Girls Save the World in This One - Ash Parsons Page 0,88
I smile back and hear the goofus “dur-heyuck” laugh in my head as I snortle quietly again.
Smooth, June. Real smooth.
Snap out of it.
“Well, it’s not a catering truck, but—” I reach into the backpack and pull out two energy bars.
I hand one to Hunter Sterling.
“Wow, what don’t you have in there?” he asks, voice tinged with honest amazement.
And I feel like an actual badass.
We open and eat the energy bars. I’m flexing my calf and my foot, seeing how bad the injury is—now that it’s covered up it doesn’t seem so rough.
“So, how did you end up here?” I ask, tilting my eyes to the desk surface over our heads.
We exchange our stories. Establish we were both in the ballroom when it started, and how we got out, who was with us. Who we lost.
Hunter was with James. Of course, the actor who played his father figure very much seeming to fill that role in real life.
I don’t tell him that I met James as a fan mere hours before the apocalypse started. Or how nice he was to us.
But I listen as Hunter’s whisper urgently explains how he, like me, got separated from the rest of his group.
It was basically the same thing that just happened to me, how I ended up split off from the others by the sheer bad luck of zombie pack (horde?) dynamics.
Except Hunter, James, and the other actors and audience members with them actually got to the doors after they were locked, but before they were shrouded in white cloth.
And saw out the chained glass doors, as they banged and hammered and yelled.
There were people in hazmat suits. Whole platoons of them, as well as tenting being set up, military-grade weaponry and barricades, a double-ringed perimeter, and a woman in a hazmat suit standing right on the other side of the door—trying to communicate with them.
She’d waved, yelled, and gesticulated, but then the zombies had arrived, chasing Hunter, James, and the others trapped inside.
It was chaos, terror, screams, people were attacked, taken down, the group had scattered, James leading the rest up the escalators to the second floor, not realizing until he got somewhere safe, if he did, that Hunter had been isolated behind the rest, cut off by the same water feature and a smaller pack (contingent?) of zombies.
Until he’d managed to dodge and weave his way here, under the desk, behind the locked door, and stayed there until the zombies at the door had been drawn away by something else.
Us. Our group.
And he’d seen on the monitors how that played out, and how I’d become isolated, how the pack (flock?) of zombies had split. As in into two groups. So Hunter was able to signal to me.
And here we both are, hiding. With no way out.
“We’re in a lockdown,” Hunter whispers. “Impossible as it seems, with actual zombies, or whatever they are.”
“That scientist guy that jumped onstage said he was a biomedical researcher, so it’s probably like a rage-virus or rabies kind of thing,” I say. “They’re not reanimated corpses, technically.”
I remember the look of them, graying, necrotic flesh, bloodshot, capillary-burst eyes. Herky-jerky locomotion like looking at a dancer attempting to perform a piece inspired by neurological damage.
“I mean,” I add, “I don’t think they’re actual reanimated corpses.”
Hunter cocks an eyebrow.
“How reassuringly technical,” he whispers, a rueful grin skewed sideways at me.
I grin back.
“That’s me, Miss Overly-Accurate-in-Life-and-Death-Scenarios,” I joke. I grab the air beside my eye and reposition fake glasses. “Actually,” I whisper in a quasi-nasal voice, “they’re not reanimated corpses.” I give a little sniff and simultaneously slide my index finger up the bridge of my nose, pushing the pretend glasses up.
Hunter snorts a laugh, then lifts a fist in a sky-punch of celebration.
“Death is still real!” he whisper-cheers.
I glance at my leg. I flex my leg gently, roll it side to side.