Chapter 71 - Buying Time

As the drum-beat picked up, I glanced at the horizon, where the fading sun was just beginning to slip below the horizon. On the one hand, I loved being proved right. It always felt nice to know you’d made the right call, and entering the mall at night would have been flat-out stupid. If it hadn’t been obvious that whatever power lived over there was more active at night before, it sure as hell was now.

On the other hand, here I was, potentially in the line of fire anyway!

I turned to Patches. “Get your people moving. If they’re starting to wake up already, it won’t be long before they grow more active. You’re sure the undead were coming at you tonight?”

“They did last night,” Patches replied. “We beat them. Barely. Sun rose before they kill us all, dead things left.”

Which meant they’d probably be back to finish the job as soon as possible. Okay, that tracked, but it meant we were dealing with something bigger than the undead I’d seen before. Skeletons and zombies didn’t care if the sun was out, and neither would a human necromancer. If whatever was leading them was an obligate night-hunter of some sort, odds were good it was a monster, not a person.

It would be something new, too. Something I hadn’t seen yet. That was pretty interesting from an intellectual perspective, but I was still all for waiting until daylight hit to go hunting whatever it was. My mind kept flickering to ideas like ‘vampire,’ which didn’t improve my mood.

“Hurry your people along,” I said at last. “Fast as you can. I’m going to scout in that direction, see if they’re coming and maybe slow them down a bit.”

“Thank you. We will hurry, but many ratkin, much supplies, much stuff,” Patches replied.

I glared. “I’ll hold them for as long as I can safely do so, but make no mistake—if they retreated only because of sunrise, they’re probably going to be all over you any minute. Get your people moving fast.”

Patches bobbed his head, then dashed off to speak with others of his people. Ratkin, huh? Okay, that worked for me. Better than rat-man or rat-people, anyway.

I patted Sue and gave the dinosaur a mental command. Sue trotted through the parking lot, heading toward the east side of the complex. It had been a strip mall, back before the Event. The anchor store was a big PetCo, which was where Patches and his friends had been born into this world. From what I could glean out of what the ratkin told me, my hypothesis was right. They’d been pets in cages, before the Event. After, they were infused with magic and somehow became something more than that.

Hell, so had I, if you thought about it. Humans were infused with magic one way, rats another—but we’d all been changed by the experience.

We moved out through the parking lot in front of a defunct Staples, and I had Sue walk toward the edge of the lot, facing southeast. There was still enough fading daylight to see a good distance, and we had enough elevation that I had an excellent perspective.

The immediate area was clear. I could see all the way down to the large, looping roads that were on and off ramps from the highway. In that area, everything looked calm, with empty and quiet roads broken up only by dead vehicles.

Just beyond them lay University Mall, and that was anything but quiet.

The flames I’d seen the other night were already visible in the parking lot. Someone was taking the time to light new cars aflame each night, then, because they wouldn’t have burned that long—these were new fires. It was tough to see much more than that. The mall was a tall set of buildings and blocked my view of the larger parking lots on the eastern side. Couldn’t see anything inside the place, either.

But what I could see was the horde of lesser undead boiling out of the west side of the mall and heading my way.

It looked like it was mostly zombies. The distance was too great to be one hundred percent sure, but it looked to me like most of the creatures coming at me were dressed in modern, regular day clothes. If they were risen dead from a graveyard, they’d be wearing funeral-type clothing. These guys were wearing t-shirts, dresses, and all sorts of other random stuff.

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I had a feeling I was looking at the results of a zombie outbreak. Back on day one, when the cadavers came to life in my lab, I watched people they killed come back to life super fast and start attacking other people. It was every bit as horrifying as the movies wanted you to think. Poor Alfred’s girlfriend tried to eat him. Ugly scene.

Anyway, a couple of those zombies got away, and I’m betting they weren’t the only dead bodies to wake up and start walking around since the Event happened, either. When things went to hell, it was mid-afternoon. There would have been a thousand or so people in the mall. Worse, it was the sort of place people might try to gather, to consolidate.

All it would really take is one zombie, tossed into a thousand or so confused, angry, frightened people, and with the speed people they killed turned, it would turn into a nightmare fast. I wondered if that was what I was facing. Could there be a thousand undead over there? Or more? The idea gave me chills. The idea—which I had good evidence to support—that some sort of stronger monster was somehow controlling an army of undead that size was even more frightening.

