Best of Intentions: The Moss (ch. 8) (Patreon)

“I'm not wading through filthy toilet water without some protection,” I argued as I suited up back at my apartment. There was a lot of nasty stuff down in the sewers on a normal day, much less the crap that Umbrella had been throwing in it. I knew of at least one genetic abomination that was currently swimming through the refuse and knowing my luck, it wouldn't just be the one.

“You're going to get yourself killed if you can't run away,” Jill argued through the door while inspecting the alpha version of my protective suit. It wasn't great -- rubber insulated overalls with kevlar over the legs and a leather jacket that was reinforced with duct tape. Covering my head was a motorcycle helmet with a flashlight attached, with a visor to protect my face. “The biggest advantage we have is our mobility.”

“Against shamblers, sure,” I replied, putting on the overalls and jacket before further reinforcing them with kevlar. I understood the argument, I did, and I knew that the suit would be a pain to run in and probably wouldn't do much if I was caught by something big, but that could be mitigated with an easy removal. And I was far more worried about all the small nasties we would find in the sewers than the big ones. Plus between the two of us and Dakka, I didn't see us doing a lot of running away. “But that's not all that we’re dealing with, you know? Umbrella is going to do what they do best and make a bad situation worse.”

There was a small pause on the other side of the door. “You… might have a point there. Are you worried about the virus mutating?”

“That’s what it does best, and those mouth breathing morons in Umbrella’s science division are going to be patting themselves on the back for ‘taking advantage of a bad situation’ to gather data for their next pet monster,” I said, opening the door to find Jill looking at my still depressingly incomplete to-do list. There were minor things that could be managed, but the window was rapidly closing for other things, like evacuating retirement homes. Jill glanced over at me just in time to catch some kevlar padding for her arms and legs.

“You look ridiculous,” Jill noted, inspecting me before looking down at the kevlar.

“Better than looking good as a corpse,” I replied and Jill inclined her head, giving me the point while she strapped the protection on with practiced ease. Meanwhile, I cracked open one of the crates that were stacked up in my apartment that was helpfully labeled ‘sewer adventures.’ Inside of it were maps of the sewers, as up to date as I could find as of a year ago.

Given there were no super secret massive underground bases on them I doubted their validity a bit, but they were good enough for public use.

There was also a list of recommended equipment for urban spelunking. Reading it over, I gave myself a pat on the back for my foresight, and cracked open my arsenal of weapons. I had to love red states for their ‘bigger is better’ approach to gun laws. Even Jill seemed impressed when I started taking out barrel drums for shotguns and laying them on the table.

I passed her a stack of drum magazines, “These are loaded with custom rounds -- Dragonsbreath, slugs, and explosive. These here are your run of the mill buckshot,” I said, sliding an equally large stack of normal ammo while she inspected the automatic shotgun. “It's going to be close quarters in an enclosed space.”

“That's not why I'm giving you this look- wait, is that a grenade launcher?” Jill blurted, glancing over my shoulder into my gun cabinet. I did the same to see the grenade launcher leaning against an AK-47 before looking back at Jill to see that she was giving me a dull look. “Where did you even get one of those?”

I stole it from the military. It was shocking what they would just leave around. “Don't worry about it,” I said, but now that she brought it up… yeah, grenade launcher. Perfect. Grabbing it, I began to fill the cylinder chamber with some stolen explosive rounds.

Jill was shaking her head, torn between amusement and exasperation. “You only say that about stuff I should be worried about,” she pointed out before taking the grenade launcher from me. “Have you ever operated one of these before?”

It didn't seem wise to admit that before I found myself here, I hadn't even used a gun before. If it wasn't for the local gun range… “Fair point. Dakka will take point, then me, then you in case we have to blow something up,” I decided, loading up some buckshot into the shotgun while the rest of the ammo vanished into my Bag of Holding. Between it, and my Arcane Weapon, I was feeling pretty solid.

I'd have to burn through a spell slot to bring back Dakka, but I could accept that. With some luck, maybe I could polish off level six. It was a decent level -- it gave me another spell slot, but more importantly, it gave me access to more infusions. The most important of them all being the spell refueling ring that would give me a spell slot back once a day.

It was, however, another stark reminder of my class. Time was my biggest bottleneck. If I just had a couple more days, I could have been so much better prepared. If I had spent more time leveling beforehand…

No. There was no point in dwelling on what could have been. I needed to focus on how things were and what I could do now to make sure they went my way.

