“Gary, what do you mean ‘it was the kids’? You’re not making any sense.”

Jonathan was still feeling flush from the 400 experience points he’d earned by killing the four zombies in the field. True, Gary had done most of the work, but all the same. Including the 300 experience points he’d gained for successfully completing the “Escort the survivors” quest, he was now sitting at 2200 out of 3000. He only had to kill eight more zombies to hit hit level 3.

Now Gary was sitting, looking as if the world had just collapsed around him. Which it had, of course, but something else was upsetting the grave digger.

Gary was muttering to himself.

Jonathan frowned. The longer that he spent with Gary, the more concerned he was getting. Some of what he had said made sense, but when he’d started talking about hearing voices and being on hold with the admin – whatever that meant – Jonathan had begun to worry. Then there were the weird hungry looks he gave. They were just brief glances here and there, but Jonathan had noticed them. As if Gary was thinking about feeding on people.

And then there was his messianic claim to being some kind of chosen one, some shit about a prophecy. What the fuck was all that about?

Jonathan was quietly concluding that Gary might be going mad.

Or, worse, he’d already driven all the way to crazytown and put down a mortgage there.

“Gary, snap out of it! What about the kids? What are you talking about?”

Gary stood up, but his shoulders were slumped. He walked over to a low stone wall, away from the groaning of the kid zombie in the garage. Jonathan a few paces away, holding onto his sword just in case. He knew Gary had levelled up, but so had Jonathan. If it came to it, if Gary was snapping under the strain, then who would win in a fight? A level 2 paladin or a level 2 zombie?

Also, he wondered, how many experience points would Gary be worth?

Gary stopped muttering to himself and spoke up. His voice was cracked and hesitant.

“I couldn’t work it out,” he began, “When this all happened, when it started. When the rain of slugs came down, I couldn’t work it out.”

“Gary, focus.”

Gary shook his head as if clearing it.

“Right, yes. Okay. So, you remember when the slugs came, and we absorbed them, right?”

“Yeah, they flooded the church, got in through the cracks under the doors. Everyone was scared out of their minds.”

“Right, well as that was happening, there was information given to us about the planet being seeded, and that hundreds of thousands of people were dying. Then it went over a billion, right?”

Jonathan nodded grimly, “Yeah. I remember.”

“And I couldn’t work it out, because that’s over one in eight people, just killed outright.”

Jonathan nodded.

“But how? At first I thought it was some kind of random selection, you know? That one in eight people had just died. But then when we got into the church, there were thirty people there, right? So if it was random selection, then at least three of them should have been killed when the slugs entered them. But the only dead person in the church was the kid whose funeral it was, right? The boy who had been killed in the hit and run?”

Jonathan nodded again. For a crazy guy, Gary was making some sense.

“So then I thought it must have been accidents. You know, car crashes and so on. People losing control. But then we got onto the motorway and that didn’t seem to be right either. If it had been drivers losing control, the motorway would have been rammed with crashed cars, but it wasn’t.”

“Just some abandoned vehicles.”

“Yes, exactly. Which I think was people getting out of their cars to see what the slug things were. I think if you were in a moving vehicle, the worst you’d have had to deal with was a sudden heavy downpour. At least that’s what it would have looked like.”

“Okay, so… what?”

“So then I thought that it resulted from some kind of disasters caused by the seeding. Nuclear bombs being fired for whatever reason, that kind of thing. But no-one mentioned nukes on the radio.”

“I don’t see where you’re going with this.”

“Then there was the other thing,” Gary continued, disregarding Jonathan’s impatience, “how quickly everything collapsed. It was less than a day. It just seems too fast. Even if it was one in eight normal people dying, and even with the undead rising, I just don’t see things falling apart so quickly.”

“Gary, get on with it.”

“I checked the bodies of the McPearsons earlier. That was when I figured it out. They’d all been scratched or bitten. Each one of them had a mark which would have infected them. Mostly bite marks.”

“Okay, so a zombie got to them.”

“From where? And if it did, then where was that extra zombie?”

Realisation dawned on Jonathan.

“Oh, fuck.”

He sat down, any thoughts of having to battle with Gary superseded by the same revelation Gary’d had twenty minutes earlier.

“You checked the kid as well,” Jonathan said, his voice thick.

“Yeah. And there were no bite marks or scratch marks that I could see. His clothes weren’t even torn.”

“The kid...”

“The kid turned the others.”

“No...” Jonathan whispered as his mind reeled with the horror of it.

“It’s the only thing that makes any sense,” Gary pressed on, “No bite marks on the kid, family all bitten.”

“The kid died, came back and attacked his entire family...”

“And they wouldn’t have known what to do. Probably just tried to restrain him. It. I mean, it still looks human, doesn’t it, aside from the sharpened fingernails and the slightly large teeth?”

“I don’t believe this,” Jonathan whispered, “No...”

Gary pressed on with his theory.

