the mortis by Jonathan R. Miller Page A

all of the fibers of the musculature simultaneously contract, locking together.  No movement, no way to draw a breath, nothing. 
     
     
    Park sights a landing position east of the main beachfront.  Nothing but a small sandspit at the foot of a steep bluff—out of the way, but still near enough to Lavelha for efficient foot travel.  He comes in apace, grounds the boat in the shallows and dismounts, jogging in the sandbar, guiding with a grip on the carry handle.  Splashing through.  He drags the kayak up onto the narrow shoal.  The sound of the keel ridge grating on wet sediment.  He tosses in the paddle and starts to scan his surroundings, breathing hard, slightly crouched down. 
    Above him on the ridgetop there is enough tree cover to keep the site more or less concealed from the resort.  He ’ll have to climb his way out and back in again later, but that’s the price of seclusion, a price generally worth paying.  He squats down and wrings out his pants at the cuffs, then starts looking around the shoal for something he can use to defend himself.
    During the search, h e comes across a few limbs that have fallen from the tree-lined ridge and he tests them, but there’s nothing sturdy enough to serve as any kind of blunt-force weapon.  Instead he decides to gather an armload of the fuller branches and drape them across the kayak deck for camouflage, working under the assumption that he’ll be coming back again—that he’ll be making a return trip. 
    Just off the sandbank he finds a tapered shard of shingle stone.  He hefts it, getting a sense.  In the end he decides to pocket it, and then he retur ns to the boat to check it over one final time.  As he examines the hull, he remembers the forward deck hatch—a compartment built right into the fiberglass structure—but when he pushes aside the branches and opens the hatch cover, there’s nothing there.  Nothing inside the mesh storage bag, nothing useful anywhere on this sand bank.  He re-conceals the deck with the tree limbs, then he approaches the side of the bluff and starts planning how to make his way up. 
     
     
    It isn ’t his first time returning here—he has slipped into the Lavelha out of necessity a few times since the collapse hit, and not just on the outer grounds, foraging; he has actually gone inside a few of the desolate hotel buildings.  One of the cafés on the west wing, the fitness center locker room, the Manakory Lounge.  The Recreation Annex, the outdoor pool enclosure, the daycare facility.  But all of those were on the outer fringe of the resort complex, not here—not in the heart.  He’s never been inside any of the guest suites since the collapse, and he’s never been on the grounds at all without his wife nearby. 
     
     
    The disease is at its worst in this place, on the Lavelha grounds; this is the site where the collapse first took root on the islet.  Three months ago, there were around five thousand living souls here.  Five thousand.  Vacationing, mostly, but there was a conference taking place at the Lavelha also—some multinational based out of Tanzania had sent its executives on a team-building retreat.  Zip-lines in the tree canopies and trust-falls and small-group breakout sessions and whatnot.  So there were the vacationers and the conference-goers, and they totaled around five thousand.  The hotel was proud of the fact—the concierge let him know the figure at check-in time. 
      Out of the five tho usand, almost all got sick—children, women, men, everybody; it didn’t matter.  Almost every guest contracted the disease, and afterward almost all of them stayed in the vicinity of the hotel.  Maybe it was the familiarity.  Maybe it was the difficulty of traveling anywhere else, or maybe it was pure instinct, staying where the resources were most concentrated, who knows the reasoning, if there was any.  Thousands have succumbed to the sickness over the past twelve weeks, but even accounting