I’d been hoping to steal Norman away for at least a few minutes once Rory graduated to solo practice (which she did remarkably smoothly; determination does amazing things), but Josh and Chloe got to him first. I guess when you’re nine, restless, nervous, and being ignored by your families while they deal with the life-and-death situation that has you restless and nervous in the first place, you naturally go straight for the guy in the clown costume. He’d gone with the Harlequin design still for the last couple of days, a simpler version of it, but still a sign of mourning. Given the circumstances, I guess it was close enough to a clown as far as the kids were concerned.
He spent most of the rest of the prep time helping them blow up a bag of those long, thin party balloons, which wouldn’t have interested any kind of looter.
At the same time, Norman kept one eye on anyone sorting supplies. Anything heavy or ungainly that made the cut to be brought along, he volunteered the space in his duffle, including the two cans of kerosene that had been saved since the riots because between his body and mine, ours was going to be the least overloaded of the scooters once we got going. He kept the crowbar and gave Rory the wrench. It was nice and manageable for her to swing while driving since Lis would be occupied with Josh. Chris and Maria took the sturdiest bars of metal they could from the shelving, and I shoved Suprbat to the bottom of my bag, out of the way, more for comfort than for the short ride around the building when I might actually need to use it.
When the gunfire started, right on schedule, announcing that our window had opened, Lis was the one who asked the inevitable question, “Are you sure about this?”
And it was her dad she stuck with the job of saying, “No. Do it anyway.”
Rory and Lis both tried to hug me as if they weren’t even sort of wondering if it was for the last time—when they hugged Norman, too, it kind of shattered the illusion.
“See you at dinner,” they told their dad in that freaky twin unison they’d barely used in years. They gathered Josh up between them on the Vespa at their designated exit, in the opposite corner from Chris and the Defoes.
Even though we were going to be in the same building the whole time, I really wanted to say something meaningful to Norman before getting things started. I looked at the pile of rejected supplies on the floor where he’d packed his bag, and I was almost glad that something kind of important had been forgotten because it gave me an excuse.
I picked up the rainbow-colored box of face paints and brought it over to him.
“You could use a touchup before curtain call,” I said.
He took the box and opened it to the mirror.
“Yeah, you’re right.”
He opened one of the individually wrapped wet wipes in the side pocket, the specialized ones that smell like nail polish remover, and started cleaning off the design.
He always rushed that process, even when we weren’t on such an urgent deadline, so I’d learned to value the glimpses of his real face. He hadn’t shown it at all in front of me, never mind anyone else, on the few mornings since he’d become my boyfriend, since Hector had died. I took the opportunity to look closer this time, memorizing him all over again. It felt like he’d aged years instead of days since the last time.
I absorbed as much of him as I could before he picked up the colored paints to cover himself in the old, coulrophobia-inducing, zombie-worthy layer again.
Only he didn’t.
Instead he gathered up the colors, two at a time, and pitched them through one of the broken back windows, just below the ceiling. Some made it, others smashed and splattered against the wall.
I didn’t ask the question, but I guess my face did because he leaned close and whispered the answer.
“Because whenever this ride finally lets off, parts of it have already been even more awesome than the birth of a zombie clown.”
Then he kissed me, perfectly and completely, right there in front of everyone, without tickling or tackling, as if there weren’t a captive audience right there, as if there were nothing at all but us. When he pulled away, I almost wanted the moment to end in a truly tasteless punch line to make me feel a little sturdier around the knees when we turned to take our places at opposite ends of the warehouse.
I climbed into my perch in the barricade across the main doorway from Maria. When she looked over to see if I was ready, she was grinning like we were about to open an extra-large Christmas present instead of a potential deathtrap. I took one breath—a long breath, but only one—to remember that Norman was a safe-ish distance away and well-hidden before I gave her a nod. We each took one of the chains attached to the big, rolling front door, and pulled.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
This Shootout Brought to You
by the Letter F
I’d set my fair share of traps before. They’re one of those things that actually translate pretty well from games to reality. If anything, they’re easier in real life because people are expecting them in games.
Even so, we did it right. We opened the door a crack, enough to make it look like a tempting accident. We waited for the sound of the scooters to pass by close enough before shouting out.
“It happened again!” I started. “Were you watching? Who was watching?”
“Just help me get it closed!” Maria snapped back at me, and we both rattled the door up and down a little, to make it look like someone was trying to pull it shut but couldn’t figure out what it was getting caught on.
“Are you pushing or pulling?”
We kept the squabbling up at a nice, natural pace while we waited for the scooters to stop, a few gunshots to clear away the closest zombies, and two pairs of living human hands to grab the bottom of the shutter.
“We got them!” Steve shouted to Rob. “Pull!”
I clicked off the dim lantern, and Maria and I held the chains for a few more seconds to put up a convincing struggle, then dropped them to retreat one shelf higher into the barricade, thoroughly hidden in the shadows, even when the door screeched open a good seven feet, letting in sunlight.
