Run - Blake Crouch [82]
He made his way between the tables toward a common area that accessed a bar and a gift shop, both locked up. He moved out of the long panels of moonlight into darkness.
Straight ahead, he could just make out a pair of doors. As he moved toward them, they vanished in the black, but he kept on, hands outstretched, until he ran into a wall.
He pushed and the door swung back.
Couldn’t see a thing, but he knew he was in a bathroom. Smelled the water in the toilets.
He ran his hand along the wall, found the switch, hit the lights.
Nothing.
Heard the door ease shut. He moved forward to where he thought the sinks might be, and stepped into a wall. Turned around, becoming disoriented as he moved in a different direction. He touched a counter, his hands frantically searching for the faucet. Cranked open the tap, but nothing happened.
Took him several minutes to get his trembling hands on the stall door. He pulled it open and dropped to his knees, hands grazing the cold porcelain of the toilet. Inside the bowl, his fingers slid into chilly water.
He didn’t think about where this water had been or all the people who’d sat on this toilet and pissed and shit and vomited here, or the industrial strength chemicals that had been used to clean the bowl. He lowered his face to the surface of the water and drank and thought only of how sweet it tasted running down his swollen throat.
A razor line of light. For a long time, Jack just stared at it. His face against a tiled floor. Cold but not freezing. Piecing together where he was, how he’d arrived here, beginning to face the fact that he wasn’t dead. At least he was mostly sure he wasn’t.
He crawled out of the stall. The raging thirst gone, but the hunger pangs doubled him over when he stood, his feet so badly blistered he was afraid to see the damage.
He wandered toward the paper towel dispenser.
Cranked out a length of paper, tore it off.
Through the dark, and then he pulled open the door, the light like a railroad spike through his temples.
He limped out into the lobby, which looked almost like civilization in the daylight, sat down and went to work making a bandage for what was left of his ring finger.
He was already pushing open the front doors when he realized what he’d just walked past. Stepped back inside, half-expecting it to have vanished, like a mirage, but there it stood.
He rushed back into the cafeteria to the broken window. Lifted the rock off the floor and brought it into the lobby, where he hurled it through the glass.
He reached through and pulled out everything he could get his hands on—bags of potato chips, candy bars, crackers, cookies—until the vending machine was emptied and its contents spread across the floor.
He ripped into a bag of Doritos.
The chips were stale, leftovers from last season, but the intensity of the flavor made his mouth ache. He sat in the warm sunlight pouring through all the glass around the front entrance. Finished the bag and opened another filled with processed onion rings he would never have ingested in his former life. They were gone in a moment.
He drank his fill of water from the toilet and urinated for the first time in days.
Then grabbed the plastic garbage bag from the trashcan under the sink.
Back in the lobby, he put the two dozen packages of snacks into the bag and slung it over his shoulder.
There was a giant mirror on the wall across from the vending machine. He’d noticed it a little while ago, and now it called to him. The reflection unlike anybody he knew, his face thin as an ax-blade, beard coming in full. He was the color of rust, covered in dried blood, like a zombie-vagrant.
Outside the entrance to the resort, he came across a bicycle rack and a single, abandoned mountain bike standing up between the bars. The tires were low and there was bird shit all over the seat, but it looked otherwise in working order. He climbed aboard and tied his bag of food to the handlebars.