Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set (240 page)

“The suitcases will blow up?” Diantha said in her shrill voice. “The unclaimed coffins in the basement, too? If the basement goes, the building will collapse!” I’d never heard Diantha sound so human.

“We have to wake them up,” I said. “We have to get them out.”

“The building’s going to blow,” said Barry, trying to process the idea.

“The vamps won’t wake up.” Cecile the practical. “They can’t.”

“Quinn!” I said. I was thinking of so many things at once that I was standing rooted in place. Fishing my phone from my pocket, I punched his number on speed dial and heard his mumble at the other end. “Get out,” I said. “Quinn, get your sister and get out. There’s going to be an explosion.” I only waited to hear him sound more alert before I shut the phone.

“We have to save ourselves, too,” Barry was saying.

Brilliantly, Cecile ran down the hall to a red fixture and flipped the fire alarm. The clamor almost split our eardrums, but the effect was wonderful on the sleeping humans on this floor. Within seconds, they began to come out of the rooms.

“Take the stairs,” Cecile directed them in a bellow, and obediently, they did. I was glad to see Carla’s dark head among them. But I didn’t see Quinn, and he was always easy to spot.

“The queen is high up,” said Mr. Cataliades.

“Can those glass panels be busted from the inside?” I asked.

“They did it on
Fear Factor
,” Barry said.

“We could try sliding the coffins down.”

“They’d break on impact,” Cecile said.

“But the vamps would survive the explosion,” I pointed out.

“To be burned up by the sun,” Mr. Cataliades said. “Diantha and I will go up and try to get out the queen’s party, wrapped up in blankets. We’ll take them . . .” He looked at me desperately.

“Ambulances! Call 911 now! They can figure out where to take them!”

Diantha called 911 and was incoherent and desperate enough to get ambulances started to an explosion that had not happened yet. “The building’s on fire,” she said, which was like a future truth.

“Go,” I told Mr. Cataliades, actually shoving the demon, and off he sped to the queen’s suite.

“Go try to get your party out,” I said to Barry, and he and Cecile ran for the elevator, though at any minute it might be unworkable.

I’d done everything about getting humans out that I could. Cataliades and Diantha could take care of the queen and Andre. Eric and Pam! I knew where Eric’s room was, thank God. I took the stairs. As I ran up, I met a party coming down: the two Britlingens, both with large packs on their backs, carrying a wrapped bundle. Clovache had the feet, Batanya the head. I had no doubt that the bundle was the King of Kentucky, and that they were doing their duty. They both nodded as I hugged the wall to let them by. If they weren’t as calm as if they were out for a stroll, they were close to it.

“You set off the fire alarm?” Batanya said. “Whatever the Fellowship is doing, it’s today?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Thanks. We’re getting out now, and you should, too,” Clovache said.

“We’ll go back to our place after we deposit him,” Batanya said. “Good-bye.”

“Good luck,” I told them stupidly, and then I was running upstairs as if I’d trained for this. As a result, I was huffing like a bellows when I flung open the door to the ninth floor. I saw a lone maid pushing a cart down a long corridor. I ran up to her, frightening her even more than the fire alarm already had.

“Give me your master key,” I said.

“No!” She was middle-aged and Hispanic, and she wasn’t about to give in to such a crazy demand. “I’ll get fired.”

“Then open this door”—I pointed to Eric’s—“and get out of here.” I’m sure I looked like a desperate woman, and I was. “This building is going to blow up any minute.”

She flung the key at me and made tracks down the hallway to the elevators. Dammit.

And then the explosions began. There was a deep, resounding quiver and a boom from way below my feet, as if some gargantuan sea creature were making its way to the surface. I staggered over to Eric’s room, thrusting the plastic key into the slot and shoving open the door in a moment of utter silence. The room was in complete darkness.

“Eric, Pam!” I yelled. I fumbled for a light switch in the pitch-black room, felt the building sway. At least one of the upper charges had gone off. Oh, shit! Oh, shit! But the light came on, and I saw that Eric and Pam had gotten in the beds, not the coffins.