Steve and Rob charged in, guns blazing, almost literally, and screeched to a stop in front of the barricade. For a few seconds, they both scanned the dark, looking for whoever they’d been hearing or a way to push in further without going on foot.
There wasn’t one. I had made double sure of that.
We had them, and it was so, so tempting to slam the door shut again right then, but I followed the plan. I lit the first string of firecrackers and dropped it between them and the exit. I reached one hand down to hold the chain, in case they tried to go around and get back out. They didn’t. They just ducked and covered behind the scooters when it went off. The zombies outside must have been ambling in our direction anyway after the noise we’d made with the door, but after a few seconds of the constant volume of the firecrackers, half a dozen poured inside at full speed, shrieking as loudly as their varying degrees of internal decomposition allowed. I waited for the last body, a huge one in a formerly white business shirt, to make it inside before I pulled up on the chain. Maria followed my lead, trapping all the different things that were making me so uncomfortably nervous together with a metallic slam.
Across the warehouse, the other drivers heard their cue and slipped out through the emergency exits with nothing but two quick ignition purrs. Then it was just Norman and David left waiting for us.
Go on.
Yeah, I heckle people in my head when I’m anxious. Try to tell me you don’t.
The gap’s right there. Climb through to where it’s safe.
Steve and Rob stayed and fought on the door side of the barricade longer and harder than I’d hoped, but not much better. With their headlights on, even with the door closed, there was decent light, but between them, they still managed to spend eleven shots and only finish three of the zombies.
One of the ones they missed completely, a woman in a supermarket apron with a pair of kitchen scissors lodged in her stomach, lunged at Rob. He managed to knoc
k it down and drop the front wheel of his scooter on its head a few times until it squashed out of shape.
I hated to admit it, but it looked like they might actually beat the whole infestation without having to escape, as clumsy as they were at it.
That was okay. We could give them plenty of other reasons to get out of the entranceway.
I picked out one of those really flashy backyard fireworks from the bottom of the evil bunny bag, the kind that sends off multicolored pinwheels in every direction. Caterpillar’s Pipe, the label on the side said.
I lit it and let go.
Don’t just scream, I thought at them. Get away from it. Go inside.
Clusters of sparks hit the wall on one side and the barricade on the other, leaving deep scorch marks on everything they touched in between.
Maria followed it up with a shower of broken bottles and a squirt of lighter fluid, carefully aimed away from the scooters’ tires, which made the last two zombies’ clothes go up in flames.
That might finally have done the trick, I’m not sure, but it might have, if she hadn’t burst out laughing over the girly little yelp Steve gave when the bits of glass went down the back of his undershirt.
But to be fair, it was a really funny yelp.
He squinted up into the shadows, one hand shielding his eyes from falling bits.
“Hello, Maria,” he recognized her and finally started climbing the barricade, but not in the way we’d planned. He was climbing up instead of through.
Hey, you didn’t think I’d waste time explaining the plan in advance if anything had actually gone according to it, did you?
He got just high enough, just fast enough, to be out of the bigger burning zombie’s reach when it tried for him. The smaller one went for Rob and took his last two bullets. Last loaded ones, anyway. I almost shuddered out loud when he reloaded out of his backpack and I saw how heavy it was.
“Maria!” Steve called out again, and I could hear Maria cursing deeper in the shadows than before.
Rob backed all the way into the barricade, away from the ash and heat coming off of the big zombie, before finally shooting it down, strafing around it, and climbing up after Steve.
Steve found a flat section of shelving to crouch down on and do a reload of his own. He fired once, straight up, in Maria’s general direction, and she emptied another box of glass over the edge on him.
In case I haven’t made this clear enough, I don’t do real guns. Not my thing. They’re not like traps. Games and nerd events teach you a little about them, angles and lines of sight and which kinds you’re allowed to get wet and stuff, but that’s nothing. Strategy is completely different without the word “Rematch.”
But I’ll admit it, in that one brief instance, I was kind of aching for a ranged weapon. The scooters were right there, unguarded on the floor. I could have been on one of them in seconds. The only problem was that Steve and Rob weren’t getting out of the way so Maria could join me, and in a game, I could have fixed that. They were so vulnerable, hanging there, never looking up at me.
No one ever did.
I sifted through the real life stuff I did have and took the heaviest, most aerodynamic thing within reach, the knock-off Swiss Army knife in the evil bunny bag, and threw it as hard as I could at the back of Steve’s head.
It was on target. It didn’t stop him, but it did make him turn to see where it had come from. I ducked out of sight behind a sheet of plywood, so he sprayed a whole clip blindly into the gap a few feet to my right.
Any sturdiness I’d been able to breathe back into my knees was completely gone in those few seconds. I gotta hand it to him for that.
Not so much for the fact that those seconds also allowed Maria to swing down behind him from the level above and tackle him to the ground, the ground, in this case, being about twelve feet away.
Rob aimed down at them, but there was no way to separate the two targets, rolling across the concrete, both moving like they hadn’t quite taken inventory of their injuries yet.
“Get off of me!”
Okay, I had to Mr. Rogers that up a little, but that’s the gist of what Steve shouted.
