Mariella abandoned the hot-wired car two blocks away from the Olympus Springs Hotel - "so people don't ask any difficult questions", she told Bert - then she did her very best to swagger up to the front doors of the hotel, drawing astonished looks from all who caught sight of her. Most awestruck of all was Candice, who let a bundle of fresh towels fall to the floor as she saw her friend...
"How...?", mumbled Candice as she came up to Mariella, who now stood at the reception desk, pushing her sunglasses up onto the top of her head. "What...?"
"Would you be so kind as to take my luggage up to my suite?", chirped Mariella, winking back at her friend.
Taking the bag from Bert, Candice followed Mariella to the elevators, and followed her into the next available car. Only when the doors were closed, and the ascent commenced, did Candice succeed in stringing words together in anything approaching a coherent fashion. "You look... awesome!", she squealed. "What did you do, steal that stuff?"
Mariella admired herself in the semi-polished lift doors. "I salvaged it", she said with a shrug. "Seemed like such a waste to leave it all for rats to chew on..."
"Is... is it that bad out there?", gasped Candice.
"Not quite", admitted Mariella, "but I wasn't gonna take the chance."
Candice had been on the verge of getting just a bit too serious, and Mariella did her best to pull her friend back from the brink. "Got you a present", she told Candice, and fished in the bag for the second belt. "Not much, but..."
"Oh holy...", exclaimed Candice, eyes widening at the sight of the price tag. "I have never owned anything even close to costing this much!"
The girl's expression faltered. "But... but it's leather", she sighed. "I'm a vegetarian..."
So, this is gonna be a fight, thought Mariella. "Guess you don't want to try on the jacket, then."
Candice's resolve wavered for all of two seconds. "Right now, I'd gnaw the backside off a cow!"
The two girls stepped out onto Mariella's floor, all cares and anxieties left behind in the elevator, Candice proudly sporting the leather jacket, toying with the collar, undecided whether it looked best turned up or down. It did Mariella to the power of good to see that there was still some joy in this crazy, screwed-up world - certainly enough for herself, maybe enough for Candice too...
...and catalysed by those thoughts, a plan began to form.
"Oh my god", murmured Candice as Mariella sat down on the bed in her room, and crossed her legs. "I love those boots! Can I try those, too?"
"Not a chance", declared Mariella, the beginnings of a sly expression blooming across her face. "But... if you're up for it, you can always go and get a pair for yourself..."
"But we're not supposed to go outside unless there's someone with us", Candice said in reply. "We can't..."
Mariella had just the right response for that. "Says who...?"
"But it's stealing", insisted Candice, taking a seat next to her devious friend. "I hear talk that the Army are gonna be out there - we'll get shot!"
"Air Force, not Army", Mariella corrected, "and they're more interested in looking after themselves, protecting their base, and all their planes and shit. They also got those 'zombies' t'worry about - and I think the last thing on their mind will be a coupla girls 'on the town'."
Candice shook her head in disbelief. "You can't be serious..."
"It took the Miami cops years to work out even half our tricks", Mariella assured her, turning Candice's jacket collar back down. "This is the military we're talking about right now - if they can't bomb it or shoot it down, they don't know shit about it - and the badges back home didn't have the slightest idea about half the stuff I got away with."
Candice took off the jacket, and sat with it in her lap, deep in thought - then she looked deep into Mariella's eyes, and Mariella recognised the fire she saw in her friend. "Okay", murmured Candice, a tremour of reckless excitement in her voice. "When do we go...?"
Dr Calloway had only barely finished picking up the pieces from Mariella da Silva's visit, and the subsequent encounter with the "zombies", when news reached her of even more guests, and not entirely welcome ones at that. The Air Force had arrived.
"Captain Christopher Brenner, United States Air Force", announced the surprisingly young military man, who had arrived with several fully armed men - helmets, body armour, automatic weapons. "Ma'am, I understand you've recently had an encounter with the so-called 'zombies' - a rather close encounter..."
"Yes", Anne replied. "They came walking in here - three of them - and one of them even spoke to me."
Captain Brenner's keen green eyes widened. "It spoke?", he said, sounding as surprised as he looked. "About what?"
"'Non-local technology', or something like that", Dr Calloway answered. "They seemed especially interested in my last patient - one of those... things seemed to merge with that computer. The last thing they accessed were her medical records..."
"You have a name for this patient?", asked the Captain.
Dr Calloway was going to protest about patient confidentiality, but someone else got to the issue first, and kicked her reservations out from under her. "Mariella da Silva", said Dr Halsted, who was conscious and coherent, but still recovering from his "shock". "Records says she's been dead for nearly a year..."
Halsted tried to stand, and Dr Calloway and one of the Air Force personnel converged on the doctor as he faltered in rising. "You don't look so good, Doctor", said Captain Brenner. "What exactly happened here?"
Dr Halsted took a moment to get his breath and balance back, sipping from a cup of water the Captain gave him. "The da Silva girl came in with memory loss, but when she touched me, it was like touching a live contact in a car engine - I've done that, I know just what it's like, but this was like that times twenty, maybe fifty..."
"And the... visitors, they asked about this girl directly?", asked Brenner.
"I was unconscious", said Dr Halsted. "Doctor Calloway saw and heard everything."
Brenner turned to Dr Calloway. "Is that true?", he asked. "Please, Dr Calloway, this is vitally important."
"I'm still not sure exactly what I saw", said Anne, "but what I heard... I have my patient's privacy to consider..."
