Page 64 of Doomsdate

“They’re waking up early,” she says, more fascinated than anxious at this development. Which is funny, since I’m going to ralph all over the ladder. “Time to go.”

She slips her loot bag on like a backpack and wastes no time with the ladder, jumping nimbly down instead. When she rises, both her Tasers crackle to life, unmistakably badass. With Chicken back on my shoulder, I shuffle down the rungs as quickly as possible, fairly certain that if I were to attempt that jump, I’d break an ankle and end up spending the rest of my life in an astronaut suit after all.

We walk quickly through the tourists toward the entrance, their heads slowly rotating to follow us as we move. My Fun & Stun trembles in my hand.

“Jesus Christ,” I hiss, my feet picking up to jog, to run, to fucking flee, but Maisie places a warning hand on my arm.

“Don’t,” she says under her breath. “Running might activate a predator-prey response.”

The groaning is louder now, followed by an explosion of angry, crashing bangs that converts my blood into rocket fuel.

The restrooms. The zombies within sense us, smell us, want us. And we have to walk right by to get to the exit.

Fuck.

“Stay calm,” Maisie murmurs, her eyes darting from zombie to zombie, assessing threats and adjusting our route through them accordingly. Chicken’s claws dig into the rubber shoulders of my suit as she hisses liberally in every direction. The entrance is in sight now. So are the restrooms. A former security guard steps suddenly toward us. Maisie tases him in the heart without blinking.

“Why are they waking up now?” My voice rings with desperation as I tase someone jerking alive to my left. He falls, and animal crackers spill from his pocket.

A dad, formerly. My stomach flips.

“I think it’s the groaning from the others.” Maisie’s pace picks up despite her determination to remain calm. “It’s like a wolf pack howling to ral—” Her words are cut off by her shriek as she nearly topples over, an invisible force yanking her out of stride. No, not invisible. A hand connected to an arm connected to a torso clutches Maisie’s suited shin. The mutilated guard it belongs to slinks out on its stomach from its hiding spot beneath the bag-check table, trailing guts behind like a gruesome half squid, half federal employee. Chicken leaps down on the zombie’s head, batting at its snarling face with both paws, the cutest boxer of all time. The zombie’s other hand scrabbles for Chicken, momentarily distracted from its pursuit of Maisie’s calf. I scoop Chicken up before I use the rubber-toed boot of Apollo to kick the zombie’s chin upward like a decomposing soccer ball. The force sends the whole thing squelching backward, releasing its grip on Maisie as she spears it in the heart with her Taser.

She grabs me by the hand, and together, we run, not stopping until we’re clear of the museum, the zombies are appropriately lifeless again, and Maisie’s SUV is in sight. She laughs, breathless, palm braced against one of the blooming cherry trees. The pink, downy blossoms arch over us in kiss-colored clouds, so lovely that even the middle-aged man in his stained tan suit hovering nearby can’t detract from it. And that’s really saying something, since he’s missing both his arms. Maisie glances at his grisly but benign presence and laughs even harder.

“Are you okay?” I wheeze out, my already-lacking cardio ability made worse by sprinting in a heavy rubber suit.

She twists until her back is pressed up against the tree now, her head tilted as she eyes me up and down in my Apollo suit. Her lips part in a loose, lopsided grin, so different from the tight smile she wore as she sat down on our first date.

“Oh, I’m having a blast.”

The funny thing is, I believe her. There’s a satisfaction in her stance as the last licks of laughter escape her in little sighs. She lifts a finger up to scratch Chicken behind her left ear, and Chicken mews dramatically until I lean down so she can curl up in Maisie’s arms instead.

“My hero,” Maisie coos as she kisses Chicken between the ears, but her eyes are locked on to mine, as if those words are for me, too. My hero. And I find that I want that, so much. I want to touch Maisie again, to kiss her and hold her close, but I want to be her hero in this godforsaken hellscape even more. Not because she needs it; she clearly doesn’t. But because she deserves to be saved, too. She deserves to feel safe.

And I want her to feel that way when she’s with me. I know this urge to be her protector is cliché, but how could I feel otherwise when all the TV and movies I’ve happily consumed my whole life have trained me to glorify the brave male hero? And how could I help but feel less-than when I failed my hand-to-hand-combat courses in military school, when I shirked the army path my parents set for me in favor of popcorn buckets and scary movies? I could’ve been a true hero like Mom and Dad, but I chose to watch fictional ones instead from the safety of a velvet seat and a big screen. I chose to be an observer, a civilian, the protected instead of protector, a burden.

But I want to be an asset. For her.

From Maisie’s arms, Chicken has squeezed her eyes into their happiest diagonal slits, and she mews again, as if to say, Fuck around with my humans and find out, zombies!

“Up for one more stop?” Maisie asks, and I find that I’d agree with just about anything she wants right now. We pad across the lawn, meander through the empty National Gallery of Art, content and quiet by each other’s side. When we emerge again, the sun’s lazy tilt tells us it’s after three p.m.

“We need to find a place for the night, and soon.”

Maisie tucks her chin over Chicken’s head, nuzzling her in simple pleasure, and smiles. “I know just the place.”

“The White House?!” I screech as Maisie’s SUV bounds over the lowered steel gates into the abandoned West Wing employee parking lot. She squeals when she sees a high-powered electric-vehicle charging station and backs into the spot nonchalantly, like we didn’t just breach the security perimeter of the nation’s most closely guarded property.

“What?” She arches an eyebrow innocently. “Where better to hole up for the night? We’ll be right here for the helipad pickup tomorrow, and look around, Everett—your parents were right. The place is clearly deserted.”

She has a point. The empty guard stations, the lowered gate, the carless parking lot…hell, there aren’t even any zombified remains of the former staff manning the West Wing’s entrance. It’s as if the entire place were evacuated all at once, before GI-27 could take anyone by surprise.

I frown up at it, but Maisie’s already gleefully charging her Tasers, her pack slung across her shoulders, with Chicken leading the way. She pauses at the doorway beneath the ugly white awning, her smirk visible all the way from the car. “Something wrong, Professor?”

“Yeah,” I grumble, pulling my own duffel over my shoulder. “I hated The West Wing.” Somehow, I don’t think the zombie version will be an improvement.

But like my own very cunning, very strange Secret Service, Maisie and Chicken methodically sweep through the ground floor while I bring up the rear. We don’t find a single zombie. We don’t even find any gore—no blood splatters on the stately wood-paneled walls, no severed limbs, and the restrooms are all silent, blissfully unoccupied.