Race to Refuge

Chapter Sixteen: Mallory

When I woke up this time, I knew exactly where I was and what was going on. I was in a hotel. I'd just watched my car basically get rendered unusable by looters. My few possessions were strewn around a parking lot populated by roaming zombies. I felt numb. But I also felt refreshed. I squinted at the clock and saw that I'd been able to sleep a couple of hours

Still, I lay in the bed. I stared at the ceiling as I tried to figure out what my next move should be. Staying at this hotel was definitely not a good longterm solution. There were obviously zombies in the area. I still had a tough time thinking of those infected victims as zombies, but it certainly made it easier than thinking of them in a sympathetic way as former moms, husbands, and children.

In the short term, I decided I needed to take advantage of the amenities that I did have. I needed to get cleaned up. I needed to see how much food those looters had left in the hotel. Then I needed to get away. The problem part of the whole plan was the getaway. I didn't much like the idea of driving a car that had broken windows. Not with zombies trying to get in. So maybe I needed to find another vehicle, although even thinking about taking someone else's car made me feel like a thief. From what I could tell, though, I was the only living inhabitant of the hotel. It was dead silent in the building and the front desk certainly hadn't been manned. The uniformed zombies that attacked the looters must have been the front desk staff for the hotel and they clearly wouldn't be needing their keys or their cars any longer. I rooted around behind the front desk to see if I could locate any keys.

Next I would need to recover as much of my stuff as possible from the parking lot and throw it into the "new" car while eluding zombies.

Maybe I needed to check and see if the mini-bar in my room was stocked.

My entire plan both scared me to death and made me very determined and focused. I did have a tiny bit of beer (because who knew the next time a cold beer might come my way?) from the mini-bar while I took a hot bath and got completely clean for the first time in days.

Then I headed downstairs to check out the 'complimentary breakfast' area. Usually it would just have cereal boxes, milk, eggs, sausages, oatmeal packets, coffee, and things like that. It looked like the looters had eaten up a good amount of the breakfast foods that had been put out by the staff so I went down a short hall to see if I could find a pantry or a storage area where the hotel kept its food. Bingo. And it looked like the looters hadn't made it that far. They'd probably been too busy trying to find rooms to break into.

The hotel front door wasn't secured and, upon quick inspection, didn't seem to really be able to be easily secured. I guess that made sense, since when the business was operating normally, people likely would have been coming and going at all hours. But it didn't make me feel safe. I pulled out a clean, clear garbage bag from a box in the storage room and put as many items as I could in it. Making sure the coast was clear, I took the bag up to "my room," which I'd been careful to leave unlocked so that I could get back in if I needed to. I was so paranoid by this time that I even checked around the hotel room and bathroom to make sure there were no looters, no zombies, or just anything I didn't know about in there before carefully bolting the door behind me. Being on the run like this must have done something to my mind.

I sat down at the desk in the room and started opening cereal boxes. I ended up eating a lot more food than I thought I would. I hadn't even realized I was hungry before I started eating. I didn't even want to think about how much sugar I was downing as I kept going through cereal boxes. Ordinarily, my diet would have been something I spent more time considering. Right now, I was just glad to have something to eat that I didn't have to catch or grow myself. Because, if Joshua was right, that was going to be the next step.