What's In Your Head?

"How did we *not* notice our coach was among the living dead?" Shay asked her teammates as they barricaded the locker room door.

"'Cause except for the not cursing every other word, she didn't act all that different," Erin replied.

"Well, until she took out half of Sherill's throat," Cathrine corrected. She hadn't yet had a chance to wash off the splatter, and it itched.

Barbara snorted. "At least now she knows what to do with brains when she finds 'em."

"Big leap of logic there, Barb," Erin said, already sounding weary.

There wasn't much they could use to block the door: equipment bags, a few chairs and stools, stuff like that. They piled it all against the door, and Cathrine added her substantial weight and broad shoulders to the load. "Think anyone else found a place to hide?" she asked.

"Fuck if I care right now, as long as none of 'em try to eat my brains." Erin smiled, sharp edges and sarcasm. "ET, you try it, you're a dead woman, or a re-dead woman, whatever."

"Becky didn't get a chance to clean out her locker, did she?" Erin crossed the room to Shay's locker and tore the cushion off. Shay started to make a noise of protest, but it died aborning when Erin withdrew a 9mm and several clips from the secret compartment underneath. The locker had a false back, too, and when Erin peeled it back, she revealed a rifle and a shotgun. There was ammo for those in the seat compartment. Soon the rest of her teammates were smiling too. "Someone grab my cell? Thanks," she said as Cathrine tossed the phone over. She dialed, paused, and said, "Hi, it's Erin, and it's, um, I guess around nine where you are. Hope you don't mind, but we're raiding your cache 'cause the Garden's under siege by zombies. I'll pay for your reload, assuming I don't join the legions of the undead first. Have a nice day."

Ashley had thought getting out of the Garden would be a good idea, all things considered, and it would have been if it hadn't been for the zombies guarding the box office doors. Strong as she was, she didn't feel safe without a weapon.

Then the zombies had scented life.

"This sucks," she announced to the season subscribers' office.

"Shut it, AB," Loree said darkly.

"You gonna make me?"

"I will. Shut it, AB," Janel said, her voice floating down from the inky blackness.

Ashley subsided, but only for a moment. "Seriously, though. Zombies. What the fuck?"

"Seriously, though," Loree mimicked. "Shut up before they hear you."

There were a couple of desks in the room, and they were soon braced against the door, but the three players were all too aware of the glass that surrounded them. "We're gonna die," Loree said quietly, matter-of-factly.

"Everyone dies," Janel replied, and somehow the fact that Janel was the calming presence for the group was almost as disturbing as the undead horde that warded the doors.

The lights flickered dimmer, and the trio huddled together for reassurance. As long as heartbeats echoed, they knew they were alive. "Everyone dies," Ashley said, picking up where Janel had left off sometime before. "But they didn't used to come back." She shivered and braced herself a little more against Janel.

A roar came from the hall next to them; somehow, while being primal, feral, and inhuman, it carried a certain femininity in its undertones. "Three guesses who that is and what that means," Janel muttered.

"Means Cat's starting at small forward," Loree whispered in response.

"Fuck you," Ashley said.

The older players had run in, and the middle-aged players had run out. The rookies ran up. None of them knew how they'd lost Shay and gotten Angelina, but Tiffany figured it was for the best, since they did have Martina, and having dead players trying to kill their teammates was bad enough without having living players do the same thing.

The concession stands were still stocked from the men's games, and in the deli section there were even a couple of knives that made Angelina's eyes light up. They refueled and took stock of the situation. "If anyone makes a 'City That Never Sleeps' joke, they're gonna live to regret it," Angelina informed them.

"Promise?" Jess asked wistfully. Tiffany whooped with hysterical laughter.

"Zombies are very slow, yes?" Martina said. The rest of them nodded. "And Sherill is… was… very fast, yes? Does that mean Sherill will be fast for a zombie?"

"Are you all pessimists?" Tiffany grumbled. She took one of the knives and held it nervously. Angelina rolled her eyes, took it out of her hand, and gave it to Martina.

"Let's find a nice room, or a way out of here, or something to slay," Jess suggested; clearly someone had watched too much Buffy during her formative years.

Or maybe not enough, since anyone who had watched Buffy would know better than to attract undead attention while unarmed. The group was moving as quickly as they could, which meant that Jess was lagging behind. Martina had been right about Sherill being faster than the average zombie, but none of them had guessed that she'd go vertical until they heard an unearthly groan and a high-pitched scream.

