Girls Save the World in This One - Ash Parsons Page 0,107
the water fountains and continues creeping down the hall toward the escalators and the stairwell. We’re in our loose turtle shape, with Scott sort of absorbed into it near the back.
I pick up the thread of conversation from before my ex-boyfriend showed up.
I really am glad he’s alive. Really.
I’m also glad he’s behind me now, literally, muttering at the back of the group with Blair.
“So, you want to go down to the first floor, do our whole water feature schtick again, and check out the security booth for radios, just in case?” I ask Hunter.
I’m distracted but it almost seems like Scott and Blair are arguing.
“No, I wouldn’t say I want to do that.” Hunter shoots a sidelong glance at me. “Just it’s a thought. I don’t have any others.”
Call it nerves, but I’m speaking before I think about what I’m going to say.
“Well, don’t worry your pretty head about that, little mister,” I say, a joking bravado in my voice. “I’ll look after ya.”
Hunter laughs, and I steal a glance to find him smiling shyly back at me.
“You think my head’s pretty, huh?”
Ladies and gentlemen, I do believe the boy is flirting with me. In the middle of the zombie apocalypse.
Although I guess, technically, I flirted with him first.
In front of us, Cuellar stops short and drops low, although there’s no potted plant to hide behind this time.
We all freeze, just in time to see a teeming swarm of zombies gathered at the far edge of the second-floor lobby.
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Then some of the zombies see us, and all hell breaks loose.
It’s like in the movies again, with that impossible time slowdown, in a way that it totally wouldn’t in real life, you would think, but you’d be wrong, because here we are, and there’s a mass, no, a horde, no, a killing of zombies ahead, and so yeah—time slows down.
My insides turn into Jell-O because there are so many. Too many, just a huge, huge number. If it was the SAT, the word question would be “How many zombies will be left with nothing to eat after our group is devoured completely, down to bones and gristle,” because it’s that many. Fifty? Eighty? A hundred? More?
Cuellar cusses.
Then several things happen at once.
A man wearing a maintenance uniform, one of those big zip-front jumpsuits made out of thick navy material, turns from the side of the herd closest to us. He’s wearing a welder’s mask with the visor up. Jaundice-yellow and blood-streaked eyes see us, somehow, because his jaw opens, no, it unhinges.
He’s terrifying.
I can’t take my eyes off him as he puppet-jerks forward, a single arm flailing toward us.
But he’s not the only one, and at least one other zombie is faster, a zoombie, because suddenly the welder is knocked slightly sideways by a guy in a yellow shirt, a security guard, just zooming up from behind.
Cuellar pops up from his crouch and steps forward, swinging high with his ax.
The blade impacts the jaw of the security guard zombie, a crunch of bone and spray of blood, and the ax stroke lifts him up and back, throwing him into the zombies behind him.
Our defense-turtle shape collapses as we stumble away, flattening into a row of sitting ducks just waiting for which zombie from the horde will reach us first.
Annie yelps in fear; Simon moves forward next to Cuellar, his stool swinging.
Hunter rushes to stand with his costars, lamp raised.
Two voices gibber in my mind.
This is it. This is it. This is it.
and
We have to . . . we have to . . . we have to . . .
Then Janet steps forward. Amazing Janet. There’s no stopping them, Vivian! Janet O’Shea. Looking like the coolest older lady you ever saw in your life, with her short, spiky white hair, and her drawer plank raised. She yells at me, her piercing blue eyes capturing mine.