My neighbor Tabi is being mean.

“I was saying to my kind naïve husband…” her voice is stern. “That you guys look as though you have less than a little clue as to what’s going on, and that I personally am under the impression that you will only hold us back, and frankly, that neither of you have enough intellect to really help, and you’ll make stupid decisions, and that...”

I can see the city pretty good from here.

There’s so much on fire it’s kind of insane.

Downtown especially looks bat shit. Just an entire horizon of orange, red blurs bleeding into smoke that ombres into the black night. What’s going on there? Some visible nearby fires, like the apartment complex across Bingham Boulevard —that place is lit the fuck up— are raging, but not a single fire within walking distance can compare to the distant doomsday downtown.

Jesus Christ, why is Tabi’s voice so loud?!

“—and I bet you don’t even know how to pull aggro!”

Oh. Fuck. I did it again.

“Pull aggro?” I ask. To Jake I say, “That mean anything to you?”

But he doesn’t respond.

He is currently humming the old Batman theme song, which is also playing thanks to his Audiophile. At the same time, he is scanning the area, yet aiming at literally nothing. Ducking behind the porch’s railing, then snapping back up. “Nuh-nuh-Batman!”

“Good work, Bruce,” I say.

“Thanks!” He swivels to aim at the roof.

Tabi is chuckling pretentiously. She makes some comment about how we probably don’t know how to effectively build out our characters or choose our skills.

That hurt. She’s not wrong. “How hard could it be?”

“How hard could it be?! Ha!”

Jake has lowered his bow now. “I play Magic competitively. I know how to build decks pretty well, and this, um, well, shooting arrows and what not is way less complicated than that.”

My turn to defend my dignity. “I’m a barbarian. It’s pretty hard to fuck that up.”

Craig laughs.

“What?” I ask.

“A meat head barbarian. Pretty tropey,” he says.

“Welcome to my life, in a pigeonhole.”

“Isn’t it nutshell?”

“Who fucking cares.”

“And he’s a depressed barbarian?!” Tabi interrobangs.

Her rant continues. She is very convinced that we are shitty people that she doesn’t want around, and I don’t particularly blame her. Fuck. I don’t even wanna be around me.

Uh-oh. The suicidal ideation is returning. Those little voices starting as minor nudges against my consciousness, growing, growing. Telling me things I already know. The choir’s coming in. I try pulling myself back to the present. I need to drown out the noise, send it to the background, lock it up. But I can feel myself failing in the endeavor... I can always tell when it’s about to happen, like an astronaut who’s just seen their spacecraft’s hull ripped open…

Something ensnares my awareness. The neighborhood’s local crazier person is staggering onto our front driveway, muttering madly about…this time it’s brains.

My fucking hero.

He doesn’t look as much like a zombie as the accident prone headless corpse beside our staircase, but his skin is definitely the right shade of undead. And if the faint red aura around him and the HP bar over his head didn’t clarify his classification, the way he’s mumbling madly about munching on our brains does the trick. Dude has been Scrambled.

“We’ve got another visitor.”

Jake, who was apparently aiming at a tree, whips his bow downward, and fires. He’s either forgotten how to aim or had no fucking clue how to shoot a bow in the first place. Despite the fact our new guest is only twelve feet away, Jake’s arrow whistles so far over the Scrambler’s head it’s almost impressive.

Zombie dude is trying to run at us now.

Jake’s already got another arrow drawn, his aim seems high, but he fires anyway. Tabi runs slowly due to her massive kite shields. Craig’s already equipped his two short blades, and he’s hopping down the stairs. The previously fired arrow course corrects last second and penetrates the zombie’s jugular, right at about the time I see Craig try landing mid-stride and slipping on my recently shoveled walkway.

“You guys don’t salt your fucking sidewalk?” Craig shouts. “What are you, monsters?!”

The zombie’s lost like 80% of his Hit Points, and anime-blood is showering his own face. Even so, he’s stagger-dashing to eat Craig’s brains.

That doesn’t seem like it’ll be in his cards though. Tabi’s already maneuvered herself between the zombie and the worst Rogue of all time, her husband.

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Well I’ll be damned.

Tabi now has the massive kite shield separated into two halves. I’ve never seen anyone dual-wield shield halves. I almost question the utility, but...

In a flurry of movements, she punches the zombie with her right, staggering it back as she lunges low, does something like an elbow-shield slash on his legs, then jumps; up, through the showering paint-blood. Up, higher still.

She’s practically six feet off the fucking ground!

Mid-air, she connects the two shield-halves, and brings the pointy end down. As one, the kite shield penetrates the guy’s gaping mouth. Pointy end comes, piercing and impaling, out the other side of his cranium and through the back of his neck.

I’ll never think of throat fucking in quite the same way.

One second of bone-snapping chaos later, she’s standing over him, pulling her kite shield free from her victim. His face looks like a mix of Heath Ledger’s Joker and one of those sandworm things from Tremors, and his neck looks like a crushed can of Guiness— bone marrow foam mixed in black blood.

