Lipstick & Zombies (Deadly Divas Book 1) (5 page)

"What the damn hell? No one told me to wear something splatter proof!" She put her hands on her hips. "I broke my shoe. Who's going to pay for that?"

CARRIE

Carrie didn't have time to hesitate—she knew that was exactly what they were looking for. She grabbed a blade and sliced slits in her skirt. She better make the band; there was no way she could afford to replace the dress otherwise.

Instincts drove her to slash straight for the muncher's head, but then she remembered: this was a show. They'd put her in this long room, like a contained runway. She was auditioning to be an entertainer. Calmly, with the muncher still ambling over from the far end of the room, she went back to the table and grabbed a second weapon.

This was improv. She'd done improv before. That had been interacting with a bunch of dancers on a stage, but who knew, the muncher could have been a dancer in its former life.

Focus. Be present. Don't let it bite you.

The sledgehammer was heavy in her hand, and she thanked her trainer for being such a hard-ass. She could swing this.

But would it be enough of a show?

She considered her options and flipped the table on its side so it blocked the runway. Now she had a shield to wait behind. And wait she did. It was a slow one; it must have been decaying for over a month. New munchers would have run right for her.

Just another couple feet and its outstretched arms would reach her. She revved up the chainsaw. The noise motivated the muncher to pick up the pace. It was close enough that a puff of rotten breath moistened her face—her pores would never be clean again—and she ducked away from its grasp before slamming the chainsaw through the table, into its gut.

So. Freaking. Gross. The spray was like holding your thumb over the end of a hose, but with chunks. Her dress was so done for.

She still had a sledgehammer and a knife the size of her forearm. Maybe the sledgehammer would make the better show, but if the blood and guts fountain hadn't proven she could handle this, then there wasn't much else she could do.

The chain got stuck on something—maybe bone, maybe the table—and the engine stalled out. She swung the blade into the muncher's skull, releasing another, thicker, spray of blood, drenching her hair.

She had to look terrifying. Good.

She bowed at the black glass in the wall above her, assuming that's where they were watching her from, and walked back out the door she'd come in through.

JO

They left her alone in a closet-sized room without a word. A door on the opposite wall popped open. Unsure what else to do, Jo walked through it. The oblong space was much brighter than the first room. There was a table covered with a variety of average looking weapons. Again a door opened at the other end of the room, this time letting in one of the moaning dead. Without hesitation, Jo grabbed the forearm machete, stalked to the end of the room, and ran the blade up through the jaw and into the brain. She plunked the blade back out, shook it off, and let the corpse fall to the ground, at peace at last.

She watched, and waited, and was met with silence.

"Is that really it? Where are the rest?" Her arm dropped to her side. She'd messed up. That wasn't much of a show; that hadn't proven anything. "Send me more! I didn't realize you were only going to give me one. I can play the cat and mouse game! I can give you a show! Send me three at once; I'll make it slow! I can do it!"

The door she'd come in through opened back up for her, but she refused to go through it. She sat by the door for the undead, crossed her legs, dropped her weapon, and crossed her arms. She would not budge. There was no going back.

GERRI

There were two bats on the table, and Gerri thought it was so damned funny, she just couldn't help herself. She picked them up and drummed them down the length of the table, rattling the weapons into an echoing clatter, and then beat them down the wall. She twirled on one leg in front of the zombie, keeping its attention on her, and then hit the bats together in a slow beat that went really well with its high pitched groaning.

The zombie was closing in. It was time to get down to business. The song was reaching its epic finale.

Both feet firm on the ground, hip width apart, she swung the bats in wide circles at her sides while the zombie crossed those last two steps. She expected it to be excited and lurch forward quickly, but it hesitated, so her first wide swing had to wait an extra beat.

"Hey honey, you feeling okay?"

She swung at the zombie's shoulder.

"You're looking a little gray today."

She swung at its knee, and it fell on its side.

"Well, that's disappointing." She kicked at its side, and it crawled toward her. She sighed in disappointment. "Weak," she said. "Hey look guys, left handed!" She slammed the end of the bat down into the skull, cracking it open with a sick splat.

"So... is that it?"

FENNEC NEWS

“The critics have not persuaded Last Chance Records to change their mind about this band, which I consider to just be a travesty, a
tragedy
waiting to happen! These girls are bound to fail, and once they do, who's going to sign up for the military then? If they truly thought this would solve their problems, well, I just can't imagine a person like that. I can't explain it.”

“But the band is moving forward?”

“Yes, as I understand it, the girls have been chosen. May they be forgiven. I can't imagine they realize the damage they're going to do.”

“Absolutely, John, absolutely. So now that the tryouts are over, what do you believe we can expect to see next?”

“Hellfire.”

Chapter Four

WILLA

Half way through explaining her plan she realized she was assigning herself to the dreadful task. Forming a girl band as part of a rebranding effort to convince teens to sign up for the military on their own was just not something she could trust to anyone else.

Before the dead started walking around, before the wall, she'd been on her way to becoming a popstar herself. Since the wall, she'd been one of the pioneers to bring order and commerce back to this undead polluted world. No one knew how to direct teen decision making—or the power in it—like she did. She'd spent the past thirty years making sure that anyone who could possibly fill that position found themselves desperately needed elsewhere. This was her world. And now, because of how she'd dominated the field, there was no one else qualified to lead such an endeavor. Honestly, if they had suggested someone else, she would have been so offended she'd have had to enact vengeance on the doubter. But that did
not
mean she wanted to do it. It had been a long time since she had to actually speak to a teenager; that was one of the benefits of being at the top: no conversation with little people.

