The Resort (39 page)

Will, the oldest man on the Cactus Wrens, cried out in pain but Lowell did not stop to see what had happened. He put two more balls down, sent them flying, then grabbed two others from the grass next to him and hit them as hard as he could.

They were soon out of balls, so they started scrambling around on the grass to gather those that had landed about them.

“Tully!” Black called to their smallest and skinniest teammate, the one who would be the hardest target to hit. “Get a bucket and collect as many balls as you can!”

Tully scrambled around, gathering all he could and parceling them out to Black and the nearest Wrens while the rest of their teammates continued to grab their own from the ever-shrinking amount out there. If there were fewer balls around them, Lowell thought, that must mean that fewer were being hit at them, which meant that they must be winning. He paused for a moment to look across the green and was gratified to see several Coyotes nursing injuries and others hiding behind the net next to the far fence, given up. The bastards may have been given the advantage of an early warning, but through some freak stroke of luck, the unathletic collection of men who made up the Cactus Wrens seemed to have far superior luck in hitting their targets.

“Time!” the activities coordinator announced, and all activity suddenly ceased.

Lowell looked around. Two old men were rolling on the grass and moaning, the unlucky Tully had been knocked unconscious in a final volley, and a few people like himself had been hit and hurt. But for the most part, the Wrens had emerged from the encounter relatively unscathed.
Was this it?
Lowell thought.
Was this the end of it?

He should have known better.

“Clubs only!” Rockne cried, and before Lowell knew what was happening, an angry mob of Coyotes was racing toward them, golf clubs raised, mouths open in primal screams of fury.

Maybe it was because they were stationary rather than moving, maybe it was the luck of having fewer injured members, but despite their outwardly geeky appearance, his teammates whaled on the madly rushing Coyotes, taking them down. The Coyotes' aggressive screams turned into cries of pain and moans of agony as irons were slammed into their legs and midsections, and they fell hard on the grass. To his left, one big guy took a swing at Rand Black's head, missed, and Black returned the favor, his golf club connecting with the man's skull. The accompanying thwack of metal against flesh and bone sounded sickeningly satisfying, and a few seconds later, Lowell swung his own club into the breast of the old bitch who'd jumped against him in the basketball game. He felt more than heard her ribs crack, a woof of air escaping from her lips as she fell.

He expected her to hiss some invective at him, to use her iron to try and hit his feet from her prone position. He
wished
she would. But instead she merely looked up at him. “I know,” she said, and there was such sadness in her eyes that he had to turn away.

He backed up, moving under the awning away from the struggle, no longer having any stomach for this imposed institutionalized aggression, horrified at the damage he had wrought.

“Time!” the activities coordinator announced.

The adversaries on both sides quit save for two men in the center of the driving range who were furiously trying to take off one another's heads. The activities coordinator watched mildly until the Cactus Wren successfully felled the Coyote, who dropped to the grass and remained still.

It was now possible to see the extent of the carnage. Broken bleeding bodies lay all about the green, many with limbs posed at odd angles, quite a few unmoving and silent, presumably dead. A ragtag collection of survivors remained, and as though acting on instinct the Wrens retreated under the awning while the Coyotes limped to their original position at the opposite end of the field. Outside the fence, the onlookers were quiet. Lowell tried to spot his family among the devastated faces in the crowd but could not see them.

“For the second time in a row, the Cactus Wrens are declared the winners!” Rockne announced. There were a few halfhearted claps from the standing Wrens.

The air was heavy with tension. Everyone remained silent, waiting to see what would happen next.

“We're doing things a little differently now!” the activities coordinator said loudly. “The Roadrunners are not going to play against the Cactus Wrens! That final matchup will be saved for the next tournament! For now, the Roadrunners will administer punishment to the losing team!” He gestured theatrically toward the battered men and women in the center of the driving range. “Boys? Have at 'em!”

From a breach in the fence behind the small shed that stored the golf equipment, the Roadrunners ran out screaming, bodies covered with dirt, faces painted like the activities coordinator, weapons raised high. They were wielding golf clubs and baseball bats, spears and knives, and the expressions on their faces were of joy and excitement, a wild exultation at being allowed to finally run free and do what they wanted to do.

What were these men in real life? Lowell wondered as he watched with numb horror. Rand Black had said Blodgett was some sort of financial analyst. Did the others have equally innocuous jobs? Dentists? Realtors? Computer programmers? What did it take to turn someone like that into someone like this? Was the potential always there, lurking beneath the surface, waiting for the opportunity to emerge? He remembered Blodgett's hostility on the night he'd stolen their room . . . and Rachel's panties.

Yes,
he thought. The potential had always been there, and once more, his mind brought it all back to high school. He had sometimes wondered in the intervening years how the practically sociopathic kids who'd terrorized the hallways had been able to dial it down enough to get along in regular society, how they'd managed to find jobs and wives and a life in the real world when, deep down, they were the same assholes they had always been.

Because they covered it up, he thought now. Because they pretended to be people they were not.

Here, they were allowed to be themselves, their ids granted free rein.

The first Roadrunner reached the first Coyote. And bludgeoned him to death. Lowell watched it happen, watched as the bigger man took his baseball bat and swung it at the man's head as though it were a ball. The Coyote went down, bits of bone and brain flying. The others arrived and made contact, swinging golf clubs, thrusting with spears. Some of the Coyotes attempted to fight back and were quickly overpowered by their bigger, stronger and more combative adversaries, but most chose to run for it, and the air was filled with the whooping delight of the Roadrunners chasing down their prey.

The Coyotes' punishment for losing the game was death, and though deep down Lowell had known that from the beginning, it nevertheless terrified him. He felt at once relieved that they'd won the game and guilty that doing so had resulted in death for others.

