With aplomb, I found several gas canisters beyond the back doors of the convenience store, but before I set to filling up the canisters, I checked my phone’s new notifications.

  “Shambler slain! Codex updated!”

  That was a shame, I had hoped that killing that thing would have given me enough points for a level up. I flipped open the codex anyway, curious what it had to say about this “Shambler”.

  Kill a Shambler by stabbing it in the core, easier said than done, but that was not the part that caught my eye. Why was the system trying to create these “instances” in the first place? The hollows codex entry referred to them as instances too, both creations of “the system”. The significance of this connection scratched at my mind like some puzzle that just needed a few more pieces, but the solution seemed pretty straight forward if it really was the “system” making these monsters.

  I just needed to kill the system.

  Now, how someone kills something as nebulous as that qualifier was a question above my paygrade. I was having a hard enough time dealing with hollows as it was.

  A box of blue lighters caught my eye at the counter and reminded me that I had a job to do. Pocketing one of them for myself, noting the ubiquitous “HV” logo, I set to dragging my treasured gas cans to one of the pumps that had not been molested by the Shambler. When I got there, I almost kicked myself that I did not have a credit card to buy the gas, but there was no card reader at the pump in the first place. The gasoline was free.

  “Even if I had to pay fifty bucks a gallon again, I’d pay anything to get out of here.” I could grouch as much as I wanted, but the price to get out of this place looked like it would have to be paid in blood. I only hoped that it wouldn’t be mine.

  After I topped off the last of the gas cans, I looked back and down the stretch of road to the recreation center. I was still a little amped up from my dance with the Shambler, so I snatched up the first two gas canisters by their handles and started down the road. The beginning of a journey is often the easiest part, while the latter half is where you really pay the price for stupid little mistakes. In my efforts of carrying gasoline to the rec center, my first trip was an exhausting lesson in utilizing every resource at my disposal. I eventually got to the end of that increasingly lengthening road, trekking the half mile with a full can of gasoline in each hand, but by the time I got there, my forearms and shoulders were screaming bloody murder.

  It was when I got back to the gas station to carry back the next load that I thought of trying to put the cans of gasoline in my digital inventory rather than lug them around like a Neanderthal. It was a happy surprise when the first one dematerialized and appeared in my digital storage space, but that happiness dimmed when I saw that each can took up ten space each.

  That meant I had to clean out my storage and take account of my inventory. Aside from looting the chainsaw from my house hunting expeditions, I had also found a solid oak baseball bat that I had kept in storage during my fight with the Shambler. The baseball bat took up seven space and the knife I recovered from my broken spear only took two, but the weight of the cans meant that I had to clear everything else out of storage if I wanted to fit three cans of gas in my limited storage space of thirty.

  “Hey baby, I’ll be back.” I set my beloved chainsaw on the station counter and made a promise I would not keep.

  I didn’t want to just leave my perfectly good knife behind too, so I wrapped the blade with some paper from a raunchy magazine in the gas station store and then further wrapped that in duct tape so that I’d at least have a ghetto sheath and not accidently stick myself in the ribs with my own knife tucked at my waist, sparing me two space for my RC car still in the inventory.

  Knife squared away, baseball bat stored and gas cans in my inventory, I sauntered down the main road toward the rec center. I figured that I must have looked like quite the sight, like some slasher hobo, covered in the black goo of my enemies’ blood and clothing torn up in several places. At that moment I thought I could have cared less if anyone saw me, but an itch crawled up my neck and made me stop dead in my tracks.

  It felt like someone or something was watching me.

  The road ahead to the rec center and the one behind to the gas station were clear, but my growing paranoia had me look up at the blind sky and behold that there was something drifting in the moonless pale light streaking from nowhere. It was so tiny and far away that my mind made it up to be some kind of bird, but if it was, then it would have been the first animal I saw in this mad place. Did it see me looking back? An equally tiny speck to it, even more so swallowed up by the ground beneath me as it was by the sky above? Whatever it was, it did not seem to be growing closer and closing the distance, so I felt comfortable moving on.

  Yet I still couldn’t shake the feeling that with the whole breadth of the world beneath it, that whatever was up there was staring directly at me.

