The Survivor Chronicles: Book 1, The Upheaval (33 page)

Al grabbed hold of her arm as she jutted her jaw out and thrust the pillow at the man. “Think of your daughter,” he quietly reminded her.

She looked torn as she glared at the man. The man handed them each a slip of paper when he realized that he wouldn’t be getting a fight from them. “Give this to the guy above,” he instructed.

Al nudged Mary Ellen forward, pushing her toward the stairwell. There was a small group ahead of them. A mother was pulling her crying toddler behind her while the father juggled a suitcase and a baby. Al was content to stay behind them as they made their way to the second floor.

There was another man at the top of the stairs, Al handed him his piece of paper. The man’s eyes were glazed as he nodded down the hall. Al thought he was going to stop Mary Ellen from coming with him but he just watched numbly as they walked away.

“Do you think we should stay here?” Mary Ellen inquired.

Al glanced up and down the hallway. There were a fair amount of doors open but some had been closed off. He stopped before his own room, the door was ajar but the light on the keypad was off. The hotel had to have generators but apparently someone had decided not to use them. Al didn’t blame them, but he would have killed for some air conditioning right now, or at least a piece of ice.

He pushed the door open and peered into the standard hotel room with its customary paintings, pastel colored blankets and walls, TV, and dresser. There were two double beds inside and a couch that had already been pulled out. He hadn’t expected to remain by himself in the room, but at least he would get first dibs on the bed and wouldn’t have to endure the havoc that couch would wreak on his back.

He dropped his pillow on the bed closest to the window and pulled aside the curtain to peer out. There was still a vast crush of people filtering into the stadium and toward the hotel or restaurant. Things were going to get very cramped, very fast. He glanced at Mary Ellen as she stepped beside him.

“Do you think this building is even safe after those quakes? I mean, there’s no way they would have the equipment to judge that before letting all these people in.”

Al glanced around the room but he couldn’t see any outward damage. It didn’t make him feel any safer though. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’m actually amazed by the amount of people who have willingly entered it.”

“We willingly entered it.”

“Sheep,” he muttered.

“Excuse me?”

“People are like sheep; they follow the herd and seek out security in insecure times. It’s not a bad thing. It has aided our survival through thousands of years of evolution. But we didn’t really think about the consequences of coming in here, we just followed the others and went for the familiar and the secure when we walked into this hotel. To us these walls, though possibly deadly, represent security. It’s the outside that frightens us with its vast expanse, animals, and unknown risks. We didn’t question it but we probably should have.”

“Do you think we should go outside? What if more quakes happen?” she asked nervously.

Al stared at the ceiling above him, he really didn’t feel like being pancaked by however many tons of concrete were above them, but he didn’t feel like wandering back out there, either. It was unreasonable to feel frightened by the world out there far more than the world in here, but he couldn’t shake it.

It felt exceedingly wonderful to sit on the bed, far more than any hotel bed should have felt. He longed to curl up on it, rest his aching muscles and simply sleep for the next week, because he knew he probably wouldn’t get another opportunity.

“We probably should,” he admitted but even so he knew he wouldn’t pull himself from this bed. At least not at this minute, maybe in the next one. He took a deep breath and forced himself to stand again. It would be a shame to be crushed to death simply because he didn’t feel inclined to remove himself from a bed.

Mary Ellen was staring longingly at the other bed. “Maybe we can walk up to the seventh floor, check out the structure for ourselves and see if we should leave the building then.”

He appreciated the fact that she didn’t ask if he was up to it, but even so his knees screamed in protest at the thought. However she was right, it probably would be the best idea. He wasn’t staying here if he saw cracks marking the walls.

He stared longingly at the bed and then the couch. He didn’t think it was a good idea to leave his pillow and water behind for someone to steal. He knew people as a whole were good and kind, far more generous than they were given credit for, but these were extreme circumstances and the survival instinct was the strongest. Far stronger than their sense of right and wrong.

He grabbed the pillow knowing that he was sacrificing his bed, but it was preferable to sacrificing his pillow and water. He followed Mary Ellen back out of the room and down the hall to a different staircase. He pushed open the door and peered into the stairwell, looking up and down he was relieved to find that it appeared deserted.

He held the heavy door open for Mary Ellen and followed her into the stairwell. He was glad no one else was around, he knew by the time they made it to the top his knees would be aching and he would appear weaker than he should. Grasping hold of the railing, he used it to help pull himself up the concrete stairs that wound through the far side of the building. He studied the walls, warily surveying them as they passed the third floor, the fourth, and then the fifth.

“I have to take a break,” Mary Ellen said.

He knew that it was more for him, but even so she stopped and sat on the first step. He sat beside her, absently rubbing his knee as he dug out his water and took a small sip. She accepted it when he offered it to her. “I wonder if they’ll hand everything out to us.”

“I imagine they have the supplies under rigid lockdown.” He took the bottle back from her and slipped it into the pillowcase.

“Who are they to decide?” she demanded.

“Military, police, but someone has to. Otherwise chaos would rule.”

“What’s to stop them from keeping it all for themselves?”

“Nothing but their moral code,” he admitted.

