Rachel and I packed up the van and called out to the animals, everyone clambering aboard. We drove out of the small suburb and headed north, hopefully to a warehouse complex stocked to the brim with goods.

  As we headed back up the tiny highway, things were largely calm. The road was flanked with either steep rock faces or thick bushland when not passing through a suburb, so it made sense that zombies were largely missing from this stretch of road. We soon passed the police wagon we’d encountered on the way down.

  “Ooh a police car – there could be guns in there!” Rachel said.

  “Been there, done that,” I replied. “That’s where we got that revolver.”

  “Oh okay, I’m surprised there was no-one in the car still,” Rachel replied.

  “Oh, there was,” I said.

  We soon passed back across the small bridge. Looking over to the larger bridge on the motorway opposite, I noticed that one of the cars stuck on it had its alarm going off and was attracting a small swarm.

  Yikes, glad we’ve over here!

  “I wonder what set off a car alarm?” Rachel said.

  I shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe a seagull flew into it,” I responded.

  “Hmm,” Rachel grunted.

  As we passed the end of our small bridge, I caught a quick glimpse back at the large bridge and noticed a car had caught fire.

  “Did you see that?” I said to Rachel.

  “What’s that?” she said, apparently lost in her thoughts.

  “That car on the big bridge just caught fire. I didn’t know cars could spontaneously combust in this game!” I responded.

  Rachel furrowed her brow and responded not with words but simply a grunt.

  After almost an hour of twisting roads and dodging travelling zombies, we approached what looked to be the start of a new town. Instead of first coming through suburbia, we drove straight into an industrial estate. First up was a huge complex of units surrounded by an almost three-metre-tall chain-link fence. The complex was gated, but one gate had been left open.

  “Let’s turn in here,” Rachel said.

  I drove the van into the driveway slowly, trying to avoid detection as best I could. The five of us sat in silence as we rolled through the complex, noting the names of the units within:

  Trampoline Supplies, Brew Co, BQ Upholsterers and Blue Haven Pools were located inside; nothing taking our fancy so far. We drove further in and saw Party King Balloons, Jane’s Beads and Hardware Max. As we came closer, we spied a green-and-cream-striped gazebo and a barbecue set up under it with a queue of about fifteen zombies apparently all waiting for a sausage.

  “Uh-oh,” I gulped, bringing the car to a halt before they had noticed us. “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  “Okay, there doesn’t seem like a bunch of things we want here anyways,” Rachel responded.

  I put the van into reverse and started slowly backing out, barely able to shift my gaze from the ravenous horde.

  Suddenly, “crunch!”. I reversed over a bag of garbage I had avoided on the way in.

  The group of zombies looked over to us, forgetting the promise of a sausage sizzle for some brains instead.

  “Oh shit! Sorry!” I said, frantically reversing, flicking my head back and forwards so fast I could get whiplash.

  “It’s fine, let’s go,” Rachel said, not terribly concerned.

  I reversed to the gates of the complex, the horde stumbling along slowly in the distance.

  “Let me out here,” Rachel said as we got to the driveway.

  “What? Why?” I exclaimed.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “Let’s keep these ones out of the next warehouse,” she said as she opened the van door and ran over to the gate, pulling it closed and fastening it with the padlock attached. With no sense of urgency, Rachel walked back to the van, zombies approaching the now-closed gates. They groaned their zombie calls through the wire and stared listlessly at us, trapped by the fence. Rachel boarded the van and casually closed the door behind her.

  “They can’t climb tall fences,” she said. “The only way they will get out is to break it down, and that should take quite some time.”

  “Quite some time as in ten minutes, or quite some time like six months?” I asked.

  “Probably about a week,” Rachel said.

  “Righto,” I replied, surprised that a fairly flimsy fence could imprison such a large group for so long.

  We pulled back onto the road and drove further along, coming to another fenced complex, but this time instead of a series of units it housed just one large warehouse.

  “Let’s try this one,” Rachel said.

  The warehouse was labelled ‘Woolworths Distribution Centre’ and had several large roller doors on one side. As we drove in, we found the parking lot empty. We circled the warehouse and decided to pull up close to the exit, should we need a quick escape. Rachel, the dogs and I jumped out of the car fairly eagerly. Artemis, however, sat lethargically in his seat. Rachel walked over to the cat and picked him up, plonking him down on the ground a few paces away.

