Light filled every corner of this room from the windows along the back wall. Easy chairs and couches divided up the room into five seating areas, each centered on a round coffee table. Nearly every seat held a well-dressed corpse. Robby took a deep breath of fetid air and let it out slowly. He scanned back and forth, looking for any movement. They all shared the same symptoms—gagging mouth, lolling tongue, and exploded eyes. For some, eye juice and blood dripped down their cheeks. Others had turned to one side or the other, allowing their eyeballs to leave streaks down the back of a leather couch, or down the front of a button-down shirt.
A distant rumbling broke the silence. Warm air came from a vent to Robby’s right.
He counted thirty-eight bodies. With the corpse in the toilet, that meant almost three times more people than cars in the parking lot. Either a lot of people came together, were dropped off, or he had missed a bunch more cars. He didn’t think many of the people here had walked—they looked like they were dressed too well to have walked.
Robby wanted keys. He wanted keys to a truck, if he could get them. He repeated that to himself in his head, trying to get up the courage to frisk the corpses.
“I’m looking for keys to a truck. Who here would drive a truck?” he asked himself inside his head.
It doesn’t have to be a truck, he reminded himself. Any car would do, it’s just he was accustomed to a truck, and thought somehow the seats were up higher and would be more familiar. He tried to remember if he had even seen a truck outside, but couldn’t recall. That wasn’t like him. Usually anything he saw or heard was pretty much at his disposal. This was different—his mind was clouded by the stress of being in this room of thirty-eight exploded-eye corpses. Surely that was enough to break the concentration of anyone.
He moved his lips as he repeated the thought—“I’m looking for keys to a truck. Who here would drive a truck?”
Robby kept his back to the wall and side-stepped closer to the back of the couch in front of him, where a bald man’s head rested on the back. From the shower of blood and slime on the man’s lap, Robby figured he had been looking upward when his eyes exploded. Robby stood behind the couch and extended his hand to touch a finger to the dead man’s head. He poked him again, a little harder. The man’s neck was stiff and he barely moved at Robby’s touch. Robby slapped at the head. He jumped back at the sound. Nothing else in the room moved.
Robby took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He reached forward with a shaky hand and pressed his fingers to the left side of the man’s neck, where his jugular should be. Nothing—cold skin, no pulse. He braced himself to search the man and then stopped. He wondered—what if they used a valet? This looked like a fancy crowd; maybe someone parked the cars and the keys were hanging on a board somewhere in the lobby? He almost walked away to go search someplace that didn’t contain a bunch of corpses, but then he saw the irregular lump in the man’s slacks, just where his left pocket would be. Robby kept his eye’s on the corpse’s face as he reached down and touched the slacks. He felt angular metal under the fabric. Perhaps he would find keys elsewhere, perhaps not, but now he knew he would find keys here.
With one more glance around the room, Robby leaned over the back of the couch and drove his hand down into the pants pocket. His turned away from the face of the corpse—just inches away from his own face. He leaned farther than he expected, but he managed to hook his fingers through a key ring and pull them back. The keychain held car keys, house keys, and a clicker to unlock the doors from a distance. Robby nodded and stuffed the keys into his own pocket. Some of the eyeball-juice rubbed off on his sleeve.
Robby skipped the woman next to the bald guy and moved on to the next man. After groping for an eternity, Robby found the next man’s keys in his jacket pocket. He wanted several sets in case he got the key ring of a carpooler. Robby worked the edges of the room, not wanting to be surrounded by the corpses. With seven sets of keys in his pockets, Robby circled around the perimeter of the room to get back to the door to the hall.
He almost made it around before he realized he was being watched. The man sitting in the easy chair at the corner sat perfectly still with his hands on the armrests and his legs casually crossed. One of his eyes was a gory mess, splattered on the inside of his glasses and stringing cord and gel down the man’s cheek, but the other eye stared directly at Robby.
Robby could circle around the length of the room the other way, or go past the one-eyed man.
The man wore charcoal grey slacks and a tweed jacket, with patches at the elbows. Robby broke the stare and looked down at the man’s chest. He couldn’t detect any rise and fall, but it would be hard to tell at this distance. Robby took a step closer, now about three paces from one-eye.
Robby squinted at the man’s glasses. Something looked weird. Something aside from the exploded eye on one side and piercing blue eye on the other. He took another half-step closer. When he realized the discrepancy, a little half-smile flashed across Robby’s face and disappeared. The glasses looked funny because the lens on the exploded side was a bifocal, and the other one wasn’t.
“Glass eye,” Robby whispered. He immediately looked around to see if any of the corpses stirred at the sound of his voice. Glass eye or not, Robby pressed his back to the windows and inched along the wall as he passed the man. The eye didn’t follow him.
Robby passed by a big open staircase on his way back to the hall. He’d already seen the lower floor through the windows downstairs, and he knew nobody was down there. He preferred that exit strategy as opposed to having to go down the dark hallway with the bathroom door. He still pictured a toilet-corpse crawling after him.
Robby took one last look at the room full of dead people and jogged down the stairs to the big meeting room. It was cooler down here. He rounded the bar and made his way quickly to the back door. The footprints in the snow leading up to, and away from, the door gave him pause until he realized they were his own. Robby put on his gloves and pushed his way outside, glad to be away from the smell of decay.
He scaled the hill quickly, passed the humming generator, and jogged down the driveway to the parking lot. The first set of keys, General Motors, had a remote control fob. He pressed it several times, spinning to look at each car as he hit the unlock button, but nothing responded. The next set he pulled—Toyota—didn’t have a remote control, and he didn’t see a Toyota parked there.
He got lucky on the third set. A big SUV parked several spaces away from the other cars chirped when he pressed the button. The lights flashed and then stayed on.
“Sweet,” Robby said to himself.
He tried the other sets as well, and found he also held the keys to two sedans. The SUV was his first choice. He peeked through the tinted windows and found it empty. He opened the door and inserted the key to discover a nearly full gas tank. He might get more range out of one of the smaller cars, but then again the SUV probably contained a much bigger tank to compensate for the lower fuel economy. Robby weighed his options briefly and then settled on the SUV. He tossed his backpack inside, started it up, and locked the doors. A dusting of snow covered the windshield, but the wipers took care of it. Before he pulled the seat belt across, he took a moment to lean back between the seats just to verify he was alone in the SUV. Ever since old one-eye, Robby felt like he was being watched. He even pushed far enough back to see over the rear row into the back storage area.
The snow crunched under the SUV’s tires as Robby backed it up slowly out of its spot. He hesitated at the thought of leaving Carl Deemer’s boat tied up to the dock. The floating dock would rise and fall with the tide, but would the water be deep enough? He acknowledged the feeling and tried to let it go, as easily as his dad would have.