Girls Save the World in This One - Ash Parsons Page 0,123
My stomach lurches with nausea. I take a deep breath and look away so I don’t hurl.
It’s only a matter of time before one of them, through the combined lift and squeeze, tips over onto the stage.
If it doesn’t simply collapse first.
“Ready when you are!” Blair yells.
There are too many bodies in front of me. I can’t tell if the water has reached far enough forward. It must.
We can’t wait much longer. The stage shifts again, like a raft on an ocean, drifting back. Shuddering.
I glance up at Hunter. At Imani and Siggy.
I lift the microphone stand and wait at the front of the stage.
“Get ready to jump!” Blair yells at me.
“Wait for it!” I yell back, rolling my shoulders and jabbing the heavy mic stand out in front of me experimentally.
On the balcony, Imani makes a hand gesture like water, a snaky wave. Then she gives a thumbs-up.
The water has reached far enough.
Thank you, Imani.
“Get ready, Blair!” I yell.
Blair wraps her arm, then a leg into the curtains at the side of the stage, winding it around herself like an aerialist on webbing.
She pulls herself up, off the metal stage, but tilts sideways, still keeping a hand on the ratchet lever.
At the very back of the hall, I see the silhouette of two shuffling zombies, turning away from the stage, from the room, running out into the hall.
What the hell?
Maybe the SWAT team has arrived. We have to light this thing up now.
“Three, two, one, GO!” I yell.
There’s a whizz of wires as Blair releases the lights.
I lunge forward with the mic stand, and heave with all my strength, knocking the aluminum light bar out that tiny, extra, necessary little bit.
Over the zombies. Over the water.
I’m supposed to jump up and back now, in the split second it will take the lights to drop, hit the water, and send out deadly bolts of electricity.
I leap up and back, extending toward the open white case.
From the balcony it looked like it was made of fiberglass-type plastic, white like a construction helmet, so it shouldn’t conduct electricity. Plus, bonus, it’s lined with that foam rubber to hold the battery pack things.
And I’m hoping between those two things, and the thin carpet that lines the plywood square top of the stage, that it will be just enough of a dampener, that in killing the zombies, I won’t also be killing myself.
But if I do, well.
It was an honor serving with me.
My brain is so inappropriate, but that doesn’t stop it from cracking the joke as I stretch my toes down to try to stick the landing on the case.
The light bar falls into the zombies, hard. The bar snaps in two, crashing heavy spotlights blaring out red and blue beams of light into the zombies, then past them, into the water.
There is an audible pop and sizzle as arcing power bolts through the crowd of bodies, backward, sideways, and forward, all at once, like branching lightning.
My feet don’t ever get to connect with the case to test my theory. Electricity shoots into the air, twisting up metal and aluminum, through the air and into me.
The bolt goes in my ankle, shoots up my leg, and comes out on my outer hip in an instant; a simultaneous, painful shock, like it’s one motion, not two moments, the lightning like a gunshot. I’m blown forcefully up and back, rotating around the axis of my jolted hip, flying off the stage, over the edge, into the chain-link set dressing and heavy backdrop of curtain that stops me, catches me, drops me.
And everything goes dark.
36
If I’m dead, it shouldn’t hurt, right?
So, I’m probably not dead?
There’s a ringing in my ears, and everything hurts, especially my leg, somehow both novocaine-numb and shooting pain at the same time.