1 Hot Scheming Mess (29 page)

Once inside, Madison moved like lightning tearing off the blond wig, the t-shirt, shoes, and the jeans, revealing the one-piece bathing suit she had kept on underneath Target’s clothes.

She looked at the startled girl and said in a low voice, “I’m going to give you my business card. Call me later, and I swear to you I’ll send you a new pair of these contacts, but you’ve got to promise you’ll stay in here for five extra minutes after I leave. I’m being followed and I need to blend into the crowd for now.” She pulled out her card from the pack and gave it to the girl.

The girl stared at the card, slowly saying, “Okay.”

Madison flew through her quick-change as she threw on sandals from the backpack, the long-sleeved poolside cover-up, and pulled out the sunglasses, fabric beach bag, and big floppy hat that had been folded up inside the backpack. Her hair was still pinned up so the big floppy hat covered all her hair. She was now a zombie beachcomber.

The young girl said, “Um… be careful.”

Target’s clothes were quickly crammed into the backpack, then the backpack got shoved inside the fabric beach bag. Madison was transformed in under a minute. She took a quick look in the mirror, made sure everything was in place, and turned to leave.

She looked over her shoulder at the bewildered girl and said, “I promise.”

Last, she put on the sunglasses and put her cell phone to her ear as if she were in a conversation. Walking out the door, she pretended to be chewing gum.

She hoped it would be enough to buy her a few moments. She knew they would figure it out fast but at least she might have a chance to get away and hide. It appeared that Jerry had them both in street clothes and in costume, planted all around the convention. She hadn’t expected that.
Stay sharp!

Her right hand shook as she kept the phone to her ear, having a quiet, fake conversation, her left hand holding the fabric beach bag ties. Seeing through both the white contact lenses and sunglasses at the same time was a unique challenge. It was like looking through a foggy night.

She was dying to know if the zombie fairies were watching her, maybe coming after her, but she knew she shouldn’t turn around to see. The hallway was nearing an end, leading around a corner. As she approached the end of the hallway, she took the chance and looked over her shoulder as she was going around the corner and saw the zombie fairy with the woodland tunic from the elevator staring at her. The cell phone whipped up to his face as he started walking in her direction. She ran around the corner, seeing a line of people going into one of the huge rooms, and barged her way past the door attendants.

“Hey!” called one of the attendants. “Miss? Miss! You have to get in line.” He remained where he was stationed at the door, his arm outstretched across the fans pressing inward at the door, the fans hooting at her and calling her rude names. She hurried across the room trying to move around several tight clusters of people already in the room, each group seeking enough empty seats to enable all of their friends to sit together.

She ducked and dodged as she ran across the floor to the door on the other side of the room, where the last crowd had exited. She burst through those doors, knocking into one of the attendants standing on the other side, guarding the door so overeager fans wouldn’t try to enter the room through the exit-only door.

“I’m sorry,” she called as she ran down the hall, rounding another corner…

… and slamming into a big zombie hunter.

Most of the fans who chose to wear costumes to today’s convention had dressed up as zombies. But there was a small percentage of fans who had chosen to dress up as zombie hunters, prowling the crowded hallways trying to stay in character. They were in their glory having more zombies to fake shoot than they’d ever dreamed of, giving many zombies a chance to act out their death scenes, creating little moments of applause from these spontaneous, playful encounters. Madison knew thespians were harder to kill than zombies and suspected the boredom of standing in all these lines fueled it.

This particular zombie hunter was big and tall, wearing platform boots to accentuate his height, a long dark canvas coat with attached capelet, five days beard growth, scraggly dark hair, and a wide brim hat. An escapee from apocalypse school.

“What have we here?” he said as he caught Madison’s arms, most likely to catch her from falling over from their impact, as she dropped the fabric beach bag that held Target’s backpack. He seemed to be having fun with the moment.

Madison got into the moment with him, saying, “Thank God, I found you!” she said, straightening her floppy hat and picking up her fabric beach bag. “He’s coming after me. Save me, please!”

