It was hard for Beth not to feel like a murderer when she was staring at the headless corpse of TJ’s avatar. It’s just a game. She had a feeling that would be her new mantra.

When he died, he dropped a backpack, and though she felt bad for it, she looted it, taking his guns and ammo for herself.

Beth stood in the same spot, waiting for what seemed like forever for them to wake her. Maybe TJ was pissed and was going to let her rot in here for an extra few hours because she’d killed him. If Maverick was right, he only had one more life, which brought a smile to her face.

Like the zombie corpses, she expected TJ’s—err—Helios’s corpse to disappear after a little while, but it just sat there, attracting flies.

When it actually started to get dark, Beth got to her feet and cursed, looking at the time above her head. Day: 3, Time: 22:06

Well, wasn’t that fan-fracking-tastic.

She hadn’t done anything to reinforce the base, but Maverick had left supplies in one of the boxes, so Beth went around turning the cobblestone into stone. For Maverick, not for TJ. TJ could kiss her ass.

As she worked, she heard zombie cries in the distance, but ignored them. If they got close enough, she’d do something about it. She went to each of the pillars and created stone boxes, placing them five blocks high. She didn’t know what Maverick’s plan was, but this was what made sense to her. If in the later games, the zombies could jump, she wanted to make sure they couldn’t jump as high as they built the base.

She hadn’t even considered that they would be able to jump.

Beth worked by the light of the torches that Maverick had placed around the base. Hopefully, they would also deter the zombie birds, because Beth had no desire to deal with them.

When she finished, she went to the storage bins and began sorting through them. There were car parts, relays for electricity, a couple of level 2 axes, one of which she exchanged for her ax, which was running low on durability. There were piles of dirt and cement mix, which she needed to figure out how to use. Maybe she needed a cement mixer? You know, one of those small ones that you could rent. There were also piles of iron and stone.

She saw something called a flashlight mod and picked it up.

Flashlight Mod

Attaches to: Guns and Helmets.

Beth didn’t have a helmet, and incidentally, couldn’t use a gun while holding her ax or her shovel. It was stupid. She tried propping it between her teeth to no avail.

As dawn broke, Beth ate some food and grabbed a couple of water bottles out of storage and climbed down the ladder. Why the hell hadn’t they woken her yet? And where was Mav? He should’ve logged on by now. She was growing more irritated with TJ by the minute.

Frack TJ. She climbed the ladder, then grabbed his corpse. If he needed it, she wanted to make sure he couldn’t find it. Beth dragged the corpse to the edge of her base, then kicked it over the edge onto the dirt below.

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The thunk it made when it hit the dirt would’ve normally turned her stomach. This is a game.

Taking several deep breaths through her mouth, she climbed back down the ladder, then grabbed the body under its arms, and began dragging it south.

When she was out of stamina, and her base was over a football field length away, Beth drank some water, then when her stamina allowed, began to dig. TJ was just like her mama’s boyfriend, poking at her, searching for weakness, and there was no way she’d show him any.

Finally, after she’d dug down to the iron, she heaved his body into the hole, then covered it with dirt. Then, because she couldn’t resist, she pulled a piece of wood from her inventory and, finding a sharp stone nearby, carved: Here lies Tiny Johnson (aka TJ) and placed it at the head of his grave. Then, immaturely, she flipped him off and spit on it.

Satisfied, she spun in a slow circle, taking inventory of her surroundings. To the east was the town with the trader, and all other directions looked like desert. Obviously, the game developers or designers or whoever decides what a game should look like, wanted her to head to the town. That was the obvious choice.

Instead, though, Beth went the opposite way. She was just hoping to find somewhere without zombies to hang out. Not that she was convinced there was such a thing in this game as a place without zombies, but with towns populated with them, she decided to head the other direction. Walking west, Beth kept her ears peeled for any shift in the upbeat music. It was like being at a piano bar all the time, but with other instruments occasionally thrown in.

Beth walked until she was out of stamina, then opened her inventory to check her map. There was a big square of white, with the smallest trail of desert cut through it. She closed it and kept going.

More than once, she passed the skulls of some horned animal that she imagined was a cousin to a cow or bison, but she had no idea which. The cactus were all basically the same three shapes. One tall with two arms coming off of either side, the stereotypical cactus, Another, with a similar body-type—could cactuses have a body-type?—but shorter and without arms, and a third with flat spiny leaf-looking things and red blossoms.

Sagebrush and tumbleweeds also helped give her that desert feel. But what was the most convincing, was the sweat dripping down her back. She’d used her jacket to wipe TJ’s blood from her face. Fracking TJ. She would forever call him Tiny Johnson in her head.

The landscape around her slowly grew more green and she came across a parking lot. There were a few abandoned cars in the lot. Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite as deserted as she was hoping for over here. In the distance, she could see a few birds flying over a small man-made lake. It was small enough that she could have swam from one end to the other without worrying about drowning. There were two docks along one side of the lake, and she suddenly remembered her empty water bottles.

She walked to the dock and leaned over, filling each of them in turn as her stamina refilled. Maybe she could anchor a boat in the center of the lake and avoid any zombies.

Blood splashed across her vision, and pain tore into her back. She spun and found a group of at least ten birds circling overhead. One had dive-bombed her.

“Son of a bitch,” she murmured.

Beth pulled out her handgun and aimed it at the birds. She only had twenty rounds left, and she wasn’t the best shot.

She squeezed the trigger, and the loud explosion was followed by a bird thunking onto the dock beside her. It flapped around wildly, and Beth exchanged her gun for her club and hit it until she got the experience notification.

+650 experience

Another bird swooped toward her and she shot, missing it completely. Then two came at her at the same time, she ducked and shot, again and again. One more fell to the ground, and she clubbed it to death, then swapped her gun for her club. She had no more ammo.

A shriek sounded from the other dock across the lake, and a bunch of zombies appeared. One dashed toward her, only the water was between them, and it dropped into the lake and disappeared below the surface.

Maybe it was swimming underwater. Maybe since it was dead, it didn’t need to breathe. But that thought was cut short as another shriek sounded from behind her, on her side of the lake.

Three birds dived toward her, and she used her club like a baseball bat, hitting them from the sky. More zombies ran at her from her side of the lake. Her choices here weren’t great. She didn’t want to die at the hands of these zombies.

“Wake me up anytime now, TJ!” she yelled as she jumped off the dock and into the lake.