Marcus introduced the woman, saying, “This is Karen, our fearless leader. She’s the reason we’re all here in the first place.”
“Welcome to Song Island,” Karen smiled. “We’re glad to finally get some new faces around here. If you need anything, just let me know. Anything at all.”
Politician, Will thought right away.
“I could use a bath,” Carly said.
“We have that, too.”
“What is that humming in the background?” Lara asked.
“That,” Karen said, “is air conditioning.”
Marcus grabbed one of the doors and pulled it open, and Will was instantly swamped with cold air seeking escape from the building. He was pretty sure Lara involuntarily sighed with pleasure next to him.
Two of the people calling Song Island home were in the lobby, including a man named Tom, who Marcus had mentioned earlier. Tom was wearing khaki shorts and a gun belt, making him the first person Will had seen on the island who carried a weapon out in the open.
Tom was eating an apple and reading a book while sitting in an armchair behind the reception desk. He came over and shook their hands. The man had a strong grip, which fit his huge six-two frame. Will pegged Tom at 250, most of that muscle, which was quite a feat given the quality of food available these days.
Will thought right away, Ex-cop.
“Mi casa es su casa,” Tom said. “Or whatever the Spanish word for island is.”
“Isla,” Lara said.
“Me isla es su isla, then,” he smiled. It wasn’t quite as winning a smile as Marcus’s, of course.
The other person they met was a young kid playing some kind of space game on a fifty-inch LED TV in one corner of the lobby. He looked all of twelve. Marcus introduced him as Kyle, and the kid, hearing his name, glanced over and gave them a cursory look, though Will noticed he gave Gaby a little bit more time than the rest of them.
Kyle raised a lazy hand and said, “Hey.”
“What is that, an Xbox?” Josh asked.
“Yeah,” Kyle said. “You play?”
“A little.”
“I got Halo and Call of Duty and a bunch of other games here.”
“Cool.”
And just like that, Kyle looked back at his game, the rest of the lobby instantly forgotten. He was moving some kind of soldier through a futuristic battlefield.
Marcus chuckled. “Kid plays that thing day and night. I’d say he’s doing it to escape reality, but frankly, his mom says he was like that before this mess.”
“Kyle is Debra’s kid,” Karen explained. “You can’t blame the boy. Everyone has to cope in their own way.”
“There’s enough electricity from the solar panels to waste on games?” Will asked.
“We have more than we need here,” Karen said proudly. “Marcus, why don’t you show them to the rooms. I have a feeling the ladies are dying to see them.”
“Follow me,” Marcus said.
He led them past Tom, who had gone back to the reception desk and his book. Will glanced at the cover as they passed, catching the name of the author, Ludlum something, but not the title. Tom looked up and caught his eye, and they exchanged a brief, perfunctory nod.
Marcus continued into a hallway, leaving the lobby behind. “Basically, pick whichever room you want — there are plenty to go around. Obviously you should try to stick to the completed sections of the hotel. There’re a lot of nails and construction leftovers scattered throughout the unfinished portions. So if you’re feeling adventurous and end up stepping on a rusted nail, we might have to cut off a limb, and no one wants that.”
The hallway curved slightly to the right the farther they went. Most of the flooring was completed with more of the shiny black marble tiles, but the walls were plain white, and there was still uncovered Sheetrock lined with dried caulk in certain sections and heavy doses of spackling over drywall. Some light fixtures above them didn’t have covers or lightbulbs, and wires dangled from drilled holes. And these, he reminded himself, were the finished sections of the hotel.
Marcus told them about the hotel’s construction as they went.
The hotel’s floor plan consisted of a long hallway marked “Hallway A” (the one they were in now), with rooms to the left and right, the door numbers starting with A100 and counting upward. Hallway A was designed for fifty rooms, twenty-five on each side, and it was the only completed section of the entire building. There was supposed to be a complementing hallway running parallel to their left (“Hallway B”), connected by a series of hallways and hotel event rooms, but the developers had never gotten around to laying foundations. It was now impossible to tell where the other planned half of the hotel was supposed to go, thanks to the overgrowth of weeds.
As they moved through Hallway A, people began coming out of rooms to greet them. He wondered what they had been doing before now. Didn’t they already know newcomers were arriving on the island?
A young woman named Sarah came out of her room first. She was in her late twenties and had a daughter, Jenny, who was blonde and the spitting image of her mother. Sarah was friendly, while her daughter shyly introduced herself to Elise and Vera. The two girls enthusiastically introduced themselves back, but that didn’t seem to win the girl over, and Jenny slowly wandered behind her mother before disappearing into their room without a word.
“Don’t mind her, she’s a little shy,” Sarah said.
Will thought her voice sounded familiar, and Lara picked up on it, too. “You’re the voice on the recorded message,” Lara said.
“Guilty.”
“You don’t know how often we listened to that recording on the way over here.”
“Oh, God, I don’t know how to respond to that,” Sarah said, looking both pleased and a little embarrassed. “You guys should get settled in. Al and I are cooking up something good for tonight. I hope you like fish. That’s Al’s specialty.”
“As long as it doesn’t come in a can,” Lara smiled.
“Would fresh from the lake work?”
“God, yes.”
They continued up the hallway, where they met a man in his fifties — the Al that Sarah had mentioned. Al had a bit of a gut, and for some reason was trying to hide his bald spot with a comb-over. Will found that both odd and amusing.
“Finally, new blood!” Al bellowed at the sight of them.
Al’s belly shook a bit as he said it, from either too much food or too much beer, or maybe both. If it was the latter, Will wondered where Al was hiding the good stuff. In his room, maybe. He and Danny had lost their taste for beer over the last eight months. Beers were simply not meant to be drunk warm.
“Just got here myself,” Al said. “You guys play poker?”
“I only gamble with my life,” Danny said.
Al laughed. “When you guys get settled, look me up. I can’t get anyone here to give me a decent game.”
“We hear you’re a good cook,” Lara said.
“Good is subjective,” Al said. “But since I’m the only cook on this island, I guess that makes me technically the only good cook.”
Al chewed their ears off about fish and cooking for another five minutes until Marcus butted in and dragged them away.
Farther up the hallway, they met a young man named Jake, who came out of his room to meet them, along with his girlfriend Sienna. They were both in their early twenties, though Sienna, with her round, cherubic face, could have passed for a teenager. Both looked friendly enough.
“You cut the grass,” Will said to Jake.
The young man nodded. “Just the front grounds, mostly. We don’t mess with the back areas too much — no point since there’s nothing back there.”