Gary pushed Zafier’s body away, gasping for air. His body was in agony again, his face and chest burning from the darkfire. His hit point total read 2 points, and red flashes clouded his eyes, alerting him to how close he was to death.

He sat up, woozy and wanting to vomit.

Rain opened the pommel of one of her blades and took out the metal vial from within.

“Drink.”

Gary took the vial gratefully, then glanced around. He wasn’t the only person injured here. Jonathan had collapsed on the stone floor. The remaining survivors were covered in bruises and cuts.

The urge to drink the precious essence of life in one gulp almost overwhelmed Gary. It came from the same place as his urge to consume human flesh. An urge, he noted, that seemed to be stronger since he had levelled up.

He resisted, however.

“How many of these do you have?” he asked, rubbing his neck. His voice was hoarse.

“This is the last one,” Rain said, “Taken from Morgan.”

Gary was surprised. He’d assumed that Rain would have collected several of the vials. He realised that the implication of this was that Rain would have had to kill several people to do so. The liquid in the vials was called Essence of Life, after all.

The living consuming the dead, he thought, just like the dead consume the living.

On some level, the idea was repulsive.

That didn’t stop him craving the sweet liquid contained within.

“Are there any more of those Ales?” he said. “Like the one that I tried to drink?”

Rain shrugged. “I have none. I can check the others’ stashes. I think they were finished, though. We’d barely stopped fighting for the past week.”

Gary processed that, then realised what she meant.

“You’re going to loot the corpses.”

“They have no use for their possessions anymore.”

If she felt any emotions for her now dead companions, she wasn’t showing them.

Is this the new normal now? Gary wondered, drinking the life essence of people you’ve killed, looting their corpses without any sentiment? Scavenging just to stay alive?

He couldn’t feel too bad about it. Forge, Annabel and Morgan had just tried to get him to kill a bunch of helpless people. Still, it felt wrong, all of it.

The rules have changed, he reminded himself. What used to be right and wrong might not apply anymore.

Something occurred to him.

“The corpses! Are they going to come back to life now? I mean the ones that were living before.”

Rain shook her head. “They shouldn’t do, unless they died of infection. It would take a necromancer to turn them into undead.”

That was a relief. Gary had lost track of how many people had been killed in the last hour. No-one that was left alive in St Mary’s was in any shape to fight another horde of undead.

“We need to leave, now.” Rain said.

“No,” Gary replied. “I came here to help. I’m not just leaving everyone here.”

“This is pointless,” Rain said. “They will all die. Everyone does, except for him. That’s the law of life.”

Gary was in no mood to debate with the strange, blue-skinned woman. He still didn’t know why she had switched sides, but he was becoming convinced that it was a mercenary decision. Which made her no better than the others that had tried to persuade him to kill everyone.

“I don’t care,” Gary said, “Just leaving them like this is wrong.”

He struggled to his feet and walked over to where Jonathan lay. He could sense that the other man was still alive, but barely. His breathing was ragged and shallow, his face half burnt off.

“Drink this,” Gary said, “It’ll help.”

Jonathan didn’t question Gary’s instruction, and took a sip from the vial. Within seconds, the burn marks on his face faded.

“What is that stuff?” he asked.

“You don’t want to know,” Gary said. “How do you feel?”

“Better, but not fully.” Jonathan flicked his eyes to his screen. “20 hit points, just under my total.”

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He paused, then added, “I still can’t believe any of this. Hit points, levelling up. It’s like we’ve stepped into a video game. I’m getting a notification telling me I need to choose a novice class now that I’ve hit level two.”

“You get a choice?” Gary asked.

“Well, sure, I guess so. Don’t you?”

Gary shook his head. “It looks like I just level up in a certain order, since they classed me as undead.”

“Right,” Jonathan said. “You look like shit, by the way.”

“I feel like it,” Gary nodded.

Jonathan stood up, swearing.

“The corpses, are they going to come back?”

“It’s fine,” Gary said. “I checked with Rain.”

“Rain?”

Gary gestured towards the black clad woman.

“Is she on our side now?” Jonathan asked.

“I don’t know. I can’t figure out what she’s playing at to be honest.”

Gary stood up, wincing, and walked over to the triage area that Jonathan had established. The man that Annabel had run through with her blade had died. That just left Chantelle with her broken wrist and the woman that Morgan had stabbed in the eye.

