Chapter 74 - Dungeon Crawl?

An hour later, Kara and I were scouting the mall, scoping the place out to find the best way inside. It turned out this was going to be a tougher nut to crack than we’d first thought. At night, it looked like all the armies of hell were pouring out of the place, but now that the sun was up, it looked like any other abandoned post-apocalyptic structure.

Our first stop had been to check the dead zombies I’d killed the night before. I was pretty sure between Sue and I, we’d taken out over a dozen zombies. If possible, I wanted to grab their crystals. But when we arrived at the scene, there were no zombie bodies left behind. The grass was scorched where Sue’s Fireballs hit, but there was no sign of the undead we’d killed.

“Well, that sucks,” I said. I slid down from the dinosaur to check through the brush where it was thicker, just in case some had been missed, but no luck. The enemy had brought their dead back home with them. “Looks like whoever is running the show over there wanted to recover as many crystals from their dead as possible.”

“Yeah, that seems likely,” Kara replied. “Hey, we never did talk about loot distribution from this dungeon crawl.”

“Dungeon crawl?” I sputtered.

She rolled her eyes at me. “Seriously? We’re entering a dark, enclosed area full of monsters, looking for a boss monster that’s controlling an undead legion. You’re telling me this doesn’t read like a dungeon crawl to you?”

“I guess. What was that about loot, though? I figured we’d just split it fifty-fifty.”

‘Selena, I love you, but you’re nuts, you know that?” Kara said. She slid off Sue and came to stand next to me. “For real. If we split evenly, with you doing like ninety percent of the heavy lifting, sooner or later you’re going to resent me for it. You have what, three tier five stones now? And you ride a Fireball-breathing dinosaur skeleton into battle? I have a bow.”

“Well, I like having you at my back. It’s worth it.”

“I appreciate that, but let’s get real here. You’re doing most of the work. I’m tier four now, myself—which makes me half the power of a single tier five. You have three tier five stones. Let’s make this equitable. We can renegotiate later, once I’m stronger too, okay?”

We hammered out a deal pretty quickly, mostly at her behest. I wasn’t convinced that she was right. My feeling was, getting her stronger quickly was in my best interest as well as hers. But then she’d gone on about me being the control stone owner, so I’d be the one setting up a fort somewhere, and I’d need to trade stones for resources from the Guard… I couldn’t say she was wrong. We settled on her getting a quarter of the haul, with Kara getting all the stealthy and assassin type black stones, me getting the caster type black stones, and clear ones being divvied to make up the difference.

After that we mounted back up and trotted to Route Two, then hung a right on Dorset Street, the road which ran past the front side of the mall. Part of the street was hard to navigate; there’d been a nasty crash, probably cars moving too fast when they all just shut off.

There was nobody around. That was something we’d noticed right away, as soon as we left the forest. Usually, there was some sort of sign of life out on the main roads. Before it had been goblins, then the ratkin—but both those groups were gone. At night, the zombies had been active, but during the day they were nowhere to be seen. The whole area was like a dead zone.

My guess was, that was from the zombies’ activity. They were either killing or scaring off everything nearby.

I guided Sue into the mall parking lot. It was over half full of cars. Not totally packed, but there had clearly been a lot of folks shopping the afternoon everything went sideways. Most of them were probably zombies, now.

Here and there we spotted the burnt out hulks of cars that had been set on fire. Those were the flames we’d seen at night. But no movement, no monsters roaming. No sign of anything wrong at all.

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In a way, that felt almost intentional. Any human survivors would want to visit the mall. It had clothing stores, a grocery section in the Target, area sporting good shop… Heck, even crap like the vitamins at the Vitamin Shop would probably be valuable before too long. It wasn’t like we could manufacture new ones.

I made a mental note to keep an eye out for toilet paper. That was already selling at premium prices at the Guard base. The couple of rolls I’d bought us were only going to last so long. When I shared my suspicions with Kara, she agreed.

“Yeah, it’s a logical place to look for supplies. It might not be someone’s first choice for a scavenging site, but it would be high on the list.”

