Chapter Nine

“My mama always told me someday I'd be good at something. Who'd a guessed that something'd be zombie-killing?”

-Tallahassee, Zombieland

“Why me?”

Liza asked it, but it was pointless because she knew the answer and honestly she agreed with the plan.

“Because I’m slow and easily startled, with an injured arm and terrible asthma,” Celia said. “Let’s say I’m more suited to desk work than fieldwork.”

Liza turned pointedly to Yana who lowered her eyes.

“I want to stay and look after Tuck, and help Celia can get stuff done. Also … you’re the best shot; we all saw it back on the field.” The brunette folded her arms. She had wiped away the smudged makeup underneath her eyes and some colour had returned to her cheeks, and once again she looked beautiful. Liza let out a breath.

“I get it,” she said. Behind her, past the probably false safety of their thin front door, sirens wailed endlessly, back and forth, as people worked tirelessly to nip whatever was going on out there in the bud.

She sort of wished that she hadn’t shown off her shooting skills back at the start. But she knew this plan made the most sense.

“So it’s settled?” Celia confirmed. “We have our roles. I’ll draw up vaguely workable blueprints, Yana will play nurse and housekeeper—” Yana frowned but did not argue. “—and Liza will be points-earner. You go out and get as many as you can, then come back and we’ll distribute them into the house. When the boys are available, they’ll help you.”

“We need to pour some points into weaponry, too, Celia,” Liza said. “I have exactly 500 UPs right now, can you think of something really short and sweet that I can do to update my Glock?” She brandished it with a wiggle.

Celia stared at it for a second, and then scratched her head. “I think … everything to update a pistol would be pointless at this stage. It’d cost a lot of points and I’d just be imitating features from other weapons you could be using instead. I’ll have a think, but for now it’s probably best if you update something different.”

“Uh.” Liza looked around. “Like what?”

Celia tapped her chin. “Your clothes. Go upstairs, grab your least favourite outfit and slap it on. Whatever we do to it might destroy it. You have anything you hate?”

“Oh, yeah, totally,” Liza said, and ran up the stairs.

Minutes later, she came downstairs with a too-small t-shirt with a slogan emblazoned across the boobs, and some tight black hipster jeans.

Celia stared at the top and then back up at Liza. “Shirt happens,” she read aloud.

“What?” Liza said, looking down at it, and then back up. “It’s not wrong.”

“I want you to thicken it. Double the thickness of the fabric. That’s all. Shouldn’t be too complicated.”

T-Shirt

UP to Next Level

Features

Empty Slot (Unlock)

100

Empty Slot (Unlock)

200

Liza already hated unlocking slots for UP when she didn’t know what was coming next, but she did so anyway.

You have unlocked a slot for a new feature for this item.

What would you like to add?

Double Thickness — 300 (+t-shirt)

“I guess I need two shirts,” Liza said. She didn’t hesitate before pulling off the plain dirty tee she was wearing and she held them both in her hands and selected the upgrade with her eyeballs.

The dirty shirt was gone, as if it had never been there, and the other one vibrated slightly against her fingers, tickling her with its reforming fibres.

“That’s done it,” Celia said brightly, clapping her hands together. “That’s amazing. We’re an amazing team!” She grinned wide, her eyes squeezed shut, and she just looked so happy that Liza had to laugh.

“I’m kind of annoyed that this was the shirt that stayed,” Liza said, pulling it on and frowning down at the slogan across her chest.

“Liza, when you pop out, can you grab some more teabags?” Yana yelled from the living room. Liza and Celia exchanged a glance.

“Teabags...?” Liza called back. “You want me to kill a crapload of zombies, on my own, and to also swing by the store for some tea?”

Yana poked her head into the hallway and furrowed her shaped brows. “We’ve run out and Tucker drinks at least five cups a day. Don’t you want him to recover?” She put her hands on her hips. “Don’t you want us to feel calm and safe in our own home? How the fuck do you think we’re going to get through the apocalypse without any fucking tea?”

Liza blinked. “OK, sure, I didn’t think about it like that. I’ll grab some teabags.”

Yana disappeared again. “And some milk!” she yelled sweetly, and the door to Tucker’s extension slammed shut, leaving Celia and Liza alone.

“Cee, I’m really worried about James,” she said, the words surprising her a little as they came rushing out. “Why isn’t he back yet?”

