Girls Save the World in This One - Ash Parsons Page 0,54
Imani is reaching out to pull back the curtain when I think of it.
The guy swinging the fire extinguisher.
“Wait, Imani!” My voice is a whisper-hiss. “What if they got away but there’s a zombie back there now? Behind the curtain?”
PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE ZOMBIE BEHIND THE CURTAIN.
My brain chatters the Wizard of Oz joke unhelpfully.
Imani pauses, hand outstretched.
“She’s right,” the camerawoman, Rosa, whispers behind me.
“So, what do we do?” Imani hisses back.
“We need a weapon.” I turn back to the stage behind us. There are chairs, the fancy padded folding kind, a tall stool, an empty microphone stand, microphone on the ground next to it.
“Wait here!”
I dash out, grab the microphone stand, and start to haul it over to the edge of the stage.
The stand is quite heavy, weighted at the bottom by a heavy black disc-weight, and it’s bulky, with an adjustable arm coming off the center pole.
As I wrestle with it, I can’t help but glance back into the ballroom.
The stuntman has sprinted out into the middle of the hall, dodging zombies and chairs.
He can’t run forever.
And that’s when I see it, and he does, too.
His squad, the stuntmen and the cheerleaders on the balcony, are waving, pulling their hands silently, urging him back toward them.
They can’t possibly help him. They can’t reach him, and even if they could, how could they possibly lift him? He’s huge—built like if The Rock met The Rock and then absorbed himself, becoming MegaRock.
His friends throw a thick, industrial-weight extension cord over the balcony. At even spaces, the cord has been tied into loops all the way up, like steps in a ladder.
The stuntman sees it and turns, pulling out of grasping hands and sprinting like a gazelle back across the hall to the extension cord.
The stuntman does a running leap and grabs it.
I reach Imani, and Rosa spins the attachment screw threads on the mic stand, pulling apart two separate weapons.
At the balcony, it’s like something out of one of those TV athletic competitions. The stuntman just swings and pulls himself, arm over arm, until he’s over the top and onto the balcony.
My heart does a happy swoop as his friends hug him, pounding his back, tears streaming down their faces.
Rosa hands Imani the base of the mic stand, and gives me the arm.
The stuntman points down to the other clump of survivors, hiding behind the overturned sound table. The two burly guys down there are still standing, swinging at the zombies with fire extinguishers.
The stuntman and the rest of the cheer squad haul up the extension cord and run along the edge of the balcony until they are standing over the trapped group.
The extension cord starts to lower swiftly.
We can’t get there from here. There are far too many zombies now butting against the lip of the stage, and too many more zombies in the rest of the ballroom between us and the extension cord.
But there are already survivors. The cheerleaders and the other people fighting, and more people making it out of the ballroom.
We can do it, too.
I take a test swing with the arm section of the stand. My ZombieCon! badge gets in the way, and the shoestring lanyard tangles around the thin metal. I nearly end up clocking myself in the forehead with the abrupt stop of my swing.
“Better take these off,” Rosa says, pulling her own ID badge from around her neck.
“Good idea,” I reply.
We shove our badges into our bags or pockets.
I take another test swing with the arm section of the mic stand.
Imani hoists the base, the heavy round disc resting on her shoulder like a flat parasol.
Rosa has broken the antenna off the burned-out car chassis.
“Let’s go,” I say.
I reach out and poke the mic stand arm through the curtains.