Tiffany turned, still running, but running backwards. Sherill- no, not Sherill, Sherill was dead, this thing that was Sherill's animated corpse- was on Jess like a leech, riding her like someone getting a piggyback ride from her big sister, but its face was only buried in the back of Jess's neck for a moment before coming up with blood smeared all over its mouth and something stuck between its teeth. It went back for seconds, and Jess screamed again as her knees buckled. Tiffany paused for a half-second, but Martina and Angelina had the knives and they weren't stopping.

The next sound she heard from Jess was a guttural snarl, and Tiffany realized she'd have to change pronouns on Jess, too.

Shay got the nine, since she said her dad taught her how to shoot a little. Erin got the rifle, since Becky was least likely to kick her ass later and it was Becky's favorite. Barbara got the shotgun. Cathrine got the short end of the stick and said so vociferously and repeatedly. "Cat, you can pass for one if you need to," Erin said. "You're pale enough-"

"So are you! So's Shay! Gimme a gun!"

"And you shuffle pretty good," Shay chimed in.

Cathrine narrowed her eyes and glared at Shay. "You saying I'm slow?"

"Yeah, but you are. But we love you anyway. You keep lookout through the ventilation thingy in the door and let us know if someone's approaching this place like their fridge." Erin absently petted the rifle.

"…seriously, you do know you don't have to be Becky Part II, right?" Cathrine said as she knelt at the door.

"Can you think of anyone better to channel during a zombie invasion?"

"Chuck Norris," Barbara suggested. "Jackie Chan. Jack Bauer. Superman."

"I'm the one who has to channel Superman, since I don't have a goddamn gun," Cathrine pointed out testily. But the half-smile haunting her face ran away. "There's something kinda greenish coming towards us. I think I'll get out of the way and let you guys shoot at it."

"We're going to have to open the door if we do that," Barbara warned.

"Kill the zombie, save the world," Shay stage-whispered. That merited three eyerolls and one rude noise, the latter from Cathrine. "Or would you prefer 'how do you stop a zombie from biting?' for your pop culture reference of the day?"

"How about get the hell out of the way so I can clear the barricade and open the door for ass-kicking purposes?" Cathrine replied. Shay got out of the way, allowing Cathrine to shove aside just enough of their stuff to get the door partly open. Now they could all see and recognize the shuffling figure. Really, other than the state of decomposition, Coach didn't look all that different. Eyes were still vacant, mullet was still scary, walk still indicated that she had no idea where she was going. But then there was the rotting thing, plus the darkening blood from Sherill's throat that coated her lips. That brought them all up short, because safely in hiding, they'd mostly managed to push that moment out of their minds because it was so surreal, but this was a reminder that this wasn't the sleeping kind of nightmare.

Shay was the fastest shooter, and of the four shots she took, two lodged themselves in the zombie's skull, pausing its progress but not downing it. Erin tried with the rifle, but her one headshot wasn't enough either. Barbara took her turn with the shotgun. Took a few shells, but the force of the shotgun was finally enough to take off the top half of the thing's skull and stop it in its tracks before it toppled to the floor.

"I think I have to work on my aim," Barbara said quietly as she jammed more shells into the shotgun.

"Uh, you do that," Cathrine answered, edging away slightly.

Janel ran out of tape halfway up one of the glass walls. She figured it might keep the pieces together in case any of the zombies decided to try and break in. Ashley and Loree weren't impressed, but it was something to do that was better than verbally slicing each other to ribbons or running a betting pool on which of their teammates would make it out alive and which had already joined the legions of the damned. Loree had a couple of bucks on Erin; Ashley figured Cathrine to be among the last survivors.

It wouldn't have been fair to include themselves in the pool, not to mention that it would have caused additional back-biting and cruel remarks, and Janel had already decreed that she wouldn't stand for it, even if she had to shove them out as zombie lunch to make her point. Besides, they weren't in the greatest of situations, and no sensible gambler would have bet on them.

Something thudded against the wall Janel had started bracing. The glass didn't give, although that probably had more to do with the light weight being thrown against it than any of Janel's work. Two more thuds caused the glass to break, tape snapping as an arm reached through, not stopping just because shards of glass peeled off strips of already decaying brown skin. There was nothing familiar in Shameka's face, only inhuman hunger and uncharacteristic rage. Janel wasted a moment pondering this, but then there was a hand around her throat and Loree and Ashley were both frozen with fear in the back of the room. The hand pulled her closer. Somewhere in the back of her head, Janel was pondering the irony of the situation, given how many people she had known who would have loved to get that close to the young diva.

Bare hands weren't enough to shake the zombie's grip loose, so Janel applied pressure from a third source, and maybe from shock and maybe because she had applied enough pressure, it let go of her. She sucked in a couple of deep breaths. "Well, that sucked," she said, turning to face Loree and Ashley in the back, and she couldn't help but notice how they were trying not to look at her. "Okay, what?"

