by Wolfe Locke
I didn’t bother grabbing a water bottle either. Things hadn’t reached a level of bad enough yet that I’d resort to actually carrying water on me. Without a second look, I grabbed the keys to my car and left the only place I’d ever considered home. Not once did I think I’d ever get to come back.
A strange sense of guilt hit me; I felt a little bad about just giving up on the place. My parents had left me that house when they passed, and I had filled it with stuff over the years. Some might call it an inheritance, but in the back of my mind, I’d always known what it was. My parents, even in death, had wanted to make sure I didn’t wind up homeless.
They had been good people like that, and they knew without judgment how shitty I was with my finances. But even then, no amount of nostalgia made it worthwhile to draw out my leaving and further endanger my life. Within seconds, I was running through a splintered front door with my bat in hand, ready to do battle at a moment’s notice. The door itself was broken inward and hanging loosely in two pieces from separate hinges. There was no way it would ever close again.
The yard out front was in pretty bad shape. Large divots marred the grass and in multiple spots, it looked like giant claws had ripped into the dirt and pulled out entire sections. In general, the entire neighborhood didn’t appear to be in much better shape than the house I had just left. I was surprised at how terrible things looked.
It was intense seeing the pavement and asphalt broken and shattered in spots, from the impact of what looked suspiciously like a hoof print. I tried not to focus on the little details for too long and shifted the blame to the Department of Transportation’s refusal to fill potholes. Take my advice on this one: a little denial can go a long way.
Was it reckless? Absolutely it was, and probably not the bravest or best decision I’ve ever made. I ignored the obvious signs all around me of hell on Earth, even though the air was hazy, smoky, a little sulfuric, and filled with screams. I made a conscious decision to not focus on those things. What was it the alcoholics said? Accept that which I cannot change? Yeah, something like that. I couldn’t help it, so it wasn’t my problem. I was obviously wrong, but I didn’t need to own up to that just yet.
As I surveyed the damage to my surroundings, I fell into a bit of a bad habit and hyper-focused with a case of tunnel vision. I turned my attention away from the bigger picture and just focused entirely on getting to my car, so focused on that one task that I didn’t see the bodies moving in the dark, heading straight towards me or the rustle of bushes and hedges.
I jumped when I pressed the remote unlock on my key fob, as it blasted the double-clicking honking sound to let me know it was now locked. I had pressed the wrong button, but the activity had caused the interior lights and high beams to briefly turn on. As it did, I finally recognized the moving shadows all around me and thought they were actually people.
“Lirai,” I asked, thinking I recognized one of the shadows, a man by the look of him, and the first of the people heading in my direction. “What are those things?”
Notification: Query - “What are those things?”
Details: Those are people. Current status, deceased. Likely ghouls, zombies, or another undead subtype. Proceed with caution, as their bites can cause serious infections and diseases such as Lyme and Typhoid.
It was a little odd to hear the robot voice explain to me that the zombies coming after me spread traditional disease, and not, you know, zombieism, but I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth so to speak. Overall, the situation had deteriorated and that was entirely my bad. I had glossed over the warning signs that enemies were close, and I definitely did recognize the lead zombie.
He had been my neighbor for most of the last ten years. An absolute douchebag who called the cops on me anytime I parked the car in the cul-de-sac. Even when it was the curb in front of the property I owned.
“Hey, Jacobs,” I called out to the stumbling man, wanting to make sure he really wasn’t among the living anymore, or sentient for that matter. “Do you have an idea what’s going on? I went on a bit of a bender and missed out on the last couple days. I’m getting ready to head out if you want to join me. I’m going to try to find some help, maybe try to hit up the police station.”
You have to understand, I didn’t like the guy, but that didn’t mean I was going to just leave him to die. While I didn’t completely trust the robot voice that told me he was an undead, I also wasn’t stupid, and if he was going to be a problem for me, I was prepared to handle it.
