Chapter 75 - Zombie Targets

What do you do, when a horde of hundreds of zombies comes rushing down the mall concourse toward you?

Well, in my case, I ordered my undead T.rex to shoot a Fireball at ‘em.

The flames blasted forward like a rocket. There was a lot of glass between the Target and the rest of the mall, but the doors were open, so it wasn’t going to stop the zombies anyway. The fireball found one of those openings, slashing out through the doors and then impacting the floor just beyond. The explosion sent flames shooting in all directions, and sent zombies flying.

By the time the zombies were sort of back on their feet, a little more dazed than they had been before, Sue’s timer was up, so I had her hit them again. The Fireball blew the lead zombie literally apart, and torched his nearby buddies. They ran around in circles for another minute, setting a few more on fire. Did I get credit for killing the ones that died from buddy-inflicted flames?

That was all the grace period we were going to get, though. The front-runners hadn’t been packed in too tight, but the ones coming behind were like a solid mass of zombies, all pushing each other forward to get to us. The sea of dead faces stretched back as far as I could see, deep into the mall.

They ran through the doors, entering the Target, and rushed us. Holy shit, were there a lot of them! Kara picked off some of the leaders with her arrows. I ordered my undead to make a fighting withdrawal, the warriors sheltering the archers, as they made their way to the now-defunct escalators in the middle of the space. The warriors would hold the bottom of the escalators, giving the archers free rein to shoot all their arrows.

I mean, they literally couldn’t miss. There were so many zombies coming into the store that any arrow sent their way was going to hit something.

Kara kept firing, more of her arrows killing a zombie than not, but she glanced at her quiver, then at me. “We’ve got a problem!”

“About a thousand of them, yeah. Care to be more specific?” I replied, having Sue fire off a third fireball. This one impacted just inside the Target doors, slowing the advance for a bit. That helped ensure Kara and the zombie archers could pick off the remainder. Sue did her part, too, stooping to snag a zombie in her teeth and snap it in two.

“Arrows. Running out,” Kara snapped back as she fired another into a zombie that had slipped through and was trying to scale Sue’s leg.

Shit, we hadn’t thought of that. Our battles so far had all been pretty short. Kara was able to recover her arrows after. But in a fight like this, with so many targets? How many arrows had she come in with, anyway? Maybe thirty? Forty? I wasn’t sure, but she’d emptied one quiver already and was working on the second.

The advantage of the target rich environment was our archers couldn’t really miss. The disadvantage was they were all going to run out of ammunition way too soon.

I wasn’t. I had mana working for me, which didn’t run out so much as I wore out. But our archers were going to be out of arrows long before this battle was decided.

“Shit. Kara, save your arrows. Use them only on anything trying to scale Sue, okay?”

“Got it!”

“Watch yourself, too. I don’t see any yet, but the force last night had skeleton mages that cast Harm. Hurt like hell, but I could heal myself. I can’t heal you,” I told her. I felt a chill as I said that, suddenly wondering if bringing her along was a terrible mistake.

She got lower on Sue’s back, which ought to help make her less visible. Harm was a line of sight spell, so if they couldn’t see her, they couldn’t hit her.

Kara was running out of arrows. Once they were gone, she still had a short sword on her hip, but she’d die in seconds on the ground. We’d both tied ourselves to Sue’s back bones with heavy rope, so that we wouldn’t fall off, precisely because neither of us would survive more than a few seconds on the ground. Kara’s utility was limited right now, and the risk level to her was still high, especially if those mages made an appearance.

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The sea of zombies poured into the building. Sue bit one and stomped on another, but it was nowhere near enough. In a flash I saw how this was going to end: the zombies would hem Sue in, then climb the dinosaur to get to the tasty treats on top. We’d stop them for a bit, but when you have thousands of zombies climbing toward you, there’s only so many you can kill before you go down.

“Not today,” I muttered, casting a Drain Life on a zombie trying to climb Sue’s leg. I ordered the dinosaur to turn in place, using its tail like a massive bludgeon. With one sweep, several zombies went down. It still wasn’t nearly enough.

I ordered all my other undead to flee. Hope was already back by the main doors, using her howl to slow down the zombies’ advance. With her covering them, some of my other undead might escape, too. Especially if I could buy them even a little time with Sue.

