Girls Save the World in This One - Ash Parsons Page 0,90

then when I got cast—”

His voice trails off. He catches himself, and looks down.

“It’s just hard to do long-distance friendships, and everyone on the show is older than me.”

I nod. Then I narrow my eyes at him.

“Tell me the truth, Hunter.”

“Okay, what?”

“Do you even like coffee?”

Hunter chuckles, and shakes his head. “It’s okay.”

“Put a lot of sugar and milk in it.” I wink at him. “Pro tip.”

Hunter laughs and sketches a salute at me.

I flex and lift my leg, then straighten it out again.

“I think I’m good,” I say. “And as restful as this has been, we should make a move.”

“Few issues. First: go where?” Hunter asks.

“There’s got to be a way out.”

“I don’t see how, if they have it all locked down and blocked from sight.” Hunter shakes his head. A lock of wavy hair falls over his eyes.

“That woman, the one outside, in the hazmat suit— where was she pointing? She was trying to tell you all something, what was it?”

“I’ve been replaying it in my mind,” Hunter says, his eyes closed. “Behind us. She was pointing behind us.”

“At the zombies coming, maybe,” I whisper, although no. It had to be something more.

Or is that just my own desperation?

“No, it was behind us and up. But not the escalator. I don’t think . . .” Hunter’s whisper trails off, a self-doubt that is so familiar to me under the soft tone. “I don’t know.”

“No, go on. What were you going to say?” I urge him, and touch his hand.

“It’s just . . . the angle was off.” His words are urgent, as he turns his hand up to squeeze mine, tight, like the pressure of his fingers can tell me more than his voice, what he means.

I would like to take a moment, right now, outside of time or mortal terror, to observe in my body the way it feels to hold Hunter Sterling’s hand. Surreal as it is, and not-really-a-hand-hold-kind-of-holding-hands as it is.

It feels nice. Really, really nice. So warm. So tingly.

“What was the angle?” I ask. “Where?”

“Up and outside,” Hunter says. “It doesn’t make sense. I can’t figure out where she was pointing. I would say down the street, but it was up.”

He lets go of my hand and points over his own shoulder and up at the desk surface above us.

Outside. Up. Down the street.

“The hamster tube!” My voice is quiet yet still louder than I intended. I glance back at the monitors. The group of zombies standing at the fountain haven’t really moved from their location, although their arms are now lowered.

The other screens are blank, the horde or pod of zombies having wandered into a blind spot.

“What?” Hunter asks.

“The walkway thingy! The skyway!”

“There’s a skyway?”

I see our town and Hunter’s experience with it for a split second, through his eyes. He probably watched fields and houses, trailer parks and denser subdivisions out his car window as the driver brought him in from Atlanta.

Depending on where he was dropped off, he wouldn’t know there was a skyway. Especially with as small as the town must seem to him.

As small as it actually is.

Midsized is what our mayor likes to call it. Midsized so that it doesn’t sound like “not as small as some.” Or “bigger than many!”

Tiny to Hunter Sterling, though.

And, like, we know, the hamster tube is ridiculous.

“It leads to the hotel,” I say.

And of course. The tube makes the most sense as a point of exit. It’s tiny. And I saw them, I saw the people in hazmat suits; we thought they were the same cosplayers from before but they weren’t, they were from the army or whatever group is trying to deal with all this. They pushed the security into the tube, they closed the entry into the hotel.