Lipstick & Zombies (Deadly Divas Book 1) (30 page)

"Sure," Noah said, and turned to the girls. "Are you sure you want to do this?"

"Well, no," Gerri said. "But who else you got?"

"Good point," Noah said.

“Wow, wow, wow,” Dee said. “Slow it down now. Your plan is to run across the field and take out the four fast ones. The four fast ones running around way over there.” The girl soldier nodded impatiently, like Dee was dumb.

“That sounds like a great plan,” Carrie said. “I've always wanted to be completely surrounded by a stadium of fresh corpses. How about you guys go first?”

“What she's saying is all those dead people are going to be zombies real soon,” Jo explained.

“You don't know that,” the soldier guy said. “That usually takes hours.”

“Tell that to Meghan,” Carrie said. “Oh wait, you can't, because we had to kill her corpse fifteen minutes ago.”

“Meghan?” Noah asked, his voice cracking.

“Fine,” the girl soldier said. “We'll knife as many as we can while we make our way across.”

“How are we going to tell who is dead?” Jo asked.

“If they're not moving, they're dead,” she said.

“But, no,” Dee said, and shook her head. “There has to be a better way.”

“We don't have time for arguments,” the guy soldier said. “Come or don't.”

“Well,” Gerri said. “Here's to one helluva first concert. Here we go?”

Dee walked to the edge of the stage and sat down. "Here we go."

They all jumped down.

Jo had spent a lot of time imagining her life after joining the military. She thought she had a pretty realistic picture of the life. None of her imaginings were as bad as this. The dead around her were unarmed, unprepared, and pulled to pieces. It was like... well, it was like the battles she'd read about in old books, where people used to fight each other instead of the undead. The scale of it wasn't imaginable, even as she looked it right in the face. It was brutal and loud and
massive
. When the sight of it wasn't taking her breath away, the smell was enough to choke her.

Telling who was dead wasn't quite the problem they'd imagined. If someone wasn't moving, and didn't have a throat, they were dead. It was easier to mentally checkout, to avoid dwelling on what she saw, or did, than to give it much thought. Carrie kept hesitating just before moving her blade, so she wasn't mastering the same skill.

The girls moved quietly across the field, which did nothing but make the sea of bodies more frightening. They kept close together, with their heads up to watch for approaching second-lifers. Noah stayed with the soldiers a few paces away, heads down, stabbing one after another, committed to their task.

Halfway across the field, Gerri stopped. “I can't tell,” she whispered to Jo. The body was bloody and beaten, the worst injury their swollen, bleeding arm. It looked like it could be broken. Possibly bitten. Possibly cut up in a struggle. Possibly, possibly. It was too mangled for any of them to tell.

“She's still breathing,” Sadie whispered. “We leave her.”

“To have her pop up and eat us five minutes from now?” Gerri asked. “I don't like it either, I'm just saying.”

“What if it were you?” Sadie asked. “We leave her.”

“But what if it's you she eats?”

“What's going on?” Dee asked, drawing both the soldiers' attention.

Jo stepped over the body. “Nothing.” She stabbed the next one.

They moved quicker across the second half of the field. The dwindling distance turned up the volume on the screams, a powerful motivator. They had in no way taken care of every corpse on the field, but they'd improved their chances.

The four young corpses were still running around, attacking in a frenzy. They weren't happy to simply take a bite out of a person; they were tearing people to pieces. Usually corpses wore everyday clothes. It was whatever they died in. Perhaps because Jo had seen these corpses just before their deaths, their black clothing stood out to her. They still had on their Kevlar vests, as though corpses cared about protecting their hearts.

Dee said, "It's them."

"Right now they're just corpses," Jo corrected her, but she was right. It was the shooters from the road, now completing their monster looks with blood dripping down their faces. They hadn't suffered any damage so far that she could see, though it was hard to tell through the blood staining their skin.

"Hey," the guy soldier said, pointing to the one on the far side. It had the biggest pile of bodies around it, and it wasn't stopping to eat any of them. It was following the screams, excited. "We'll get that one and be back."

Noah nodded.

"Okay girls, you stay here and watch out while I get this." He didn't wait for them to agree before he ran off toward the closest one to them. Jo didn't like watching him run off alone, but this was his job; he was a strategist. Jo knew very little about that.

Noah hollered at the corpse to get its attention and draw it in, like he'd shown them to do in the studio. This was real life, though, with lots of distracting screaming, and the corpse paid him no mind. Its focus was on picking out prey in the crowd. Noah needed to come up with something new, something clever.

He ran toward it.

"Oh my god," Dee said, appalled. "Yeah, right, screw this. We go in?"

They all looked to Jo, like she knew what to do. Again. She didn't want to be responsible for all of their lives. Someone else should have had answers.

Noah swung at the zombie's head with his ax, but missed and hit its shoulder. The ax slipped free of his grasp. The zombie turned on him.

Jo ran for it, the girls at her side.

Noah was backing away and pulling out another weapon. The corpse was advancing, until it noticed the girls charging its way. Its eyes moved roughly between them, confused by the five new targets. They broke apart into a circle, Jo facing the corpse head on. It turned to lunge at Carrie, but she slid a blade into its skull before it got its hands on her.

"See?" she demanded, breathless. "It's always me!"

"We all feel that way," Gerri said.

"If we had a scorecard," Carrie said, still catching her breath, "you'd see I win."

"Win?" Sadie asked, doubtful.

"Whatever," Carrie said, standing up straight and checking around herself.

“Thanks.” Noah raised a knife in salute.

"Whatever," Jo said.

"One down," Sadie said. "Two to go."

