CHAPTER 7 - SPLITTING THE PARTY

There was zero time to waste, so I set off across the quad toward our dorm building. It was only a couple hundred meters off, so my hope was we could get there without attracting any more monster attention. I kept a sharp lookout as we moved, using my zombies as a screen ahead of us to intercept anything nasty that we did run into.

“Thinking the dorm is the best bet, then?” Alfred asked.

I shook my head. “Probably not. Too many ways to get in, too hard to defend. But you’re right that a lot of people will probably go there, and it would be good to get some stuff from my room. You must have something there you can use too, right?”

“Sure,” Alfred replied. “I’ve got a good backpack. Water bottles. Shit, toothbrush? How bad do you think this is, Selena? Will it pass quickly?”

I shrugged. “I have no more idea than you do, but I wouldn’t count on it. This…is big. Whatever it is. I don’t think it’s just gonna go away.”

As we closed with the building, I pulled my zombies back. If there were people inside trying to defend the building, they might decide my guys were attackers and take them out. I wanted to keep my zombies in one piece, which meant keeping them close to me.

“You get any good crystals?” I asked Alfred.

“Strength,” he replied. “I have the other two from the goblins, but neither slotted itself. I don’t know what they are.”

“Okay, from what I can tell, the way this works is you get two of a kind and they upgrade to a level two crystal,” I told him. No sense keeping secrets; he’d be more useful keeping us both alive if he had more information. “Once you have a level two crystal you can lock in a second crystal, like I did. I’m guessing that if we can rank a crystal up to the third tier, then we get to slot a third crystal.”

“Got it,” Alfred replied. “Merge to win!”

“Something like that,” I muttered back.

The area around the main doors was all glass panels from floor to ceiling, and all of those panels were now shattered, the shards scattered about both inside and outside the dorm. That wasn’t a great sign. Nor were there any people defending the lobby against attackers.

“I’m on the third floor,” I said. “You?”

“Fourth.”

I nodded in reply and moved into the dorm, carefully avoiding the shards of glass still hanging from the panels. This place was a serious mess. Shattered lobby furniture was everywhere, and there were a few bodies of dead goblins there as well. I went to one and tapped it, but no crystal appeared. I was guessing that meant someone had looted the creature, which felt like a good sign. The more people were out there gaining these strange new powers, the better we’d be able to defend ourselves.

Using the elevators was out of the question, so we hit the stairwell, moving up them at a faster pace than we’d used back in the classroom building. I felt seconds slipping away fast. We needed to motor.

When we reached the third floor I turned to head down the hall to my room, and Alfred made to continue up the stairs to his. I grabbed his arm. “Wait. You sure you want to split up?”

He hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah, I think this place is clear, and I can probably handle one or two creatures if they show up.”

I felt like that was a super bad plan, but I shrugged and let go. “Be careful. If you get done before me, meet me at room 302. If I finish first, I’ll join you upstairs.”

“Sounds good. I’m in 409.”

Then he was off, and I was on my own for the first time since all this went down.

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I opened the door from the stairwell and started down the hall. My door was only a dozen feet away, just past the bathroom. I reached into my pocket to grab the key card and held it against the lock before I remembered—no power, no locks. But if I was right, the power being out ought to make it so the door just opened. That was a fire safety thing, right? I tried the knob, hoping.

It turned, and the door opened.

“Hold it right there!” a voice said from inside.

“Kat?” I said. “Hey, it’s me!”

“Selena holy shit, you scared me and ohmygod what is that?”

She was pointing at Rosie with the baseball bat in her hand. I had a bunch of explaining to do. “Cadaver from anatomy class?”

“It’s walking, Selena.”

“Yes. Yes, it is. And I have to tell you, that’s not the weirdest thing I’ve seen today.”

“Oh my god. I know what you mean. I watched that mess through our window. The monsters, they came out of nowhere, it looked like. They just attacked people. It was a slaughter,” Kat said.