Taking his cue like a pro, the big zombie hunter grabbed his plastic futuristic rifle from a huge leather holster on his back. “Today he infects his last. Show me this vile transmutation!”

Madison pointed behind her, “He’s a zombie fairy.” She leaned in, breaking character in a half-whisper so only he could hear, “and frankly the guy’s an asshole,” she said rubbing her shoulder and wincing. “He’s way too rough on the girls.”

The zombie hunter nodded, whispering, “There’s one in every crowd. I’ll keep him away from you.”

He looked up, standing up to his full height, the business end of his plastic futuristic rifle pointed high in the sky, his mission clear. In a loud voice he said, “To cleanse the earth!” and dove forward with his rifle just as the zombie fairy rounded the corner.

Madison fled. The double doors leading back to the main convention ballroom were in her line of sight. The short burst of manly screaming behind her made her feel guilty, oh yes, but it made her run faster, too. No doubt it came from the zombie hunter not from the zombie fairy. She also noted the following applause was louder than usual.

Rushing through the double doors, she ran down the aisle of black tablecloths, her eyes mapping out the open curves in-between the crowds where she could run. A sharp turn down an opening between booths put her in another aisle where fans were standing at the table fronts examining t-shirts, rubber brains, and lawn ornaments. She ran all the way down to the other end of the aisle before she ducked under the black skirt of the long table that held down the corner where two aisles intersected. She heard a female voice saying, “Did you see that? Some girl just went under the table.”

The space under the first table was clear, allowing her to crawl on her hands and knees, dragging her bag behind her, barely able to see inside the darkened tunnel combined with her sunglasses and white contact lenses. But the next table had cross beams that supported the weight of the table. She crawled out to the side of the table where the vendors stood completing purchases with customers. If anyone saw her, she didn’t know because she didn’t stop to look and kept crawling.

She saw the black curtain separating the space from the next vendor over. She stayed down on her hands and knees, speed crawling toward the curtain, lifting it with her hand and diving through. She heard a buzzing sound.

She came out into a vendor booth where a red bearded tattoo artist sat with a customer, his tattoo gun putting the black outline of a new tattoo on his customer’s arm. Madison was wedged between the black curtain and several boxes piled high enough to hide someone sitting on the floor, a temporary place to stay out of sight. She needed help and she needed it now. She pulled out her phone to call for help and stopped. If the tattoo artist heard her above the buzzing noise, she would be kicked out. Aaron Reed or the zombie fairies might see her. But a text message on her phone could be done silently. She hoped the message would be noticed soon enough to get help. She pulled off her sunglasses and looked up Jason’s number.

Once again, she dearly wished she could hear his voice. He had a comforting presence that she’d barely gotten to know, and she wished she hadn’t screwed it up with him in the many ways that she had. ExBoy might make her feel adventurous, but Jason made her feel safe. They both pulled at her primal drives, and even now she didn’t know why her heart was so divided.

Text message: Jason, call DC agents. I need them fast! Hilton Hotel, Zombie Prom convention. You were right about the devil in the details.

The buzzing stopped.

She finished the text: And he’s here at the convention.

She pressed Send.

“What the hell are you doing?” came a man’s voice from overhead. She looked up, seeing the man with the red beard. The tattoo artist’s face didn’t look angry so much as perplexed as he looked down at her from over the tops of the boxes she was hiding behind. “There’s nothing back there of value,” he said. “Be cool about it and go, or I’ll call security.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “I’ll go.” She stood up, putting her sunglasses back on, and checking to see that her floppy hat was still secure. Most of the people in the aisle were in normal zombie fan activity mode. But a few were watching her. She heard that same female voice, “That’s her,” but she wasn’t sure who’d said it.

The urge to hide from Jerry’s men and the urge to get away from this embarrassing situation were both strong motivators. Walking out of the booth, she realized the zombie fairies knew what her costume looked like now, so she needed to find somewhere she could hide.

She walked at a quick pace, hoping to blend in with the crowd, but she kept running into people because she was looking behind herself so often. Just the act of bumping into so many people would bring unwanted attention after a while.

