The white hallway is the same, just as we left it. We move silently. The double doors that exit from the back of the ballroom still flap and strain from the zombies moving on the other side.
There’s no telling how long this hallway will remain passable.
We pause at the dressing room for Hunter to arm himself with a heavy wooden lamp, bigger than the matched pair Mia and Rosa had used.
I look at Annie and tip my head at the dressing room.
Annie shakes her head, clutching her defibrillator case like a talisman.
It’s gotten her this far, I guess. Plus, to be fair, she looks pretty shell-shocked.
We go back into the hall and rush down to the double doors that lead out to the second-floor lobby and escalators.
“Okay, no one left behind,” I whisper over my shoulder. “Remember the turtle defense thingy.”
We cluster together with each other at our backs, our weapons bristling outward.
If two sections of a microphone stand, two vanity stools, front pieces of drawers, a lamp, a sculpture, and a defibrillator case can be said to bristle.
The point is, we’re going to work together this time.
Hunter stands to my right. We’re the front of our little phalanx.
“Yay, rah, turtle defense thingy!” he cheers, a low murmur so only I hear, then he shoots that crooked smile at me.
I smile at him, just a full-on beam of teeth and gums, I’m sure, and my heart does this squeeze-trip-skitter-lunge thing. Like it’s warming up for more work to come, if I ever get more of those smiles.
Which, like, how ridiculous am I for thinking about how nice the shape of Hunter’s lips are? Right now? When we’re going out to face certain danger and possible death?
Get it together, June.
Okay, except his lips are so nice. Call it a focus object.
A gal could go to war for a pair of lips like that.
We push open the door and run out into the second-floor lobby. Our turtle is basically two by two, Janet and Imani behind me and Hunter, Siggy and Blair behind them, Annie and Cuellar and Simon bringing up the rear.
The ballroom lobby is very bare compared to the balcony area upstairs on the third floor. There’s no bar and fewer seating areas. It’s just a wide sweep of carpet and entry points to the ballroom.
A single zombie, a man, stumbles haphazardly around the second-floor lobby.
He doesn’t see us. At first.
We don’t stop, simply rush across the carpet, across the area at the top of the escalators, turn down the side hallway.
Behind us, the zombie lets out an unholy roar.
“Don’t stop! Don’t look!” Cuellar calls, so we hightail it, bounding like deer toward the escape of the hamster tube.
Which means we have to run away from the top of the escalators, past the small banquet rooms, another set of bathrooms, another banquet room, and it’s there—clear and glinting in the late afternoon sun.
The hamster tube.
We back up, putting Cuellar’s side of the turtle formation beside the emergency fire station.
Cuellar drops his vanity stool. He opens the cabinet and pulls the fire ax out of its brackets.
That zombie’s roar must have drawn others; the noises behind us are . . . intimidating, but I’m not looking back until the turtles in the back tell us to turn and fight.
And yes, it looks like my hope and the hazmat lady’s gestures were right—there’s a barricade at the far end of the tube, the hotel entry side.
It’s a mostly round door, or rather a hatchway cover, a lid, shaped to fit exactly over the hamster tube entry. It’s flat only on the floor edge, and it looks like it fits over the hotel side of the tube sort of like the lid on a can of Pringles, a larger lip-edge stretching beyond the frame of the tube, but on the hotel wall side, keeping the whole thing from falling inward.
A duplicate lid is on the convention