Chapter 19: Room Without A View

“Just a sec,” I wedged my sword between the doors, twisted it. Probably not good for the sword, but the elevator doors cracked open a bit. Shone my light in there. I whispered, “No legs. No stench. Promising.” We pulled the doors open further. It seemed empty. “I’ll go first.”

Staying on the ladder, Marci held one of the doors open for me. I pulled myself up, shone the flashlight in both directions. It was an empty hallway. Instead of paint, it had yellow-ish wallpaper, fading, some parts falling off the wall. No marble flooring, either, this place was all laminated.

A bronze sign opposite the elevator read, ‘Service Area. Staff/Personnel Only.’ Under it, another sign pointed left, ‘Employee Lounge,’ and another, right, ‘Office.’

“It’s empty so far. Come on.” Holding the doors open, I gave her a hand. She was much lighter than I imagined and soon, Marci was standing with me.

“We should wedge the doors open. In case the rest of the team enters the shaft, so they know where we are.”

“Ok, but with what? Damn, our backpacks and gear are still in the bar.”

“Uh,” she looked around, then headed toward the wall. “This fire extinguisher. I’ll take the axe.”

“Careful, if you break it, the monsters might hear.”

“It’s got one of those little ring handles.” Marci opened the door, handing me the fire extinguisher, taking the red axe for herself.

“Hey, pass me the hose, too. I’ll stick it in the shaft, make it more obvious where we went. In case they think the same way we or come looking for us.”

Soon, we’d wedged the doors open with the extinguisher, and the firehose was extended entirely down the shaft. If our group entered it and walked up, they’d know someone did this.

“Oh shit.” It hit me and I froze for a second.

“What’s that,” she asked.

“My healing potions were in my backpack.”

“Oh. Damn.” Holding it in both hands, Marci gripped the red axe more tightly. “Mine too.”

“And the first aid kits. We really can’t afford to get injured.”

“Yeah. And the food and water.” Looking down each side of the hallway, she asked, “Ok, which way?”

“I don’t know.”

She pulled the axe up a bit for emphasis, “You’re the leader. Lead.”

“Right. To the office. Maybe, I don’t know, maybe we’ll find something out in there. Like why there’s a hotel hidden in an underground chamber.”

“Office sounds good. I’ve had just about enough of lobbies and lounges.” After resting the axe on her right shoulder, Marci pulled out her flashlight with her left hand. Her sword remained at her hip, so I guess she felt more comfortable with the axe. The axe would be better at breaking doors down, too.

I carried my sword free, but in my right hand, too, gun hanging off my shoulder by its strap. A short walk down the hall, we made it without incident. The hallway took a right angle here, continuing down to what was probably a service stairwell. Shaking the door handle, I said, “Locked.”

“Back up.”

I did, then Marci brought the back of her axe down on the handle hard, metal on metal ringing out. I raised my light, scanning both ways down the hallway, seeing if she was drawing anything to us, but nothing came. She hit again and again and on the fourth hit, it broke.

“For a sorceress, you’re pretty strong.”

“Points into strength.”

“Really?”

Marci furrowed her eyebrows, “Not a chance.” Then, raising the axe, she made a mean face, “I’m all about charisma, baby.”

Nodding, I said, “That works, that works.”

It was a standard office set up. Cheap counter than ran across the room, not quite wall to wall, to set the office apart, and to greet people. Behind it, several work stations that were basically desks, computers, and many, many filing cabinets.

Marci shone her light back and forth, illuminating one desk, then another. “What do you think we’ll find here?”

“Keys. We need a master key, whatever the cleaning ladies used. And if there’s any info written down, anywhere.”

Marci walked behind the desk. “The keys are right here.” They jangled metallic sounds as she picked them off their hook.

“Nice!”

“Do you hear that?” She cupped one of her pointed ears with her hand. “I think someone’s knocking. Probably the stairway doors are locked on this level, to keep their paying guests out.”

Listening closely, I heard a banging sound off in the distance. “I hope it’s the group.”

“Let’s go . . . check it out.”

We followed the sound down the eerie and dark hallway we hadn’t explored, our flashlights leading the way. Thankfully, it remained empty. The pounding on the door was again rhythmic, not rushed. At the end of the hallway, a door marked with a green sign above, ‘EXIT,’ the pounding stopped. The door was metal and locked.

“It is a service stairwell.” I knocked three quick beats, “Hello?”

A pause, nothing happened. Then, thump, thump, thump.

“Fred? Ave?”

The thumping continued.

Marci touched my arm, “I don’t think it’s them.”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s get out of here. We don’t want to be cornered here.”

“Back to the office. We didn’t finish searching.”

“For what?”

“Anything. Maybe someone wrote a note about what’s going on.”

“Maybe.”

***

We searched and searched. In a log-book, there were notes about which rooms requested dry cleaning, some about employee mistakes, times they came late, even some with praise for various employees. Post-it notes up and down the keyboards reminding the office workers of their tasks for the day, but nothing relevant to us.

“River! A map! Check this out.”

“Of the whole building? That’s great.”

She spread it out on the countertop, knocking off pens, pencils and erasers. “Yes.”

It was a pretty standard hotel. Central elevators controlling the flow of the guests, hallways leading away from them in a rectangle, room after room along them. Main stairway by the central elevators, one service elevator at one corner of the building – couldn’t tell which direction – and service stairs near it and the opposite side. Kind of like an H, at least in terms of the hallways.

