Chris scrambled through the door to the garage and slammed it shut, throwing his back against the door.

He fought to keep from hyperventilating as his renovated brain attempted to reestablish control. He could feel it shackling his levels of Cortisol and Adrenaline, righting the ship and returning him to functionality. It took half a minute of erratic breathing, and a retch or two, but eventually he regained the ability to think coherently. His mind buzzed and spun as he scanned the bare garage, searching for anything useful.

Goddamn it, pull yourself together. What do you have at your disposal? Status!

Status

Ongoing Effects: Fear

Shifts: Intelligent Design, Speeded Per. and React. (FD) 9/X (60), Mental Health 10/50

Skills: Running 7(1), Boxing 5, Self-Control 5, Endurance 4, Flexibility 3, Meditation 3, Cleaning 3, Multitasking 3(1), Pain Tolerance 2, Driving 2, Knife Fighting 1, Cooking 1, Dancing 1

Unallocated: 2 points

Yes, I know I’m afraid. Fuck you. He lamented his decision to forgo offensive shifts for mental ones, though logically he knew that without them, he would be a sobbing wreck.

His eyes finally alit on Ben’s beat-up old tool-chest, and he darted over. He could hear the corpses moving on the other side of the door, but nothing else. No moans, no breathing, just the shuffling of feet against carpet and the rustling of shifting clothes. He knelt, and threw open the chest to find the one object reminiscent of a weapon in the room, a two-foot prybar that Ben had affectionately dubbed “The Persuader”. He grabbed it, and stumbled to his feet in time to hear a sound that sent dread snaking up his spine.

The creaking of a door. He hadn’t locked it.

He turned and leveled his prybar at the door, rounded end out, to see it slowly swing open. The first to come shambling through was Tina, of course it had to be Tina, cold and pale and utterly dead.

“Tina… Kristina.” He begged. He never used her name any more, only darling or dear. “Don’t come any closer. If that’s you, and I’m hallucinating, I could hurt you. Just let me tire myself out, or call the police. Please, just don’t come any closer.”

The corpse continued to trudge forward, implacably. It moved haltingly, with great effort, as if wearing a body too heavy for its musculature to carry. A chef’s knife was loosely gripped in its right hand.

Chris resisted the urge to back away into a corner. If he gave up the bottleneck of the doorway, he would easily end up surrounded. His clockwork mind continued to feed him tactical information like this, even as his emotions threatened to immolate his skull from the inside out. Survival was the main goal. The only goal.

He continued to plead with her as it moved closer and closer, until it was almost within range, when he responded with the only thing he could think to do. He took a wild, loping swing, a slow swing, a haymaker, one that would be easily avoided if it was Tina, right? One that she could duck without thinking. She had always been faster than him, so there was no way she wouldn’t dodge, right?

She didn’t.

The blunt side of the prybar hit the corpse’s head with a sickening crack, and it stumbled to the side, almost falling before just barely catching itself. Then, it turned, and resumed its march.

Chris was beyond coherence. It was only his most recent shift that kept him on his feet, kept him fighting as he took another swing. This one he took two handed, with a proper stance, and it caved in the corpse’s skull, dropping it like a wet sack of flour. No blood splattered the walls. That would be too human.

The corpses seem to be moving faster as time passes, some distant, cold part of him registered as he continued to kill, to butcher. He took down Ben with a single blow to the head and Nova with a kick to the chest and an overhand swing before the corpses got fast enough to threaten him. Ben’s corpse had been wielding the Multitool he always carried, and Nova’s corpse had the other kitchen knife.

Max was next through the door, and he proved more problematic. The corpse carried the claw hammer that they used to hang pictures, and swung it in slow, dangerous arcs. Chris needed to break its elbow before he could get close enough to bash its skull in.

The last through the door was Juliette, with her pocketknife that she used as a stagehand, moving towards him with empty eyes. The corpse moved to just outside swinging distance, and waited, with the patience of the dead. They stood like that, floor strewn with the bodies of their friends, until Chris calmed down enough that he was no longer on autopilot. The minutes stretched, one combatant’s terror slowly giving way to determination, the other silent as the stone.

After five minutes had passed, Chris stepped forward and took an experimental swing, and the corpse counterswung, aiming for his forearm, but it was still too slow, not even at human speed yet. They retook their positions, and held for another minute.

These aren’t my friends. They have some intelligence, but it’s not them. Its just Sarah, trying to break me.

Well, she wouldn’t be able to break him yet. He shifted the prybar into one hand, and stepped into another swing. When the corpse counterswung, he was easily able to grab its forearm with his free hand and yank it off balance. As it stumbled, he crushed its skull.

With the final combatant dispatched, he dropped into a crouch and waited, watching the twice-corpses for movement. During the standoff, he had managed to subdue his panic, fear and guilt, and replace them with a knife’s edge focus on completing the Instance. He had nothing to gain by crying, swearing or shouting at god. Or in this case, shouting at Sarah. The only thing that he could control in this blasted hellscape was himself, and his only way to hurt Sarah was to show that he couldn’t be broken. So, he waited, and his mind ticked away.

