A Royal Apocalypse (Lady Slayalot Book 1)

by Louisa Lo

  Except for the single adult-sized Jimmy Choo Emma was now holding in her hand.

  “Where did that come from? You didn’t leave it behind?” Chelsea’s jaw sagged. How could she not have noticed the shoe all this time?

  Emma lowered her head, the fingers from her free hand playing with the ruffles on her pink dress, “I—I’m so sorry. I hid it in a pocket. I thought, you know, maybe Mama would want it later.”

  As a young child, Chelsea, too, had thought that her mother’s affection was just another trinket away—if only she were to be the one who helped her find it. It was irrational and sad, but such was the way when one craved love from someone who would never be ready to give it.

  She had no time to dwell on that thought, because the door got kicked off its hinges at that moment, sending Ruiz flying almost two meters in the air and landing against the opposite wall. Then a couple of Obsessed clamored over the threshold, heading straight toward Chelsea and Emma.

  Ruiz bounced back on his feet with an agility that was surprising for his age, but even in his prime Chelsea doubted he could’ve won against two monsters in straight hand-to-hand combat, which was exactly what he was about to engage in.

  The two-against-one fight lasted but twenty seconds, then it was pretty much over when one Obsessed had Ruiz in a headlock while the other lifted his feet off the ground. They pulled at him in opposite directions, trying to tear him apart by the limbs at the same time they were trying to choke him to death.

  He’s going to die. And it’s all my fault.

  That was Chelsea’s last thought before she pushed Emma behind her and fished the flashlight out of her jean pocket. Made of metal and almost as slim as a lipstick, it nevertheless carried the weight of two AAA batteries. In one smooth motion, she threw the flashlight toward the Obsessed holding Ruiz’s feet. It hit him right between the eyes, just like the concrete had with Judith, and the Obsessed went down.

  Not stopping to marvel at her amazing luck once again, she scrambled to the box of liquid diet supplements and vegetable crackers. The crackers, while fattening, didn’t make very good projectiles due to their large surface area and light weight, but the hard plastic tubes of liquid diet supplements worked just fine.

  Chelsea threw the tubes at the Obsessed who had Ruiz in a headlock. It wasn’t easy, given that Ruiz was now basically serving as the monster’s shield. But somehow the mini rockets found their way onto the exposed areas of the Obsessed, whether it was the head, the shoulder, the arms, or even the toes. When the grip on him loosened, Ruiz dropped to the ground, wheezing, his face blue.

  The respite was brief, however. Very soon, more Obsessed were cramming into the small space. The dozen or so supplement tubes would only go so far, especially toward creatures who were extremely determined. After the last tube was thrown, three Obsessed remained standing. One of them was holding onto a bejeweled metal earring tree, the other had a child’s silver bangle clutched between her teeth. Chelsea shuddered, wondering what had happened to the child to whom the bangle had belonged.

  Three pairs of eyes stared at her, and cold chills ran down Chelsea’s back. She was going to die. She just knew it.

  The monsters made a move towards her, but something on the floor caught their eyes. They looked down at it, then back at her, then down again, their faces in rapture.

  With her heart in her throat, Chelsea followed their gaze to see what had gotten them so utterly fascinated.

  It was the gossip magazine with Chelsea on the cover. It had fallen out of the box when it was knocked over during the earlier commotion.

  When the Obsessed looked at her once again, their eyes gleamed with glee and interest even more intensely than when they looked at their run-of-the-mill victims. There was possessiveness and greed there, true, but also something else.

  Was it—could it be—borderline reverence?

  They started chanting again, “Pretty Barbie, pretty Barbie, pretty, pretty, pretty Barbie…”

  Oh dear lord in heaven, could they have recognized her from the cover? Could it be that just like Ruiz, they saw through the grime and gash and envisioned the girl with stylish golden hair and perfect makeup. Someone so far from Chelsea’s new reality that she wasn’t sure if she could ever turn back into that person?