“Sounds like a plan. With how things are up top, and with that thing chasing me, it'd be best to head through the sewers,” Jill decided, already locked and loaded. There was a pistol strapped to her thigh, my grenade launcher hanging off her shoulder, and a shotgun in her hands. Between her and Dakka, I really didn't see the need to do much running in the near future.

She looked at me, and I supposed that between the two of us I was the expert on exploring sewers, so I hastily shoved in the tools that were left in the crate -- chain cutters, bolt cutters, battery packs, and a couple of emergency flashlights. Heading outside, I popped open the manhole while Jill stood guard, checked to make sure there were no surprises waiting for us, turned on my headlamp and started climbing down.

It felt weird being back in the sewers. It hadn't been that long since I was first down here killing zombies to grind out my first level. Here I was again, back at it. You'd think I'd be braver, but I had to say, the long dark shadows didn't help my nerves when I knew there were going to be more zombies down here than ever. Jill made her way down behind me after replacing the manhole while I rolled my shoulders, getting Dakka comfortable and ready to use.

“Okay, maybe the headlight wasn't a bad idea,” Jill remarked and I just grinned before reaching into my Bag of Holding to pass her one. She rolled her eyes as she chuckled, replacing the hat she wore with a much more functional, if less appealing, hard hat. “You know where you're going?”

“More or less,” I said, taking point as we began making our way through the sewers. I immediately regretted not bringing some nose plugs, because the stench was awful. “Smells a lot worse than when I was last here,” I said, my shotgun braced against my shoulder as I peeked around a corner to see… Daniel. The very first zombie that I had killed. It looked like the rats had gotten to him, because he was mostly scraps of flesh clinging to bone now.

“Thousands of corpses would do that,” Jill replied. There was a small beat of silence as we walked near soundlessly. I could hear the sounds of splashing echoing down the tunnels. And groaning. I kept a keen ear out, trying to locate them, but it was next to impossible with how the sound was bouncing off the grimy concrete. I tried to take comfort in that -- I wasn't entirely sure how stuff like perception checks or passive perception worked with me, but I'm guessing that if I couldn't tell where a sound was coming from, odds were a half rotten corpse couldn't either. “How many?”

“What?” I asked, making my way up to where I had hit level two.

“How many people do you think have died already?” Jill questioned and I could hear the frown in her voice.

It wasn't a question that I liked thinking about, but I'm pretty sure I had a solid estimate. “I'd say ten thousand. Maybe twenty. Not that bad, all things considered,” I ventured. It was still a lot of dead people, and a lot of reanimated corpses, but Raccoon City had a population of around a hundred thousand. “It'll be more with the riots and general chaos, but… thanks to Raymond and Marvin we might have enough of the police force to actually put a lid on the destruction. The military will be less likely to pull out and so long as we keep things contained, we can avoid getting nuked.”

I heard Jill stumble behind me. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that she wore an open grimace but she didn't seem surprised. “They would do that, wouldn't they?”

“It'd be a real convenient way for Umbrella to get rid of any evidence…” I said, trailing off as I turned the corner to where I had leveled up. “Speakin’ of getting rid of evidence -- I killed a half dozen zombies here like a day ago. Where are they?” I asked, barely seeing a trace of them. There was a stain from my Grease spell, and some of the other stains looked like they could be blood. But the actual bodies were all gone.

My lips thinned as I started to look around for those drainage things that were on the walls in the game. There weren't any, but I was seeing some damage to the concrete. Something big and heavy had come this way. I'm not entirely sure what they were called in the game, but those white tadpole looking things were at the top of my suspect list.

“I'm guessing we'll find out soon enough,” Jill remarked, changing out her ammo type from buckshot to explosive. “Do you really think we'll be able to save seventy thousand people?” She as the barrel magazine clicked home. “I was on the streets last night. It's just… dead people, everywhere I looked.”

The admission was quiet, as was the fear in her voice.

I wished I had something to say that would convince her that everything was going to be just fine, but the truth of the matter was that I was as much in the dark as she was. But it felt wrong to say so.

“It all depends on how this next part goes. I never managed to make any solid plans for this part -- the churn. Everything is a mess, a bunch of pieces are in the air, and the outcome depends on how a lot of them fall.” The biggest wild card was Umbrella. They had ways of making the situation a great deal worse than it already was.