  Reaching the rec center again helped me shake the heebie jeebies clenching my stomach as there were more important things to worry about than some creepy bird in the sky. Namely, I had to start spreading the fuel for my plan around the exterior of the building. It looked like it was made out of that white plaster material so many public buildings were made of, so the outside would catch easily enough, but after dumping two of the four cans on the outside walls, I was not so sure if it was enough. What if those things noticed the flames licking the edges of the building and came out in a heaping hurry? Then I’d have thirty flaming hollows chasing me down the street and no amount of reflex could avoid death in that scenario.

  I had to go inside.

  While I sloshed gas on the outside, I made sure to stay mostly clear of the windows and to double check if the inhabitants had seen me. Fortunately, the thirty something hollows did not seem to have noticed nor moved from their tightly packed congregation in the main hall, so the idea of sneaking inside seemed more and more like a possibility.

  I went round to the front of the building and poked my head inside the front lobby. There was a reception desk, stairwell, and a set of big double doors that I understood led to the main hall where the hollows were lurking, but otherwise this part of the building was empty. The set up was perfect, since I could slosh my remaining two cans of gasoline in this front hall and start the inferno from here. That way there’d be no escape for the hollows trapped inside the inner main hall of the recreation center and they’d go down with minimal risk to myself.

  When I’d just about dumped the last dregs of my gasoline into the lobby, I almost jumped out of my skin at the sight of a combat boot and leg sticking out from behind the front desk. It wasn’t moving, just laying there, so with my knife ready to shank some faces, I circled around and checked it out. It was a leg and an accompanying torso, but just that. I would have averted my gaze from the grisly sight had I not noticed that the torso was wearing body armor similar to mine and on further inspection, had something strapped to its bloody waist…

  A handgun.

  “No way.”

  Yes way. The light filtered from the main lobby windows like some kind of beckoning force pointing the way towards my prize. I reached for the firearm with my left hand, humming a soft ditty, and whispered, “Come to papa.”

  My greed almost cost me my hand.

  A deformed german shepherd’s head came howling out of the dark from beneath the desk and would have taken some of my fingers if I had not pulled back quick enough. This oversight on my part to not check if there was anything lurking under the desk had made me totally miss the angry ball of flesh and fur that just tried to rip my hand off. The monster had a second chance and lunged again, taking one of my ankles with its powerful canine jaws.

  I knew blasting it with my new gun wouldn’t be the smartest idea with all those hollows in the next room, so I tore my knife out of its ghetto sheath and started jamming it into the soft spot where the dog’s head met a pulsating tendril of flesh. The thing kept doggedly biting through my trousers and gnawing at my boot until I nearly decapitated the hound’s head from the writhing appendage it was attached to.

  I was going to make a quick getaway until a chihuahua’s head poked out of the small Shambler’s body and glared at me with trembling fury.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “Oh oh… easy boy…”

  The deformed chihuahua head didn’t just yelp, it screamed such ear piercing cries that I had to clamp my hands to my ears lest the drums burst. My feet almost started working automatically as they carried me from around the desk without having to look over my shoulder at the doors to the main hall. I knew a company of thirty hollows would be joining me soon with that stupid chihuahua’s yapping, yet I hesitated as I arrived between the front entrance that I came from and the dark stairwell beckoning to the unknown upper floor.

  If I ran out the front, I may be able to outrun those hollows like I’ve done before, but what if they didn’t go back inside the building afterward? Then my grand plan would be ruined and I’d get runned down like some extra in Dawn of the Dead. Yet the staircase was a mostly unknown factor. Would I find a suitable way out? Are there hollows waiting up there too? So many ways this bad situation could get worse almost paralyzed me, but the sound of the double doors slamming open helped me make a decision.

  I went for the stairs.

  My flight made me wish that I had put points in agility instead of reflex as I bounded up the stairwells steps by twos and threes. Aside from the dog Shambler’s screaming, there were no shouts of pursuit or even the labored breathing of my pursuers losing their breath, just the pounding of footsteps drumming on the floor in a rhythm set to the same chaotic beat of my heart.

