The group of locals had noticed them, one standing up to shout something.

Goodie saw the fool nearly take a fall headfirst into the waiting dead bellow, fortunately, one of the people next to them managed to pull the idiot back before they did.

The dead.

Undead, rather. Grotesque corpses of the recently deceased that had risen, their sole desire being to seek out anything alive to drain them of their energies.

How were they going to deal with them?

For the first time in days, he spoke, turning to Diane to ask…

“What are we gonna do?”

She stared out of the windshield for a time, watching the group of people huddle together in the pouring rain.

No doubt they were staring back, wondering if he and Diane would stay and rescue them, or drive off like any sane person would.

They sat in silence

“If it weren’t for all the water, I could have had my gold beetle dig a hole, something large enough that we could have lured them into, but with all this water everywhere, she’d drown before she’d even touch the ground.”

“No name?”

“What?” she turned to him and asked.

“Your beetle, no name?” he asked her again.

“It’s a fucking bug, why would I name it.”

“Aren’t summoners supposed to socialise with their pets, romance them and shit so they do what you tell them to?”

She gave him look, the meaning behind it lost due to his inexperience with social interaction. She eventually gave up and continued.

“You have a link with your snake, don’t you?”

He nodded his head.

“Well, let me tell you what every summoner learns early on. Nature and all its various and wonderful manifestations, don’t give a shit about anything ‘cept eating and fucking. So no, no name.”

Goodie did not know what to say to that. So he avoided saying anything by turning back to look at the group of people.

Some of the people within the group were arguing amongst each other. Goodie hoped that they were not going to try and make a run for it, even if they got past the deadheads, with the level of water that they would have to wade through to get over here, they would barely be faster than the things chasing them.

The tapping of rain could be heard all around them as they sat there, their attention completely on the problem before them.

“Fuck,” Diane sighed, a moment later. “How are we gonna save these people.”

Goodie racked his brain for anything, and everything. He could not take them out with a direct attack, so an indirect one, then.

“Could we maybe drag a bunch of waggons together, form a circle or square, or something?”

“Possibly? What do you have in mind?”

“Well, I was thinking…what if we get some waggons together, form them into a box or something. Then…wait…can your bug throw things?”

“Not really, no.”

“Fuck…um?” Goodie took a moment to collect his thoughts. “Okay, we still need a box to keep ‘em in…but I’m thinking that if I can summon a sort lasso of shadow stuff, I can create a plastic-like substance, it’s weak, but if I can make it thick enough, it should be able strong enough to last a minute or two, then I summon it over one of them with the other end over your big beetle. Then, your beetle drags it over the walls of the overturned waggons and into the box.”

He looked at Diane for a response, he knew the plan was sketchy when he said it out loud, but it was all he could think of.

She seemed to take her time thinking about before replying.

“Okay, first off, how would you even get it over there without all those gruesome ghoulies bum-rushing you.

Shit, he thought, whenever he had summoned shadow stuff where Diane could see, he had always done it from his hand. The exception being that stupid moat he had made to block that abomination two days back, but that had been hidden in the dust.

“I’m a [SHAMAN OF SHADOWS].” He said, hoping that she would fill in the blanks.

“I’m not really familiar with your class. You lot aren’t that common.”

He swore under his breath. Diane had helped him a lot since he had met her and to be honest, she was probably the most trustworthy person he had ever met. Somewhat depressing since he had known her less than a month.

Still, he was uncertain about revealing his abilities and their weaknesses to her despite all that had happened to them over the past few days.

“Fuck it… you know how you can summon you bugs anywhere within a certain area around you, well, I can do the same, only with my shadow stuff…and my summons, of course…you know what I mean…uh, only my range is a bit larger because of the whole wizard-slash-summoner build my class’s got going on.”

He was fudging the truth…by a lot…okay, he was lying, but his powers were one of the few things he had going for him and he did not want to lose one of the few remaining cards up his sleeve.

Both of her eyebrows raised as he talked, the action setting him on edge. Yes, his class was rare, but the chances of an ability like his being concealed, especially considering that it was the starting abilities.

The question had been bothering him for over a year now and still had no hope of answering it.

“Okay then, second question…uh…how much control do you have? Of you stuff, I mean.”

“A bit, why?”

“The [SYSTEM]’s made from spiritual energy, you know this, but even though our abilities use magic, they require the system’s input. With those fuckers draining anything they get near, anything we can do goes wonky. Wait, I thought you’d run into them in the sewers?”

“Yeah, but I wasn’t stupid enough to fight any of them.”

“Right then,” She patted her legs. “Well, do your thing on one of them first, and we’ll take it from there.”