It also depended on what the General recommended to the President, Kirk Talon. If they had hope that this could be contained, then they'd send in the marines en-masse. They'd retake the city. It wouldn't be bloodless, but it was doable. However, what weighed the scales in our favor was the number of civilians that were still alive and fighting back.

I wouldn't blame the President if he nuked Raccoon City when it's population was ninety-nine thousand shambling corpses and a couple hundred civilians, all spread out through the city… I didn't like it. It didn't sit well with me. I didn’t think I would have what it took to make the call myself, but I could understand why the President would push the big red button if things got that bad.

“So, why aren't we evacuating?” Jill questioned as we pressed on. “Why act like we're in this for the long haul?” I wasn't really sure where the interrogation was coming from, but it was a fair question.

My lips thinned and not for the first time, I wish I knew more about the Resident Evil series. I had watched all the movies, but some of them… it had been years since I did. “I'm worried about what happens when you drop the sun on a virus that's whole shtick is adaptation,” I admitted. My knowledge of Resident Evil got spotty after Raccoon City, but what I did know was that the world ended. Things got pretty weird in the movies with Alice developing psionic powers, but this was the same setting that had super mutant undead people.

From the sound of it, I just gave Jill a new fear. “It could adapt?”

“Or worse. It could spread,” I replied, my tone grim. The details on exactly how were spotty -- I wasn't even sure if it was ever directly stated. I just knew that they dropped a nuke, and then the world started dying. I had no intention of living in a Mad Max nightmare, so if I wanted to save the world, I had to contain the virus here. “There's this stuff called Cesium 137 that only appeared after the first nuclear bomb dropped. Doesn't really do anything for the most part, and it's a way to test to see if stuff like old wine really is old wine because it spread all over the place, but it won't be present in anything vacuum sealed. My worry is that the same thing will happen with the T-Virus.”

There was a beat of silence, before I heard a whispered, “Fuck.”

“When the military pulls their heads out of their asses, we can start evacuating the civilians. The metro connects up to Louisville, and it's a three hour round trip. Sick people, old people, kids, and the people who just aren't cut out for this,” I continued. Keen Mind made itself known as I could perfectly recall the map of the sewers with no difficulty at all. Hell, I could recall the map of the sewers that Jill had wandered through in the game and compare the locations to the complete map to discover that it was halfway across the city.

Hopefully that meant we had an unbothered trek to one of the three water treatment plants of Raccoon City. All of which were pretty small, which was why there were three of them.

“The military sees that the evac isn't a shit show, that we have clear safe points and exclusion zones… no nuke, and the world is saved,” I finished. There were a couple of things I could do to sweeten the pot. One of which was probably right under my feet -- the Nest.

“Provided Umbrella doesn't mess anything up,” Jill added and I chuckled without any humor.

“Yeah. Provided that they don't mess anything up,” I agreed. A tall order, considering that making messes is what Umbrella did best.

With that, the conversation lapsed as Jill mulled over everything I just said. I hadn't exactly kept the stakes hidden from her, but I could understand it all feeling a great deal more real now. I went through the same thing when I first arrived in this world not that long ago. With my half remembered memories it had already seemed like a herculean task, but with Keen Mind, I now knew exactly how fucked we were.

I knew more about Resident Evil than I thought I did. The lore that I had skipped through or didn't really read was suddenly remembered with perfect clarity. I still didn't know for certain how exactly the outbreak started, but I knew some of the names involved. Up to and including US Senators. My memories of the movies were still pretty spotty, as they were well beyond the one month limit to my memory.

There were also mentions of things -- links that I didn't click on when I was looking something up on a wiki. But that was an issue for another time.

Slowly, as we closed in on the first water treatment plant, the air in the sewer got worse. The stench was already rancid to the point that it burned my nose, but it slowly started to smell more like putrid rot and I nearly gagged. I had to borrow an old humming trick to stop myself, and it was just a warning of what was to come.

Turning a corner, I recoiled at the sight of one of the cisterns where water was held until it could be treated. The water was black, almost like sludge, but more alarming was what was emerging from the water. I wasn't even sure how to describe it -- it looked like piles of rotten meat that had congealed into a singular mass. There were pieces of corpses sticking out of the interconnected web of flesh piles that seemed to be slowly growing over the concrete walls.

I had no idea what this was, I realized, and it was like getting dunked into ice cold water. My heart seized in my chest, lurching against my ribs to the point it was painful. There wasn't anything like this in RE3 or the movies.

