Of all the casinos, Michelle liked Caesar’s Palace the best. She thought the way the old statues and the neon flashing lights came together was cool, like a weird nightmare. But they’d stayed at the Monte Carlo because someone’s father was able to get them their room for free.
After sucking on a lime, she threw the rind into her empty shot glass and headed back to the hotel room she was sharing with three other girls. Sharing a queen was not exactly the ideal situation for her, but it was kind of fun. It reminded her of sleepovers she and her sister had when they were kids.
She walked into her room and shut the door behind her. “Hello?” No reply came, so she went in and collapsed onto the bed with a loud sigh. She closed her eyes and began to drift to sleep, but then she smelled something awful. The scent was like warm vomit that had been left out for days. She heard something from the bathroom.
“Hello? Heidi, is that you?”
She rose and walked over. The lights were off, and a streak of fear overcame her, giving her chills. Someone was on the floor. She flipped on the lights and screamed.
Carrie was lying on her back in a pool of blood that didn’t seem real. The blood had spread across the bathroom tile like a wet rug and filled the corners. Congealed and curdling, it looked like gelatin.
Carrie quivered, and a stream of blood came out of her mouth and ran down her already-bloodstained neck. Only the whites of her eyes were showing, and she was trembling.
“Carrie!”
Her body convulsed so violently that she kicked her legs. They hit Michelle in the ankle and she slipped on the blood and fell forward on the sink. Black vomit spewed from Carrie’s mouth, over Michelle’s back.
Michelle pulled herself up using the sink and slipped in the putrid fluid, coating herself in it. Getting to her hands and knees, she crawled to the doorway and scrambled out of the room with an ear-piercing scream.
48
“Wait.”
Samantha’s heart beat against her ribs like a sledgehammer. She was still young enough that the actual concrete fear of death hadn’t settled over her yet. She’d always been trying to prevent it in others or comforting those who had already lost people. She’d never had time to contemplate her own death. That one day, her life would be extinguished as easily as turning off a light had never entered her mind, until Robert Greyjoy was standing over her a month ago, telling her she was going to die. She had that same feeling again. Fate would flip a switch, and everything she was wouldn’t exist anymore.
She had seen so much death in her life that it didn’t seem tangible. She’d seen entire villages wiped off the face of the earth by a single virus that could barely be seen under the most powerful of microscopes. Samantha had watched hemorrhaging children suffer for weeks in hospital beds with open sores before dying, and it had never dawned on her that it could happen to her. She thought she was immune from it somehow because she was the one taking care of them.
She thought back to a young child in Nigeria who had lost both his parents to Ebola. He had watched them die and had still asked where they were days afterward. His mind had erased that memory because of the acute pain it caused. She wondered if any memories like that were floating around in her mind-things she repressed because she could not face the possibility that life could be nothing more than cruel, random chance.
And, with a gun pointed at her heart, she wondered if she had led the life that she truly wanted.
“Do you need a moment to prepare?” the man asked.
“Would you give it to me if I did?”
“Yes. I’m not a monster.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
He grinned and lowered the gun. “People always ask me why I’ve chosen them. Why they’re going to die. But you didn’t ask. It’s such a funny thing to see people expect good things in their life, that everything will turn out all right. We’re parasites drifting through black space on top of a rock, and people are shocked when bad things happen to them. I think it would be more appropriate if people were shocked when good things happened to them.”
“I wouldn’t want to live that way-without hope.”
“Hope was what was left in Pandora’s box. Maybe people’s lives aren’t meant to have hope.” He was silent a moment and then glanced back to Jane. “She’s quite lovely, even like this. They gave her a sedative after I came in here and she saw the gun. I told them I was her husband. She called out for you.”
Emotion tugged at her, and she swallowed, hoping to keep it down. “Leave her alone.”
“I only take a life when I’m paid or when it amuses me. Taking the life of an unconscious convalescent wouldn’t amuse me, and no one’s paying me to do it.”
“How much are they paying you to take my life?”
“They’re not giving me money. In fact, when my employers get here, there won’t be a use for money anymore.”
“Who are your employers?”
“Unfortunately, you won’t get to meet them, but they’re coming. They’ll be here soon, actually, once my work and the work of others like me across the world is finished.”
“What is your work? Murdering doctors?”
“No. Eliminating resistance.”
49
Howie woke in the dark, feeling only the intense heat. He couldn’t hear anything but his own breathing. His eyelids fluttered, and they seemed sticky, as if they had been glued shut. Reaching up over his head, he touched smooth steel. When he forced himself up, pain shot into his shoulder with such intensity, he thought he might pass out. When his fingers found the space between his neck and shoulder, he felt the roughness of bandages.
He was in a box-a metal one that was about five feet by four feet. He thought of monkeys he’d seen on television that were crated and shipped off from Africa to the zoos or labs where they were destined to spend the rest of their lives. He felt like one of those monkeys now.
He guessed the slits in the box were for air, and he pressed his face against them to look out. He was inside what appeared to be a storage facility. At least a dozen other boxes were stacked around him, along with crates overflowing with supplies. A sliver of dim, golden light was coming through from the space underneath a door.
Howie sat back, trying to control the vertigo that was making his stomach feel like Jell-O. He was so hot that his eyes felt as though they were frying, and when he closed his lids, it was worse, like putting a blanket over them.
Weakness overtook him then, and he wanted nothing more than to lie down and die. Jessica was gone-probably taken back to a camp-and he could only pray that she was in a women’s camp. His girlfriend was gone; so were his house, his cars, and his family. The only family he really had was his ex-wife’s family. Her mother had been surprisingly gentle and loving with him, and Howie had grown close to her. But she passed from a heart attack at forty-nine years old. The cardiologist had told Howie that it was just one of those things they had no control over. Humans had no control over the most important things in life, really. He had felt so helpless then, so impotent. But that was nothing compared to how he felt in that box. Fate hadn’t spun his life out of control; other men had-men from his own government, no less. They were meant to protect him.
He leaned back against the side of the box and thought he would close his eyes. No more running. No more fighting. He didn’t have it in him.
He felt a warm sensation on his face. Sticky blood was coming out of his nose. He wiped at it softly but then stopped. What did it matter anyway?
He began to drift off to sleep, but laughter woke him, and he realized it was his own. He was about to die in a box. Despite all his wealth, the hundred or so employees who relied on him, the interviews with the media, and all the people who sought his advice as though he actually had something to teach… he was going to die alone in a box, like a sick dog.