He was not certain about doing this without having a container ready, but a second later, something burst from the water, a thin, tentacle-like thing, with a pointed head. Normally, doing something like what he had planned to do would have been extremely difficult, the rain coming down, obscuring his vision and the wind and water any form of movement a challenge. However, he had Her Majesty to help him plan and coordinate, so with a mental command, he had aimed it a particularly wide looking zombie and let it loose.

He had used compressed gas to launch his construct, all shadow stuff, the force being just enough that it might have knocked a child over if it had hit. As it travelled forward, the wind pressing against its tip forced the head open, revealing a net-like structure with small barbs along the rim. In the centre was a hole leading into the body of the tentacle, a hose that he was generating and lengthening as it flew onward.

It was his most complex creation yet.

He was only familiar with the basics of aerodynamics, but he had hoped that with the air forcing itself down the hose, it would help it to stay rigid enough to remain on course. It was not his design, of course, like most with most of his ideas, he had stolen it from comics and games.

The whole exercise was executed in an extremely inefficient way, he knew, but he was still trying to keep Denise, and now those locals on the rock, in the dark as to his full capabilities.

It hit, the sticky tar-like substance coating the net part of the head helped it remain attached to the corpse it had latched onto.

Whatever the zombie’s aura did, it caused him to lose control of his creation as Diane had told him. He watched it go limp. But it went a step further as he then watched the tentacle begin to decay far faster than it should have.

“Well, shit.”

It was all he could say.

The two of them sat there in silence.

“Fucking idiot!” Diane exclaimed as she slapped herself.

Goodie forcing himself to not slap the bitch, her sudden yell nearly giving him a heart attack. He had had enough shocks for one lifetime, he did not need her adding to the tally.

“We don’t need to trap these idiots; we need to corral the stupid things.”

Through gritted teeth, he asked her, “What exactly do you mean?”

“Like you said with the lasso, only…no lasso. We go cowboy on them, group them up like cattle and corral them.” She looked at him, “They hunt the living, I can’t get my beetles to attack them, but if I can get them close enough to attract their attention, we’ll be in business.”

“But the thing is, how will you get ‘em all to come after you? There’s like what…seventeen of them, and their all different sizes and states of decay and such, so they’re all going to be moving at different speeds.”

“It doesn’t matter if we don’t get all of them, we just need to whittle them down ‘til we can get them all. It’s not as if we have a shortage of materials.”

“Yes, but we probably won’t have a shortage of undead, either, if we go messing around with all those waggons,” Goodie warned. “But you’ve got a point,” he admitted. Her plan being far simpler than his.

It was obvious really, why had he not thought of it? Goodie felt himself growing jealous, a petty emotion. But he could not help himself.

He dove into their shared link to see through Her Majesty’s eyes as Diane had her giant scarab drag a few waggons over, forming a ‘U’ shape, with a fourth nearby to act as the gate. It took a while, the end result being a crude trap by any standard, but it looked like it would probably keep the zombies in long enough for them to get the people and be off before they could break through.

Goodie watched as the beetle turned the waggons over onto their sides, the possibility that the zombies could crawl underneath them would be remote, but it was better that they not take the chance and cover all exits.

As the wooden constructs sank, he could not help feeling regret as he saw them go down. With the price of wood being what it was, each of them was worth almost as much as a small middle-class house. Probably worth a whole lot more now that one of the last remaining forests in the region had been choked to death by the dust storm.

For the second time that day, he wanted to kill Diane. She had her beetle confront the undead as planned, issuing out a high-pitched scream before bursting open. What had happened was, the beetle had stretched out its wings, something he forgot they had.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the zombies began to take notice. And one by one, they turned and began walking after the Big Beetle.

They were slow, excruciatingly slow with having to wade through the water.

Some of the people on the rock looked as if they were about to make a break for it, which would have ruined their plan and screwed over the ones remaining. Fortunately, the stayed. And even more fortunately, the entire pack of undead had turned to follow the larger, more accessible bug.

It was not long before they had walked into the corral. Big Beetle had crawled over the back waggon and round the side, but as soon as touched the one meant to be used as a gate, the people on the racked finally broke, their descent from the out-cropping attracting the undead’s attention. The bug managed to cut most of them off with the gate, but a few made it through.

He and Diane had purposefully set up the corral as far from their mobile home as they could for just this possibility, but it was still too close for their liking.

Thankfully, the dead were just as slow walking towards them as they were when they walked to the corral.

Goodie raced to the back and opened the rear of the truck-waggon as the people ran came near, the group crowded into his mobile home and as soon as the last one entered, he slammed the doors shut. It took Diane a moment to get her scarab harness itself to the vehicle again, but once she did, they booked it down the road as fast as they could, the fastest of the undead coming within arm’s reach of his home as they did.