When Jacobs didn’t respond, I knew it was time to put on my serious face. He stumbled forward towards me with his mouth contorted in a snarl of white veneers. He had this glazed look on his face, like he was almost feverish but not quite, and his eyes had gone almost completely yellow. It was an odd detail, but one I remembered easily.
With the smoke in the air, it was hard to see much else. But as Jacobs got closer, I couldn’t help but notice the red stain on his shirt. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that something was wrong with him and while I’m sure Jacobs was a sloppy eater, I was pretty sure it wasn’t steak and ketchup on his shirt. Thankfully, I lived in a place that respected castle doctrine, so not once did I think of running away from him, aided and abetted by the system pushing me towards fighting him.
I gave him one last warning just in case this was a fucked up practical joke that had gone too far. I didn’t think it was, but it couldn’t hurt to not overcommit if I was going to be killing people. “Back the fuck up, Jacobs.” But he completely ignored me. It was like he didn’t hear the words at all and was just responding to general sounds, lunging straight at me.
I teed up my weapon, ready for him with a smile, and bashed him upside the head with the bat. The sound of it was loud, both the wet thud from hitting him and the way the bat seemed to echo. It was very loud. I fully expected his brains to splatter on the sidewalk.
Instead of brains on the sidewalk, I saw a small green rectangle underneath him, much like the one I had seen with Ur’Goth the Reputable. I watched as the meter almost instantly went from full green to a mostly black space. The remaining portion that was green instantly transformed into a sliver of red. But even then, the only thing that seemed to change with him was that his movement slowed, and the red stain on his chest widened. Is this being censored? His brains should be splattered everywhere.
It was at that point that I decided it was time to turn and run away and try to get a little information. “Lirai, how the shit is he still standing?”
Notification: Query - *Language Localization - “How is he still standing?”
Details: All monsters and humans must reach 0% of their health to be killed. The undead of unknown subtype, formally called Jacobs, has taken 92% damage due to a critical hit caused by a blow to the head. When his health meter is completely empty, he will die.
That settled it. I had only moved a few feet before changing my mind about running away. I turned around, pivoting on my foot, and dashed back in his direction, swinging the bat with a crack across his chest, meaning to knock him over and bash his head in. Instead, things got weird. He didn’t tumble over as I expected, and I didn’t knock him aside. The bar below him went dark and disappeared, and as soon as the meter disappeared, Jacobs toppled over in place. Dead for real and unmoving.
Notification: Experience Gained - +12 experience, next level in 88 experience. +6 Sol.
Current experience: 12/100.
Sol: 6.
No items have been dropped.
I felt this pleasurable shiver across my body, sort of like when you’ve been on your feet all day and kick off your shoes and let yourself fall backward onto the bed or into a chair. It was short-lived bliss that I couldn’t enjoy, bliss prematurely ended as more bodies appeared around me, and from the look of them, they had all been my neighbors. Each had the same fevered and glazed look that Jacobs had.
As my father used to say, sometimes the shit just hits the fan. But at least I had plenty of gr
udges to settle. It helped make the next part that much easier. I had wet work to do.
Chapter 11: Best Served Cold
Have you ever experienced a particularly low point in your life when you’re forced to look at all the options laid out on the proverbial table and then have to make a decision based on what’s laid out to choose which flavor of shit sandwich life is about to feed you? That was me. Well, that was me at that moment, completely surrounded on all sides by my undead neighbors. On a positive note, they were neighbors I hated, so in a sense, it was an absolute win.
One thing I’d never struggled with was being claustrophobic, but this was an exception. If there ever was a time to panic about small spaces, it was in these exact circumstances. Those grime-covered middle-class sausage fingers trying to grab at me and pull me down, it wasn’t that different from when they were still alive.
