Girls Save the World in This One - Ash Parsons Page 0,122
the screen.
Imani and her helpers rush along the front edge of the balcony to the next sprinkler.
The water landing on the hardwood floor of the ballroom spills out into a wider and wider area; as the heavy shower continues to fall, the water spreads outward, toward the side wall, toward the front of the ballroom, toward the back doors.
“I’m gonna fight.”
I hear a thunderous boom, and my eyes jump to the back of the ballroom.
The single set of open doors has slammed back against the walls, pressed by the massive influx of zombies.
It’s working.
The sound lure is drawing them, from the hallway, up from the first-floor lobby, over the barricades, and with those numbers, probably from the exhibit hall itself.
I feel triumphant, then tiny, then terrified as hundreds more zombies press into the ballroom.
The zombies at the front of the stage are buffeted by others arriving. I can feel the vibrations through the stage floor.
The curtain behind the stage billows against the chain-link set dressing. The zombies that found their way backstage to the double doors now trying to find their way back, following the noise.
How many zombies can press in until there are enough to collapse the stage? Or to climb over each other to reach us?
I lift my eyes, looking for Imani, and clever Siggy, who had said, “Haven’t you been in a hotel and seen those little No hangers! signs below the sprinkler heads? When they’re set in the wall? That’s because you can set them off just by trying to hang a shirt there!”
Imani’s taller and so she has longer arms; that’s the reason we chose her to do the sprinkler-jabbing. She’s working fast now; three more sprinkler heads have been set off and she’s working on another. When that one pops open, water gushing out in its wide circle, Imani, Siggy, and Simon sprint around the soundboard, ignoring the two sprinkler heads in proximity to it, and rush to the opposite side of the balcony and start again.
I run to the edge of the stage and grab a white hard-sided briefcase. I open it. Inside it’s filled with foam rubber, with little nests for battery or broadcasting packs.
I carry it out to the center front of the stage again, and look out over the sea of straining, grasping bodies. More and more push into the hall, tracking through the rapidly pooling water.
The front edge of spreading water isn’t far enough yet.
Almost. Almost.
I open the case and place it, rubber side down, on the carpeted part of the stage behind me.
“Got it!” Blair yells from the side of the stage.
She pushes the curtains back, revealing a square aluminum truss that runs up and over the front of the stage. Hanging off the center top piece of the truss is a huge light bar, easily ten feet in length. It hangs out just slightly beyond the front edge of the stage.
Blair has her hand on a lever of some sort. She gives it an experimental crank.
The lights lift an inch.
Blair steps back and looks up, taking in the cables.
At the front of the stage, the movement of the zombies piled up, trying to reach us, has changed. Instead of reaching, and ineffectively pushing their chests against the edge, they’re starting to rise, somehow.
It’s uncoordinated, nothing like a predetermined movement. A susurrating noise under their groans, a slight rise and fall, like a wave.
Like popcorn in a pan, as kernels expand beneath kernels.
The stage shifts, I can feel it start to slide slightly backward.
They’re being pressed so hard against the front edge that it’s rupturing lungs, breaking ribs. Several of the zombies start to pour blood and other effluvium out of their mouths, noses, eyes. The pressure of the mass of bodies behind them is quite literally crushing them.
And causing others to rise, squeezed in and up, like . . . like . . . like—