Extended Stay

by Juan Martinez

Genres: Hispanic & Latino; Horror

Synopsis

In a rundown neighborhood in the heart of Las Vegas, the Alicia hotel awakens and beckons to the most vulnerable—those with something to hide.



After his parents are killed in a horrific roadside execution, Alvaro flees his home in Colombia and finds work as a line cook at the seedy hotel. Together with his sister, Carmen, he begins to make a new life in the desert, earning a promotion to management along with an irresistible offer to stay at the hotel rent-free. But as beloved photographs go missing and grotesque strangers wander the corridors, the promise of the Alicia decays into nightmare. Alvaro discovers that the hotel is a small appendage of an enormous creature that feeds on guests and their secrets, one that will eventually bring him face-to-face with the memories he most wants to outrun. Alvaro, Carmen, and their friends decide to cooperate with the creature. But in their efforts to appease it, do they sacrifice too much of themselves?



Haunting and visceral, Extended Stay uses the language of body horror and the gothic to comment on the complicated relationship between the Latinx undocumented experience and capitalism, the erasure of those living and working on the margins, the heavy toll exacted by memory, and the queasy permeability of boundaries that separate the waking world from the world of dreams.

Release date: January 17, 2023

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Print pages: 320

Sample

Chapter 1

Alvaro’s family was singing, hisbaby sister, Alba, included, but they stopped when the Fiat stopped. Carmen would have said something. She’d have gotten them in trouble, but she wasn’t there. She had schoolwork and insisted on being old enough to be left at home unattended. Plus, Alba’s swim meets bored her and she didn’t feel like she should go. Alvaro agreed—he didn’t want to go either but he had just dropped out of college again, for the third time this year, and he didn’t feel like he had much in the way of an argument. He had been lolling about the house, putting empanadas on his parents’ tab at the country club, having vague thoughts of taking up architecture (Dad could talk him through the math). They’d all figure out what was wrong with him, why he couldn’t make himself go to classes, why he cried when there was no reason to cry.

The day had just made it to noon, the trip from Barranquilla to Ibagué barely clear of the dead-fish smell of the coast, the sun in full force when the girl tapped on the glass with her enormous gun. A gun, he’d tell you later. Not a rifle.

The girl with the gun asked them to please step out of the car. She was calm. She was polite. She wore a bandanna over the lower half of her face.

The girl with the gun had hazel eyes, like Carmen. It was just Alvaro and his baby sister, Alba, and his mom and dad and scores of other families, strangers all, everyone dazed and stepping out of their cars like it was normal, no big deal.

It did look normal. It looked for all the world like a routine roadblock, an ordinary traffic stop. The military set them up to look for guerillas, but the guerillas set them up just as often to look for kidnapping targets, and now that the guerillas were on the run, now that their world had crumbled, you didn’t know who it was. Maybe common criminals, or paramilitary, or who knows, and that’s what he’d try to tell you later, what he’d say to you, what he could only whisper. That he did not know, had no idea. One roadblock was indistinguishable from the other. Everyone used the same prefabricated pieces to build the structure, the same smoothly swinging steel-and-rope arm blocking the road, the same procedure for pulling people out of the car.

The family joined the crowd gathering by the shoulder of the road on a lazy curve overlooking a trampled field, a valley just beyond: a low, flattened cup of green and mist. Time refused to settle nicely into the story when he told it to you, and now you’re having the same problem. It all happened all at once, he told it in the wrong order, he got the names wrong. He asked you to remember that he was not named after his own father, that Alvaro wasn’t actually his name, but that he had done his best to think of himself as Alvaro, to call himself Alvaro, that he’d explain it to you later, and then forgot to tell you why.

He knew that they had left early in the morning, that they had been stopped around noon, but when they stood on the curving road, it was already late in the afternoon, the sun was already giving up.

His sister’s swim meet wouldn’t be until tomorrow. They had time, they could still make it, even if this lasted however long it was supposed to last. His mother stood in front of him and held his sister’s shoulders. Alba was ten, old enough to know what was going on. She cried, but when they decided to move closer to the edge of the road, she did so calmly. His father, too, was calm. He whispered, “It’s going to be all right. They do these all the time.”

He wanted to ask if they’d be interested in Dad and the family because Dad worked for the oil company, but he knew better. Dad worked in research and development and had done graduate work in the States, but the family had no money, none whatsoever.

