We didn’t stop at ten zombies. We didn’t stop at twenty. I figured that I’d made my point after we killed over a hundred of them. With the tiger at my side, it was easy. She could use her weight to bat the emaciated zombies around like a child playing with a balloon. I didn’t push them away though, cutting through them with X-Ray’s sword. My sword.

When I was done, my efforts had barely put a dent in the numbers. What was most surprising, however, was that after I’d sliced through the undead core, taking some of the energy for myself, the fallen bodies would disappear, the physical bodies breaking down, converting into pure mana before the energy would streak away from me.

The destination of the energy was obvious, the pillar of blue and black mana coming down from the sky like a giant symbol that shouted, “hey, I’m evil!”

We vaulted back over the barrier, only to be greeted by a firing squad. I dropped my sword at my feet and put my hands in the air. The tiger growled at the obvious threat, but she didn’t try to attack the group. Honestly, I wasn’t sure if bullets would even harm her, since it took my mana-enhanced sword to cut her tough hide.

“Weird way to say ‘thank you’, but I’ll allow it,” I said.

“Who are you?” a newcomer asked. He stood behind the line of rifles. In his hand, he held a staff, bent at the end just like you would see from a Shepherd’s crook. I didn’t see any sheep though.

“No one,” I said. “I was a lieutenant in the Army, but that’s behind me. Now, I’m just a man trying to get home.”

“Yuri told me that you were supposed to kill ten of those things. But you didn’t stop there. Why?”

“Yuri?”

“One of my sergeants,” the man said, gesturing to the leader of the defenders I’d interacted with. The newcomer tapped one of his men on the shoulder, and the line shuffled awkwardly to the side. I finally got a good look at the man who apparently commanded respect. His hair was mostly gray at the temples, though it was still black on top, a top that was cut short enough for military approval. When he stepped forward, there was a hint of a limp in his stride, as if from an old wound. One eye was dark brown and examined me carefully, while the other was white and unfocused.

His clothing was clean, even if it didn’t fit well. Not that I could complain about that. I was wearing my third – or was it fourth? – pair of clothing that didn’t belong to me. And I was covered in congealed blood from slaughtering zombies.

After we’d taken in each other’s appearances, he nodded, as if making up his mind.

“Welcome. I am Dominic. I won’t make my sergeant a liar, so why don’t you join us?”

“I’d be glad to,” I said. “However, I didn’t bring all of my gear here with me. I left some hidden a few miles from here, so I could find out what all the shooting was for.”

“We should be able to replace your belongings easily enough,” the man said.

“If you give me the time, I will be back in less than an hour. I will also give you a gift.”

“A gift? What did you have in mind?”

“Let’s just say that it’s something that will make you stronger in this new world. I have a feeling you will need it.”

“Not interested,” he cut me off.

“What?”

“I’m not interested in your magic that twists souls. You’re powerful, but every person who’s absorbed the energy from the zombies has gone crazy and started killing some of our own people.”

That was what they were afraid of. That was why all the guns were trained on me.

“I get it,” I said. “What if I told you that I know how to keep that from happening? You can absorb the energy and get stronger from it.”

“We’ve tried everything,” he said.

“Maybe you haven’t.”

“This is not up for discussion. You are welcome among us here, and we are grateful for what you’ve done. But if you insist on peddling this nonsense among my people, I will have to ask you to leave.”

“In that case, I can still provide you with information.”

“Knowledge is power, and we would be grateful.”

“Excellent,” I said. “I’ll be back in under an hour.”

They let me walk away. A part of me was surprised they took a step back and let it happen.

Ten minutes later, I rejoined our merry band of misfits.

“What the hell happened to you?” Andy asked.

“I helped out some people with a Zombie problem. On the bright side, we should have a safe place to sleep tonight, if we can make the last mile before nightfall.”

“Excellent,” Andy said. “We had a few developments here as well. It might interest you, given your clothing.”

“I’m not sure where you’re going with this…” I trailed off.

“One of the mothers in our group was a seamstress,” Carter said, jumping into the conversation. “She can use her mana to repair clothing.”

“No shit!” This was the best news I’d heard since the apocalypse. Yeah, it’s the little things in life.

“Yes shit!” Chavez said, bouncing joyfully on his heels as he joined the conversation. “What are we talking about?”

“Alysa figured out how to repair clothing with her mana.”

“Oh, yeah. I already knew that.”

“We were just telling Ward,” Carter said.

“Oh, right,” the big man said. “You were away.”