“Wake up!” I said, shaking Pam since she was closest. She didn’t stir at all. It was exactly like shaking a doll stuffed with sawdust. “Eric!” I screamed right in his ear.

This got a bit of a reaction; he was much older than Pam. His eyes opened a slit and tried to focus. “What?” he said.

“You have to get up! You have to! You have to go out!”

“Daytime,” he whispered. He began to flop over on his side.

I slapped him harder than I’ve ever hit anyone in my life. I screamed, “Get up!” until my voice would hardly work. Finally Eric stirred and managed to sit up. He was wearing black silk pajama bottoms, thank God, and I spied the ceremonial black cloak tossed over his coffin. He hadn’t returned it to Quinn, which was huge luck. I arranged it over him and fastened it at the neck. I pulled the hood over his face. “Cover your head!” I yelled, and I heard a burst of noise above my head: shattering glass, followed by shrieks.

Eric would drop back to sleep if I didn’t keep him awake. At least he was trying. I remembered that Bill had managed to stagger, under dire circumstances, at least for a few minutes. But Pam, though roughly the same age as Bill, simply could not be roused. I even pulled her long pale hair.

“You have to help me get Pam out,” I said finally, despairing. “Eric, you just have to.” There was another roar and a lurch in the floor. I screamed, and Eric’s eyes went wide. He staggered to his feet. As if we’d shared thoughts like Barry and I could, we both shoved his coffin off its trestle and onto the carpet. Then we slid it over to the opaque slanting glass panel forming the side of the building.

Everything around us trembled and shook. Eric’s eyes were a little wider now, and he was concentrating so heavily on keeping himself moving that his strength was pulling on mine.

“Pam,” I said, trying to push him into more action. I opened the coffin, after some desperate fumbling. Eric went over to his sleeping child, walking like his feet were sticking to the floor with each step. He took Pam’s shoulders and I took her feet, and we picked her up, blanket and all. The floor shook again, more violently this time, and we lurched over to the coffin and tossed Pam into it. I shut the lid and latched it, though a corner of Pam’s nightgown was sticking out.

I thought about Bill, and Rasul flashed across my mind, but there was nothing I could do, and there wasn’t any time left. “We have to break the glass!” I shrieked at Eric. He nodded very slowly. We knelt to brace ourselves against the end of the coffin and we pushed as hard as we could till it slammed into the glass, which cracked into about a thousand pieces. They hung together, amazingly—the miracle of safety glass. I could have screamed from frustration. We needed a
hole
, not a curtain of glass. Crouching lower, digging our toes into the carpet, trying to ignore the rumbling noises in the building below us, Eric and I shoved with all our strength.

Finally! We punched the coffin all the way through. The window let go of its frame and cascaded down the side of the building.

And Eric saw sunlight for the first time in a thousand years. He screamed, a terrible, gut-wrenching noise. But in the next instant, he pulled the cloak tight around him. He grabbed me and hopped astride the coffin, and we pushed off with our feet. For just a fraction of a minute, we hung in the balance, and then we tilted forward. In the most awful moment of my life, we went out the window and began tobogganing down the building on the coffin. We would crash unless—

Suddenly we were off the coffin and kind of staggering through the air, Eric holding me to him with dogged persistence.

I exhaled with profound relief. Of course, Eric could fly.

In his light-stunned stupor, he couldn’t fly very well. This was not the smooth progress I’d experienced before; we had more of a zigzag, bobbing descent.

But it was better than a free fall.

Eric could delay our descent enough to keep me from being dashed to my death on the street outside the hotel. However, the coffin with Pam inside had a bad landing, and Pam came catapulting out of the remains of the wood and into the sunlight where she lay motionless. Without making a sound, she began to burn. Eric landed on top of her and used the blanket to cover both of them. One of Pam’s feet was exposed, and the flesh was smoking. I covered it up.

I also heard the sound of sirens. I flagged down the first ambulance I saw, and the medics leaped out.

I pointed to the blanketed heap. “Two vampires—get them out of the sun!” I said.

The pair of EMTs, both young women, exchanged an incredulous glance. “What do we do with them?” asked the dark one.

