Dropping through an air duct into a library, unfortunately, wasn’t considered odd, so nobody looked up as I landed, except for Andrea, who I had landed on.

“God’s nightdress, Kitty, it’s hard enough to sleep in here without you using me to break your fall!”

“Susie’s on the mattress we usually use,” I explained, ignoring her glare. “You aren’t injured, are you? Well, then, look at this!” I held up my prize, one that I had spent three days in a mall to find.

“Nice.” She didn’t seem impressed.

“It’s Coach,” I explained. Seeing her unimpressed expression, I added, “Coach is good.”

“How’re you going to get that off?” she asked, pointing to the security tag still on my bag.

“I was thinking crowbar, but I doesn’t really matter. It was one of the last things I could grab before they ransacked the store. You should have seen their faces when the alarm went off.”

“The alarm was still working?”

“They forgot to kill the genny. One of them had the sense to kill it after the alarm went off, but I think Creedy Defense will know something’s gone wrong now.”

She glared at me. “Aren’t you part of Creedy Defense? You lived there.”

I brushed my hair back from my eyes, hair that was once sapphire blue, but had blonde roots down to about my ears, and felt wetness. Pulling my hand away, I saw that it was covered in a slightly dry, slightly congealed red substance. Zombie blood.

“Damn!” I yelled. As at least 6 other people had yelled something at that exact moment, no one but Andrea really heard. “Furghen shotguns are so damn messy! Now I need to wash it!”

Andrea sighed. “You’ll just get more in it tomorrow. Why bother?”

I ignored her. “Hey, Gman!” I yelled up at the bartender. “I need a bottle of Holyman’s Secret Brew.”

“You’re fifteen, Kitty!” he yelled back. “And you don’t drink! There’s no way that I’m giving you anything that strong!”

“Hair!” I yelled back, pointing to the blood. “I’ll take patio service tomorrow to pay for it! I just need it now!”

Throwing me a bottle, he yelled, “That’s a waste, and you know it. You’ll just get more in it tomorrow,” but I didn’t care. I looked overhead to make sure that the lights, and therefore water, was on, and ran to the bathroom. It took almost all of Holyman’s Secret Brew, and close to an hour and a half to get all of the blood out of my hair. I grabbed a new towel out of my new bag, and dried it off, stuffing the towel back in the bag and pulling out a hairbrush. I was vain about my hair, I admit it, but at least I could brush it. One man who we’d seen in our library-turned-pub had a bloody green mess of hair that I assumed was once a Mohawk. He had explained it with, “Well I surely wasn’t thinking ‘zombie attack’ when it got cut that way.”

I am of the firm belief that someday we will recapture the city, find an antidote to whatever the Zed Virus is, and get out of this blasted city. And I plan to look good for when that day comes.

As I got to what ‘Drea and I had claimed as our corner, I threw her the remains of the Secret Brew, which she downed. It wasn’t much, anyway. I guess we could have watered it down and given it to a zed or really drunk customer, but I disliked the unethical part of it, and I already had patio duty tomorrow, so ‘Drea might as well profit from it. I set everything in my bag in the farthest reaches of the corner, and laid the bag out, where I could easily attack the security tag, and grabbed ‘Drea’s crowbar. I attempted to pry it off, with no success, so I grabbed the fire axe that I carried on my back and swung it over my head.

“What are you doing? If you’re gonna wreck the bag, just keep the tag on it. It makes it look like you stole it.” Andrea had grabbed the top of the axe, preventing me from slashing the bag to pieces.

I looked at the bag again. It was one that was very hard to come by, straight from the spring lineup of two years ago, large enough for me to carry everything I needed in it. I liked that security tag. She was right. It gave it bit of…character.

She glanced at my hair, which was fully dry by now. “I’ve got to try washing it with beer. It does add a lot of volume.”

“And Holyman’s Secret Brew is strong enough to get anything out of it. You’ll probably need at least two bottles, considering.” I lifted up a lock of her hair. “So, I heard some CDF guy gave you a severed head? That’s romantic.”

She blushed. “Shut up, Kitty.”