Coyote (26 page)

“Don’t worry,” spoke up Beast. “We got this.”

She said nothing, but gave a brief nod. Then she began to hobble toward the closest couch, two spots away from where Bait still slept, as the others filed out of the room to do the work—work she should have done herself.

Beast, the Professor, and the Mule completed their check of the lodge without incident. A few times she was brought alert by crashing or cursing noises, but it turned out that was just them getting through a locked door, or bumping into serving trays left in the middle of a dark hallway. Not only were there no monsters lurking in the hallways, but there were no signs of people either. The summer was the slow season, but there must have been some people here on the day of the Fall. She imagined there would be skiing year ‘round on the glacier above the lodge, and she knew the restaurants were also open for day hikers, tourists and sight-seers. But neither those people, nor any of the employees that would have served those people, were here now.

What’s more, there wasn’t even any indication that the terrible things that befell most people during the Fall had happened here. There were no bodies, no bloodstains, not even broken or overturned furniture to suggest there might have been a struggle. The whole lodge was silent, empty, waiting.
Waiting for what?
she wondered. Just waiting—maybe for them, maybe for someone or something else. She didn’t know. In some ways, this was the most disturbing place she had visited since the Fall. Where were the guests, or the workers? What had happened to them? Where were the owners of the cars still scattered across the parking lot outside? How does a whole population, small though it might be, just disappear without a trace?

And more worrisome, how could she be sure that whatever had happened to all those people wasn’t about to happen to her and her companions? She couldn’t. There was nothing for it but to wait and see.

That night, for the first time in a long time for some, they all slept in real beds. During their search of the premises, Beast had kicked in the doors to the first guest bedrooms before the Mule had found a set of keys behind the front desk that gave them easier access to the rest of the rooms. It seemed the lodge liked the quaint notion of using real keys instead of electronic key cards—something that certainly made their entry easier. Passing by those first rooms with the broken doors, the group split into the next three rooms—the Professor and the Mule in one, Bait and Beast in the other, and herself and the dog in the third.

Tired as they were, there was no conversation, no desire to seek out the nicer rooms with nicer views that might be found on the upper floors. No one even wanted to investigate what the kitchens had to offer. Each pair simply drifted into their own room, closed and locked the door, and, she assumed, ate rations from their backpacks before falling asleep on the clean, comfortable beds. None of them gave much thought to what might come tomorrow or later than that. They were just tired. They just wanted to rest.

---

The next morning she woke early, even stiffer and sorer than she had been the day before. She wasn’t sure she would be able to get out of bed, and she wouldn’t have even tried it if it weren’t for her almost desperate need to use the bathroom. With much wincing and suffering, she made her shaky way to the room’s toilet and back, though the trip took perhaps four times as long as it would on a normal day. She was looking fondly back at the bed, wondering if it would hurt more to slowly inch onto it, or to let herself fall on in one fell swoop, when her eyes shifted to the dog. She assumed the dog must have a similar desire to use the facilities but, being a dog, needed somebody else to work the doorknobs for it. Sighing, she gradually moved to the door of her room, limping, almost hopping, fighting back a groan every time her wounded leg bumped to the ground. She opened the door and, as expected, the dog scooted out. But it only trotted half-way down the hall before stopping to look back. It seemed anxious—nervous. At that moment, adrenaline spiked through her veins, preparing her for whatever the dog might be sensing down the hallway, out in the lobby.

But then she saw that the dog’s ears were up, and it wasn’t growling. Slowly, it dawned on her. The dog would want to go outside, and in between it and the outdoors were at least two more doors fitted with, yes, more doorknobs. It must be frustrating to be a dog. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to be a stupid dog, living in ceaseless amazement at the world around itself. But to be a smart dog, as this one was, would be unending torture. To be smart enough to know that there were closed doors between you and what you wanted, but not smart enough to open those doors on your own—she didn’t think she would be able to take it.

She made her painful way down the hall, through the lobby, and to the front doors, letting the dog out to do its thing. It was cold outside this morning—sunny, but cold. She waited inside for the dog, which came back in a decent amount of time. She wondered if the dog had learned that wandering outside alone in this new world wasn’t safe, or if it just wanted to come back inside where it was warm.

When the dog was back in, she slowly hobbled back to her room, a much more relaxed-seeming dog now following at her heels. She saw no one else about, and assumed they were still sleeping in their rooms.

In her own room, she chose the just-fall-in method of getting back on the bed and regretted it. The bouncing after she landed made her leg send echoing waves of pain back up into her brain. Once she had recovered somewhat, rolled over, and scooted herself back up on to her pillows, she looked down at her leg. It was bleeding again, she could see. Either the walk to the door and back, or the fall onto the bed had opened the deep wound on the back of her thigh. It seemed to be seeping more than squirting though, so she didn’t think blood loss was going to be a problem. Lying back, she resolved to find herself a better bandage than the already-dirty bandanna she had wrapped around it as they hobbled up the road last night.

When next she awoke, it was much later. She wasn’t sure how she could tell—maybe the shift in the light, or just her inner clock—but she felt it was at least noon, and maybe even later than that. Still sore, she once again made her way into the bathroom. After using the toilet a second time, its tank was now empty, perhaps never to be filled again now that running water was largely a thing of the past. She wasn’t concerned, though. There were a hundred other rooms in the hotel with toilets that had at least one last flush in them.

When she had finished in the bathroom, she made her slow way out toward the lobby. In the hall, she noticed that the doors to the rooms the others had slept in were both leaning slightly open now, though she saw nobody and heard no voices. They must be elsewhere.

