Chapter 114 - Food Courts Are The Pits

  Back during round one with the wraiths, I’d tried to go one on one and seriously gotten the bad end of the deal. I’d almost died. If it hadn’t been for my friends, I probably would have.

  Round two, no more miss nice guy. Those wraiths were absolutely deadly, so I wasn’t mucking around with them anymore. As I streaked across the passage like a dark comet, I hammered one with a Drain Life at range, then used the brief weakness it felt after being hit with the spell as a distraction to slam into it shield-first. The small shield rang like a gong with the impact and the wraith sailed backward through the air, then smashed into the floor in the middle of the zombie horde.

  One down, stunned anyway. The other wraith wheeled toward me, but Sue caught it in the air with a Fireball spell that set it aflame. The flames guttered and went out quickly enough, but the wraith slipped back toward the rear ranks, well outside Sue’s range. I grinned ferociously at that. We had them on the rocks. All we needed to do was keep the pressure on them.

  With a roar, our ground forces collided with the hissing and growling undead. The enemy’s front rank collapsed almost instantly as the higher tiered undead in my front row made short work of their cannon fodder. Still, sufficient tier one monsters had a literal weight of their own, and they started climbing my Abominations, half a dozen zombies biting and clawing each.

  I swung down toward the ground, landed, and started cutting zombies loose from my undead. Where it was needed I cast Heal Undead to get them a little health back, and then I followed that with Augment Undead for each Abomination. Augmented, they seemed to grow a little larger and they were definitely a whole lot more aggressive! They tore forward, ripping apart more zombies as they drove deeper into the enemy lines.

  One avian went down, nailed by multiple Harm spells from inside the enemy ranks. He landed in the middle of the zombie swarm and was killed before anyone could do anything. The other avians backed off; they seemed to have figured out the only ranged attackers the enemy had were skeletons, and they focused on either hitting them or staying away from them.

  Over the next thirty minutes we slowly ground our way forward. A hundred or more zombies died trying to keep us away, but using the Abominations to tank the bulk of their attackers was paying off. All I had to do was keep them healed, which was turning into a full-time job. I maintained the Augment spells and Healed undead as fast as I could get the spell to reset, only casting Drain Life when I needed to use Health to Mana.

  But it was already growing dark.

  The skylights above were dark blue with just a hint left of pink. The windows still let in some illumination, but it was fading. Without power, this place was going to be dark very soon. I’d still be able to see, thanks to the NightVision power. Kara, too. My undead wouldn’t be hampered too badly. But the rest of the living would be fighting blind.

  We needed to wrap this quickly. I launched myself into the air again, hoping to find some way to accomplish that. Instead, I spotted nothing but additional problems.

  The area ahead was still packed with zombies, the two wraiths holding back toward the rear of their force. They seemed focused around the Food Court, and now that I was nearer I could see why. In the center of the Court lay a gigantic hole in the floor. It dropped into darkness. There was a mound up against one side, and a steady stream of zombies continue to clamber forth from below.

  That’s why we hadn’t seen the boss bad guy. That’s why the zombies seemed to keep coming no matter how many we killed. They had tons of the things pouring out of the ground—and down there, that had to be where whoever was in charge of this Domain hid. The big bad was down there, waiting for me. I could feel it.

  If we wanted to take him out we were going to have to grind our way through all his undead and then chase him down into the darkness. At night, when he’d be strongest anyway. This whole mission wasn’t going the way I’d hoped at all.

  Shouts from the rear guard drew my eye. I turned in the air and saw…more zombies? They definitely weren’t mine, and they were storming out of the Sears behind us. We’d cleared that space, though! I had several ratkin scout it, to make sure we weren’t caught between two armies, just like we had been.

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  Farnsworth was already making his way toward the rear of our force to help. It was mostly ratkin back there, and they lacked the numbers or skills to hold back a tide of zombies alone. I streaked through the air and landed directly in the zombies’ path, slicing one in half with my sword. I killed another, and a third, before Farnsworth caught up with me and added his axe to the fight. Between the two of us we managed to slow the zombie advance a lot.

  “How did they get behind us?” I called out.

  “Not sure. Either they hid somehow, or they went around.”

  “Or under,” I said, realizing that was probably what had happened. “They have tunnels under the mall. There’s an opening in the food court. The real enemy has to be down there, beneath us.”

