I felt like my surroundings were growing somewhat familiar, although the extreme growth that the trees had undergone kept me in a constant state of low-grade confusion.
My watch read ‘07:20’, so I had been jog-walking for nearly an hour at this point. I plugged water as I looked around, deeper into my surroundings. Beyond the occasional small forest critter that I was forced to dissuade with a baseball bat, I didn’t sense much else but something had me on edge.
I dropped the bat and spun to get a bead with my shotgun. My Nemesis. She was at a distance, in the shade of the deep brush by the side of the road.
We stood there, looking at each other, as time swept by.
“Well? Come on!”
Her head twitched, like she was debating the proposition.
‘Among those things?’ That didn’t sound good, “Might be. Why don’t you try your luck?”
The wolf-mutt scoffed and I growled.
It disappeared and I could barely pick out the sounds. It didn’t seem like it was lying. It was weird, the wolf being surprisingly honest. Was it something with the Nemesis class or role she had taken or maybe she couldn’t lie to me?
That was a dangerous assumption though, extraordinarily arrogant cats aside, my recent conversation with Chibi had finally reinforced that these ‘beasts’ were not lesser than anyone else I’d met in my life. In some ways, they were more. More dangerous at least. Sure, I hadn’t seen any of them do calculus, but then again, neither could I.
I took a quick 360* to try and see if I could pick anything out. Nothing. So, was it lying to me? Was it pretending that it couldn’t lie to me? Was it a compulsion or something that she had chosen? Maybe she had decided that it was beneath her to lie to her Nemesis. Whatever.
With her now gone, I had no more opportunities to fish for answers. No matter how smart or not she may be, she was clever and had enhanced dog senses. I would have to be careful. In the day I had a slight upper hand, but, at night, I definitely was in more of a ‘prey’ position.
My pace slowed again when I started seeing houses off to the side of the road. The only problem was that they were nearly buried by the new storm of underbrush. I couldn’t imagine how bad an actual forest would be, the near dead brush campsite I… we, I corrected, had been camping in had undergone a primordial amount of growth.
I ignored the houses and looked for a road that I could follow, hopefully into a town-square, after all, if I was remembering it correctly we had stopped for gas somewhere around here. Again, living in LA and judging distances by foot was a ridiculous concept that I had less than zero experience with. I slowed my pace to recover the rest of my breath to ‘be ready’ for anything. My pace slowed to creeping steps as I heard something off to the right. I heard moaning off from that side, maybe even multiple people. Another person?!
I darted toward the treeline and took a beat before pushing in. It was much more dangerous without proper sightlines. My Nemesis could be here and even if she wasn’t, there were plenty of smaller forest critters that seemingly never learned how to properly fuck off unless it was at the business end of a baseball bat.
I pushed through thigh-high bermuda grass, feeling like I was in Jurassic Park 2, taking only thin humor in the thought of velociraptors streaming through the grass, ready to pull me under. Knowing my luck, there would be dinosaurs, but no stegosauruses or brontosaurus mounts, just the shitty, really hungry ones. I found a crumbling stone wall that I started to work myself up and a thought struck me. Dinosaurs… did they actually ever exist? Now that God was proven to be real, presumably, how old was the earth actually?
That sudden philosophical crisis made taking in the sight over the wall both more delayed, and when it hit, more sudden.
“Fuuuack!”
I felt something bite my ankle and I twisted on top of the wall in shocked panic and fell over the top to the other side. I accidentally fired my shotgun as I fell and heard it rip into something organic. I groaned for a moment as my backpack saved me from cracking my skull open on a tombstone but also pulled some poor muscle in my back along with the stark reminder that my shoulder wound hadn’t completely healed.
Wincing, I scrambled to my feet and looked around in desperate hope. Please no please no.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
It was a cemetery and every grave was disturbed. Even worse, every grave was empty. I didn’t spend time wondering why every grace was empty, because the evidence was all around me.
Fucking zombies.
I put my back up against the wall and looked toward the gate, near where I had fallen over. Closed and the shambling horde was starting to shrink the distance between us. I ran up to it, saw it was locked, aimed the shotgun at the lock then closed my eyes and turned my head as I fired. The shitty thing burst apart, having a slightly out-of-body experience at the knowledge that zombies were now going to be a concern, I barely noticed as several pieces of lock shrapnel buried themselves into me. That didn’t matter. Ears ringing I kicked the gate and it groaned open a crack. The moaning was close, thank God for slow zombies. I kicked it again, then shoved my shoulder against it.
It groaned, both my shoulder and the gate, but it did move. Then I backed away in a rush as the zombie that had attacked my leg on the other side slammed itself against the gate, its arms pushing through to grab at me.
