Chaos reigned king the Jolly Holly’s tavern, with the softest beds west of the Nevisen. Fast-turning, fast-acting, zombies had been unleashed on a small group of humans, elves, and a dwarf and they didn’t have the slightest idea what was happening. They were too slow to kill their turned friends. Too slow to realize not to let themselves get bit. Too slow to figure out that they had to go for the head.
Samuel himself didn’t have the slightest idea what to do.
He thought briefly of making a break for the stairwell, but the now two human zombies were attacking their one-remaining un-turned friend.
What could he do?
When he was in kindergarten, Samuel head-butt a kid a year older who was throwing sand at his younger brother Lucas. The helicopter moms watching from the playground benches ended that fight with a good bit of screaming.
It was the only fight he had ever been in.
As for sanctioned violence, he played little league football for about six years. He was never the quickest. Never the most agile. But he compensated for that by being the most willing to take a hit. He’d charge headlong into anything in his way. His coach had even nicknamed him the freight train after Samuel cracked another player’s helmet during a tackle.
Samuel had been bold, protective, and decisive. He was at one point in his life hard-headed—literally and figuratively—but he had always rushed headlong into any challenge in his way. Until his younger brother died when they were fifteen and sixteen and his father had left them all. It made him grow timid. Hesitant. Always imaging the worst.
But he had never imagined this.
The few uninjured people were either trying to help staunch their bleeding friends or fend off the growing number of zombies. All at once, the world froze around Samuel. Blades held still in flesh. Droplets of blood and purple sludge hung in place midair. The Core’s voice reverberated in his mind.
WELCOME TO YOUR FIRST COMBAT SCENARIO. IN THIS GAME ITERATION, COMBAT IS A REAL-TIME KILL-OR-BE-KILLED SCENARIO. USE TERRAIN, SPEED, STRENGTH, MAGIC, AND WEAPONS TO YOUR ADVANTAGE. FOR THE WEAK AND UNPREPARED, ONE BITE FROM THE INFECTED IS ALL IT TAKES TO LOSE IT ALL AND TURN INTO A FLESH-EATING ZOMBIE.
GOOD LUCK!
“Wait, I don’t want to—Samuel started, cut off by the world unfreezing. The violence had begun anew. Samuel watched as one person was bit after another, slowly turning what felt like the entire room into zombies.
He had to do something.
“Don’t get bit,” Samuel whispered, wanting desperately for the last few people to hear him without the zombies also hearing him. The dwarf had an elf woman chewing on his face on the floor. He writhed underneath her, trying to wrestle her off.
Jon had successfully wrestled Ned to the floor and was kneeling on the man’s neck. He was shouting at the large man to stop and get ahold of himself. The now somewhat familiar calming pulse filled the air and indicated Jon was using his pacify spell on the man. It was actually calming the zombie down, shockingly, but did not bring any sanity back into Ned’s eyes.
One zombie bit three fingers off the hand of a swordsman in yet another spray of blood. It was a horror show. The dwarf with his face being eaten had grown still. The elf on top of him turned her attention toward the barkeep, mouth full of the dwarf’s nose. She rushed at Jon’s back.
“Don’t let them bite you!” Samuel finally screamed.
This had the intended effect. Jon heard him.
And so had everyone and everything else in the room.
Samuel shrank back from the sudden roar of the zombies of differing species in the room. Maybe he’d count himself lucky that the faceless dwarf and recently un-fingered man were too busy foaming at the mouth to notice him. Two of the zombies ran for Samuel. The elf woman zombie and another feral man.
“Fuck!” Samuel yelped, scrambling further behind the bar and finding a wall behind him. The zombies were fast. Far too fast for the average human. Samuel grabbed a bottle of booze next to him and threw it. In his panic, his aim was off, and it went wide, missing the zombies by several feet and crashing to the floor.
The two zombies leapt through the air toward Samuel. They sailed over the bar, arms outstretched. He ducked down, the elf only inches from tearing off his scalp. It crashed into the wall behind Samuel, shattering dozens of bottles of various alcohols and spraying the two of them in the spirits.
“Don’t get bit, don’t get bit, don’t get bit,” Samuel whispered to himself, backing up into the bar’s corner. He was trapped.
“Shit, shit, shit!” he muttered, feeling around himself for anything to ward off the zombies.
The booze-soaked elf-turned-zombie scrambled on all fours toward the cowering Samuel. Samuel planted his feet between himself and the zombie and caught her at the shoulders, finding himself in the highest stakes squat he had ever done. He roared at the effort of pushing the zombie back with his feet. She bit into Samuel’s leather shoes but didn’t break through.
A small miracle.
