They entered the mall just ahead of the zombies. Some precautions had already been taken to slow down a potential zombie onslaught -- a maze of large food carts, benches, and other obstacles had been arranged just inside the main entrance, and the glass doors had been reinforced with sheets of corrugated steel. Stu, Lucky, and Luna -- who, as far as they knew, were the only survivors of the zombie battle on Sunset Drive -- locked the doors behind them and navigated their way through the obstacles, pushing some of them together to make them even more of a hazard. This accomplished, they ran into the mall, their rapid footsteps echoing through its empty corridors.
There didn't seem to be anyone around; the Georgetown residents, and presumably most of Dr. Snowe's assistants, had already fled. When they arrived at the clothing outlet where Dr. Snowe had set up shop, however, they found that he was still there, along with Millie and the blonde woman Ula. The centrifuge was still spinning; Dr. Snowe was fretting over it.
"We've lost the electric shell," Ula noted. "What's the situation?"
They told her, briefly, about what had happened on Sunset Drive, and the sacrifice that Charger and her men had made to stop the giant mutate. She closed her eyes and sighed deeply when she heard about Charger. "Stupid woman," she muttered. "If only..."
"We have a problem, Dr. Snowe," Stu said. "Luna's been bitten."
"Oh, dear."
"Do you think your cure will be ready by the time she begins to show symptoms?"
He fretted some more and started biting his nails. "We've still got about thirty minutes. We managed to evacuate most of our people, and my equipment is already on its way to the pharmaceutical plant south of the city, but we need to hold out here for just a little longer."
"Thirty minutes," Stu sighed. "That's going to be tough."
"And that's not all," Ula said. "The Dread himself is on his way here."
He blinked. "How do you know that?"
"I just heard it over the radio. One of the teams spotted him on their way out of town."
"Spotted him? Where?"
"In the sky. He can fly, you know."
"I didn't know," he muttered. These kinds of crazy revelations didn't even surprise him all that much anymore.
"He's after me," Dr. Snowe grumbled. "He has been from the beginning, because he knows I've been working on a cure." He glanced at Luna. "How long ago were you bitten?"
"Just a few minutes ago."
"You should lie down. Physical exertion will accelerate the course of the infection." He gave her a thoughtful look. "Actually, this may be a blessing in disguise. We are going to need a test subject for the serum, after all."
Stu didn't really like the idea of Luna being used as a guinea pig, but the zombie infection was a death sentence and this was her only hope for a cure.
Thirty minutes. Could he hold off the zombies for that long? They were already at the door; they were already on the verge of breaking through.
He shook his head and steeled himself. He could hold them off, because he had to hold them off -- for Luna, for Lucky, for Dr. Snowe. They were all depending on him.
"Thirty minutes," he said again. "I can give you thirty minutes."
Lucky started reloading his big revolver. "Let's go, then."
"No. You stay here with your sister. You too, Millie. If something happens to me, you two are our last line of defense."
The kid hesitated. "I think we should stick together."
"I can kill more of them if I don't have to worry about protecting you. Stay here." He turned to Luna. "If I don't make it..."
"You'll make it," she said quietly, her dark eyes intent. "I believe in you."
"I believe in you, too," Millie agreed.
This little vote of confidence cheered him. "I'll get going, then. Wish me luck."
He gave each of them a confident nod and, without looking back, turned around and ran out of the store.
* * *
He quickly checked the ICON system as he made his way back to the mall's main entrance. He had accumulated twenty-eight skill points while battling the zombies on Sunset Drive, which would allow him to purchase any number of new skills: Boulder Smasher was now available, as was Bomber Blocker, Turtle, Nice Landing, and Guns Blazing. Guns Blazing, the firearm equivalent of Chainsaw Ballet, looked promising, but he only had one gun -- his Midnighter -- and only about six rounds in the magazine. Boulder Smasher might be useful, too, but like most of his skills it could only be used once a day, which was a serious limitation.
The next levels of Strong Arm and Speed Freak were sixteen points each. He was tempted to choose one of these, but another skill soon caught his eye: Red Wave, a bare-handed "special" attack:
Pummel your opponent with a thousand fists!
It cost thirty points, but he was scoring so many critical bonuses with the Captain Critical skill now that he didn't think it would take long to earn the two additional points he needed to purchase it.
He wished he could afford Golden Moment. This was the skill that would give him ten minutes of perfect invulnerability; unfortunately, at sixty points, it was also the costliest skill in the entire ICON system.
