by Ash Parsons
A communications satellite, bleeping and zipping by, high in the atmosphere above us.
“Hunter! Go trade with Imani!”
Hunter doesn’t ask why or hesitate. He sprints to the embattled hatchway and takes Imani’s place.
“Here!” Imani rushes up next to me. She’s holding out her phone. I try 911 and get a recorded message.
How many people are calling?
“No answer.” I hand the phone back.
Imani opens the Code Blue police scanner app. The spinning wheel connecting to our local frequency is aggravatingly slow as it loads.
I glance down at Cuellar. The hotel-side hatch is splintering, but not broken yet, in spite of how he’s attacking it.
Imani and I huddle close to each other, bent over her phone like it’s a sacred flame as a fusillade of booms echoes from the hatchway into the convention center.
“We’ve got to make a move soon!” Simon’s voice is part yell, part grunt of effort. Blair repositions herself, shoving her back against the lid.
The phone connects, and a man’s voice blares into the tube.
“. . . dock. We are prepping for SRT entry and extraction at 1800 hours. Consult the building map from the fire inspector. Ground team A will clear the loading dock area.SRT will enter and proceed to the first-floor exhibit hall. Clean and sweep.”
“Roger.”
“Roger.”
The first man’s voice returns. “SRT, you copy?”
“Heading to position now,” a young man’s voice answers.“Ready by 1800.”
“No, no, no!” I moan, picturing it now, just like it would be if it was on the show. If it was Human Wasteland, this plan would go horribly, horribly awry. There would be mass carnage. Mass death.
The infected would erupt from the exhibit hall, into the loading dock area, out into the world.
That scientist. That rogue scientist, and maybe even the hazmat not-actually-cosplayers . . . they locked us in here, but they also locked them in here.
It doesn’t matter how it started; well, I mean, of course it matters. But it doesn’t matter to me, here and now.
All that matters is I am not ready to die, and I’m tired of sweating in this hamster tube, and I’m mad, dammit, because I’m supposed to be having the Best Day Ever and instead I’m fighting for my life.
“Can you hear me?” Imani talks into her phone, pushing an on-screen button. But the app isn’t designed that way, doesn’t actually have the frequency to send directly back to the police. Instead she’s trying to talk to anyone who’s listening, kind of like a CB, except both it and the police band signal are actually rerouted.
And we don’t have time to hear if anyone has their ears on, so to speak, because at that moment the embattled hatch tilts inward, a sudden spill of arms and fingers clawing around the top edge.
Simon screams a curse and shoves back. We rush to him, and all push at the arms and fingers, bashing them, trying to get the zombies to pull them back.
But their pain response isn’t there. So, the arms don’t draw back, even though Siggy stabs one clean through with the pointed corner of her drawer plank.
“We have to get out of here!” Simon pants, shoving at the bottom edge of the hatch, struggling to keep it from tilting farther inward.
No one has to say it, we just push against the hatch, our faces grim.
If Cuellar can’t break that other hatch down in time . . .
There’s no way out.
28
There has to be a way. I got us in here, I can get us out.
Except, my plan, such as it was, kind of hinged on the idea that someone would be waiting on the hotel side of the hatch.
And that the convention-side hatchway would actually lock behind us.
And that we’d have time to break down the hotel hatchway with the ax if no one was there.
“Can we ever catch a bloody break!” Janet yells.
If it was an SAT math question, it would be something along the lines of a ticking clock.
How long will it take the zombies to break down the hatch and kill the humans trapped inside?
“Now what?” Hunter says, as we strain to hold the tilting hatch in place. His voice isn’t angry, just scared.
And seeking inspiration.
What would Clay Clarke do?
Can’t hide. Can’t run.
I yell down the tube to Cuellar.
“Out of time! We have to fight!”
Cuellar stops his attack on the hatch and runs back toward us.
“If someone can lift me or Siggy, we can take a few of them out through the gap.”
I make a downward stabby motion with my microphone stand.