Meanwhile, I was trying desperately to find a way out of the mess I was in. It took a second for me to realize how deep in shit I really was. My initial assessment that my undead neighbors were crowding me had been incorrect. It was far more than just the people from the block trying to mob me. Far more, like maybe hundreds more, but that’s more a guess than anything else.
Judging by the sheer mass of bodies pressed all around me, I had to guess it meant that most of the people in my subdivision had been turned into undead, and they’d all turned up for me. Obviously, I was fucked, but I still took a moment to gloat about their fate, even if it was a bad time.
I guess you could say this change was a bit of an improvement over the way they were before; at least they were getting outside now. Trying to murder me was a kind of exercise, right? Eh. I knew it was a bit of a stretch. Regardless, they were still mouth breathers being mouth breathers.
Yes, I know that the dead don’t technically need to breathe, and I know they weren’t actually breathing. More just sort of standing around with their mouths hanging uselessly open as they started snapping their jaws together impulsively long before they got close enough to bite me.
So what was I to do, surrounded as I was by the undead? The horde was five, no ten, actually, make that fifty bodies deep, with bloody hands stretched out and open maws, closing in on me. Where they came from, I really had no idea, maybe from the other neighborhoods, the city, or maybe it was just magic. There was just no explanation for how this many could have snuck up on me in a matter of seconds, but they managed it.
I was trapped in the sort of crowd you used to only see at concerts, back before Rage Against the Machine turned into something corporate. I needed a way out, and no matter how frantically I looked, I couldn’t find one. By all metrics, I was stuck, cordoned off from any avenue leading to safety, but I didn’t give up. That was a mantra I’d picked up in the service and had no intention of letting go of now. Even as the undead pushed forward, crowding each other as they tried to get me.
At that moment, the word that best described how I felt was some kind of morbid gratitude. Gratitude that in the crowd of zombies, I saw something that changed everything for me. The contorted and slimy face of my neighbor from across the street, Mrs. Sanders. I could tell it was her by her massive forehead and her terrible choice in undersized flower dress that failed to contain all of her mass, and by her side with his head rolled to the side and a bloody gash of teeth marks across his neck was the oddly pear-shaped man she had married.
To say there had been bad blood between us was an understatement. For example, I had never had a single problem in my entire life with dogs, except when it came to the Sanders family. Because every single fucking time they took the dog out for a walk, they would walk him right over to my lawn and stand around in the cul-de-sac waiting, just to make sure their dog could take a massive shit on my grass. I got it, we all had to go sometime and mistakes happened. That wasn’t the case with these folks, though they had claimed it was all an accident. Worse still, not once did they pick it up.
Sure, I could have lived with that, I could, but then they had the balls to call the homeowners association to complain about me not picking it up either. I mean, why would I? I didn’t even own a dog, and it’s not like I had kids to worry about stepping in it. That little treat ended up costing a few hundred dollars in fees and a steady stream of dirty looks as if it was somehow my fault. Fuck those guys.
Obviously, I couldn’t do anything about it back then. It wasn’t like I hadn’t thought about it, you know? Something like picking it up with a shovel and flinging it onto their porch or at their door. I had even thought about putting it in a bag and sending it back to them by mail, but I never went through with it. These people were such good tellers, they could have easily gone to work at a bank. I mean, the resume writes itself. Even thinking about it, I can still hear the ghost of the cop sirens I knew they would have called if I stepped out of line.
This is where that little piece of gratitude came in. I wasn’t going to get out of there alive. I realized that and nothing was going to change it. Not even the strange way my thoughts seemed to be altered so I’d be less afraid and more down to fight could change the overall fate I was going to meet. I didn’t even plan on going out in a blaze of glory. Those were only in the movies, and I already had a bad case of the fat sweats wearing me down. But what I did have was two people I absolutely hated right in front of me, and basically an open license to take them out. I was grateful. I, at least, had a decent way to go out.