  The upstairs led to another wide open room with scattered chairs and tables and for a moment I was about to jump out of a window just to escape my pursuers, yet the moonlight guided me to my salvation. A door was on the far end of the room and I did not need me to ask twice if it led anywhere useful. Anywhere than here was better. It was only as I was slamming that door behind me that I finally looked back and saw the empty eye sockets of a horde of hollows surging toward me. This brief gaze with death only lasted a moment and the temporary security of a locked door stood between my flimsy flesh and grasping hands.

  From the shaking of the door, I knew that the cheap materials would only last a short time before the hollows made it in here, but unlike the last room with multiple windows, this one was a smaller space, like a personal study room, and had only three windowless walls.

  “No, not today.”

  There was no way I was going to die like some trapped lemming and the tiled ceiling caught my eye. Could the ceiling support my weight? I didn’t see any other choice, so I jumped on the table in the middle of the room and punched one of the tiles out of the series of squares that made up the ceiling. Insulation, piping, and wood support beams were bared by this, but more importantly, there was a small space between the pink insulation and ceiling tiles. A space big enough for a man to squeeze through.

  I dropped the knife, not wanting to waste precious seconds manually storing it with my phone, and tucked the handgun in my waist, making sure the safety was on. My pullups weren’t like they used to be when I was a younger man, but I was able to pull myself up just the same, scrambling to find more and more purchase from the wooden beams crisscrossing the upper area. At last, I had pulled my whole body through and just as my foot cleared the tiles, I heard the sound of the door cracking open and those monsters pouring inside the room.

  I prayed that they did not figure out that I was up here, nor even know how to climb, and I started slinking across the ceiling area. It was dark up here, the only light was a few tendrils of moonlight spilling from between the loosely fitted ceiling tiles, but another, brighter source caught my attention in the form of a grating on the other end of the building. A way out.

  It was slow, since I was making sure to keep my weight evenly distributed across the weightbearing wooden beams and not the tiles themselves, but I was making progress. About halfway there I heard some scratching coming from behind me and I was just barely able to turn and look with my limited space. Something else was crawling through the hole into the ceiling I had made and then another.

  Turned out hollows could climb.

  I tried going even faster, but my hand missed a wooden beam and ended up going through a tile instead. I almost lost my balance, but the sight of pale hands reaching up for where I had made that new hole got my legs clenching and prevented a fall. The scratching grew louder as my two pursuers started gaining ground in their single minded pursuit. They didn’t care how much they scratched their backs on pipes sticking out above them or how many splinters jabbed their hands, they just wanted me.

  There wasn’t much more that I could do to pick up the pace except to keep going without looking back and my perseverance paid off with the sound of another ceiling tile cracking. The following thud told me that one of those ghouls must have taken a fall with its careless pursuit, but the continuance of the sound of nails dragging on wood told me that there was still one more. It would have had me too, had I not reached the grating in the nick of time.

  The flimsy grating was knocked down and out with a few desperate smacks and when I poked my head out of the hole this provided, I saw that my exit led to a sloped roof and a ten foot drop to the ground. My less than agile reflexes got me outside quick enough, but my haste made me tumble out of the ceiling crawlspace and gracelessly fall off the roof.

  Immediate and intense pain rang the doorbell of my left shoulder’s senses, but I scrambled to my feet and hustled to the nearest pool of gasoline I had trailed around the rec center. I just wanted to be done with this stupid quest and didn’t spout any lame one liners as I tossed the ignited lighter into the fuel. The flame instantly caught and ran down the line where I had planned its meal, following the trail of gas around the building and inside the lobby.

  Watching the orange tongues of flames licking up the side of the recreation center and black tongue of smoke vomited from the hole I had just crawled through started to break something in me. It was beautiful. Like a dam giving way to the stress fractures unnoticed by her engineers, I was somewhere else, reveling in the death of those monsters. They thought they could hide from justice, get off on some weasely technicality, but not on my watch. The whole building started to ignite far quicker than it should have and the groans of her support beams weakening to the consuming flames sounded like nothing else than the screams of people burning alive inside.

  Those sounds caught me in a trance of grim satisfaction and horror, betwixt the present conclusion of my quest and somewhere else where my mind refused to fully dwell on. From behind, above, and every other cardinal direction, a gust of wind came like the world itself was blowing out a candle and my building sized torch was snuffed out in an instant. Only a black plume of smoke, rising as a dark hand reaching for the moonlight remained, and from it a snowstorm of ashes raining from on high.

