All Together Dead

The coffins entered here before they were taken to their designated rooms. Two uniformed men armed with shotguns stood facing the elevator, but I have to say that they looked remarkably bored, not at all like the alert watchdogs in the lobby.
    In an area by the far wall, to the left of the huge elevator, some suitcases were slumped together in a forlorn sort of suitcase corral, an area delineated by those posts that contain retractable strips that are used to direct crowds in airports. No one appeared to be in charge of them, so I walked over—and it was a long walk—and began reading labels. There was already another lackey like me searching through the luggage, a young man with glasses and wearing a business suit.
    “What are you looking for?” I asked. “If I see it while I’m looking, I can pull it out for you.”
    “Good idea. The desk called to say we had a suitcase down here that hadn’t made it to the room, so here I am. The tag should say ‘Phoebe Golden, Queen of Iowa’ or something like that. You?”
    “Sophie-Anne Leclerq, Louisiana.”
    “Wow, you work for her? Did she do it?”
    “Nope, and I know because I was there,” I said, and his curious face got even more curious. But he could tell I wasn’t going to say any more about it, and he resumed looking.
    I was surprised at the number of suitcases in the corral.
    “How come,” I asked the young man, “they can’t just bring these up and leave them in the rooms? Like the rest of the luggage?”
    He shrugged. “I was told it’s some kind of liability issue. We have to identify our suitcases personally, so they can say we were the ones who picked them out. Hey, this is the one I want,” he said after a moment. “I can’t read the name of the owner, but it does say Iowa, so it must belong to someone in our group. Well, bye, nice to talk to you.” He set off briskly with a black rolling bag.
    Immediately after that, I hit luggage pay dirt. A blue leather suitcase was tagged with “Sheriff, Area”—well, that was too scribbled to make out. The vampires used all kinds of scripts, depending on the education they’d had in the age they were born. “Louisiana”: the label did say that. I picked up the old suitcase and lifted it over the barrier. The writing wasn’t any clearer closer to my eyes. Like my opposite number in Iowa, I decided the best course would be to take it upstairs and show it around until someone claimed it.
    One of the armed guards had turned halfway from his post to figure out what I was doing. “Where you going with that, beautiful?” he called.
    “I work for the Queen of Louisiana. She sent me down to get it,” I said.
    “Your name?”
    “Sookie Stackhouse.”
    “Hey, Joe!” he called to a fellow employee, a heavy guy who was sitting behind a really ugly desk on which sat a battered computer. “Check out the name Stackhouse, will ya?”
    “Sure thing,” Joe said, wrenching his gaze from the young Iowan, who was just barely visible over on the other side of the cavernous space. Joe regarded me with the same curiosity. When he saw that I’d noticed, he looked guilty and tapped away at the keyboard. He eyed the computer screen like it could tell him everything he needed to know, and for the purposes of his job, maybe he was right.
    “Okay,” Joe called to the guard. “She’s on the list.” His was the gruff voice that I remembered from the phone conversation. He resumed staring at me, and though all the other people in the cavernous space were having blank, neutral thoughts, Joe’s were not blank. They were shielded. I’d never encountered anything like it. Someone had put a metaphysical helmet on his head. I tried to get through it, around, under it, but it stayed in place. While I fumbled around, trying to get inside his thoughts, Joe was looking at me with a cross expression. I don’t think he knew what I was doing. I think he was a grouch.
    “Excuse me,” I asked, calling so my question could reach Joe’s ears. “Is my picture by my name on your list?”
    “No,” he said, snorting as if I’d asked a strange question. “We got a list of all the guests and who they brought with them.”
    “So, how do you know I’m me?”
    “Huh?”
    “How do you know I’m Sookie Stackhouse?”
    “Aren’t you?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Then what you bitching about? Get outta here with the damn suitcase.” Joe looked down at his computer, and the guard swung around to face the elevator. This must be