With a thought, I ordered the dinosaur to race sideways across the store. It didn’t get us closer to the exit, but it did get every zombie in sight chasing us instead of paying attention to my lesser undead. One quick sprint from one side of the store to the other, and I’d successfully given my other undead time to flee.

Now it was time for us to do the same. I turned to Kara. “Hold on tight! This is gonna be bumpy.”

Mostly, I hoped our ropes held.

I ordered Sue to make a mad dash directly through the middle of the zombie army.

Have you seen the old Lord of the Rings movies, back when TV was still a thing? Remember the riders, when they plowed into the bad guy army? Yeah. That was us.

Sue’s bulk smashed into the front ranks of the oncoming undead like a freight train. Zombies went flying in all directions. The dino’s tail did almost as much damage, flailing back and forth and knocking undead aside with each blow. It wasn’t an easy passage. Each step Sue made landed on a zombie or two, which made the dinosaur rock from side to side, almost staggering a few times.

For Kara and I, riding on their back, it was a bruising experience.

We weren’t killing an awful lot of them this way, but they weren’t slowing us down, either! With a burst of speed, Sue broke through the far side of the zombie horde. Not the side facing deeper into the mall. I wasn’t sure if there was another side in that direction. From what I could see, the zombies just kept coming.

Instead, we bolted for the hole we’d entered through. Sue bounded forward, my butt picking up new bruises with each massive step, and then with one final leap, we were outside, in the open sunlight again! I didn’t have Sue stop until we were a good fifty feet away from the opening. Then I had our mount pause, turn, and see whether they’d follow.

Whatever ambivalence the undeads’ leader had toward sunlight, it clearly wasn’t a big deal for the zombies. They weren’t anything close to as fast as Sue, but they kept coming at their steady, deadly pace. Before long, they were climbing out through the windows we’d shattered to get in, and making their way toward us again.

Kara was panting a little. “Well, that didn’t work as well as we’d hoped.”

“We didn’t think it through,” I said. “I didn’t think it through. I knew there were hundreds of the things, maybe more. I didn’t think through what that meant in terms of fighting them, though.”

“If we hold still, they’re going to wreck us,” Kara said. “They seem pretty dumb, though. What about kiting them?”

“Kiting?”

“Run Sue ahead a bit. Blast them with fireballs. Run a bit more. Blast again. Repeat until zombie legion is a pile of burned goo.”

“Burned goo, huh?”

“Did you look at the damage that spell did in there?” Kara smirked. “I meant what I said.”

It was maybe worth a try. If I ran ahead of them, we could keep blasting them at range. Any that got too close, I’d zap with a Drain. Even if they all retreated at some point, we’d have whittled them down.

“We can give it a shot,” I said. I passed the order to Sue to hit them with another Fireball as the zombies were now outside in enough numbers to start a steady stream heading our way. “Wear through some of them, anyway. Hey, what are you doing?”

Kara was untying the rope that held her on Sue’s back. She flashed me a grin. “I’m no use to you up here. But I have that Shadow Walk spell now. I can slip back there and loot the dead zombies while you keep the rest busy. They recover their dead, remember? We killed dozens of them in there, and you’ll kill dozens more out here. You knock ‘em down, I’ll loot them up.”

I shook my head. “It’s too dangerous. Not worth the risk.”

“This many crystals? If we kill a hundred of them here, you willing to give up a hundred crystals? Because I’m not.”

She wasn’t wrong, damn it. I hated seeing her taking on all that extra risk, but it was the best way to get at least some of the crystals we’d won. I figured eventually the zombies would force Sue and I to withdraw through sheer numbers. If that happened, the undead army would haul their dead back with them, and we’d lose those stones.

“One condition,” I said.

“What’s that?” Kara replied, her voice challenging. She really wanted to do this, and I understood.

I was the one with the flashy powers, the fire-breathing dino, the undead, all this cool shit. She wanted her contribution to matter, too. She’d found a way to do that, so now she was grabbing it with both hands. I wasn’t going to talk her out of it, but I could show that I recognized what she was doing.

“We move the split to fifty-fifty,” I said,

She thought about it for a second, snapped me a nod, and said “Deal.”

Then she slid down Sue’s leg with a whoop and went running off into the parked cars, using them to cover her advance.