  As if smelling her fear, they came toward her again. The Obsessed with the earring tree brought it above her head. Chelsea closed her eyes, waiting for the sound of her skull being crushed in…

  The earring tree touched her temple, but ever so gently. The bars of metal traced down her hair, then it was brought to the top of her head, and glided down her hair again.

  Huh?

  Chelsea blinked. It almost looked as if the Obsessed was trying to brush her hair, with the branches of the earring tree as teeth of the “comb.”

  Another Obsessed, the one who had been biting into a child’s silver bangle, took the jewelry out of her mouth, grabbed hold of Chelsea’s hand and tried to stuff it into the bangle. It wouldn’t fit, of course, but the Obsessed wasn’t about to give up. She stuffed harder, and Chelsea cried out in pain. The third Obsessed was scraping the cuticle of her toes with his own nails, as if he was trying to give her a pedicure—if by pedicure it meant the nails being in worse shape after the treatment.

  Oh, no. Did the fact that her face was spotted in print make her a walking, breathing brand name item of sorts?

  Like, a Barbie to play dress up with?

  No, not Barbie, more like those creepy undead dolls from Monster High.

  With a newfound energy born out of desperation, Chelsea twisted her body and reached back with the hand that wasn’t being squeezed into the child’s bangle. When she found soft ruffles, she knew that the shoe in Emma’s hand was close by. It had a spiky heel and it was the only weapon in the proximity that she could think of.

  After a few more seconds of fumbling, she found the Jimmy Choo. Chelsea yanked, and Emma let go of the shoe with a strangled squeal.

  Chelsea’s fingers tightened and loosened around the shoe in small jerky motions until she was holding the shoe firmly by the base of its spiky heel, all the while taking stock of the three monsters surrounding her and “glamming” her up. She would only get one shot to turn her new weapon into a projectile, and even if her weird and incredible luck held, she would only be able to take one monster out before the rest of them killed her. Was it worth certain death?

  But wasn’t she screwed anyway?

  At least there would be one less monster for Ruiz and Emma to deal with. And maybe the other two Obsessed wouldn’t kill her, after all—they would just try to exfoliate her to death. Slowly.

  She prayed that her strange luck would hold and her aim would be true.

  Before she could launch her assault, though, every single one of the Obsessed’s heads exploded like squashed watermelons, spraying her with blood and gooey brain matter and whatever else.

  There was no warning. As the Obsessed dropped like hollow puppets around her and on top of her, Chelsea struggled to get up, still in shock and holding onto the Jimmy Choo.

  “Drop the shoe. Now!” A male voice, hard and authoritative, shouted from behind her. His words would’ve been almost funny if not for the circumstances.

  Chapter Six

  Sitting Duck

  Chelsea turned toward the voice. Dazed, she noticed that the outside entryway to the storage room was now wide open, inviting the cool night air into a space full of the stench of fear and death. The doorframe was filled with three soldiers in military fatigues in jungle camouflage patterns. They were each holding a M4 carbine, all of which were pointing at her. Well, at least she thought they were M4s. One assault rifle looked the same as all the others when she was looking up its barrel, her entire life flashed in front of her.

  One male soldier was flanked by a female and another male. The one in the middle was tall, with a muscular body, and light brown hair that, had it been longer, might have been tipped with blond streaks. His face showed h
igh cheekbones and hard angles. The second male was shorter than the first, with black hair, a round face, and a stockier build. The woman had red hair sporting a buzz cut, and tattoos that would have looked right at home with an array of nose rings, though she wore none. Chelsea was too far away to see if her nose was actually pierced—not that it was a priority right around now.

  Just like everyone else Chelsea had met since the start of this ordeal, these soldiers were covered in various types of bruises, blood, and dirt, though they didn’t seem to be bothered by it. Or maybe that was what they were trained to project.

  With her turning motion, the barrels of the weapons drew up a centimeter or two. She had no idea which of the two men had called to her. She was too stunned to ask any questions—or even to be afraid.

