“A whole shitload of Army dudes went by a few hours ago in trucks,” he said. They stopped to check a few buildings, I don‘t know what for. One of the guys traded info for some weed. He said they tried to push most of the happyfaces south, all the way to a place called Sweeny Ridge. He said they herded them like cattle. They were singing the theme to some old TV show called Rawhide as they did it.”
Sweeny Ridge is a wilderness area with some great hiking trails through the hills.
“Then they set the fires on the way back. I asked him if they were helping anybody get from the city to the East Bay and he said they weren’t allowed to, San Francisco was now a quarantine zone, cause there are still grins in it. And then they just left.”
I didn’t like that at all. “So… we’re on our own.”
Benjamin nodded.
The kid’s candle sizzled and went out, and he cursed.
It began to rain, and the rain came down hard.
“We better get inside,” I said.
Benjamin hooked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the McKesson Building.
Jillian shook her head, and looked across the street, to the Palace Hotel. “If we have to be inside, let’s do it in style.”
We crossed Market Street within the pedestrian crosswalk despite the fact that every vehicle we could see was empty and abandoned.
A gray and white cat was sitting on the hood of a car. It watched us for a moment, and then jumped down out of sight.
Beyond the cat’s hiding place, a naked man was shambling down Market Street, heading south, coming toward us. His skin was patchy and raw, and he holding a stuffed animal in one hand, a tiger.
“Nyih-nyih,” the man said.
Ben took out his revolver. “You know how to kill these things?”
“I bashed one’s head in,” Jillian said.
Ben nodded. “Yeah, just like in the old zombie movies, you can kill them by destroying the brain. The Army dudes said you can also bleed them out, cut their throat or fill their body with bullets, but their blood is as thick as shit and it takes way longer to kill them that way, so—”
The old man began to sprint, running at us faster than I would have imaged was possible. He was grinning and making that same sound over and over, nyih-nyih-nyih, as Ben stepped between us and raised the pistol.
There was a dry click we all heard over the rain.
“Fuck,” Ben said.
He and Jillian darted out of the way. Without thinking what I was doing I drew my sword and swung it in an awkward tennis backhand. I felt a jolt in my arm from fingers to wrist, and saw the old man’s head bounce twice on the road. Blood welled up slowly, pooling on the stump of his neck and then spilling down his pale chest in thick black clots.
Ten minutes later, we were in the lobby of the hotel. We smashed the glass in one of the doors on New Montgomery Street and blocked the opening with a couch and a soda machine. That machine was a heavy son of a bitch, and as we were sliding it in front of the door I saw that the old man’s headless body was still standing in the rain.
It was warm and dry inside. “Much better,” Jillian said. We were standing in the Garden Court under a stained glass dome. Her voice echoed softly off of the old marble floors and ceiling, and the polished columns between them. It was quiet in here. There were no sounds of conversation, footfalls, or traffic on the street. Outside, the rain hammered down, sounding like the end of the world.
We were three when we broke into the Palace Hotel. A week later we were twelve. Thirteen, if you counted the dog.
The Palace was built 1875, and rebuilt after it was destroyed by the fires that followed the 1906 quake. We were staying in room 8064, a top-floor suite overlooking the corner of Market and New Montgomery Streets. It was a nice suite. President Warren G. Harding died there in 1923, while in office. There were rumors he’d been poisoned, but he simply died of heart failure.
As we searched the hotel for other survivors we found eight dead grins and two living ones; both were Latinas in maid uniforms. One was small, one was fat. They were easy to kill, and it bothered me that killing was becoming so easy, even if these things were too dangerous to live. They were still human beings.
The power was out in the city, but there were generators in the basement. Jillian spent about three hours down there on our first night, switching off what she called non-essentials one by one. We were using candles and battery-powered flashlights and lanterns. There was a Walgreen’s a block away. We raided it for everything from batteries to snacks, Tylenol to clothes; sweatshirts, sleep pants, and cheap sneakers.
The first to arrive was a homeless man, hammering on the door after the rain stopped, and it rained for two days straight. He said his name was Randall, and that was the only name he would give. He had a pit bull mix named Clyde. He stank, and Jillian, fully in charge by then, gave him a room number and sent him upstairs to a suite for a bath. “You’ll have to take the stairs,” she had said, from behind the reception desk. The Palace was less than ten stories high, and the stairways were spacious and stylish. “The water is cold, but the beds are comfy. The door will be held open by the security latch when you get there. Use the latch the same way when you leave or you’ll be locked out.”
All hotel room doors have electronic card readers instead of old-fashioned keys. With no power supply, this was a pain in the ass. Without power we couldn’t program new keycards, even if we did figure out passwords to the hotel’s internal computer systems. Jilly was the first to suggest we look for a master key card and use it to open every door we could, and chock those doors open. Sure enough, the master key card we had stopped working a few hours after we began using it. The card readers in the doors didn’t need power, they were battery operated — and rejected all of the now expired keycards.
The doors still worked fine. The card readers were powered by AA batteries. If you had a good card, you could enter a room. Otherwise most doors were still locked tight on the outside, but the locking mechanism only applied to the outer door handle. The inner handle could always be opened, a standard security feature.
Why am I boring you with this primer on hotel doors? Trust me, there’s a reason, one none of us considered until too late.
Randall went up the stairs with Clyde.
“He didn’t even say thanks,” Benjamin said.
I was thinking the same thing. I was also thinking Randall was a bit of an asshole.
“He didn’t have to,” Jillian said.
Two days after that we took in three more strays, an older Japanese man with a boy and girl who appeared to be in the eight to ten year old range. The older man was Isao Yamada. The girl was Haya and the boy was Haru. It seemed the only English words Isao knew were tourist and vacation. The kids didn’t know much more, but like kids anywhere they were quick to learn.
Benjamin had found a long vinyl banner from some corporate event. It was three feet high and thirty feet long. He also found some black paint and a brush. On the stark white back of the banner he painted The Survivor’s Club. He somehow managed to hang the thing from the rooftop cornice so it wrapped around the corner of Montgomery and New Montgomery, and he secured it so it wouldn’t blow away. He did all of this without saying anything about it. I noticed it when I went up to the suite Jillian and I shared on the top floor and saw the damned thing blocking the top half of the tall window.
When I asked him about it Benjamin shrugged and said, “I thought it might help.”
The day after the banner went up three more people came to the Palace.
Soledad and Marisol Morales were sisters from the Mission district. They were in their early twenties, pretty, tattooed and pierced, and nervous wrecks.