“Maybe he found the safe area,” Celia said, but the smile on her face seemed fake to Liza. “I bet he’s over there with tea and a biscuit — so he’s better off than we are over here in our beverage-free hell.”

Liza returned the smile. “I hope so. While I’m out there I’ll grab a policeman’s attention, find out where the safehouses are.”

“It’ll be somewhere fortified. Somewhere everyone knows the way to. Somewhere big and thick with large rooms,” Celia said.

“Alright,” Liza said, and turned to face the door. It seemed really daunting. She peered out of the peephole and the fire blazing at the pub across the street had spread to the house next door, but the flames were not reaching nearly as high as they had been. Hopefully somehow it would put itself out before it levelled the entire block.

“Anything else we can do for you before you leave?” Celia asked her. “I can give you a rifle and ammo, and the rest of the bandages. But … I don’t know what else.”

“I would just really feel better with some kind of a gun upgrade,” Liza said. She couldn’t even afford the capacity increase anymore.

“If you think of something I will sketch out a way to make it workable,” Celia said with a small shrug. “As long as it’s not, you know, rocket science.”

“I thought you were doing modules in Space Engineering?”

Celia gave a dazzling smile, and Liza realised she had walked into that. “OK, OK, I get it, you’re a rocket scientist,” she tutted, and then turned back to the door … then back around again. “I’m going to wait a couple of hours. Is that alright? I just think things will calm down in an hour or two.”

“But Liza,” Celia said, gripping onto her upper arm tight, so that Liza felt a surge of panic roll through her. “Tucker might need a cup of tea!” She stepped back and giggled at her own joke. “No, that’s fine. We’ll go through the house and decide what we’re going to fortify, and then we’ll know how many points we want you to get: a minimum and an ideal.”

“Great,” Liza said. “Let’s start with the front door…”

Front Door

UP to Next Level

Features

Cheap Wood

400

Simple Lock

300

Empty Slot (Unlock)

100

“Well, you could upgrade the material right now,” she told Celia, exiting the interface. “It just says ‘Cheap Wood’ — 400 to next level.”

Celia approached the door and stared at it for a moment. “I need a little extra solid wood,” she said, drumming on her chin. “It suggests planks of oak.”

“I’ll bring back some oak,” Liza said, happily and knowingly overestimating how much she could achieve in one solo trip, but riding the high of making a plan to overcome death. She would worry about logistics a little later.

“Windows next,” Celia said, manoeuvring Liza expertly through the door to their right, to James’ room. Both boys slept on the ground floor and shared that bathroom in front of Tucker’s room, while Liza and Celia slept on the floor above, and Yana got the attic room above that. The windows they would need to worry about were the ones to James’ bedroom, to the living room, to the hallway before Tucker’s room, and into Tucker’s room itself. Four similarly-sized windows.

Celia stared at them for a while. “Could add an extra pane, as in double-glaze them, or we could convert the existing glass to something much stronger. The former requires you to haul back glass as well as the oak for the front and back door.” Shit, Liza had genuinely forgotten that there was a back door by Tucker’s room that led out into the small garden. Of course there was. And chances were it wasn’t even as strong as the front door, since it had been hastily added before they had moved in.

“Ugh, this is already too much,” she moaned, making her way back to the living room to throw herself onto a couch. God, they were so uncomfortable.

Hmm…

Small Leather Couch

UP to Next Level

Repair?

66/100

180

Features

Faux Leather

200

Empty Slot (Unlock)

100

She let out a gasp and Celia glanced over at her from the living room window.

“Did you know these sofas are fake leather?”

“No,” Celia said, turning back to trace a finger down the peeling pane.

Liza huffed her hair from her face. “I’m calling the police.”

“Liza?”

She turned around to see Yana standing in the doorway to the extension, fidgeting with her fingers. “Tucker’s, uh, his HP is a little higher than it was before,” she said. “He says he just wants to speak to you real quick before you go.”

“Oh?” Liza said, getting up from the couch. If she found herself rolling in points … she thought that it might be nice to give some other stuff in this house a little upgrade. Now that she had the power to, it seemed like it would be a nice idea to at least get something out of the end of the world.

She made her way back through to Tucker’s room and carefully shut the door.

“Hey,” Tucker croaked, a sick-looking lump underneath his daisy-yellow duvet. “Bring me that water?”

Liza spotted a mostly full bottle on the dresser and stepped across his laundry to hand it to him. He grimaced as he sat up, and Liza took the opportunity to bring up his HP bar again. It was at least 15% full now; definitely higher than it had been before.

