Chapter 71 - Dead North

  Only two days had passed since we finished repelling the Karabos invasion, saving downtown Boston from a watery grave and rescuing thousands of people from becoming dinner for the lobster-like creatures. Just two days, and we still couldn’t get a break!

  I flew over the streets of northern Cambridge, staring down at the mess below. This was bad news, and it was only getting worse by the minute. I flew back the way I’d come, already knowing the defenses we’d laboriously put into place weren’t going to be nearly enough.

  Catherine Reynolds waved to me from the wall top that stretched across Massachusetts Avenue just north of the Harvard Law School campus. Everything north of there was considered no-man’s-land. I’d knocked down a couple of large brick buildings to get construction supplies, and the folks from the university had used them to construct the beginnings of a wall. So far, we’d blocked off that street and a few others, but it wasn’t nearly enough to stop what was coming.

  I landed next to her and shook my head. “It’s worse than we thought.”

  “How many?” Reynolds asked. She was somewhere in her fifties, with platinum-gray hair cut to shoulder length. Smart as a whip, she’d been the president of the university before the Event hit, and it was her leadership that had kept people together and organized during those critical early days.

  “Too many to count,” I replied. “There’s at least five hundred zombies north of the wall, moving this way. Maybe more. It’s hard to say for sure when they’re not holding still.”

  “Damn. We can’t hold that, can we?” Reynolds asked.

  “Not at this wall, no,” I replied. “The wall itself might hold them back, but it’s spotty. We haven’t had enough time to connect all the buildings with chunks of wall, or to block off the windows and doors. They’ll walk right through the gaps, break windows and move through the buildings… There just wasn’t enough time to build up proper defenses.”

  “We’ll retreat back to Harvard Yard, then,” Reynolds decided. “I hate to give up the ground we’ve been working to recover up here, but we don’t have much choice, do we? Unless you think you can take them down before they reach us?”

  “I’m game to try, but that’s a lot of zombies,” I replied.

  This trouble had been brewing since before the fighting finished against the Karabos. Harvard had a team of eggheads working to track all the changes wrought by the Event, as we were calling it, and one stand-out had been the fact that dead people were sometimes coming back as undead monsters. Cemeteries in particular had become hot spots for spawning new creatures. Most of the bodies buried in the area had been there for a long time, so they were coming back as skeletons. Those were easy to take down and relatively low on the threat meter.

  When someone who’d died more recently was brought back by magic, you got a zombie instead. Zombies were also low threat, usually popping up as tier one or two monsters, the lowest risk adversaries we could meet. The problem with zombies was they had the ability to pass on their infection.

  It didn’t work quite like the movies, thank goodness. Not everyone who was bitten or clawed turned into a zombie themselves. But if you were wounded by a zombie’s teeth or claws and died soon after, you’d come back as a zombie yourself. The time to rise as an undead varied. We’d seen waits as short as a few minutes or as long as a few hours.

  Somewhere in Somerville, a zombie had risen about three or four days ago. That zombie managed to kill a few people, turning them into zombies as well. That little pack kept growing, running into more people, killing them, and turning them as well. The whole thing snowballed out of control before we even knew what was going on. Whole neighborhoods went down under the relentless undead horde marching through.

  Now there was an actual army of the dead moving south like they had an appointment in Harvard Yard, and there was precious little most people could do to stop them.

  Harvard had some good defenders. Reynolds showed some real leadership in keeping people together and organized. She’d centralized the university’s resources, gathering critical supplies like food and water into areas where they could be guarded and doled out to everyone as needed. She’s also authorized the Harvard University Police Department to deputize as many volunteers as they could get. Over two hundred students had signed up to help defend the place.

  It was a good start, but those students were young, lacked training, and had little experience fighting. Most of all, they had few magical crystals backing them up. With my help, the HUPD had enough resources to grant every volunteer at least one crystal, and some had two or three stones. That wasn’t enough to keep them safe in close combat against an enemy like this.

  And of course, anyone who died fighting this army would just join its ranks.

  “Anything you can do to whittle them down some would be a help,” Reynolds said. “But please, don’t risk yourself. The last thing we need is a zombie with all your abilities, eh?”

  “No kidding,” I replied, chuckling. That would be an even greater disaster.

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  Thanks to some early encounters with a lot of monsters, I’d wound up much stronger than most other people. The early lead I’d acquired snowballed until I was tier eight. In fact, I was tier eight for multiple crystals, which meant I had the equivalent of one hundred and twenty-eight tier one crystals stacked up for Strength, Stamina, and Natural Armor. Add it all up and I hit harder than anyone else around and was incredibly difficult to take down.

  All the same, that many foes gave me pause.

  “I’ll do what I can to slow them down and take out as many as I can before they get here,” I told her. “You use the time to get your people back somewhere safer. I’ll buy you as much of it as I can.”

  “Good luck!” Reynolds replied.

  I waved and flew upward again, soaring back north toward where the horde was bearing down on our position. If I couldn’t stop them, where would the people who’d been trying to build up Harvard Square go? They could retreat south, I supposed. In a pinch I figured I could find a way to knock out the bridges. That would probably at least slow the zombies down, but I couldn’t be sure even the Charles River would stop them.

  It wasn’t difficult to find them. The zombies stuck mostly together. There were a few wanderers at the edges of the group, but most of them stayed packed in, near to one another. They moved in the same direction, too. It was uncannily like the zombie movies I’d seen before everything went to heck.

