Girls Save the World in This One - Ash Parsons Page 0,49
camerawoman jabs impatiently at her phone.
In every row that isn’t in the back of the ballroom, the audience just sits calmly, glancing around, some standing, but most waiting for Michaela to tell them what’s happening, to get the panel back underway.
But Michaela just stands there, holding the mic below her chin, staring in surprise as more herky-jerky bodies press into the ballroom.
“It’s . . . is it . . . ?” Michaela says, squinting at the surging bodies in the back of the room. “Some kind of flash mob?”
The standing-room crowd at the back of the ballroom has started shoving to get away, moving in isolation from the rest of the seated audience like the ripple of a larger wave to come.
And in row two, Siggy is still blowing kisses at Linus, as Blair eggs her on, clapping.
They don’t know. They don’t see.
This is an attack.
The scientist said the infected are here.
Zombies. He called them zombies.
The zombie apocalypse is here now.
I have to warn them. Siggy, Blair, Hunter, all of them. Everyone.
Imani is already ahead of me, of course, her thoughts and mine running together like always, almost as if we’re telepathic. She’s cupped her hands around her mouth, hollering at the stage.
“Run, Siggy!”
There’s too much noise. Too much confusion.
Siggy’s head swivels slightly, like she’s thinking of glancing back where we were.
Onstage, Linus says something and her head turns back toward him.
On the giant screen over the stage, there’s a wide shot of the waiting actors. The shot wavers slightly with our weight as Imani jumps and waves her arms.
“We have to show them!” I tell the camerawoman.
I grab the side of the camera lens and push.
The camerawoman takes ahold of the lever that tilts the camera and adjusts it down.
On the big screen, the picture skims down and across the seated audience, then finally hits the aisle at the back of the room.
The camera must have an automatic focus, or the camerawoman does it, because the picture first blurs, then pulls in clear on the face of another zombie, a woman with bright blood smearing her mouth and nose, making it look vaguely like she has a muzzle, except for the fact that it’s blood, and when she opens her mouth wide you can see chunks of bright red flesh in her mouth.
I recognize her. It’s the rude woman with shiny lips from Autograph Alley. The one who pushed in front of me to get Janet’s signature.
Something got to her. A zombie. The skin of one cheek is torn—white teeth gleaming through the gash.
Through the close-up of the camera, I can see clearly not just the gray mottling on her skin, the coloring that makes it look necrotic, but also something else.
A writhing, somehow under the skin. As if the musculature of her face is somehow undulating in a wave. It makes her skin look like a snake’s egg, pulsating with the movements of the snakeling within.
I recoil instinctively as my stomach lurches. It’s disgusting and really, really disturbing, the ripples of the muscles under her gray and mottled skin.
She jerks. Her arms give a spasm, and she falls forward as if tugged, flailing toward a man.
The panic that began in the back of the hall sweeps forward through the seats, like a wave in a stadium, as the rest of the audience sees the zombies on the big screen. As they watch the zombie woman bite into the arm of the man. As they see his agonized, terrified face.
Screams and shouts as people clamber out of their seats, or try to. There’s shoving in panic, trying to escape narrow rows and funneling into suddenly crowded aisles.
Imani is still waving her arms over her head, and I see Siggy standing on her chair, searching for us in the back of the hall, where she left us.