  “He could probably stay in the car if he didn’t want to get out,” I said to Rachel.

  “Nope. Team members have a maximum radius of one-hundred metres unless they are at a safe house or they get flung back together. With Artemis in the car, and this being a large warehouse, both of us would soon be clunked into the side of the car after a while – and I’ll pass on a concussion for the time being,” she explained.

  “Oh right. Thank god I followed after Rat when he found Jagger!” I said.

  “Yep, or you two could have been magnetised back together,” Rachel noted.

  We headed over to a single wooden door by the first roller door and tried opening it. It was locked.

  “I’ll check the next one,” I said to Rachel, motioning to the door down the way.

  “That’s okay,” Rachel said as she whipped out her hammer, slamming it down on the handle with a thud. “In we go.”

  Rat and Jagger ran into the warehouse first. I stepped in through the door and tasked Rat to his usual routine of checking the place out, making sure to tell him not to go too far. Rachel followed behind us, coaxing Artemis into the door with a small fluffy mouse on a string she pulled out of her pocket. Once inside, she closed the door and slid a chair in front of it to keep it from swinging back open, since she had broken the handle. Inside the huge warehouse were piles and piles of pallets, most wrapped tightly with plastic. Inside were a variety of things, from cans of peas to brooms, kitty litter to toasters. This is fantastic!

  Rat and Jagger ran up and down the aisles, Jagger’s little gym boots occasionally squeaking as he took a sharp turn. Soon they returned to me, apparently encountering no trouble in this part of the warehouse. Rachel and I checked some offices and a toilet block and also found them to be empty.

  We all then moved into the second half of the warehouse, which was separated by a smaller roller door controlled by a pulley chain system on the side. We opened the door and I once again asked Rat to do his rounds. Walking after them, I saw a set of metal stairs that, by the look of them, led up to the roof. The dogs had disappeared to the far side of the warehouse when I heard the all-too-familiar sound of Rat’s alarm-barking.

  “Woof woof woof woof woof!” he shouted.

  Rachel and I looked at each other and headed towards the noise. Soon we heard Jagger howling, his bellows echoing through the aisles. We finally managed to get close to the scene when all of a sudden the noises stopped. I turned the corner to find Rat trotting towards me, wagging his tail as he brought me the foot of a warehouse zombie, steel-capped boot and high-visibility sock included. Further up the aisle, Jagger sat next to the torso of the man who had landed right next to a fallen trolley, its base standing erect like an upended guillotine. The head of the zombie lay in one of the empty bays of the aisle; apparently the trolley’s base had managed to sever it during the dogs’ encounter.

  “Good boys!!” I said to the dogs, accepting the gift of the leg with a slight grimace.

  “Wow, maybe not playing on hard mode after all!” Rachel said. “Glad it was him and not me meeting these two all alone – my head would have come off too if they pushed me into that trolley!”

  I giggled at the absurdly morbid scene and we finished checking the layout. It looked like this was the only man who stayed behind to work during the apocalypse.

  With the sun setting and many pallets to be sorted through, we decided to secure the warehouse and call it home temporarily. We closed up the front gate and moved the van inside the first loading dock, replacing the handle of the front door with one from inside and properly locking that too. After a time, we made our way to a small staff room and prepared dinner for the animals and ourselves.

  “I was just thinking about all those dead zombies,” I said to Rachel. “Well, double-dead zombies I guess. But anyway, I meant to ask, what happens if we die in this game?”

  “Well that depends on the setup. There’s a checkbox in the settings menu called ‘permadeath’ – if it’s ticked when you die, you won’t respawn. If it’s not ticked when you die, you just come back in another body. You’ll lose all your skills, though, and you just reappear in a random location, so it’s not ideal,” Rachel answered.

  “I’d better check that box isn’t ticked then!” I opened my bag, reached over to the cog icon and grabbed towards it, reading down the menu headings. About two-thirds of the way down, I found the box. Permadeath it read. Oh no – it’s ticked! I reached out to remove the tick from the box, but it wouldn’t budge. I grabbed at it, hit it – I even tried thinking really hard about it in case it was some sort of psychic switch, but nothing would get rid of it.

  Closing out of the menu, I looked up at Rachel. “My permadeath is on and I can’t turn it off!” I said, filled with concern.

  “So is mine,” Rachel responded.

  We exchanged glances, now very worried. Turns out our guaranteed afterlife wasn’t guaranteed after all.