Running forward all of five feet, I yelled at the top of my lungs as I swung that bat as hard as I could across Mrs. Sanders’s face. The fat of her jowls bounced under her chin as the bat recoiled backward. The bar showing her health decreased into the red, but it wasn’t quite enough to bring her down. I wasn’t ready to call it quits either, so I followed up the blow with the bat with an awkward left hook.
It barely connected, and if she wasn’t already injured, it wouldn’t have done anything. But in this case, that little bit of damage was just enough. It had been a little uncomfortable trying to finish her off, with the rest of the undead around me making it hard to maneuver, but I managed. When the red bar disappeared, she dropped to the ground. Permanently dead.
Notification: Experience Gained - +10 experience, next level in 78 experience. +5 Sol.
Current experience: 22/100.
Sol: 11.
Crumbled Paper has been dropped and put into your inventory. Use the terminal for access.
But wait, you say. I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t the crowd of undead just attack him? What a plot hole! This fucking guy. Can you believe the lies this guy is telling? Trust me, there is an explanation to that, we’ve just got to reach that part of my story first.
When Mrs. Sanders went down, that’s when things got a little dicey for me. The danger zone went up by a factor of at least two or three Mavericks. I wish I could tell you I was successful in beating the husband to death too, because I hated that cowering simp bastard just as much as I hated her. I wish I could tell you the story of the Chad bat wielder versus the crowd of zombies.
But it didn’t go down like that. I died like a punk, sort of like a certain mercenary in a sandy pit.
See, I’d missed an important detail about my new reality. My sensation of pain was gone and I just hadn’t noticed. I sort of thought I’d been jacked up on adrenaline and had just temporarily put off feeling any pain. Without that sensation, I’d missed that the undead had been attacking me the whole time. Death by a Thousand Cuts, basically. I’d taken minimal damage a bunch of times. These undead weren’t very strong, basically meant as level one fodder for a team to carve through and that was it. Not meant for a soloist like myself.
They were meant to be grinded for quick levels in a new player zone and left behind. I missed that memo. Maybe if I hadn’t been passed out for so long, I wouldn’t have been behind the power curve.
Not once had I noticed that my health had started to chip away. I know it was literally right there, I just had to look to see it, but swinging the bat
all around me, trying to keep the zombies off of me, I got distracted. Anyone would. I actually thought I might be able to get free to relative safety when I saw the health of all the undead in front of me dip into the red. I was wrong.
Apparently, with whatever this system was, it didn’t just turn off the pain threshold, but also a perception threshold. If I’d bothered to look at myself, I would have noticed the blood blossoming on my shirt. A visual cue that I was actively being murdered, but I didn’t notice because I was being reckless, being fickle, and thought for just a moment that I was some kind of hero.
Without any sort of warning, minus the ones we just went over that I’d failed to notice, my body seized up, and I fell over dying. It was over pretty quick; I saw my own health bar flashing black, denoting what I assumed meant that I had died. The experience was a bit of a mood killer but not terrible, even though I’d give it a rough “.5/5 stars, would not recommend.” As soon as I hit the ground, I sort of collapsed in on myself and dematerialized into a ball of light and sped off, leaving a dead body behind.
Notification: You have died. Respawning in 60 minutes at location “My Room.”
Details: You have retained all current experience but have forfeited all earned Sol. In the future, please consider establishing an account with the Crusaders Guild.
You have lost 23 Sol.
It took me all of five seconds to realize I had respawned. It doesn’t need an explanation. You and I both know what I’m talking about, what that word means.
Even though I knew it was coming, it still came as a shock when I opened my eyes after death. Seeing is believing, after all. The first thing I noticed was the feeling of the sheets of my bed neatly folded up all around me. Safely tucked in, quite comfortably I might add, inside my room. It was the weirdest sense of déjà vu I’d ever had, and when I kicked off the blankets, the first thing I noticed was the trash was all back on my desk, but noticeably absent in the room, and absent from myself, was the smell of piss and vomit. Thank the gods for small favors, I guessed.