He closed the menu screens and forced himself to concentrate. This one was for all the marbles; if he failed here, Luna would die, Dr. Snowe's cure would be lost, and this world would belong to the zombies forever. How had it happened that Stuart Brakely, an ordinary computer repairman, who had no particular dreams or ambitions, had ended up in this unbelievable situation? How had the fate of an entire world come to rest on his shoulders? Well, he knew how it had happened; Dr. Snowe had explained it. But a part of him was not entirely convinced -- a part of him still wondered whether he was dreaming, or whether he had been placed in some kind of virtual reality simulation. Zombies, sure. An alien entity living his brain? Why not? But the idea that a nobody like him could be so important...well, out of everything that had happened to him, and everything he had seen, this was almost the hardest thing to believe.
He checked his weapons -- he had the alien chainsaw strapped to his back, the Midnighter on his belt, and Excalibur in his hands. He had a single fixed-blade knife, too, about five inches long, which he had found in the mall's sporting goods store and which he thought might make a good throwing knife. He hoped they would be enough.
It didn't take him long to reach the mall's main entrance. The zombies hadn't broken through yet; they were still pounding on the locked doors. Stu could see that the steel sheets covering the doors had been dented in a number of places, and the lock itself, along with the length of pipe he had shoved through the door handles, was beginning to give way. But he still had a few seconds to work with. He pushed the food and vendor carts closer to the door, and shoved the benches, plastic chairs, potted plants, and other obstacles together, so that the zombies would have to climb over them to make any progress. He was in the middle of this when, to his surprise, the doors were completely demolished by a deafening explosion -- the glass shattered; the steel sheets were sent flying.
A bomber. Stu swore. He hadn't counted on that.
Fortunately the bomber's explosion had killed most of the zombies who had been pounding at the doors, and it took a few seconds for the remaining zombies to start to find their way in, scrambling over the debris. Some of them had shards of glass in their faces and were bleeding freely; others had rotted arms dangling out of their sockets. All of them were snapping, snarling, and howling, full of rage, and determined to enter the mall.
Stu went to work. Using Excalibur, along with his superior strength and speed, he killed a couple of big ones, a Level 6 and a Level 7, after they pushed their way through the obstacles -- bashing their brains in before they could even mount an attack. He scored a critical bonus on the Level 7.
He killed a Level 3 next, and then a Level 4 Rager, which threw itself over the obstacles in a screaming frenzy; he jabbed it in the face with the butt-end of the bat, grabbed its wrist, and whirled it into the wall with tremendous force, shattering its cranium. He was getting better at fighting ragers, he reflected, or maybe just getting better at fighting generally.
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But there wasn't time for reflection -- a Level 8 Jumbo, an overweight, oversized monstrosity, almost the size of the Brute, had just muscled its way into the mall. Stu kicked it in the gut, but it barely budged, and when he hit it with Excalibur, the bat sank into the folds of its fat. Without missing a beat, he let go of the bat, drew the Midnighter, and shot the jumbo in the face, using his Speed Freak-speed to perform the actions faster than any ordinary human would have been able to.
It was his speed that allowed him to keep up with the onslaught. The zombies were ferocious, but Stu was nearly twice as fast as any of them, excepting the speedies, and he was capable of quickly dispatching one, and then another, as long as he had some space to work with. The danger was in being surrounded, and he took care not to let this happen, quickly backtracking or slipping to one side or another in order to avoid being overwhelmed.
He continued to rack up skill points, and he went up a level, too, going from level thirty-nine to level forty. He was beginning to think he might actually succeed in holding the zombies off; the only ones that were a real threat to him were the irregulars and the mutates, and these kinds of zombies were not common. He snarled a series of challenges at the undead monsters, as he recovered Excalibur and cracked another zombie skull: "Is that all you got, you ugly sons of bitches? You want some more of this, huh?" The floor was soon covered with blood and mangled zombie-bodies.
How much time had passed? His Speed Freak skill, which seemed to slow the world down, relative to himself, made it hard to tell. It couldn't possibly have been thirty minutes, though. Five? Ten?
He backed away from a Level 3, intending to open up the skills menu and purchase Red Wave -- he had thirty-eight points now, which was more than enough to buy it. It took a certain amount of concentration to manipulate the menu screens without using his hands, though, and before he could allocate the points, or do anything else for that matter, a Level 8 Speedy suddenly burst out of the crowd. This was the highest-level speedy he had ever seen, and it was faster than he was -- it easily avoided Excalibur, and then, to his surprise, ran right past him, darting off down the corridor.
