“To start with,” I said, “Have any of you ever killed a zombie before?”

The survivors looked at each other. “Course we have,” Travis said sullenly.

“How?” I asked. “I don’t think I could hit one, and I’m much better at fighting than you.”

Travis looked away. “Guns,” he muttered.

Rachel took over. “Sure, we can’t get into hand to hand with ‘em,” she said. “One bite, and that’s the end. But guns work.”

She shrugged.

“Of course, that just brings more of them, so really, guns don’t work,” she said. “Best thing to do is hide.”

“Guns might do enough damage,” I admitted, “but you’ve still got to hit with them. Don’t they dodge?”

“Only in hand to hand,” Evan said. “If you shoot them, or drop something heavy on them, they won’t see it coming.”

“That’s what we do with a swarm,” Jenna put in. “We keep a lot of junk on the roof, so we can drop it on them.”

“That’s smart,” I said. I wondered if they had enough junk. None of my [Earth Magic] spells created stone, just shaped what was already there, but I could use existing stone to create weights and have them carried up. “What do you do when you’re outside of your base?”

“Run,” Evan said shortly. “They don’t run fast, but they track you. If you get behind something they can’t get past, they’ll sniff and howl for a bit before giving up.”

He frowned. “Of course, then they’ll be back next swarm.”

I looked back at my friends. “So those are probably fabricated memories, but they sound realistic? What do you think?”

“Our memories aren’t fake,” Travis snarled. He backed down when I looked at him, though.

“No offence,” I said, “But you’ve only existed for… well I don’t know exactly. But it’s months, not years. There has to be a point where the real memories give over to fake ones, and it could be as recently as this morning.”

“It seems workable,” Cloridan said hastily. “I like the idea of dropping things, sounds very safe.”

“Borys, what about your storm? Can you make it so it just affects outside?”

“I can,” he said slowly. “It might not be the best idea though. Zombies don’t die from the cold like humans do. You have to freeze them solid before they stop moving.”

“These zombies aren’t dead, though,” I pointed out.

“That’s… true?” Borys said. “It might work then. One thing to be wary of is that the ice starts to build up. Eventually, you get a ramp leading to the top of the wall.”

“That happens normally, with bodies,” Evan put in. “They’ve never gotten to the top, but the closer they get, the less effective it is to drop things on them. And the upper-floor windows are less secure.”

“That’s your job,” Borys told me. “Using [Stone Shape] to fix weak walls and cover up windows.”

“Right,” I said. “We should—”

“He’s awake,” Marta called out from across the room. She’d been watching over Marcus. We all trooped over to look at him.

He was drinking some water, looking at us nervously. Aside from that, he looked perfectly normal.

[Identification]: - Marcus Thompson - Threat: 10 - Properties: None

Not exactly normal, but normal for here.

“Thanks for rescuing me?” he said, looking around the group. “I’m not sure how I got here, but I guess you guys are the ones I should thank.”

“What do you remember?” I asked.

“I… got sick?” he said. “I remember getting hot, and having to lie down, but… do you guys know Dulcie?”

There were a lot of shaken heads. Marcus’s face fell.

“She was looking after me? She would have been nearby.”

“Dude, you were a zombie,” Evan said.

“Maybe he still is,” Travis growled. “We should get rid of him now, before the magic runs out.”

“Magic doesn’t work that way,” I said. “Well, some of it does, but not this kind. He’s an ordinary human monster now, just like the rest of you.”

“Human… monster?” Marcus asked.

“Don’t worry too much about it,” Rachel said. “Her and her lot have got some funny ideas… but they’ve got magic as well. They cured you.”

“Well, she did,” I said, nodding at Felicia.

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“Can you really do that?” Evan asked incredulously. “Just… cure all the zombies?”

“Not all of them,” Felicia answered. “Not even a decent portion of them. It wiped me out doing Marcus. I won’t be able to try again until I’ve had a night’s sleep.”

“Where did the mana go?” I asked.

“On healing, mostly,” Felica said. “I cured the disease—he started that screaming as soon as I started. Once that was done, he fell unconscious. It was weird, he was in negative hit points, but he was still alive, at least for a few seconds. My healing worked, so we brought him back here.”

Travis snorted. “So you curing one is going to be the reason we get buried under zombies tonight. Doing great, kid.”

Felicia flinched a little.

“Don’t be such a baby about it,” I told Travis. “Chances are, there would be a swarm whatever we did. At least this way you have us to handle it.”

“Oh, I’m real lucky,” Travis growled. “I get to hide behind some woman’s skirts.”

I blinked. “I’m wearing trousers,” I pointed out. “And if my pants aren’t masculine enough for you, there are three guys in my party.”

He looked away, muttering something so faint I couldn’t hear it—even with enhanced hearing.

“That’s what I thought,” I said. “Let’s get to work.”

We got to it. Kyle did have [Masonry] so he was able to advise me on what parts of the building needed shoring up. Most of it was sound, but there were some parts that were cracked. They were holding steady for now, but might well fail if put to the test against repeated zombie blows.

Almost as if they were deliberately constructed that way.

The others were mainly occupied with hauling junk to the roof. It turned out that the reason there were no fire engines in the fire station was that they had been dismantled and brought up to the roof to be thrown down. There was half a firetruck up there, according to Borys.

