They arrived at the outskirts of Heart's Glow that evening, just as the sun was beginning to set. A big green billboard which read, "Welcome to Heart's Glow," had been placed along the side of Route 90, but the letters were peeling off and the sign itself was rusty and it looked like it was about to fall over. It was also riddled with bullet holes.

  "Well, that's encouraging," Stu muttered. "This is it, huh?"

  "This is it," Luna said. But then she frowned, her eyes fixed on something up ahead.

  Stu followed her eyes, and found himself frowning as well -- Route 90, the four-lane highway that had led them to Heart's Glow and which -- according to their map -- cut right through the center of town, had been blocked off. Half a dozen junked-out cars, along with two big piles of debris, had been positioned in the road, making it impossible for them proceed.

  Luna applied the brakes, then made a right turn, taking the vehicle off-road. They crossed over a grassy area, maneuvered around a median, and eventually landed on another road -- this one had not been blocked off -- which brought them to the edge of town, but in a roundabout kind of way. It was only Route 90 that had been blocked off, apparently; they could still enter Heart's Glow through side roads and surface streets.

  "Who put those cars there?" Lucky wondered. "Why did they block the highway?"

  "Hard to say," Luna said. "Could have been a trap, set up by bandits. The Butcher's boys, maybe. That's why I didn't stop."

  "Bandits?" Stu inquired. "You think there could be bandits here?"

  "Could be," she said, shrugging. "Could be the zombies killed 'em off years ago, too." She gave them both a glance. "We're in uncharted territory here. Don't forget."

  "How are we doing on fuel?" Lucky asked.

  She tapped the fuel gauge on the glider's dashboard. "We're down to two percent."

  "How far will that get us?"

  "Another nine or ten miles, maybe, depending on how hard I hit it. Not enough to get us back to Meku, and not enough to get us to Pretoria. If we don't find that dynamo fluid..."

  "We will," Stu said, trying to sound confident. Looking ahead at the city of Heart's Glow, however, he found himself wondering. From what he could see, the town had been fairly large, with a population of perhaps thirty thousand before the outbreak -- there were no big skyscrapers, but he could see a couple of twenty-story high-rises in the distance, along with some larger buildings to the south, situated upon a set of rising hills. There seemed to be a great deal of sprawl; there were fast food joints and strip malls all along Route 90.

  Luna drove the glider into the parking lot of one of these strip malls. This seemed to be a pretty quiet area; the parking lot abutted a kind of park, full of leafy trees. She parked the glider under one of these trees, about eighty feet from the strip mall itself. The sun was sinking fast now; shadows were lengthening all around them.

  "What are we doing?" Lucky asked.

  "We're making camp," she said. "I don't want to drive around Heart's Glow after dark. Our headlights will attract attention, and with only two percent left in the engine..." She shook her head. "I don't want to run out of fuel in the middle of town, in the middle of an emergency. We'll start looking for this robotics factory in the morning."

  "Suits me," Stu said. "Are you sure we should camp here, though? How do we know it's safe?"

  "We don't," she admitted. "But we've got a pretty good view of things here, and if we see trouble coming, we can hop right back in the glider and take off."

  "I guess." They had to make camp somewhere, Stu supposed, and this was as good a place as any. "Should we put up the tent?" They had acquired a small pup tent and a set of sleeping bags back in Beggar's Town.

  "Nah. We may have to leave in a hurry; I don't want to have to waste time taking it down. Besides, it doesn't look like rain." She yawned. "I'll sleep in the glider. You two can sleep on the grass over there. Which of you wants to take the first watch?"

  "I will," Stu said. He was not particularly tired, and unlike the others, his Zombie Radar skill would let him know if any zombies approached.

  "I'll take the second, then. Let's get to bed." Luna stretched out in the front seat of the glider, with her hands behind her head and her boots up on door, while Lucky, grumbling, got out his sleeping bag and spread it out on a greensward near the edge of the parking lot. Within a few minutes both of them were asleep, and snoring softly. Both siblings had the unusual ability to fall asleep quickly, which Stu envied; he was usually so tense that it took him hours to fall asleep.

  He sat himself down about fifteen feet from the glider, in a spot which gave him a good view of both the strip mall and the park. Fortunately it was a moonlit night, and he could see his surroundings pretty well. He thought about turning on his Night Vision, but it would only last half an hour and he didn't want to waste it.

  An hour passed, and then another. He heard strange sounds, sometimes, most of which were probably just animal sounds, but he heard bangs and rustlings occasionally, too, in the distance, which unnerved him. It was probably just the wind, but in the dark, and in a world like this, where zombies were real...well, it was easy to allow his imagination to run away with him. He had to remind himself, more than once, that his Zombie Radar skill would warn him if a zombie got within fifty feet.

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  Despite all this, he eventually found his attention wandering, and his eyelids drooping. To keep himself awake, he opened up the ICON system and started scrolling through the list of available skills. There was one skill, called Insomniac, which would allow him to forgo sleep entirely, and which would definitely be useful in situations like this, but it cost almost thirty points. If he had chosen the Scavenger class rather than the Bulwark class, the skill would have only cost half as much, however. He wondered again whether he made the right choice, in deciding to boost his defense with the Bulwark class.

  He was still scrolling through the skill list when he suddenly spotted something out of the corner of his eye -- something that looked like a little red light, winking at him from within the deep darkness of the park. It disappeared in an instant, almost as soon as he looked at it.

