024 – Nice Stroll

Time to Seal: 01:02

I wished Hell had a little more respect for the tropes. I could accept zombies not just being slow shamblers, just waiting for a hero with an axe. I could accept them running.

What I really didn’t like was the fact that they were not dumb. Before I could even shift, a nearby zombie picked up a brick and threw it at me, with remarkable precision. It was only because I was already running for cover that I didn’t get hit. Others didn’t bumrush me either. They grouped up, blocking my path, before they slowly approached.

“Is the fire station safe?” I asked.

“Only in the sense that it is a building with controllable entrances. They can enter there, just like the animals affected by the Wild Hunt could.”

I cursed. I needed to get back there, and fast. Down to 4 ATP, I just needed to ensure I killed one of the zombies with every shift; two if I wanted to use that new skill.

Time to see how the impala’s horns would do if the enemy wasn’t voluntarily impaling itself. And I had picked just the right time. Behind me, only now visible thanks to the impala’s insane field-of-view, one of them had calmly dropped to one knee and was aiming a pistol at me. I activated the Focused Fury buff and dashed toward the approaching group.

“If you want to kill, you need massive physical trauma, brain damage or spine damage,” Gabriel explained. “They are level 1, not at all stronger or faster than they were in life. But they retained their skills.”

With the gunman behind me, I didn’t want to jump. I put my horns down and charged into the group at full speed. If my math was even slightly accurate, I was about four to five times as dangerous as a regular impala. Now to figure out if that was at all dangerous for a regular New York City pedestrian.

One of them I got in the arm, shearing through flesh, barely slowing him down. The one to his right my horn caught square in the center, ripping through bones and muscle. According to the experience notification and the ring, that must have qualified as ‘massive physical trauma’, awarding me my 1 ATP refund. I’d need to kill another in a minute to get back to four. Bullets whizzed by.

“Most of them are just about as dangerous as you have been before this night,” Gabriel went on, “never having been in a fight before. But some are like Frank and know how to hurt you. Stay sharp and run if you have to. This is not the time to grind for experience.”

Punctuating Gabriel’s statement, I saw Liz’s health bar drop on my party UI. With her skill set she shouldn’t ever be the first one to get hit. But then, our party had a severe lack of frontliners. With one stupidly running through the streets, and all.

The zombies lived up to Gabriel’s explanation. I got a handful more, shredding them with charge attacks, enhanced by the impala’s insane speed. What she had failed to mention—or maybe it was new, too—was their cooperation. Soon I was running into impromptu barriers, where they had piled up anything they could find. I could probably jump those, but I also saw police uniforms in those clusters. Jumping would put me on a very predictable, very shootable trajectory.

I went looking for other paths to the fire station. They couldn’t barricade all the streets.

In a phone shop I went past, one sidewalk-facing TV was running, showing Jamie, standing behind a podium, wearing a black suit. Behind him was a coffin and a large printout of a photo—of me. It was supposed to show my funeral. I had only stopped for half a second when I’d seen the screen. Enough time for the Wyrm to achieve its goal.

Two shots rang out, and then my entire torso was pain. My body skipped the part where it registered being shot and went straight to the part where it was deciding whether to continue. I couldn’t see the remainder of my health bar and stumbled, only dodging the next two shots by nothing but luck.

“Eve!” Gabriel cried out.

I managed to switch to Angel’s shape before my consciousness faded. The near-lethal pain became nothing but memory as I resumed running, zig-zagging. Looking back, I saw that the shots had gone all the way through and penetrated the sidewalk, right in front of the TV. That meant the shooter was firing from a high angle. Never slowing down, still zig-zagging, I crossed the street.

Sticking to that building, I continued to advance. At this angle the shooter shouldn’t be able to get off a shot.

[“I thought the Wyrm wasn’t going to try and kill me anymore? Perks of having a devil?”]

“I’m going out on a limb here, but maybe something of what we’ve said, or done, earned us, yes both of us, its ire. This is pure conjecture, but maybe—just maybe—I shouldn’t have called it broken.”

Awesome. Getting on the shit-list of one of the four most powerful entities in existence. Fucking great.

“Sorry,” Lucy added—very, very, quietly.

Despite not matching the impala’s speed, this shape outclassed it in every other stat, while providing a lower profile. Which allowed me to weave between the zombie citizens with ease.

Whatever allowed them to communicate and organize, it wasn’t speech, and it wasn’t a hive mind. One of them spotting me didn’t mean others knew exactly where I was. Thus I was able to snap a neck here or there, keeping my ATP at 4/6—the ring wouldn’t ever allow me to go beyond what I had when I shifted—and even enabling me to use the Focused Fury. I wished I had some of Stephen’s food. I was tired, hungry and could really use the stat buff.

So far the others had been holding their ground. Health had dropped, but had been steadily replenished. Certainly Annika’s work, with her Healer class.

But now, multiple people dropped at once, and not just a little. I shifted direction. There was no more avoiding those barriers. I had to help the others.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Only that I was too late. Another similar attack struck, dropping Jamie down to less than 20%. And then Frank’s health dropped to zero and he vanished from my party interface.

I howled and charged at the barrier, weaving behind car wrecks where I could, more shots whizzing by. I didn’t need to avoid getting hit. I only needed to avoid death, and I needed to avoid near-death happening more than once per minute. Everything else I could survive by swapping between Angel and the impala, and killing at least one of them before I swapped.