Kat was my roomie for the year. She was a graduate student in the Classics, which in my (carefully kept to myself) opinion was tantamount to a degree in ‘do you want fries with that?’ But she’d been a polite, friendly, easy to live with roommate, so I wasn’t complaining if she dyed her hair blue and had the common sense of a baby rabbit on weed.

“Did you have to fight any of them off?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “I’ve been hiding in here. I take it you did?” She gestured at the blood stains on my axe.

“More than I’d like, yeah.”

“Selena, what the fuck is going on?”

I shook my head, unsure how to answer because I didn’t really have answers. “I don’t know, Kat. I wish I did. But we can’t stay here. We need to get somewhere safer.”

“Our room feels safer than out there right now,” she snapped back.

She was scared. I got it. I was frightened, too. But if we let that control us right now, we were going to end up dead instead of scared. “Kat, the lock on the door doesn’t even work. Does the water still run? The toilets flush? I’m betting the water went out with the power, right?”

“Yeah…”

“When, not if, those creatures come marching up here looking for a free meal, the entryway doors are smashed glass, our room’s lock is busted, and campus security is probably either dead or fled. We need to rally up some folks and try to get someplace more secure,” I told her.

As I talked, I went to the closet and grabbed by backpack. It was an outdoorsy thing I nabbed from Fjallraven because it looked cool, but now I was extra glad for the rugged waxed canvas. What felt like a dumb choice the next day might just save my bacon. Bag in hand, I went around the room tossing necessities in: a couple changes of clothes with a big focus on stuff that would wear well, a steel water bottle (full, thank goodness), cotton pads I’d bought on a lark and was now doubly grateful for, a small notebook and pen…

I tested a flashlight, but it was out as well. Whatever took down the power really broke everything. Even the simplest electrical devices weren’t working anymore.

“Selena, I don’t know if I can do this,” Kate said. She’d seen what I was about and grabbed a backpack to mirror me, but then slumped down on the bed a minute later.

“Not a lot of choice, Kat.”

“Maybe we should just stay here and wait for help? I mean, help is going to come. It has to.”

And every other disaster we’d ever read about in the newspaper, she’d have been right. This time, I just wasn’t so sure. But the look on Kat’s face told me there was no way I was convincing her of that, so I changed tactics. “Maybe so, but how long will it take? A day? Two? Three? We don’t know how widespread this is. It could be a little while before they can get help to us. We don’t have much water or any food, and we can’t even lock our bedroom door right now. Let’s get someplace safer to hole up while we wait, okay?”

“Okay,” she replied, and turned back to piling stuff into her bag.

I’d grown up in the Northeast kingdom, that corner of Vermont where living outdoors was in most folks’ blood. It really hadn’t been in mine—I always preferred my nose in a book to camping. But you couldn’t grow up there without absorbing a lot of that stuff, almost like osmosis. Turned out I had a little bit of prepper in me, because I had matches, a candle, several packages of nuts, a thin rain jacket, and a lot of other things I was suddenly incredibly grateful for.

I took some spare, oversized clothes from Kat’s closet. “You mind if I get my zombies dressed?”

“You understand how insane that sentence sounds?” Kat replied. Then she sighed and nodded. “Sure. I’ve packed what I’m bringing.”

I picked out some old, grubby clothes and tossed them to my zombies, ordering them to dress themselves. They set about it, not especially dextrous, but they were managing. As weird as it might be, I was going to be much more comfortable once they were both in some regular clothes instead of patient johnnies.

Noise from outside got my attention—some sort of moaning sound. I peeked out the window and let out a gasp.

The quad had been utterly empty when I entered my dorm. It wasn’t anymore. There was a small sea of zombies wandering across the open space. They were moving this way from one of the undergrad dorms, and unless they had a sudden change of heart, they were coming directly toward our dorm. Right in the middle of the mess was one naked zombie. That had to be one of the missing cadavers. It must have gotten into the undergrad dorm and turned a ton of the students there.

And our dorm was next on the snack list.