Which, okay, we try that plan. But then the microphone stand isn’t exactly sharp, and the hatchway is already tilted too far, and then it’s chaos as the hatch spins in place, tilting in, and zombies fall over the hatch and each other, grasping for us. Then the hatchway comes away from the wall-edge completely. It tips onto its rounded edge and wobbles in a slow roll into the tube before falling flat.
Imani swings the weighted disc-base of her microphone stand, and it impacts a zombie head with a crunch.
I jab upward, and my microphone stand arm goes into the gut of a zombie woman. It feels like it . . . might have impaled her? 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.
Tilted at about a forty-degree angle, the hatch acts like it’s one-part shield, one-part bowling ball, aimed at the ankles of the zombies trying to reach us.
It rolls smoothly, knocking over zombies, until the rounded edge becomes the flat side. But we just hoist it and set it rolling again.
Speed is more important than taking out the zombies behind us; the ones we’ve set spinning and falling over our shield. So, I don’t turn to stab them, or face them, just glance over my shoulder once as we keep going.
“Hey! What do we do?” Cuellar yells as we keep barreling forward, knocking zombies ass-over-ears behind and over us.
“Take them out!” I yell back.
And then we are there, pushing into the hallway, where more zombies turn to see us, our rolling shield, and the meat of our arms, legs, and faces. They come, running, stumbling, or shuffling.
“Fall back! There!” I yell, and let go to point straight ahead. We rotate and drag the hatch backward with us, putting our backs to the wall directly across from the hamster tube. The same place Imani, Siggy, and I stood earlier today, watching the hazmat suits close the hatch.
The wall by the bathrooms. Where the fire-safety station is.
Missing an ax, but with a fire hose behind a glass cabinet door.
Imani doesn’t hesitate. She lets go of her side of the handle, and spins, all in one movement, like a dancer; she keeps spinning, grabbing the handle and pulling the cabinet door open. The move would make me dizzy, but Imani stops on a dime and yanks the hose out, popping it out of its zigzag stow pattern, pulling it arm over arm like a cadet in basic training, or like a magician with a really heavy scarf coming out of their sleeve.
When she gets enough of the hose out, she turns on the fat faucet on the top of the case. Then she plants her feet wide, and puts a hand on the lever running along the top of the hose nozzle.
“Drop now!” she yells, and so Hunter, Siggy, and I shove forward, letting the hatch door push out. Then we fall back, ducking.
A wide jet of water pounds into the zombies, pushing them away.
Hunter and Siggy and I scurry on our heels, back behind Imani and the jet of water. We crouch against the wall.
A loud clanging draws my eyes, and I glance up in time to see the remaining loops of the stowed hose flapping and expanding with the water pressure, popping free from the brackets holding it.
“Watch out!” I yelp to Hunter and Siggy, but it’s too late.
A falling, flapping loop of wide canvas hose clocks Siggy in the back of the head. Siggy falls forward, dazed.
I haul her back and shield us, pulling the rest of the hose out before it can pop loose again.
Imani steps forward, sweeping the zombies with the increased water pressure. She’s aiming at their chests, not sweeping their ankles. I want to tell her to take them down, then we can run out and stab them or something. Then I realize what she’s doing.
She’s pushing them back in a row, like the hose is a leaf blower and the zombies are the leaves, nudging them toward the interior bannister. Toward the one-story drop to the hard tiles below.
They start toppling, first one, then another, over the rail. Imani steps forward and sweeps again, keeps sweeping as the zombies spill over like bowling pins.
Hunter lets out a whoop beside me, and Siggy joins in with a wobbly-sounding yippee, and I’m screaming with them and at the zombies, screaming at all of it, and then they’re all gone, literally washed overboard, propelled by a jet of water.
I grab Imani’s arm and we rush the few steps forward to the hamster tube, Siggy and Hunter right behind us, helping to drag the heavy hose.
“Get down!” Imani yells, and Blair puts out a hand, tugging Simon down beside her as the others also duck. Then Imani washes the zombies in the tube back, back against the opposite, ax-scarred, locked hatch.
We advance in, and the others scrabble toward us, low or crouched under the jet of water.
To my surprise, Cuellar comes last, slinging the ax around him like he’s some kind of medieval knight, knocking the last of the zombies away from the retreating group and into the jet of water.