“You take them to a nice basement somewhere, one without any windows, and you tell the owners to keep that basement open, because there are gonna be more.”

High up, a smaller explosion blew out one of the suites. A suitcase bomb, I thought, wondering how many Joe had talked us into carrying up into the rooms. A fine shower of glass sparkled in the sun as we looked up, but darker things were following the glass out of the window, and the EMTs began to move like the trained team they were. They didn’t panic, but they definitely moved with haste, and they were already debating which building close at hand had a large basement.

“We’ll tell everyone,” said the dark woman. Pam was now in the ambulance and Eric halfway there. His face was bright red and steam was rising from his lips. Oh, my God. “What you going to do?”

“I have to go back in there,” I said.

“Fool,” she said, and then threw herself in the ambulance, which took off.

There was more glass raining down, and part of the bottom floor appeared to be collapsing. That would be due to some of the larger explosive-packed coffin bombs in the shipping and receiving area. Another explosion came from about the sixth floor, but on the other side of the pyramid. My senses were so dulled by the sound and the sight that I wasn’t surprised when I saw a blue suitcase flying through the air. Mr. Cataliades had succeeded in breaking the queen’s window. Suddenly I realized the suitcase was intact, had not exploded, and was hurtling straight at me.

I began to run, flashing back to my softball days when I had sprinted from third to home and had to slide in. I aimed for the park across the street, where traffic had come to a stop because of the emergency vehicles: cop cars, ambulances, fire engines. There was a cop just ahead of me who was facing away, pointing something out to another cop. “Down!” I yelled. “Bomb!” and she swung around to face me and I tackled her, taking her down to the ground with me. Something hit me in the middle of the back, whoosh, and the air was shoved out of my lungs. We lay there for a long minute, until I pushed myself off of her and climbed unsteadily to my feet. It was wonderful to inhale, though the air was acrid with flames and dust. She might have said something to me, but I couldn’t hear her.

I turned around to face the Pyramid of Gizeh.

Parts of the structure were crumbling, folding in and down, all the glass and concrete and steel and wood separating from the whole into discrete parts, while most of the walls that had created the spaces—of rooms and bathrooms and halls—collapsed. That collapse trapped many of the bodies that had occupied these arbitrarily divided areas. They were all one now: the structure, its parts, its inhabitants.

Here and there were still bits that had held together. The human floor, the mezzanine, and the lobby level were partially intact, though the area around the registration desk was destroyed.

I saw a shape I recognized, a coffin. The lid had popped clean off with the impact of its fall. As the sun hit the creature inside, it let out a wail, and I rushed over. There was a hunk of drywall by it, and I hauled that over the coffin. There was silence as soon as the sun was blocked from touching the vampire inside.

“Help!” I yelled. “Help!”

A few policemen moved toward me.

“There are people and vamps still alive,” I said. “The vamps have to be covered.”

“People first,” said one beefy veteran.

“Sure,” I agreed automatically, though even as I said it, I thought,
Vampires didn’t set these bombs.
“But if you can cover the vamps, they can last until ambulances can take them to a safe place.”

There was a chunk of hotel still standing, a bit of the south part. Looking up, I saw Mr. Cataliades standing at an empty frame where the glass had fallen away. Somehow, he had worked his way down to the human floor. He was holding a bundle wrapped in a bedspread, clutching it to his chest.

“Look!” I called, to get a fireman’s attention. “Look!”

They leaped into action at seeing a live person to rescue. They were far more enthusiastic about that than about rescuing vamps who were possibly smoldering to death in the sunlight and could easily be saved by being covered. I tried to blame them, but I couldn’t.

For the first time I noticed that there was a crowd of regular people who had stopped their cars and gotten out to help—or gawk. There were also people who were screaming, “Let them burn!”

I watched the firemen go up in a bucket to fetch the demon and his burden, and then I turned back to working my way through the rubble.

After a time, I was flagging. The screams of the human survivors, the smoke, the sunlight muted by the huge cloud of dust, the noise of the groaning structure settling, the hectic noise of the rescue workers and the machinery that was arriving and being employed . . . I was overwhelmed.