Chapter 36: Inside Smog

“Oh, yeah, the fumes are worse now.”  Ave pointed her light to the electrical room, grey smoke was wafting out from under the door, the smell of diesel exhaust everywhere.  “Why hasn’t it stopped?  The power’s out.”

“The room’s probably saturated,” said Bentley.  “It’ll balance out eventually.”

I took the lead, saying, “Let’s get out of here as quick as we can.  Remember to avoid the pressure pad in the hallway.”

“Man,” Marci stared at the exhaust billowing into the room, and said, “this place is still creepy, even without the dead guys walking around.”

“Now they’re just laying around,” said Dylan.  “More gross than creepy.”

“No, still creepy.  If we were staying in this hotel, we’d want to get rid of the bodies.  I have no idea why they’re not putrid right now, but they certainly will be soon.”

Bentley shone the flashlight onto his own face for a moment, making shadows just beneath his brown eyes.  “It’s probably the necromantic magic.  If it didn’t protect the flesh, they’d have been rotting the entire time they were zombies.”

“Yup, still creepy.”

From the doorway, I said, “Come on guys, let’s not linger.”  I illuminated the trap as we passed it, again reminding everyone to steer clear.  It was Fred whom I mostly worried about, but he successfully avoided it again.

The further we got from the electrical room, the better the air became.  Entering the elevator shaft was almost like opening a door to a greenhouse, despite it still being dry and dusty.

After exiting the shaft at the first floor, I shone the light all around the room, but there wasn’t anything else inside with us except the unmoving dead.  “The front doors go to that long hallway, then out of the cavern entirely.  We need the side doors, the ones that go to the pool and hot tub.”

“They’re on the opposite side from here, but after what we just watched, I’m not so keen on going there,” said Dylan.  “Though I’m sure all those, uh, people are gone.”

“Right this way,” Ave said, taking the lead, lighting up the path ahead and periodically back and forth, constantly checking around.

Fred came up behind her, doing the same with his light.

From the main room, we entered a medium length hallway, with two open doors leading off it.  One to a room with ping pong and billiard tables, the other men and women’s change rooms.

“Damn,” Dylan said, “we could have played some snooker.”

“Who plays snooker these days?” asked Bentley.  “I’d be down for stripes and solids, though.”

“We definitely have enough beer to play pool,” said Fred, looking over his shoulder.  “I wonder if we’re better or worse at it now.”

“Wait,” Ave stopped, we all stopped, and she shone her light on the glass doors.  “What the hell is that?”

A short human-like creature, perhaps up to my knees, stood at the window.  Its head was wedge-shaped, coming not to a point but rounded at the front.  Large nostril openings on either side, a triangular jaw, and convex spaces taking up each of side of its head.  It reached up with a human-like hand, tapping the glass with thick nails that looked more like claws.  It had no eyes.

Marci whispered, “I think those are ears on the side of its head.  They’re enormous.”

The creature leaned in, cocking its head a little, tapped again, then stood back.  Between its legs, a yellow liquid sprayed the door briefly.  Then it walked away.

Ave said, “What the hell?  It peed on the door?”

“Marking its territory?” said Fred.

“Maybe,” Marci walked closer to the door, shining her light out.  “I think we should go up to the lounge, to the observation windows.  I think there’s more of those things.”  She backed up.  “A larger one is coming over!”

This one was about twice the other’s size, which made it about half my size.  Its arms and legs were thick with muscle, and its claws were bigger and longer.  It scraped them along the glass, making an awful sound.

“Damn!”  I covered my ears up.

The creature repeated this several times before tapping along the glass until reaching the side frame.

Fred said, “Ok, this thing looks like it wants in.”

“I’m not sure I want it in,” Ave pulled out her war hammer.

Marci asked, “You want to try talking to it?  It might have been human before, maybe it still understands language?”

“We can try.”  I walked up to the door.

The creature was tapping on the wall now, off to the side.  Then it began scraping on that surface.

I rapped on the glass with my knuckles, saying, “Hello?”

Its head swiveled to point at me, like an owl does, then it moved rhythmically side to side.  Because it had no eyes, I didn’t know where to look and felt a little lost.  The creature then leapt at the door, hitting the glass and bouncing back, shook itself and again scratched its claws along the window, screeching the entire time.

“I don’t think it wants to talk to us.  I think,” said Bentley.  “It wants to eat us.”

“What’re you getting that from?” asked Marci.

A bunch more of the little guys ran up and joined in scraping the window.

“Just a guess.”

Setting down his pack, Fred readied his submachine gun, popping out the ammunition cartridge to double check it, putting it back in place, and making sure a bullet was in the chamber.  “These guys are alive.  Maybe this’ll work on them.”  Then he pulled out several clips for the gun.

