AnimeCon Harem Z: Z pt 1 (Patreon)

   “Hello,” Kelly sighs out in a tired voice. “This is Kelly Brandt or Kelly Zee-one-six, and you are in immediate, life-threatening danger. You are now in the Zee branch of timelines and for the bands I’m sending to, it is eleven-thirty-one A.M. on Sunday morning. If you are in this range of sending, it is already too late to escape the city without losing Emily. You need to hunker down at the convention center until you can be evacuated at the end of March.”

   “Can’t coddle you with explanations,” Kelly said, patting the stump of her amputated arm for emphasis as she had for the thirty or fortieth time that morning. “Too many bands to send to— hundreds, actually—and I’m just one fucking person. Your Emily and Rebecca have a joke plan made up called Code Zee, you need to immediately convince them it is not a fucking joke. Rebecca has a rifle and about four hundred rounds over in her car at the Sherriott. The convention center is a designated disaster relief center and has supplies. Fucking figure it out. The one-tenth or so of you Kellys that survive the first week have good odds and are considered Zee-one timelines, you guys will receive more information via send. The rest of you are already dead. Protect Stephanie and Brian, don’t get bitten. Don’t fucking get bitten. Kelly Zee-one-six out.”

*     *     *

   Kelly staggered forward, dropping to her knees and splaying her hands out on the city sidewalk just outside the Westerlin hotel they’d left. She gagged, and as revulsion and horror rippled through her a bit of fluid and bile was retched out across the ground. This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening. THIS CAN’T BE HAPPENING.

   Zombies. A zombie apocalypse scenario was descending on them in a matter of minutes. They were already out of time. Just as the Kelly of two days ago had a personality that seemed so different that it was almost alien to her, touching for a moment on this future Kelly hurt. The Kelly from Zee-one-six was cruel and empty, extraneous emotions had been sheared away by suffering and loss until there was almost nothing left. Kelly couldn’t help but open and close the fingers on her left hand in disbelief, because Kelly Zee-one-six did not have a left hand, or a left arm anymore.

   “Kell?!” Stephanie was at her side in an instant. “Are you alright? What hap—”

   “Code Zee,” Kelly blurted out, scrambling to pull Stephanie close against her as she and Brian helped her back up to her feet. “Emily—where’s Emily?! It’s a Code Zee.”

   “Code Zee?” Emily stepped up. “Wha—”

   “Send from future Kelly, she says Code Zee, Code Zee,” Kelly snapped, lunging over and grabbing Emily by the shoulders. “It’s already too late for us to get out of the city. She was not fucking joking!”

   “Uhhh, uhhh!” Emily panicked, fumbling out her phone. “Code Zee?! For fucking real? We, we, we need to, to—?!”

   “Rebecca first, where’s Rebecca?” Kelly demanded. “She’s supposed to have a rifle in her car. Her car’s at the Sherriott. Call Rebecca, we need to move. We all need to run. Now.”

   “What’s going on, what—” Brian started to say.

   “No time!” Kelly cut him off, taking Stephanie by the shoulder and crowding her forward so that she would move down the sidewalk in the direction of the convention center. “Emily—fucking move, fuck! We need to go!”

   “Okay, OKAY!” Emily squeaked out. “I just—”

   “Emmie, get on,” Brian instructed, dropping down into a crouch to offer her to climb up for a piggyback ride. “Make your call, do what you need to do. Kelly—where are we going?”

   “To AnimeCon!” Kelly yelled, already hurrying forward and tugging a bewildered Stephanie along with her towards the crosswalk.

   Police sirens had already begun to wail somewhere in the nearby city blocks.

*     *     *

   “Rebecca, where are you?!” Emily demanded, the tension in her voice apparent even through the little speaker of Rebecca’s phone. “Are you at the convention?!”

   “I’m in line to buy single day passes,” Rebecca explained with a frown. “I was going to pick up yours, too.”

   Something was wrong—she wasn’t sure what or why or how, but between the feeling of raw anxiety pouring fresh off the dreamscape and Emily’s voice, it was as if Rebecca could feel her hackles raising—the little hairs on the back of her neck standing up.

   “Fuck, fuck!” Emily swore in response. “Do you think you can get to your car really quick? Like, start running now, like big fucking hurry? It’s a Code Zee. A for real Code Zee—news outlets are picking it up now but the shit’s already hitting the fan. Code Zee.”

   “Where are you?” Rebecca felt her blood run cold, the dread deadening her senses into her Mara frame of mind as she stepped out of line and began to jog for the nearest exit with the phone still held to her ear.

   “We’re—we’re going to the convention center, Kelly says we have to,” Emily explained. “We’re almost there. Kelly says it’s a hurricane relief place or whatever and that they have supplies for that stashed somewhere. Kelly says you have your rifle and four hundred rounds in your car.”

   “Kelly says?” Rebecca asked, not breaking stride as she darted past the scattered Sunday morning convention attendees and arrived at a door.

   It was an exit and not an entrance—this particular wide door was only unattended and bereft of traffic because it was a fire door, with bold red lettering warning that an alarm would sound if the door was used blazened upon the broad horizontal panic exit bar that opened the mechanism. To Mara’s surprise, no alarm at all went off as she elbowed the bar and shouldered her way through and out into the sunlight. Or, maybe the alarm is silent?

   “It’s a charm thing, she got like a, a, a heads-up or something,” Emily stammered. “Kelly says we can’t leave the city, she—she says it’s too late. Don’t go for the rifle if anything looks dangerous, okay? Just turn back the very second you think you might be—”

   “Got it. Gonna call you back,” Mara said in a brusque voice, ending the call.

