The Resort (34 page)

There were women in the game this time, and while Lowell had always considered himself modern and open-minded, he didn't think women
should
be here. Play or no play, fun or no fun, this was a man's sport, and if bitches wanted to get involved, well then they should start their own tournament. Luckily, Rachel had no interest in participating. In fact, she looked very feminine this afternoon, sitting in the bleachers wearing a tight top and a short skirt that showed her off to best advantage. She may have had three kids, but she still looked damn good.

Lowell stopped himself.
Bitches?
What was he thinking? This train of thought was not even remotely connected to his own beliefs and opinions.

Only these
were
his own beliefs and opinions. They may not have been before, but he certainly believed them now.

How was this possible? How could he suddenly start thinking things that he never would have considered before? The only conclusion he could come to was that his mind was not his own—and that was the scariest notion he could ever conceive. Physical restraint or intimidation was one thing, even that strange emotional damper that had been placed on him since arriving at The Reata he could deal with, but to have his thoughts altered, to be corrupted from within so that his core convictions were no longer his own . . .

What was the next step? he wondered. Not
caring
that he was harboring idiotic opinions? Not
knowing
?

Maybe he would become a totally new person living in the outer shell of his old body.

The idea made him want to kill himself to keep it from occurring.

That
was a completely alien thought.

The stands were full, and Lowell recognized a lot of people from the sunrise service. People who had walked out offended, people he would have thought would check out and leave immediately afterward, were in the bleachers waiting enthusiastically for the first basketball game to start.

The two teams—the Wrens and Coyotes—had been warming up at opposite ends of the court, but at the sound of the buzzer, they broke for their respective benches. “We can do it,” Rand Black said as the team gathered around him, and the funny thing was, Lowell thought they really could. Black had said the same thing before the volleyball tournament and was obviously saying it now to boost their spirits and give them confidence, but Lowell had been eyeballing the other team and the truth was that the Coyotes didn't seem to have any really strong shooters, and the Wrens easily had them on height. Most importantly, the Coyotes team was half chicks this time out, many of their other players having quit or checked out this morning. The Cactus Wrens were all men.

If they played their cards right, this could be a blowout.

As the center, Lowell was called upon for the tip-off, and he found himself facing an old lady who glared at him with beady eyes. “Fuck you, Mr. Fuck,” she said softly, the words all running together. “I call you Mr. Fuck, you fucker. Fuck you. Mr. Fuck.”

Rockne, holding the basketball and acting as referee, grinned.

The whistle was blown, the ball was thrown, and Lowell jumped as high as he could, feeling a strange and unwelcome sense of satisfaction as he hit the ball to Black and bumped the old lady to the ground. The cries of the crowd that accompanied his action were not of outrage but approval.

That seemed to set the tone for the game.

There were elbowings and kneeings, trips and punches, but Rockne, the lone ref, did not call any fouls. Lowell himself the high scorer for the first quarter, got involved, delivering a hard elbow to the tit of that old bat who'd jumped against him, and she went down in a hail of obscenities to the delight of the roaring crowd. In the front row, he spotted an elderly couple who had left the sunrise service shocked and horrified by the so-called minister's shenanigans screaming at the top of their lungs, cheering him on. “Kick her!” the old lady yelled. “Kick her in the twat!”

Something snapped within him, like a rubber band stretching and then whipping back to its original shape. Seeing that old couple screaming crazily brought him back to reality like a slap to the head.

He was himself again.

That didn't mean he went soft on the court, however. His game was on today, and though he hadn't played basketball in quite some time, he was a lot more coordinated and in a hell of a lot better shape than most of his opponents. Not to mention taller. He and Black, the two best athletes on the team, developed a kind of rhythm, and by halftime they were up by twenty points. By the end of the game, they'd beat the Coyotes by forty-eight, and it was Lowell's idea to retire as champions.

“We're not playing,” Rand Black declared when the referee announced the beginning of the second game. All of the Cactus Wrens stared defiantly at the activities coordinator.

“You . . . have to.” For the first time, the man appeared flustered; he'd obviously never encountered a refusal to play before.

“We don't have to do anything!” Garrett Reynolds piped up. The gangly man had scored ten points in the last quarter and his confidence was high.

“The Roadrunners would have an unfair advantage,” Black said calmly, logically, offering a rationale Lowell wished he'd come up with. “We've just been running around, playing our asses off for the past forty minutes. They're all rested and ready to go.”

The activities coordinator—Rockne—did not have a comeback.

The crowd was starting to disperse, rows of spectators carefully making their way down the aisles at both sides of the bleachers, and more than anything else it was the defection of the audience that seemed to signal the true end of the tournament.

“We want to play!” Blodgett bellowed from midcourt.

It was the perfect opportunity, and Lowell couldn't resist. “Play with yourselves!” he shouted. “You're good at that!” There was laughter from the departing spectators, a response that seemed to diminish the activities coordinator and enrage Blodgett.

“Right now!” Blodgett yelled. “Right now!”

Calmly, dismissively, Lowell turned away. He saw supportive grins on the faces of his fellow Wrens.

“The Cactus Wrens forfeit!” Rockne announced. “The Roadrunners are our basketball tournament champions!” But no one was listening, no one cared, and his voice barely carried above the varied conversations of the dwindling crowd.

Lowell found Rachel waiting for him by the home team basket. “Take off that ridiculous uniform,” she told him, “and let's get the hell out of here.”

The kids were still out when they returned to the suite, and though the boys might return at any second, Rachel wanted sex. Once more, she was aggressive in a way that Lowell found disturbing and more than a little off-putting.

“My pussy's dirty,” Rachel told him, and she flipped up her skirt. She wasn't wearing any underwear. She spread her legs wide. “Lick it,” she ordered. “Lick it clean.”