“Or what, you’ll fire me?”
I could smell Maria’s hair burning when he pushed her up against one of the flaming corpses, which I’m guessing he thought was really witty.
The scooters were right there.
I climbed down as far as the pulley chain once more and yanked on it with my full weight. With no one pulling evenly on the other side, the door made an even more horrible sound than it was supposed to, a grating, crunching squeal, and it only lifted from one corner, but I was able to winch it just high enough for one scooter and one rider at a time to squeeze out through the side closest to me before it jammed.
Rob aimed unsteadily at me from the other side of the entranceway, and Steve raised his empty weapon in my direction, too, out of reflex, so I backed out of the light and shifted between levels a couple of times, hoping they’d lose track of me.
The first thing I considered shouting was, “What are you waiting for? This is the closest you’ll ever get to stealing your boss’s car!” but for obvious reasons, that seemed like it might hurt her chances of pulling it off, so instead I shouted the second most persuasive thing I could think of, “Bring my friends’ daddy home.” I took another strand of firecrackers, my second-to-last one, and threw it onto that big, zombified businessman’s pyre.
Steve and Maria came apart when the strand went off next to their heads, and Rob was too busy shielding his eyes from the flashes to take the opportunity to shoot.
Maria understood my message, and she went straight for Steve’s scooter and dragged it to the opening I’d made in the door. She stopped there, though. I don’t know if she was hoping to understand the rest of my plan first, or if she just wanted to find something worse to do to Steve before parting ways with him, but I had to shout again for her to go before she finally did.
I watched for David’s signal light and listened to his exit opening when she circled around to pick him up, but only out of the corner of my eye (and ear). Most of me was busy climbing behind as many silhouette-obscuring bits of scrap as I could, searching what was left of my bag, and trying to decide what exactly the plan was that I hadn’t told her.
It was just Norman and me left then.
Rob fired another volley into my side of the barricade, and I know I felt shots pass me on both sides.
I lit another Caterpillar’s Pipe and threw it, but Steve was ready and swatted it out the door with his gun before it went off.
“Who’s there?” he called out, reloading at the same time. He didn’t need to hurry anymore. I wasn’t going to attack him head-on.
Quieter than I’d ever had to be in the trees or the smoke arena, I started inching my way around, across from the door, over to what had been Maria’s side. I just had to get down, get to the scooter, and get out while they were still focused on the last place they’d spotted me.
It was right there.
“Chris?” Steve guessed. “You still on your feet up there?”
I was halfway across. Then three quarters. When they moved, I moved. When they spoke, I tested the next beam to see if it would squeak.
One more sheet of metal away, one more box flat. I was only about four feet off the ground by then, so I could land silently once I got close enough to the scooter.
Two more paces would have done it.
“Hey, Chris!” Steve called. “Is this what you want?”
He turned back to Rob’s scooter, ripped the keys out of the ignition, and threw them as hard as he could in the direction he thought was away from me.
Actually, they skidded along the floor right under me.
I knew before I’d finished reacting that I’d reacted wrong. I gasped out loud and reached out, down the front of the barricade, to catch them. It was too late. They kept skidding until they collided with God-only-knew which support strut of the makeshift mess behi
nd me.
Steve grabbed my outstretched hand and dragged me out onto the open concrete like a ragdoll.
Rob made an uncertain sound somewhere out of my range of vision.
“What?” Steve snapped. “It’s not like we were planning on leaving any time soon.”
Rob made the sound again, so I guess he wasn’t making it over the keys.
Then I realized that this was the first time since they’d broken in that they’d seen me up close, the first time either of them had ever actually seen my small, pale, freckled, fifteen-year-old face.
“Steve?” Rob said cautiously. “You okay, man?”
I hadn’t looked in a mirror recently, so it’s always possible that I’d gone through the same sudden, premature aging I’d seen on my friends, something in the way we held our features rather than how they were shaped. The difference might even have been dramatic enough on me that in that narrow streak of sunlight and the dim glow of the corpse fire, I could have been mistaken for a peer of Chris and Maria.
I think it’s a lot more likely, though, that Steve wouldn’t have noticed anything about my face, even if it were green with orange stripes and warts the size of Skittles. He was too busy looking at my jacket. It was open, showing off more of my underdeveloped frame and my I Heart Utah gift shop T-Shirt than of itself, but it was the same thick, dark green windbreaker I’d been wearing when I knocked the goatee off his scooter.
Okay, I did kill this guy’s little brother to stop him from killing me because he thought I was someone I wasn’t who had tried to kill him for taking part in a hostile takeover that probably involved killing more people. Here’s where I guess I should say something deep and tragic and profound about how no matter how few living people are left, or how much death is out to get us, we still find reasons to try and kill each other ourselves, but . . .
I got nothing. Sorry.
Anyway, that’s when Steve slammed my head into the floor, harder than the hit that killed Mark. In my case, being aneurism-free, it just hurt a lot, made my vision go sparkly, and kind of killed my interest in tallying up the score.
Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know Of) Page 24