And now she had five needy, sloppy, self-entitled teenage people she had to turn into the perfect propaganda. And it was her own damned fault. It wasn't the first time she'd wished to shirk the responsibilities of being so intelligent, but what was she to do?

Her peers—if that's what you could call that room of dull drones—thought it was a big joke.
Oh there goes Willa, thinks she's going to save the world with pop music
. And yet they'd given up on coming up with any other plan, and everything else they'd tried before had failed. They expected she'd come through, and then it would just be another silly thing she did. If she did fail, by magically becoming someone with the capacity for such an event, they'd act like they knew it all along.

She would go ahead and sufficiently ruin their careers to secure some new colleagues, but they'd be just as bad, if not worse. It would be great, in theory, to do everything yourself, but in reality you just had to shove off tasks you didn't absolutely have to do yourself, and hope nothing too important was destroyed. Time was precious, especially when you were trying to run the whole freaking world.

The world at large was easier to run than the lives of five teenagers. That was for sure.

The girls were meeting just then. Willa thought giving them five minutes to size each other up was better than wasting five of her own minutes where they'd be too busy staring at each other to listen to her. Five minutes was all she was willing to risk, though. How much damage could they do to each other in five minutes?

Her shoes clacked a faster beat down the hall.

CARRIE

Carrie was now part of a
band
. Somehow, throughout reading the ad, the applications, and the audition process, she'd managed to keep herself from thinking about that. It was when they'd shook her hand and said, "Congratulations, you are now one of the Deadly Divas," that it finally hit her.

She was a member of something. A group. She was one of five. A small crowd. This was happening
now
, not someday, but today.

She had spent most of her life fighting: smiling, struggling, pushing everything out of her life that wasn't going to get her to exactly this fate. And now she'd done it. And she spent the whole night awake, not bursting with excitement, but terror. Who were these girls? Would they like her? Would they talk a lot? Would they expect her to talk a lot? If they didn't like her, would that hold back her career? Was that the next fight she had to face?

She ran through conversation topics, practicing in front of the mirror as she'd done with pretend interviewers for years.

When she glanced at a clock and realized she'd been in front of the mirror, pathetically practicing fake conversations for over an hour, and had spent two hours before that worrying away the time in bed, she gave up on any plans for sleep. She spent the next hour picking an outfit for the day, two hours after that getting dressed, and then went to the roof to wait for it to be time to leave. The hours on the roof helped calm her. Her energy was flowing freely again. Peace didn't seem like such a far-fetched idea. And then the alarm went off and it was time to leave.

"Positive. Mental. Attitude." She ran her fingers over her topaz bracelet. Her mom had given it to her when she noticed how scared Carrie was around people. It had been how Carrie coped with the world before therapy or anything else. Yellow, she'd told Carrie, would help her balance her energy, boost her self esteem, and give her a sense of calm. She would emanate that calm and get back a confidence in her abilities from other people, establishing her role as a person of influence. Yellow was everything Carrie wanted in life.

The secretary at the record company who led her to the meeting room wore a yellow skirt. It looked ridiculous on her, but was exactly the fabric Carrie needed to see before going into that room. She ran her thumb over that topaz bracelet, let out a deep breath, and strode confidently into the room.

She was pretty sure she didn't even flinch when she locked eyes with that girl.

JO

She was a popstar now. It still seemed like a joke; she wasn't sure that was ever going to wear off. They told her to go home and get her things. She needed to be back the next day for a meeting where she'd get to know the other girls. Then they'd be given living quarters and get to work. They had lots of work to do, they'd promised her.

No one asked her if she still wanted to do it. They'd just assumed, and so she assumed, too, that this was still the right decision. That was the thing, though: she wasn't sure she'd ever made the decision. Not in any real way. She'd never said to herself, "I'm going to be a popstar and live in the city!" It was more like, "Jo, here's a way you can completely change your life." And so she did.

Jo hadn't bothered going home, or telling anyone what was going on. She didn't think she could do that. She couldn't even imagine how that conversation would go.
You know that thing you've been making jokes about? That awful new thing the city dwellers are doing? Well, I'm in it.

She spent the night walking around the city, watching people go about their normal lives. Their normal lives that were completely foreign to her. She waited for her new reality to sink in. It didn't.

The meeting room was sleek and shiny and smelled like citrus. They grew oranges behind her house, but the smell of actual citrus was different. Artificial scents were always like that: a slap in the face. For a world constructed of such sharp colors, and scents, and bright, overpowering greetings from people paid to be nice to you, the streets sure had been full of people slogging dimly through their lives.

Maybe nothing felt real because nothing there was.

She shook her head free of the thought. That was heavy.

A black girl with a prosthetic leg walked in. The prosthesis was sharp at the base, shoeless, and looked like it would scratch the hell out of their floors. The sleek prosthesis and her shiny curls made her look like she belonged in that room in a way Jo never would, but she still managed to look relaxed, like none of it was anything to her. She seemed like someone who could be at home anywhere. Jo liked her right away, which was surprising. She didn't like people; it wasn't something she'd thought much about until she noticed how strange it was that she appreciated this one.