by McKay, Faith
"Alright?" Sadie asked Jo.
Jo nodded, and then quickly shook her head, in case that was taken as the other signal. "Alright," Jo said.
"Alright then." Sadie pushed off the wall and waited for Jo to get up. "I feel like we've been waiting to film this video for forever. I expect before we get back on the dance floor, we'll be sent back to makeup or clothes again, or told to learn a new routine, or, you know." Sadie coughed. "Sorry. Stage nerves make me yammer."
Jo had never been on a stage before, but she wondered if that's why her palms were so slick. She rubbed them down over the brief length of her shorts, but they still felt damp and now she had the glitter from the hem of her shorts to contend with. Sweat and glitter. There were no two better symbols for the bizarreness of her day.
She looked over at the corpses pawing at the smooth, clear surface of their cages, and suspected there would soon be more symbols to add to that list. She was still staring, palms growing slicker, when Noah snapped his fingers in front of her face. Her lips rose into a sneer before she had time to notice, but she didn't regret it. Noah shook the machete in front of her, and she took it. He moved on, and the other girls looked away.
The weapon felt right in her hand. As far as embellished weapons went, she found hers to be the prettiest. She'd expected the other girls to be jealous—Dee, at the very least. Perhaps her idea of what was pretty differed from theirs.
Jo took a few practice swipes through the air, reacquainting herself with the weapon's weight and feel. Her wet palms became less of a problem, the corpses less fierce. Finally, they were getting into something she knew about.
Noah waved an arm, signaling to the people watching them on camera to start the song. Tammi had insisted they listen to its entirety just before the fight to help the girls capture the spirit of the song.
She overheard Carrie say, "It's surreal, isn't it?"
"What part?" Gerri countered.
"Listening to my own voice singing while I stab at moving corpses."
"Oh, that part," Gerri said with a laugh.
Sadie said, "I think we'll be getting used to doing pretty much everything while listening to our own voices. Not that it'll be anything new for you Gerri. Or you, Dee."
"You're so clever, honey," Gerri said.
"I don't get it," Dee said.
"She's saying we talk a lot," Gerri said.
Dee shrugged a shoulder. "And is that an insult?"
"Excuse me!" Noah yelled. He was doing a lot more of that than Jo remembered him doing before; he'd always been so quiet. "Are we here to talk, or work?"
Carrie and Sadie laughed.
"What's so funny?" Noah asked.
"Those two think everything's funny," Gerri said. "Just ignore them.”
Dee, made almost a head taller courtesy of her shoes, peered critically at Sadie's face. Sadie growled, "What the hell do you want, Dee?"
Dee looked over at Noah. "Five more minutes and we're going to need makeup out here."
"You know, that's pretty insulting," Sadie told her. "Someone remind me why we don't knock this girl right off her shoes?"
"Entertainment," Carrie suggested.
"Girl's a great little seamstress," Gerri said.
"The charming essence of naive honesty," Jo offered.
Carrie, Gerri, Sadie, and Noah all turned to look curiously at Jo. Dee put her hands on her hips and looked around at them all, satisfied, and told Jo, "Thanks! Right?"
"Alright, alright," Noah said. "Are you ladies ready to kill some zombies, or should we recheck with makeup first? Your call."
"Let's make some stuff dead," Dee said.
"Our rally cry," Carrie agreed.
Jo softly said, "Let us lay some bodies to rest at last."
"Damn, hon," Gerri said. "You're all, like, poetical. Did anyone know Jo was poetical?"
Some of them glanced over at Noah. He cleared his throat and said, "Blood and guts it is, then," and headed for the cages.
WATM NEWS
“WATM news here, your number one source for the things you want to know about! I'm standing in front of Last Chance towers, where rumor has it the Deadly Divas are filming their first music video! I'm here with Teegan, who sources have confirmed works for the band. What can you tell us, Teegan?”
“Hi, Mom and Dad!”
“Hi Teegan's parents! Now, Teegan, have you met the Deadly Divas?”