"J-Mac," Loree said in stunned disbelief, "you just bit a zombie."

"It was either her or me."

"But- but you bit a zombie!"

"And now I need mouthwash."

"You bit Shameka!" Ashley chimed in.

"Noooo, I bit a zombie. Get with the program." Janel stopped to gather her thoughts. "Maybe you guys missed this part while you were, you know, not helping, but it was trying to kill me, so I really didn't give a crap whether it used to be Shameka. It's dead, sorta. I'm not. That's all I care about right now. Survive and advance."

"If that's the case, I'm changing my bet to Shay," Ashley replied.

"Fuck you," Loree said.

The thing about up was that it was safe, since it had only the one zombie- well, now two zombies after Jess had gone down in a heap. There hadn't been any reason for anyone else to be upstairs, and there wouldn't have been for two days more. Tiffany doubted there would be a preseason game, given the presence of the living dead and also the team's lack of a coaching staff. There was no precedent for the in-season death of an active player, but she thought the league would be understanding, given the situation.

She realized that this train of thought was a little out of whack, since surviving and not becoming a walking corpse really needed to be her priority, but she was doing okay at the not dying thing so far. Besides, Angelina and Martina were really good at keeping an eye out for the zombies formerly known as Sherill and Jess, and they had the weapons. What was she going to do, wave at the undead before they devoured her?

The other thing about up, though, was that it was a trap, since none of them were Spider-Man, which meant that even if they got up to the roof, the only way out was down, and jumping off the top of the Garden to land on concrete seemed like an open invitation to death or injury severe enough to leave her as a zombie buffet. They had to get out, even if only to see whether the dead had only started walking on their team, or if New York was about to become the battleground for the fight between the living and the dead.

So they crept their way down through an arena they barely knew, descending from the cheap seats to the slightly more expensive seats, where they found something that used to be Kiki. Tiffany helped hold it down while Angelina and Martina took turns beheading it. "We need bigger weapons," Martina said when they were finished. She didn't seem to care that thick blood, too thick and dark to be normal, had splattered on her sweats, was coated on her hands, had spotted her face so that she seemed to have freckles.

"We need to get the fuck out of here," Angelina said. It was hard to disagree with that. "This place got any exits that don't look like doors? Things that maybe a walking stiff won't notice?"

"You're asking rookies this?" Tiffany pointed out. But Angelina had a point, and there'd been something in the Liberty-specific rookie orientation. It would have been better if she'd been paying more attention, but she hadn't really thought it would be that important, and if it was, she could always pick it up from older teammates. Running for her life from an invasion of the undead hadn't been on the radar. "Think they mentioned an underground exit into the garage across one of the little streets. We gotta get back downstairs to get to it, though. It's past the locker room."

"Then we go. And nothing stops us from escaping." Martina wiped off the knife on her shorts, but Tiffany got the sense that it was purely for upkeep purposes.

The quiet was making them all a little crazy, and the worst of it was that if any of them broke the quiet, the rest of the group would shut her up immediately. Humor fell flat, philosophy was too dark, and baring one's soul would only have served to make people feel worse about the situation. So they were quiet, tending to their guns, or in Cathrine's case, keeping an eye on the hallway through the vent in the bottom of the door. "Hey, guys? There's someone coming. Might even be a few someones. And they're talking."

"We still have teammates left? Excellent," Erin said.

Cathrine had already started clearing the barricade again when a polite knock on the door eradicated any doubt about the living nature of whoever was out there. "Anyone there?" Tiffany asked.

Shay opened the door cautiously, keeping the gun in her hand as visible as she could. The other rookies stared wide-eyed at the gun, and at the guns Erin and Barbara held. "You have guns. Lucky." Martina held up her knife to make a point.

"We're thinking about going out the garage exit. Wanna come with?" Angelina offered.

Shay looked back at the others. Erin and Barbara shared a look, and Barbara nodded. "Better than staying hidden in there forever. No supplies? We'd never last. As long as no one eats my brains, I'm fine with dying on my feet."

That having been decided, the locker room emptied out, and the seven players slipped into the hallway. "Wasn't Jess with you guys?" Cathrine inquired.

Tiffany nodded, unable to talk past the sudden blockage in her throat. She realized after a moment that it wasn't grief; if she opened her mouth and tried to describe that scene, she was going to throw up. She could still see it playing out in her head, even without having her eyes closed. Terrifying and disgusting, she knew that she couldn't let herself forget. No one else had seen, because Angelina and Martina hadn't turned around and Sherill counted as something, not someone.

