Surprisingly, Bragg was easy to convince. We just called his name, and he followed us. He showed about as emotion about it as a zombie, but he did it. And not like those zombies that we’re currently dealing with — the ones that want to rip open your chest and pull out the core of energy that eventually becomes your central focus for your soul and spirit. Yeah, not that zombie. Bragg was a useless, shambling zombie that didn’t have a brain.

We headed north, staying on the freeway as long as we could. I’d never walked in the middle of an interstate before. I mean, it isn’t really the kind of thing that people do, but there I was, making my way up the interstate. There were some cars on the road, but since the blackout happened in the middle of the night, we weren’t surprised the roads were empty.

We did, however, encounter another person. We knew immediately that something was wrong. When we saw the person standing, unmoving, on the freeway. Since I was at the front of the group — because I’m still a dumbass — I held up my hand, and we came to a stop. For a long moment, I watched the person standing there.

“He’s dead, Jim,” Chavez said to my left.

“What?” Carter asked.

“Nerd alert,” I muttered. “We got a Trekkie in the group.”

“You got the reference,” Chavez said back. “Anyway, looks dead.”

“Agreed. No breathing. No other movement. It’s unnatural.”

“Should we shoot it?” Andy asked from the rear. He watched our back and made sure Bragg didn’t fall behind.

“Might draw attention,” I said. “I’ll sneak up and take it out with my sword. You can shoot it if something happens.”

“Roger,” Andy confirmed, fully in military mode.

I handed my MP5 to Chavez, drew the sword from my back, and stalked forward. The figure never moved as I approached from behind. Its eyes were glassy as it stood at the edge of the freeway, looking out over the guardrail. As if it was keeping watch.

As I came closer, the stench of death confirmed in my mind that this was not a person anymore. Whoever the body belonged to was long gone. From my watching of zombie movies, the best way to kill them was to damage their head. As I approached closer, I pulled the sword back, then swung it like a batter swinging for the fences. The head sailed from the dead person’s shoulders. The zombie turned and attacked me.

“Shit!” I yelled and swung again, lopping off part of the thing’s torso and completely removing the right half of its body. Still, the dead thing came at me, its remaining hand reaching for my throat. How it knew where my throat was, I had no idea, but I wanted to avoid finding out. Instead of striking at the undead’s body, I swung for its core, and the blade of my sword sliced cleanly through. The corpse immediately dropped limply to the ground.

“What the shit!?” I yelled. I had thick globules of blood clinging to my new, clean pants.

“Don’t you know nothin’?” Chavez yelled from where he stood about fifty feet away. “You’re supposed to cut its head off.”

“I did cut off its head!” I roared back. “That was the first thing I did. What the hell zombie doesn’t die when you cut off its head?”

“Magic zombie, I guess.” Chavez shrugged. They made their way over and looked at the grisly pieces of the body.

“Yeah, that’s a zombie for sure,” Chavez said, kicking half of the headless torso.

“I had to cut through its core,” I said. “The head didn’t matter. Didn’t even seem to make it unable to see me. It still came right at me.”

“Can we just get out of here?” Carter asked. “Usually, zombies come in hordes, right?”

We did just as she suggested, making our way along the freeway. We had to stop several times to cut down more zombies. This time, though, I cut off their legs first. Though they still tried to crawl, soundlessly pursuing me, they were much too slow after that, and I could destroy the core in a few, precise cuts.

I was quickly learning that I was not a swordsman. I’d seen X-Ray practice with it for hours before we’d ship out for missions. Of course, he’d never used it, but it was his prerogative to waste time on whatever exercise he thought was useful. We each had that option. A pang of loss shot through me when I thought about my team and their odd quirks. Who knew that X-Ray’s sword would be so valuable to me now, using it to cut down zombies in relative silence.

“I figured out why there are zombies,” I said, pointing to the mana funnel in the sky, spiraling down into the center of a cemetery. The grounds looked like the undead had ripped themselves free of the ground. The corpses were more than just zombies, some of them having no skin left, leaving only bones clattering about moving. “That mana funnel is probably powering them.”

“What mana funnel?” Carter asked, looking around.

“That one right there,” I said, pointing to the giant column of energy. How could she miss it? “Bear, I don’t see anything,” Andy said.

“Oh, right. It might be too far for you to see. There’s a mana funnel coming straight down and into the middle of the cemetery.”

“Well, that’s a dead giveaway,” Chavez quipped.

“How long have you been waiting to use that?” Carter snorted with derision. “Since the first zombie,” Chavez answered. “Just couldn’t find the right time.”

“Let’s get out of here before those things check up here for what happened to the other zombies.”