  “Drop the shoe now, or we’ll shoot,” the firm voice that she had heard earlier said. It turned out to belong to the guy in the middle. Piercing blue eyes narrowed at her with such fierceness that she was sure would seriously cause him to shoot her if she didn’t comply.

  It was then it dawned on Chelsea the reasoning behind that request—they weren’t sure if she was one of the Obsessed, but they had enough doubt to not kill her right on the spot. That meant she’d better do something fast to prove to them she was indeed human.

  She dropped the shoe.

  The jaw of Blue-Eyed Soldier loosened as if he had never truly believed she wasn’t a monster until now, “You actually listened.”

  You have your toys pointing at me. Of course I listened, Chelsea wanted to snap, but her tongue was tied from shock.

  Blue-Eyed Soldier gave a curt hand signal to the other two, and all three of them passed Chelsea without a backward glance, and headed into the main room. There was a brief round of shooting, with a lot of screaming.

  Then a female voice yelled, “All clear, Captain. Should we commence pursuit?”

  “Let the Pretty go, Nik. Everyone stay together. There are too few of us and too many civilians,” the one being addressed as the captain said. He had the same voice as Blue-Eyed Soldier.

  “Yes, Captain.” Nik, the sole female soldier, answered.

  “Nik, do a tally on the civilians, and have them keep close to the store. Sonny,” the captain directed to someone Chelsea bet was the second male soldier. “See if you have any luck boosting that signal to the base. We need to talk to them ASAP.”

  “You got it,” Sonny said. Then he breezed through the storage room and headed back outside.

  By then Chelsea was finally able to spring into action. They were safe, for now, and things were probably as good as they were going to get. As an added bonus, they didn’t think she was a Pretty—no big guess what that term was referring to. She crossed the room to Ruiz. His face was no longer blue, and he had managed to prop himself against the wall. His limbs must have been on fire from being pulled in such a manner, not to mention the whole almost being choked to death business, but his eyes were steady and clear. The man was a fighter.

  “You all right?” Chelsea asked him.

  “Yeah, those sons of bitches had the hold of an anaconda.” Ruiz coughed and spit something onto the ground. Chelsea did her best to hide her grimace. The man had pretty much saved her life, after all. What was a little bit of hygiene issue? “But these old bones have felt worse.”

  Chelsea turned her attention to Emma, wanting to discover how she was doing, only to see the flash of the little girl’s dress as she sprinted out of the storage room and into the front of the store. Then she heard the alarm in Nik’s voice as she yelled at someone to stop or she would shoot.

  Oh God, was that Emma the female soldier was screaming at?

  With her heart pounding, Chelsea raced out of the storage room. She tried to look at the area where she had last seen Emma’s Mom, deducing that the little girl would most likely be heading in that direction. But her sightline was blocked by the bulky backside of the captain, so she pushed past him.

  She found Emma kneeling next to her mom, with Nik already lowering the weapon she was pointing in the little girl’s direction.

  Emma’s Mom was still alive, but her Mont Blanc anklet was gone—and so was a good portion of her leg. She was sobbing into her daughter’s dress while Emma hugged her in an awkward angle.

  Chelsea shook as a sigh of relief left her lungs seeing both Emma and her mother were safe. Then a horrible thought occurred to her. Was the bite of the Obsessed going to turn Emma’s Mom into one of them, like in those zombie movies?

  As if reading her mind, the captain coughed behind her. “It’s not contagious, as far as we can tell.”

  “How do you know?” Chelsea questioned. “What if it just takes longer for them to turn?”

  The captain hesitated, then answered, “I’ve had some experience dealing with them before. If there’s a trigger, it wasn’t the bite.”

  Huh, so the military had not been dismissing the stories about the Obsessed as nothing but rumors. Interesting.

  The captain went on, “And ma’am, please refrain from bumping into my person while we’re on high alert. I almost maimed you when you knocked me aside just now.”

  Chelsea rounded on him. “Yeah, well, you almost killed me before, so maiming would have been an improvement, wouldn’t it?”

  Surprisingly, the captain’s face split into a reluctant smile. “True.”

