Some of the Hunters had thought it was best to keep everyone in their rooms, while others had thought it was best to try to put everyone into a few big areas so they could be watched. Both methods had their pros and cons, and depending on what we were dealing with, either one could potentially be the best or worst possible thing to do. If we were dealing with something like a fast-spreading mutating plague or undead outbreak, then keeping people separate behind locked doors and controlling choke points made a lot of sense. In a situation like that, sticking everyone in one place could potentially create a zombie army in a matter of minutes. On the other hand, keeping them in small groups made them virtually impossible to defend, and would be terrible if the phenomenon could simply pop up wherever it felt like, which is what had apparently happened in Hugo’s room. It wouldn’t do any good to be isolated behind a locked door if the thing he had called Nachtmar could simply float up through your carpet and chop you to pieces.

The decision was a moot one anyway, since very few of the bystanders that had been trapped here were inclined to listen to us, and the place was a huge maze of interlocking rooms and confusing corridors, so if somebody wanted to wander off it wasn’t like we could really stop them. It’s a free country. Most of the trapped non-Hunters and employees were clustered in the common areas, some whining, others nervous, though nobody had panicked yet. The Ebola announcement would probably change that, and it would more than likely really suck for Nelson and Hunters that had volunteered to herd sheep.

Meanwhile, the Hunters had thrown politeness out the window and were all openly armed, and many of them didn’t speak a lick of English. Not to mention that this was Nevada, and the SHOT Show was in town, so many of the stuck gamblers were probably concealing guns too. I was all in favor of people packing heat, but we didn’t want anyone to get jumpy and decide that my side were the bad guys here, so MHI was encouraging the other Hunters to be polite.

Hotel security had still been consulting their manuals to see if there was an official policy about what to do in a situation like this by the time we had a small private army wandering their halls looking for monsters. So security had shut down the gambling areas and locked up the money. Now they were mostly protecting the vault and trying to keep their trapped tourists calm. They’d been told to defer to Earl’s judgment, a wise choice. The only services trying to conduct business as usual were a strategic few of the restaurants, open for breakfast, because people full of bacon are less likely to riot.