“Wow, feel the love,” I said.

“What did you find?” Andy asked.

“People,” I said. “Probably close to a hundred of them.”

After I recounted everything to the small group, we gave an abbreviated version to the civvies.

“You want us to trust our lives and the lives of these kids to people we don’t know?” Susan asked, her brow furrowed. She had a good face for frowning.

“Yes, just how you trusted us with your lives,” I answered. “Please remember that you haven’t known us three days.”

“A lot can change between people in three days,” she shot back. “You have proven that you will protect us. These people have not.”

“They’ve proven that they are defending their people from dungeon. It won’t last longer than they have bullets, but they are doing it.”

“If anything,” Susan said, “you’re making my case stronger.” She folded her arms over her chest in that way my wife always did when she was stubbornly determined to get her way.

“We aren’t going because we need their help,” Carter said. “We’re going because they need ours.” She stepped between me and the young woman. Her height wasn’t a match for Susan’s, but her stocky build made the several inches of difference seem to vanish.

“Oh,” Susan said. “I thought you wanted to get rid of us.”

“Not unless it’s the right thing to do,” I said. “We want to find good people that you can join with, maybe start a new town. These ones might be good people; they might not.” I took a long moment to think carefully about my next words. “From what I saw, I don’t think they will last long against the dungeon. The dungeon won’t run out of bodies, and they will run out of bullets before long.”

“How can you help?”

“We cut our way into the dungeon and take its power.”

“Is that easy?”

“It wasn’t last time,” I shrugged. “But we have more experience and strength this time. Also, the zombies are slow, which means we shouldn’t get overrun. They’re not exactly intelligent either, or they would have killed these people days ago.”

“And if you can’t kill the dungeon?” Susan asked.

“Well,” I said, “then we encourage the people to move out with us, away from the area. I don’t think that’s really an option though.”

“Why not?” She asked.

“Because,” Andy broke into the conversation, “there is no guarantee that anywhere else is better than where they currently are.”

“If they run out of bullets, you said they could all die.”

“You weren’t there,” I said. “There was no panic or even an underlying sense of dread. It was peaceful, calm. The leadership may know they are in a tight spot, but the general population doesn’t. Convincing people who aren’t afraid to leave their relative comfort for the unknown is almost impossible.”

“Can’t we just tell them what’s going to happen?”

“That’s not how it works,” Andy said. “People don’t believe disaster is coming until the army is circling the walls of your city. Even then, it might not be until you run out of food and water that people understand how bad the situation is.”

“How can people be so stupid?” she asked.

“Because it is easier to fool people into believing a lie, than to convince them to believe the truth,” Andy said.

“Which is why we have to go,” I said. “We aren’t doing this for us. We’re doing it for them. They need to understand this new world. If they don’t, every one of them could die.”

“Oh, cut the shitty melodrama,” Chavez said. “We’re doing the right thing, sure. We don’t have to be all noble and brooding about it.”

“I’m not brooding,” I said, my automatic response whenever my wife told me I was brooding. And so what if I was brooding? After the rapid pace of the last week, maybe some thoughtful brooding would be good.

“Yeah, and I’m not missing an arm,” Andy said.

There was a long moment before the group broke out into laughter. Yeah, even with a dungeon of zombies on the horizon, we could still find humor in any situation. After our brief moment of joy abated, we focused on moving out. I took the tiger ahead of me, along with some of our supplies. I would have to tell them that I had more people with me. Not that it would be a problem, given we were bringing lots of food to share.

I packed one of the two cores we had left into my backpack, giving the other to Carter. No need to start off by giving the town more than one core.

“Ready?” I asked the tiger. She chuffed, which I took for agreement, and I headed off.

“See you in an hour,” Andy said, tipping an imaginary hat as I turned back to him.

“Not if I see you first.”

In less than a minute, they were out of sight.

The number of gunshots hadn’t seemed to decrease all that much from earlier in the afternoon. I guessed that even with my contribution earlier that day, the stream of undead hadn’t slowed by much. That seemed to be one of the downsides of killing the undead. Whenever the core was destroyed, the energy in their body was pure corruption, not mana. None of it flowed into me, thankfully. However, I was used to getting some of the energy when I killed a mana-corrupted monster. Now, it was just… disappointing, like I was missing something about the value of killing the undead. Perhaps that was the point though. They were so unlike everything else on the planet, because they weren’t alive in the first place.

