Girls Save the World in This One - Ash Parsons Page 0,96
center side of the tube, stowed immediately to the side of the skyway, in a discreet, wallpaper-covered recess.
We run into the tube.
At the back of our phalanx, Cuellar and Simon grab the convention-hall side hamster tube cover from its stow position and haul it into position behind us.
Except something immediately goes wrong, or the convention center–side lid is broken, because it tilts inward at an alarming angle, only seeming to catch on the frame edge of the tube in two places, pivoting inward like a quarter held between two fingers.
Cuellar and Simon push it up, hard, just as the zombies arrive. Gray, vein-mottled arms tear at us.
The disc of the hatch lid slams upright into the zombies, thumping into place, but unsecured, held by the strength of Cuellar and Simon.
“We got a problem here, girly!” Cuellar yells.
“I see it, sonny!” I yell back. “Hold it!” I point to Janet, Blair, and Imani. “Stay here, help hold the lid. We’ll get to the hotel side and get help.”
“Done,” Janet says, as Imani nods. Blair presses her hands flat on the lid.
Hunter and I sprint across the tube, over the distance of the three-lane street below us. The back of my neck prickles at the yawning distance between us and the others, between me and Imani and Siggy, and yes, even Blair, and the thundering pounding on the hatch behind us magnified by the tube.
We reach the hotel-side hatch and pound on it.
“Hey! Anyone there? Help! Help! We’re normal! Let us through!” I’m yelling and pounding, Hunter is doing it, too, our voices booming back with the sounds of our banging on the lid
Nothing. Not a sound, not an answering call, nothing.
It’s growing hotter in the tube, the sun beating down onto the film-covered glass, cooking us like bacteria in a test tube.
“Where are they?” Hunter asks. “She pointed here. She was pointing here!”
He steps back into the tube and cranes his neck, looking farther up the street below and behind us.
“Help!” I yell, and kick the hatch with my foot.
Sweat pools in my armpits and butt crack. I feel a droplet run down my temple.
“Cuellar! Bring your ax!” I yell.
Cuellar pivots away from the broken convention-side hatch, leaving the others to hold it, and comes running.
“No one’s here,” I say. “Or if they are, they aren’t coming.”
Cuellar wastes no time. He lifts the fire ax and starts chopping.
The first impact splits the plastic coating of the hatch cover, showing the wood beneath.
“Good, keep going!” I say.
Hunter looks at me, frustration, anger, and apology in his vibrant eyes.
“I guess I got it wrong,” he says. “She wasn’t pointing here.” Both hands drag hanks of dark hair off his forehead.
“Maybe, maybe not,” I say. “But she was pointing somewhere.”
We look at each other, and have the idea at the same time. We leave Cuellar working frantically with his ax, and we pivot and run back out into the center of the tube, and stop in the middle.
“Any luck?” Blair calls over her shoulder toward us.
A crashing, battering of knocks and thumps against the broken hatch.
“Not yet,” I yell back.
Hunter shields his eyes against the sun and peers out, up the street, toward the front of the convention center.
But I look the opposite way, down the street, toward the back of the building.
And that’s where I see people.
“Hey! Hey!” I yell, jumping up and down, waving my arms at the soldiers and scientists, whoever it is out there, in hazmat suits erecting barricades and more tents. There are what look like security trucks, and prison buses, more orange plastic barricades, and fully armed soldiers standing behind it all.
None of them look up, or even down the street.
Where are they? What part of the convention center is their staging area? If that’s even what I’m looking at?