“Frightening thought.”

It was a terrifying thought, and one he didn’t intend to linger on. “Rested enough?” he inquired.

She studied him before nodding. “Yeah.”

He bit back a groan as he grabbed hold of the rail and pulled himself to his feet. She was worried enough about him without adding to it. He had a good ticker, or at least that’s what his doctor had told him at his appointment last month, and he’d always eaten well and tried to take care of himself. He wasn’t as worried he’d have a heart attack as the idiot downstairs had been, but his joints were most certainly not enjoying all the activity of the day.

Sixth floor, seventh… “Do you think we should go all the way to the top?” Mary Ellen asked worriedly.

Not one little bit, he thought.

“We probably should,” he said instead.

She hesitated for a minute before trudging further onward. They arrived at the tenth floor but continued up the stairs to the door to the roof. A red sign announced that an alarm would go off but he doubted that was going to happen with the power off and the generators not running. He pushed into the door and shoved it open, relieved with the silence.

The hot air hit him; he hadn’t realized how much cooler the shadowed and concrete stairwell had been until he stepped onto the tar paper lined roof. It was littered with the remains of birds and feathers. He imagined that by tomorrow they would start to smell hideously bad. He kicked the stopper down on the door and made sure it stayed propped open before leaving it.

“Ugh,” Mary Ellen muttered as she stepped carefully around the broken remains.

He couldn’t have said it any better himself as they made their way toward the edge of the building. This probably wasn’t the safest place to be, but he didn’t particularly care as curiosity drove him onward. He stopped at the edge, his mouth dropping as he gazed over the land that had been greatly changed since this morning. There was even more destruction than he had thought there would be.

They were lucky to be alive, and he was determined to make sure they stayed that way no matter what the cost. He just didn’t know how much the cost was going to be, or how either one of them would survive paying the toll.

Tears slid down Mary Ellen’s face. She turned away from the carnage. Al took one last, lingering look. There was a canyon out there that might rival The Grand Canyon, curling tendrils of smoke dotted the landscape as far as he could see, and there were rivers on the horizon he was certain hadn’t been there before. They were the color of blood. It was the eeriest thing he’d seen in his life, and though he didn’t believe that it was actually blood, he couldn’t shake the thought that it was. Couldn’t shake the thought that the life force of many humans was what now filled those rivers. He forced himself to turn away from a world that was no longer his and that he no longer knew.

Mary Ellen was creeping back through the broken bird bodies, her attention riveted upon the roof. “Well, I don’t see any breaks up here,” she muttered.

He didn’t see any either, but he didn’t know what that meant. He still didn’t trust the building beneath him, but there were visions of that bed dancing through his head as he prowled the roof with Mary Ellen.

“We should take the other stairwell back down.” Mary Ellen was already at the door.

He nodded as he followed her down the stairs and out of the stairwell. All of the doors on this floor were still open; apparently the hotel hadn’t filled up enough to have people pushed this far up. They entered the other stairwell, and though there were more cracks running through the walls on this side of the building, it still appeared in relatively stable condition.

Reaching the seventh floor, Mary Ellen pushed the door open and stepped into chaos. People were crammed into the hall, searching through rooms, shouting for other people and weeping loudly. Mary Ellen took a startled step back, bumping briefly against a child of five or six who ran screaming down the hall past them with his mother scrambling to keep up.

Mary Ellen began to push through the crush of bodies in the hall. Al’s nose wrinkled in response to the people around him, most were in desperate need of a shower, as was he. Mary Ellen’s room was around a corner and almost at the end. She disappeared inside and Al quickly followed.

Five women looked up as they entered; four of them were standing next to the two double beds while the other was sitting on the pull out couch. They were slouched and dirty, disheveled with an air of defeat that frightened him. “I’m supposed to be staying here,” Mary Ellen informed them in a choked voice.

The woman on the couch shook her head and turned her attention back to her clasped hands. “Guess I’m sharing too,” she muttered.

Mary Ellen looked like she’d just been socked in the stomach. Al’s hand tightened on the pillow. He hoped they would let him take the pillow back when they left the hotel, and he hoped it didn’t start to rain or hail or some other new thing Mother Nature may just be waiting to throw at them when they went out there. But he knew, without having to ask, that Mary Ellen was not going to stay here. He had no intention of doing so either, if this was what his room was going to be like. In fact, he suspected that by the end of the day, or at least by tomorrow night, there would be people sleeping on the floors. He’d take sleeping outside over that any day.

He grabbed hold of her forearm. “Why don’t we just go,” he suggested. She opened her mouth to protest but he quickly cut her off. “At least back to my room where it’s a little calmer.” He glanced at the women. “And private.”

She nodded mutely but panic lingered in her eyes. He reluctantly reentered the turmoil enshrouding the hall and pulled her back toward the stairwell they had just left. They passed by others on their way down but no one spoke and most just seemed content to remain oblivious to the two of them. On the second floor he returned to his room to find it as empty as it had been before, but more of the doors in the hall had now been closed off. He gratefully tossed his pillow onto the bed and released a relieved sigh as he sat down.