Gary went to the woman missing her eye first. The bleeding had stopped, but she was in shock. She looked at Gary without fear or even much sense of comprehension as he approached her.

“Here,” Gary said, “Drink some of this. Don’t take it all.”

The woman, who was in her thirties, took a sip. The wound in her eye closed up and a half-smile appeared on her face as the essence of life flowed through her. Her eye didn’t heal, but any pain she felt from the wound had dissipated.

“Thanks.”

Next was Chantelle. She looked terrified as Gary approached her.

“Please don’t kill me!” she whimpered. “I didn’t mean it, okay? I’m sorry! I didn’t know!”

Gary nodded, “I won’t kill you,” he said, “Just drink this.”

Chantelle took the vial with her one good hand, then drank the rest of the liquid. Her eyes widened as her wrist snapped back into place.

“That’s amazing!” she exclaimed.

“It’s also all we have,” Gary replied, “I think.”

Chantelle looked around at the devastation in the church and sobbed.

The whole of St Mary’s was covered in blood and corpses, and that was just the bits that Gary could bear to look at. The really gruesome stuff made him feel nauseous if he so much as glanced in that direction.

But on another level, and far worse than that, it made him feel hungry.

“Is this all my fault?” Chantelle asked, tears in her eyes. “Did I do this? Because I attacked you?”

Gary looked at the teenager and felt a moment of pity for her. She might have instigated the fight that had occurred, but couldn’t have known what would result.

“Honestly,” Gary said, “No. You didn’t know what was going to happen. The others, they were planning to kill everyone here, anyway. Or getting me to do it. If this was anyone’s fault, it was mine for trusting them in the first place.”

The full weight of his last sentence hit him like a body blow.

Was he responsible for all this death and carnage?

He was distracted by the urge to eat human flesh. Chantelle offered him the now empty vial, and Gary had a mental image of himself chomping down on her wrist.

You know you want to, an unbidden voice urged him. Think of all the lovely, lovely hit points. Look at her, so alive and fleshy! She’ll taste fantastic. Go on!

Gary recoiled in horror, snatching the vial from Chantelle’s hand and stepping backwards.

“Are you alright?” Chantelle asked. “Do you need anything? Can I help?”

See? She won’t mind! The voice continued.

All around him, Gary could hear pumping hearts and feel living flesh begging to be fed on. The cravings were worse than he’d experienced earlier. He didn’t know if it was an effect of levelling up, being injured or a combination of both. Grotesque images filled his mind as he gazed around at the living.

No! he shouted at the internal voice that was urging him on.

“I’m okay,” he said, stepping backwards.

He waited for a minute as he got the urges under control, banishing the voice back to whatever subconscious hellscape it was coming from.

How long can I manage this? He wondered.

It was clearly a side effect of his undead classification. Gary surmised that this was what drove the undead. It was only because he had his own consciousness and free will that he could suppress the urges.

He looked around.

The group of ten survivors were conferring with each other in hushed voices. Jonathan had closed the side door to the church and joined the small group. Rain, in the meantime, was picking over the bodies of her fallen comrades, pulling objects out of thin air and then adding them to her stash.

Was this all my fault? Gary wondered again.

He walked over to the group of survivors, caution in his step. They regarded him with suspicion and mistrust.

“What do you want?” a woman in her late twenties asked.

“Well, I was thinking we should make some kind of plan here,” Gary said.

“What do you mean, ‘we’,” an elderly man said. “I think you’ve done quite enough already, don’t you?”

Rain paused her looting.

She glanced across at the group, her hands reaching for her knives as she registered the raised voices. Gary breathed in, terrified for a second that she was about to turn on the survivors.

“Alright, alright,” Jonathan said, “Everyone calm down. Gary helped, okay? He was fighting those bastards just as hard as everyone else. This wasn’t his fault.”

Gary felt a wave of appreciation at the teacher’s words. But he still felt that on some level, this was all his fault. The survivors had to admit that Jonathan had a point, however, and begrudgingly stood down.

Rain relaxed and returned to her corpse looting.

“Oh, that explains everything, doesn’t it?” a middle aged woman piped up.

“What does?”

“Well, he’s a Gary, isn’t he? Garys always make a mess of things. Bloody Garys.”