I nodded. “That’s my point. They come here looking for stuff. They poke around, looking for trouble, and find nothing. Hell, the glass on the main doors isn’t even shattered. The place looks pretty good, aside from a few burned cars in the parking lot. They think it’s all clear. They go inside. Boom! The trap is sprung, and a thousand zombies descend on them.”

“Well isn’t that a cheerful image. Yeah, it’s probably a honeypot trap. So what do we do about it?” Kara asked.

I thought about it a moment. Ultimately, we still had to go in. The only other choice that made sense would be to mount up on Sue and ride off for somewhere very far away, so that when this horde hit ten thousand zombies, or more, we’d be far enough distant that it was someone else’s problem. For multiple reasons, I didn’t like that plan.

“The plus side is, we already know it’s a trap. They can’t surprise us, because we know they’ll be coming,” I said. “When we go in, we hit with shock and awe. Make them be the ones reeling. If we can keep them off balance, we win.”

We were committed to the attack, which left figuring out which entrance to use. There were a lot of them, dozens of doors of various sizes. We did a quick lap around the building on Sue’s back, both scouting and looking for entry options. When that trip was complete, we had only a few options big enough for Sue to enter the building. Most of the doors were simply way too small for her.

There were a number of loading bay doors in the back of the mall that she could use, but we nixed those for two reasons. First, we’d be in the back storage rooms of Target or another big store. Sue might get inside, but she’d never be able to move through the small personnel doors leading into the stores themselves. Second, because those loading doors were all locked. We checked.

That left any of the five big, fancy glass door entrances. There were two into the mall itself, and three others into various big stores. After thinking about it a bit, I decided we’d enter through the Target entrance.

“Why that one?” Kara asked.

“It’s plenty big, and the interior space has a high overhead, so Sue can walk around okay.”

“Yeah, but that’s true of JC Penny’s, too.”

“Target has TP.”

“Sold.”

We lined up a dozen meters from the glass entryway. It was a lot of glass, and remarkably none of it was busted. Yet. That was about to change… Then I smacked my head, spotting something much better. I guided Sue to the right, and lined her up outside a corner of the Target store that was all windows. Like, twenty feet or more of glass, with only a little stone at the top and bottom. It was going to be way easier guiding Sue through that than it would be through even the main doorway.

Sue spat out a Fireball, and it blasted the glass apart, shattering it inward like a bomb hit. The glass rained down inside while the explosion boomed like thunder. Our path was clear.

Kara and I stayed aboard Sue as we picked our way over the stone lip into the store. It was a little smoky inside from the Fireball, but nothing had caught fire. Sue clambered over the edge, and we were inside. Fortunately, the place was heavily bedecked in windows, so there was plenty of light to see by. The interior looked dim, but I didn’t need to rely on Kara’s NightVision—yet, anyway.

We pushed ahead into the space.

“See anything?” I asked.

“Not yet. The big bad won’t be in here, though, that’s for sure.”

“Why not?”

“Too bright,” Kara replied. “If they hate sunlight, they’ll be somewhere dark during the daytime. Probably very dark, like those storage rooms you were talking about.”

She was probably right. That didn’t mean we were safe here, though. Somewhere in this building were hundreds of zombies, and we’d definitely rung the dinner bell for them by blowing in the corner of the building! Without the guidance of the creature controlling them—assuming we were right about that—the Fireball should have called just about every zombie for miles around.

I sent Sue mental commands to continue forward, marching gradually toward where the Target store met the rest of the mall. If I remembered right the dino ought to be able to slip through there. Sue might have to duck a lot, but it ought to work. Once we were in the main area of the mall, Sue would be fine getting around. Getting into some of the smaller stores might be tricky. Getting into the back areas with Sue probably wasn’t possible unless we literally busted down the walls.

I heard a faint rumbling, almost like drumming. But lots of drums, and quiet. “Do you hear something?”

“Yeah,” Kara replied. “Coming from the mall hallway, I think.

Sue took a few more bounding steps in that direction. As soon as we had a good line of sight with the doors to the mall, I saw what was making the noise. We’d woke them up, all right. It looked like every zombie ever made was in that main hallway. Hundreds upon hundreds of them, and they were all making their staggering, unsteady way directly toward us.