“Oh, yeah! I bring them stuff.”
“And what kind of stuff do you bring them?”
“Food. They like lemonade.”
“What have you seen the girls doing?”
“Oh, I can't tell you that! I signed a contract.”
“What can you tell us?”
“I like them.”
Chapter Thirteen
JO
Noah said something that was supposed to be motivational, but Jo didn't think anyone else was listening to him either. He'd just unlocked the first cage.
Carrie dropped down, rolling into the first zombie's legs. Her short skirt barely moved when she fought. Jo was still unsteady walking on the shorter heeled shoes Dee had given her to practice on in the halls; Carrie ran smoothly in hers, and they were three times the size. Girls who can run in high heels should be feared.
This was really not the thing to be thinking about when fighting corpses.
Carrie knocked the corpse to the ground, and Dee drove the machete down into its skull, ending the corpse's second life at last. Dee's bare legs were splattered with dark blood, and to her credit, she didn't pay any attention to it. They all seemed very aware of the audience, a thing Jo had to keep reminding herself of.
Sadie was skipping forward to pin the second corpse in the chest, and Gerri was preparing to swing and slice off part of that one's head. When she was done, she would turn to fight the third one with Jo, so Jo turned her focus to the third and final slow-moving corpse, already released from its cage and taking its first steps out to do battle with her. Jo heard the slice of skull, a sound that should have been unsettling, but only meant that her friends were safe. Things were going according to plan, until there was a shriek followed by a clatter just behind her. Jo turned in time to see Gerri, her ankle twisting over her heel, fly forward and skid across the gym floor.
Jo looked from Gerri on the floor, to the slowly approaching corpse, a quick glance to the cameraman, and back to Gerri. "Are you okay?" Jo yelled while she ran.
Gerri wasn't moving.
Jo slid the last couple feet on her knees. She put her hand under Gerri's nose to make sure she was breathing, not sure how to check for a pulse and afraid to shake someone who may have been hurt in the fall. Gerri slapped her hand away.
"Are you okay?" Jo asked again. "Can you move?"
Gerri rolled onto her side. Jo looked back to the other girls, wondering why no one else was coming to check on Gerri, when she saw it: the fresh corpse, standing just outside its cage, not yet charging the three girls standing with their weapons held weakly at their sides. Three was a lot less than the five they'd planned on having to fight that monster.
"Are you okay?" Jo tried again, shaking Gerri's arm.
Gerri nodded slightly, or maybe just bobbed her head under the force of Jo's shaking. It would have to be enough.
DYLAN
Dylan's mother had told him to ask for more money. Unlatching the door to his cage, that was all he could think: I should have listened to my mother; a thought his mother surely would have agreed with. Though, he still agreed with his reply at the time as well: how much do you ask for, for this kind of thing? Surely, nothing would have been enough.
During the brief training Noah had given as preparation for the job, Noah had explained that with a fresh corpse anything could happen. It may just stay in one area, which would make for easy filming, or it may zig and zag around the room, making for some chaotic footage. When the group of girls went to greet the fresh corpse, leaving Gerri alone on the ground, it was that training session that drove him out of his cage. Th
at new zombie could cross the room any second. He'd seen them move faster than could be caught on regular footage, which meant it could be much faster than Gerri was likely to recover, or anyone else was likely to help her.
Dylan had seen that look before. Gerri's wide, still eyes. The way she didn't seem to notice anything around her. The wall had been completed shortly before Dylan's birth, but his parents had both survived the before times, and his siblings had signed up for military duties back before the draft had become a necessity. He was one of the rare members of his family not to have a trigger that put him into one of those states. Whether it was waking up in the middle of the night, or some horrific footage used in some crap video, the response was always pain. Some people got real quiet. Some panicked, leaving the person unable to really function through whatever they'd been doing before their memories were unlocked. Panic ridden flashbacks were the curse of the lucky, the survivors. The people who panicked in the moment, well, they were usually stars in the flashbacks that cursed those lucky survivors.