  “It’s almost night, and we’re fighting on two fronts now,” Farnsworth said. He paused a beat, chopping down another zombie. “I don’t know that we can win this tonight.”

  He was probably right. We’d put a serious dent in their troops. If we retreated now, there was a limit to how much harm they could do overnight. Best case scenario, we’d return first thing in the morning and finish the job. More likely scenario, they’d come for us tonight and we’d fight them out in the open somewhere. Not super optimal, but neither was staying here and letting them slowly pick us apart from both sides.

  “I think you’re right. They’ll come for us tonight, though.”

  “Let them!” Farnsworth said. “We’ll hole up somewhere defensible. You have ideas?”

  “The farm?” I asked. There were no walls around it, but the open fields gave us plenty of open areas for Sue to blast them apart as they came at us.

  “Better than this. I’ll lead them out, if you can cover our withdrawal!”

  “I’ve got it,” I told him.

  What followed was messy, but it mostly worked.

  I darted back to the front ranks, filling in the ratkin and Kara as I went. Instead of advancing, my Abominations began a slow withdrawal. I’d already sent all the fire skeletons, regular zombies, and Hope back to the rear to help Farnsworth keep our escape route clear. He in turn was guiding ratkin out the rear mall entrance. It was a short tunnel-like concrete passage which led outside on the north-west side of the mall. From there, crossing the highway and getting to the farm would only take a few minutes.

  Step by step, we withdrew as the last light faded from the sky. The avians were gone; they’d figured out what was happening and made their own exit somehow. Most of the ratkin were out. It was down to the last of us, a few humans and a bunch of undead holding the line.

  “Time to go,” I told Farnsworth. “Take the rest of the Abominations. They’ll fit out your passage and help make sure you aren’t followed.”

  I grabbed six zombies with Control Undead and turned them on the rest of the enemies. They didn’t last long, but taking over a bunch at a time like that, they at least brought down a few more with them.

  “What about you?” Farnsworth asked.

  “Sue won’t fit down that passage. We’re gonna have to go out through Target. We’ll meet you quick as we can.”

  “All right. Stay safe.”

  Then he was gone, fleeing down the stone passage. The doors slammed shut behind him; he’d been the last of the living to flee. I sent three of the Abominations with him and ordered the rest to hold the door against the enemy for as long as they could.

  I leaped atop Sue, using Flight to give me some extra lift. My sword slashed out, taking down a zombie trying to climb my dino’s leg as I flitted up. But as I reached Sue’s back I saw to my horror that Kara was still riding, too!

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Helping make sure you get out,” Kara snapped. “Now, can we please go?”

  “Damned right!” I hollered. I ordered Sue to beat feet. The dinosaur took off east at a run, stomping several zombies into mush as we raced down the hallway, back through the shattered doorway into the Target.

  From there, getting out was pretty simple. I mean sure, we had a few hundred zombies chasing after us as we sped across the tile floor and jumped out through the massive, shattered window. But a couple hundred zombies was fast becoming an everyday thing, you know? It just wasn’t as scary as it had been a few days ago.

  I had Sue break left as soon as we were back outside, racing around the north end of the mall. We passed the parking garage and then we were back in the open again, moving across a grassy space toward the highway. Ahead of us was the remainder of our force. Farnsworth was at the rear guard with my Abominations, but it looked like the ones I’d left inside were doing their job, because there wasn’t any sign of pursuit, yet. Operative word being ‘yet,’ I was pretty sure.

  They were going to come after us in force. After we’d made an incursion like that, they couldn’t afford anything else. Either they beat us tonight, or they knew we’d be back in the morning and blow them to kingdom come then.

  Patches was at the vanguard of our force, leading the rest of the ratkin and humans toward the abandoned farm that we’d set as a rally point. I was thinking the Barnes & Noble might have been a more defensible spot, but we’d been stuck retreating on the west side of the mall instead of the east. We’d have to make do with what we had.

  I kept Sue running at a fast pace as we closed the gap to Farnsworth and the others. Behind me, I heard a rumbling boom. I turned back to look over my shoulder and listen.

  The boom came again, and then a third time. It was a drum, some sort of massive drum. Something was hammering on the drum. All I could picture was the sound summoning up every undead this enemy had at hand, all their forces, all the creatures it could command.

  Boom. Boom. BOOM.

  Over and over, the drum went on. They were coming for us. We had little time to prepare, and quite a lot to do if we wanted to survive until dawn.