Minutes passed with no movement from the twice-dead, so Chris stood.

“Not over yet, huh?” he muttered as he walked back through the open garage door into the living room. He took in the empty room, with the single word burnt into the carpet. “Survive. For how long? Hell of a time to go silent, Sarah.” He climbed the stairs to Ben’s bedroom, and moved the blackout curtains to the side in order to peek out the window.

He saw dead roaming the streets.

Roughly 15 walking, no longer shambling, corpses were wandering around the neighborhood, each armed with a makeshift weapon. Chris lived in the “Student Ghetto”, a somewhat offensive sobriquet for a cluster of streets to the south of campus occupied mostly by ramshackle duplex and triplexes, rented out by landlords to poor undergrads for cheap. More specifically, he lived on Carson Lane, which consisted of two cul-de-sacs connected by a road up to the main street. From out the window, he could see his cul-de-sac, a hint of the other one, and the road out, but no farther. There seemed to be a wall of blackness, vertical and rising to the horizon, partitioning off the neighborhood.

This did not bode well for the Instances win condition.

At least the dead didn’t seem to be actively hunting him. Also, since his neighbors were almost entirely college students, none of them appeared to have guns. Lucky him.

He carefully weighed the options before realizing that he shouldn’t be carefully weighing the options, and the longer he took, the faster these creatures would get.

Fuck. Wait, I don’t see Johnny.

He needed a better weapon, and while nothing he owned came to mind, his neighbors, the two men he split a duplex with, were both good ol’ country boys. They likely had something.

His engine of a mind churned, then spit out a plan. While it wasn’t a particularly good plan, it was something, and he needed to move. Fast.

None of the dead were looking up, so he quickly grabbed a lamp, sorry Ben, and eased the window open, sliding out onto the roof. He eased across the roof, careful not to dislodge any shingles, and made his way to his neighbor’s window. As soon as he was sure that no corpses were looking in his direction, he chucked the lamp as hard as he could at the driveway of one of the houses across the way.

Right as it landed, with a crash that belied its weight, Chris broke in the window with his prybar, leaning on his speed shift to get the timing right. He was thankful that whoever had this bedroom had invested in blackout curtains which deadened the noise.

Without checking to see whether his distraction worked, he stepped through the window and into the bedroom. He received a cut on his forearm for his trouble, and this t-shirt would never be the same again, but he was more or less fine. The room was, blessedly, empty.

He pressed his ear to the bedroom door. All was quiet, but that didn’t mean anything. He slowly eased open the door, and crept down the stairs to check the living room.

Standing there, eyes locked on the front door, was a corpse. A firewood axe sat in its grip, and it rested in a fighter’s crouch, statue still, ready to pounce on anyone who came through the door.

Oh Johnny, I’m so sorry. He thought, as he crept up behind his amicable neighbor and dispatched him, with one heavy blow to the head. I promise I’ll get to know you better after this. That is, if I’m not in a mental hospital.

He searched the house, but the only real useful item was the firewood axe in Johnny’s hand, which was surprisingly dull. The real prize came when he searched the garage.

There, amongst other things, was a three-foot breaker bar, a crowbar, bigger than the one he had, and two sharp, trident-style gigging spears. Never had he thought that he’d be grateful his neighbor hunted frogs.

Goddamn, Johnny. You should have been the one to survive the apocalypse, not me.

He gathered them up, and moved to the living room to try and think a plan. The corpse got thrown bodily into the garage, where it wouldn’t bug him. Even with his turbo-charged brain, he still wasn’t that great of a planner. When you struggle to complete step one of any plan, you fall out of the habit after a while. Screw you, depression. These days, he mostly left the planning to Nova.

All the cars had mysteriously disappeared from their driveways, and he didn’t want to get trapped in one and surrounded anyway, so that was out. He wasn’t particularly stealthy, especially with a crowbar, so going out and trying to play assassin would probably get him surrounded and killed. He could try and set traps, Home Alone style, but all the time he would need to spend on them would end up balanced out by the corpses getting faster.

After about a minute, he had a plan, but he didn’t like it.

First, he started moving furniture. He used chairs and dressers to barricade every door on the first floor except one, both outside and interior doors, just to have a second line of defense.

Second, he blocked off the only first floor window with a bed turned on its side. It wouldn’t hold long, but might act as a deterrent.

Third, he took the two couches and lined them up with the door, forming a corridor to the center of the room. Then, he took all his supplies, weapons and water bottles salvaged from the fridge, and arranged them so that they’d be in easy reach from the center of the room.

Preparations almost complete, he raided Johnny’s closet. He pulled on a leather jacket, and slid an oversized pair of carpenter’s jeans on over his own, thankful that Johnny was at least three sizes bigger than he was. With a belt, they didn’t seem to restrict his mobility any. He also found a sturdy pair of work gloves. Pity the steel-toed boots didn’t fit.

Finally, he pulled out his phone and connected to the Bluetooth speaker sitting on Johnny’s coffee table. He turned the thing all the way up, cued up his Thrash Metal playlist, and threw open the front door.

The only thing louder than the screaming guitars was the thudding of his pulse in his ears.