The thing about being on an overpass looking down is that if you want to go anywhere, you have to follow the road down. We didn’t see more zombies until we crested the top of the overpass and could see the rest of the way down to where the overpass met the flat ground. There, at the base of the ramp, were a dozen or so zombies, with a few others lumbering slowly toward the line.

“What do we do?” Carter asked.

“We sure as hell don’t wait for them to get more numbers. I’m the point of the spear. Everyone else line up on me. Take out the legs of the ones on the side, and I’ll punch through the middle.”

We moved down the road at a trot, the spear only marred by Bragg’s positioning. His movements were not much more fluid than that of the zombies. The zombies moved toward us as well, their arms outstretched, fingers flexed to grab onto anything they could. I focused on the walking corpses in front of me. I saw the spray of blood, as the rifles cracked, but I blocked it out. I held my sword out to the side as I ran, and for a moment, I imagined I looked more like a character in a cheesy Anime than a soldier.

The sword met no resistance as I cut through the bodies. I didn’t bother to aim for the cores, just swinging to cut them down and barrel the rest of the way through.

In a protracted fight, if we were trying to kill all of them, we would have had difficulty. Andy was not at his best, and we were badly outnumbered. But punching in, creating a hole, and working our way out. Hell, I’d run this play several times in football, even if I didn’t need it in my position. I was carrying the ball, and my teammates were there to help push me over the finish line. Of course, the defensive line was undead zombies, but that made them only slightly dumber than your average lineman anyway, and these were only skin and bones.

After my first swing, I flattened the five-zombie deep defensive line. I felt bones break under my feet, and bodies went flying in front of me. I felt a few fingers try to grab onto me, but I lowered my left shoulder and punched through. I didn’t stop moving, either. The zombies didn’t seem terribly fast — they were just generic zombies, apparently — and I was grateful that we were able to simply walk faster than them once we made it through.

Everyone, aside from Bragg, had come out the other side unscathed. Chavez was dragging Bragg along the ground by his arm, while a zombie had latched onto his leg, the teeth cutting deeply into the man’s calf. I didn’t hesitate to move back and decapitate the zombie, followed by cutting its core apart. I lifted Bragg over my shoulder, yet again, and we hauled ass away from the overpass.

“Dammit,” I said as I lowered Bragg to the ground when we were finally a safe distance from the horde.

Despite the deep wounds, the leg wasn’t bleeding. I wasn’t certain if that was because of some kind of zombie… saliva? Did zombies even have saliva? Bragg wasn’t bleeding, regardless. The wound had scabbed over, but it didn’t look like the wound was bad. When I looked at it with my mana sight, I was stunned. The wound festered with black mana, but the mana seemed to seep out of the wound like it found no purchase on Bragg’s body.

“What is it doing?” Carter stood next to me, and she stepped out of the way as the black mana left Bragg’s leg, seemed to catch on a breeze, and sailed smoothly away back toward the cemetery.

“When someone’s bitten by a zombie, ain’t they supposed to turn into one?” Chavez joined us, also looking down at Bragg’s leg.

“Guess that’s not how mana zombies work?” I said aloud.

“Ow!” Bragg reached down and touched his leg where he’d been bitten.

“Shit!” Chavez leaped back and raised his rifle at Bragg.

“Whoah there!” Andy said, stepping next to Chavez. “Ease off the trigger finger there, cowboy.”

“Bragg, you okay?” Carter sank so she was almost on a level with Bragg sitting on the ground.

Bragg just shrugged. “It hurts.”

“Yeah, you were bitten,” I said.

“That why there are teeth marks in my leg?” Bragg said it deadpan, and I couldn’t quite tell if he was being sarcastic or not.

“Uh, yeah. I figure the pain must have brought you out of whatever was bothering you.”

“Oh.” Bragg looked down at his chest where his core used to shine brightly like a beacon, but it now sat dull and dark. “Yeah, that’s disappointing.”

Just the way he spoke seemed off to me. Bragg had been a confident young man. Now, his eyes didn’t flick from side to side when we moved. His face didn’t show his relaxed, lazy grin. There was just something off.

“You think you can walk?” I asked. “We’re heading north. You good with that?”

He just shrugged and got to his feet. He didn’t ask for his gun. He didn’t ask how far north we were going. I wasn’t sure what to expect when — if — he came back to his senses, but it wasn’t that.

“Cool,” Chavez said, lowering his rifle. “Let’s get out of this town. The big town is just creepy like this.”

“Corpus Christi is much bigger,” Andy said.

Chavez shot him a glare. “Shut up, man.”