We didn’t feel that was enough, and we had rope strong enough to do it, so we—and by we I mean the boys—tied a rope to a nearby burned-out car and dragged it up.

“I wonder if, instead of breaking it up into pieces and throwing them, we should just rig this thing up as some kind of killer pendulum,” Borys mused.

I looked at him doubtfully. “You’d need some way to keep it off the wall, I said.”

Visions of the massive weight ploughing through ranks of zombies ran through my head. They were good visions, but…

“With that kind of momentum, if it glanced off the walls, it would do real damage,” I said reluctantly. “It’s nice to kill zombies, but it’s the walls that are keeping us safe.”

“I suppose you have a point,” he said sadly. “If we had more time, we might be able to rig something.”

“We don’t,” I said, pointing. It wasn’t sunset yet, and the zombies were already gathering.

“We’d better get into position then,” he said, sighing.

“Wait,” I said. “What am I forgetting?”

“I… don’t know?”

“There has to be more ways for the zombies to get in,” I explained. “You’ve watched more zombie movies than I have. What are we missing?”

“In movies, the weak point is normally one of the other survivors,” he replied.

I cast [Privacy] around us.

“I’m assuming that one of the conditions of the floor is that we keep at least some of the survivors alive,” I said. “We can keep them out of the fighting if we put them on the roof. We’ve eliminated the secretly infected plotline.”

“Are you worried about one of them turning on us? If, say, Travis—”

“—to pick one at random,” I said wryly. Borys gave a slight grin.

“—as a random example,” he agreed. “He can’t do much to us, but he could go after the other survivors.”

“Murdering his teammates seems a little out of character, even for him,” I said doubtfully. “I’ll get Felicia to keep an eye on him, but I think he’s going to have his chance to betray us later, when there’s someone to betray us to.”

“That makes sense… So you’ve shored up the weak points in the walls, blocked off the doors and windows—”

“Except for the ones we need and are guarding,” I said. He nodded

“Zombies can’t fly…”

“Keep an eye out though. We know that the sky isn’t real. Axel could have a zombie crawl out over us and drop down.”

Borys glanced up out of reflex. “They’d die, though.”

“Wouldn’t matter if they managed to land on someone.”

He winced. “Point. Aside from that, we don’t need to worry about above. So what about below?”

We looked at each other, the same idea forming at the same time in each of our minds.

“The sewers,” we said as one.

The workshop level of the firehouse had good drainage. It had to, they washed off trucks and played with hoses in here. It didn’t take us long to find out where the water went.

“It’s not such a big hole,” Borys said, staring down.

“Big enough for a zombie to climb through,” I retorted. “And that grating looks loose.”

I tugged at it. I couldn’t pull it out, but it wobbled.

“I can probably get it,” Borys said, bending down. “Wait, should I? It’s probably easier to reinforce if the grate is still there.”

“You’re not wrong,” I said. “Let’s just see what we’re working with.”

I cast a [Light] and sent it down the hole. Dead eyes stared up at me.

“Jesus!” I shouted, starting back. Borys was made of sterner stuff.

“Are they even alive?” he asked, staring down. “They seem jammed in there, and I can’t see any of them moving.”

I joined him staring down the hole. There was an easy way to check.

[Identification]: - Zombie - Threat: 30- Properties: Diseased Bite, Diseased Blood

“That’s a zombie,” I said. “Three of them.”

“They must be waiting for the right time?” Borys suggested.

“Maybe,” I agreed. “I guess they’ll start moving if we open the grate though.”

“And they’re too far down for a sword to reach,” Borys mused. “Ice magic?”

“Let me try this,” I said. “I hardly ever get a chance to cast it.”

I knelt down and pushed one finger through the hole in the grate. With an unobstructed line to my target, I cast [Iron Dart].

You have inflicted 173 damage!

The zombie moved, at least. The dart sunk into its skin and then dissipated. The zombie snarled silently in response but didn’t otherwise react.

“Well,” I said. “I could cast that about thirty more times to get rid of them. I could use the practice.”

“I could use ice,” Borys said. “But if there’s more behind them, they could chip through it, given time.”

“Fire it is,” I said. “It’s a bit ironic, trying to find petrol in a fire station, but I bet they have some.”

They did have some. Travis was against letting us have it, until we said why we needed it. It wasn’t until we gathered back around the drain that I started having second thoughts.

“Wait,” I said. “Wouldn’t we be better off just shooting it?”

“No way,” Travis said. “Those fuckers gonna burn.”

“What about the ventilation?” I asked. “We don’t have a chimney in here.”

Travis ignored me and poured the tin of petrol down the grate, followed by an emergency flare.

“Ain’t easy to light up gasoline,” he muttered.

Not easy perhaps, but not beyond his ability. Flames quickly flared up down below.

That got more of a response. As thick black smoke poured out of the grate, the zombies let out another one of those horrible screams.

Borys swore, and let an icy blast roar down into the sewer. In seconds, the smoke was choked off, and a foot of ice was blocking the hole.

“What’s got into ya?” Travis asked with irritation. “Aint done yet!”

“That,” Borys said. With the sounds from below muffled, we could hear more screams from outside. “Looks like the swarm is starting early.”