I checked behind and saw the horde closing in. Shit.
I took off to the side, following the wall and tried to recall everything I knew about zombies. Then I discarded those thoughts as I barely managed to jump over an open grave and focus on what my eyes were immediately telling me. They were slow and probably dumb. They’d likely just follow me in the shortest distance, aka a straight line. I had to almost immediately discard that assumption as I saw the gap ahead closing. It took another precious second to realize in a horrifying second that they were trying to cut off my escape.
Fucking smart zombies. Shit.
I dodged around grasping hands as one overleveraged and fell back into a grave. Where they belong, I miserably thought. One was directly in my path of escape and I pulled the shotgun up firing my second shot, to blow its head apart and thread the gap it had left. Now, out of the encirclement, and away from imminent death, I took a beat to scan my surroundings and reload the shotgun. The barrel snapped up with a click.
At least they were slo…. I heard a screech and… of course. OF FUCKING COURSE, my only other assumption was proven incorrect as a relatively fresh looking zombie sprinted out from the horde and directly toward me. The first shell blew off an arm and it spun as it dropped to the ground. It screeched as it picked itself up and I sent the second shell into its head.
It kept twitching, though now directionless. Fuck this. I dropped the spent shells to the ground and reloaded again before my eyes landed on a portion of the tall stone wall that had two of the most important qualities, it looked climbable and it was a decent distance away from the horde.
I sprinted toward it, making extra sure to not fall into my own grave and started to climb. A miserable task while still carrying the shotgun, I threw it over the top and hand over hand, I pulled myself up and over.
In the shocked, empty-minded silence, with only my breath and faint distant moans, I felt it. I had gained a point in Soul. I felt it settle my frayed nerves. Well, at least I knew what that stat did, at least in part.
Unfortunately it meant that waiting to gather up Feats and activate them all at once was more than likely D.O.A. Although, not entirely. It didn’t necessarily mean that gaining Feat points was tied to the rebalancing aspect. Deeper considerations would have to wait. I heard some scrabbling at the wall behind me but that wasn’t what just pushed me forward. I heard the gate at the front of the cemetery groan as it opened further.
I picked up my shotgun and pulled my kukri-hatchet-blade-whatever before I took a moment to calculate my position, then started moving through the underbrush.
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A mausoleum opened and a figure emerged, shielding their eyes,
“Damned bright. Why was I awoken early?”
No one responded to the figure’s query. The interruption was… annoying.
His tongue tasted death in the air, “My adopted children are agitated…?” He looked over each of his 10 new-dead that had been tasked with guarding the largest maloseum in the graveyard. The younger children were dumber, but far more capable in regards to base physicality. However, that was no matter to him, he did the thinking for them. They twitched and looked outward, for threats.
The figure’s eyes locked at the front of the cemetery. At the damnably stoic gate that he had been unable to open. Now, it was open.
“Perfect! The old ones do need to stretch their legs.”
The figure counted only 9, not 10 like there had been when he had gone underground, “Where is the 10th?”
The group wandered through the cemetery as the older zombies continued to stumble and push their way through the ajar gate.
“Ah, there you are…” The minion was missing its head and a significant chunk of its shoulder. He found the detached arm still twitching some distance away, “Oh no! What awful sort of monster would do such a terrible thing?”
The figure sighed and motioned to the 9 other zombies, “Come come, bring your brother, it will take some time to fix him.” He looked in disappointment at the lack of material near him. Thankfully, he had brought his own.
He moved back to the large mausoleum as the zombie companions gathered the scattered pieces of their brother’s corpse and brought it along with them. Let the old ones have their fun with the town, the figure was not finished exploring his own magick first.
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Zombies… when did that happen? I started to dig into that chain of thought, but my surroundings unsettled me right out of that. I wasn’t sure what was worse, suffering the constant low-grade attacks from forest critters or the perfect silence that accompanied me now.
Even though it was incredibly unlikely that my Skill, “Speaks with Animals”, would let me talk my way out of most fights, the biggest advantage was that it made it incredibly easy to be ready for pretty much any animal attack.
I didn’t know if the animals didn’t realize that they were constantly chattering and voicing out nearly every future action, had just learned a new form of language themselves, or if I just had a pretty rare Skill that the animals weren’t expecting me to have. Whatever the reason, for the ambush animals it typically meant that there was nearly always something sharp and metal or solid and wood ready to meet whatever leapt out.
Right now? It was dead silent. The pun was unsettling and reassuring in equal measure. I hoped that the silence wasn’t a bad sign. I knew it was.