing so made her happy, and so he got to taste what it was like to please a strong woman by simply by giving in to his own passivity, something that came naturally to him. Chris understood his classmates too, and he tried to share what he learned with a few of them, but none would listen. He was too strange. He had no friends. Why should any of them care what he thought? Even the other rejects rejected Chris Meyers. He had nothing they needed.
Until the day that Hunter Grant came to his house.
His mother had refused to leave when the news spoke of a new and frightening disease. “You never give in to fear,” she had said. She was working from home, on a conference call, when the bridge blew. After that, in less than a week, she went from a woman who asserted her will over everything in her path, to a wife who gave her husband a lethal overdose of Percocet, and believed she had killed her son the same way, before she crawled into her own bed for the last time.
Chris almost died with them. For five days the city had turned into a cage full of wild animals. At the grocery store, his mother had yelled and screamed and demanded, and in the end she only made it back to the house with a few cans, a packet of chicken breasts, and a deep purple bruise on her left cheek. They sheltered in place as well as they could, while she called every phone number belonging to people that she expected to help. The last day, after the phones had gone dead, she never came out of the bathroom. Screaming had kept the first of the looters away, but one fired a bullet through the front door, and another shattered the dining room window with a chunk of cement.