   There was thirty yards of empty plaza to cross at a dead run from where the fire door had been situated, and by the time Mara was forced to weave through crowds again—Emily and the others were likely somewhere in this throng of people, even—Mara had already speed dialed the first entry in her phone. Mara ducked and cut between people as fast as she could without losing speed, her viking toggle boots tapping a steady rhythm against the pavement as dial tone played. No one picked up on the other end until she was almost at the intersection.

   “Yes, dear?” Her grandmother answered.

   “Trouble coming. Stay at home, start barricading the windows,” Mara instructed. “There’s enough plywood in the shed, you have all the food you need there at home. Stay at home. Tell grandpa I love him, both of you be safe. I love you.”

   Mara hung up and shoved the phone back into her pocket, steeling her nerves as she jumped out into traffic. The light had just changed from red to green, but the nearest car in front of her hadn’t accelerated fast enough to pose a threat. Instead, a guy in his mid-thirties was forced to jerk his vehicle to a halt of screeching brakes that was quickly overtaken by the zealous blaring of his horn. He slammed both hands on the steering wheel and then raised them in an open-palmed what the actual fuck are you doing gesture, but Mara had already crossed over to him and started impatiently rapping on his windshield.

   “You’re going that way? It’s an emergency—can you take me down a few blocks?” Mara yelled, yanking open the first pouch on her belt for the small store of cash she kept on hand. “Sixty bucks? Just a few blocks that way—please.”

   “What the fuck were you thinking?!” The guy demanded, partially opening his door so that she could hear him speak. “You about got yourself killed.”

   “It’s an emergency,” Mara repeated, pushing the sixty dollars towards him. “Please—if you’re going that way, can you take me just a few blocks down? It’s an emergency.”

   “I—yeah, alright,” the guy tabbed the automatic locks. “Alright, hurry up, get in.”

*     *     *

   Their small group of Brian, Stephanie, Kelly, Emily, and Megan heard the screaming the moment they made it inside one of the sets of double-doors at the entrance to the convention center. The shrieks—several people were screaming in unison now, and the hysteria seemed contagious—preceded a small stampede as dozens of attendees attempted to push and shove their way back from something in a rapidly expanding pocket of open space.

   At the center of which, a pale college-aged guy with a backpack was violently ripping the throat out of a girl with his teeth in a spattering of blood and viscera. A black cosplayer in a Shinobi Souls Killer Corps cosplay rushed to separate them, and then their view of the situation was disrupted by the chaotic scramble of bodies. Some were fleeing in terror, others were struggling forward to assist, and several had their phones out to capture video of the shocking scene.

   “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God,” Megan muttered under her breath. “I, I, we can’t, we can’t even—”

   “Kelly they’re already inside the convention,” Emily hissed out from her perch on Brian’s back. “This place is fucked.”

   “I can fucking see that!” Kelly snapped back. Stephanie had gone frightfully pale and was squeezing her hand so hard that it hurt. “There’s got to be somewhere to go, somewhere that’s—”

   “This way,” Brian called, hefting Emily up a bit as he muscled through the crowds. “Upstairs, upper level—we need to get out of the thick of this.”

   The screams of panic and fear suddenly redoubled in intensity, and those that had pushed forward in confusion were all now turning back in a frantic attempt to escape the escalating danger. A veritable wave of people was streaming laterally down the convention hall, several of them slamming into Kelly from the side and nearly yanking Stephanie from her grip as they tried to make their break towards the escalators.

   “Get the fuck off—out of the way,” Kelly shoved back, sending a chubby guy with tears running down his face sprawling. “Megan? Stay with us.”

   “Brian, go go go go,” Emily insisted, tapping the top of his head as she surveyed the rapid spread of carnage. “There was one of them, and now there’s like three of them, whatever this is it’s spreading way too fucking fast! Go go go fucking go!”

   “Yeah,” Brian grunted. “Going.”

   “Wait—what about Rebecca?” Megan called as they reached the stairs between the escalators—it was an obvious struggle for the overweight girl to keep her breath. “What about Rebecca?”

   “She’s trying to get her gun from her car!” Emily yelled back, sliding off of Brian’s back so that she could scramble up the stairs after him.

   “In this?!” Megan turned to cast a terrified look back behind them.

   The convention lobby had descended into chaos, with an enormous pool of blood— but no bodies— in the middle of the tiled expanse, already getting tracked around in footprints by the frenzied footsteps of people fleeing every which way. The real horrific sight was that if you followed the mess, it was clear to see that the bleeders weren’t on the ground because they were now in active pursuit of those still living. The victim from earlier, now with a mangled neck, was clawing her way up the thrashing form of someone who’d been knocked down by the panicked exodus, while the black cosplayer who had first rushed to help now had an enormous chunk of his right forearm missing and was tackling another hapless bystander down to the ground.

   “This is, this is, it’s happening too fast,” Megan stammered. “We, we can’t, we can’t—”

   “Move, move, move,” Emily yelled back.

   “Stairs and escalators make a choke point,” Brian raised his voice over the screams that echoed throughout the enormous hall. “I’ll stay right at the top and make sure none of them try to come up.”

   “We are not leaving you,” Kelly growled. “Don’t even—”

   “Want you girls to make for the Atrium, they have weapons there,” Brian instructed. “Grab what you can, fast as you can.”

   “Yeah uh those are fake weapons!” Emily protested, smacking him across the back. “If you think padded swords are gonna—”

   “Eight foot spears are eight foot spears,” Brian retorted. “Padded or not. Three or four people with spears at the top here can shove and smash whatever’s coming up right the fuck back down the stairs.”

   “Brian, I can’t leave y—” Stephanie began to say as they reached the upper level veranda.

   “Steph, go, go!” Brian pushed her forward. “I’ll hold here ‘till you guys get back!”