Free Night of the Living Trekkies by Kevin David Anderson, Sam Stall, Kevin David, Sam Stall Anderson Page A

in this chair and wait. Will you do that?”
    Another slow nod.
    “Great. I won’t be long, all right?”
    No nod this time. Just a stare.
    “Okay,” Jim replied on her behalf. “I’ll be right back.”
    He shouldered the backpack and walked out the door.
    “No,” Janice whispered after he departed. “You won’t.”

Chapter 9
Hope and Fear

    As Jim walked through the hotel’s offices toward the front desk, the banging from the entrance grew louder and louder. He got down on his hands and knees, crawled to the end of the check-in counter, and peeked around the corner.
    He could just make out what he figured were the two pedestrians he’d seen on the street—a young man and woman, both fairly well dressed, looking something like a couple that had been out on a date. Now they pounded on the glass with bloody fists, creating large, smearing circles of red and black. Their loud, strange moans made Jim’s neck hair stand up.
    But that wasn’t the worst.
    There weren’t just two of them anymore. There were at least a dozen, all in roughly the same sorry condition as the first pair.
    One, a middle-aged man wearing the remnants of a UPS uniform, had taken what looked like a point-blank shotgun blast. A vast, bloody crater had been scalloped out of his chest. Another seemed to have extricated herself from a flaming car wreck. Her clothes were charred and smoking, her hair singed away, her body covered with livid-red burns the exact shade of barbecued brisket. Crawling underneath them was a corpse with no legs, dragging itself along on its hands.
    No such thing as zombies, my ass
, Jim thought.
    He knew now that his instincts had been right all along. Something had happened. This
was
Dawn of the Freaking Dead. The end of the world was upon them, and his poor kid sister had no idea.
    He forced himself to focus his thoughts. One thing at a time. First, find Dexter and secure the perimeter. Then get the remaining guests—especially Rayna—into a safe position where they could plan their next move.
    Jim scuttled down to the far end of the check-in counter. He took a deep breath, calmed himself, then stood up and walked, as nonchalantly as possible, toward the elevators. They were only about a hundred feet away, but it felt like a hundred miles.
    Maybe they won’t notice
, he thought as he stepped out into the open.
    They noticed. Jim’s sudden appearance set off a chorus of moans. The glass took an even more vigorous pummeling, but he knew it would hold. It was bullet-resistant and half an inch thick. The zombies could beat on it all day to no effect. The only thing capable of breaking the glass would be a moving vehicle, but driving one seemed beyond the capabilities of the gang out front.
    Jim’s legs felt like noodles as he closed the last few steps to the elevators. He pressed the call button and waited.
    And waited.
    At first he tried not to look at the entrance. But curiosity—and his own sense of self-preservation—won out. If one of those things somehow got through, he didn’t want to have his back to it.
    So, while the elevators took their sweet time descending to the ground floor, he looked.
    When he did, his stomach rolled.
    It’s the gang from the alley
, Jim thought.
It’s all the people who went out to smoke or to make a phone call and never came back.
    Among the crowd he recognized Kai Opaka—or rather, a middle-aged woman dressed in the elaborate vestments of Bajor’s supreme spiritual leader. She wore a purple robe and headdress, but the lower half of her jaw had been torn away, opening her neck and exposing the knobby ridges of her spine. And there was the boy who’d been playing with the toy phaser, the one who complained about the bad TV reception. Someone had plunged a carving knife into the side of his neck, and yet still he walked.
    An elevator announced its arrival with a ding. Jim could barely hear it over the noise from the crowd.
    He stepped aboard and hit the button for the third