“When was the last time you were in my room?” he asked, flashing her a dangerous smile over the lip of his water bottle. It was dampened somewhat by the way his hair stuck to his face, and the near-translucent pallor of his skin, and it made her frown.

“When I helped carry you in here just a little while ago,” she said. “I’m about to head off, is there something you needed from outside?”

He let out a hoarse, single laugh. “No,” he said. “I just feel … I don’t know. I just wanted to talk to you for a second. Is that alright?”

She perched on the side of his bed and folded her arms in her lap. “What’s up?” she asked, looking over at his dark, messy room instead of at him. He squirmed in his place to sit up more comfortably, pain clamping his features into unnatural positions.

“The world fucking ended, Liza,” he said low. “You’re acting like you don’t care that much.”

She shook her head hard. “Sorry,” she said, ashamed, because she really didn’t know what else to say. “I just … I don’t know how to explain it.”

I feel like I’ve been preparing for this for a long time? She couldn’t say that. What was something normal to say? Shit.

“I just really hope my family is OK,” she landed on. It was a platitude, nothing more Her family would be fine; she knew it in her gut. Her brothers, being older, had received even more ‘character building’ one-on-one time with her father than she had.

And her father was the kind of force of nature that would rival the apocalypse itself, but concentrated down into one dense, angry man.

He would be fine.

“I’m worried about my family too,” Tucker said, latching onto this and speaking quickly. “My mum, she’s not the healthiest these days. I just … I don’t know how she’ll do. I haven’t been able to get ahold of her but her phone is always off. I’m worried. She should have tried to call me by now. The phone service will cut off soon, completely, won’t it?” He lowered his head into his hands and Liza rested her palm on his knee, through his yellow duvet.

“It’ll be alright,” she said pointlessly.

What do you say to a close friend who is fairly sure his family is dead?

Even if none of this had happened at all, Liza would still be avoiding being alone with Tucker for a few more weeks, at least. After what had happened last week. She didn’t want to think about that.

As if he was reading her thoughts and specifically disregarding them, he pulled his arm out from under the covers and wrapped his long fingers around hers. His hand was hot, and he barely had the energy to squeeze, but he tried.

“I just wanted to tell you that I know things have been weird, but I want you to be able to talk to me if you want to. If you’re scared.”

“I think I’m doing OK,” Liza said, getting to her feet slowly and allowing his hand to slip away. “But thank you, Tucker, that means a lot to me.”

“If I hadn’t gotten into that stupid fight I would be going by myself. In fact, I wanted to know if you wanted to wait until tomorrow, and I would go with you. Or instead of you. I don’t know how quick this gamified healing works … I just hate that you’re going by yourself.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said, noting as she said it that she totally believed it. “I have guns, I know how to use them, and … I dunno how to tell everyone this because nobody seems to really be grasping it … but zombies move, like, really slowly.” She gestured with her hands to punctuate the sentiment as best she could. “The army or the cops will dispatch them easily. I promise. We’ll be out of the woods in no time. You just have to concentrate on resting and healing up as fast as you can.”

He swallowed, his Adam’s apple visibly bobbing even in the dark, and looked away.

“Look, just let Yana take care of you for a little while, alright?” Liza said with a smirk. “She’s been secretly hoping for this moment for … forever. Just play the role of the invalid until I get back, and we’ll make another plan from there. Hopefully by the time I return, James will be back too,” she added lightly. There was no point in being negative. Perhaps he had found a safe area on his way home, or maybe he was holed up somewhere waiting for a horde to pass by. James was a smart dude.

But his fitness wasn’t the best.

She put that thought out of her mind and strode towards the door.

“I’m going now,” she told Celia on the way out. Yana looked over at her with concern, and then her gaze darted in the direction of Tucker’s bedroom, as if it could pierce through cheap plaster. “He’s fine,” she added to Yana, though she knew that wasn’t what was on her mind — Yana was wondering what Tucker could possibly have wanted to speak to her alone about. The answer was ‘nothing’, but there was no way to bring that up without being asked.

“Good luck,” Celia said. “Ideally we need points in the thousands. 800 to upgrade the structural integrity of both doors. 400 each to strengthen the glass of each window. That’s 2400 points, Liza.” She chewed her lip. “Minimum, really. There’ll be more we could do.”

