“I broke its knees using a sledge hammer with a long shaft, and then I shattered all of its leg and arm bones,” he said, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world to do. It was quite helpless and hardly a threat under those circumstances. That wasn’t the first grin I studied. I’d done it before, and since I had already begun eating maggots—they are a wonderful source of protein and tasteless if you wash them down with a glass of water—I was almost certain I was immune.
I was dragging that last grin into my house, hoping I could study it as well, when Haise intervened and treated me like a criminal. I told him I may have discovered how to become immune to the disease and we began to argue. He shoved me, I stumbled on the curb, and the incapacitated grin couldn’t resist tucking in to the arm that fell in front of its face. Haise shot the grin in the head, cuffed me in the street, and since then he’s been watching me to see if I am immune. What is worth noting is that I have known a lot of police officers, and Haise does not talk like a cop. Not at all. In fact—”
Renfield was interrupted by a harsh medley of screams drifting down the stairwell.
Most of us ran up the stairs. Benjamin was ahead of me, having recognized the voices of the Morales sisters. I was followed by Renfield. Jillian was behind him, and Conaghan was puffing along behind her. I didn’t notice that Randall and Haise were not following us.
On the seventh floor we saw the Morales sisters standing near the stairs, both appearing to have been startled out of sleep. Benjamin went to them. Further down the hall I saw Isao and a woman in a business suit locked together in a struggle. It didn’t occur to me that it was a grin until they turned around and around like dancers and I saw that horrible rictus. Her jacket, blouse and shirt were streaked with dried vomit that had been mostly blood.
Beyond them near the end of the hall and the room they shared with their father were Haya and Haru. Both children were curled up on the floor. Both were bleeding from bite wounds.
The grin was snapping at Isao’s hands and face, and the older man’s hands were already bloody from bites. Yet he was holding her back from doing any greater injury, and as if in response she let out a frustrated sound, made a choking noise and then regurgitated a syrupy mixture of vomit and dark blood into his face.
Renfield and I stepped forward, and I realized I didn’t have my sword. I turned to Conaghan and pulled a long screwdriver from his tool belt.
The grin bit into Isao’s left hand and tore away a patch of skin. He let out a yell and shoved her away.
Renfield approached them, bouncing on the balls of his feet like he was doing some sort of kooky dance. He was a gangly man with a shaggy head of hair and the sight would have been hysterical if not for the fact that he was playing a deadly game. The grin lashed out at him and he grabbed her arm, swinging her face first into a door.
The Palace is an old and luxurious hotel. The doors to the suites are paneled in mahogany. The doors are solid. So solid that you can use one to kill.
The grin’s face smashed into the door and she recoiled, looking up and down the hall in shock as that too thick and too dark blood oozed from her mouth and nose.
Renfield twisted her arm behind her back, I distinctly heard something break, a muffled snap, and then he slammed her face first into the door again, and again, until her knees buckled and her face was unrecognizable.
I looked at Isao. He was touching his bloody face with his bloody hands, shaking his head, and saying something in Japanese. He took a few steps toward me and then lurched as if he’d slipped on something. Then he began to grin, and I saw the humanity leave his eyes. He had a nasty cut on his upper lip, and his lips parted to reveal red, bloody teeth. As his muscles contracted his grin became so fierce that his upper lip tore apart.
“Careful, Bellemer,” Jillian whispered behind me.
Isao launched himself at me as if thrown by an invisible sling, his arms flailing at me like a man doing a bad imitation of a cat. I leaned out of his way and stuck out a foot, and Isao went sprawling on the thick carpet underfoot. As he struggled to get to his feet I bent down and rammed the screwdriver through his right temple.
“I’m sorry,” I said, hoping that some part of his humanity remained and understood that I was doing what I had to.
I worked the handle of the screwdriver up and down and side-to-side, scrambling Isao’s brains as if churning butter. When he was dead, I wiped the screwdriver clean on a fold of his shirt and gave it back to Conaghan.
I heard the children crying now, and heard Renfield saying comforting words as he stepped towards them. He froze when their cries became idiotic grunts, meaningless vocalizations.
Renfield looked over his shoulder, his expression bleak.
Conaghan stepped up and handed each of us a screwdriver as the children got to their feet and took their first unsteady steps toward us. “I can’t do it,” Conaghan said. “Not that. I have… had kids, fuck, I don’t even know if they are alive…”
Renfield killed what was left of the little boy. I put down his sister.
When we were done I went to Jillian. I leaned close to her and realized she was staring at me. At my neck.
“Oh baby,” she said.
I raised a hand, touched my neck and winced. There was a deep scratch there. Isao got me after all, with hands that were at least partially covered in the female grin’s blood and bile.
I moved down the hallway, an equal distance from Renfield and Jillian, and sat down against one wall.
From downstairs I heard a distant shout and a bang that had to be a gunshot.
Jillian looked over her shoulder at the stairs, said, “Jesus Christ,” and then looked back at me.
After a while Randall came up the stairs with Clyde. He stopped beside Jillian and Conaghan and joined them in watching me. I saw he was holding the Glock that Haise had been carrying. I would have asked what the hell had happened downstairs but I had bigger things to worry about.
Renfield had hunkered down at some point, sitting with the others. Now he stood, walked to me, and offered his hand.
“It’s been fifteen minutes,” he said. “Bellemer is either very lucky, or immune. If he was going to show signs of being infected, we’d have seen it already.”
Randall made a gesture and Clyde came close to me, growling as he passed Isao’s body. The dog sniffed me up and down, and then trotted back to Randall, who said, “He’s clean.”
Renfield helped me to my feet and then Jillian was holding me and about to kiss the awful ruin of my face. Renfield shoved her away. “He may be immune, but you may not be. You don’t want to touch any of their blood,” he said, gesturing to the dead grins.
I went into a suite to wash my neck, entering the first open door I saw.
The room was a ruin. The walls were scratched, the curtains torn down. The wall-mounted TV was on the floor. The bedding was shredded, and there were streaks and pools of dried blood everywhere. As I went into the bathroom, which hadn’t faired nearly as bad and dampened the clean edge of a towel to dab at my neck, I realized this was the grin’s room.
She must have been in here since the beginning of the pandemic, somehow making it into the safety of her hotel room and closing the door just before the infection had taken over. Since then she’d just been a hungry, mindless thing, clawing at walls and floor to try to escape and spread the disease at the command of the parasites within. It must have been just a fluke that she finally struck the door latch and managed to pull it open. It must have been a fluke that she hadn’t turned the deadbolt or engaged the security latch. It must have been a fluke that Isao and his children happened to be walking by when she pulled the door open and stepped into the hall.