They were spearing the injured on the ground, and Lowell scanned the driving range until he found the old lady. Blodgett himself was pounding on her head with a baseball bat. Not content with merely crushing her skull, he kept pounding until her head was little more than a pulpy red spot on the grass. Another woman, trying to flee, was taken down with a golf club to the stomach, and she shrieked in pure agony as a good-looking well-built man with a knife grabbed her hair and hacked off her scalp.

The Coyotes, Lowell realized, was the only team to have women on it.

He was not sure what that meant.

The fight, if that's what it was, was mercifully short. Part of it was the fact that so many Coyotes were already injured and the able-bodied Roadrunners simply overwhelmed them, although even if the Coyotes had been in peak form the outcome still would have been a foregone conclusion. In a matter of minutes, the Coyotes were either dead or had fled, and several Roadrunners climbed the tall fence to go after those who had escaped the same way.

The activities coordinator had been watching from the sidelines, and he strode purposefully to the middle of the grass. He raised his hands for silence but didn't get it this time. The Roadrunners were out of control and some were still beating on the dead bodies while the others laughed and high-fived each other and patted each other on the back, moving impatiently and excitedly around the center of the field.

Lowell did not like where this was going, and he quickly and surreptitiously backed up against the fence and made his way along the inside of it toward the gate, praying it was still unlocked.

“That is the end of today's tournament!” the activities coordinator announced. There was very little response.
Would he be giving out awards this time?
Lowell wondered, and shuddered to think what they might be for.

“Tomorrow—” Rockne began.

And was felled by a blow to the head.

“Shut the fuck up!” yelled Blodgett, and a cry of triumph went up from his fellow Roadrunners.

The activities coordinator collapsed in a spray of blood. Lowell tried to watch what happened to the man, but after he fell, Lowell could no longer see his body. He thought at first it was due to all the movement—Blodgett's angry pacing, the other Roadrunners' back and forth jostling—but it became clear almost instantly that Rockne was no longer there. He had disappeared.

Somehow Lowell was not surprised. On some level, he supposed he had even expected it.

He crept along the edge of the fence. What was going to happen now? He was under no illusion that the activities coordinator's disappearance meant an end to The Reata's reign of terror—whatever power lay at the heart of this evil place was still here—but Blodgett and his minions no longer had any checks on them, and Lowell had the feeling that was intentional. The Reata was using them all as pawns, playing with its guests to see how this would turn out.

Lowell knew exactly how it would turn out. Mob rule, a Darwinian nightmare. The Roadrunners would run roughshod over everyone else and turn the place into their own private playground, an anarchic melee.

Was that The Reata's goal? He thought of the abandoned resort in Antelope Canyon and the way it was changing. “Fixing itself up,” as Ryan said. Maybe the boys were on to something. Maybe that was the key to everything that was going on. Maybe
that
resort was the real power and was somehow feeding off this one. As the current Reata devolved, the old one in the canyon strengthened, growing younger, like some architectural Dorian Gray.

There were too many possibilities to consider, and all of that could be done at a later time. The priority now was getting out and getting away. He reached the gate and, keeping his eye on Blodgett and the Roadrunners immediately about him, opened it, sneaking through. There was no outcry, no one chased after him, and he was suffused with gratitude that he'd made it. Rachel and the boys had obviously been watching him, and they were there to meet him, taking him quickly back out through the crowd. Other Wrens were sneaking along the edge of the fence behind him—he obviously hadn't been nearly as secretive as he'd thought—and their families were silently motioning for them to hurry up. For now, the Roadrunners remained oblivious.

Lowell wished them well as he and his family, David still with them, crouched down and sped up the sidewalk away from the driving range, using the standing crowd of onlookers as cover. Once around the corner of a building, he hastened them back to their suite, locking the door when they arrived, using the chain and the deadbolt though he knew that neither could keep out a determined mob. He propped a chair under the doorhandle. David was silent and pale, and he wondered if the boy suspected his parents were dead. Lowell was almost certain of it.

“So what do we do now?” Rachel asked. Her voice was low and frightened.

Everyone was waiting for his answer, but he didn't have one. “We wait,” he said, closing the drapes and turning on the television. CNN was airing a White House press conference, and he was grateful for this window to the outside world.

Sometime before dark, the electricity went out.

 

Patrick hid in the limbs of a cottonwood tree, peeking through a screen of fluttering leaves, safe for the moment. The Roadrunners were still roaming the resort grounds, looking for stragglers, and he knew that if one of them caught him he would be killed.

He'd seen Tony Lawson, the Coyotes' captain, beaten to death with a spiked club.

Violence in real life was nothing like it was in movies. He'd known that on an intellectual level, of course, and like most of his friends he'd deplored war and aggression from a purely philosophical perspective, but seeing how quickly people could devolve into bloodthirsty beasts, he understood in his gut how deep-down horrible violence really was.

When the activities coordinator had announced that the Roadrunners were not to play against the winners but punish the losers, Patrick had fled, deserting his team, worried only for his own safety, caring only about preserving his own life. He hoped some others got out as well, but he wasn't going to risk his own life trying to help them.

“I stick my neck out for nobody,” Bogart said as Rick in
Casablanca,
and although he'd renounced that philosophy by the end of the film, Patrick still thought the sentiment one to live by.

Live
being the operative word.

So he'd jumped the fence, darting between cactus and behind palm trees until he'd reached the building that housed his room. Only he'd lost the key. The magnetic card had been in his shirt pocket, but it had obviously fallen out during the “game” or when he'd leaped over the fence, so Patrick quickly walked the pathways searching for someplace to hide. From around the corner of a building, he heard an old man cry “No! No! Please, God, help me!” and then the rough laughter of several other men, and that was when he climbed up the cottonwood tree, going as high as he could without venturing onto branches too weak and thin to be safe.