Lipstick & Zombies (Deadly Divas Book 1) (25 page)

Meghan gripped Sadie's elbow, drawing her attention back to the soldiers in front of her with pictures and scraps of paper held out in front of them, waiting for autographs.

Sadie asked for names and winked at the ones too nervous to tell her. They were all her age or a few years older. If she'd had more time to search faces, she was sure she would have recognized some of them as kids who'd hated her in school.

"I love your smile," one of the guys said. He was tall and gangly and looked a lot like her last big crush, who'd been drafted before Sadie was ready to risk having her heart broken again. He held his ground against the people pushing their way to the front of the crowd, and she smiled more honestly and gave him a wink before handing his paper back to him. Dee giggled and bumped her hip into Sadie's.

"I always used to hate those uniforms," Gerri loudly said, "but you folks make them look
good
."

The crowd laughed.

"Are you trying to date them all?" Carrie asked.

"If I can find the time."

The crowd was thinning out and becoming less pushy when they realized the girls really would stay around long enough to sign autographs for them all, and after about five dozen soldiers had thanked them, Jo finally leaned down and asked one of them, "Thanks for what?"

"Spreading the message," the kid said. He couldn't have been old enough to have graduated. If you dropped out of high school it was an automatic trip to the wall for military duty unless you were pregnant. No one wanted to see a soldier with a baby bump. They said the dropouts were troublemakers and daredevils, but he just looked small under those big admiring eyes.

"Spreading the message?" Sadie leaned over so the kid would hear her better, pushing in between Dee and the group she was currently flirting with. "About joining the military? Weren't most of you drafted?"

"Yes ma'am," a girl standing next to him said. She looked about five years older than Sadie. "But if we'd had any idea how much they needed us, we'd have signed up ourselves, and I wish more people would. We need more people if more of us are going to survive and make it home. Oh, excuse me." She gave a slight incline of her head and jogged to the outer edge of the wall, where someone else stood with a gun pointed out at the field, but with one hand straight up in the air, signaling the others. The remainder of their audience followed the jogger, and even Meghan was curious enough to follow without saying anything about smiling or sticking to a schedule. Not wanting to get in the way, and unsure what was going on exactly, they crept up to the edge of the wall, a ways down from where the soldiers were lining up. And then Sadie forgot all about what they were doing.

She'd never seen over the wall before. Of course, none of them had. The most they ever caught from the tops of the tallest buildings were the tips of mountains in the distance on clear days. The world beyond the wall was just something old people talked about. But then, there it was. To the side of the mountains it just stretched out, unending. You could walk forever in a straight line. Assuming nothing ate you.

There were ruins of old buildings, most of them fairly far away, that looked to be as tall as anything they had inside the wall. Large groups of roaming corpses splotched the expanse, but mostly they were scattered out. There had to be thousands. Just as many people as were on the inside of the wall, probably more.

At the base of the wall was a zombie obstacle course. She'd heard about that in school. The traps grabbed most of the zombies and kept from them getting into mobs at the wall, but sometimes, in rare and horrible events, the groups came in masses so large that they trampled through the traps, over the fallen corpses before them, to push at the cement barrier. The wall had always held, but the groaning group was loud, and the gunfire louder. When it was at its worst you could hear explosives being set off in the desert, no matter how centrally located you were.

Now that she was looking for them, she saw more of the holes and stakes and bait based traps scattered farther out into the desert. Last year Sadie had an angry English teacher who used the class to rant about things, and while she usually didn't pay much attention in class, she had enjoyed listening to him. He'd mentioned that at times where the military count was too low—too many recent deaths, not enough drafted in to make up for it—they wouldn't have enough soldiers to clear out the traps, so they'd overflow and draw more groups to the area, which would lead to a crowd at the base of the wall. There would be a big draft around this time, and a surge of young deaths as they tried to clear out the area. When they had more of a workforce for the job, they sent old trucks out there to pile up and burn the bodies. Thinking of it, Sadie squinted and found two trails of smoke out by what looked like the widest trench.

"It's so weird to see it," Dee said.

Meghan blotted at her eyes with the back of her hand. Sadie looked at her questioningly, but Meghan shook her head.

"Jo?" Dee asked. "Do you know why they're shooting those ones?"

It was hard to make it out exactly, but it looked like they were shooting the front corpses in a group that was approaching the wall way out in the distance.

"Why would I know?" Jo asked.

Dee shrugged and looked away.

One of the closer soldiers walked over. "We're redirecting them," he said, having heard their conversation.

"Redirecting them how?" Jo asked.

"If we shoot the front runners, they'll start moving to the sides. Either side has traps for them."

Dee nodded like it made sense, but Jo asked what Sadie was about to: "Why wouldn't they just run over the fallen?"

"They do, but if you build up enough, they'll move around the obvious obstacles. Usually. Hi, by the way, I'm John." He held out his hand and Jo shook it. "I love your video. You were all so great. I've watched it too many times, to tell you the truth."

"Thanks," Jo said.

"Could I get a picture with all of you?"

"Of course," Jo said, and turned to the rest of them to make sure they were all paying attention—Gerri wasn't, and Jo grabbed her arm to pull her into the middle of the forming group shot.

"Oh, Gerri!" He made a sound that could only be described as a squeak. "I just love that part where you're all drenched in blood. That must have been so scary. You're so-so-so brave!"

Gerri closed her eyes for a moment, but when she opened them she was back to full Gerri. She leaned forward and kissed the soldier on the cheek. "Thank you, honey!"

The picture showed him slack-jawed and staring at her.