Samuel was at a stalemate. He roared at the effort of holding the zombie back and desperately sought out something—anything—to use as a weapon. There was a bottle of alcohol to his right. He reached for it and barely brushed the edges with his fingertips. It rolled away. The second zombie that had chased after him at the bar made its way round and spotted Samuel. It ran for him and it felt like Samuel’s heart stopped.
“STOP,” bellowed Jon, the barkeep.
That same soothing pulse exploded into the air, causing Samuel’s heart to ease back into a steady rhythm. The strength gave out in his legs and the elf-zombie dropped to the floor between his legs. The zombie shuddered, seemingly incapacitated. An eerie quiet took hold of the room as Samuel breathed in and out, his mind reeling. The intensity and fear that had only moments before overwhelmed him were gone, and he felt as though he was observing himself at a distance. The barkeep had used his spell again.
“Magic,” Samuel muttered, an almost drunken smile creeping up on his face.
A large hand reached over the bar and grasped the front of Samuel’s shirt, lifting him bodily into the air and out from the corner of the bar.
“Come on, lad, up the stairs,” urged Jon, holding Samuel up as he swayed on unsteady feet.
The bar was a bloody mess. Dismembered limbs and disemboweled guts were strewn about around overturned tables and chairs. Samuel counted six zombies stirring on the ground in a stupor. Only two others were un-turned, standing with Jon and Samuel and similarly surveying the carnage in front of them in a magic-induced daze. The pacifying malaise wasn’t lasting, and as Samuel felt his own stress and anxiety rebuilding, so too did he watch coherence and unbridled rage build in the zombies’ systems by the second.
Samuel wasn’t sure if his legs were helping or hindering as Jon dragged him into and up the stairwell. The two others followed them into the narrow space. A woman—maybe some kind of woodsman trader if Samuel had to take a guess—and a scarred swordsman. Jon practically threw Samuel up the stairs before turning and slamming a door closed behind them. Samuel rubbed at a growing bruise on his hip and wondered at just how strong the man was.
A terrible crash hit the other side of the door, sending Jon stumbling away from alongside a shower of dust. He pushed his shoulder into the door again as more shuddering caused it to shake.
“What in the ever-burning hells is going on?” Jon breathed, holding back a sneeze as more dust cascaded onto him and was inhaled into his nose.
The woman and swordsman added their weight as a counter measure on the door. With the three of them against the door, there wasn’t any room for Samuel. He added his weight to Jon’s back, feeling useless.
“I’ve not seen anything like it,” the woman muttered, the same shock Samuel felt on her face.
“They were eatin’ each other,” the swordsman remarked.
The zombies on the other side of the door were relentless, scratching and groaning and slamming into the other side of the door. The wood and rusted hinges were not going to last against the onslaught.
“Samuel lad,” Jon started, wiping a bit of dusty sweat from his brow and out of his bloodshot eyes. “Could ya grab some of the furniture from the rooms upstairs? I don’t—”
Another crash against the door pushed all four of them back a few inches.
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“I don’t think we can hold this for long,” Jon finished.
Samuel ran up the stairs and burst into the first door on the right—the yellow room. The bed was shockingly heavy—Samuel belatedly realizing it was the difference between real wood and the cheap composite he was so used to. Try as he might, he could hardly make it budge, carving deep scrapes into the floor beneath it. He moved onto the table and groaned at the weight, but was able to lift it up into an uncomfortable bear hug. It felt like his fingers were going to rip off, but he waddled it down the stairs, step by step. Together, the four survivors placed the table down while simultaneously, and awkwardly, keeping the door puhsed closed behind it.
While Jon, the tradeswoman, and the swordsman held the door, Samuel brought down every piece of furniture he could carry. It was exhausting work, and by the end of it he was lathered in a thick sheen of sweat and struggling to catch his breath.
All told, he carried down six side tables, eight chairs, and two wooden trunks. On the last piece, he collapsed against the wall of the upstairs hallway. His head was throbbed, and the thick beat of his pulse rang out his skull. A bone-deep exhaustion was settling into his mind and muscles—far more than the furniture had accounted for. Through half-lidded eyes he watched Jon place a still-sleeping Oscar on the floor and move the pieces of his bed into the smorgasbord of furniture wedged in the stairwell between them and the zombies below. They were safe, for now.
Samuel fought against unconsciousness. He knew he shouldn't have felt so tired. It was unnatural. There were too many questions unanswered. And there were zombies downstairs trying to get at them. Zombies. He slapped his cheeks once, then a second time, feeling as if he was fighting something external forcing his mind toward darkness. He pulled himself up into a seated position with a straight back and breathed deeply, in and out, trying to center himself. Just like Oscar had before him, Samuel was feeling the after effects of Jon’s Pacify spell.
Samuel watched and listened as Jon discussed plans with the two others.
