Chapter 13
Trip and I went on patrol. We were one of ten different teams out looking for early signs of trouble. Most of those had a casino employee or two with them to keep them from getting lost in the confusing place. Earl had directed the two of us to the camera room to try to coordinate some more help.
It had been an hour since the quarantine had started, but the Feds still hadn’t tried to communicate with us. Phones, radio, and internet were all down. Cable TV still worked, and as we passed a big screen above one of the bars, I spotted the front of the Last Dragon. “Hey, that’s about us.”
The man being interviewed was a tough guy in a suit with a short haircut, which pretty much screamed MCB. “You know, that guy looks like he’s in really good shape for a CDC spokesman.” Trip found the remote on top of the bar and turned the volume up.
“There’s no need for alarm. Everything is safe and contained. One of the guests at the casino showed symptoms of a very rare type of African hemorrhagic fever.”
“Is that like Ebola?” asked the nervous reporter.
The agent looked right at the camera. “Yes. Exactly like Ebola. Which is why we suggest that everyone stays well back from the containment area. It is very contagious.”
“Is there any danger of it spreading?”
The MCB agent gave a fake laugh. “Oh, no. Everything is perfectly safe and there is no danger at all to the city of Las Vegas. The people inside may be inconvenienced, but our doctors are testing them now. Once we are certain that no one else is infected then they will be released. The whole procedure should only take a few days at most.”
“Great. We’ve officially got Ebola.” If the hundreds of innocent people trapped in here hadn’t been freaked out before, they would be now. I looked over at Trip. “How much you want to bet somebody at the MCB is getting screamed at for forgetting to shut the cable off into here before that aired?”
The TV turned to static. “Jinx. Way to go, Z.”
“Sorry.”
We continued walking through the oddly lit neon wonderland of beeping and clicking slot machines. It felt odd being so empty of people, but the entire casino floor area had been closed off. There had been some argument about what to do with everyone stuck here. Some of the casino staff had wanted to try to stick to business as usual, but Earl had been rather persuasive that that was an incredibly stupid idea. Since word had arrived from their management that they were to cooperate with us, they had acquiesced.
Some of the Hunters had thought it was best to keep everyone in their rooms, while others had thought it was best to try to put everyone into a few big areas so they could be watched. Both methods had their pros and cons, and depending on what we were dealing with, either one could potentially be the best or worst possible thing to do. If we were dealing with something like a fast-spreading mutating plague or undead outbreak, then keeping people separate behind locked doors and controlling choke points made a lot of sense. In a situation like that, sticking everyone in one place could potentially create a zombie army in a matter of minutes. On the other hand, keeping them in small groups made them virtually impossible to defend, and would be terrible if the phenomenon could simply pop up wherever it felt like, which is what had apparently happened in Hugo’s room. It wouldn’t do any good to be isolated behind a locked door if the thing he had called Nachtmar could simply float up through your carpet and chop you to pieces.
The decision was a moot one anyway, since very few of the bystanders that had been trapped here were inclined to listen to us, and the place was a huge maze of interlocking rooms and confusing corridors, so if somebody wanted to wander off it wasn’t like we could really stop them. It’s a free country. Most of the trapped non-Hunters and employees were clustered in the common areas, some whining, others nervous, though nobody had panicked yet. The Ebola announcement would probably change that, and it would more than likely really suck for Nelson and Hunters that had volunteered to herd sheep.
Meanwhile, the Hunters had thrown politeness out the window and were all openly armed, and many of them didn’t speak a lick of English. Not to mention that this was Nevada, and the SHOT Show was in town, so many of the stuck gamblers were probably concealing guns too. I was all in favor of people packing heat, but we didn’t want anyone to get jumpy and decide that my side were the bad guys here, so MHI was encouraging the other Hunters to be polite.
Hotel security had still been consulting their manuals to see if there was an official policy about what to do in a situation like this by the time we had a small private army wandering their halls looking for monsters. So security had shut down the gambling areas and locked up the money. Now they were mostly protecting the vault and trying to keep their trapped tourists calm. They’d been told to defer to Earl’s judgment, a wise choice. The only services trying to conduct business as usual were a strategic few of the restaurants, open for breakfast, because people full of bacon are less likely to riot.
Not too bad of a reaction considering we had only been quarantined for an hour. It had been one heck of a crazy day and the sun wasn’t even up yet.