“The slug things. I think anyone under a certain age, maybe over a certain age as well, they couldn’t absorb them. Maybe it was too much of a shock for their bodies to handle. I don’t know. But instead of upgrading them...”

“It killed them, and then….”

“And then they came back as zombies, across the entire planet.”

Jonathan sat down and let out a sob.

“That explains everything,” he whispered. “Who the hell wants to fight against their own kid? Especially with everything else that was going on? They came back and…”

“And started infecting their parents, friends, family. All of them.”

Jonathan made one last attempt at denial, “… but the radio report! It didn’t say anything about kids dying.”

“The reception kept coming in and out, remember? We didn’t hear everything. Or maybe there was just so much other stuff going on that no-one had realised yet. Jonathan, it makes sense.”

Jonathan put his sword down and slumped next to Gary on the low wall.

They sat in silence then, as Jonathan shivered in the cold.

Gary noticed that the cold was barely affecting him.

*

Half an hour passed before Jonathan spoke again. His voice was low. Angry.

“All of this so that, if I understand this correctly, our world, everyone on it, can join some kind of army of the undead and fight in a war on other worlds. Is that right?”

“That’s the way I understand things,” Gary said.

Jonathan stood up and starting pacing around the garage, muttering.

“All of this because some bastard decided we were just fodder for his fucking undead army… sending in the slugs, killing all the kids, sending in the necromancers...”

“I don’t think it’s the same thing,” Gary interrupted, “The system seeding and the admin stuff, that’s one side of it but the undead army, that’s separate.”

Jonathan wasn’t listening, however. He kept swearing and swinging his sword. He kicked the stone wall Gary was sitting on.

“I didn’t ask for this, Gary,” he said. “I mean, I was doing fine, you know? Good school, good kids. I was doing fine, everything was fine and then this... this fucking horror show hits us out of nowhere, and I mean, what the fuck, man? What the fuck, hey? I wasn’t ready for any of this shit!”

“None of us were,” Gary said.

Jonathan was looking and sounding deranged. Gary wondered if he should have told the other man about his theory. Everyone had a breaking point, and it looked like Jonathan had reached his.

He started doing squats and stretches, punctuating his sudden activity with loud huffs, even as he kept swearing. He snapped his long-sword into his stash and started shadow-boxing, then jumped up and down on the spot.

Then he turned to Gary and held his hand out.

“Key.”

“What?”

“Key. Now.”

Gary pulled the farmhouse keys out of his pocket and handed them to Jonathan.

“Jonathan, don’t...”

“Just stay out of this, Gary. You’ve done enough for one day.”

The PE teacher swore as he struggled to find the right key to the garage side-door. Then he unlocked it and flung it open.

“Repel Undead,” he shouted as the kid-zombie walked towards him.

With a scream of fury and pain, Jonathan snapped his longsword into his hand and launched himself into the garage.

*

Jonathan stepped out of the garage a couple of minutes later. His face was a mask. Calm on the exterior, but burning with rage beneath.

He tossed the keys back to Gary.

“No need to warn the others now,” he said.

His voice was empty.

“Jonathan...”

“Don’t, Gary. Just don’t. I’m fucking done with this shit.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I don’t care what it takes or what I have to do, I’m going to find the son of a bitch responsible for all of this, and then I’m going to fucking kill him.”

“What?”

“Every army has a leader, right? Someone who is in charge. The person at the top. Well, I’m going to find them and them I’m going to kill them. And that’s all there is to it.”

A notification popped up in front of Jonathan’s eyes.

A Paladin’s Oath!

You have made your first oath as a Paladin, well done!

Your Oath: Kill the Immortal Overlord.

You will gain +10% combat bonus and +10% experience when pursuing…

“Oh, PISS OFF!” Jonathan raged.

“What?”

“Not you, it’s the fucking system, updating with some questing shit.”

“Anything useful?”

“Like I give a flying fuck at a monkey’s arsehole right now! Okay, I have fucking had enough for today. I’m exhausted, and this, this is just fucking obscene. We’ve done our shift on the watch, its time for someone else to take over.”

“Actually, I’m not tired.”

“What? After all of this?”

Gary shrugged. “I think maybe I don’t need to sleep anymore. I’m a zombie, so...”

Jonathan waved his hand. “Fine, whatever. I’m going to send that couple out. What was it, James and Gemma? Show them around like you did me. Fucking hell.”

“Fine,” Gary said. He could see that Jonathan was right on the edge, his emotions and sheer exhaustion pushing him to the limit.

“And find that Rain bitch, will you? She’s got answers and I want them.”

“This isn’t her fault,” Gary said.

“Isn’t it?” Jonathan asked, his eyes dark. “Do we know that for sure, Gary? Do we know anything for sure at this point?”

“Get some rest, Jonathan,” Gary said.

Jonathan nodded and walked back into the farmhouse, leaving Gary alone in the night.