The girl who waved them toward the crowd with her gun was not much older than Carmen. Sixteen. Maybe seventeen. She could hold the gun, she could point with it, she could presumably shoot it, but she was so tiny.

His parents had spent the bulk of their lives traveling. After the kids were born, the family had lived in Curaçao and spoke some Dutch, some Papiamento. They had lived in Venezuela in the middle of a jungle. A worker’s camp, Dad an engineer for a hydroelectric dam. They had spent some time in Ohio when Dad was finishing up his PhD, returning to Colombia only at the insistence of Mom’s extended family, and of Mom herself: They missed her, they wanted them here, grandchildren included, they’d been gypsies too long. Come home, said the family. We don’t belong here, he wanted to tell the girl with the gun. We never have. They hadn’t spent enough time in this country to be kidnapped.

A guerilla rode on the back of a Kawasaki motorcycle and, through a megaphone, told the crowd to face the field. Another Kawasaki followed, lime green, where another guerilla, an open laptop dangling, checked the license plates of the idle cars.

They have a database, Alvaro thought.

There was some relief in knowing that much. Because his family really did not have any money. They could barely afford to get him to college, which they could not have done at all without Ecopetrol’s sizable subsidy. They could afford to get him to a doctor—they’d made the appointment, they’d figure out what was wrong with him—but his parents constantly fretted about affording anything, and now they fretted about him dropping out of school again. About what troubled him. They told him, You can tell us anything, and he kept quiet. Cried. He couldn’t get himself to classes, didn’t know what was wrong with him, it was his first time alone, away from home. And now he was home again, a big disappointment. They went out for dinner, his parents fretted. He or his sister signed for an empanada at the country club, they fretted. They fretted and traveled, never staying wholly fixed to one place, so they had nothing in the way of savings. He’d hear his parents talk about money, argue about it. Say that they should have stayed put. That they should have saved.

His dad whispered, “If they start shooting, roll down the hill and act dead.”

He nodded and whispered the same thing to Alba, grateful that Carmen wasn’t here. She wouldn’t whisper, wouldn’t comply. She’d fight. She’d yell. Alba nodded and whispered the same words to their mom, and she cried the whole time but she did so quietly.

They faced the field. A foot away from him, a trucker left the crowd and sat on the edge of the highway, and the guerilla zipped past with his megaphone and told him to get back, which the trucker did, but lazily, slowly, a man having a hard time taking the people with guns seriously.

All the truckers laughed and huddled and moved about and had no problem engaging in conversation. They must have seen the fear on Alvaro’s face and on the faces of his whole family, because they tried to reassure them. The truckers told them that drivers on this route were stopped all the time, that the guerillas hardly took anyone in these fishing expeditions and that half the time it was what they loved to call “information campaigns,” one of the chiefs talking at them for three hours about land redistribution and Marxist ideology. That the men on the Kawasakis handed out booklets on their history and encouraged you to read and take notes and ask questions. That the captive audience was thanked for their time and then released unharmed.

One of the Kawasakis roared past again and the megaphone told the trucker to shut it. The trucker waved him off. Laughed.

The day waned, the air cool and gentle. Alvaro shivered. He’d been shivering earlier too, when it was hot and humid. Mom shivered also. So did his sister, his dad. If they shoot, burrow under bodies, act dead. He thought, My whole family will do the same. We’ll be fine. The trucker told us we’d be fine.

The trucker would know, he’d been here before.

The moon crawled out, too bright, the field overlooking the valley clear in the horizon, as was a sky choking with stars. The world turned dark blue and silver blue and placid. Even the quick rip of gunfire sounded unrushed, brief, distant. Laughter burst here and there among the throng of civilians, so the gunfire didn’t feel serious. Not to him, not to them. Hundreds of their own kind gathered by the side of the road, the kind of people who carried no guns, who did what people with guns told them to do. Nothing to worry about. The trucker told them the only thing to worry about was the military. Because when the military intervened, things got bloody. But then the trucker drew their attention to the heartbeat and the murmur of distant helicopters.

The trucker said, “They’re far. They know what they’re doing. They’re not going to endanger us.”

The landscape above the valley stretched flat. There was nothing to worry about. Alvaro could not stop shivering.

That was when they called his father’s name through the megaphone.

Alba said, “No, no, no.”

Mom sobbed.

Dad asked him to take care of his sister and mother until he returned. Dad was being asked for his ID, the young man and the boy on the Kawasaki already there, and Dad pulled it out of his wallet, the ID a dirty cream color and poorly laminated and smudged, he’d never gotten it updated, and there was comfort in being witness to the process, it was so sane and orderly, as planned as the whorls of the Colombian seal stamped in a dead and faded green.

