Girls Save the World in This One - Ash Parsons Page 0,99

But I don’t have time to check, I just yell and shove her back into the zombies behind her.

Beside Simon, Blair lunges at a zombie with her driftwood sculpture, knocking the zombie back while Simon swings his vanity stool in tight arcs, impacting the approaching zombies as we retreat into the tube.

“Duck!” Cuellar yells, and Hunter and I drop to our haunches.

There’s a blur, and a whistling, as Cuellar leaps over us, ax swinging sideways across the line of approaching zombies.

We pop back up and compress back into our loose turtle shape, but there are just more and more zombies stumbling into the hamster tube. At least ten, no, twenty, no, more.

My heart thunders like a locomotive.

And then instead of fear, I get another jolt of pure anger.

It powers through me like a charge of gathering electricity, and I almost feel like it could lift my hair or crackle through my fingertips.

“Lift the hatch!” I yell to Hunter and Imani. “You stay in turtle!” I yell to the others, and I rush forward, jabbing and swinging and pushing.

And I definitely impaled that woman zombie, because she’s slumped over against the curved wall of the tube, weakly swiping at me as I zoom past her.

Good to know. The mic arm did the trick.

I jab it into the face of a zombie man, his gray, seething skin my only target, but it catches on his cheekbone, then slides up and into the jelly of his eye, like a perfectly lined-up pool shot, so clear I should have called it first.

Eyeball, corner socket.

The zombie man falls like he was pole-axed straight in the brain. Which, I guess he sort of was.

The mic stand is stuck in his eye.

I make a high-pitched keen at the absolute grossness, the kind of noise I make when I smoosh a cockroach, except more, and I stand on his face to yank the end of the mic stand out of his eye socket.

Next to me, Imani lets out a yell like a warrior princess, and she swings that mic stand like it’s an extension of her own arm. Is there anything my beffie cannot do? I contend there is not, for lo, she fells two lurchers with one blow, head into head into hamster tube. Crunch, smush, crumple.

Smear of fluids.

I’m perilously close to peals of unhinged giggles or screaming.

Maybe that’s a healthy reaction, but I honestly can’t spare the oxygen, so I stifle it and jab my mic stand arm into another zombie face.

It doesn’t go as well as the first time, just tips the zombie back on her heels, and her fingers catch at my arm and she yanks me forward.

I stumble but bring the mic arm up in between us. The woman pulls me in closer, trapping my arms and the mic stand between our bodies.

Her gaping mouth strains toward me.

I rap her with the mic, like a teacher with a ruler, or an old-timey lady slapping a suitor.

You cad.

Then Siggy is there, she must have left the turtle with us even though I told her to stay back. She’s yelling “Ew! Ew! Ew!” as she stabs with the sharp corner of her drawer. It sinks into the lady’s neck first, then her cheek, then her eye.

The woman zombie lets go of me and falls.

“Thanks,” I tell Siggy.

Siggy’s making the most disgusted and appalled face I have ever seen.

“Ew,” she says softly. She’s pale, and there’s fountain spatters of blood on her, but she doesn’t faint. Doesn’t look like she’s about to, either.

Ahead of us, Hunter and Imani have propped the hatch up on its flat side.

We skid over to them and all crouch close under the angled edge of the hatch.

“It’s a rolling shield,” I say. “So roll it!”

Hunter and I take the front handle, set into the flat side of the hatch, while Imani and Siggy take the back one, and we push.