Sarah woke up to find a notification for a new task filling her vision. Maybe the buzz and the tingle of the notification had interrupted her sleep; she had nothing to complain, though, because she felt rested, as if she had slept for a full day.

She had gone to bed about an hour after finding the book at the armory. She was tired, so tired that she felt as if she hadn’t slept for a long time. And in fact she wouldn’t be able to say for how long she had been awake, since the wave had messed up with her perception of time. Now she had slept soundly and felt full of energy.

The text was written in the same format she had gotten used to, with the letters emitting a tenous glow against the background of her field of view. What was unfamiliar was this background. She was not in a place she could recognize. It looked... off. Too modern to be a room in the Castle.

Reading the notification confirmed her suspicions.

TASK: Retrieve the flamethrower

You are one of the last survivors of the outbreak. The whole city is in ruins, food is scarce and

going outside is always dangerous. There is a weapon that can help you: a flamethrower that is

waiting for you in an abandoned hardware store three blocks away. Use all your caution and skill

to get there and make it back alive.

Reward on success:

- new weapon: Flamethrower (crossphasable)

- 300 XP

- Stealth skill

- increase in Perception, Endurance and Agility

So that was it. A wave had come while she was asleep, taking her off the Castle and sending her to a different realm.

Sarah sat up, grabbed some blood-stained clothes that were lying on a chair beside the bed, put them on, and inspected her surroundings.

The bed that had seemed so comfortable to her was nothing to write home about. Her sound sleep had been due to her being so incredibly exhausted, more than because of the quality of the bed. It looked like it was a century old and the mattress was thin and worn; the cover was basically a rag and the sheets were translucent in places. On the nightstand there was an oil lamp, and Sarah assumed that there was no power in the whole city. The walls were stained with blood and the ceiling was partially black with soot. There was only one window, but several planks of wood had been nailed to the edges in order to block anything from entering through it. In between the planks an orange light made its way into the room: the blood of the setting sun.

In the almost complete silence there was a subdued noise coming from outside, some sort of murmur that sent a chill down Sarah’s spine. She went to the window and looked outside. The room was on a second floor in what seemed to be a downtown block. But the city was dark and silent, devoid of anything resembling a living, breathing urban center.

Also, dead bodies walked around the streets.

The zombies dragged their feet and opened their mouths to emit what they maybe meant as words, but all Sarah could hear from the distance was that sound she’d hear before, like a constant murmur.

In the distance, Sarah saw what must be the warehouse. She noticed it because there was a point of blue clarity coming from it, the result of her Perception trait telling her that something important was in there. The flamethrower. That’s where she would be headed.

She took a brief walk through the rest of the apartment. It was in disarray, and the only thing that had been taken good care of were the barriers blocking all entrances. Doors and windows were well secured as to avoid any surprises. Evidently, the apocalypse has been here for a while, Sarah thought.

She went to the bathroom and relieved herself in the darkness. Luckily, there was still running water, so she could wash her hands and face. She used a lighter to see inside the bathroom and found a dead man in the bathtub. He had shot himself in the head, and his blood was splattered all over the wall, which the bullet had also cracked, drawing an explosion of black lines. She grabbed the gun and checked that it still had a couple of bullets. The corpse was recent, since it didn’t smell. Sarah thought of touching it to see if it was still warm but she shuddered at the idea and desisted.

She toured the apartment once more but this time she went around picking up stuff. She grabbed a backpack and filled it with a working flashlight, a change of clothes, two bottles of water, a can of beans, a kitchen knife, a fork, a spoon, some metal wire, several rags, a lighter, a hammer, a short rope, a bunch of nails, and the man’s gun. Then she remembered the bit about the flamethrower being “crossphasable” and wondered if the weapons she had in the medieval realm had been carried over to this one. Invoking her Inventory, she saw that they were still there, but now they were different weapons. The small sword was now a switchblade (Really? she groaned internally), the big sword was a pistol, and the bow and arrows had been translated as a sniper rifle.