Apparently my gag reflexes need work.

I gulp. “Well done.”

“Thanks,” Jake says, popping in with his bow raised triumphantly. “I even earned 84 EXP!”

I feel bad for not seeing his craftsmanship, but…“I was actually talking to Tabi.”

Tabi is already back at Craig’s side, looking over his sprain.

She won’t look at me. “Thank you, Logan. Receiving accolades from someone who did nothing but stand and watch means a lot.”

How the hell does a guy respond to that? “Sorry.”

To Craig, she groans. “It’s pretty bad, dear, but maybe Bill can fix it up.”

Bill? I scan my memory banks…didn’t they have a dog named Bill?

Tabi unzips the fanny pack she’s got buckled over the waist of her cloak, and a second later, there’s that faint glow, followed by the production of…something.

In half a second or so, I instantly discern that the something being produced is actually her Pet Dimension. Just like the Pet Dimension I currently have Mando inside, hers looks a lot like a snow globe.

I look through its glassy globe. Inside, there’s a meadow. There’s also what appears to be something like a D&D miniature version of a labradoodle. Memory sparks. Their dog was a labradoodle…named Bill! Who… is currently frolicking in his dimension’s meadow.

A werewolf that’d rather frolic than go on a killing frenzy. Great.

Tabi holds the balled dimension away from everyone, and says, “We need you, Bill!”

There’s a flash of light, a storm of flower pedals, and then their lanky werewolf of a dog appears, tongue hanging out. He gets excited and pees on my front lawn, turning the snow yellow, then trots over to Craig and Tabi.

Why am I not surprised?

She pets him. “All right boy. It’s time to find out if your move, Lick Wounds, works as well as the description says it does.”

Huh? What does Lick Wounds do?

Bill nods, surprisingly intelligently, and begins licking Craig’s sprained ankle.

I need to rethink my perspective on gentle giants. Bill is a healer. Which would be comforting, if his humans didn’t seem dead set against joining a party with us, thereby letting me benefit from said heals.

Also, I’m distracted. My street is starting to look like zombies celebrating mardi gras, in New Orleans.

A shrill scream erupts from a house across the street, and I turn toward it. The screaming house is a football field north.

House’s front door swings open, and an anthropomorphic reptilian girl springs through it on all fours, sobbing and screaming for help. Her hands slip on some snow and she goes tail over head down her front steps.

Mortification strikes as another figure appears in the doorway. A hunchback male.

I can’t remember the guy’s name, but back before he had the hunchback, he always seemed nice enough. At least, he didn’t seem like the sort of guy who’d be chasing his daughter and screaming for her to let him devour her brains. His wife didn’t seem the type either though, and yet…here we are —welcome to the apocalypse. Both zombified parents are rushing out their front door to feast on their lizardling daughter.

Incestuous cannibalism? Wait…is this technically cannibalistic behavior?

Lizard girl is escaping the best she can. The problem is that her best isn’t even adequate.

Two things seem clear: (1) Lizard girl hasn’t grown accustomed to her shifted form, and (2) she’s fucked up over the fact she’s living a Kafkaesque family horror. As a result, she’s sort of pin wheeling all fours across her front lawn, faceplanting like she’s mowing the grass, with her mouth.

They say at times like these you realize whether you’re the heroic type or not. It begins to occur to me to decide on my realization, but…

Jake seems to realize his inner hero faster than the rest of us.

I hear his arrow being knocked, and he’s rapidly cursing, running forward, saying something about being out of range, yet firing anyway.

Lizard girl is about to slurp up the snowy sidewalk. Her parents aren’t far behind.

By now I’ve chosen my realization. I act heroically. Kicking off in a sprint, readying an attack. My boots, stomping through snow and asphalt; my mind, hating running, and debating the morality of killing zombies, debating more —fuck cardio my lungs already hurt—deciding killing them is to save a humanoid lizard and based on personhood, lizard girl seems like more of a, well, person, and besides, zombies aren’t even really alive. Then again, Lizard girl isn’t really alive anymore either.

It was my fault. Too slow.

Before I’ve closed half the gap, the girl’s zombified parents are tackling their daughter to the ground. Her skull hits the concrete so hard that even with the snow I hear it. She screams again, and a morbid part of me wishes she would’ve been knocked unconscious. For her sake.

I run harder, faster.

No. This is just so fucked up. My heart’s pounding. Blurred red numbers pull my attention quick enough for a glance at my Fury Meter.

Fury Meter: 53%

It's already climbed to 57%.

Her father grabs her by the hair and slams her head repeatedly into the ground, while her mother is bouncing up and down like a fucking monkey about to drink from a goddamn coconut. Blood spills out over the sidewalk.

And here I thought the apocalypse wouldn’t be traumatizing.

I am closing the gap, finally. It’ll be too late, but still. They’ll be within mauling distance in just—I’m distracted by the sound of some carnal roar; it’s like hordes of vikings going berserker on an invading army. Except the entire horde is just me.

Fury Meter: 71%