“Walkway is blocked,” Jill noted, sounding far more calm about this than I felt. She pointed her flashlight at the large fleshmass that had engulfed the walkway that would have let us walk above the disgusting filth.

I licked my lips and swallowed my nerves, “The overalls aren't so stupid now, are they?”

“No one likes a sore winner, Rude,” Jill sighed, knowing what we had to do. It was absolutely vile, but we had to walk through the rotwater.

Taking a breath, I hopped down in it, and sank up to my waist. My clothing under the overalls remained dry, but I would probably burn them after this just to be sure. Shoulder my shotgun, I walked forward while Jill followed me and I heard her swallow a gag as she did so. I ignored it in favor of watching my surroundings, inspecting the rot piles, seeing the veins of flesh that seemed to connect them.

It was then that I realized what it was.

“This is a nest,” I whispered and, as if to agree with me, the inhabitants woke up to find an intruder in their home.

A creature- a monster ripped itself from the flesh pile with an awful shlucking sound that was accompanied by the sound of meat tearing. The filthy water splashed as the monster opened a single massive eye that seemed to glow in the low light. The rest of it was an amalgamation of flesh -- it wasn't quite humanoid, but it was made out of their parts. It almost looked like a crab made out of rotting meat, I thought, black slime water splashing over my visor as it raised an oversized claw with bone protrusions.

My shotgun bucked against my shoulder, the explosive ammo in the chamber striking the massive eye right in the pupil. The creature roared, recoiling from the injury before a half second later, the explosive embedded in the shot exploded. Meat and stale blood rained down on us as the monster collapsed in a heap, breaking apart now that whatever was holding it together was dead.

“Aim for the eye!” I shouted as the nest woke up around us, Jill whipping around as a creature ripped itself free behind us. I fired another shot at another monster, seeing three of them wake up in front of us. It was tempting to summon Dakka, but the situation wasn't completely out of hand.

Yet.

Clenching my jaw, I trusted Jill to have my back and fired at the nearest creature. It seemed to understand that it’s eye was a weak point so it angled it away from me. That was fine. I had hand-crafted the explosive ammo to deal with Nemesis, and as freaky as these things were, they weren't Nemesis tough. A claw exploded off the monster, exposing its torso and another three shells into it blew it apart without even needing to hit the eye. The second monster hissed at me, a warbled hellish sound.

I stepped forward to meet it. A shotgun blast took off its oversized claw, and as it recoiled, a second shot destroyed its eye.

The third corpse crab, however, was already bearing down on me. Making a snap decision, I braced to take the hit. The massive claw raced down towards me and it seemed to get a lot bigger the closer it got. I could see the shattered bones that protruded from the club of rotten sinew -- broken ribs and femurs. However, Shield blocked the attack, acting as a physical barrier, and the Spellwrought tattoo on the inside of my wrist vanished.

With the monster exposed, I fired a shot at its eye and the second that it exploded, I felt myself cross the threshold to Level 6. The monsters had to be worth a decent amount of exp, I reasoned as I made my choices as fast as I could, knowing that we weren't out of the woods yet.

There wasn't much to choose from beyond the Infusions and a new spell slot opening up. Most of my choices were already made, but I quickly made a snap decision to trade out Mending for Prestidigitation. If only because of the smell.

My second choice was for the new Infusions. The Spell-Refueling Ring was a must have. My second choice was more situational. I only had so many attunement slots, and I could only have so many active Infusions at a time. I was a bit lucky, though -- I could switch out my learned Infusions when I leveled up, much like I did spells. So, it wasn't a permanent decision.

My second Infusion was Alchemy Jug. A jug that could produce a limited amount of any substance poured into it.

Like, for example, the T-Virus vaccine.

My final choice was a spell. I already had Lesser Restoration, and I wouldn't get Revivify until I got access to 3rd Level spells. For now, for the sake of utility, I chose Enlarge/Reduce. Being able to adjust my size in a pinch sounded lovely.

With my choices made, time resumed and I slammed back into my body. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw Jill finishing off the last crab. The very next thing I did was use Prestidigitation, silently lamenting that I hadn't chosen the spell until now. The stench instantly vanished and I found that I could breathe again. Jill noticed it too, glancing back at me with suspicion in her eyes.

“Nanomachines?” She asked with a sigh and I cracked a smile despite the situation.