  Chelsea’s eyes did a sweep of the crowd, and she counted around six or seven Obsessed lying dead on the floor with their heads blasted open. All of them were once people. Bile rose in her throat, so she tried to block it out by focusing on making sure that her count was right, not the implication behind it.

  Then she gave up. There wasn’t much math to do. Basically, X amount of monsters had rushed in, Y amount of monsters had bitten the dust, and Z amount of monsters escaped and were maybe gathering new friends for another attack right this moment. All that against two hundred defenseless civilians and three soldiers.

  Didn’t take a genius to figure out their chances of survival.

  For the regular people, most had suffered superficial wounds, but there were two deaths. One apparently from a heart attack due to the stress of the attack, while the other one from suffocation when an Obsessed tried to remove a man’s particularly ornate tie. Overall, they’d gotten off relatively easy compared to the other attacks people were whispering about. Thank heavens the soldiers had come when they did.

  Chelsea went back to the storage room. Ruiz, the old sergeant, was still there, his uniform torn beyond recognition and his body battered.

  “Sounds like they’ve secured the premises,” he commented.

  “Yeah, they did.”

  For now were the unspoken words between them.

  “I’m going to stay here. Somebody’s gotta in case they come back through this way.” Ruiz told her, sitting on the floor with a grimace.

  Chelsea suspected he was in a lot more pain than he was letting on. On top of the limb-pulling and the choking, the Obsessed had also punched Ruiz in the guts quite a few times during their skirmish. She decided not to say anything that might hurt his pride.

  “So, kiddo,” Ruiz continued. “I saw you try to save me back there.”

  Chelsea decided that kiddo was infinitely preferable to m’lady. The latter implied duty, while the former indicated a measure of grudging respect. Though it was for something she’d done out of sheer dumb luck, she found herself liking it nevertheless.

  “It was just luck,” she told him.

  “It’s not about throwing stuff, or whether or not the aim is good.” He shook his head. “It’s the fact that you got my back. Thanks.”

  Chelsea sniffled. It was silly getting choked up over the old soldier’s words when there were so many things that had gone wrong tonight, but nobody had ever appreciated her for trying to stand by them. Not her mom, not even when Chelsea had defended her beyond all reasonable doubts. Nor her high school classmates, not even when she ended up being the only one who put a school dance t
ogether, or used her allowance to pay for an unexpected expense so their year-end trip to Paris could go forward.

  She gathered all the food in the storage room that wasn’t ruined in the attack—including potato chips and gummy candies from a small, unopened shipment that had gone unnoticed until now—and put them all in one single box. Then she picked the box up and headed back out to the front. She walked around the shop, offering people a little drink and snack here and there. The crowd was subdued, their initial feeding frenzy dampened by their latest attack. It was a good thing, because Chelsea could not afford a riot on her hands.

  All through the process, she was determined to avoid looking at any of the dead Obsessed, either in the storage area or the front, any longer than she had to. In death, without seeing their missing teeth or hearing the chanting of “pretty, pretty”, they looked so very normal. People in suits, jeans, and sweatshirts, giving a hint of who they had been before they turned.

  She had no idea how she should feel about the monsters, or about the fact that she’d killed more than a few in one night. She wasn’t sure if they would be considered the undead, or the living dead—a part of her still marveled at the use of such surreal words—but there was no doubt they once had been regular folks, with jobs, families, and friends. She grieved for the loss of their lives, and what she had had to do to not lose her own.

  As she made her rounds around the store, she took note of all the inedible items people had bypassed in their hunt for food, hoping to find something she could pick up to defend herself if the need arose. Something compact that would pack a punch would do nicely. Paper cups? Too light. Laundry detergent? Too bulky. Umbrellas? Already taken.

  Then she saw them. Half a dozen pair of stainless steel Korean chopsticks she’d used in ramen shops before. They weren’t as long or as heavy as umbrellas, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. Also, they handily came in their own black pouch with strings. Chelsea tied the strings onto the loop at the front of her jeans, feeling a little safer with the new weight around her hips.