What the hell? The speedy had completely ignored him. He had never seen a zombie act like this before; they were usually determined to kill and/or bite any human in their immediate vicinity. This one had been more interested in getting past him, in getting into the mall.
But he couldn't let that happen -- he couldn't let the speedy reach Luna, Lucky, and the others. He turned around, drew his Midnighter, and called upon the Marksman skill. The speedy was already a hundred yards away, but he was able to shoot it in the back of the head, stopping it cold. It fell on its face and skidded to a stop.
And that was it for the Marksman skill, which could only be used once a day. He holstered the Midnighter and went back to fighting the zombies with the baseball bat -- swinging it as hard as he could, he managed to kill two Level 2's with a single blow, and to cave in the chest of a third, in rapid succession. But several of the zombies were now avoiding him, just as the speedy had, and were attempting to make their way into the mall. What was going on? He remembered that the Dread was capable of controlling zombies, and he wondered if that was what was happening here -- perhaps the horde had received some kind of telepathic command to ignore Stu and press on into the mall, to get to Dr. Snowe. It was as good a theory as any.
Killing zombies as they came at him was one thing, but chasing after them, and trying to hold back a seemingly endless wave of them, was quite another. It complicated things. Stu stopped another one with the Midnighter, and was able to knock the legs out from under a couple more, but even with his speed, he had trouble keeping up.
The fact that some of the zombies were still actively trying to kill him complicated things further. A slavering Level 3 Rager staggered into the mall and tried to strangle him; a Level 2 Jumbo and an enormous Level 10 attacked him in tandem. He shot the Glowie in the head with the Midnighter, using what was probably one of his last bullets, and killed the rager and the big Level 10 by somersaulting past them and leaping into the air to deliver two terrific hammer-blows to the sides of their heads, using the rebound from one hit to add extra force to the other.
He was continuing to rack up skill points, but he had no time to open up the damn skills menu; he had no time to do anything except fight. Thirty minutes, he repeated to himself, over and over again. They need thirty minutes.
But the zombies just kept coming. Stu wasn't exactly tired -- the ICON system had given him greater stamina than an ordinary person -- but even he had his limits. He was sweating, covered in blood, and breathing hard. Excalibur, which he held in front of him like a silver sword, was likewise dripping with blood. When he pulled the Midnighter out to kill a Level 3, the hammer clicked. He was out of ammo.
Shit. He stuffed the gun back into the holster before spinning around to shatter the knees of a female Level 4. Though her legs were now useless, she continued to crawl forward, ignoring Stu, but trying to press deeper into the mall. There was definitely some kind of weird intelligence at work here, urging these zombies on.
How the hell was he supposed to stop them? How could he hold them off? More of them were now pushing through the obstacles and forcing their way into the mall.
He sighed. He hated to do this -- he had been saving it for a life-or-death emergency -- but it seemed to be his only option now. Reluctantly, he dropped Excalibur and unslung the alien chainsaw from his back. He pressed the button to start it, revved up its miniature engine...and activated Chainsaw Ballet.
The ICON system -- or, more precisely, the alien in his brain -- took over. He became an unstoppable instrument of death, cutting down zombies left and right, lopping off heads and arms and driving the blade into the chest cavities of ragers and agitated shakers. He was showered with silvery blood. Some of the contortions that the skill forced him to make as he danced around were almost painful -- one minute he was ducking, dodging, and rolling, and the next he was leaping forward, stiffening his spine, extending his arms, and throwing his head back, all the while whirling around dizzily. Once activated, the skill could not be turned off, so all he could do was wait for the balletic chaos to come to an end.
It was having an effect, though. He was killing and maiming zombies by the dozen, tearing through their ranks, leaving piles of bodies in his wake. He was slowing them down.
The skill wore off after a couple of minutes, however, and he found himself in control of his body again. Shaking drops of blood out of his hair, he continued where Chainsaw Ballet had left off, cutting down even more zombies, including a very tall Level 8; Stu cut off both of the zombie's hands with the chainsaw when it reached for him.
More zombies were coming through, however. Stu quickly scanned the ICON system's designations, searching for the biggest threats -- the ragers, the speedies, the jumbos, the high-level regulars. He focused on killing these first, saving the lower-level zombies for later.
