Doings at the Katahdin

Posted on Mon May 22nd, 2023 @ 9:39pm by Hale Stratton [Major, United States Army] & Calista Sutton & Killian Sutton

2,651 words; about a 13 minute read

Mission: Bangor or Bust
Location: Katahdin Inn & Suites, Millinocket, Maine
Timeline: 26 AUG 2010 - 08:00 p.m.

With all the rooms occupied, staff at the Katahdin were forced to turn away people looking for somewhere safe to sleep. That was until a heated conversation between the mayor and the Inn's manager, one where the mayor talked about 'emergencies' and the manager talked about his bottom line. Under pressure, the manager finally agreed to try to figure out a place where cots could be put up. And so, reluctance etched into his features, he agreed to set up cots in the pool area but cautioned that it wasn't sustainable nor would his staff provide services to these people. The mayor, understanding he had reached the man's limits, said that he would look for someone from one of the local churches to manage the effort.

The non-paying 'guests', mostly visitors to the festival who had been unable to make the trip back to Bangor, came in. They talked quietly among themselves, some decided to take advantage of the facilities, which mollified the manager somewhat, some sat quietly, talking amongst themselves, while an older, heavyset man, who had been feeling poorly all day huddled up in a corner, while a high fever wracked his body.

[Sutton's Room]

"Kil, she's not breathing." Calista used the back of her hand to feel Savannah's head. It was rapidly cooling under her touch. Her mouth was discolored from something.

Killian came over and looked at his wife's now dead friend and felt for a pulse. "She's really cold to the touch. She must have died in her sleep then."

"I was so wrapped up in watching the news; I missed it." She started crying. "Can we do anything?"

"Sugar tits, she's too far gone." He said as he lifted her stiff arm and it fell back down to the bed. He turned and gathered up his wife in his arms, and held her tightly as she started sobbing. "I'm sorry."

"This isn't fair," she choked out between sobs. "We need to call someone. Anyone."

He turned to grab the hotel phone and dialed for emergency services. "Line's busy."

She looked worried and grabbed her phone and tried, and it too went to a busy tone when she called for emergency services.

Killian tried as well and shook his head when nothing went through. He called her phone and it rang. "So phones are working, emergency services are out."

[Near Indoor Pool]

He had pulled over to help a young girl lying on the street rather than just continuing out of town and back to his own home. Mistake and maybe a fatal one considering how bad he felt. Like his bones were made of razor blades and his skin was on fire. He huddled on the cot, miserable, and in the last moments, before his eyes drifted shut, he thought of home, of Leslie and the girls, and prayed that they were safe.

Kara Sloane took a few deep breathes, trying to relieve the tension she felt throughout her body. It'd be en one hell of a day, and despite her best attempts to lie to herself, the white knuckle grip she had on the patio furniture wasn't convincing. Since witnessing the scene last night at her hotel, she'd been consumed by questions she didn't have the answer to. At first, she'd simply wondered. Was the man yesterday on some sort of drugs or if we was really... Well surely, it couldn't have been the second one right? Dead bodies don't move. That'd been what Kara Sloane would have thought 24 hours ago. Now though? Things weren't quite the same.

Regardless, she'd been forced to relocate here. Her lone bag of belongings sat at her feet out on the faux patio at the Inn's indoor pool room. She'd tried to find the place that both isolated her from the crowd and looked like she wasn't interested in changing that. It hadn't stopped the kindly older woman from swinging by to check on her a few times though.

Lying on his side, facing the wall, and covered in a thin blanket, the man slipped from this life unnoticed but then, that had been how his life was lived as well. One moment clinging to life, wracked by pain and fever, and the next, gone.

It had been a couple hours since the new group of people made the pool and Sarah McIvoy wanted to make sure that the ones that looked a bit more rattled had what they needed.

"Once a mother, always a mother," the elderly lady stated gently as she handed a steaming mug of tea to the woman down at the pool. "Hopefully this'll help for the eve'," she said.