"Alright, alright," Meghan said. "It's time to say our goodbyes." This was their cue for big smiles and giant waves. Gerri leaned forward and blew kisses at everyone. Carrie put one hand on her hip with the other raised in a gentle wave and demure smile. Dee waved with both hands and nodded to spaces in the crowd, so people would think she'd singled them out with her love. Jo was the only one of them given permission not to smile, since her forced ones looked painful, and stuck to surveying the crowd and looking like she was interested to be there. Meghan mumbled something about "working more with that one later" every time this came up. Sadie stuck to the end, sweet and coy smiles, with her shoulder turned in and intermittent giggles. She gave the crowd small, wiggling finger waves.

Once the elevator dipped out of sight of the soldiers she let her body slump against the wall. "I feel a little more ridiculous each time we do that."

"You'll get used to it," Willa said.

She doubted that, but didn't figure it was worth duking it out with Willa over.

"That was really great," Dee said.

"Don't tell Willa that," Carrie said. "She doesn't need anything else going to her big head."

"Thank you, Carrie," Willa said, "for deeming yourself responsible for deciding what my head needs."

"Oh! Oh! Oh!" Dee laughed. "She just did the thing!"

"What thing?" Carrie asked.

Sadie, laughing, put a hand on Carrie's shoulder. "She sounded like you."

"I do not sound like that!"

All of them, even Willa, laughed.

"It's okay, honey," Gerri said. "We love it when you get all smart and mean."

Carrie rolled her eyes and mumbled, "Smart and mean."

"Oh, I see that smile." Sadie pointed to Carrie's lips. She couldn't believe the two of them were being friendly again. It was a miracle of the wall. "She's proud of it! Watch her head grow."

The elevator bumped to the ground and Willa stalked out. "Look at her run from us," Sadie said. "You'd think she didn't like us or something."

Their security guards, a man and woman who doubled as drivers, were lying on the hood of their SUV. The band had only seen the backs of their heads on the drive there, but they were getting an eyeful of them now.

"I love that," Gerri sighed.

"What?" Jo asked.

"Fresh meat."

Dee slapped her arm. "Don't you just love when that sliver between their pants and their shirts is poking out?" She pointed to the guy's stomach. "I love that little strip of hair right there.”

"Mhm," Gerri agreed. "The pleasure trail."

"I think it's called the treasure trail," Sadie corrected.

"Whichever," Gerri said.

"Her calves," Dee said. "That's all I have to say about that."

"They have to be sleeping," Sadie said. "I think that makes us creepy perverts, doesn't it?"

"Are we caring?" Gerri asked.

Carrie shook her head. "Haven't you gotten your fill of eye candy up on the wall?"

Gerri gasped and drew back. "Never," she promised.

"Come on." Dee grabbed Carrie's chin and turned her toward the view. "Do you really not appreciate that?"

Carrie's forehead picked up a pink gleam and she smiled reluctantly. "I didn't say that."

"Okay, alright, show's over," Meghan said, breaking away from her conversation with Willa. "Don't you two have jobs to be doing?"

The two guards/drivers snapped up, sunglasses falling from their faces, and ran right into the car without saying anything to Meghan. Sadie thought that was surprisingly smart.

"You guys go ahead and pile in. I'll be five minutes behind you, I have things to go over with Willa." Meghan didn't wait around for them to acknowledge what she'd said, and they didn't expect her to. Dee already had the door open and a wicked smile on her face.

"Be nice," Sadie said. "They have to drive our car."

"Only one of them is driving," Dee corrected. "The other one's fair game."

"You think they'd know better than to give us pretty security guards," Carrie said. "We have been... bad."

"And you think they could come up with guards we wouldn't get in trouble with?" Gerri asked.

Carrie giggled. "I hope not."

"That's the spirit!" Gerri pushed past Carrie and climbed in after Dee, getting in the two seat middle row, putting them right behind the guards. Gerri got to work chatting with them straight away. The rest of them squished into the back row and stuck Jo in the middle, because she was the only one unwilling to complain about it.

Gerri tumbled back in her seat before the van had even pulled onto the road or Sadie had a chance to listen in to what she was saying to the guards. "They're together," Gerri said. "I guess they found unfun guards after all."

"You're fun enough for all of us, Gerri," Jo said.

"Ahh, you sweet thing, you," Gerri said.

"I really need to work on my autograph," Dee said.

"Why don't you just do a big pretty D, no Es?" Gerri asked.

"Hmm." Dee fogged up the window with her breath and started working on swirling Ds, angled Ds, and Ds that didn't look much like Ds at all. "This is going to take a while."

Cool air swirled up dust from the vents, and Sadie coughed and turned the vent forward, so it blew at the back of Dee's hair. There was so much product in there it barely budged a single strand. They curved over the rough terrain on the edge of the city, rock formations lining the road. Light flicked in and out of the windows, exposing the swirling bits of dust.

"I can't believe it," Sadie finally said. "They really liked us."

"We haven't even done anything yet," Carrie said.

"But they know we will," Dee said.

"We're really doing this," Sadie said.

Real smiles, ones they rarely caught in the photographs they'd seen of themselves so far, filled up the van. They were
famous
and
loved
and nothing was going to stop them now.

The van slammed to a stop. Sadie jerked against her seat belt and watched as Dee slid into the back of the passenger seat in front of her.

"You girls stay here," the passenger guard said. He kept it covered on his side, but they heard the clip click out and back into his gun.

"This is bad," Jo said.

"What's going on?" Sadie leaned into Jo to get a look around the seats. Two large trucks were blocking the road, both of them parked slanted so there was no getting around them. Someone had gotten out of the driver's side of one of the trucks, and appeared to be saying something friendly to their guards. "Did they get in an accident or something? How bad is it?" There wasn't any damage to the trucks that she could see, but...