Brian Keene - Entombed

Zombies.

I think their silence was the scariest part. The dead were quiet. No moans or gurgles or cries or shouts. That’s not the norm, or at least it didn’t remain the norm. Zombies make noise, as a rule. But this group was quiet. It was obvious that they meant business. They bore down on the hotel with an emotionless, single-minded determination, hobbling and pulling themselves forward despite the fact that some of them were missing limbs and major organs, or trailing intestines behind them like leashes. Most of the zombies were human, but there were dead animals, too. Rats, mostly, along with a few foxes and skunks and a black bear cub that was missing an eye and most of its lower jaw. That didn’t stop it from coming, though. The dead are determined sons of bitches. Their silence made that determination all the more unnerving.

Two of our groundskeepers drove toward them in a golf cart. To this day, I don’t know what those guys were thinking. It’s not like they were armed or anything. They were landscapers, not soldiers. I have no idea what they intended to do. Maybe run over the zombies? Whatever their plan was, they never got a chance to see it through. The dead might have been slow, but they could swarm you until there was nowhere left to run. That’s what happened with the groundskeepers. They ran over a zombie fox with the golf cart, but the corpse got caught beneath their back wheel and slowed them down. The golf cart shook. Bits of matted fur and decayed flesh were smeared across the pavement. Then, the driver made a sharp turn. I guess he was trying to dislodge the dead critter. Problem was, golf carts aren’t made for hairpin turns. He tipped the fucking thing over on its side, and before either man could scramble free of the wreckage, the zombies were on them from all sides—penning them in. One man started screaming as the dead shuffled closer. The other one sank to his knees and began praying in Spanish and frantically crossing himself. It was a slow death for them both. The zombies crowded in, closer and closer, until both the golf cart and the victims were lost from sight. Their screams became whimpers, and then turned into screams again. One zombie thrust its arm in the air, as if in triumph, clutching a hunk of raw, red, dripping meat.

That was all the rest of us needed to see. We turned and fled, shoving and tripping each other in our hurry to get away. Behind us came the most awful sounds—tearing and ripping and biting. By then, the screams had ceased. We ran back into the hotel, only to learn that the shit had hit the fan inside the Pocahontas, as well. Zombies surged in through both the main entrance and the doors to the meditation garden. They swarmed through the lobby and around the elevators and were beginning to make their way down the long concourse of ritzy stores and shops that occupy most of the hotel’s first floor—jewelers, a humidor, candy stores, coffee shops, a bookstore, clothing stores and other businesses catering to the guests because none of the locals in town could ever afford to shop in them.

I ran into my buddy Mike, who worked in the hotel’s banqueting department. Looking back on it now, it’s all Mike’s fault that I’m in this goddamned situation. He reached out and grabbed my shoulders, stopping me in mid-run. At first, I was so scared that I didn’t even recognize him. I tried pushing him away, but he squeezed harder. My hands curled into fists.

“Let go of me, asshole! Don’t you see what’s happening?”

“The bunker,” he yelled. “We’ve got to get everyone into the bunker, Pete.”

And just like that, everything changed. It was like Mike had uttered some magic words. I was still scared, but my head was clearer. I started thinking about survival, rather than just running around in blind panic. My fear wasn’t ruling me. I was ruling it. It felt very Zen. People ran by us, tripping and stumbling and crying. The hallway was filled with screams and shouts. All of these things seemed distant. Remote. Disconnected from us. I suddenly felt like an island.

“The bunker… hell, why didn’t I think of that?”

“You’ve got a key, right?”

I nodded. As one of the tour guides, I had one of seven plastic key cards that would let us into the bunker. I was about to speak, when I noticed Mike’s eyes grow wide. He bit his lip but I don’t think he was aware that he was doing it. He stared at something over my shoulder. I turned around, wincing at the sudden stench. A group of zombies were shambling toward us.

“Shit.”

“Tell everyone you can,” Mike said. “I’ll meet you down there.”

“Where are you going?”

“The kitchen. There’s no telling how long we’ll be down there. We’ll need food and water.”

“Good idea. I’ll come with you.”

“No, Pete. You need to let everyone else know. I’ll take care of getting the supplies.”

“You can’t carry all that stuff by yourself.”

“I’ll load it up on a cart and use the service elevator. That opens up right into the conference center. Long as you’ve got the bunker door open, it’ll be fine.”

I frowned. “Are you sure?”

He nodded. “Positive. Now go.”

“Be careful.”

“You, too. Just make sure you keep that door open for me.”

I promised him that I would, and then he ran down the hall, easily dodging the dead. His movements reminded me of a football player charging toward the end zone, intent on a touchdown. By the time the zombies reached for him, he was already past them. I turned the other way and headed for the bunker.

The next time I saw Mike, his throat had been torn out, his nose was hanging by a flap of skin, and one of his eyes was missing. That didn’t stop him, though. He showed up at the bunker door, just like he’d said he would.

And then he tried to eat me.

There were two entrances to the bunker. The first one was via an outdoor tunnel on the other side of the mountain, some distance from the hotel. Normally, when we gave visitors a tour, we started from that entrance after taking them there via a short bus ride. The entrance had a ten foot high steel blast door with a big sign affixed to it that said DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE. The sign had originally been put there to scare people away—random hikers or hunters who might have stumbled across it—but it was obsolete now. The Pocahontas kept the sign there as part of the ambience. Since the bunker was now nothing more than a museum, it added a touch of authenticity.

The other entrance was located inside the hotel itself, adjacent to our basement-level conference center. The conference center was a huge, open room where various organizations and groups held conventions, employee meetings, dinners, and things like that. It was a very plain room. The carpet was thin and worn. The overhead lights were too bright. The walls were a drab off-white color. I once overheard a hotel guest refer to the décor as “wholly uninspiring.” But one of those uninspiring walls concealed the bunker’s second entrance. When the partition was slid back, it revealed a second steel blast door, bigger than the door guarding the outside tunnel entrance. It was twelve feet high and twelve feet wide and weighed over twenty-five tons. Despite its size, the blast door was easy to open from the inside. Any healthy person could have done it. There was a wheel you turned to open or close the door, and all you had to do was apply fifty pounds of pressure. On tours, we always exited the bunker through this door, and it always took our guests by surprise when they emerged back into the hotel.

A shriek brought me back to my surroundings. A woman’s voice. I couldn’t tell whose, shouting about something biting her face.

The zombies flooded into the lobby and there was no time to wait for an elevator. I took the stairs two at a time and paused at the bottom of the stairwell. I put my ear to the door and listened, trying to determine if the conference center was safe or not, but I couldn’t tell. The screams from upstairs were too loud. Taking a deep breath, I slowly nudged the door open and peeked into the room. Either Mike’s warning had been heard, or others had the same idea as him, because there were a group of about twenty-five people cowering by the wall. About half of the group were folks I knew—employees of the hotel. The other half of the group looked like hotel guests or visitors. One big guy had a cable repairman’s uniform on. My friend Drew was among them, and I felt better when I saw him. I stepped through the door and hurried over to them.