He didn't want Gerri to be the star of his own first set of flashbacks.
Just as he reached the back side of the gym, he saw the new zombie dart through an opening between the group of girls and head straight for him. Dylan had just enough time to reach down and grab Gerri's weapon, but not enough time to readjust so he wasn't holding it from its center. He cut his fingers as he whipped the weapon back across the zombie's face, but since he managed to knock the thing away from himself, he counted it as a proud win. Noah, the asshole, finally decided to make himself useful and called the zombie to the other side of the room. They'd talked about him possibly doing this in order to regroup the girls for the shot. They'd have to do a lot of work cutting together the footage, but that seemed a much smaller problem in the moment.
Gerri had propped herself up on her elbows, and was looking at Dylan with some life back in her eyes.
"Hey, kid," he said. "Bet my cage is looking pretty good right about now, wouldn't you say?" The girl blinked a few times, but didn't respond. He checked back over his shoulder to make sure the group was doing okay around the new zombie. Dee was looking pretty bloody, but he was hopeful that it wasn't all hers. They were keeping the thing busy, though, and he knew a lot of the cameras they'd set up were pointed right where they were at, thankfully. "Looks like you broke your shoe," he observed. "Think I could have it?" Gerri's head tilted to the side, and she cracked a confused smile, a good sign. "When you kids are rich and famous I'm thinking a broken shoe signed by the famous Gerri of the Deadly Divas will be worth more than my camera."
"Oh honey," Gerri said, and grunted the shakiness out of her voice. "With how famous I'm going to be? More than your house."
He shot another glance back at the girls, who had knocked the zombie to the ground. What a bunch of scary ass kids. He took Gerri's hands to pull her up. "Back to the cage?" he asked, but instead of answering Gerri's eyes went wide again, the terror back, and he dropped her hands before noticing the twinge in his neck, or the blood spewing in front of his face.
DYLAN’S PHONE
Tawnya: Dylan, sweetheart? Could you please pick up milk on the way home? And licorice. I know it's expensive, but I'm dreaming about it, and you love me that much, right? I love you and your licorice buying ways. Don't forget the milk. Xo
Chapter Fourteen
DEE
Well, so far, being a popstar was not at all living up to Dee's plans.
"Is this what you had in mind?"
"This can't be happening. It's a trick, right?"
"What the corpse is wrong with these people?"
"Is this what any of you had in mind? Seriously?"
"Should we be doing this?"
The rest of them never talked this much. Every time one of them started crying, it made it harder for her to stop. Their faces were covered in dark colorful lines; their makeup artists really had a lot to learn about quality waterproof products. Dee's towels were ruined with stains.
It was almost morning. They'd been downstairs getting cleaned up, answering questions, and getting shuffled about for most of the night. It was like no one even thought they had to pretend to care about them, or poor dead Dylan. She was almost done being outraged; she figured the rest of it would wash away with one really good shower. The sadness she'd just have to live with.
"Where are you going?" Sadie asked.
"Shower." Dee closed her bedroom door. The rest of them had been talking about quitting and she didn't want to hear it. It wasn't the time. It was rude. They hadn't even washed off Dylan's blood. And even if it were the time, none of it mattered. No matter what they did, Dee would never quit. This popstar thing wasn't exactly working out right, but she'd figure out a way to make it work. She didn't care what she had to do.
She guessed that was what made her sad the most. Dylan wasn't in that gym because he was living his dream of being rich and famous. He was there as part of her dream. And he wasn't even supposed to be in danger—he was supposed to be in that box! He was dead, for no reason. Just, dead. It wasn't fair.
She couldn't think about it anymore. It was pointless. It didn't help Dylan, and she'd run out of tears.
They'd given her a wet rag to wipe herself down earlier, but the shower water ran off murky: red and black with little chunks of she didn't know what. There was something really satisfying about that, about watching the muck run off of her. When the water ran clear again, she rotated, expecting it to find more on her somewhere else. She didn't feel clean until she'd rinsed off the fifth coating of soap.
