“Good, lets go on real slow, V, you take point, Gap girl you are next up, Jimbo you got the rear, keep well back to cover us, the other girls will be following after me, go people, we have a cube hole up here on the left.”
‘Up on the left? Uh-oh' thought Max, 'that is my cube. Shit.' He went to the door, it opened in such a way to allow Max to peer down the corridor towards where the zombies were heading. The zombie Jimbo was looking right at him, then turned away and shuffled back down the corridor, the opposite direction. 'What the fuck is going on?' thought Max, 'He is letting me get the jump on them, it has to be a trap!'
Still Max, knew it was not going to get any better than right now. Max eased out the door, bracing it against a loud slamming noise and headed off behind, what looked like an all girl gang.
The lead girl was fast approaching the cube entrance, 'This is it.' thought Max. He ran up behind one of the three girls between him and the three zombies in the lead and swung the metal garbage can over his head, it made a resounding thud and the zombie girl dropped like a sack of cement.
When he was a kid, Max, like most of his generation, had watched cartoons. He was reminded of one in particular where the character would swing his guitar at his foes, making a grand ‘El-ka-bong’ noise as he struck them down. It was hilarious, the trash can, filled halfway, made the same noise as it smashed the zombie girl down.
A nice side effect of the strike was the loudness of the noise, Max had meant to scream out a primitive war cry, but somehow it came out as a faint gurgled squeal, definitely not the noise to wake the whole office as he hoped. The 'el-ka-bong', however, woke them all up effectively. As Max was readying a blow against one of the other girls, he heard Stewart screaming, “Get the fuck off me Steve! Get the shotgun, you Tom, you! Oh for fuck’s sake!” followed by the sound of her nine millimeter gun discharging, the girl, V, came reeling out of the cube opening and the third zombie, pushed her and the second girl past the opening into Kirkpatrick’s reception.
Max pushed forward into the second girl, who still hadn’t quite figured out just what was going on, she was slow, slower than the three women in the lead and dressed pretty nicely too, in a blouse and mini skirt Max could have admired on a living body, that thought led to revulsion and he pushed her all the harder forward, screaming, “Stewart I am behind them, there are five or six left!”
That got the two girl’s attention, they turned on Max like slavering beasts and his all out charge abruptly ended, at least he had the trash can between him and them, even if he could not raise it over his head to whack them, he could use it as a lousy shield to keep them a whopping eight inches away from his fleshy parts.
Stewart appeared behind the girls and Max ducked, mini skirt girl number one suffered what was probably her second fatal wound in the last twenty four hours as the back of her head was forced through the front of her face. Then Max saw one of the faster moving zombies jump Stewart from behind, after that he was busy dealing with mini-skirt zombie number two or was it number three? She was strong and Max had already been through a lot that day, she jumped up on him and her momentum, if not her mass, knocked him over onto his back. A shot gun blast echoed in the confined space of the office, but Max’s girl kept on coming. He tried to flip her over using an old high school move from his wrestling days. He had a moment to reflect that he never thought that wrestling would come in handy, but hey, just goes to show that everything you learn has a proper application.
The mini-skirted girl went flying, a testament to Coach Julian’s training and the laws of physics. Once again Max was up and on his feet. He reached down and grabbed his trash bin as another shotgun blast echoed in the hallway. Stewart was screaming something, Steve was screaming and even Tom was yelling as he pumped the shotgun for a third shot. The zombie on Stewart, V? No the other one, Max thought, had taken a gut shot from the side and was struggling to rise to her feet, she appeared to be watching Tom and while this was distracting Max the girl he was fighting took the opportunity to rush him. He bashed her with the trash can, maybe breaking her arm, probably not, it was not a good enough shot, it did make her scramble around defensively, it was enough that Max was no longer on the defense and he swung the trash can around and around trying to keep her at bay. The shotgun went off again and Max heard Stewart say, “For fuck’s sake Tom shoot her in the head!”
By this time the cries started coming from Kirkpatrick’s office, the door was shut and the screams were something Max knew he would never forget. Stewart was back on her feet and yelling more at Tom, then came to stand by Max, pointing her pistol at the mini-skirt girl number three, who promptly ducked into an open cube, Stewart did not fire, but turned and took three steps up to Steve, saying, “Gimme that!”, as she jerked her secondary pistol out of his hands, she held it up in front of his face and said, “Safety! Off!” While sliding the safety to the off position, then handed the gun back and said, “Now go make yourself useful while I track down Max’s new girl friend. Tom, go clean up the mess in the office, save who you can.”
Max and Stewart headed to the open cube when Max saw the girl climb over the walls to the next cube down the row, then the next, Stewart took a shot at her when she was making the second jump, and Max thought she had winged her, but the girl kept going, a few steps further and Tom was calling out, “Stewart! Is this a five shot or three shot? I think I am out!” The door to Kirkpatrick’s office opened and Tom immediately fired towards the head of whomever was there, yelling “Fooled ya! You dumb fuck!” the body toppled backward and the door was slammed shut again. Tom fired through it near where a woman’s head might be and leaned over to Steve and quietly said, “I am out, I gotta reload, they open the door you hold em off with that little twenty five.”
Meanwhile seeing the zombie girl fleeing back towards the stairs, Stewart said to Max, “She is running, we gotta go help the others if we can. C’mon.” Max followed her as she reversed course and headed back to the reception area. Tom was reloading shells into the bottom of the shotgun and Steve was watching the door. Occasionally a head would peek through the opening of the door, but Steve did not fire at it. The screaming had turned to groaning inside the office. Max heard a woman’s voice call out, “Throw down your weapons, and you won’t be hurt!” from inside the office.
Stewart replied, “Hell no honey, you just step out here and we will end your unnatural life for you. Nice and quick.”
Laughter greeted her words, “Not a chance, sweetheart! Max you out there?”
“Yeah, who am I talking to?”
“So you survived so far, eh Max? That guy Steve too? Better than I would have thought, or was it just luck so far?”
“Who the fuck are you?” Max called back.
“Oh just little ole Nancy, you remember me, right? Marketing.”
“Yeah, yeah, you tried to take a bite out of me yesterday, how could I forget?”
“Bingo, Maxo! Right in one, you guys gonna blow or end up like the other norms in here?”
“Let them go Nancy, let them go, I know you can, you don’t need them!”
“Oh but I do need them Max, oh but I do. This is powerful Max, like meth to an ice-head, only worse. I can’t give you back your buddies, they are all dead, my crew got a little too ‘over-zealous’, there was one still alive before your friend did that very naughty trick with the shotgun. So it is his fault she died, what a bad man he is!”
Tom looked sick in the pale light, but Stewart was quick to say, “Tom, they were probably dead anyway, you heard her, ‘meth to an ice-head’.” Then to the others she asked, “Do we believe her or blow this joint? We have at least one behind us and what if they left a door open somewhere when they came in?”