She hobbled out to the front lobby, but still saw no one. Frustrated, she was pondering how much it might hurt to sink into one of the wicker chairs in the lobby when she heard a burst of laughter coming from up the stairway. She followed the sound, making her slow, painful way up the stairs. At the second floor landing, she could hear the murmuring of voices as well as more laughter coming from higher up the stairs. She groaned. Were they going as far away as possible just to make her climb these stairs?

But when she reached the third floor and turned out of the stairs, into the large, central room beyond, she saw what had drawn them there. The room was a huge, high, circular chamber, starting on the second floor, below her, and going up to the high, peaked roof of the lodge at least thirty more feet above where she stood now on the third floor. The center of the third floor was open, allowing her to look down to the second floor where a massive stone fireplace took up most of the middle of the great room. Its rough, gray stones came together in an equally massive chimney, which rose up to disappear into the peak of the roof.

The walls were polished logs, with square, rough-hewn beams running across the ceiling as well as supporting the wide balcony she stood on, which ran all the way around the room. Around that balcony were a series of cutouts in front of large glass windows, and in each one a cozy nook had been set up. Each nook held a wooden table surrounded by couches or comfortable chairs with seating for six to eight people.

She saw her companions in a nook to her left and hobbled in their direction. They saw her as she entered, and called out cheerful greetings, though none came to meet her. They were busy at their table.

Suddenly she paused. Where was she going? Why was she going
toward
the others? Shaking her head, she filed that thought away for later contemplation and continued on her course. It was too late to go all the way back down those stairs now.

The others were busy with the largest array of foodstuffs she had seen since the Fall. The table in their nook, as well as much of the floor, was covered in cans, tins, bags, and pots, holding an amazing variety of foodstuffs. She saw canned fruits and vegetables, a fifty-pound bag of oatmeal, plastic bags of dried fruits and nuts, cardboard boxes of beef jerky and peperoni sticks, and uncountable bottles of wine, soda, juices, water and more. Soon her eyes glazed over, unable to fully process the great variety.

Beast stood as she arrived, throwing out his arm expansively.

“Welcome, madam,” he cried, “To the Black Iron Grill!”

“The Black Iron Grill?” she asked.

“Yup,” he replied, pointing to a sign at the other side of the room proclaiming that area to be the Black Iron Grill.

“Actually,” the Mule interjected, “I think we might be in the Ram’s Head Bar.” he pointed to a sign to his left proclaiming that no-one under the age of twenty-one could pass into the next few nooks, which were a part of the Ram’s Head Bar.

The Professor spoke up then. “Well we’ve got things from both, as well as from the Cascade Dining Room, through that arch over there.” He waved his hand vaguely in the direction she had come from.

Beast thought for a moment, then opened his arms again to proclaim “Welcome to the Black Iron Cascade Bar!”

Neither the Professor nor the Mule objected, as they both had their mouths full again. She couldn’t care less what they were calling their place. She just wanted the food.

She sat, gingerly, on one of the stuffed chairs, leaning forward to reach the table and sideways to keep her weight off of her thigh.

“Where is Bait?” she asked, reaching out to the first thing at hand, which happened to be a bag of dried banana chips, and stuffing some into her mouth.

“Still sleeping,” answered Beast. “Brought him some food and water a while ago, and he woke up for that, but dozed back off after eating just a bit.” He shrugged, indicating that he had as little idea as she did as to what that meant for his medical status.

For a time, they ate in silence. She knew there had been conversation, even laughter before she had arrived, and that her presence had dampened it, though she couldn’t for the life of her discern why. But it didn’t bother her. She liked the silence better.

Of course, even without Bait here to stir things up, it didn’t last.

“Something I’ve been wondering,” began Beast after swallowing a particularly large chunk of beef jerky. The others looked at him with curiosity.

“I told you what I thought was happening here,” he continued. All of them seemed to connect right away with what he meant—what had caused the Fall. In Beast’s opinion, they were living out the biblical end of days story. “So my questions is, what’s your opinion?”

She just looked at her food, having no intention of joining the conversation. The Mule and the Professor looked at each other, wondering who was going to speak up first. Beast chose for them.

“Now you,” he pointed at The Mule, “say you’re picking aliens as your cause, and well that’s just stupid.” the Mule frowned, but didn’t protest. “So Mr. Professor, I’d like to hear your idea. Please make it better than aliens, or Bait’s government conspiracy crap.”

The Professor thought for a moment before he began. “Well, in a lot of ways I think I agree with Bait…” he was interrupted with groans from both Beast and the Mule.

“Now hold on. I said ‘agree in a lot of ways.’ Not ‘completely agree.’

“I do think this was probably caused by man. In fact, as much as I hate to say it, I have to admit that I fear our government is the most likely cause of all this.”

“That’s just like Bait,” said the Mule.

“So far, perhaps. But I don’t think it was on purpose.”

“What?”

“Well, when I look out at the sudden onset of the Fall with everything happening at once—the monsters showing up, the electricity not just going out but somehow completely ceasing to work, even batteries—it makes me think that one, giant thing happened. But what?

“It could be the wrath of God or maybe a giant conspiracy, but the whole thing strikes me as just too random and disorganized for either of those explanations. But what’s more random or disorganized than a plain old accident?”

“That’s a big accident,” argued Beast.

“Yes, it would be,” answered the Professor. “But it still makes the most sense to me. I can even think of a couple of ways it might have happened, and they are both government funded.

“First, let’s say there’s a big government lab using, I don’t know, genetic recombination, nanobots, and who knows what other sorts of top-secret technology to create these monsters we’ve been seeing. Most of these things seem pretty ferocious. We haven’t met any peaceful plant-eating monsters yet, have we? So maybe these were all dreamed up in some defense-department lab and they were meant to be weapons, loosed on a foreign battlefield. Except something went wrong—somehow they escaped and over-ran our world.”