  I dove, pouring on the speed as I did. Fists out ahead of me, I plowed directly into the lead zombies. They were blasted apart by the impact, which was every bit as disgusting as it sounded. I kept moving, slowed but still flying forward, and plowed into more of them. A quick pass through the crowd took down half a dozen of the things, but it was like pulling a few drops of water out of the ocean.

  There had to be a faster way of dealing with this mess. I wished for a moment that Alex was there with me. He was good for thinking up plans. His mind, always sharp, was now many times stronger thanks to magical Intellect crystals. With that boost, he was probably one of the smartest people to have ever lived.

  But he was downtown, leading his new Domain. There wasn’t time to go to him for help before the horde reached Harvard.

  “But maybe I don’t have to beat them all,” I said aloud. “Maybe I can give them something new to chase?”

  I dropped from the sky, landing on the street a dozen feet behind the rearmost zombies. Like the sides, the rear guard was more scattered than the center of the pack. Some ambled along slower than the main group, leaving a gap. I rushed to the nearest of those and used the outer edge of my hand like a blade, slicing its head clean off. The zombie dropped like a pile of rocks.

  It took killing two more of them before I got the attention of the rest, but once I did, they all turned around. Every zombie within line of sight pivoted, almost all at the same time. For a lingering moment, they stared at me. Then they surged ahead, all of them rushing at me as fast as their legs could carry them.

  These weren’t ‘fast zombies’ from the movies. These guys were more like what I’d call ‘shamblers.’ They started toward me, picking up speed as they walked, which was exactly what I wanted.

  I backed away, keeping just enough distance between myself and the monsters that they were never really a bother. How long they’d keep following me if I didn’t let them get close, I didn’t know, so every so often I allowed a couple to come near enough that they could try to grab me. I didn’t let them, of course. I just killed the ones that grew too close.

  With a little luck, maybe I could draw them away far enough that they stopped being a threat to Harvard altogether, but that was going to take all day. Besides, even with the zombies all tier one and two, that was over six hundred crystals out there.

  I’d been in a bit of a lull since the Karabos invasion ended. Mostly, I’d spent the past two days helping to bring water and food into the main four hubs of human civilization organizing themselves along the banks of the Charles.

  There was Alex’s Domain, in the downtown area, based out of the old Boston City Hall. Then there was a group over at Fenway. They’d barricaded the place, allowing it to house hundreds of refugees. Captain MacGregor, formerly of the Boston police, now headed that base. MIT was steadily fortifying their campus on the north side of the Charles, and Harvard had set up two strong points. One was focused around Harvard Yard, while the other was at the stadium south of the river.

  I’d seen evidence of more enclaves starting to form, but those were the most notable, and those were where I’d spent most of my efforts. Between my Flight and my Strength, I could carry literal tons of supplies with each run, and everyone was desperate for any help they could get.

  We all knew winter was only a couple of months away. Boston got cold. The river would freeze over, making it more difficult to access the main water source everyone relied on. You had to boil river water before it was safe, but at leas there was plenty of it—for now. Food was going to be key in surviving the months ahead, so I was bringing in as much of it as I could.

  All that left me stagnating in terms of advancement, though. I’d jumped up a bit when Alex swapped a few high end crystals for the control stone that gave him a Domain, but I hadn’t grown much since.

  Magical Stones

  Point 1: Clear Stone (Tier 8) - Strength

  Point 1, Second Ring: Clear Stone (Tier 8) - Stamina

  Point 1, Third Ring: Clear Stone (Tier 7) - Agility

  Point 1, Fourth Ring: Clear Stone (Tier 6) - Will

  Point 1, Fifth Ring: Clear Stone (Tier 5) - Will

  Point 1, Seventh Ring: Clear Stone (Tier 6) - Agility

  Point 1, Eighth Ring: Clear Stone (Tier 5) - Strength

  Point 1, Ninth Ring: Clear Stone (Tier 5) - Stamina

  +

  Point 2: Yellow Stone (Tier 5) - Flight

  Point 2, Second Ring: Yellow Stone (Tier 5) - Lightning Bolt

  Point 2, Third Ring: Yellow Stone (Tier 3) - Gust of Wind

  +

  Point 3: Grey Stone (Tier 8) - Natural Armor

  Point 3, Second Ring: Grey Stone (Tier 7) - Natural Armor

  Point 3, Third Ting: Grey Stone (Tier 3) - Regeneration

  +

  Point 4: Blue Stone (Tier 3) - Water Breathing

  +

  Point 5: Black Stone (Tier 4) - NightVision

  Spare Stones

  Clear: Strength (Tier 1) x2, Stamina (Tier 1) x4, Agility (Tier 1) x 4, Will (Tier 1) x7, Intellect (Tier 1) x4, Intellect (Tier 2) x3, Intellect (Tier 3) x1, Charisma (Tier 1) x6, Charisma (Tier 2) x8, Charisma (Tier 3) x2

  Yellow: Air Elemental (Tier 2) x1

  Grey: Regeneration (Tier 2) x1, Sense Danger (Tier 3) x1

  Blue: Create Water (Tier 1) x6, Water Breathing (Tier 1) x2, Ice Blast (Tier 1) x5

  The bottom line was, if I could find a way to take this menace out, rather than just leading them on a wild goose chase, it would be a massive boon, for me and everyone else.

  I swatted another zombie, killing it, then took off again, Flying just a few feet out of reach as I continued leading them north, away from campus. All the while I brainstormed ways I could do a little mass monster extermination. It wasn’t hard to come up with a few ideas.