A horde of a thousand zombies is a potentially world-ending catastrophe all by itself. Left alone, they could kill even more people, slowly growing the horde until it was next to unstoppable. With some stronger thing commanding it, though, that was even worse.

I looked at it as if an ‘evil me’ was working the problem. If I could command all undead, unlimited numbers, and had no principles at all, I’d go street by street, combing the city for survivors. Clear each building, one at a time. The zombies kill anyone you meet, which nets you crystals for each kill. Then, the victims they kill rise and become new zombies, which you also control.

It wouldn’t end. Not unless someone stopped it, anyway. Sue shifted underneath me as the zombies poured across the highway ramps toward us. I understood the feeling. Sure, I had a Fireball-breathing dinosaur on my side, but there had to be a hundred zombies heading our way. And more still poured out of the mall every minute!

“Sue, we may need to test your range in a minute,” I said. The dinosaur didn’t reply, but they ducked their head, almost like a nod. Tier four monsters were pretty smart.

I hit Sue with Augment Undead, buffing their stats up. Now everything Sue could do, they could do better than before. I had a feeling that included spellcasting, so it ought to bump up the Fireball effects, too. After that, there was nothing else to do but wait.

It wasn’t until the lead ranks crossed the main highway and started walking through the second ramp that I felt like they were close enough to hit. Not for me—they were still outside my Drain Life range. But for Sue? I had a good feeling about it.

“Now!” I said, sending the mental command. Sue spat a quick Fireball directly at the oncoming horde.

I watched as the flaming sphere shot through the air, arcing high before gradually falling. It turned out I’d waited a bit longer than I needed to—the spell impacted about ten feet past the front of their line, smacking one zombie in the chest and setting a couple of nearby ones on fire.

The rotten thing was, I didn’t think I was going to be able to go collect the crystals from any of these guys, not at the rate more of them came pouring out of the mall. I was guessing maybe a hundred and twenty so far, and more still exiting the back doors every couple of seconds.

It wasn’t a very organized mob, though. If there was a commander on the field, they were doing a shitty job organizing their troops. But the sun still lit of the western sky just a bit. Maybe the enemy leader was waiting until it set entirely before coming out to play?

“Sue, hit them again, quick as you can fire,” I commanded.

The dinosaur spat another Fireball a few seconds later. Looked like there was a timer for the spell. Might be fifteen seconds, maybe a little less. I wasn’t sure how many shots Sue could make without resting, yet. Guess we might be about to discover that!

The Fireball blew apart a couple more zombies, but they were spreading out as they moved, so there wasn’t much splash damage happening. I considered rushing down there with Sue to trample as many of them as we could. With my Drain spell killing some, my ability to heal Sue, and the fact she outranked the zombies by a ton, we’d probably be okay. So long as I didn’t fall off her.

I really didn’t want to land on the ground in the middle of a massive zombie horde, though. I’d seen the movies. Not a great way to go out.

Sue fired a third time, but I could sense their mana was running low, so I called it quits at that point. We’d killed a few of them, and the fires started by the Fireballs were burning merrily, forcing some of the horde to divert. It was time to get back to the ratkin and see how their evacuation was proceeding.

We rode up to the front of the PetCo, which now looked wildly different from before. Scores of ratkin of all ages were gathered outside. I saw a few older ones, graying and stooped, dozens of adults—and was shocked to see a fair number of ratkin children as well. They had kids here? Crap. No wonder this was taking time. “Patches! How’s it going? The undead are almost here!”

“We are mostly prepared,” he replied. “We gather the last things now.”

“I’ll make one last rush at them, then. Try to stall for a couple more minutes. But we need to go. Five minutes, maybe ten, and they’ll be here.”

“Thank you, Selena,” Patches said. “We hurry.”

Muttering under my breath, I whirled Sue around and rode back toward the horde. How could I do otherwise after looking at the cute, terrified little ratkin cubs? Damn it if I wasn’t a sucker for kids.

“All right, Sue. We’re gonna have to buy them some more time. You up for this?” I asked.

Sue roared her readiness, and against my better judgement and all common sense, we charged down the hill toward the enemy.