Girls Save the World in This One - Ash Parsons Page 0,84

A piercing shriek sounds from the opposite end of the convention center ground floor, coming from the direction of the hallway where Simon was standing guard moments ago.

Rosa whirls in the direction of the scream and sprints toward it, as Mr. 305 struggles up to his knees, and falls over again, arms and legs thrashing.

I step out to follow Rosa, which is when I realize there are more zombies streaming around the opposite side of the water feature, the lower half of the circle, moving between the waterfall and the exhibit hall.

Way more zombies. Ten? Twenty?

And I realize I’m too far behind Rosa. And far, far too far behind the others.

Time slows, for a split second, like in a movie, or a football replay. In the taffy-slowdown, I have a math epiphany.

Or something.

A perfect image appears in my mind, plotting the graph of the variables—two groups of zombies, some fast and some slow, one group of survivors, fast, but way ahead of me. And that scream is a giant unknown symbol, no, a variable, dammit. Wait. Is it. An exponent? Is that the thing it is? Get it right, June.

I don’t have time to solve for X.

But it doesn’t matter, because I can see it, clear as day. The water feature, the locked doors, the security booth and one long wall of the exhibit hall, boarded-up doors and no time to break them open. And the zombies, inexorable, all vectors and quadrants—my mind predicting and following arcs and parabolas, point-to-point-to-line-to-conclusion—suddenly, with perfect clarity.

I am not going to make it.

Even if I run like an Olympic sprinter. Even if I call out to Rosa, and she waits for me, and tries to whack some of the zombies away with her lamp, and just ends up eaten for her trouble. Even if I dodge and weave, dip and slide, flip around like a superhero on steroids who’s made of pixels and CGI instead of flesh and bone.

I’m simply too far away.

There are too many of them, funneling around the bottom of the water feature—plus the group at the top fixated on Rosa and the scream.

But if I don’t yell for help . . . if I don’t try to follow the others . . . if I just think clearly, if I can think clearly—

A single flower flutters down from the mound of fake volcanic rock, waterfall, and orchids. The flower lands in the small, surrounding pool.

And I know what to do.

I run up the semicircular entryway, looping behind the first group of zombies, the mangled group of injured and slow, one uninjured and faster, stumbling after Rosa. The woman zombie with the chewed-up leg is up again, from when Simon knocked her down.

Only Mr. 305 sees me. The others are distracted by the scream.

Mr. 305 is up, sorta, falling and crawling and standing again, making his unsteady way back toward me as he registers my movement.

My friends, my group, can make it back to the stairwell and safety. I think they will. Even though I don’t know who screamed or why.

They have to be safe.

Imani and Siggy and Blair have to be safe.

I run toward the smaller group of zombies, but off to one side. If they were normal people, there’s no way they wouldn’t see me in their peripheral vision.

But their eyes. The bloodshot hemorrhages in the eyes of all the infected. The occluded black of impact cataracts, or clots, or whatever incredibly gross thing has happened in their eyes means . . . maybe it means . . .

They won’t see me yet.

Of course, it’s only a matter of time and field-of-vision until they do.

As if hearing the thought, the other zombie man with the dragging leg turns toward me, a zigging motion, whipsawed away from the noise of the scream.

I rush at him, silent, although I want to yell, swinging the microphone arm with all I’ve got. It catches him on the side of the head, connecting with a resounding impact I feel up