He had just killed a Level 1 Rager and was sorting through the designations to find a new target when he spotted a deadly combination: a Level 9 Bomber and a Level 11 Glowie. The bomber was a bloated, bearded man, dressed in blue overalls, while the glowie was a rotting obscenity dripping globs of green flame.
This was bad. If the bomber exploded in the vicinity of the glowie, it would almost certainly produce a massive, fiery conflagration; the two of them together could obliterate everything within a thousand feet.
He stopped at that thought. An explosion of that size might be just what he needed. He had done it before, in Heart's Glow; it could work again here.
He killed two more zombies and began to retreat from the entrance, moving deeper into the mall, all while keeping his eyes on the bomber and the glowie. He took a second to open up the ICON menu and purchase three new skills: Bomber Blocker, which would protect him from a bomber's explosion; Firewalker, which would protect him from heat and flames; and Red Wave. The three skills cost a combined forty skill points, leaving him with just twelve total, but if everything worked out like he expected...
When he was perhaps two hundred feet from the entrance, he stopped, turned, and pulled the knife out of its sheath. Narrowing his eyes, he used his Dead Aim skill, along with his enhanced strength, to throw the blade at the bomber's belly. It shot out of his hand like a bullet...and, a second later, it struck its target, puncturing the bomber's overalls and causing it to ignite. The explosion was gigantic, and the glowie, standing almost right next to it, was caught up in the blast as well, adding a fiery component to it. Stu was close enough to feel the shockwave, and he was swept up in the heat of the green flames, which swirled around him like a firenado, but thanks to his newly-purchased skills, neither of these things had any effect on him -- the incredible shockwave, which caused the mall's entrance to collapse into a pile of burning rubble, didn't budge him an inch.
It had a significant effect on the crowd of zombies, however. The ones nearest to the explosion were totally destroyed; the rest were incinerated by the flames. In the aftermath dozens of blinded, shambling zombies stumbled into walls and fell to their knees, the glowie's green flames consuming what remained of their ragged clothing.
Just as had happened in Heart's Glow, the ICON system gave him credit for every kill, and he received critical bonuses on all of them. By the time the messages finished scrolling across his vision, he was back up to fifty skill points. If his calculations were correct, that single blast had killed almost forty zombies.
Level Up! 41-42Gained 2 SP!Access Menu?
And he gained a level as well, which earned him two more skill points. He felt a little of his fatigue disappear.
The main entrance was completely blocked off by fire and debris, and the only zombies he could see now were the small handful who had survived the explosion. Waving the dust and flames from his face, he methodically dispatched the remaining zombies, executing them with the chainsaw and earning a few more points. This done, he stood up, wiped the sweat from his brow, and studied the scene. Was it over? There were almost certainly more zombies outside, perhaps hundreds more, but they weren't getting through that fire, and they would have to climb over the rubble to get in, besides, making them easy pickings.
His Zombie Radar, which had been buzzing quietly in his head the entire time he had been fighting, faded into quiescence. He puffed up his cheeks and let out a long breath. Had it been thirty minutes yet? More like fifteen or twenty, probably, but...
Then, somewhat to his surprise, his Zombie Radar began buzzing again. He couldn't see any zombies in his immediate vicinity, but he could hear footsteps, echoing upon the tiled floor, coming from the direction of the blazing entrance. Squinting, he watched as a dark figure, strolling casually through the emerald flames, stepped out of the blazing, smoking inferno.
A zombie? Stu readied his chainsaw.
The figure that emerged from the flames didn't look like a zombie, though. He was a man in his early thirties, about six feet tall, with dark, unkempt hair and eyes that looked like drops of mercury. But his head was the only thing about him that looked more or less human; his body was a grotesque amalgamation of organic and synthetic parts -- tubes, wiring, and metallic plates incorporated into flesh and bone. He reminded Stu of the Lab Rat, only his synthetic parts appeared to be much more sophisticated, and what's more, they were constantly changing, shifting, moving, rearranging, and reshaping themselves, flowing along the surface of his body as though they were alive in some way. It was the weirdest shit Stu had ever seen.
The man brushed the hair out of his face and looked up. Stu froze. He knew that face.
It was his face.
An ICON designation appeared over the man's head:
Level 99 Brainy
The brainy looked him up and down, a grin slowly spreading over his face. "My! Aren't you a handsome fellow?"