The voices of the shouting Gamers drew more and more zombies away from the battlefield, toward the forest. In the darkness, the movement of the thousands of undead resembled the opening of a dark sea, revealing a path that could colpse upon itself at any time.

  Mark was running through that small path, trying to maintain some distance from the wandering zombies that hadn’t been tempted by the shouting.

  It was forcing him to zigzag in certain zones.

  He looked to his side, a few yards away, and he saw a shadow running at the same speed as him. His friend Arthur, also moving under the moonlight. Also zigzagging to avoid concentrations of zombies.

  Mark was running more silently than Arthur—he instinctively knew how to step and what pces to avoid. And he winced internally when he heard the loud rustling of leaves his friend was causing.

  Mark forced himself to calm down. To realize that his nerves were getting the best of him, that it wasn’t that loud—not compared to the shuffling of the feet of tens of thousands of undead moving around.

  And in any case, most zombies reacted too te, and when they tried to reach for the fast shadows running next to them, the Gamers were already gone.

  Other zombies reacted faster. Mark had to duck to avoid the grabbing hand of a massive zombie—easily over six foot five.

  Sometimes, Mark avoided a group of zombies by going to the left, and Arthur went to the right, and they didn’t see each other for a couple of minutes.

  And only faith kept them believing that the other was still going. That the other was still alive.

  After one of those leaps of faith, they met again and realized they were approaching a distant wall of zombies. The two masses of undead the Gamers had divided with their shouting were still touching at this point. It was a confusing mass of about three hundred of them, about ten zombies deep.

  There was some movement on the right side of the approaching wall of zombies, and Mark realized that one of the Mongol horses, after losing its rider, was now running around the battlefield, stirring the zombies, a more attractive prey than the ever more distant gamers still shouting.

  “I LOVE FAST FOOD! I WANT A FUCKING BURGER!” Tobias was now shouting in the distance, apparently having gotten tired of the more cssics lines of “Come get me!” or “Fuck you zombies!”

  Arthur and Mark couldn’t stop running to think it through—they would be caught by the undead.

  The wall of zombies was getting closer... There wasn’t a path to circle around it.

  One hundred yards away.

  Go through. Or come back with empty hands, Mark thought. And die tomorrow, when the other armies pick us apart.

  Fifty yards away.

  They were both winded, and they didn’t waste any breath talking. Arthur smiled and made a gesture. Mark understood, smiling back.

  Twenty-five yards away.

  While still running, Arthur grabbed a shield abandoned on the ground. Mark drew his dagger.

  Five yards away…

  Fuck you, zombies, Mark thought.

  And Arthur rammed through the wall of undead, using the shield to open a path. The impulse got them about four zombies deep, and then Arthur started pushing through, with the energy of a desperate man forcing his way through a colpsing cave, trying to push away the rocks threatening to bury him alive. He pushed with the shield. He kicked. He rammed with his shoulder…

  And Mark walked behind him, backwards, stabbing, kicking. Trying to keep as close as possible to Arthur—to make sure to cover him well. Stabbing through eyes, through temples… His [Traitor’s Premonition] fshed a couple of times, helping him avoid being pinned by reaching hands. Helping him escape from the bites of snarling zombies.

  “Keep fucking going,” Mark whispered, when he noticed they were slowing down.

  If they didn’t move fast enough, they would get swamped. The crowd would become dense enough to surround them, to block any movement.

  The moment they stopped advancing. The moment the undead could pile on them…

  The moment they stopped… they would die.

  “Please, keep pushing, keep pushing,” Mark muttered.

  “I’m fucking trying…” Arthur answered, with rasping voice.

  And Arthur did keep pushing, but the zombies were stronger than they had expected, or maybe the wall of undead was deeper than they had realized.

  It didn’t matter.

  All that mattered was that their advance started to slow.

  Eventually, Arthur pushed away zombies, but the zombies had nowhere to go; there was nothing more than a moving, solid wall of undead behind them.