"It's a matter of national security", said the Air Force officer, advancing on her. "Based on current figures, we estimate that at least two thirds of the population of the entire planet have changed into these things. We're outnumbered, Dr Calloway - and now they're getting violent. Doctor, they killed a man outside this very hospital."
"I... I thought I heard something", mumbled Anne. "One of the nurses said there'd been an accident - I didn't know..."
"Well, now you do", said Brenner. "Doctors, I'm going to have to ask you to come with us back to the base. We're going to need to get a detailed picture of events here, before we take any action."
"And by 'ask', you mean 'insist'", said Dr Halsted. "I know the military - and I'll be happy to give you all the assistance you require..."
Halsted directed a stern gaze towards Dr Calloway, and what he said next caused what felt like a great oppressive weight to form inside her, somewhere between her heart and her stomach: "...as will Dr Calloway, here."
Anne was helpless, trapped. As a doctor, her first duty was to "do no harm", and she hoped her assisting the Air Force wouldn't cause Mariella da Silva to come to any harm...
She also hoped she hadn't provided aid to someone who might bring the wrath of the "zombies" down on what was left of humanity.
Bert suddenly sat up, wide awake, and for a moment, he failed to recognise his surroundings. Looking around with his one good eye, he gradually pieced together where he was, and what little there was left of who he was - he was in one of the offices of The Olympus Springs Hotel, and every person currently residing there relied on his steadfast guidance to keep them alive, and out of trouble during the current crisis.
He didn't remember falling asleep - in fact, he rarely recalled ever sleeping - but apparently, he had been at the computer, accessing the intermittently functioning internet for some reason he couldn't quite call to mind. He'd heard that some people had been sharing information on the movements and locations of large concentrations of "zombies", which some watchers called "drones" in reference to creatures in some TV show or other...
For a moment, Bert sat deep in thought - maybe he'd been trying to find out something about Mariella, something beyond the police report Troy had given him - a dead-end figuratively and literally. There were all those "social networking" sites, where young people shared their secrets, and maybe Mariella had used one of those, for herself, or maybe her gang in Miami, the luridly-named "Bloody Doves" - but Bert couldn't remember looking at any of them, let alone finding anything of use. This he blamed on the condition that had wiped out his past, but this time, he wasn't going to let a faltering memory stop him - not when the computer should already be doing the remembering for him.
The man with the ruined face did something he had not done before in his truncated memory - he called up the computer's records of recently visited web-sites, and studied the information closely. None of them seemed immediately familiar: in the past two hours, someone had visited a free web-mail service called "Omninet Mail"; some site to do with reporting police breaches of human rights going by the bizarre name of "EyeOnThePigsty.com"; a rather dry-looking academic site concerned with the biology and behaviour of insects...
The web-site on insects sounded strangely interesting, but as Bert opened the Options menu of the computer's web-browser, he concentrated on looking for something to do with one of the other sites that had been accessed recently. As he had hoped, the browser had the capability to store log-in names and passwords for those sites that used them - including Omninet Mail - and saved along with user information for sites that had not been accessed for weeks was a user account for Omninet Mail: user name "BertLV", password "dontforgetsara".
"Who's Sara?", wondered Bert, as he steered with mouse and keyboard to Omninet Mail, hoping to find out just who had been getting emails from "BertLV", and what they contained. The user name and password allowed him into an account that saw only occasional use, with one message in the Inbox, a dozen or so in the Sent folder.
Bert opened the newly-received, untitled message, from "victim1@eyeonthepigsty.com", but all it contained were strings of numbers, punctuated now and again by dashes. The same was true of many of the messages in the Sent folder, except for two, which both had titles - one, the very first, bore the title "I Know Something", and the more recent of the two had the rather alarming subject line "DESTROY THIS".
In future, refer to The St Louis Journal of Academic Entomology. Article - page - paragraph - line - word. Destroy this message.
Bert reopened the latest incoming message, and in a separate on-screen window, he called up the web-site of The St Louis Journal of Academic Entomology, and the laborious process of decoding began: "Ask... her... about... "
After about half an hour, Bert had decoded it all, and was rather troubled by what he read:
Ask her about the traveller - stop. Reply immediately if she knows him - stop. Expect arrive tomorrow - stop. Confirm present location - stop.
Bert sat back, fascinated, yet at the same time quite alarmed. For the last two weeks or so, he had been sending coded emails to a stranger, and he didn't even know about it. There seemed to be nothing he could do, except wait for "victim1@eyeonthepigsty.com" to arrive, and confront the mystery recipient about what had been going on - but first, he needed all the information he could get, and that meant decoding the rest of the emails that had been sent. It would be only half the conversation, but it was a lot more than he had when he woke up.
Gradually, Bert began to piece together something of the past fifteen days; a conversation laden with promises, but short on actual content, with the startling exception of the last message sent by "BertLV"...
Based at Olympus springs hot eel - stop. Found someone - stop. Young female with no memory - stop. Remember you telling about strange people in new york - stop. Is she one of them maybe - stop.
Bert shuddered. The message was dated the previous night, only hours after Mariella had been brought back to the hotel, and put to bed...
...to be continued...
Posted at 23:21 on 25.10.2009
~ o O o ~
Previously...
Mane-of-Night And The Wayward Child - Chapter 10 - 06.11.2009
Mane-of-Night And The Wayward Child - Chapter 9 - 04.11.2009
Mane-of-Night And The Wayward Child - Chapter 8 - 02.11.2009
Mane-of-Night And The Wayward Child - Chapter 7 - 30.10.2009
Mane-of-Night And The Wayward Child - Chapter 6 - 28.10.2009
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
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