Chapter 2: The Back Room Door
The chair leg connected with a wet crack that Jenney felt in her teeth. The zombie's head snapped sideways, its jaw unhinging like a broken latch, and for one horrible second she thought it would just keep coming—that nothing short of fire or decapitation would stop it.
Then it crumpled. Folded. Dropped to the sticky dance floor like a puppet with cut strings.
"Go," she said. "Go, go, go."
Jane didn't need to be told twice. She grabbed Lily by the wrist and hauled her toward the back of the stage, toward the shadowed corridor that yawned behind the tattered curtain. Lily stumbled but kept her grip on the bottle, clutching it like a talisman.
Sarah hadn't moved.
Jenney grabbed her arm again—harder this time—and dragged her off the stage. The girl's feet barely seemed to work, like her legs had forgotten how to be legs. Behind them, the window frame splintered further. Another body squeezed through the gap. Then another.
"Move, Sarah. Please."
Something flickered in those empty eyes. Not hope, exactly. Something more like recognition. Like maybe she'd just remembered she was a person.
She moved.
The corridor swallowed them whole.
Darkness here was different from the darkness of the main room. That had been punctuated by neon and strobe, fractured light that kept you oriented even as it confused you. This was absolute. The kind of dark that pressed against your eyeballs and made you wonder if you'd gone blind.
Jenney kept one hand on the wall, the other clamped around Sarah's wrist. The concrete was rough and cold, pitted with years of grime and something that felt disturbingly like mold. The air tasted recycled—stale cigarettes and cheap perfume and the ghost of a thousand desperate nights.
"Where are we going?" Lily's voice came from somewhere ahead, thin and reedy.
"Back exit. Has to be one."
"Has to be? That's not—"
"Would you rather go back out there?"
Silence. The only sounds were their bare feet slapping against the floor and the distant, muffled thuds of the horde throwing themselves against the front barricade. It wouldn't hold forever. Probably wouldn't hold for long at all.
The corridor branched. Jenney paused, squinting into the darkness, trying to remember anything about strip club layouts from movies or TV or the one time her roommate dragged her to a bachelorette party. Dressing rooms in back. DJ booth somewhere. Emergency exits marked with glowing signs.
No glowing signs here. Just dark.
"Left," Jane said. "I think I saw a light earlier. Before everything went to shit."
"You think?"
"Everything's a little fuzzy, okay? I was drunk. I'm still kind of drunk. Sue me."
Jenney turned left.
The corridor narrowed, then opened into a room that smelled different—stale perfume and old sweat and something chemical underneath. A dressing room, or what was left of one. Vanity mirrors lined the walls, most of them cracked, their bulbs long dead. Costumes hung from hooks like shed skins—sequins and feathers and things that glittered even in the dark.
And in the corner, a chair.
And in the chair, a woman.
Jenney froze. Her brain took a second to process what she was seeing—the ropes around the woman's wrists, the blindfold cutting into her face, the gag stuffed in her mouth. She was wearing a sequined top and not much else, her dark skin gleaming with sweat, her chest rising and falling in quick, panicked breaths.
She was alive. She was tied up. She was not, as far as Jenney could tell, a zombie.
"What the fuck," Jane whispered.
The woman's head snapped toward the sound. She made a noise behind the gag—something between a scream and a question—and started thrashing against the ropes.
"Okay. Okay, we're not going to hurt you." Jenney approached slowly, hands up, the chair leg still clutched in one fist. "We're going to take the gag off. Don't scream. There are things outside that will hear you."
The woman's head bobbed—yes, yes, whatever, just get this thing off me.
Jenney nodded at Lily, who stepped forward and worked the knot loose. The cloth fell away, and the woman sucked in a breath like she'd been underwater for years.
"Who the hell are you?" she gasped. "What's going on? Where's Marcus?"
"Marcus?"
"The owner. He said—he said it was just a game. A thing for a client. He said he'd let me go in an hour. That was—" She stopped, her eyes darting around the room, taking in the four naked women with weapons and wild eyes. "That was last night. I think. What time is it?"
"Time doesn't really matter anymore," Jane said. "What matters is that the world ended while you were tied to that chair."
The woman stared at her.
"What?"