Interesting.

She went to the window and leaned forward. Retrieve sniper rifle, she thought, and the rifle appeared beside her. She mounted it on the window, passing it through the space between two wood planks; whoever had nailed them to the wall knew what they were doing. She checked that the rifle had a silencer, looked through the crosshairs, centered them on a zombie’s head, and took a shot.

The zombie died again and fell to the floor, where it remained as an inert lump. The shot had been clean and accurate. Sarah waited a while to see if it stood up again, but it didn’t.

Skill active: Hunt

So she was a zombie hunter now. Nice.

The zombie remaining dead was a good sign. It meant that these zombies were like the ones in most movies and TV shows, where you take them out by blowing up their heads.

That was all she needed to know. The sun was already setting. It was time to go outside.

* * *

The air outside was chilly and charged with electricity. Or at least so it seemed to Sarah. She had fastened the backpack tightly to her body using all the stripes and hooks. She had feared that the corridors of the building itself were infested with undead but the stretch from the apartment to the front door in the ground floor had been clear. Now, though, she was crouching behind a dumpster, waiting.

Her Perception came to her rescue again. Even though the dumpster and other objects were blocking her line of sight, she could tell where the zombies were because they appeared like diffuse patches of very faint blue. The downside was that she needed to concentrate with all her might to be able to see this. Otherwise, her sight was just ordinary, and she could see almost nothing in the city that was quickly going dark as the sun hid in the horizon.

This was a complete runover. I doubt there are many living here, she thought. I might even be the only one.

She wondered what had happened to Maggot and Uberyn. Had they been sent to this realm too, and were they hiding in other apartments in the same city? Or were they struggling in other worlds? Or perhaps they were still in the medieval world, wondering what had happened to her. If only...

Oh, fuck.

She realized now that she didn’t have the book anymore. It hadn’t crossed realms with her.

I don’t know how I will appear to you exactly, Sumiko had told her when she climbed into the tank to log into the game. You will be in time dilation, so whatever the case, we won’t be able to talk in real time. It was evident now that Sumiko was sending her messages and the game translated them in the form of a book. She pictured Sumiko typing a quick message for her and the game updating the book with it. But since time ran so much faster ingame, it was not an immediate process: she would receive the messages several minutes or maybe hours after Sumiko had sent them. Talking to her live would be impossible: it would resemble the part of Lord of the Rings where Merry and Pippin try to maintain a conversation to the Ents but the trees take long hours to say a couple of words.

So here was the deal: Sumiko would let her know about anything important that she could find out, but she would tell her only in the form of very brief messages, and Sarah would need to check the book once in a while in order to receive them.

And for that, she needed to have the fucking book.

Her thoughts were cut short when she noticed that one of the zombies roaming around was getting close. Another undead, a woman, followed him a few steps behind. They were not coming to her, but they would smell her soon (if they could smell, that is). She needed to act quickly.

Retrieve switchblade, she commanded with her mind. The suicidal man’s gun had no silencer so using it now would be a death sentence; she needed something to kill the zombies without making any noise. The switchblade appeared in her hand. She got ready.

The first zombie grunted as it reached the dumpster. It had smelled Sarah, or perhaps it just let out an involuntary sound, like the other undead. Sarah didn’t stop to ask. She sat up suddenly, turned around, lurched forward, and sunk the switchblade into the zombie’s left eye. It penetrated so deeply into its head that she needed to hold it tight to avoid losing it when the corpse fell backward and thumped on the street.

+1 XP

Oh, come on. Are you kidding me?

The second zombie, the woman, looked at her with hungry eyes. It hissed and pushed forward, stumbling upon the first one, and extended its arms, searching for Sarah’s neck. But Sarah was faster. She dropped to the ground, tackled the zombie, and received its head with the switchblade pointing upward. This time she had to struggle for quite a while to recover the weapon. Only after the fact she wondered if she could just store it in her Inventory whenever it got stuck and then retrieve it immediately afterward, so that it would be in her hand again.

