Not the hotel’s.

Not the bedbugs’.

In fact, he didn’t have to mention bedbugs at all. Most of the guests were more than happy to check out, and couldn’t get on the hotel’s shuttle buses fast enough. A few, though, were refusing to leave immediately. They were either waiting for their own limos or thought the whole thing was a hoax or wanted to simply sleep through their hangovers. Some of the guests didn’t answer their room phones.

Mr. Ullman guessed he had at least an hour or two before the soldiers entered the hotel and forcibly ejected the stragglers, something the TV newscasters breathlessly told their viewers would happen with each and every building in the Loop.

Since there were still guests inside the hotel, he gave strict orders for what was left of the staff to remain. They weren’t happy, but it wasn’t his job to make sure his employees enjoyed their jobs. It was his job to make sure the hotel was in the best possible hands, and therefore, he wanted everyone on hand in case the guests needed anything. He suspected that many of them had already left before being given the official green light.

He decided that he would give them the benefit of the doubt, and when all of this nonsense was over, he would welcome them back to start with a clean slate. The only problem, a minor irritation really, was that the ineffectual little man from the pest exterminator company, Roger Something or other, had never checked back in with him. He had probably run off with all the rest.

Mr. Ullman rode up to the top floor alone in the elevator. He was determined to verify that every single door to every single room in the hotel was not only shut, but locked as well. He did not trust the officials, some of whom were trying to quell panic by reassuring the city that this evacuation was only for twenty-four hours. The possibility of looters was very real and he couldn’t stand the thought of someone soiling the image of this pristine hotel. So he started at the very top and worked his way down.

On the fourteenth floor he came to room number 1426. The door was still open, forgotten in the chaos. The detectives poking around had suddenly been called away, and even the uniformed officers had vanished, pulled by more pressing matters.

Mr. Ullman couldn’t help himself; he had to step inside and look around. The room was still a mess. The shattered window had yet to be repaired. White fingerprint dust filled the air and formed a fog that clung to the floor and roiled in the ebb and flow of the hot wind.

He made a note to get on the phone immediately and get this window replaced. He could only imagine the shots from the helicopters, zooming in on the lone shattered window in a high cliff of glass, occasionally catching a glimpse inside the sad, empty room. Those soulless producers would die for a shot like that.

The last thing he wanted was that kind of image to linger in everyone’s minds.

He stepped around the bed, calculating the damage. The room was in such a state of destruction that the amount needed to repair everything staggered even him. His initial reaction had been to start the process of billing the estate for the damages, but he’d reconsidered after someone had mentioned the negative publicity he would attract by charging the family of the suicide victim.

He edged around the couch, watching the space under the bed. He bent closer. He couldn’t see any bugs, but Roger had assured him that that didn’t mean anything necessarily. The image of their fecal matter filled his thoughts, no matter how much he wanted to pretend the clotted droppings didn’t exist.

His gaze landed on the corner, behind the nightstand. He pulled it away, shining his flashlight at the partially peeled silicone, the painted trim that had been pried away from the wallpaper. Nothing moved in the light. The dead bugs from Roger’s insecticide were still there, as if someone had scattered wet coffee grounds. Once again, he couldn’t help himself; he had to expose the worst wounds of the hotel, and tapped the silicone with the toe of his wingtips. Living bugs erupted around the floor trim in the hundreds. Thousands. It was as if the building itself had vomited the tiny parasites into the room.

The bugs spilled over themselves in an almost liquid movement as they oozed from the cracks. The carpet grew alive under his shoes. They swarmed up the legs of the nightstand. His leg brushed the mattress and he flinched as bugs gushed from the seams.

Mr. Ullman didn’t waste any time getting back to the doorway. He slammed the door shut and locked it. He hustled down to the elevator and hit the button and fought the urge to hit the button again. That little shit Roger was going to hear about this.

Mr. Ullman checked back down the hall. The shadows around the door seemed to grow. He blinked, ran one hand through his thinning hair. The only thing he could hear was the thrumming of the cables and the rest of the elevator, but his eyes caught movement, down at the door to room 1426.

Shadows dripped from under the door. They grew along the corner of the hall. Flowed down the carpet at Mr. Ullman. He punched the down button, over and over.

The darkness grew, still utterly silent. Millions of the bugs flooded the hallway, washing across the carpet in waves of foul-smelling tiny bodies. He heard the elevator come to a slow stop on his floor.

The elevator doors split in half and he fell inside. He leapt for the CLOSE DOOR button, and jumped up and down to activate the capacity indicator, anything to close the doors. Bugs spilled inside.

The doors slid shut.

Mr. Ullman stomped on the bugs, grinding them into the thin carpet. He hit the basement button. He planned to deactivate all of the air systems throughout the hotel, all of the air intake and circulation, anything he could think of. He hoped that it would at least stop the bugs from spreading to different floors. The only way to accomplish this task was to gain access to a secure terminal in the basement, behind ten inches of steel. There were only three keys. Mr. Ullman had one. The facilities manager had a copy. One of the elected officials of the board had the other.

He stepped back to assess the bug situation in the elevator. He couldn’t tell how many he’d killed; if you scraped it all together it might be enough to butter a slice of toast. More were still crawling around the doors, about three inches off the floor. Mr. Ullman stepped in close, bent his toes on the door just above the bugs, and slid his shoe down, crushing the bugs with the ball of his foot.

The floor numbers flashed. His ears popped.

Once he shut the air circulation down, his next move would be to visit each of the remaining guests’ rooms. They could either leave under their own volition, or be removed by the soldiers who were even now marching through the city. After his encounter with the bugs, he did not care.

Once the guests were no longer on the premises, he would inform the staff and they would file out in an orderly fashion. Of course, being the general manager, he would be the last out of the building, handing the operations key over to the emergency personnel.

The elevator slowed, stopped.

The doors opened and Mr. Ullman stepped into the basement, full of visions of handing the damn key over to somebody else. He was four or five steps down the corridor before he realized he was walking through an inch or two of the bugs. They were up his pants before he had a chance to even register the sounds of all of them under his shoes. He tried slapping at them with his clipboard, but he might as well have been trying to stop the rain with fresh laundry in a Midwestern thunderstorm.

He went to his knees.

The virus was already slipping into his brain, slinking into the cells, corrupting everything exponentially. He didn’t know that he was already infected, and still fought as he fell forward. Waves flowed to him, as if the tide of bugs had been lovingly called to the moon. They covered him, crawling over his face, into his hair, down his suit, fastening those horribly efficient tubes to every inch of his skin. He held on to the key until it was nudged aside by bugs looking for a place to feed.