20210819

Day 2,535

The carpet pulsed and twitched underfoot, the booze she'd spilled on it seeming to make it too drowsy and uncoordinated to properly throw her off balance and into one of its stomach rooms. She wasn't much better herself, having only discovered the little trick when she'd dropped her first drink in shock at discovering her husband's corpse dissolving into their honeymoon bed.

Now she was staggering around the hotel resort, taking a swig from any drink she found and pouring the rest onto the floor to keep the building as dazed and easily distracted as she was slowly becoming. Her goal was the reception desk where she hoped she'd find a real phone and not one of the lures she kept hearing inside the stomach rooms she passed.

No matter how normal and inviting they seemed, no matter how comfy the beds looked or how fresh the room service food just over the threshold smelled, she could still smell the acidic decay lingering beneath it all. And she knew better than to try the emergency phones in the hallway after the first one she picked up vomited something boiling that burnt the carpet and made the entire hallway tremble in agony.

But all she had to do was get to reception, use the phone and report a murder. The police would come, she'd give a vague description of a killer and they'd either find her husband's body or join him but she would be outside and alive and that mattered more to her. He would have wanted her to survive.

Did the hotel ever have a reception or did her husband just have the keys with him? Had he planned for her to die instead? Had he planned to die himself? Were they both tricked into coming here to feed whatever creature more the disguise of a hotel?  Were the staff even human?

Soon as she got to reception she'd have her answers.

If she could only find it.

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