  The path in front was closed. The path behind was closing, with the undead starting to realize there was other prey besides the terrified horse running through them…

  So close… We were so close… Mark thought, pulling his dagger from the eye of one of the zombies, kicking another on the chest, and preparing himself to fight and die when the zombies finished surrounding them. Preparing himself for the moment when they wouldn’t even be able to move their arms from the pressure of bodies, when they would have to suffer being eaten alive…

  He clenched his dagger. And he looked at his friend’s back… In just a few seconds he could cut Arthur’s throat and then plunge the dagger into his own heart. At least that would spare them the horrible pain and terror of feeling those cold hands and teeth ripping through their bodies.

  Fuck, he thought, trying to steel himself to finish his friend. He killed me once. So this would make us even…

  Then he heard a commotion nearby, and saw the terrified horse that had created the wall of undead raising its frontal legs defensively, fending off some zombies. It was only a few yards away, in the same mass of undead Arthur and Mark were in. And it was close to escaping, thanks to its raw strength and its thick hide that helped protect it from the reaching cws and bites.

  And Mark saw an opportunity—a crazy one. The horse was so close… He stopped protecting Arthur’s back, and started moving sideways, using [Phantom Presence] to step through the reaching hands of a couple zombies, ducking under another’s grasp. And then he reached the horse, he grabbed the reins, and pced a foot in the stirrup, and leapt onto its back.

  He barely managed to seat himself on the horse, which immediately started thrashing, trying to throw off the stranger attempting to control it.

  Mark fought to stay on the horse’s back and looked over his shoulder to check on Arthur.

  He had moved on an impulse, taking advantage of an opportunity. With no time to warn his friend.

  And now Arthur was surrounded by zombies, hitting with his elbow one that tried to grab him from behind. He was looking around, desperately searching for Mark, who he probably believed had already been killed by the undead.

  No time, no time…, Mark thought.

  Then he started shouting from the horse, like a maniac:

  “COME GET ME, MOTHER-FUCKERS! COME FUCKING GET ME!” he shouted, trying to get the zombies’ attention away from his friend—helping ease a little of the pressure.

  The horse had been close to getting away from the crowd, but now Mark pulled its reins to the right, forcing it to change direction and start running through the crowd of zombies horizontally, trampling over them, starting to clear the path for Arthur to go through.

  Arthur had seen him moving, and he left the shield behind and just started to desperately scramble through the now more open mass of zombies, taking advantage of the distraction, and crawling, jumping, pushing through… until he eventually reached the other side, falling to the empty ground.

  When he realized his friend was safe, Mark kicked the zombies that were trying to grab his leg and dismount him. And then he precariously got on his feet over the frantic horse, crouching down—his heart screaming with fear, knowing that if he fell now he would die—and he depleted [Phantom Presence] when he used it to avoid the grabbing hand of a zombie. He jumped from the horse to the left, over the heads of the undead, in a jump through the air that felt as if it sted an eternity, and finished with a hard fall on firm ground, a few yards away from Arthur. He rolled a few times, feeling a sharp pain on his side.

  Then he crawled toward his friend, gasping for air.

  And they both turned and saw that the horse’s desperate scramble for its life was coming to an end. The horse’s legs failed it, making it fall to the ground, and it was swamped by the undead. The pained, desperate squeals of the animal made Mark’s stomach lurch.

  “Sorry…” Mark gasped, “sorry…”

  “Have to go…” Arthur answered, pale and out of breath. He had a deep gash in his arm and a bleeding bite mark on his shoulder.

  And they started running towards the hill—it was close, less than a quarter of a mile away.

  Mark held his side, feeling sharp pangs of pain with every step.

  They reached the approximate zone where the redhead was supposed to have been killed—where he should still be, if he’d had the decency to stay put after being killed.

  Mark looked back over his shoulder for a moment.

  Although many zombies were staggering towards them, most of the undead on the battlefield were too distracted by the shouting Gamers, by the squeals of the dying horse, to have noticed the Gamers running through them.

  But the Gamer’s voice was growing fainter and fainter, as they were forced to retreat while the zombies pursued them—Tobias was now shouting about his favorite TV shows that he would never see again, Emily shouting back and saying that most of those shows were “totally overrated”. The zombies, their prey getting farther and farther away, were starting to come back to the battlefield, attracted by the noise their own presence generated, and starting to close the opened path.

  Can we come back the same way? Mark wondered, his heart still racing.