The tradeswoman’s name was Blythe. She was older than Samuel had guessed, with grey streaks through her dark-brown hair. Wrinkled eyes and calloused hands spoke to the hard life she lived on the road, wandering from town to town and trading bits and bobbles. Her clothing was assembled from leather and furs instead of woven materials like Samuel’s own. That wasn’t to say the furs were crudely assembled—the stitchwork was immaculate. She had a belt knife, about a foot in length, and was thumbing the string of a long bow she had brought into the stairwell with her. She lamented over her bag full of trade goods, survival gear, and most importantly, the quiver of arrows she had left behind in the main room below.
The scarred swordsman’s name was Yandry. He was on leave from the king’s army to visit his mother in a town far to the north called Moldren. Unlike Blythe, he surprisingly young. It was as if decades of experience were crammed into the 19-year-old’s scarred body. He had a shortsword speckled with blood gripped in his hand and wore simple clothes and a traveling cloak. Unlike Blythe, he’d brought his bag upstairs and passed strips of some kind of dry jerky to everyone.
Samuel accepted the meat graciously and chewed into it, desperately trying to stay awake. It held hardly any flavor, wasn’t salted, and felt more like trying to chew through a leather belt than something he would of found in a bodega back home, but it was incredibly sating. A contentment settled in his stomach with the first few bites. He was reinvigorated. He wasn’t back to one hundred percent, necessarily, but the food had done more than it had any right to.
Minutes passed and the constant crashing against the door below settled down to a light scratching, the zombie’s seeming to have lost their initial zeal to break through.
With his renewed clarity, Samuel stood and stretched, taking his body through a bastardization of a yoga flow to get his blood flowing once more. Oscar was still unconscious on the ground. Samuel nudged him with his foot and the man didn’t stir. The conversation between Jon, Blythe, and Yandry had died out some minutes ago.
Jon’s breathing was far too labored for how long they had all spent sitting.
Samuel had spent so much time examining Yandry and Blythe he hadn’t noticed the sweat-soaked shirt Jon was wearing. Or the blackening of torn skin on his forearm. The skin itself around the wound was writhing, almost bubbling.
“God dammit,” Samuel muttered.
“What?” Blythe asked.
“Jon,” Samuel stared. “Do you feel alright?”
Jon looked at the three others with sad eyes. “Can’t say that I do, lad.”
At once, Blythe and Yandry stood and drew their blades.
Jon eyed their fear with resignation. He tugged at his mustache and looked around at the wooden framing of the building around them. He ran his massive hand along the cracked grain of one of the boards and winced. A splinter had stuck into his finger. He examined it wistfully and bit it out.
“I helped build some of this inn with my own hands,” Jon said. “Before, my wife… died in childbirth. Almost twenty winters ago. I buried her with a daughter that never had her first breath. I almost lost myself. Ned pulled me out. Told me of his dreams of opening a crossroads inn between Fort Iskalad and Moldren. I buried my grief in this wood.”
Tears brimmed in Jon’s eyes before falling to his already-soaked shirt. He choked back a sob and continued.
“I’d have liked to meet her… My little girl…”
He twitched then, slamming his head into the wall. Jon scratched at the back of his head and pulled away fingers soaked in blood. He gave a soft laugh with tear-filled eyes. It was a miserable sight, watching such a giant of a man breaking down.
“You’d better run me through,” Jon whispered, a yellow-white foam building at the corners of his mouth, like a dog run too hard and too long.
Yandry raised his sword between them and slid it into Jon’s heart. Samuel gasped, shocked at the ease in which he did it. He’d expected some kind of hesitation.
Jon let out a soft breath as his life fled him. He slid to the floor, the sword stuck in-between the ribs of his chest. The once kind eyes of the giant barkeep turned lifeless and still... and then came back. Darker. But it was unlike the manic rage of the zombies below. There was a thinking menace under the surface. In the darkness bits of a faintly glowing purple obscured the man’s irises.
Yandry yanked at this sword embedded in Jon’s chest. It did not pull free. Jon snarled and grabbed Yandry hard by the ear. Yandry cried out, vainly trying to pull Jon’s massive hand away.
“Why isn’t he dead?” Yandry screamed in terror.
Unlike in the subway with Oscar falling to the tracks, unlike in the white void with the woman breaking her wrists, Samuel’s body acted before his mind could catch up. He grabbed at Jon’s hand and tried to pull it free from Yandry’s ear.
With his other hand, Jon grabbed Samuel by the wrist and yanked him free. The blood drained from Samuel’s face and with shaking hands he pulled the dagger from the sheath at his belt. He stabbed it toward Jon’s face and Jon picked Samuel up by the wrist and threw him bodily away. As if a ragdoll, Samuel careened through the air. He crashed into Blythe with a gut-wrenching smack and the two of them tumbled across the entire length of the hallway and into Oscar’s sleeping body. The business end of Nathan-the-daggerembedded itself into Oscar’s thigh.