“2400 points,” Liza repeated. She had gained 800 with only a couple of encounters and she had barely broken a sweat! This was going to be easy enough. “Sure. I’ll see you guys in a couple of hours. Barricade yourselves in if you can.”

“But then how will you get back in?” Yana asked.

“I’ll knock to the tune of ‘Shave and a Haircut’,” Liza said with a shrug. They both looked at her blankly so she sighed and rapped on the wall. Dun dundundun dun … dun dun. “Bye!”

She wondered how she was going to find enough zombies to get 2400 points. It would involve making combos, probably, so she would need to keep calm and focused and try not to mess up a chain if she began one. A stab to the skull also netted a fair amount of points. Liza figured that if she was quick enough to create a combo, a flurry of Melee 1HKOs would have her home in time for a cup of tea.

If she remembered to grab the teabags, of course.

*

Celia had given her the rifle to use and Liza had it strapped to her back. The Glock was on her hip at the right and her Bowie knife was sheathed on her waistband at the left.

Liza was ready to kill some motherfucking zombies.

Weapon

Features

Power

Range

Glock 19

Capacity: 15

25

50

Bowie Knife

None

10

10

M1 Carbine

Capacity: 10

20

300

The rifle had just a touch less capacity and kick than her trusty pistol, but it made up for it in range.

Looking over the stats made her heart race. Hopefully she would grab more than 2400 points, because then she could upgrade these guns.

Her backpack was stuffed with ammo, water, and the rest of the roll of bandages. She would need to get to a quiet, safe space in order to reload, which wasn’t the most convenient … but for times like those, she did have her knife.

It was just important not to allow herself to get trapped, or boxed in for any reason. Period.

McCray had made a deadly mistake setting the zombie apocalypse on humanity. Liza had seen all the zombie movies; read every post-apocalyptic book and graphic novel. She was going to fight back, and she was not going to make any stupid mistakes. And she was going to take down every single undead in her neighbourhood before she headed back home that day, or her name was not Eliza Volkov.

London Road was deserted.

A car sat lengthways across the road, the driver door open. Beside it, a decimated motorbike lay in pieces beside a levelled streetlight.

The flames had died, and the pub was a blackened husk while the house next to it looked just as if it had been splashed across its side by a flamethrower.

There was no person, alive or dead, on the busy road that she could see. As she walked carefully across the shattered glass of every other window she passed, she saw nobody and she saw nothing.

The sun was beginning its descent. For the first time in a long time, Liza wished that she had a camera on her so she could capture the charred rubble and the abandoned vehicles bathed in a dangerous but warming orange glow...

I call this one ‘Sun Sets over Life as We Knew It’. Nice and poetic. It’d probably get shared so much online.

She reached the corner of the street and looked out, and her breath caught in her throat at what she saw.

At least ten cars were piled up, smashed and smoking, in the intersection, right on the train tracks that cut through the tarmac road to the town centre.

To the left, beyond the barriers, was a train with a smashed front window. As Liza approached, she noticed that the strange ragdoll-like thing hanging out of the splintered train window, impaled on a dozen shards of glass like it was being held in the jaws of a predator, was actually the train’s driver.

And he was still moving.

She gently cleared her throat when she got to about thirty feet away. He was thrashing, his jaw working, but she couldn’t quite see his eyes, or the bite status of his upper body and arms. Blood rivulets coiled around his skin, giving him what almost looked like tiger stripes from far away.

“Hello?” she called out to him, keeping her voice quiet enough that she didn’t attract a hundred zombies from all around her, but not so quiet that he wouldn’t be able to hear her. “Are you alive or are you dead?”

She slid the rifle tentatively from her back, glancing in a 360 degree all around quickly before she approached any further — she was getting perilously close to the pile of cars, and therefore something of a dead end.

“Hey, I’m talking to you,” she said, and loudly cocked the rifle for effect so he knew she wasn’t messing around. “Are you a person still? Just make a sound if you are.”

A guttural rasp escaped his lips audibly, and his head snapped towards her. His pupils were faded and even though she was still ten feet away from him, his arms whirlwinded in her direction, desperate to get his hands on her. His teeth gnashed.

“Thank you,” she said politely. Since it was short range now, she popped the rifle back into its place and snatched up her Glock, aimed, and his head exploded in a shower of red.

Headshot!

80 UP

“Yuck,” she commented, watching the rest of his bloated dead body sag against the splintered glass, dripping dead blood onto the tracks below.

