Girls Save the World in This One - Ash Parsons Page 0,83

whatever Simon could see out his set of doors, the spiderwebbed glass at last folds, like a shutter, and falls back toward us, onto the floor.

Cuellar rips the white cloth, revealing a broad plank of wood, completely covering the door.

They hung the cloth to stop the zombies from breaking the glass, then they boarded up the doors.

“Dammit!” Cuellar shouts.

“We have to fight!” I call. “Then retreat!”

Someone yells, “RUN!”

The first zombie, a man, rounds the edge of the water feature farthest from me and closest to Simon. The zombie man moves in a twitching lurch, dragging one half-eaten leg behind him.

Two more zombies emerge behind him, another man and a woman, jerking and lurching from their own injuries that happened before they . . . changed.

The woman has a torn and bloody calf and lower leg, white bone and torn tendons showing through the shredded meat. She has to lift and throw that leg forward first, propping back on her good leg.

The third zombie, a short, bald man, is not injured, that I can see. But he has the same twitching jerking on his unseen virus-strings, tugged forward faster when he sees Simon, bloody mouth opening, spilling chunks of raw meat.

More zombies shuffle forward behind these three, stumbling sluggishly, then with increasing speed as we come into view.

The bald zombie breaks into a lurching run toward Simon.

Simon lifts his vanity stool.

Annie screams, and the bald zombie turns, shoulders, then head, then hips, in her direction.

Cuellar tears Annie’s grip off his shirt.

And he runs back the way we came, toward the stairwell.

Annie follows, and so do the rest, Rosa, and Imani, and Siggy. They run instinctively, like gazelles leaping away from a lion. As a group, they press between reaching zombie hands, shoving their weapons out.

Simon rushes after them, arcing the seat of the vanity stool sideways and into the head of the slower zombie reaching for him, knocking her sideways.

Simon sprints ahead of the others, stands guard at the top of the hall, and yells.

“Hurry!”

My group runs and I’m still standing here, frozen against the boarded-up doors so the rest of the zombies won’t notice me.

Except, no. Rosa isn’t running away.

As the short, bald zombie reaches for Siggy at the back of the pack, as his fingers twist at the edges of Siggy’s scarf of trailing hair, and as his lurching rush amps up another notch . . .

While I stand helpless and rooted to the floor with my heart in my throat—

Rosa pivots and runs back, toward the bald zombie, and then diagonally down, toward the exhibit hall and where I stand, even though she’s about twenty feet away from me. Her voice lashes out.

“Hey! Mr. 305!”

Okay, I hadn’t really thought of it, but yes, he does sort of look like the zombie version of the Miami-based rapper Pitbull.

The bald zombie spins away from Siggy in that disjointed way again, first shoulders, then hips, then feet, and runs toward Rosa.

Rosa takes a wide stance and cocks the metal lamp on her shoulder, holding it upside down in a choke-tight double grip. The felt-covered base rotates in small circles by her ear, as she watches, and waits.

It’s a thing of pure beauty, the way she steps forward, the lamp’s whistling arc, composed of hours spent in the batting cage or on the field. So, I guess Rosa must have been on her high school or college softball team, because that lamp swings out like whip-crack poetry in motion, and it catches the Pitbull zombie mid-run.

The lamp hits him square in the throat. His legs keep running, as the top of him is knocked back, held in sudden place by the impact. His feet run right out from under him and up into the air, almost like he’s trying to run up an invisible wall.

The bald zombie slams onto his back, a horrible, wet choking noise rattling out of his throat as he scrabbles on the ground.