Dutifully, he lowered his face between her legs and began swirling his tongue in the circular motion he knew she liked. Her hands held his head down hard, and she ground her crotch painfully into his face until she achieved satisfaction. Afterward, she sucked him with a fierceness he had never experienced before, and though it was arousing on a purely physical level, inwardly he recoiled. Grunting like an animal, she sucked harder, faster, more furiously, and then he came, exploding in her mouth, and she greedily gulped it down, holding him between her lips until he was completely spent. She squeezed out the last few drops then let him go, licking her lips like a cat and smiling, a look of complete satisfaction on her face.

Who is this?
he thought. It sure wasn't the Rachel he knew.

Then he was pulling up his pants as she walked over to the dresser, took out some underwear and put it on, and suddenly she
was
the Rachel he knew. She seemed embarrassed by what had just happened, though neither of them mentioned it, and he thought of his own suddenly reactionary reactions at the beginning of the basketball game. They were being played by whatever force or power lurked in this resort, and the feeling was extremely unnerving. He felt as though they were stepping across a minefield, never sure when their next movement was going to blow off a leg or kill them dead.

He had still not heard back from AAA, and he called back to complain. They should be leaving here by now, halfway on the road to Tucson. The representative on the phone looked up his name and number, then explained that a series of accidents in Tucson had taken up the resources of the towing service that was supposed to pick up his car. As his situation was a low priority, and The Reata was so far out of the way, it would probably be tomorrow morning before a truck arrived to tow their vehicle.

They were trapped here for another night.

The boys returned shortly after. They didn't say where they had been, and neither he nor Rachel asked, but their manner suggested they had seen something they did not want to talk about, something that had made a profound impression upon them.

They all spent the rest of the afternoon together, playing cards on the patio of their suite. They should be talking, Lowell thought, opening up with each other, communicating, but he didn't know how to get them to do it and, besides, the impulse was more of a general notion than a conviction.

They ate dinner early, room service again, and stayed inside after dark, the boys in their room, he and Rachel in theirs, each of them watching their respective televisions. It felt to him like they were hunkering down in their bunker, hiding from whatever was going on outside their door and hoping it would not touch them until the sun rose again in the morning.

He supposed to some extent that was exactly what they were doing.

By ten o'clock, Rachel was already asleep next to him, and out of curiosity, he used the remote control to turn down the sound on the TV and flip to the resort's information channel. He didn't know what to expect, but what he saw was an infomercial for The Reata that was far more honest and realistic than anything on their Web page or in their brochures. There was a shot of today's basketball game, with one of the Coyotes gleefully headbutting a Cactus Wren, and a scene of a bottomless woman in a Reata T-shirt singing karaoke at the Grille. He turned the sound up slightly: “Here at The Reata you can play all day and party all night in our luxurious surroundings amid the natural beauty of the Sonoran Desert.” The picture shifted to what appeared to be a vulture pecking the eyes out of a dead human baby lying motionless in the sand.

Lowell turned off the television. They needed to leave. They needed to get out of here.

Tomorrow, he promised himself.

Come hell or high water, tomorrow they were getting away from The Reata and never looking back.

Lowell awoke early. He sneaked carefully out of bed so as not to disturb Rachel, grabbed the cell phone and took it into the bathroom to call AAA. A beep and a message told him that the phone was out of range, but he didn't see how that was possible since he'd just used it yesterday. Another try in the bedroom and another outside yielded exactly the same results. Rachel was still sleeping—snoring, in fact—so he was quiet as he lifted the handset of the room phone to call out.

The phone was dead.

Lowell hung up, tried again, jiggled the little catch in the cradle, but there was no dial tone, no noise, nothing.

He had a bad feeling about this, and he quickly dressed and put on his shoes.

“Wha—?” Rachel said groggily.

“Nothing,” he told her. “Go back to sleep. I just need to check on something.”

There was no newspaper on the welcome mat outside their room, and while the world was usually quiet this early in the morning, today it seemed
too
quiet. He wasn't sure what that signified, but he didn't like it, it worried him, and he hurried down the steps and up the sidewalk toward the lobby. Something was wrong. He could feel it. No, more than feel it, he could see it, although it took him a few moments to realize what it was exactly he was seeing.

Empty parking lots.

He stopped walking. He'd reached the first group of rooms above their own, and the parking lot in front of the building was empty. Either everyone had checked out and gone home or everyone's car had been stolen. He continued on, sprinting up the cement to the next building and the next until he reached the lobby and the main parking lot.

Jesus Christ.
All of the cars were gone. Overnight, each of the lots had been emptied. Even the little carts that the staff rode around in were nowhere to be seen.

He walked across the bare asphalt to the guardhouse to find out what the hell was going on, but the little shack was abandoned, its doors locked, the gates blocking the road closed.

Now he really was worried. He ran back across the parking lot to the main building, opening the door himself since no attendants were there to do it for him. The lobby was empty. Not only that, but it appeared to have been empty for some time. He felt like Rip Van Winkle, as though he'd fallen asleep and a great amount of time had passed. There was dust on the front counter, and the ornate mirror behind it was cloudy, the carpeting on the floor worn and thread-bare. Looking through the windows at the patio outside and the pool below was like looking at a ghost town: chairs and tables were overturned, the cabana bar boarded up, the pool filled with visible debris. Only the well-landscaped grounds gave any indication that this was not the way it had always been, that yesterday this had been a thriving luxury resort with an extensive staff.

Since there was no one around, he placed his hands on the dusty countertop of the front desk and hopped over. The computers were gone, all shelves and drawers empty, but the phones were still in place and connected. He picked up one. Then another. And another. Until he'd tried all five.