The only thing I can do is say “Oh, shit.”

I am absolutely terrified. One zombie was bad enough, and this? This is way, way more than just one zombie.

The giant zombie is about twice my height and five times my girth. Each of its disproportionately large fingers is about the size of my thigh and the hands themselves are pretty much just the fingers. Like, there’s a tree trunk size arm and then boom, fingers.

It has no neck. The head is nothing more than a hill on its shoulders and the only reason I can tell it even is a head is because of the eyeball hanging out of one of the eye sockets – the other socket filled with some sort of fleshy mass I don’t look at for too long – and the mouth slash across it full of sharp, spiny teeth.

It charges at us. I stare in horror as its massive weight bears down on me.

‘Move, Alex! You have to run!’ I scream at myself in my head.

I do not move. I stand there, frozen, waiting for death.

It curls its fingers and prepares to crush me flat. The fist falls. The only thing I can do is close my eyes.

My eyes which fly open in shock when something crashes into my side and throws me clear. My glasses fall off my face but I can still tell it’s Jin Hailin.

“This is a lot of zombies,” he tells me.

Thanks, man, never would’ve known!

He says something else but the only word I catch is ‘yi neng’.

Yi neng, yi neng… Oh. My eyes widen.

Snowflake.

In the moment that I take a breath in preparation for yelling his name, doubt almost overcomes me.

This is a really big zombie backed up by a horde of normal zombies. What can Snowflake even do? Will he even come? Am I really sure that he even exists and the whole thing wasn’t just some illusion cooked up by my tired, desperate-for-human-contact mind?

I guess there’s only one way to find out.

“Bai Xuehua!”

There’s a single heart-stopping moment where I think nothing will happen, then a miniature snowstorm materialises in front of me and Bai Xuehua steps out. He is facing the giant monstrosity.

In that moment, I can’t help but think that his back is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

“I am here, my liege,” Bai Xuehua says without turning around. “Fret no longer, for I, Bai Xuehua, will take care of everything.”

He flicks open his fan, and with a wave of his hand, a great swathe of ice appears, freezing all the normal zombies to the ground.

With just one move, he’s dealt with 99 of our problems. Now there’s just one. A very, very big one.

While all the normal zombies moan and claw uselessly at the ice, the giant zombie screams in anger and smashes the ice trapping its feet, killing a few normal zombies as well.

Man, I really need to call them something other than ‘normal zombie’ and ‘giant zombie’. Perhaps, tier-1 and tier-2?

Bai Xuehua is unfazed when the tier-2 starts charging towards him. He flicks his wrist and the ribs of his fan elongate and flatten until he is holding a fan of blades.

He lightly kicks off the ground, and I watch with wide eyes as he jumps higher than any human should be able to.

But then again, he’s not quite human, is he?

Bai Xuehua’s arm blurs and an ice blade is now lodged in the tier-2’s face. The optic nerve is cut and the eyeball falls to the ground. It rolls in front of me. Jin Hailin is the first to react and kicks it away from us.

The tier-2 is now blind. (Not that I know how it was seeing before, with its eyeball hanging out like that.) It roars and gropes around, finally grabbing the head of a weakly flailing tier-1. The tier-2 crushes it and I have no idea what it’s trying to do, but then it mashes the matter into its eye socket.

I think I’m going to vomit.

Somehow, an intact eyeball is in that zombie mush. I don’t know how the tier-2 starts seeing out of it, and I don’t want to. All I need to know is that it just does.

The tier-2’s attention is fixed firmly on Bai Xuehua. Bai Xuehua, who evades the clumsy swings of the zombie with grace and artfully flowing robes. Like, what the actual hell. You’d think he was an aerokinetic with the way the cloth moves in the air.

He uses his fan blades to inflict wounds on the tier-2 but never goes in for the kill. He seems to be waiting for something. What that something is, I don’t know.

I’ve been so absorbed in the fight that I barely notice Jin Hailin getting up and dragging me to my feet.

“The others,” he says.

Right, the others! What happened to everyone else?

I nod at Jin Hailin and we head off. We find Xiuying-jie helping chip Kui Renshu out of the ice with a dagger. Looks like he accidently got caught up in Bai Xuehua’s groundfreezing move. Lu Yang is in the middle of the horde killing the trapped zombies, and the non-combatants, Ms Lu and Su Xinya, have moved back into the relative safety of the shopping mall.

