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

floor. Glancing around, he found everything was still as it should be. No broken glass, no blood on the floor, no abandoned personal items.
    The doors slid shut, silencing the moaning and the pounding. In its place, all he could hear was Nichelle Nichols singing her cover of “That’s Life.”
    Everything felt normal. For a moment—and for the last time—Jim allowed himself the luxury of imagining that perhaps things weren’t as bad as they seemed.
    That feeling lasted exactly as long as it took the elevator to reach the third floor, and for its doors to open.

Chapter 10
Dagger of the Mind

    Back on the first floor, Janice sat in Dexter’s office, impatiently tapping her foot. She stared at the clock on the wall, watching the second hand sweep through minute after uneventful minute.
    The interlude allowed her time to think. Which, in her current state, was the most dangerous thing she could do.
    The hotel staff had vanished. So had most of the guests. The phones didn’t work. There were riots—or something like riots—in the streets. And now Jim had left her alone.
    She looked at the clock again. Every time the red second hand reached the top of the dial face, the minute hand snapped forward with a pronounced
click
. She’d never noticed that sound before. How could she have never noticed?
    As she stared at the clock, her subconscious mind made a decision. Instead of trying to make sense of the whirl of events, it simply pushed them away. The evening’s growing list of horrors and mysteries were gathered into a tight ball and sealed inside a brittle shell of denial.
    Denial and delusion.
    “I’m the day manager,” Janice told herself, as if suddenly remembering. “I’ve been doing my job for seventeen years and I’ve got a hotel to run.”
    Everything else was deleted.
    She turned her attention to the racket in the lobby. People wanted in. Paying guests. They were probably angry. And it was her responsibility to help. Or at the very least explain what was wrong. Communication was often the key to soothing unhappy guests. People were surprisingly forgiving of subpar service when they understood the circumstances. The best way to earn lots of one-star reviews on travel Web sites was to keep your customers in the dark about problems.
    Yet here she was, the day manager, parked in a chair because some kid told her not to move.
    It didn’t make sense. None of it made any sense.
    All she had to do was take charge.
    Janice got up, took a deep breath, and gathered herself.
    “Everything will be fine,” she thought. “I just have to face the problem and deal with it.”
    She left Dexter’s office, walked slowly through the Botany Bay’s abandoned administrative center and into the lobby. Her arrival set off a thunderous round of moaning and pounding.
    She walked up to the interior doors. Close enough to get a good look at the crowd outside. She saw several of the costumed Star Trek people. They looked like they’d been in some sort of accident.
    Her mood improved a bit when she spotted Oscar.
    “Oscar!” she shouted over the din. “Are you all right? Where have you been?”
    Oscar, she plainly saw, was not all right. There was blood all over his face, and something had opened up his torso and caused his intestines to spill out. The gray entrails dragged behind him like a tangled garden hose.
    It occurred to Janice that he should seek medical attention, not stand outside pounding on the glass with his brawny arms.
    Clearly something had to be done.
    She thought of her training, of the management seminars she attended twice a year at the company headquarters in Charleston. Then she cleared her throat and began to speak.
    “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry to announce that your rooms are unavailable,” she told the bloody horrors clambering outside. “The Botany Bay Hotel and Conference Center was founded on the promise of delivering excellent customer service to our guests. I realize we are failing to