  They didn’t have a pn to regroup with the other Gamers—it had been impossible to predict beforehand how the zombies would react to the shouting.

  They had agreed to meet at the same spot along the treeline where they had been lying while spying the battlefield.

  How everyone would reach that point was still up in the air.

  If there was enough space, Mark and Arthur intended to come back using the same path—it was the most direct route.

  But if there wasn’t enough space, they had pnned to delve deeper into the battlefield, escaping to the forest through any opportunity they saw.

  “He’s here!” Arthur whispered from a few yards away. “He’s fucking here!”

  Mark approached the corpse. The redhead was lying face down. The shaft of the arrow that had taken his life still protruded from the back of his skull.

  He could have become the first of us to learn magic, Mark thought. This could have been the greatest adventure of his life… One of the greatest adventures in the history of our world…

  But an arrow had taken that from him.

  No mercy.

  No second chances.

  The young man hadn’t even seen it coming.

  Mark began patting down the corpse, searching for the book. The night’s dew had soaked the redhead’s clothes, and soon Mark’s hands were damp with moisture. For a moment, it felt strange that the corpse didn’t move, trying to grab him. Even back on Earth, whenever he had seen a corpse—whether at a funeral, or after having killed someone—Mark had always felt as if the corpse would start moving at any moment. As if death wasn’t anything more than a small trance that could end in an instant. The st couple of hours had done very little to stop those odd twists of his imagination.

  The book was in a pocket inside the redhead’s jacket. When Mark opened it, he saw glowing orange lines that seemed to shift and writhe on their own. His eyes, accustomed to the darkness, were almost blinded when he tried to focus on those moving, fiery patterns—feeling as if they were trying to tell him something... burning through the deepest confines of his mind… And then, a few seconds ter, he had to let go of the book when a brutal headache tore through his skull, almost making him lose consciousness.

  “You okay?” Arthur asked, shaking his shoulder to make him focus while looking around to see if they had attracted any attention.

  “Yeah… I think… Yeah,” Mark answered, getting on his knees, the sides of his head still throbbing. Trying to hold onto consciousness while he felt as if the glowing orange patterns finished burning out within his mind, as if they had exhausted any fuel they could find.

  “Is that the book?” Arthur asked, looking at the book on the wet grass between them.

  “Yes,” Mark answered, grabbing it and putting it in his holding bag.

  It has to be, he thought, trying to focus on the world surrounding him and forget the shimmering lines that were now just blurry memories.

  Then he checked the clothes of the redhead again, and then his bag, because he would never forgive himself if it wasn’t the Book.

  “Yes. It’s the book. We have it!” he told Arthur when he was sure there was nothing else on the redhead.

  Arthur nodded.

  “I think we’ll have to find another way back,” he said.

  They looked at the path they had taken to get there. It was still somewhat doable—if they were lucky. But it would be easier to escape through another part of the battlefield, especially the sections trampled by the Mongols.

  Mark was eyeing one of those spots, about two miles away —with barely any undead around—, when he realized there were hundreds of small fires moving through the right side of the forest. For a moment, he thought he was still seeing the fiery lines of the book, as if they had rekindled and were now burning through his retina.

  But then he realized that the Gamers on that side of the forest had gone silent. He no longer heard Tobias and Emily discussing the best pizza shops.

  And he heard Arthur muttering:

  “No, no, no… Motherfucker…”

  The Mongols were coming back to the battlefield, and for a moment, Mark hoped that they hadn’t noticed them. That this was just another one of their charges against the undead. That the Mongols would get the undead’s attention, and they would be able to escape…

  Arthur and Mark looked at the riding Mongols entering the battlefield… and Mark felt his stomach plunge when the Mongols started charging directly toward them.

  “So… same path then?” Arthur asked.

  Mark was too tired to answer. He just nodded and followed his friend. They started running through the same path they had used to come. Only now, the dark sea of bodies was starting to regroup, attracted by the noises coming from the battlefield, and the path started to colpse upon itself, threatening to drown them all.

  Mark looked back and saw the speed the Mongols were coming after them. They were getting closer at a terrifying pace. The pounding of the horses’ hooves was getting louder and louder. There was no way they would be able to run faster than the cavalry charge.

  There’s no chance we’ll make it, he thought.