I unsheathe my knife to help Kui Renshu as well while Jin Hailin runs to Lu Yang’s side. Xiuyin-jie looks up at me and then Bai Xuehua. She raises an eyebrow. Kui Renshu is also chattering, too fast for me to pick anything out but I figure he wants to know what’s up with Bai Xuehua as well.

I puzzle over how to explain it to them with my limited vocabulary. In the end, I just shrug.

“Yi neng,” I say. I figure that it means something like ‘special ability’ or ‘superpower’. “Can call people over.”

I can’t currently remember the word for ‘explain’, so I just follow up with, “Chinese is not good. Don’t know how to say it.”

Xiuying-jie and Kui Renshu look at each other. They look back at me.

“Sorry,” I offer.

Xiuyin-jie sighs and ruffles my hair.

“Don’t worry about it.”

Kui Renshu chips in with reassurances as well, but this guy always talks too fast and too much; I get maybe a third of it.

“Hey!” Lu Yang calls us over. He’s found the rest of the team that came before us. Kui Renshu breaks free of the ice with last swing of Xiuying-jie’s dagger, and the three of us rush over to Lu Yang.

Most of the first team is dead. Only the old lady, the child, and the leader survived. I don’t know how long the leader has to live though; she’s in pretty bad shape. There’s a big chunk taken out of her waist and adrenaline seems to be the only thing keeping her standing.

I’m given the task of ushering the old lady and kid over to the safety of the shopping centre. The combatants will continue to slay the tier-1s while Kui Renshu tries his best to save the other team leader. I hand the medical kit I was carrying over to him before leaving.

The old lady seems shaken up but has no major injuries, and the child hasn’t stopped crying and clinging to her. I really can’t blame him. I, too, want to curl up and cry until this apocalypse bullshit goes away. Nearly all the people in his team were killed in front of him too. No child deserves to see that.

Once we’re back in the shopping centre, Ms Lu helps comfort the kid while Su Xinya bandages the old lady’s cuts and scrapes. I nervously look around. The five of us here are all non-combatants, and my trump card is still fighting the tier-2. Ms Lu, Su Xinya and I could probably take on a zombie each, but any more than three and we’re screwed.

An infuriated howl draws my attention to the battle between the tier-2 and Bai Xuehua. Both of the tier-2 zombie’s arms have been destroyed and its legs are solidly frozen to the ground. It seems Bai Xuehua is finally ready to unleash his finishing move.

Bai Xuehua does another of his gravity defying jumps and this time, when he raises his fan, it turns into a massive spear of ice that takes about five seconds to form. Oh, so that’s why he focused on immobilising the tier-2 first.

When it’s done forming, he drives it straight down and it plunges through the giant zombie’s head and through its body. Now held upright by the spear, the tier-2 doesn’t die immediately. It struggles futilely for a few more moments before finally expiring.

Bai Xuehua lands nimbly on the ground. Another ice fan forms in his hand and he flicks it open leisurely. He looks as if he’s just finished with a relaxing stroll instead of a fight against a monster.

I can’t help the smile that stretches across my face. I can’t believe it. He’s really done it. He’s really killed the giant zombie!

I trot towards him, to thank him, praise him, worship him; whatever, but all of a sudden I am completely and utterly drained. My legs give out beneath me. I mean, I’d expected them to do that sometime anyway, but this is different, somehow. This isn’t the ‘I just narrowly avoided dying’ collapse. This is the ‘I have been doing intensive exercise for an entire week without eating or drinking and suddenly the consequences are upon me’ type of collapse.

The edges of my vision start to fade. I’m too weak to even catch myself. Somehow, Snowflake moves fast enough to stop me from breaking my nose on the concrete. An expression I am intimately familiar with crosses his face.

It’s the ‘Oh man I majorly fucked up this time’ look. It’s quite strange to see it on his face when all he’s ever looked like before is calm and composed. Granted, I haven’t known him for that long, but he had an unflappable air about him even when he was in battle.

The last thing I see is him plunging his hand into the chest of the giant zombie and shoving whatever he finds there into my mouth.