"Does that make the Becky trade the worst idea in WNBA history?" Shay asked as she did her best to scan the darkened hallway. "We did end up giving away an All-Star for someone who will never play in the WNBA."

"I really don't think the experts are going to give Blaze grief on that. It's not like she knew Jess was going to turn into one of the undead," Erin replied. "You can't expect the experts to factor zombies into their season previews, you know." She paused again as the group hit a junction, making sure nothing else that used to be a teammate was approaching. "Then again, if we're going to have the undead all over the place, I'd rather have had Becky covering my back than Jess."

There was a question in the air that none of them really wanted to broach: where else was this happening? No one wanted to think about former teammates or idols rising from the dead with a hunger for human flesh. Better to believe that it was unique to New York, to its component islands and inability to stop. Better yet to believe that it was some random quirk that had turned Coach into one of the walking dead, better to believe that this was their problem and theirs alone, that once they found a way out of the Garden the world outside would be normal and they could treat this like the bad dream it had to be. Better not to realize that the odds of it being exclusively their problem were vanishingly slim.

They moved as quietly as they could into the subterranean levels of the Garden until they were by the door that had served as escape for many players tired of the mindless pawing over the years. Erin waved her card in front of the reader a few times until she decided that it just wasn't reading and opened the door anyway. Just as quickly, she slammed it shut. "We're not getting out that way."

"They're down there."

It wasn't a question, but Erin answered it anyway. "Yeah, we don't have any assistant coaches left in the realm of the living either. You'd think zombies wouldn't think they were all that yummy, but I guess they smell working brains and don't stop to judge quality."

"Main exit," Barbara suggested. "Lots of doors within doors. Might mean they'd have access to us, but it also means we have more shots of getting out. I mentioned how much I like that part, right?"

"Barb, how many of them do you think there are?" Tiffany asked with a nervous giggle.

"I'd rather overestimate and be wrong than underestimate and be wrong."

One of the desks had a drawer full of paper and pens, and Janel started doodling. They weren't very accurate depictions of whatever was in her mind, but she couldn't see what came out on the paper, so it was all okay. It was just something to do to keep herself from getting bored, since Ashley and Loree had both decided to ignore her. The way they acted around each other was hysterical, because they were too scared to stay far away, but they disliked each other far too much to stay close. It was like bumper cars, or magnets.

Something pounded outside their not-so-safe haven. Ashley lifted her head and muttered, "Oh, goodie. She's back. Sharpen your teeth, J-Mac."

The groan of the hungry zombie shivered all their bones, freezing them in place. The worst part about zombies was that even when the zombies won, dying wasn't the end. But no hands reached through the glass to seize them and deliver the worse than fatal bite. Instead, there was a second groan, and a sound like thunder, and a very faint splatter. "Oookkay, so either the zombies are exploding at random, which is kinda cool, or there's someone out there," Ashley said.

"That was a voice!" someone started to exclaim before the volume was abruptly cut down, presumably because that someone had noticed the undead, still uniformed in Garden purple and white, were hanging around their former places of employment.

Loree perked up. "Door #2," she said quietly to Ashley, and they broke for the barricade, shoving the desks out of the way as fast as they could. They came face to face with the rest of their teammates, and Janel followed the two out a moment later.

"They have guns and knives. What do we have?"

Loree considered. "I think we have a letter opener. Oh, and Janel bites people."

"I really wish you wouldn't say that to the people with guns and knives. It was just the once, it wasn't a person anymore, and I was doing it in self-defense." Janel exchanged a look with the rest of the group. "She never bothers mentioning that part."

"We've got everyone we're going to get," Erin said, quiet steel in her voice. "Let's get out of here and try to figure out what's going on." She hefted the rifle, taking solace in its heavy, balanced, weight, and took the lead.

The fight between the Liberty players and the former employees was mercifully short. Guns had a way of doing that in a fight. After the smoke had cleared, the giant clock that hung from the center of the room had a couple of new holes in it, but the only bodies in the room were the ones who had been dead before. The group approached the doors slowly, but no one bothered opening any of them. Even through the doors, the scent of death and the echo of distant screams filtered through. The florescent lights that were always on weren't. And at noon, people should have been exiting Penn Plaza for lunch, their steps light, instead of coming towards it, and towards the Garden itself, in a slow shuffle.

"God," Shay said like a prayer.

Ashley swallowed a couple of times. When she spoke, she sounded raw, like there was sandpaper in her throat.

"I don't think anyone's starting at small forward this year."