“Nanomachines,” I agreed. “We need to check out the water treatment area. I don't like the fact that these things were so close,” I said, pushing through the breaking down corpses with a shiver. I didn't like these things at all. I thought I had a decent enough handle at what this city could throw at me -- zombie dogs? Okay. Zombies? Sure. Giant lizard things? Got it. Spider things? Ew, but I can squish ‘em. Massive tadpoles? I can handle it. Nemesis? I'd prefer not to, but I already had a plan.

These crab monsters? I had no clue what they were, why they were here or how they got here.

I especially didn't like the look of that eye.

Reaching the other side of the reservoir, I helped Jill up, who let out a groan of disgust when she saw that the disgusting water was clinging to her. Deciding to help her out, I cast Prestidigitation again and a grunt of surprise escaped her as the water ran off her body and pooled at her feet, leaving her clean and dry. “That's convenient,” she remarked. “Thanks.”

“What I'm here for,” I said, starting the trek over to where the water treatment plant was. Since we were heading to it through the water tunnels the path was a lot straighter, so it was only a short few minutes of walking before I discovered my fears were well founded.

The water treatment plant was filled with… gunk. There weren’t piles of rotting meat or anything, but the water was absolutely filthy, complete with dead rats floating in it. Climbing up via an emergency ladder, I leaned on the railing to get a better look… and it was pretty bad. “The other two can't be much better,” I realized, my stomach clenching. “Oh. Crap. I showered with this water. I brushed my teeth. Ugh, I think I'm going to puke…!”

Jill's lips curled into a frown, “Something has been living in it. Look,” She urged, bringing me to one of the flood gates and I saw that she was right. Something had bent the metal bars until they had all but pressed into the ceiling. Something big had crawled through that gate, and I was coming up with nothing that could fit the bill. Only Nemesis could, and he only got that big towards the end.

“Scary, but we have to do something about the water,” I said, my grip tightening around the railing. If something was living down here in what had to be a couple tons of filthy runoff water, then that could explain how the T-Virus got into the water system. It would also explain how it was so… hit and miss. If it was just traces of the virus, with each water treatment plant connected to a third of the city, then it explained how some people got infected and others didn't. There were probably other factors, of course -- distance, the size of the boiler, whether someone drank straight from the tap, if they used hot or cold water, and so on.

“That's a given. What, though?” Jill prompted and I looked over at the monitoring room that overlooked the pool. She followed my gaze, and we both headed up and soon found an old school computer system that had a readout on the water's condition in various parts of the sewer. Unsurprisingly, it was all in the red.

Taking a seat in a chair, I used the keyboard that was built into the desk to start going through screens. The setup was from the early eighties, back when computers were still the size of a room. Raccoon City got the bleeding edge of the time, so it was only down to the size of a dresser. And, what I found made my eyes narrow.

“There's a purge function,” I observed with a frown in my voice. That, I was fairly certain, wasn't normal. “It'll clear out the water and cycle it.”

“Would that be enough?” Jill asked and I shook my head.

“No -- normally, the reservoirs on standby would be used to flush this crap out, but with how filthy the water is… best case, what's in the pipes is cleaner.” I said, a plan forming and I started to fly through the menus. To my relief, all three treatment plants were on the same system and could talk to each other. “I'm going to shut the other two treatment plants down and run a bypass. That should give us enough clean water to get rid of this crap, and I'll concentrate it along the rail network.”

Water pipelines tended to follow the metro network in big cities because it was convenient. They were already digging big tunnels underground, after all.

“That's not going to stop it from getting reinfected,” Jill pointed out, and she was right about that.

“I'll need to create a filter,” I reasoned. “Something to protect this treatment plant, something to clean whatever water does get into the pipes on the chance of lingering infection… and probably another filter back at Central Station.” We had water bottles, so we could survive for a little bit, but water was too valuable a resource. Seventy thousand people would go through our reserves in a flash. “Of course, people are going to bitch about it.”

“I'd rather them complain than be dead,” Jill decided. “How long will this take?”

“To build the filter? An hour, maybe. Issue is that when we purge the system, it's going to get loud. And I'm worried about whatever is living here getting pissed off at us for wrecking his home,” I said and, to that, Jill grimaced.

“So, things will get loud. I can handle the loud if you can handle this,” Jill said and I got up, heading to the supply closet and opening it. Inside were a lot of chemicals -- industrial amounts. It wasn't everything that I wanted, but it was enough that I could make do.