With the tiger at my side, I kept only half a mind on my surroundings. The couple of miles rolled away beneath our feet, since we could keep up a good pace, and no wildlife seemed interested in tangling with me. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the enormous tiger loping next to me. They probably thought it was a large, domestic house cat. Yeah, that’s exactly what it was.

I didn’t sneak into the camp the second time. I didn’t circle around to try and avoid notices. I walked up to one of the barricades of cars between houses. I was greeted with a shout.

“I think that’s far enough.” The voice, like many of the others I’d run into here, didn’t carry the expected Texas drawl. Definitely more of a true Southern accent. Virginian gentleman, if I didn’t miss my guess. “I thought they were trying to pull a fast one on me.”

“Didn’t think the man with the tiger was a true story?” I called back, letting some of my mother’s own accent, more Appalachian, leak back into my voice, though I didn’t overdo it. I couldn’t match the culture and high-brow nature of this man’s accent, but it should provide some familiarity immediately.

“Would you have believed it?”

“Of course not. Not a big enough idiot to believe that story. How’d you tame it?”

“Tame?” I looked down at the tiger. “She ain’t tame.”

“Ha!” He laughed. “I like you. Well, come on, if you’re coming.”

I picked up my feet and hurried up to the cars. It was a simple matter to vault to the top of the stack, and the tiger didn’t even rest at the top. She simply landed silently on the other side, next to a very startled man. His handgun came up to point at the tiger, but he did not fire. Her hackles came up, and I thought there would be blood on the ground, but the trigger never pulled, and she never pounced. I hopped off the metal junk pile, next to the man.

He was a beanstalk of a man, unlike the others I’d met. He didn’t have the hard edges that I’d seen in the others before. His eyes seemed to say that he laughed quickly. A bead of sweat ran down his temple under shoulder-length hair, which had been pulled back into a ponytail. His hands held the gun firmly, which I took to mean he’d been shown how to use it, but it shook just enough for me to know that he was about as unfamiliar with guns as a fish on their first day of boot.

“I wouldn’t threaten her,” I said. “I’m not even sure if that peashooter would hurt her. Might just make her angry.”

“She bulletproof or something?” He looked at me, but his eyes still twitched back over to the tiger. Couldn’t blame him, really.

“I’m pretty sure a high-velocity bullet would still work,” I chuckled. “For now.”

“You ain’t joking?”

“World’s all catawampus, and a bulletproof cat is what’s got you?”

“Catawampus? More like it’s been turned on its head.”

“Fair,” I said. “So, you happen to know where I’m going?”

“The big house,” he pointed with his chin. “They mentioned something about a gift. Hope it’s good.”

“More than just a gift,” I said. “If I am right, I’m about to turn your entire existence upside down.”

“Agin?”

“More like the rest of the way,” I winked, then strode off toward the big house. It was a rich manor, compared to the houses around it, no doubt the property of some doctor or executive before the end of the world. Most of the houses around used asphalt shingles on the roof, but this had the classic clay shingles that could only come from ostentatious money. So, likely an executive. A small fountain stood in the front yard, though the water sat still, under the naked cherub that topped the display. The grass in the front yard had grown long now, mana feeding its untidy growth. Double doors graced the front entrance, only marred by the missing glass in the frames.

My approach didn’t go unnoticed by the people in the house or the people milling around in the streets. Everyone stopped to stare at the stranger with the tiger. Okay, they stared at the tiger. I’m pretty sure I could have strolled through the town naked, and no one would have noticed, if the giant cat was just next to me.

“Good to see you again.” Yuri had stepped through the front door to greet me. I could see my gun in the holster at his side. I ignored the twinge of annoyance that gave me, but the reality was that it only had three rounds left in it, and its use to me was quite limited now. I looked over at the pillar of mana in the sky, now visible at this distance from the dungeon.

“It’s good to be seen,” I said. “Are we going to jump directly into a meeting, or is your boss going to make me wait to try and impress upon me how valuable his time is?”

“Oh, he’s gonna make you wait, but I’ll go let him know you’re here.” With that, the big man walked off. There were several soldiers who’d taken up living in the other houses, judging by the mess in the front yards. Several sat lounging in the cool shade of the front porch. When they noticed I was waiting, three of them got up and made their way over. I had to force myself not to roll my eyes at the obvious setup. Dominic either wanted to prove something, or he was looking for me to prove something. It felt like I was the fresh meat in a prison, and they were trying to decide if I a predator or the prey.

“This should be fun,” I said to the tiger next to me.