The two left were at the biggest pool of people. They were fighting to reach the main entrance to the stadium. People were still flooding through it, but not fast enough. There really had been thousands of people at their concert. It looked like the whole city was dying in front of them.

The two corpses were playing tug-o-war with an already dead body. At least, she hoped it was dead. It wasn't screaming, which pretty well labeled you deceased in that crowd.

"I can't take much more of this." Carrie was sucking air through her teeth.

"It's almost over,” Dee said. “Keep it together. Balance your chakras, or something. Right?"

"Right," Carrie said, with a grimace of a smile.

Dee smiled proudly.

"I don't trust that we'll be able to break them apart to do this one at a time,” Noah said. “Two groups. Me, Sadie, Dee in one group, Jo, Gerri, and Carrie in the other. Be careful. Everyone ready?"

"And if we weren't?" Sadie laughed. "Sorry." She stopped laughing. "Keeping it together. Chakras balanced. Let's do this."

SADIE

Sadie had one throwing knife left. It wasn't
really
a throwing knife, not a good one anyway, but she'd found it among Noah's weapons and it would have to do. She got her group to stop just long enough for her to throw it before they went in, hoping that they could avoid the close fight altogether. She hit her target, of course, the top of the thing's forehead. The corpse dropped the body it was fighting for, but didn't fall down dead. It was like the thing had a
third
life.

"Good try," Dee told her.

"Thanks," Sadie said.

The knife stayed put in its forehead, but must have loosened in the skin, because blood began spurting out of the wound.

Noah winced. "Yeah, could have done without the corpse fountain."

"Sorry," Sadie said.

The three of them moved toward the corpse. Like it knew that Sadie was the one to throw the knife, and still understood concepts like revenge, it went right for her. Sadie jumped back. If she got close enough to attack, she'd also be close enough to be blinded by blood.

Dee told her, "I'll get it from behind," and circled around to where the blood wasn't shooting out at her. She raised up her arm, knife in hand, and the thing
ducked.

“Guys?” Dee yelled. "How is it remembering how to fight this good?"

"Sometimes they do,” Noah answered. “Muscle memory maybe? This isn't really the time for a lesson, okay?"

"Jerk," Dee harrumphed.

Noah went in with his knife, and in some kind of surreal nightmare moment, the thing wrapped its hand around the blade and pulled it away from him. It was like Noah didn't know how to keep a weapon in his hand.

Sadie was still shaking her head about that when she sliced her machete clean into the side of its head.

CARRIE

Carrie ran at the thing with her machete, and stopped just short of hitting Gerri. "Oh god," she said. Her stomach had gotten through all of this keeping it together, but bile rose up her throat at what she'd almost done.

Jo yelled, exasperation heavy in her voice, "Don't hurt each other!"

Jo slashed through the side of its head. Something slapped against Carrie's stomach. She looked down to see what looked like an ear land on her shoe. She jumped free of it.

The zombie was still moving and had just turned back toward Carrie, of course. Gerri took the opportunity to kick the corpse in the side. Like they were still in class, Carrie had the absurd impulse to tell Gerri they weren't supposed to do that. Maybe it would have been useful. With reflexes Carrie had never seen from a corpse, it grabbed her ankle with both hands.

Jo and Carrie both ran forward. Carrie cut at its arms, focused on nothing but freeing Gerri's ankle. Jo stabbed it in the side of the head. Its body crumpled onto Carrie, knocking her flat on her back. Trapped again, Carrie screamed for help but managed to roll herself free before anyone else got to her.

Standing, she yelled, "Why didn't you help me?" and found Jo standing helplessly over Gerri sleeping on the ground.

Carrie hurriedly checked Gerri for a pulse.

"She's alive," Jo said. "Passed out from the pain, I think."

Carrie asked, "Pain?" and looked down to see the bone standing free of Gerri's calf.

She managed to turn her head away from Gerri before she threw up.

DEE

They were all doing the best they could to help Gerri. Sadie kept her hand on Gerri's neck, so maybe monitoring her pulse was important, Dee had no idea. The doctors in stories Dee watched never did that. Dee held Gerri's hand, because that's what she thought she'd want. And Noah walked around the group in circles, checking for more zombies, Dee figured. People were still screaming and fighting each other, but there weren't any corpses moving around as far as she could tell.

"They're here," Jo said, pointing to the stage where some military folks were just walking around.

"Is it over?" Dee asked.

Noah said, "Yeah, it's over," and pulled out his phone. "Calls won't go through."

"Still?" Dee flipped out her own phone, hoping Noah just didn't know how to work his.

"We'll have to send in complaints when we get home,” Sadie said.

"I have a text," Dee said. "It's from Willa. She says,
Can't get Meghan. Get to the VIP tower
!!"

Dee looked up at the tower that rose up over the right side of the stage. "You think she's still in there?"

"If she didn't get ate." Noah shrugged.

“You don't think zombies got to the tower, do you? My parents are in there!”

“No, no,” Noah said. “The tower was built to be safe in extreme situations. I'm sure your parents are fine.”

“Oh,” Dee said. “More messages just came through. Parents are mad, but yelling at me, so I guess they're okay.”

The two soldiers who'd been with them earlier jogged up. "What happened here?" the guy asked.

"Gerri's hurt," Jo said. That really should have been obvious. Bones go on the inside.

"You stay here. We'll go get some of those medics." They jogged away.

"Hurry," Dee called after them. They may not have been very intuitive, but they were helpful.

She rubbed Gerri's arm and told her nice things, like that when she woke up she'd be in a clean room, on drugs, with no zombies or blood or anything bad at all. She promised to bring her chocolate and flowers, and made a mental note to look up what else was appropriate for hospital visits.