She should have waited, actually. A prone, stationary zombie would have been the perfect thing to keep around to shoot to keep up her combo score, in case there was a lull.

In fact … Liza had an idea. Stationary targets were her forte, after all. She would figure out how to utilise that to her advantage.

She just needed to collect some tools. The sound of her gunshot had already attracted two loping monsters as far as she could tell from a quick in-place spin. They were both wearing bloodied cop uniforms.

She still had not seen anybody alive.

It made sense … unfortunately. Britain was very proud of its anti-gun culture, but that did mean that the world around her was going to become very full of the undead very quickly.

It also meant that her weapons gave her a definite edge. Over the zombies, and over any other survivors, if it ever came down to that. Liza had seen enough movies to know that it might.

“Here, zombie zombie zombies!” she cried, and then gave a short sharp whistle for good measure. The two dead cops still had to navigate their way around the car pileup. A quick scan of the area revealed three more limping up to her from behind, and then a noise brought her attention to the motherlode.

She hadn’t even noticed this store because it was cordoned off and unsmashed. The local video game store: Game-a-Palooza. It spanned maybe fifteen metres in width and it was all glass. The door handles had been blockaded with nylon rope, and Liza could see why.

At least a hundred zombies were tightly confined, pressed up against the glass, silently moaning and smearing blood with their fingers. And every single one of them was staring right at her.

The rope.

Shit … what was she thinking?

Was she really going to do something so stupid, when she had just promised herself she wouldn’t?

“They’re going to break through eventually anyway,” she told herself, her heart pounding with excitement behind her ribcage, but she wasn’t totally convinced by her own argument.

Liza scraped her hair from her face and made her way towards the game shop. The zombies increased their vigor, pounding and walking against the glass that separated them.

“Hello!” she said brightly, jutting out her hip and resting her hand on it. “Wow. You guys are making me feel like a movie star.” She strutted up and down like she was on a catwalk, and then turned and shot them her best pout. Some of the zombies were scraping their tongues and rotting teeth against the glass, and she could see the doors rattling, the rope straining to keep them all in. Whoever had the key to lock the glass doors and pull down the steel covering must have died. Maybe they were one of the creatures in there now. So clearly someone had improvised and just tied the handles together.

The five approaching zombies outside, and probably more that she could not see, were getting closer and closer every passing second.

How was she going to do this best? Before a reload, she had 14 short-range bullets and 10 long-range bullets. If she could get time to reload, she had 25 more total, but she was not counting on being able to pause and mess around with ammo.

The rope holding the doors together had a long tail at each end of several extra metres. Liza whipped out her knife and sawed at it as close as she could without damaging its overall integrity, and then repeated that at the other end, and tied them together.

“Would you say that was long enough?” she asked her zombie audience. “I think that’s long enough.”

She tied it tight as she could around a half-broken car bumper that was on the far left of the store window, and then wandered over, humming a tune, to tie the other end around a pole on the right. There was a good two-metre gap on the sidewalk between the rope and the store window that a zombie could easily just stroll through to get around the blockage and towards her, but Liza knew how to combat that.

“First things are first,” she told the watching, desperate zombies. “Watch this, it’ll be fun.”

She buttoned her jacket up tight and gripped her knife hard in one hand, and then blew out a breath. The two cop zombies were at the rope now, and the three from the other side were just three metres or so away. Liza very slowly backed away towards the storefront so that the five zombies met in the middle, and then she ducked under the rope with her back to the glass doors.

The five zombies reached the rope barrier and continued to try to walk, grasping at her and opening and shutting their jaws, urgent, hungry. Their arms flailed in her direction, but they couldn’t reach her.

“Great, so we know it works,” Liza said, throwing a smile to her audience behind her, and brandishing her knife above her head. “Sorry you all died. That sucks. But it’s OK — because you are all really going to help my friends and I out by dying this second time. So, thank you.”

She brought her arm down once, twice, three, four, and then five times. That last one was a bitch to pull out, and when she did her blade was covered in disgusting black blood.

Melee 1HKO COMBO! x5

100 UP

100 UP (+10)

100 UP (+20)

100 UP (+30)

100 UP (+40)

600 UP

“Yes!” she cried, raising her blade in the air as the message popped up for her. “Suck it, apocalypse. I am going to make you my bitch.”

The doors behind her rattled and she jumped out of her skin and turned on her heel to face them. Without the tail of the rope on each end, it was starting to look a lot like the general figure of eight someone had wound around the handles was going to come loose.

