The sisters were almost completely dependent on Joe Conaghan, a black guy with a big belly and a shaved head. Conaghan was an electrical engineer for Pacific Gas & Electric. When Jillian heard that her eyes lit up, pun intended.
From time to time we heard gunshots and distant screams. It was so quiet inside and out that we could hear footfalls in the street if someone ran by outside and we were near a window or door. Further inside the fortress-like bulk of the hotel it was as quiet as a forgotten tomb.
Grins passed by from time to time, wandering the streets or sitting on the sidewalk for minutes or hours before moving on. We worked hard to avoid attracting their attention. From the high window of our suite I watched a grin come up Montgomery Street. It was a tall man in a gray suit that was mottled black with dried blood. His torso had been cut open and his guts, now hard, encrusted tubes, hung stiffly between his legs. His blue tie flapped in the hollow below his ribs. He turned south on Market Street and made it another block before falling and lying still.
Unlike the zombies of film lore, these things could die without any intervention. If we could wait it out long enough, attrition though disease, injuries and exposure to the elements would remove infected citizens from the equation. How long that would be was the question.
At the end of our first week in the Palace our group counted a dozen with the arrival of Darryl Haise and Corey Renfield.
Jillian and Joe Conaghan were up on the roof working on an electrical panel. I was with Benjamin in one of many secure storage areas in the basement sorting through boxes and cases of personal items and emergency supplies that had been left behind, when we heard the faint and distant sound of Clyde barking.
The dog was earning his keep, guarding the shattered front door we had barricaded with the couch and soda machine, a safety measure Conaghan had described as half-assed, but he had been smiling when he said it and that made me like him.
We were using two-way radios all set to the same channel, and I asked anyone if they knew why Clyde was barking. No response. Benjamin and I went upstairs. I passed by the Garden Court and saw Isao sitting at one of the tables, reading what had to be a Japanese-English dictionary.
“Good-uh, to meet… you,” he said
“Likewise,” I replied.
His boy and girl were behind the reception desk. They were bored. Their MP3 players and phones had dead batteries and could not be recharged, at least not at this time, according to Jillian, so no more games or music for them.
The Morales sisters were probably upstairs in the room they shared, sleeping. They slept a lot. Jillian said it was their way of dealing with the shock of all that had happened and that with luck, sooner or later they would come around. We checked on them often, Benjamin volunteering most frequently for that duty, but we didn’t have time to play nursemaid, there was just too much to do.
I saw Randall slouched in a plush chair on the far side of the lobby. He called Clyde to him when he saw me heading for the door.
There were two men at the door. One was wearing an SFPD uniform. The other was wearing a green coverall. The cop was tapping one the doors with the butt of a Glock.
I unlocked one of the doors from a big ring of keys we’d found behind the reception desk, and let the men in.
“Man, am I glad I found you,” the cop said. And then, when he got a good look at me, “Jesus, what the fuck happened to your face?”
“Cut myself shaving,” I said, when I wanted to toss a dollar at him and tell him to go back out and buy some fucking tact.
I introduced myself as I locked the doors, and that’s when I noticed that the man in the coverall had his hands cuffed behind his back. On the back of the coverall was a logo. It showed a winged insect flying away and looking back in horror. Below the illustration was a phone number with a 415 area code and a web address, and above it was the name of the company, Pest Off!
“Darryl Haise,” the officer said, shoving the handcuffed man toward a chair in the lobby and giving me a bone crusher of a handshake. He had short-cropped blond hair and pale blue eyes and he grinned an all-American grin.
“I must protest,” the man in the coverall said as he awkwardly sat on the edge of a chair.
“Shut up, Renfield,” Haise said.
“We need to leave the vicinity immediately,” the man named Renfield said.
Haise took a step closer to Renfield and his voice turned ugly. “I told you to shut the fuck up.”
I asked Rendfield why we needed to leave and Haise snapped a look at me, his eyes narrowing.
“Because they are coming back,” Renfield said. “The infected are coming back by the hundreds if not thousands. And it gets worse.”
Haise gave Renfield and open-handed slap that knocked the man out of the chair.
“Holy shit, man,” Benjamin said behind me.
For a moment I could only stare. The world had gone all to shit, we few survivors had to stick together, and this cop was beating down a man in handcuffs?
Renfield had fallen on his side. It wasn’t a hard fall. The Palace lobby floor was cool marble and plush carpet, and he fell on carpet, but the man was humiliated
I took Renfield by one elbow and helped him into the chair.
“Okay,” I said. “How are things worse?”
“Do not listen to him,” Haise said.
I turned and looked at Haise and for the first time I noticed a light in his eyes that was either insane, dancing rage, or barely contained terror.
“I want to know what’s going on out there,” I said, trying to sound strong and hoping Haise didn’t take a swing at me. I was no fighter.
“So do I.” The voice boomed, reverberating off of marble.
I turned and saw Jilly and Conaghan coming down the stairs, a belt of tools Conaghan had found jingling with every step. Conaghan had an easy smile on his face, but his eyes were dark and hard. Jillian was pale.
We stood together, the six of us tense, until Isao approached, flanked by his children, and announced, “We go to make-uh pee-pee!”
The broke the tension.
Haya looked embarrassed and Haru rolled his eyes. Renfield snorted. I grinned. Haise saw my grin and took a step back. Conaghan smiled again, but he was watching Haise closely.
“Let’s take these cuffs off,” Jillian said.
“That man is dangerous,” Haise said.
“Please,” Jillian said.
Haise put a hand to one side of his mouth and spoke in a dramatic stage whisper. “He eats flies. He’s fucking crazy.”
Renfield gave Haise an offended glare, and then ignored him as he addressed Jillian, Conaghan and me.
“Did you know that our most common companion creature is not the dog or the cat, but the common housefly? They have been with us since the dawn of Homo sapiens, eating and defecating and mating alongside us while we carried them into every region of the world. They are almost perfect, far better in their biological niche than we are in ours.”
“Fuck off, Renfield,” Haise said.
“The Roman poet Vergil once had a lavish funeral for a fly,” Renfield said, “and had it laid to rest in a mausoleum. He may have cared for the fly, or he may have had ulterior motives—”
Jillian gave me a what the fuck look and I cut in.
“The government was planning to confiscate the property of the rich and distribute it to war veterans,” I said. “But no grounds containing burial plots or mausoleums could be taken. Vergil saved his land from seizure.”
Renfield gave me a nod. He looked like a young Richard Dreyfuss. “For the rest of us, however, flies are simply pests that need to be exterminated, and the genocide of musca domestica has been one of mankind’s enduring efforts. However, the fly has turned the tables on us, by delivering one disease after another into our lives until it found one that could truly annihilate us.”