“I think this is it,” Trip pointed at a door that was nearly invisible under the strange lighting. There was a swipe pad for a key card. He tugged on the door, found it locked, then knocked and waited.
A few seconds later it was opened for us by a middle-aged, overweight man in a wrinkled gray suit, who blocked the way and regarded us suspiciously. He was wearing a big gold name tag that read Mitch. “Who’re you?”
“We’re from MHI,” Trip said.
“Let’s see some ID,” he demanded.
Trip looked down at his body armor. “Seriously?”
“These particular circumstances aren’t exactly in the handbook, okay? Gimme a second…Fine. Management warned me you were coming. This is on them if you do anything stupid. All right. I’m the night-shift surveillance room supervisor. This way.”
We entered a very normal corridor that could have come out of any office building in America. “How’d they tell you we were coming? I thought the phones were down.”
“There’s an internal switchboard and operator. We can still call from room to room, but we can’t call out,” Mitch explained. That was good to know. I’d have to make sure to alert Earl and spread the word. “I saw you coming. I see everything here. Management said I was supposed to fully cooperate with you.” He took note of Abomination and Trip’s KRISS submachine gun. “Rules say no unauthorized weapons in the control room. That’s in the handbook.”
“I’m not feeling real rulesy right now, Mitch.”
“We’re trained professionals,” Trip said. “We’re perfectly safe.”
“Friggin’ management…I get fired if I don’t follow the handbook but they just toss order right out the window at the first sign of trouble. Management just picks and chooses which rules to ignore and then everything turns to chaos, and you watch, because then it goes on my evaluation…Chaos, I tell you.”
“Total chaos. Complete pandemonium, I know, but here’s the thing, you can have my full-auto shotgun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. Apparently your management is on my side in this argument, so quit dinking around and let’s go.”
“All right, fine. Guns, guns, guns. You better be on your best behavior.” The chunky man turned and led us down the hall. “What’s going on?”
“Have you seen the news?” I asked.
“Before it went out, we were. It isn’t Ebola,” Mitch said. “I know that much.”
“What do you know?”
“Damned near everything.”
“That’s unlikely,” I whispered to Trip.
“Whatever it is, we don’t need outside contractors to handle it. We’ve got our own security force here. My guys can handle anything.”
“Well, apparently management disagrees with you there, Mitch.”
Muttering profanity, Mitch swiped his card and led us through another door into a large room. Two uniformed security guards watched us suspiciously and put their hands on their holstered pistols, but since we were with Mitch they hesitated. Trip gave them a friendly wave. “Morning.” Past the guards were a bunch of employees watching dozens of computer monitors. Each monitor was divided into four separate camera views, and they switched around every few seconds.
“That’s a lot of cameras.”
“Thank you,” Mitch answered with pride. This was obviously a man who owned his job. “Hey…wait a second, dreadlocks. I recognize you now. You two were with that bunch that trashed the buffet.”
“It was all a misunderstanding,” I said.
“We looked great on the security video, though…I mean, we probably looked great on video.” Trip corrected himself. “I can only assume. Obviously.”
“Freaking management.” Mitch grumbled. “They said we were supposed to be nice to you conference attendees. At least the polo-shirt bunch had the common decency to move to a hotel across the street and out of my hair. If it was up to me I would’ve pressed charges and never ever let any of you back on the property.”
“But then we wouldn’t be here to save the day now.”
“Freaking management.” Mitch gave the sort of resigned sigh that only a truly disgruntled employee that knows he’s smarter than his bosses can make. “Come on.” Mitch took us to the first couple of computers. “These banks cover the street. How many people you got out there now, Mickey?”
The employee manning those computers looked over and did a double-take when he saw how Trip and I were dressed. “I lost count when the National Guard showed up.”
Mitch continued his tour. “Most of these cameras are of the casino floor, these show the shops and plaza, here’s the conference center, and we can cover every corridor and elevator in the hotel. I saw you all running around on sixteen earlier. We called the police and sent up a security team, but they got turned away by some of you assholes who wouldn’t let them up the stairs—”
One of the uniformed security guards butted in. “They don’t pay us enough to argue with a bunch of crazies with machine guns.”
“And then this—this travesty.” Mitch pointed at one of the four squares on the screen. It was black. “Can you believe that?”
“There’s nothing there,” Trip pointed out.
“Exactly. You people broke one of my cameras.”