Kara's cold standoffishness melted a bit as she accepted the steaming mug. The hint of honey brought a smile out. "Thank you. I think a bit of caffeine wouldn't exactly hurt." She took a sip, before her social graces got the better of her and she asked a follow up. "Did they bring you here today too?"

"No, my dear. My son has wanted to see the festival after his hike. However, we haven't heard from him and he was supposed to arrive today," the elderly women partially lamented while holding out for some hope.

Kara felt a tightening in her stomach at the thought of what might have happened, but the platitudes that were so practiced came to her tongue as a would be comfort. "Oh, sorry to hear that. I'm sure he's alright though. Where was he coming from?"

"The trail itself. He might have run into trouble on it, or the weather at the actual mountain is nonconductive. We've tried his cellular but it's not seeming to want to connect, which is what it normally does due to making sure he has power in case of an emergency," the elderly woman stated quietly about the situation. "We'll just have to see what happens. If we don't hear anything in a couple of days, we'll call the rangers to try to find him from his last check in."

Kara nodded. "Signal's get pretty weird around here from what I heard. Hopefully he's just holding up somewhere." She did everything in her power not to think about the alternative.

[Sutton's Room]

"Kil, what do you think? Should we go downstairs to try to find someone that we should tell?"

"Sugar tits, I promise you that right now, we should probably just stay put," he went to the window and opened the curtains and pointed down at the pool. "There's a lot of people down there. If they are sending people here to weather the ongoings outside."

"Do you think Sav had what the news is talking about?" Callista asked.

Her husband sighed and looked at her. "It's a very possibility. She could also have just caught the flu. People die from that all the time."

"She was healthy, Killian. I don't understand what's going on with the world that would do something like this," she said mournfully. She started to weep. She wiped her tears and looked up at her husband.

He gently rubbed the tears from his wife's face. "Shh, it's okay."

"These stupid hormones. Everyone down there doesn't have a bed. Do you think we should find someone downstairs that we could bring Sav's body to so that we can let someone else have her bed for the night?"

"I mean, it's possible. There's no emergency lines working right now. Yes, I can go see if that's possible," he said as he wrapped her in his arms and gently kissed the top of her head. "Let me hold you a bit longer."

[Near Indoor Pool]

In the corner, his body turned to the wall, the first stirrings of life returned to the unfortunate samaritan and a soft moan could be heard.

The slightly obscured sound drew Kara's attention away from the small talk for a moment, toward the cot where a man had taken up to go to sleep a little while ago. He'd been fairly quiet and still for a while, but she was fairly certain she'd heard him make a noise at least twice now.

Turning back toward the elderly woman, Sarah, Kara gestured with a tilt of her head toward the cot off in the corner. "Hey, do you know if anyone's checked on that guy in a bit?"

The samaritan's eyes opened and he made a soft moaning sound low in his throat as a wave of hunger swept through him. Noises in the area caught his attention and he began to turn over.

Father Alexander walks through the pool area, surveying the gathered people packed up as tight as they could be with little to no services or assistance. Alexander grasps his crucifix around his neck as he mouths a silent prayer for the unfortunate victims here.

The priest would crouch down to crying children attempting to calm them with basic words and prayers, playing with their innocence to give them any type of hope.

Sarah looked over where young Kara had mentioned the old man who had turned in for the night a little while ago. "I don't think so," she said.

The elderly woman went to check on the man as she heard him moan. He reminded her of her father not so far in the recent pass.

What happened next was something that she wasn't prepared for. Sarah stumbled back as the man looked back at her moaning. "Do we have a doctor here?" She asked loudly, drawing the attention of the people milling about the pool, especially the old man who seemed to snarl at her. "I think you need to rest, my dear."

The mind the samaritan who had once done the New York Times Saturday crossword in ink was blank; his attention focused now on the old woman as hunger, raw and all encompassing, swept through him. He grabbed her arm and pulled her toward him, teeth bared.