  What was it? It might have been an animal; it might also have been his imagination. He closed the ICON menu and got to his feet, squinting into the darkness beneath the trees, but he couldn't see or hear anything there, and his Zombie Radar wasn't going off, either. Shrugging, he returned to the glider and nudged Luna awake -- it was her turn to keep watch.

  Her eyes snapped open. Upon being rudely awakened, Luna's first instinct was to grab for the nearest weapon (a trait she shared with her brother), but before she could seize her shotgun Stu caught her wrist and held it. "It's just me," he said quietly. "It's your turn to keep watch."

  "Oh." She shook her head to wake herself up, but then noticed that Stu still had hold of her wrist. "You can let go of me now."

  "Ah. Sorry." He quickly released her.

  "You see anything out there?"

  "I thought I saw a red light out in the woods a minute ago," he told her. "But I might have just imagined it."

  "Some kind of irregular, maybe?"

  "Nah. I'd know if it was a zombie."

  "How?"

  "It's one of my skills. Zombie Radar. I just picked it up the other day."

  "Not this again," she sighed. "You're still trying to sell me on this video game stuff?"

  Luna knew about his ICON system -- he had told her all about it -- but she still didn't entirely believe him. It was, admittedly, pretty hard to believe.

  "It's all true," he said. "But you don't have to believe me if you don't want to. I told you that before."

  "So how does this radar skill work?"

  "I can sense it if a zombie gets within about fifty feet of me. I feel a kind of...tingle in my head."

  "How convenient."

  "You've seen the other things I can do. You've seen how strong and fast I am, and how quickly I can heal. Is it really so hard to believe?"

  "I'm not denying you have these powers," she said, a little testily. "I just don't believe your explanation of how you're acquiring them. Skills points? Sidequests? Gimme a break."

  "I don't understand it either," he said, sitting down. "I wish I did."

  Her tone softened somewhat. "When you first told me all this stuff -- this stuff about coming from another world and earning skill points and all that -- I thought you were just crazy."

  "I did get that impression. Do you still think I'm crazy?"

  "I'm not sure. It doesn't seem like you're lying...but it's also possible you've just come to believe your own ridiculous stories."

  "I'll take what I can get."

  She glanced at him. "Lucky told me you used to fix computers for a living."

  "Yeah."

  "Did you like it?"

  He shrugged. "I didn't like it or dislike it. It was a job, a way of making money."

  "Do you miss your world?"

  "Very much," he sighed. "But mostly because there were no zombies there. No real zombies, anyway." He stopped, frowning. "Did you have zombie movies here, before the outbreak?"

  "Sure," she said, surprising him. "The Curse of the Zombie, The Dead Walk Again. I don't think they were very popular, but you used to see them in horror movies all the time, along with werewolves and vampires and things like that. Honestly, I think the fact that everyone had seen zombies in movies was part of the reason why the outbreak was able to spread as quickly as it did. People had a hard time believing it. The idea of a real-life zombie outbreak was just too silly for people to take seriously."

  That made sense. Certainly Stu would have had trouble believing it, if someone had told him that zombies had been spotted in his own quiet suburb. He would have thought it was a hoax or something.

  "You don't miss your job, then?" she pressed.

  "Not really. But I miss my parents, and my friends. I miss sleeping in my own bed. I miss the food. I miss hot showers. And I miss..." He trailed off, the name Berly on his lips.

  Luna gave him a sidelong look. "You miss what?"

  "Just...my normal life," he said, rather lamely.

  She nodded. "I miss those things, too." She glanced at Lucky. "Lucky's too young to remember what things were like before, but I was almost thirteen when the outbreak happened. I remember sleeping in a nice big bed, and I remember the food and the hot showers and all the rest of it. I remember video games."

  "What kinds of video games did you play?"

  "Puzzle games, mostly. I'm pretty good at solving puzzles." She patted her glider affectionately. "Fixing things, taking them apart, putting them back together...those are kinds of puzzles, too, if you think about it."

  "Ah."

  "What kinds of games did you play?"

  "All kinds. I spent most of my time playing games." He snorted. "Sounds kind of pathetic, when I say it out loud."

  She shrugged. "There's nothing wrong with playing video games."

  "But it was all I did. It was all I wanted to do."

  She snorted. "I'd want to spend all my time playing video games, too, if I lived in a world like yours -- a world that still worked." She turned away, her eyes acquiring a faraway look.

  Stu studied her for a moment, then said, "I'm sorry."

  "Sorry? For what?"

  "Sorry that...that this happened to your world. I've only spent a few weeks without fast food and running water. It's been ten years for you."

  "It hasn't been easy," she admitted, sighing. "I had to look after Lucky after..." She hesitated. "After our parents died. It was hard enough keeping myself alive. Keeping him alive, too..."

  He wanted to ask her how, exactly, her parents had died, but he didn't want to open up any old wounds, and he wasn't sure she would want to discuss it with him anyway, so he held off. Instead he said, "Well, that's what family's for, I guess." And he started to say something more, but that was the moment his Zombie Radar suddenly began buzzing through his brain. He snapped to attention immediately, reaching for the Midnighter on his belt.

  "What is it?" Luna asked.

  "My radar just went off," he told her. "We're not alone out here." And indeed, he began to hear some kind of commotion coming out of the darkened woods near the parking lot -- the sound of something, or several somethings, making their way through the underbrush. He heard leaves rustling, and twigs snapping...and the unmistakable moaning of more than one zombie.

  "Looks like we're in for another fun night," he muttered.