Chapter 73 - Five More Minutes

I woke as the first rays of dawn hit my eyelids after what had been a very fitful night’s sleep. Kara and I crashed in one of the watchtower parapets. Sue stood guard at the bottom of the ladder, ensuring we weren’t disturbed by any of the ratkin. They didn’t want to go anywhere near her, and I couldn’t blame them.

My other undead had stood watch through the long night, keeping their deathly eyes open for any attackers, but there’d been nothing. The zombie horde we’d left behind hadn’t picked up our tracks and decided to follow us. I wasn’t convinced whatever was directing the horde was just going to let the ratkin all go, though. I’d seen a few ratkin zombies in the horde, when I was doing my heroic delaying action, which meant those creatures were fodder for this army the same as humans.

They might have gone after easier prey for the time being, but in the long run anything which allowed that army of undead to grow larger was something it would inevitably chase. And that was something I needed to stop in its tracks. The bigger that horde got, the more dangerous it would be. I’d seen hundreds of zombies, and that was just their opening rush. I was willing to bet there were hundreds more still in the mall. Maybe as many as a thousand of the things, if they’d turned everyone who’d sought shelter in the mall after the Event.

Now they were clearly turning outward under the command of some other being. With the zombies on the prowl in those sorts of numbers, no one would be safe. Even the Guard base was potentially in jeopardy. I probably was the one really safe one out there, between my powers and Sue’s speed. Any smaller batches of undead, I could take down handily. And bigger ones, Sue could outrun easily.

But this wasn’t a threat I wanted to flee from. That many undead represented a massive opportunity, one that might not ever come again. I’d gained enormous power just from taking down one graveyard with under a hundred undead in it. How strong would I become with hundreds of zombies worth of crystals?

It was growing ever more clear that survival now meant growth. The threats were continuing to expand in scope. I needed to gain more power to keep up with it, or I was going to be in a lot of trouble when I fell behind. This zombie horde represented a massive opportunity.

“Kara, hey, we ought to talk.” I shook her arm gently.

“Five more minutes…” she mumbled, eyes still closed. A little drool trickled from the corner of her mouth. She was still out like a light.

I couldn’t help but grin, and I even reached toward my pocket for my phone to snap video. It wasn’t there, of course, and remembering that cost me some of my good mood. I let her rest a little longer so I could sit and think, but I grew restless quickly, and went down the ladder instead.

Sue nodded a good morning to me, and Hope ran over, yipping as she ran in circles. She’d been less than thrilled about being left on the ground, but ladders aren’t that great for dogs. I told her wherever we settled as a home would have stairs instead, which seemed to mollify her. I wasn’t sure if she understood the words or just my tone.

Patches came toward me. “You rescue ratkin. We thank again.”

I nodded. “It wasn’t that big a deal.”

“Was,” Patches protested, holding up a paw. “You slow dead so we escape. Give us place to rest safe. You save. We thank.”

To my horror, I saw that another dozen of the ratkin had gathered in a semicircle behind Patches, all nodding, and then the entire lot of them went and bowed in front of me. I blushed furiously. “That wasn’t why I helped. Get up, please. You asked for help, so I did. It was just the right thing to do.”

“And all beings do right thing?” Patches asked me. I swear to god, the rat managed to raise one bushy eyebrow at me.

“The good ones do,” I replied.

He nodded. “Just so.”

I shrugged my shoulders, shaking off the compliment. From my point of view, it was the minimum standard. But if it had won me new allies, I’d take it. “I’m going to have to go back down there and face them. That undead horde is too big. If I leave it alone, it will spread everywhere, kill everyone and make them like that. I saw some of your people in there.”

Patches lowered his gaze. “We know. When they kill, we rise as dead.”

“We need to stop that,” I said. “If we don’t put an end to it soon, they’ll be unstoppable.”

My biggest worry was that they might already be beyond my ability to contain. The raw numbers I faced the night before were like something out of a horror movie, and my gut said that was the tip of the iceberg.

“We will help you,” Patches said. “Ratkin can fight, too.”

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I wasn’t thrilled with that idea at the outset. I’d gone to a fair bit of trouble to save them from this mess, and now they wanted to throw themselves back into it again, too? I was tier five. With luck I’d hit tier six or even more, after this was done. These guys were all tier one and two, same as the undead I’d seen. Their odds of survival were slim.

I pointed that out. They didn’t care. Not helpful! I finally wound up reminding them that if we failed in our quest, they'd need all their warriors to protect their people. Then I framed this run as a scouting run, to see what we could learn about this enemy.

"It's going to take more than one attack," I explained. "This is a large army of enemies, and beating them will take time. Let Kara and I handle this first assault. You can join us in future ones. In the meantime, your people can set this fort up to be more easily defended."