"The dead are walking. Eating people. It's not a joke. It's not a prank. We barely made it here alive." Jenney crouched in front of her, working at the knots on her wrists. "What's your name?"
"Destiny. My stage name is Destiny. Real name's—doesn't matter. Destiny's fine."
"Okay, Destiny. I'm Jenney. That's Jane, Lily, and Sarah. We need to get out of here. You know this place. Is there a back exit?"
Destiny rubbed her wrists where the ropes had bitten in, her face cycling through shock and disbelief and something that looked like grief. "There's a basement. Marcus used it for storage, but that's not—" She stopped, bit her lip. "He had other stuff down there. Things he didn't want people to know about."
"What kind of things?"
"Guns. Crates of them. And a car."
Jane let out a laugh—short and sharp and slightly unhinged. "A car? There's a car in the basement?"
"A BMW. An i8. He was always bragging about it. Said it was his baby, that he'd never let anyone touch it." Destiny's voice wavered. "I don't know why he'd keep it here. Maybe he was planning to run. Maybe he knew something was coming."
Jenney's heart was doing something complicated in her chest—hope and fear tangling together. A car meant mobility. Meant escape. Meant a chance.
"Show us," she said.
Destiny led them through a door hidden behind a rack of costumes—a door that looked like part of the wall until you knew where to push. The stairs beyond were narrow and steep, descending into a darkness that smelled like oil and metal and old secrets.
The basement was bigger than Jenney expected. Concrete floor, concrete walls, a ceiling low enough to make her feel claustrophobic. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead, powered by something that hummed in the corner—a generator, maybe, running on fumes.
And there, in the center of the room, beneath a dusty tarp, was the car.
Jane pulled the tarp away, and the BMW gleamed in the flickering light—sleek and silver and impossibly beautiful. It looked like something from a different world. A world where people cared about things like horsepower and zero-to-sixty times. A world that had ended twelve hours ago.
"Holy shit," Lily breathed.
"Yeah," Destiny said. "Holy shit."
Jenney walked around the car, running her fingers along the smooth metal. It was real. It was here. It was their way out.
"Keys?"
Destiny pointed to a lockbox mounted on the wall. "Combination's his birthday. 0-3-1-5."
Jane was already at the box, her fingers flying over the dial. It clicked open, and she pulled out a key fob, holding it up like a trophy. "Got it."
"Wait." Sarah's voice was small, barely audible. It was the first thing she'd said in over an hour. "Wait."
Everyone turned.
Sarah was standing at the bottom of the stairs, her arms wrapped around herself, her eyes fixed on something in the corner of the room. Jenney followed her gaze.
Crates. Stacked against the wall, wooden and military-looking, stamped with symbols she didn't recognize. And next to them, a body.
A man. Middle-aged, balding, wearing a suit that had probably cost more than Jenney's entire wardrobe. He was slumped against the wall, a gun in his hand, a hole in the side of his head.
Destiny made a sound—a strangled gasp that turned into a sob.
"Marcus," she whispered.
No one moved. No one spoke. The generator hummed, and the lights flickered, and somewhere above them, the horde continued its endless assault on the barricade.
Jenney walked over to the crates. She pried one open with the chair leg, the wood splintering easily. Inside, nestled in foam, were guns. Handguns, mostly, but also something longer—a rifle, maybe, or a shotgun. She didn't know enough about weapons to tell.
She picked up a handgun. It was heavier than she expected.
"Can you shoot?" she asked Destiny.
The woman wiped her eyes, her makeup smearing into dark streaks. "Marcus took me to a range once. I wasn't bad."
"Good enough."
Jenney turned back to the car. The BMW. Their ticket out of this nightmare. She hit the unlock button on the fob, and the headlights flashed—bright and white and impossibly hopeful.
"Get in," she said. "We're leaving."
The engine purred to life, a low rumble that vibrated through the concrete floor. And above them, something heard it. Something that had been scratching at the barricade, something that had been waiting for a sign.
The scratching stopped.
The silence that followed was worse.
"Drive," Jane said. "Drive now."
Jenney slid into the driver's seat. The leather was soft against her bare skin, the steering wheel cold under her hands. She'd only had her permit for six months. She'd never driven anything faster than her mom's Honda Civic.
But the world had ended. Time to learn.