Janet and Annie take the hose as Hunter and Siggy come forward to spell them in the fighting.
Cuellar, Simon, and Blair stand with their weapons raised, and wait for Imani to turn off the jet.
Hunter, Siggy, and I join them, standing tight in a row, ready to sweep in.
“When you say go, I’ll keep the ones down on the right,” Imani says, and she gives the plume of water a twitch, indicating the direction so there will be no confusion.
“Got it,” Simon says.
“Go!” Cuellar yells.
Blair nods, determined.
Imani aims the jet at the zombies on the right side of the tube, keeping them down.
Hunter, Siggy, and I follow Cuellar, Simon, and Blair in a rush down to the zombies sprawled on the left side of the tube.
We’re getting splashed by droplets from the hose impacting the other zombies, and I’m desperately trying not to think of the words blood borne or bite borne or virus or atomized or whatever, as we take out the zombies struggling back to their soaking feet.
When those zombies are dispatched, Imani turns off the hose and we rush to finish the job off. All the zombies are down, and I think they’re all dead, but one behind Cuellar surges up, screaming a hissing, pressured noise out of his mangled throat.
Behind the zombie, Siggy lets out a pissed-off shriek and leaps forward, swinging her drawer plank down on the back of the zombie’s head. The zombie falls like a tree, but it’s still making those horrible noises.
Siggy steps onto its neck and makes a gimme motion with her hand. I hand over my mic arm. With a repeating “Ew!” keening noise, Siggy stabs the pointy end of the mic arm into the zombie’s ear.
The zombie goes completely slack.
With a violent tug, Siggy pulls the mic arm out of the zombie’s ear and hands my weapon back to me. She picks up her drawer plank again and tosses her long blonde hair back behind her shoulders.
Cuellar leans over panting, broad, square hands planted on his knees.
“Gotta hand it to you, girls,” he says, eyes sweeping over Imani, then me, then Siggy. “You’ve got some helluva will to live.”
I can’t help the crooked smile.
Imani slings the fire hose up, cocking the nozzle on her shoulder. “You got that right,” she tells him.
Siggy simply gives one long shiver of disgust. “Ew.”
; “You’re not so bad yourself,” I tell him.
Cuellar salutes us with the ax.
29
We clean our weapons on the clothes of the fallen zombies and cautiously move back into the long hallway that leads to the top of the escalators.
We have to decide what to do next, because now that we’ve cleared the zombies currently loose on this level, we have a window of opportunity.
Before other zombies in the ballroom find their way out the wide-open double doors.
We could go back in the tube and take the ax to the hotel-side hatchway again. But there’s the small issue of the SWAT team or whatever it was called getting ready to a mass of zombies, and unleashing them into the sleepy downtown of Senoybia.
My hometown.
Sleepy, small, nice-place-to-raise-kids Senoybia.
We need to tell the others what we heard.
Imani and Hunter and I explain to the others what we saw outside, and then heard on the Code Blue app. About how it sounds like the military or police are preparing to enter the exhibit hall through the loading dock.
“Man, if that don’t just sound perfect,” Cuellar says, his whisper so sharp it should be weaponized. “1800 hours, that’s 6:00 p.m. An hour.” He shakes his head. “Bet you dollars to donuts there’s some wannabe heroes down there all excited to shoot their weapons. Go all Johnny Hotshot.”
He sounds exactly like his character, and also, incidentally, exactly right.
“All it will take is just one zombie to get out, and everyone we know could be infected. Hell, the whole world,” I murmur.
“They’re going to be overrun,” Hunter says.
“Can you imagine if someone who was bitten got on an airplane?” Janet whispers.
“We have to do something,” Simon says. “We have to warn them.”
“How?” Imani asks. “The phones are jammed, and my app wouldn’t send.”
“Maybe there’s a radio,” Hunter begins. “A walkie-talkie, I mean. Downstairs in the security booth.”
“I didn’t see one, did you?” I ask.
Siggy’s blue eyes go wide.
“I saw one,” she says, turning to me. Her hands rise to her face, like she’s about to yelp in excitement, jumping up and down.