“Should be,” I replied before I started grabbing things. Reaching into my Bag of Holding, I pulled out my Alchemist Tool. Or, in this case, a chemistry set.

It was there that I was reminded again that time was the greatest weakness to my class. Infusions were short cuts. A design that was built on a single cornerstone -- my magic. If I removed the Infusion, then the magic left the item. A real magic item, however, was self sustaining. For that reason, it was independent of my Infusions.

The issue there, however, was time. Magic items needed time to make. Sometimes days of uninterrupted labor. Sometimes it required special materials, of which I was shit out of luck for some. I very much doubted that I was going to find any hill giants to create a Belt of Hill Giant Strength with. Though, I could probably substitute some materials. Maybe.

I could create an Alchemy Jug pretty easily. I would need to shape the clay, inscribe it, wait for it to dry, glaze it with a special magical compound, fire it, and that was it. But, again, that took time. Instead, I was forced to turn the canister with the vaccine into an Alchemy Jug. It could produce up to a gallon a day.

Well in excess of what I needed. I barely needed more than six ounces.

Infusions were instant. Only limited by the number of them I could sustain at a time. At Level 6, I got three of them. So, Bag of Holding, Spellwrought, and Spell-Refueling Ring once I was done with the Jug.

“Hey, Rude?” Jill spoke up, watching me as I got everything ready to make the filter. I would just need to replace them with whatever they had in the pipes now.

“Hm?” I hummed, watching as the chemicals boiled over a flask, straining in to a tube, and then a pale pink fiber began to curl into itself in the framework for an industrial grade water filter.

“Don't take this the wrong way, but… are you… actually smart?” Jill questioned and I paused, looking away from my work to see her watching me.

“...How exactly am I supposed to take that?” I asked flatly, cocking an eyebrow.

“Half the time you run around the place screaming, so you can't blame me for being surprised,” she shot back at me, somewhat apologetically. To that, I just huffed and rolled my eyes. “It's weird seeing you do… science. You even look like you know what you're doing,” she admitted.

Fair enough, I suppose. “I didn't go to school for it, if that's what you're asking. I'm self-taught, but I could be blind, drunk, and recovering from a lobotomy and I'd still out-do those hacks in Umbrella.”

My intelligence was weird. I didn't feel any smarter as my Int stat went up. I didn't suddenly become Lex Luthor or anything, who could play 8D chess and plan a hundred thousand steps ahead with a million contingencies and a million contingencies for each of those contingencies. I did find that I understood things easier though. Learning was simpler. As was applying what I learned.

I'm not sure if there were some skill checks that I was passing, or if I was just generally less stupid than I was at the start. In general, though, it was me applying what I knew and utilizing my tool proficiency. The result, after about forty minutes, was a magic filter that could purify any traces of the T-Virus that passed through it. The mesh was pinkish from the vaccine that was mixed in.

Making it was only so easy because I had access to the vaccine. It was doing most of the leg work. The rest was just making the filter itself.

“Well, you'll have to get used to it. Once everything is less of a chaotic cluster fuck, I'm going to take a step back and really start cranking out what we need,” I swore. That was the reason why I chose Artificer over something like Wizard.

Jill chuckled, “Let's see you put your money where your mouth is before you start bragging,” She said and I did exactly that.

Initiating the purge on the treatment plant, I heard an alarm going off shortly before the water began to move. It was utterly disgusting, especially when it got to the bottom and I saw the zombies that had fallen in and sunk to the bottom. All of the waste water was pumped out into the reservoirs, which probably pumped that filth into the overflow chambers. Once the water was empty, I headed down to replace the filter while Jill was on overwatch.

I secured the filters to the intake and the outage pipes, meaning that the water coming and going from the treatment plant was double tested for the T-Virus.

It was as I was securing them that I heard it. A low, deep, rhythmic rumbling. Instantly, my gaze snapped to the busted in gate, but that was the wrong place to look I learned when Jill called out to me.

“Rude! We have company!” Jill shouted a split second before I heard her shotgun go off. In haste, I scrambled up the ladder to help her out and it was then that I saw what she meant.

Striding through the door, built like a brick shit house at seven feet tall, was a gray skinned man wearing a black trench coat and a fedora. No- not a man. A corpse. A zombie.

One whose milky white eyes zeroed in on me as it began to march with a terrible purpose.