The anguished cry was inhuman. I ran in the door to the pizzeria and saw a huge, hulking creature lying on the ground. An arrow stuck out of the back of the downed monster’s head, and a rapidly growing puddle of blood spread over the tiled floor. Teddy stood over it, bow raised and ready to shoot again. I looked around the room and saw Teddy’s brother Wood on the ground, starting to pick himself back up, blood dripping from his mouth.

Wood!

And then Ellie crashed on through the swinging door leading to the kitchen. A line of blood ran from her temple, but her eyes were furious. She brandished a baseball bat in her hand.

I gasped, so happy to see both of them. Especially Ellie.

She glanced down at the dead monster, then to Teddy, and over to Wood. He was wiping the blood from his mouth. And then I saw the moment she laid eyes on me. I was about to say her name when she rushed at me, the baseball bat raised and ready to come down on me. Well, actually, it did

come down on me. Stunned, I hadn’t moved out of the way, and it made a cracking sound as she bashed me in my head. It was the first thing that really hurt since I’d woke up in this, well inside Mrs. Hendershot’s gnome.

Ellie immediately went to hit me again, but this time I slid out of the way, just barely, and ran to the other side of the room. Luckily, before she could come and hammer me one more time, Teddy got in her way, his hands up.

“That’s Mort!” he said.

She shook her head, raising the bat again. “That’s what killed Mort!”

I raise my hand up and touched the spot where Ellie had bashed me in the head, and was relieved that I didn’t have a crushed skull or anything.

Did I have a skull?

“Look at him through your stats box,” Teddy told her, keeping his hands held up.

She shook her head. “That thing was made by the aliens. We can’t trust it!”

“It’s part of the game,” he said. “It doesn’t lie.”

The game… what game?

“They made the freaking game, Teddy,” she said. “It wants all of us dead.”

That’s when I got a good look at her baseball bat. The thing was wrapped in barbed wire, and there was blood dripping off of it.

“Jesus fucking shit-balls, Ellie!” I said. “When did you go all Negan?”

Ellie’s expression faltered, and I saw confusion in her eyes. She blinked and took a step back. But her hands were still locked on that baseball bat.

“Mort?”

I tried to nod, but nothing happened. “Yeah,” I said, “it’s me.”

She blinked again, and then shook her head. “You’ve been… you’re…”

“Yeah,” Teddy said, slowly approaching her, his hands still up cautiously. “He was dead—dead, dead—we all saw it. But now he’s not.”

“He’s inside that gnome?” She shook her head in disbelief.

“Yes,” he said, and then quietly, “and he knows about his mom.”

If I could have, I’d be crying again right then and there. Just thinking about it hurt. But I had no tears. Not a one. I really wasn’t human anymore, was I?

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Wood let out a derisive laugh. “Everyone’s parents are dead, gnome-boy.” He glared at me. “Sisters, brothers, there’s only like a hundred people in town left alive.”

“Two hundred and forty-eight,” Teddy told his brother. “And stop being a dick.”

Two hundred and forty-eight? How did Teddy know that?

Wood was still staring holes through me. “That many huh?”

“Just use your stats box,” Teddy said, “and you’ll know.”

Obviously Wood didn’t believe it was me in here. I didn't blame him. That I was stuck inside this fucking gnome was beyond bizarre, it was completely horrifying. But at least nobody was trying to smash my head in anymore.

Wait a minute… Teddy kept talking about using their stats boxes. Like in a video game? Teddy said there was a game. It was when he was getting between me and Ellie’s baseball bat. And…

And I remembered someone talking about a game… was it when I was still dead? I closed my eyes for a beat, feeling my head swimming in a funnel of thoughts, and then opened them again.

I thought to myself, open stats box. And WHAM! A giant stats box, kind of like a video screen but way flashier and glowy, just appeared, floating in the freaking air in front of me. I gasped, but no one was paying me any attention—even though they were all talking about me. I reached out to the box, which had my name—my full name—blazing across the top of it. (And no, I’m not telling you that!) That was when I saw that my species was “gnome.” My actual species was gnome.

I was a little shocked. I really wasn’t human anymore. I didn’t have a class, and all my stats were all at level 1. Except for Health and Mana. Those were labeled with a red NA. I tried to remember what NA meant. Not Applicable?

That was really weird.

When I turned my eyes towards my friends, my stats box disappeared, and when I focused on one of my friends, a new stats box popped into being over their heads.

They were all still human, and they all had health, Mana, intelligence and other stats—and they had classes.

I saw that Teddy was a Thief, Wood was something called a Man-at-Arms, and Ellie was—Jesus—Ellie was a freaking Barbarian? Wow. The way she’d come swinging for me with that barbed wire studded baseball bat thing… yeah, I could definitely see barbarian.

I concentrated, and made the stats box disappear, and then brought it back up. Then I minimized it. It was an Immersive HUD (Heads Up Display.) That was good. Not being able to control the stats box could blind us. And that could get us killed.

But right off the bat, I noticed something really strange about my friends. Teddy was a level 22 thief. My other two friends were still in the single digits. Ellie Was a level 5 barbarian, and Wood was a level six Man-at-arms. Why weren’t their levels closer to Teddy’s?

And then suddenly I realized something. “Hey, where’s Oz?” I couldn’t believe I was just now noticing his absence.

They all stopped and looked at me, and I could swear everyone’s face got sad.

Oh god…

“He’s not dead, is he?” I felt something inside me twist and fall. Oz was my oldest and best friend. Wood and Ellie looked at each other, and Teddy looked down.

“Oz is dead?” Fuck…

Ellie shook her head and took a wary step towards me. She still had her baseball bat clutched in her hand, monster blood still dripping from it. It took everything in me not to back away from her.

“Oz…” she said, and took way too long of a pause. “is on patrol right now. He’ll be back… in a day or two.”

I couldn’t wrap my head around that. Oz was out on patrol by himself? Out there was a literal war zone, and my comic book addicted, always plugged into a video game best friend since kindergarten was out there like Rambo, all by himself? Maybe he’d gotten a SEAL or Green Barret class?

That didn’t compute. But then nothing about this nightmare made any sense.

A nightmare is still a dream.

Who told me that?

Oh, yeah, that scary goth-chick I had senior English with last year. She hadn’t said a word to me the whole time we were in school together. Well, unless you count insults. But she had said that to me, about the nightmare, right after I’d given a lackluster description to our teacher of Shakespeare’s Midsummer’s Night Dream.

My mom kept popping into my head. The sight of her hand hanging out of the car door, all purple and splotchy. And cold.

I closed my eyes real tight and tried to force that out of my mind. I didn’t want that to be the last memory I had of her. And I didn’t want the memory of our last phone call to be the last memory. But I couldn’t remember the last conversation we’d had. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d had dinner together.

I stopped, and tried to focus. But nothing came.

Fuck… I needed to think about something else. That’s when I decided to concentrate on my friend’s levels again. It just didn’t make sense. Why were their levels so different?

Just as I was going to ask about that, Ellie looked at Wood and said, “Help me drag this corpse out?”

Wood nodded, but then Teddy moved in front of Ellie and grabbed the monster’s legs.

“I was going to get that,” Ellie complained as Wood and Teddy heaved up the fallen monster. It was covered in green scales, and I could see an open mouth filled with big freaking fangs. And that left me alone with Ellie. Her eyes watched our friends heft the monster out the front door, and then she abruptly turned her attention on me. She just stared at me, clutching her barbed wire wrapped baseball bat.

Crap…