  I had won, didn’t I?

  My phone was buzzing in my pocket, I presumed from all the notifications for hollows I’d burned, but the taste of victory was like the ash flowing around me and my attention was elsewhere. Descending from the moonlight and walking down the smoke plume like it was some kind of staircase, the thing in the sky approached me. My phone kept buzzing and I saw that there was an incoming call, from a number vaguely familiar.

  “Hello?”

  “Please, please, send help to 3201 Kingfisher Street now! There’s someone trying to break in, please!”

  “Sharon?”

  My brain trembled and I dropped the phone in the pile of ash accumulating on the ground. Who was Sharon and why did thinking of her cause nails of pain scraping through my skull? The phone kept its soliloquy going and the sounds of a woman screaming, mingled with a baby’s cries devolved into wordless static.

  “Whaa…” Words fled me along with the strength of my knees and I sank to the ashes to cradle the phone, as if I could reach through and hold the woman on the other side of the static. Yet from the chaos, a whisper came to me from the speakers.

  “Deadbeat.”

  “Sharon…” I clung to this mystery name like a child to a security blanket. It was the only thing I knew then in that moment, the only thing keeping me from totally blanking out.

  “Coward.”

  The voice had such vehemence, such derision that syllable dripped with the condemnation of a judge handing out the maximum penalty of a sentence. It grinded in my mind and rang with a familiar tone that teetered just off recognizable.

  “Murderer.”

  The last word did not come from the phone, but rather from just a few feet away from me. I finally looked up and beheld the figure which had descended from on high. It was no bird, but a tall and thin man, dressed in a black overcoat and blank obsidian mask that covered his entire face. He was pointing at me with one arm in a finger that ended in an inhuman point, distorted and too long. He spoke again, the final condemnation and the worst of all. It was a list of names.

  “Rami Castillos, age nine. Samantha Gardener age fourteen. Tamara Thompson age sixteen. Billy Simms, age three. Jose Garcia, age eight.” The list went on and on, so many children’s names and then adults too. “Mary Kun, age sixty eight. Maria Salanza, age twenty seven. Jospeh Salanza, age twenty nine. Yolanda Kurz, age thirty six.”

  “Shut up!” I raised the handgun I had found and aimed it at the man in the black trench coat. He didn’t seem to care that I was aiming a gun at him and just continued list off names that I had never heard before, but with each new one added, the pain in my head exploded. It was attacking me, some sort of psychic onslaught. It needed to be silenced. I fired.

  For a moment, I thought I had missed, aim misjudged by the pain drumming in my skull, but the accuser had moved just a bit. He was no longer pointing at me, but clutching something in a closed hand. As it opened that hand and dust floated away to join the cloud of black ashes swirling behind it. It had caught my bullet in midair.

  My phone was buzzing, but I was too transfixed on the man in front of me, too enraptured by the recreation of a burning building built of billowing ash blocking the sky overhead. Skeletal remains floated from the remains of the destroyed recreation center to this new impossible structure overhead, and in it the scorched skulls and burnt flesh of slain hollows were given new life in an animation of countless faces screaming from the moonlit windows made of ash. Their hands reached for me, still steaming from the inferno that had consumed them, and rictus grins of pain and inevitability gnashed invitation to join them.

  My phone buzzed again and I finally broke my gaze for just one second. My mysterious observer had messaged me, again and again and again, the same word.

  “Run”

  The trance I was under was broken and the will to live lifted me off the ground and to my feet. The figure pointed again at me and the floating building of moonlight ash and skeletons swirled into an angry cloud of accusations and screams. I turned from the black clad figure and cursing cloud and started sprinting down the main road, past the cul-de-sacs and gas station to the main body of the town next door. Yet block after block, the pale moonlight failed me, swallowed by an encroaching shadow of living flame and hate following me into the heart of Hopeville.

  Sirens blared without cars and shouts for help reached only my ears, but packed among this cacophony of panic was a somber voice that haunted me to my core. This voice knew my name and it spoke thus, “Richard Slate, you have been found guilty of one hundred and fifty seven counts of murder in the second degree. In light of your heinous crime and by the authority of the state of New South California, you are hereby sentenced to death by lethal injection. May God have mercy on your soul, because I certainly won’t.”