He woke then.
And his shriek was blood-curdling.
Samuel gasped desperately for air, the impact and tumble emptying his lungs. The air was slow to come, pain receptors across his entire body competing for attention and making their complaints known. Blythe extricated herself from Samuel and Oscar and crawled forward. She threw up, the contents of her stomach splashing onto the wooden floorboards.
While holding fast to Yandry’s ear, he pushed the man away with his other hand, causing the swordsman’s ear to rip free. Yandry cried out and stumbled away, clutching a palm at the freely bleeding wound.
Jon examined the ear in his hand, turning it over and watching the small trickle of blood running down his hand. He popped the ear in his mouth and chewed slowly—as if savoring the taste. Samuel shivered.
“Demon,” Blythe breathed, the first to have recovered.
Jon placed a hand around the hilt of Yandry’s sword, still embedded in his chest, and pulled it free, the blade sucking wetly and scraping along the bone. He swung it once, sending blood and viscera splashing across the wall and floor in an arc.
“Better than Demon,” Jon replied, gazing at the four humans in front of him. His voice was gravelly and airy, tinged with the sound of air sucking through the hollow in his chest.
A cold sweat broke out on Samuel’s neck.
Yandry looked back at the three piled together at the far end of the hallway and pulled a small dagger from his belt—pitiable compared to the sword now in Jon’s hand.
“Get out of here,” he said.
Blythe pulled Samuel to his feet.
“Let’s go!” She yelled into his ear. “Out the window!”
Together, they hauled Oscar off the ground, Nathan still in his thigh. Samuel went to pull it out and Blythe smacked his hand away.
“Let it be,” She said, pulling the two men into the blue room.
From the corner of his eye before going through the doorway, Samuel caught sight of Yandry squaring off against Jon. The moment felt like a painting of David vs. Goliath. Samuel didn’t have much hope for David in this fight.
The window in question gave way to a dozen-foot drop.
Oscar squealed at the height and tried to push himself away like a screaming toddler being put in a bath. Blythe shoved Oscar out the window with her far greater strength. He fell straight to the muddy ground on his stomach with a plop, the impact knocking him unconscious yet again and dislodging Nathan from his leg.
Blythe jumped from the window next, landing gracefully next to Nathan and rolling to distribute the impact.
Samuel eased out of the window backward, trying to lower himself to the ground. Inside the taver, just outside the door frame for the blueroom, Samuel watched Yandry’s arm—just the arm—tumble through the air trailing a stream of blood.
“Nope!” Samuel said and dropped to the ground. The impact rattled his teeth and he fell onto his butt. He shook himself out of the pain, his body protesting with understandable anger for the considerable abuse of the last half hour. Samuel picked Nathan up from the mud and rose to his feet on shaky legs.
The zombies from inside the first floor of the tavern poured out toward them. A growling Ned-the-stablemaster was among them.
“Give me a break,” muttered Samuel.
Blythe picked Oscar up onto her shoulders as if he weighed no more than a bag of flour and ran for the stables. Samuel ran after her.
The zombies were fast, pulling on and tackling each other, in a madness-induced craze to be the first to get to the prize—the prey.
Samuel ran past Blythe and yanked open the barn door.
“STOP.”
An almost electric buzz filled the air in a wave, reminiscent of Jon’s earlier Pacify spell but turned rancid.
Samuel and Blythe stopped, their minds warring with being force-fed such powerful feelings of calm. It was all Samuel could do to keep himself from sitting down.
The group of zombies that had been chasing them only moments before lay twitching on the ground.
Jon dropped from the second story of the tavern, landing solidly in a graceful squat. He surveyed the clearing and gave Samuel, Blythe and the unconscious Oscar a bloody smile. He wielded Yandry’s short-sword and strode toward the three of them. He walked through the zombies twitching in the mud, stepping on top of some to take the most direct path. He stopped several feet in front of them.
“Blythe, Samuel,” Jon said. “There’s no reason to fight this. Undeath is inevitable.”
Samuel gripped Nathan tightly, his nerves shaking him to his core. That familiar headache and malaise from the after-effects of the pacify spell were creeping in on him and he knew it. It would only be a few minutes before it incapacitated him. He flared his nostrils, energy into his body and setting his resolve. He wouldn’t go down without a fight.
“Come on, then,” Samuel spat.
Blythe had other plans.
She let Oscar drop to the ground and sprinted off into the woods.
“Friends only ever backstab,” Samuel muttered under his breath.