Except for the top floor. No hallways leading away from the elevator, it simply opened to a large space. “What’s do you think this room is?”

“I’m guessing it’s a private residence for the hotel owner. Or a wealthy guest. That’s a bit strange, given the size of this hotel.”

“Strange?”

“Yeah, owners don’t usually reside in large hotels like this one. Smaller ones, where they run it as a family, sure.”

“Maybe this planet had different customs. Or it’s a luxury suite or something.”

“Could be. I wonder if there’ll be a private lap pool or something.”

“Yeah, exercise room, sauna, full service bar, wealthy person stuff. Wait.” I paused, listening. “The pounding has stopped. The zombies must have gone away.”

“Good.”

“What if they’re looking for another way in?”

“You think they’re hunting us?”

“We don’t know that they aren’t. They look dead, but as you pointed out, that’s not possible. Maybe they can think.”

“Or, more likely, being directed. Either by the nanotech or, I don’t know, an intelligence of some kind.”

I turned to face her, pointing the flashlight down. Shadows danced across Marci’s face, highlighting her pointed elven features. “What do you mean by that?”

“Magic. I’m wondering if these are some magical creation. At least, we’re supposed to act as if they’re a magical creation instead of what we know is going on.”

“Marci, this technology is frighteningly powerful. I’m not sure we can find a solution, stop what’s happening, if nanobots can animate corpses.”

“For that matter, why walking corpses? Why not immortality? The only solution that makes an ounce of sense is that this really is a game, the tech created to be a game, but it’s a wildly unwise use of resources.”

“That’s putting it mildly.”

“But this dungeon has shown us that the game is limited. I think we can beat it.”

“How so?”

“Could we first, sorry River, if they are hunting us or someone is directing them, we should probably find a room we can retreat to. With an intact lock. Some place safe to talk.”

“Good call. We’re on the employees’ floor. I bet all the doors are locked from the hallways.”

“We need to know for sure.”

***

After checking all three stairwells and making sure doors to them were all locked, we found a small, locked room, and went inside. It must have been for overnight stays for overworked employees, maybe managers. Plain wallpaper, a single desk and chair with orange cushions, one empty, door open, minifridge. The bed looked pretty good, though.

Marci sat on the bed, with barely a bounce, “Oh, I could almost sleep.”

I took the chair, turned my flashlight beam to the wall, and asked, “Before you do, what were you about to say, how we can defeat the game?”

She rested her light on the bed, aiming at the wall behind me, “Oh, I didn’t figure out how to beat the game, but let’s work this through. The quest we got was to find the dungeon core. And Lane said there were computers somewhere in here.” For the first time in a while, Marci smiled. “Walking computers.”

I sighed. “Coming in here was a mistake.”

“We know Lane lied. And if we don’t find something here then, at best, we’re ruling out that this place, this dungeon or cavern hotel or whatever it is, isn’t where the nanotech mainframes are located.”

“If we have to search every cave and these dungeons, that’s going to take a lot of time.”

The elf’s smile held, “Right. We need a better strategy.”

“How though? The people have all been changed. They don’t have memories of what happened to them. Or these are new people and the former inhabitants are gone, but that seems unlikely.”

“This hotel is here. It means we were wrong about this place and the nanotech. Because of what it did to us,” she pointed at her ears, “and how vastly it can change living beings, we assumed it’d had remade the entire world. But it didn’t. The nanotech kept some of the structures intact, making them part of their game world.”

“And?”

“Video footage from before the attack, maybe even during, probably still exists. If we can get power to the security computers, we can probably watch what happened to this hotel.”

“Holy, Marci! Great idea. You think we can convert our flashlight batteries to run the computers?”

“Hum. Probably not. They’ll run these lights for years, maybe decades, but we’d be pushing them to run a computer. They don’t have the amperage.”

“Let’s see, we’re in a hotel. There are lots and lots of emergency lights here, each with their own batteries. But those are dead. We can probably recharge them if we could build some kind of generator. Maybe from an exercise bike.”

Marci laughed, clapping her small hands together, and it was nice to see. “You’re overthinking things. There’s a back-up generator somewhere.”

I smiled. “Good point. Assuming there’s fuel for it.”

“This planet disappeared from our communication systems about four months ago.”

“Right. And that means?”

“If the fuel is sealed, it should be fine. If it’s diesel. It’s kerosene, it’ll work, regardless. It’ll be in the basement. Kind of an unwise place to locate a generator – you know, flooding and all that – but that’s almost always where hotels put them.”

“We can take the stairs, but probably the safest way is through the elevator shaft. Well,” I pulled my whip up, then let it fall back into place, “we know the stairways have zombies. And we know they can use them to get around.”

“Shaft it is, then.” She pushed her golden hair back, “What about the others?”

“I think they’ll eventually figure out we’re using the shaft. Or they’ll be holed up in a room, probably near the second floor. We can check the second floor on the way down. If it’s still full of zombies, we’ll just continue to the basement.”

“And if it’s full of zombies?”

“Plan B.”

“Which is?”

I pushed my hair back, shrugging, “Come up with plan C.”

“Comforting to be with such a strategist, River. Seriously, though, I’m glad we’re together.”