No matter. She would be ready if they burst through.

“Come and get me!” she said, watching as the doors rattled further. “Come on, come out here and eat me! Eat me!” She waved her arms up and down and bounced on her feet, and then let them fall and sighed.

She stepped tentatively forward. The zombies were pushing hard on the large glass double doors, but it just wasn’t hard enough. The strain on the ropes only sprang back after a little while, and caused them to stagger backwards a couple of steps.

Liza reached out, chewing on her lower lip, and touched the nylon rope again, and then the door rattled and she danced backwards again.

People died in the zombie movies she watched even though they tried their hardest to avoid monsters and to stay alive and to help their friends to survive. If this went wrong, Liza would have died because she had goaded the zombies.

And then, knowing the irony of the universe, the army would arrive and gun the threat down, and the rest of humanity would be perfectly healthy again within one day of her death. She would have died for dancing around like a skewer of fresh meat in front of a pack of predators.

That was a pretty damn awful reason to go.

Which meant she had to do this right.

She sighed and, annoyed, turned around to leave the zombies inside the Game-a-Palooza. She would find the rest of her prey the old-fashioned way: by walking around and searching, and picking them off one by one. It was just that … she had really wanted those combo points.

“Ugh!” she cried, and stormed away, around the barrier she had created of the five zombies leaning over the stretch of rope.

On the floor by the impressive wreckage she spotted something shiny that gave her pause on her way to clamber over the pile of cars. On bending over and picking it up she realised that it could be a shell casing from a gunshot.

Every weapon could help to make the difference between life or death in an apocalyptic scenario, so Liza pinched it between her finger and thumb and looked around carefully for a discarded weapon it might have come from.

Another shell lay right by the crunched up remains of a red Audi, and she bent over to pick it up from under the car.

An arm shot from the shadows beneath the wrinkled bonnet and curled around her wrist, and Liza couldn’t help but scream when she caught sight of a lipless, wide-eyed zombie face using her for leverage to pull itself from its place, trapped beneath the car.

Her left hand shot to her hip and just as the zombie clacked its yellowed teeth together and craned its neck to snap off one of her fingers, to snack on like a baby carrot, Liza’s Bowie knife had sawed through its wrist. She fell back and crab-crawled away, panting, with the dead, cold hand still wrapped tighter than tight around her own. She could feel her heartbeat in her skull.

She rested her wrist on the tarmac and stomped with all of her might on the bloodied stump, causing the third hand attached to her body to stay on the ground while the rest of her moved away. Adrenaline was screaming in her ears, and so when a clattering noise sounded behind her — echoing through the empty high street — she whipped around and fired a single shot straight behind her, her chest rising and falling. She hit nothing made of flesh; the distant shattering noise in the place of silence, or screaming, alerted her to that.

A black cat launched across her path, eyes white with pure primal panic, and disappeared into the bushes beside the train tracks to her right.

She relaxed, first that there was no zombie behind her, and second that there had been no human person that had fallen victim to her uncharacteristic panic.

She made a vow to nip the ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ impulse in the bud. There were plenty of people still alive in this new world, and she refused to be the kind of person that couldn’t be relied upon by them under pressure.

Blowing air carefully through pursed lips, Liza turned back around to the trapped corpse under the car, gargling quietly and waving its stump in her direction, and she closed one eye and pulled the trigger once more.

Headshot!

80 UP

It occurred to her that she didn’t even know what the prompt for killing a zombie with a gun but without a headshot looked like, and that made her smile.

Until another noise — a much, much louder noise than a cat knocking over a hubcap this time — forced her to slowly turn around again.

She had certainly shot something with that bullet aimed at the poor cat, though she thought she hadn’t.

The double doors to the Game-a-Palooza. Slowly but surely, the zombies were filing out of the single pane, now just a pile of bluish hunks on the ground beneath their feet, and shuffling right towards her.

The barrier. It was keeping some of them away, but some were coming towards her to their right, which was blocked by nothing. They were coming for her. A hundred, at least.

Liza stood there and wiped at her brow, with just 22 bullets in her possession and the knowledge that they were absolutely blocking her path back home.

She had given up on this plan for a reason, and the reason had been death. The greatest reason of all to give up a plan.

There was nobody around. No one was coming to save her from the wave of monsters approaching. Behind her was a pile of cars. It had happened. She was pretty much cornered, after all. So much for being smart.

“Shit,” she whispered.