Night of the Living Trekkies by Kevin David Anderson, Sam Stall, Kevin David, Sam Stall Anderson

tourists, stood her ground until the dead washed over her.
    “No!” Jim yelled.
    The wave broke over the hotel’s front desk, submerging Janice beneath a sea of ravenous dead. The stench of decomposing flesh filled his lungs. Jim pointed the Glock into the crowd and squeezed the trigger. All he heard this time was a
click
. The gun was empty. He was still staring down at it when a hand grabbed his left shoulder and spun him around.
    “Come on!” Leia screamed.
    He ran on unfeeling legs back to the elevator, which was propped open with a plastic, potted ficus tree. He kicked it out of the way. The doors closed just as the first of the zombies smashed against the clear panels that surrounded them on three sides.
    “Get us out of here!” Leia shouted as face after hideous, hungering face pressed against the glass.
    “It’s okay,” Jim said matter-of-factly as he locked the doors. “They can’t get to us. On the ground floor we’re surrounded on the see-through sides by a thick Plexiglas sheathing. It’s to keep people from getting crushed by the elevators. It also makes a pretty good zombie barrier.”
    Then he slumped down onto the floor, dropped the Glock and put his head in his hands.
    “There was nothing you could have done,” Leia said, trying to ignore the horrors surrounding her.
    “There’s never anything I can do,” Jim said. “Never a goddamned thing.”
    “What happened?”
    “She let them in. She unlocked the doors and let the zombies in.”
    “Why?”
    “Maybe she got tired of waiting for me to come back,” Jim said.
    “What did she say to you?”
    “The last thing she said before she opened the doors was, I believe, ‘I have to lower the shields.’”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Pretty sure. What the hell does that even mean?”
    The zombies slammed against the Plexiglas with enough force to make it shudder.
    “I don’t know,” Leia said, a look of mounting panic in her eyes. “All I know is that if you don’t get this damned elevator off the ground, I’m going to go as crazy as she was.”
    Jim glanced over her shoulder to the zombies. He recognized several faces. One of the Klingons from the feast, his snapping-turtle headpiece now wildly askew. A uniformed member of the Botany Bay’s housekeeping staff who had obviously made her last bed. The guy who brewed him a double latte every morning at the hotel atrium’s coffee kiosk. Different people from different walks of life, but now with one thing in common. Each had a third eye located somewhere on the head or shoulders or arms or chest. An insane-looking eye with a crimson pupil.
    He also noticed, in a detached way, that the ocean of horrors surrounding them seemed to mount higher and higher. The first arrivals, the clumsy bastards, were tottering and falling as new monsters pressed in. The newbies stood on top of the first wave. As the mound of the fallen grew, the zombies who stayed on their feet gained altitude.
    It wouldn’t be long, Jim mused, before they surmounted the elevator’s protective sleeve and climbed onto the box itself.
    And once they were
on
the elevator, they would be
in
the elevator.
    Jim looked up at the access panel in the ceiling and wondered if he should prop it open and help the zombies along. Dying, even at the hands of flesh-eating ghouls, might be preferable to seeing Rayna and Janice in his nightmares. More accusers, asking him night after night why he let them down.
    But Leia clearly had a different view. He could see it in her face—her beautiful, terrified face. She was still talking to him, and he tuned in for a moment.
    “. . . can’t make the buttons work because you’ve frozen everything with your passkey!” she screamed. “You need to get your shit together before they climb on the roof and trap us!”
    “It’s hopeless,” he replied. “They’re everywhere. They’ll kill us no matter what we do.”
    “But they don’t have to kill us
right now
!” Leia shouted. “We can hole up