The towels were plush. At least they'd gotten something right. The slippers felt like stepping on a cloud. She slid her feet back out of them; she'd always hated slippers; she just wanted to check.
Hair wrapped in a towel, slightly too thin robe wrapped around her—she'd have to remember to say something about that—she padded into the kitchen to order herself a milkshake. There was nothing like a frosty drink after turning your bathroom into a sauna.
The other girls had gone off to their own rooms, and the place was dead quiet.
She'd have to talk to Meghan to see if anyone was sending anything to Dylan's family. That should be the obvious thing to do, but these people didn't seem to know what the obvious things were. She wasn't sure what you sent for something like this, so once she was done ordering the milkshake and pulled it out of the delivery cupboard, she decided to look it up.
Flowers.
That was not enough. There had to be something more, but the internet failed her. She'd have to figure it out on her own.
She searched for Deadly Divas news. She did it without thinking now. She had alerts set up, but they weren't as fast as an automatic service should be. Once she was famous enough, she'd have someone fix that, too.
"Divas!" She not-so-secretly loved that the band name made them all sound like her back-up singers. Milkshake sloshed over her left hand as she ran into the center of the living room. She slammed the glass on the table and wiped her hand on the robe. It was garbage, anyway. "Everybody!"
"Now, hon? Seriously?" Gerri staggered out of her bedroom, looking downright haggard. Dee had always thought Gerri dressed decent enough; she wouldn't have expected her to choose to keep walking around looking like that.
"It's up!"
"What is up?" Sadie growled. She had a different prosthesis on, it was furry and had a purple candy cane style print on it. Dee couldn't decide if it was great or ridiculous, which meant it was at least interesting, so Dee had to applaud her for it. All the boldest fashion choices had to get near that line.
"What the hell do you think is up?" Gerri asked. She took a deep breath and put a hand out to stop anyone from saying anything back to her. "Sorry. Bad day."
Sadie grunted.
"Are we going to watch it?" Jo asked.
"Why wouldn't we?" Dee asked. They all gave her that look they thought she didn't understand, the are-you-dumb? one. "Everyone else in the world is."
Ca
rrie turned the big screen on.
GERRI
If there was one thing Gerri was not, it was small. No matter what anyone else had to say about it, she'd never wanted to be. Gerri commanded attention in a room; she took up space. She had nothing to hide, no matter what anyone else thought. Her whole life she'd seen people curl up on the sides of rooms like pillbugs, and she'd brushed them off as the sad cases they were.
Curled up at the end of the sofa, wishing she could roll her ball self all the way out of the room without anyone noticing, she recognized herself as one of those people. It was not a good look.
What the hell was it? Was it shame? Was there a grosser emotion than this?
The video started up, and she gripped her ankles, pulling her legs closer to herself.
There they were, dancing in the club to their own song, which, now that she thought about it, was kind of awful. Didn't they look like assholes dancing to their own song? Their arms were all swinging in the air, and then in a quick flash, weapons appeared in their hands.
Carrie and Dee took out the first killer, looking cool, confident, and... impressive. It made Gerri cringe in anticipation of her own scenes. Sadie and Gerri took out the second one. The video was spliced together from a few different angles. It looked good. This was where Gerri fell, but they didn't show that, of course. In one fast shot, the clip glimpsed Gerri jumping up, fierce and furious and covered in blood, killing the blood-covered slow corpse they'd forgotten about, the third old one. Dylan was still on the ground screaming in pain while that happened, not that he was shown in the video, of course.
The focus flashed away from her and over to the other four, who were surrounding the fast one. There was a slow close up of the fast one from the side, an imposing masked figure in a slight crouch, looking at the four girls surrounding it like it was much smarter than they say it's supposed to be.
Sadie didn't wear that boring prosthesis they made her, but a silver and shiny thing she called her robot leg. Covered in blood, it looked especially badass.