Looking down the aisle, she saw three welcome figures, but she didn’t dare signal them. Atomic Waist, Dewey Decimator, and Sparkle Pecs were all in their wrestling costumes but had added zombie features on top of them. It was the rest of her surprise for ExBoy. They were heading across the end of the aisle toward his booth on the other side of the convention. She dearly wished her life were normal right now so that she could join her friends in a relaxed afternoon of zombie silliness. She never had cared for this stuff before, but right now it felt so childlike, so innocent and carefree compared to what she was dealing with.

She had to face the fact that the convention was no longer providing much cover for her and it was probably best if she got out of here. There must be a hundred places in this hotel that she could duck into while she waited for the DC agents to arrive.

Why hadn’t they at least tried to call her after taking the metal box out of her apartment? Did her fairy godmother props being in the box make them think her grandfather had been lying about evidence being in that box? Surely not. They interviewed Mitch the next day, didn’t they? So why hadn’t they bothered with her?

She took a decisive turn at the end of the aisle, heading for the main entrance, watching over her shoulder. She couldn’t wait to get these contact lenses out. Not only did they cloud her vision, her eyes were becoming uncomfortably dry.

As she neared the main entrance, she saw Aaron Reed. He was standing at the entrance talking on his cell phone, when he looked up and saw her. She had faith in her disguise and kept walking toward the entrance door, toward him. He squinted at her and said, “Madison?”

She bolted, running in the opposite direction, and heard him call, “Madison, wait! You don’t understand!”

She turned her head in frantic side to side movements looking for a new door she hadn’t tried. Seeing one in the back corner, she ran for it, causing a stir in her wake, as well as in front of her. People stared wide-eyed at her as she ran towards them, commenting to one another, pulling in their kids and getting out of the way. With her feet pounding on the floor and her bag flying at her side, she arrived at the door, stopping herself just in time not to crash, and instead plunged her hands down on the push-bar in a fantastic metallic clap.

It was locked.

She plunged down again and again in a rapid rattle but it wouldn’t budge. She whirled around in a panic, and yanking off her sunglasses she saw the zombie fairies down at the other end of an aisle on her left, but they had spotted her and began to run her way. Way down the aisle on her right, she saw an arm waving at her, waving towards her as if to say, “get over here.”

It was the red haired woman, standing near an open door. In that split second, Madison knew she could no longer delay this meeting. She could no longer shove the question to the back of her mind and put off dealing with the possibility of who this woman was. She ran full out toward the oddly familiar woman with the dark red hair, and as she came closer, she saw the woman’s light green eyes.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

They ran together through the service entrance door, Madison following the quick figure in blue jeans and black t-shirt, noting that her body seemed strong and fit, though the quick glance at her face said she was older. Older certainly than what Madison had expected from the way this woman had decisively dealt with those drunks the other night.

Though the hall was long and inviting to run down, the woman made a fast turn to the right into a much narrower hallway with Madison in hot pursuit, and bounded up a small staircase, up to another level. She stopped on the landing to go through another door, all decorative wallpaper and carpeting gone as they ran across a hard concrete floor, the walls painted an old dirty white with black scratches where large bins or cleaning carts had scraped by many times.

Just as Madison thought her heart would pound through her chest and her lungs begged for more air, they ducked into a large closet about five feet wide and ten feet deep, full of mops and vacuums, the red head hitting a light switch on the wall and slamming the door shut.

Sudden stillness, her breathing loud, her eyes slightly burning, she blinked, trying to moisten her dry eyes, vaguely wondering where she had dropped her sunglasses. All she could hear was their combined heavy breathing not quite in sync or the occasional swallow. Her brows knit in fear, not knowing how she should ask the question. She stared at the older woman, seeing a smile not quite there, an uncertainty in her expression. Madison didn’t know how she would feel whether the answer were yes or no. She felt stupid that she had to ask. Just looking in the woman’s eyes told her everything. Her eyes were like looking in the mirror thirty years from now.