Ave put her war hammer back into its holster, dropped her pack, and followed Fred’s example, getting her gun ready.

The noise from all those creatures clawing the glass was getting louder.  I shouted, “Guys!  Let’s back up down the hall a bit.  You don’t want to be this close when you start firing anyways.”

We all moved away, Fred and Ave shouldering their packs once again, after having placed several clips in their front pockets.

“Maybe we should pile up furniture or the bodies to slow them down?”

“Nah, Boss,” said Fred, pulling the gun up to his eye level and sighting in, then dropping it back down.  “They’d just dig through it.”

“Or use them as shields,” added Avery, also sighting in.

“Alright, Ave, Fred, you guys hold them off here.  If your guns work, that is.  If they don’t, hightail it up to the second floor.  We’re going to go see what we can see from the observation windows.”

“Gotcha.”

“For sure, Boss.”

“I’m serious,” I gave each of them a stern look, “don’t stay here if the guns don’t affect them.”

They both said, “Right” at the same time.

The rest of us headed upstairs.  As we walked away, I could hear Fred telling Ave how this could be a good time to test out his new strength.  I hoped he wasn’t serious.  Those creatures were small, but the bigger ones had bulging muscles and nasty claws.  They might be nasty fighters.

It was a dark walk, the flashlights illuminating the middle of the stairs, catching just the outlines of corpses laying here and there.  No matter that we’d spent days in this hotel, fighting and besting them, and seeing their bodies lying motionless, I still felt unease every time the light revealed another body.

“Good idea to leave Fred downstairs,” said Marci.  “Had he come up here, he’d be raiding the bar.”

“I’m sure his pack is loaded with alcohol.”

“Mine’s full of dried fruit and meat.”

“Yeah, I took a lot of food, too.  I think we all did.  There’s the windows.  Let’s see how far our lights can go.”  We walked straight up to the glass, put our flashlights against it, and looked.

The light didn’t cover a lot of the ground, because when we angled the light, much of it reflected off the glass.  The cavern was wide and high, higher than we could see and necessarily higher than the hotel.  Almost out of sight, there were lots of the little creatures walking in single file, with their hands cupped in front of their bodies, as if they were carrying water somewhere.  We couldn’t see where they’d come from, only that they crested a small hill, walked for a time, and went out of sight, but nearer the hotel.  Stones they passed looked enormous until I reminded myself how little these things were.  They had the same proportions as people and so, from this distance, tricked me into thinking they were.

“What do you think they’re carrying?”

Marci pressed up against the glass, moving her flashlight to the right, its reflection shining in my eyes, so I backed up.  “Uhm, not liquid.  None of it is dropping.  Wait.  Dirt, I think.”

“They’re carrying dirt?”

“Some of them have rocks.  Huh.  There’s a big one.  It’s not carrying anything.”

“Hey,” said Bent, dropping his light to the ground and turning to face me, “there is that stairway in the penthouse that goes up to the roof.  Why don’t we try it?  I think the suite has a balcony, too.  We’d get a larger field of view from up there.”

“That’s a great idea.  But we should get Fred and Ave to come with us.  No point in guarding that door if the rest of us are upstairs.”

“I don’t know,” he said.  “If those things get in, they’ll be in the hotel.  We might have an easier time controlling that single entry point.”

Still looking out the windows, Marci moved her flashlight, “There are a lot of them.  I’m not sure even submachine guns could hold them off very long.”

“You think they’d keep attacking if they were getting cut down?”

“Look at the way they walk.  Single file, long line.  And there’s another big one.  That’s one big one to roughly twenty little ones.  They remind me of ants.  Lots of workers and a few warriors to protect them.  Ants do not stop attacking when their members are killed.  They overcome attackers by swarming them.”

“You think these are some kind of eusocial . . . mammal?”

“Monster,” said Marci, backing up from the window, “eusocial monster.”

Bentley said, “So, we stop them by killing the queen?”

“I doubt that would work.  You’d confuse them for a while, but they just attack again.  Then, make another queen.  Plus, these might be more complex than ants.  They certainly have larger brains.  They might have several queens guiding them.”

“Ok.  Let’s, uh, let’s head upstairs.  Dylan, can you go down to Ave and Fred and let them know what we’re doing?  And back them up.  You’re to hold that entrance if the bullets affect them and if you can.  But if there are too many, come up to us.”

“Will do.”

“I don’t know,” said Marci, looking one by one at each of us.  “If we lose the lobby, we’re cut off from our only exit.  This might be our only time to leave.”

I took a deep breath and released it, then said, “I’m not quite ready to give up on this dungeon just yet.  I’d like to get us that core, whatever that is, and confirmation that the mainframes are or are not here.”

“God, I hope the guns work on these things.”