Dead Island

sports socks, her fingers deft as they tied the laces. Grabbing her room key from the dressing table, she crossed the room, opened the door and stepped into the corridor.

Despite the time, the corridor was not deserted. At its far end was the bellhop who had brought her luggage up earlier. He was a young, polite Chinese guy in a grey uniform, but there was clearly something wrong with him. In fact, he looked as though he had been in a fight or had an accident. There was a lot of blood down the front of his uniform and on his face.

He was moving strangely too, tottering like a drunk, his body hunched over and his hands twisted into arthritic claws. Purna noticed that it was not only his face and clothes, but also his fingers that were smeared with blood and clots of matter, as if he had been tearing up raw meat.

Purna licked her lips, torn between offering help and treating him with caution. Though her instincts were generally good, she was finding it hard to decide whether the bellhop was acting like a victim or an aggressor. If the latter, then he was clearly confused — perhaps he was drunk or high on drugs? As a cop, Purna had dealt with domestic incidents involving horrific violence, only for the attacker to be utterly bewildered by his or her actions afterwards.

In the end, thinking of the distressed woman in the street, and knowing she would have to approach the bellhop to get to both the lift and the stairs, she stepped forward and said, ‘Are you OK?’

The bellhop’s head snapped up, and for the first time Purna got a look at his eyes. They were almost white, the pupils the size of pinpricks. The bellhop opened his mouth and snarled, something red and lumpy sliding from between his lips and spattering to the floor, then he started towards her in a shambling run.

He was parallel with the lift and Purna was adopting a defensive stance to meet him when the door beside her opened. A rumpled-looking Logan stepped out, having clearly crashed out on his bed fully dressed, and looked at her sleepily.

‘What’s all the fucking—’

‘Look out!’ yelled Purna.

Before Logan could respond, the bellhop was on him like a wild animal. The Chinese boy leaped on his back and frenziedly began to bite at his shoulder and neck, tearing at his flesh with his teeth. Taken by surprise, Logan staggered and almost fell, then began to scream and thrash about, his arms flailing in an effort to dislodge his attacker. Within seconds the shoulder of his pale blue shirt was soaked in blood.

Moving forward, Purna grabbed Logan’s flailing arms and, displaying both strength and composure, clamped them to his sides. Then she slammed Logan backwards as hard as she could, so that the bellhop’s body was crushed between the ex-football star and the wall. She heard a satisfying clonk as the bellhop’s head impacted with the wall and a crunch that she hoped was a couple of his ribs giving way. Before the bellhop could recover, she yanked Logan forward again and shoved him aside, out of harm’s way. The bellhop slid down the wall and landed in a heap on the blood-spattered carpet, like an insect whacked with a newspaper.

He should have been dazed enough to have had the fight knocked out of him, but almost immediately he scrambled to his feet. Springing across the corridor, Purna grabbed a fire extinguisher from the wall, brandishing it in such a way that showed she clearly meant business.

‘Stay down or I’ll bash your fucking brains out,’ she warned.

The bellhop ignored her. Whatever he had taken, it had clearly made him think he was invincible. He seemed not even to notice the extinguisher as he sprang upright and leaped at her, clawed hands extended.

With an almost balletic fluidity, Purna stepped back and then thrust forward with the fire extinguisher. The base of it smacked into the centre of the bellhop’s face, smashing his nose and knocking him backwards. The blow would have been enough to incapacitate a normal man, but after tottering back a few steps he lurched upright once more. Seemingly impervious to pain, he snarled at Purna through a thick, red mask of blood and hurled himself towards her in a fresh attack.

Purna stepped to her right and swung the fire extinguisher into the side of his head. As he staggered into the wall, she followed this up with two more blows — another directly into the centre of his face, pulverizing his nose still further, and the other a sideswipe across his forehead, the sound of impact like a coconut hitting a brick wall.

No matter how many uppers the guy had been taking, this latest trio of blows should have been more than enough to render him unconscious, if not put him into a coma. However, like a puppet jerking back into life, he rose to his feet again almost immediately, blood drooling from his shattered face like molasses from a cracked pot.

‘Fuck,’ Purna breathed and whacked him again. She didn’t want to kill the guy if she could help it, but the way things were going he was giving her no alternative.

On a sudden impulse, she pulled the pin from the fire extinguisher, aimed the hose at the bellhop and squeezed the trigger. A highly concentrated jet of fire-retardant foam shot from the nozzle, directly into his face. He flailed and thrashed, but Purna grimly kept up her attack, concentrating on his eyes and mouth so that he could neither breathe nor see. The foam dripped down the front of his grey uniform, running red with blood, making it look as if he had met with a particularly nasty shaving accident. When she had forced the bellhop to retreat about ten metres, she upended the extinguisher, smashed it into his face once more, and then threw the extinguisher aside and ran back down the corridor.

Logan had slumped against the wall and was now semi-conscious, breathing stertorously and clutching his bleeding shoulder. Purna wrapped her arms around him and dragged him into her room. As soon as his feet had cleared the doorway she lowered him carefully to the carpet, then ran across and closed the door. Now, unless the bellhop had the strength to break down a sturdy hotel room door, they were safe — at least for the time being.

Crossing back to Logan, Purna heaved him up on to the bed. She lifted his head gently and slid a pillow underneath it. He was sweating, his eyes were fluttering, and blood was still pumping out of his shoulder.

‘Logan,’ she said. ‘Can you hear me?’

His eyes drifted open, flickered around. ‘Where am I?’

‘In my room.’

He considered this, then his lips twitched into a smile. ‘Knew I’d make it into your bed eventually,’ he murmured.

She laughed suddenly, a release of tension after what had just occurred. ‘Dream on, lover boy,’ she said.

In the en-suite bathroom she grabbed all the towels hanging over the rail. The hand towel she ran under the tap, wringing it out so that it was wet but not dripping. She went back into the bedroom, dragged a chair up to the edge of the bed and sat down. Logan had closed his eyes again but was breathing a little more steadily than before.

‘You still with us?’ she asked gently.

He licked his lips. ‘Just about. Feel a bit woozy.’

She clicked on the bedside lamp to examine his shoulder better. ‘Are you in much pain?’

‘Not as much as I was when you kicked me in the balls,’ he replied.

She snorted another laugh. ‘Yeah, sorry about that … Actually, no I’m not sorry. You deserved it.’

‘Guess I was being kind of a doofus,’ he conceded.

‘At least you can admit it.’ She was silent for a few moments as she ran her eyes over his wounds. There were several deep bite marks as far as she could tell, each of which was still oozing blood. ‘Listen, Logan, I’m going to patch you up as best I can,’ she told him, ‘but I’ll have to clean the area up first. It’s probably going to hurt a bit.’

‘Thanks for breaking it to me gently,’ he muttered.

‘My pleasure. Now I want you to be a brave little soldier.’

She pressed the wet towel to his shoulder, soaking up as much of the surface blood as she could. He winced a little, but otherwise didn’t react.

‘How do the wounds feel?’ she asked as she folded the wet towel over and began, gently but firmly, to wipe the excess blood away.

‘Weird,’ he replied. ‘Numb, but they also kind of sting a little. Like a jellyfish sting.’

‘Hmm,’ she said.

‘What do you mean “hmm”?’