The world moved in seemingly slow motion before Kara Sloane. Her eyes went wide, watching as the man who'd been sleeping mere moments earlier suddenly turned on the kindly Sarah, with a speed and a fury that she'd only ever seen out of a predator. The previous night came back to her in a flash, seeing the wild, inhuman eyes of the man reaching for the older woman. The feeling that settled over her was simple. Recognition. "Sarah!" Kara leapt from her seat, practically feeling the adrenaline shoot into her bloodstream. But the older woman was well out of arm's reach, and all she could do was watch as the man in the cot caught her arm.

Alexander rose from one of the children he was administering to as he heard the shout. Alexander quickly looked into the direction he heard the commotion from and saw the man who grasped the older woman's arm. The priest quickly ran over toward the assailant. "There is no cause for this uproar when we are all in this together. Be at peace as the Lord commanded and be with us as our brother."

As the priest spoke, he turned his gaze to the man's wild, predatory eyes, his free hand moved down and grasped a black leather handle, a color similar to his robes, tied to his waist.

The man, if he could still be called that, obeyed the siren call of his hunger and bit into her arm, the hot spurt of her blood filled his mouth as he tore a bit of flesh off and then turned, indifferent to her horrified screams, toward the other meal presented to him.

[Sutton's Room]

Calista was crying into her husband's chest when she started hearing the commotion from down below. It took her a couple of moments to get knocked out of her reverie about what was going on with the muffled shouts and screams that was coming from the pool down below their room.

Killian had already heard them and was on alert. He rotated his head and looked out through the sliver of light that came in from the pool area. He kissed his wife's head gingerly, bringing her over to the window to see what was going on.

Since they had turned their backs on the body in the room, both of them failed to realize that their friend was now standing up at the edge of the bed, drawn by the siren call of noise and light from the now opened curtains from a window.

A shot rang out from somewhere. Calista instinctively ducked into Killian's legs as she went under the window sill. The sound of the glass to their room spidering was eery enough even on its own, coupled with another shot ringing out. She ducked down and covered her ears from the noise.

Turning, Killian saw the damage down below, people were starting to run around the pool area. He looked down at his wife and was helping her to her feet. It was the moan that he heard first before he could get his sobbing wife off of the ground.

His head whipped around and saw Savannah coming towards them, eyes were fogged over, and she was moaning as she started coming towards them. Killian froze solid still. "Sugah," he said quietly. "Run for the bathroom, lock the door unless it's me."

Calista looked over to what he was looking at and horror washed over her face as she registered what was going on at the pool and also in their room. She instantly went quiet and went against the back corner of the room.

With a shout from her husband, her focus snapped to him and saw her friend or what had been her friend starting to go towards him. Calista tried to start shimming along the desk quietly to get away from what was going on, considering she was pregnant after all.

However, she made a noise. Savannah snapped her attention directly for her. Before she could even react to it, Killian had grabbed a hold of Savannah's arm and yanked her hard using his height against her.

The window completely gave way from the moving dead body that went through the window, which now took flight and flopped into the pool with quite a splash.

Killian didn't bother looking out the window to see what happened. The threat was gone, and now he needed to see to his wife. He yelled down below, "RUN!" It was all he could do right now.

A third shot rang out further deeper into the hotel. He quickly grabbed his wife, lifting her into his arms and retreating to their bathroom. There was enough space for them to hide under the counter to get away from any other bullets flying out there.

[Near Indoor Pool]

As the older woman was looking at the now bite wound on her arm, fear washed over her, and a sense of foreboding. This was something that she had not expected to happen tonight, and now she didn't know how she was exactly supposed to process it. She heard the one shot rang out in the area, echoing across the walls of the indoor pool area.

Before she could do anything else, or think anything else, she was taken into someone's arms and led away from the immediate area. There was another shot that made her flinch from the noise, but she was more shell shocked that she had gotten bit than anything. Before she could really start processing the words that were being spoken to her, a body came flying out of the window. A man shouted something that she couldn't hear and then he disappeared when there was another shot deep within the hotel.

 

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