+1 XP

Only one experience point per zombie? This is so shitty. You made up some shitty mechanics, Game Master, Sarah thought.

Skill acquired: Sneak Attack

OK, I guess that’s nice anyway.

Sarah looked up and noticed that there were several more zombies coming down the street. They didn’t seem to have noticed her, but she decided not to find out. She sprinted in the opposite direction, her backpack still tightly fastened to her body. It was lucky that her shoes were now a pair of good sneakers, worn out from use but still completely adequate for this task: silent, comfortable, and performant.

The only problem was she was taking a detour. The warehouse was three blocks away in the direction the zombies were coming from. There was the flamethrower, waiting for her, waiting to unload its deadly spit all over the undead.

Her Perception was tingling again now, and Sarah realized she was already in trouble. Several bluish vaguely contoured shapes started appearing in her visual field. They were behind buildings and cars, still out of sight, but coming at her, all of them coming at her, always coming at her. Or so it seemed.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

She ran faster, trying to reach the intersection and cross the street before the undead got to that point. It was no longer a priority to keep advancing silently; now, speed was everything that mattered. She panted and huffed as her feet hit the hard ground one after the other, left, right, left, right, left right left right leftrightleftrightleftright until she reached the corner and had to kick a zombie in the knee to go first. The cracking sound was really satisfying.

Fuck!

They were in this other block too. They were coming from everywhere: from behind the cars, from inside the buildings. Suddenly, half of Sarah’s field of vision was bluish, and her heart was pumping so hard that she could hear it without difficulty.

It’s a fucking swarm.

What to do?

What to do?

She started despairing. She had received a boost in her Intelligence in the previos mission, but right now she felt like that Intelligence was nowhere to be found. She was running wildly, with no direction; effectively running into the undead, almost giving herself to them.

She could hear that murmur now, louder than before. The zombies were babbling nonsense, grunting in anticipation as they closed in on her, eager to get her brains. It was almost as if she could understand them, although they weren’t really saying any words. Only that now, at ground level, the sound...

Oh, for the love of all fucks. That’s it!

If these zombies were indeed like most zombies she had seen in other fictional universes outside the Anderworld, they couldn’t climb. So anything from the second floor up would be safe... from zombies at least. There might be dangerous people in the buildings. But she would worry about that later. Now she only needed to figure out how to go up instead of forward.

A block ahead there was a bus that had crashed into a building. It was worth trying. Sarah ran, ran, ran until her sprint was cut short, and then she ran into the zombies. She stuck the switchblade into an undead’s eyesocket. The zombie fell backward.

Store switchblade. Retrieve switchblade.

It worked.

She drove the blade into another zombie’s head by impaling it behind from the neck.

Store switchblade. Retrieve switchblade.

The weapon was in her hand again.

A zombie (one who had been just a kid when it passed away) jumped on her, trying to bite her leg.

Hey, that’s not where the brain is. Don’t you have zombie parents to explain this stuff to you?

She stabbed the zombie kid in the head.

Store switchblade. Retrieve switchblade.

But she couldn’t keep doing this. They were too many for that.

She didn’t care anymore about finishing them off; she just pushed them aside, kicked them, slashed their eyes or throats or limbs just to stun them and get them out of her way.

Even so, it was hard to advance. There were many, so many of them. A fucking swarm.

And the sound, the ever-present murmur coming out from them all at the same time.

She grabbed the dead man’s gun and started shooting.

She ran out of bullets.

There was no time to recharge. There was no time for anything.

She kept running, kicking, slashing.

When she got to the next intersection, with the crashed bus just a few meters away, she was exhausted. It was as if there was no more air in her lungs, and they couldn’t take any more air from outside. Her body was trying to shut down.

No.

No!

She ran a bit more.

Then, she jumped.