They were enamored with the fort, so that worked out well. They stopped asking me to come along at that point. I was glad of that, because I didn't want to be responsible for a bunch of dead ratkin. It was risky enough even bringing Kara. I couldn't heal her, like I could my undead or myself. One person, I could maybe keep safe. Add a bunch of ratkin too, and it would be impossible.

After I left them discussing how to improve the fort, I grabbed a quick meal while surveying my current undead legion. I’d already decided that I was going to take everything I had with me for this trip. There was no point holding stuff back in reserve, not against an enemy this massive. Sue was going to be my big hitter, obviously, but the rest of my force was powerful, too.

I had a full roster of Animated undead. There were four goblin zombies, all of them tier two and each one armed with a bow, arrows, and a knife. These zombies were not the ‘stab them in the head and they die’ type, but they did take damage from stab wounds. Hit them hard enough or enough times, and they’d go down. I learned that back on day one. So the bows would work. To round off the party, I had four Animated skeleton warriors, each heavily fortified with spears and shields I’d procured from the Guard base. They were all tier two as well, and were crazy effective as a shield wall.

That was all sixteen tier points of Animate Dead. I also had a good number of Controlled undead, although I still wasn’t maxed out there. I had Sue, who was tier four and cost me half my Control points alone. Hope was only tier two, so she used two points. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern had somehow survived everything I’d been through, trailing along with me since day one. Sooner or later, I needed to get those guys some buffs. Find more of those pet augmentation stones and buff them up, maybe. They’d been with me through a lot.

That left me four points worth of Control Undead, enough to grab two to four of the enemy and make them mine. I intended to use that to maximum effect once we struck.

Kara slid down the ladder and joined me as I finished breakfast. “Hey! Thanks for letting me sleep in.”

I pointed to the corner of my mouth and grinned. “You’ve still got some drool, yeah, right there.”

She flushed and wiped her face. “Showers. We need a base with showers, Selena. Surely there must be a magical way to make showers work? Hot showers would be best, but I’d be okay with cold ones. I miss showers.”

“They’ve got field showers at the Guard base,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, but that colonel gave me the creeps.”

I arched an eyebrow. That was good information to know. I’d gotten something of a mixed vibe from the man, but I also had known issues with authority figures, and I was an obvious threat to the man’s power base, thanks to my Will level. Some of the nasty vibes I’d gotten could have been from Turner just not knowing how he wanted to deal with me, personally.

But if Kara was getting similar feels, that was worth knowing. “Yeah, I felt a lot the same. You know his Charisma is tier five, right?”

“Yeah? I don’t have any Charisma crystals. What does it do? Make people want to kiss you, like in games?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

She froze. “Wait, really?”

“Well, sort of. I don’t think he can command people to do something completely against their nature. But he can ‘suggest’ you do something, and you’ll be more likely to think it’s a great idea. My Will was almost as high as his Charisma, and the fight between our stats almost gave me a headache.”

“So Will blocks that control?” Kara asked, her attention now laser-focused on what I was saying.

“Yeah, seems to be the only thing that does.”

“Guess I want to see about getting some of those, then,” she replied with a shiver. “I don’t want to be controlled by someone else, Selena. Not ever.”

I got the hint of an unspoken ‘again’ at the end of that statement, but I let it go. If Kara wanted to open up more about her past at some point, we could talk. Otherwise, it was her business. “Turner doesn’t seem to be abusing the power, from what I saw. He’s just using it to keep everything in order on the base. But that’s why things are running so smoothly there. Everyone listens to him because he has a magic power that makes them want to obey.”

“Tell me that doesn’t sound creepy as fuck,” Kara replied.

“No, I’m right with you. That’s creepy as fuck.”

“Is that why you didn’t stay there? Why you headed back out to this fort?” Kara asked me.

I thought about that a sec, then shook my head. “It probably had something to do with it. But I don’t see joining them as a good way to push ahead. If we want to thrive in this new world, we need to grow with it. That means getting a shit-ton of crystals, which means being out in the thick of it, facing down bad guys and killing monsters. I didn’t think I’d be able to do that as well from inside their walls. And besides, with Sue, do I really need them?”

“Fair enough. What’s the plan now? We’re going back in, I’m assuming?” Kara asked.

I nodded. “If you’re game, I want to leave before noon. Whatever is controlling them seems averse to daylight, and if that’s the case I want every advantage we can get.”

“I’m in. Let me finish eating, and we can hit the road right away.”

She went back to her food. That was something we had plenty of, thanks to the trades I’d done at the base. I figured I’d leave it here at the fort. The ratkin were too grateful for my aid to go rooting through it, and if the worst happened and we didn’t come back, they could make good use of it. There was always that chance, and as morbid as it sounded, thinking about dying to a zombie horde, it was worth reminding myself once in a while that all it would take during this attack was one serious screw-up, and we’d be dead. Worse than dead—we’d be new additions to the zombie horde.

I was confident we could win, but this was a far bigger battle than anything I’d been in so far. Going into the heart of this camp was going to be a serious shit-show. I just hoped we were ready.