Outnumbered (Vol. 1)

Act 5: Trendy & Spendy

Day 3 – 16:08; Denver, CO United States:

We travel on in the vehicle I had picked out at the zoo. Kassandra is sitting in the console seat, between David and I, in the front. She passed out some time ago and is leaning against me. It makes it hard for me to drive this way, but she looks so peaceful, I cannot bring myself to wake her. David is pretty knowledgeable about Denver, so he is watching for places to stop. Much like Kassandra, Dwayne is passed out in the back, behind my seat, leaning against the window with his head laying in his left palm. Cheyenne is laying across the backseat, asleep, with her head in Dwayne's lap. She must be pretty exhausted too. She would never get that close to Dwayne.

    After an hour of driving around in circles, trying to find a safe haven to rest for a bit, we eventually come into Downtown Denver. Just as the heavy rain begins to slow down in its falling, we come across the famous 16th Street Mall. According to David, 16th Street Mall is a pedestrian and transit mall, stretching one and one-fourth miles down 16th Street. Luckily for us, the mall has over three-hundred locally owned and chain stores, fifty restaurants, and the Denver Pavilions. That means there is plenty of shelters, and hopefully, plenty of food too. It is only the end of the second day of this zombie apocalypse, so there should be some food left in some of these places.

     Or is that just wishful thinking?

    "Just park over there at that Plaza hotel, for now. Let's go in there, make sure it's safe, and then we'll pick a room for each of us to stay in for the night. We'll go start getting whatever we might need from the shops at the mall, tomorrow," David makes a plan.

    After parking the Chevvy Impala we were riding in, we all walk into the Plaza hotel through the front doors. Dwayne and Kassandra are both still in the process of fully waking up, but the rest of us are alert and prepared for the worst. Throughout the ridiculously large lobby, not a single zombie can be spotted. It seems we are safe for now.

    David continues on ahead of us, dropping his guard a bit. He walks to a door that reads "employees only" and attempts to open it. As expected, it is locked by a key pad connected to the door knob. David comes back around to the front desk and climbs over. Once behind the counter, Dwayne and I both climb over as well. Cheyenne stands in place, watching, and Kassandra stays next to her, rubbing her eyes.

    "I'm looking for where they keep the keys to the rooms," David informs us, in case there was any question of what he was doing.

    "Here they are!" I find them in a drawer on the opposite side of the desk that David is searching on. David comes over to get them from me.

    David takes off the rubber band that is holding the cards together in a neat stack, puts it in his pocket, then takes five cards from the pile and sits the rest on the shiny, marble surface of the desk. He sticks one card into some sort of machine and holds the other four in his hand.

    "What does that do?" I wonder.

    David slips over to the desktop computer next to the machine and wakes it from its Sleep Mode by jiggling the mouse connected to the modem.

    "It makes the cards usable for certain doors," David informs me.

    "You know how to use that thing?" Dwayne is impressed.

    "Not exactly. But I've seen it done plenty of times. I can probably figure it out."

    After a few minutes of working with the computer, David hands us each a card key. He activated the rooms closest to the lobby on the bottom floor, just down the main hall. Each room is located next to each other, two being on the opposite wall directly across from the other three. The rooms all look really nice. I am sure they would have been expensive in a normal situation. My favorite parts about them are the king size beds and the huge, pearly white bathtubs with broad, metal shower heads that are so clean I can see my reflection on some of their surfaces.