Alvaro could not stop shivering. He wanted to intervene but he could not bring himself to say or do anything. What was he? He was just a kid, he had never held a gun or gotten drunk or anything. The family barely had enough to keep going, to pay the maid, to travel, to pay for the country club. It would only be later that he would think, That’s not poor, that’s not poor at all. What did he know? What was he thinking?

“Dad’s got nothing,” he said. “We don’t have any money.”

The boy on the back of the motorcycle checked his laptop. He stared at the antediluvian photo of the father, with its muttonchops and big hair and wide lapels. He rechecked the laptop. The boy leaned into the driver and whispered, and the driver whispered to another guerilla by Dad’s side. Another person roughly Alvaro’s age. Everyone in charge was too young. They all should have been in school, himself included, they should have been somewhere else.

The boy said, “Take the whole family.”

* * *

They walked for hours by clear moonlight, the underbrush and trees etched in the dead, pale-blue light. His sister fell twice and scraped her knees, their mother grew quiet, Dad turned and told him again to take care of the family. Then said it again. Then again. Alvaro nodded and said yes every time, but Dad forgot or he wanted to make sure or else he was so nervous he could only repeat himself. He said it and he rubbed his son’s back. “Take care of the family.” The smell of spearmint brightened the cool, wet air, their shoes brushed the grass, the sound carried far into the night. An army helicopter whirred in the distance, but it did not follow them deeper into the mountainside. Either it never found their trail or did not care or knew better, decided that to follow would endanger civilians, like the trucker said, the trucker who also said that everything would be all right.

They were not alone. In front of them and behind them were other families, a few lone men, a few shivering teenagers, the line of civilians flanked by guerillas, some older and clearly in charge. The younger ones were younger than he was, men and women both, all wearing rubber boots and armbands, their bandannas no longer obscuring their faces but bunched around their necks, their faces flat as the moon, bored, blank, unperturbed, unalarmed.

* * *

They stopped in the middle of the trail, the rut deep with the footsteps of strangers, and one of the men whistled, and someone else laughed, and one of the hostages ran in the blue light and was shot. Alvaro heard the shot before the man had fallen, and so didn’t know if the man fell by accident, if he tripped just before the shot was fired, but someone leaned in and shot him again two times in the back of his head. The body twitched and lay still. He remembered his sister saying, “Poor thing.” She looked at the body, she did not turn away, the body twitching still, and she said it softly, holding their mother’s hand.

The guerillas told them to stay, to not move, to not run away. The men with the guns left the family and the other hostages in the middle of nowhere, where they waited, one of their own already dead, the poor thing. Dead and nameless.

There was no talk of leaving, no talk at all.

The other men arrived within the hour. They came at the exact time that Alvaro thought, Let’s leave. Alvaro could have run, the whole family could have, they had time, but what if they were watched? They had been warned. The body lay still not too far from where they stood. The men and women and boys and girls gathered close, huddled in a cloud of their own breath, not talking. They shivered. They cried, but they made an effort to keep quiet. When the other men arrived, the whole group turned in unison. We are a herd, Alvaro thought. We are cattle.

Four of the men wore black bandannas and military uniforms and gum boots, and the fifth a bright-yellow soccer shirt, his right arm missing, his face visible and streaked with scars, one of which bit into his left eye. The other scars were still raw, the skin held together with thick, black thread, but the thread wormed in and out of the puckered skin as though it had fused into the body, as though it should have been removed a long time ago and no one ever got around to it. The other men held guns but the scarred man carried a machete in his left hand. Most of the right forearm had been chopped off and the tissue at the stump was puckered and seamed. The men wore no armbands, were much older, in their forties, and when the one-armed man spoke, the others laughed. Their teeth had been removed. Their mouths were blacker than the night. Their faces were moonlit, distinct, but the countryside swallowed their laughter and their words.

The one-armed man called his father by name. The one-armed man said, “I’m Ernesto. Remember me? Remember Ernesto? Remember what you did to my family?” Alvaro thought of Bert and Ernie, of a broken Muppet, of this heavily injured, heavily scarred man sharing the same name as a Sesame Street character. This is all a joke, he thought. This is not happening.

Ernesto swung the machete deep into his father’s thigh and his father fell to the ground, the blade still lodged deep inside him. His father did not make a sound. Neither did he or Mom or Alba. What was there to say or do that wouldn’t make it worse?

