"Did she get you?" Beverly gave Anastasia a wary look as the brunette nervously wiped the saliva off her hand and onto her skirt. "It looked like for a second--" She broke off, blushing as she tried to find a way to describe one woman grabbing another's hand and enthusiastically fellating her fingers that didn't make it sound like some kind of pornographic fantasy. The others watched, anxious but unwilling to take the awkward step of confronting Anastasia themselves when Beverly seemed content to do it for them. None of them had any real experience with this kind of situation outside of a few late-night Halloween horror marathons at the campus theater, and even they didn't convey the bizarre hilarity of the all-too serious situation.
Anastasia held up her hand. "Didn't break the skin," she said, giving everyone a good look at her chubby pink fingers. "I guess she was too used to trying not to let her teeth scrape whatever she was sucking." An explosive snort of amusement escaped her lips, and she clamped down on it hard before it threatened to erupt into helpless, hysterical laughter. The whole situation was just so utterly weird that she didn't know whether to laugh or cry or scream or go barricade herself in the science lab on the fourth floor and hide until a real grownup came along to come and solve everything. Even though she was eighteen and halfway across the country from her parents, Anastasia didn't feel like she counted just yet.
And that went double for the others. "We should put something in front of the doors," Noah said, looking behind them at the entrance to the science building where a small crowd of slender, busty women were already beginning to gather. "I know these girls don't seem strong, but--"
Nadine broke in. "Can we not call them girls?" she asked, a plaintive whine of anxiety making her nasal voice even more annoying than usual. "I know it sounds awful, but I don't want to have to think of them as human beings right now. Not if we might end up having to, um, fight them or something." The thought of five-foot-two Nadine Butterman throwing a punch almost made Anastasia snort with laughter again, but she could hear the high tittering giggles from the... the girls, or whatever they were going to decide to call them, outside. She didn't like the thought of finding anything too amusing at the moment, not with the situation so serious.
But at the same time, she couldn't help finding everyone's complete and total incompetence at least a little bit comical. "Okay, fine, the zombies don't seem strong. Happy?" Noah looked over at the maintenance worker who let them in, his cheeks reddening ever so slightly as he paused for a moment to read the man's nametag before addressing him. "Um, Luis, are these doors--"
Corinne interrupted. "They can't be zombies," she said, fixing Noah with a sullen glare made even more sullen by the dark eyeshadow she wore. "They're not dead. Zombies are animated corpses, and these fucking bimbos are alive. We saw Beverly knock one of them out with her skateboard, remember?" Of course it would be Corinne who got hung up on this particular detail. Anastasia's roommate never met a horror movie she didn't like, even when it was eleven o'clock at night and Anastasia just knew the screams that came from the bunk below her would give her nightmares even though they were diminished to a tinny murmur by Corinne's headphones. She was probably already slotting the very real crisis they were going through into a specific sub-genre for her podcast later.
Nadine crossed her arms. "I'm really not comfortable with calling anyone a bimbo," she said, pursing her lips as if the word was bitter on her tongue. "It's a misogynist term that degrades women, and--"
"And you just said they weren't women," Corinne needled, unable to resist taking the opportunity to deliver a cheap shot to her favorite frenemy no matter how dire the situation. "If they're not really people, then what does it matter if we call them bimbos? If the shoe fits, right, Bev?" She looked to her friend, but Bev didn't seem inclined to get involved in their argument at the moment. She was the only one of them who looked like she was taking the whole situation one hundred percent seriously, probably because she already had the broken half of her skateboard as a mute testimony to just how terrifying it could be to wind up in the middle of a pack of the extremely single-minded creatures waiting just outside.
"Look, it--it doesn't matter, okay?" Noah sputtered, his cheeks red with consternation and embarrassment. "Whatever we call them, the bombos--zimbies--zimbos--" He clamped his mouth shut, trying to get his wayward tongue back under control. Anastasia pursed her lips tightly, trying hard not to laugh as her brain randomly began spoonerizing the two words in every combination possible despite her very best efforts to get it to stop. Her shoulders shook silently, convulsing in desperate amusement that she knew was a displacement reaction to the crisis unfolding around her, but that didn't stop her from suddenly blurting the most spectacularly hilarious portmanteau out loud just as Noah was beginning to speak.