They are going to chop all of us, he thought.

He was remembering it wrong. He had been crying, whimpering, yelling. His mother and sister too. His dad too. His dad moaned and said, Please and No, and when he held his arms in supplication, Ernesto’s machete sliced off half of his father’s fingers, the fingers still intertwined.

The men pointed their guns at the screaming family and did not tell them to be quiet, and the eyes of the men were dead, their faces plain and visible in the dead, blue moonlight, in the night that was like no night you could imagine, and the family would not make it, they would not leave this place alive, not his dad and not him and not his sister or his mother, and he could not hear himself scream, but he screamed like his dad screamed.

Ernesto screamed too, mocking his dad, and when he chopped off Dad’s arms at the elbows and his feet above the ankles and cauterized them with flame and tourniquetted them with twine, the forest lit up with the animal sound of his father, and the birds answered back.

His father had no feet, no arms.

The men propped him against a tree so he could watch while they raped his wife, Alvaro’s mother. No one turned away. Alvaro could not turn away because they pressed a gun against the side of his head. It went on for no time at all, it went on for hours, it did not happen, he did not see it happen.

He did not see the little girl either, pale and blond and out of place, as she peeked from behind a tree and smiled. She wore a dress or she was naked. She was as old as his sister but he had no way of telling, could not tell you how he knew or why she put a finger to her lips.

Quiet.

The men were drunk, the men had no teeth, the men were naked from the waist down, their feet still encased in gum boots, their parts caked in the blood of his mother, the boots and their thighs and their scars and the stump of Ernesto’s elbow all caked in blood too.

His mother made a low and awful sound from her bloodied face. She was bloody everywhere.

There was a gun pressed to the side of Alvaro’s head and he watched it all, and no one but him saw the little girl, who watched it all too, no one saw her walk to him, her feet blue in the moonlight. No one saw her, no one heard her. How could they? She wasn’t there.

She did not say, Give them to me and you live.

Give them, they’re dead anyway, you’ll die too. Give them to me.

Sometimes there is no sound, and she is not there, sometimes it turns out that he did not watch, that he shut his eyes, but he can’t lean in on the memory. Sometimes he wants to tell himself that it happened at a great distance, but the men clustered the family in a small patch of land. So what distance? None. He was close enough to smell what he did not want to smell.

Will you give them to me?

They sliced his mother’s stomach open and all her dark, wet secrets spilled. She moaned like an animal abandoned by the side of the road. She tried to bring the coils and cords back into herself, but her fingers had been broken, a nail had been pulled off, and she could not do it.

They gave his sister a gun. They told his sister to shoot Mom, to put the gun against Mom’s mouth and pull the trigger. They said, Right here, and tapped her mother’s cheek, and laughed, and the little girl who wasn’t there asked once more if he’d give them all to her, if he’d give her the broken pieces of his family, and then she said, Look, and she pulled back the bark from the tree to reveal a black, ropy, wet mass, something alive and throbbing behind the fabric of the world, some other awful pain that waited behind the awful pain of his mother, and the little girl laughed when the men laughed. She laughed with them. His sister cried and held on to the gun with both hands and could not lift it, not until they slapped her and told her they’d rape her if she didn’t do it, that they’d let her go if she did. (Will you?) His sister crawled to their mother, the men alongside her, and she dragged the gun to their mother’s temple, and she shot her. They told her to shoot again, that her mother was not dead yet, that if she loved her mother she would put her out of her misery, and the men meant it. They were no longer laughing. Whatever pleasure they had taken in what came before was gone, they were all business, and his sister did what she was told, and the body of their mother stopped convulsing.

You shoot your brother, they said.

Will you? said the girl who wasn’t there.

He heard them say it, he did not hear them say it. He did not hear his sister say yes or no, and he’d like to tell you that he didn’t say yes, that he didn’t say, Yes, take them, I give them to you, let me live, but that much he remembers. That much he can confirm. He said yes. His father slumped on the tree, his face swollen and blotched, his eyes red and black. If Dad was crying, there was no way to know, no way to tell. If he said anything, if he wanted to say anything, there was no way to tell. Dad’s mouth was a mess and the eyes half blinked, half opened.

Alba put the gun to her brother’s mouth, to his mouth. The barrel tapped his teeth, and her hands shook, and the metal chipped his front tooth, the crack small and unimportant and still unfixed, ...