The Mongols were coming. They were a couple of miles away, riding their horses through the battlefield. Carrying about a hundred torches that shone faintly in the darkness of the night.

  Maybe the erratic wind had carried the voices of the shouting Gamers towards them.

  Maybe they had been getting ready to make another cavalry charge against the undead, and they had seen what the Gamers were doing.

  Or maybe the gods of this world were as cruel as they were fabled to be.

  In any case, Mark and Arthur were forced to take the same path they had used to get the magic book. Only now, it was even more crowded with undead, attracted by the sudden commotion on the battlefield. The shouting Gamers on the left could barely be heard in the distance—and the ones on the right, Emily and Tobias, had gone silent with the arrival of the Mongols. Mark didn’t want to think about what that meant.

  Arthur and Mark kept running. They managed to cross through the mass of zombies they had almost died in, with the undead focused on ripping apart the horse’s corpse.

  But it wasn’t enough. The Mongols were already just about a mile away. The pounding of the horses’ hooves was getting louder and louder.

  They weren’t going to make it.

  Mark felt fury within. They had been so close. They had gotten the book, against all odds. They had survived so much… And now, they were going to die like this.

  Killed by an enemy they couldn’t fight against. At any moment, the Mongols would reach them and strike them with their sabers.

  Or maybe we’ll end up like the redhead—an arrow through the brain that we never saw coming.

  Mark started to run behind Arthur, trying to cover him with his body. His [Traitor’s Premonition] was almost depleted, but it would warn him about at least one incoming arrow.

  We could have fucking done it, he thought with bitterness, Against all fucking odds… We could have fucking done it.

  They could see the forest about half a mile away. Yes, there were hundreds of zombies wandering around and starting to walk towards them, attracted by the thundering noise of the Mongols they had behind. But there had been a path…

  They would have succeeded.

  In front of him, Arthur started looking around, at the undead coming from both sides. At the pursuing Mongols behind them.

  Looking for a way out.

  Trying to find a way to escape the inevitable…

  Nothing to do, Mark thought. We’re done… The shadows of the night seemed darker, deeper, and about to devour them.

  And then Arthur started shouting. He shouted with all his remaining energy, his voice carrying through the battlefield. The voice of a man spitting at hopelessness. Making sure to be listened to at least for one last time.

  “MOTHER-FUCKERS! COME GET US! COME FUCKING GET US!”

  It wasn’t clear whom he meant, if the Mongols or the undead.

  But oh, they were coming.

  Both were coming.

  The Mongols seemed to accelerate their charge. Mark heard the Mongol commander ordering his riders to tighten their formation. The voice of the Mongol commander carried to the Gamers, and it seemed tense and urgent. It seemed they were being pursued by a smaller battalion of Genghis Khan’s army, of about a hundred soldiers.

  “COME GET US!” Arthur repeated, still shouting, and ramming through a couple of zombies in his way. “COME FUCKING GET US!”

  For a moment, Mark thought his friend had gone crazy, until he realized Arthur was still looking around, still calculating—hearing their prey nearby; the undead in front of them were closing the path faster and faster…

  And Mark understood the crazy gambit his friend was making.

  Arthur intended to block the path and trap the Mongols, causing an avalanche of undead that would crush them.

  Of course, by accelerating the collapse of the path, he was risking that both Mark and he might be caught in it as well.

  Crazy bastard… how did he manage to live for longer than I did? Mark thought, before also going for it, shouting:

  If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  “COME FOR US! FUCKING COME FOR US!”

  Mark desperately tried—and mostly failed—to find the right amount of loudness that would attract the zombies on their sides, but not attract the ones in front. He even shouted with his face turned to the side, covering his mouth, trying to stop his voice from traveling too much in front of him.

  It was useless. The horde of zombies was closing in fast. The ones already in front were staggering towards them, their hands reaching, preventing them from running in a straight line.

  The path closed for the Mongols first—they needed a bigger space to move. The Mongol commander had seemed resolute on catching the Gamers, but on the flanks of his charge, more Mongols were having to trample over zombies, or change directions and lose control of their terrified horses.

  A few Mongols were dismounted, their shouts of pain and fear reaching their commander, who seemed to realize the heavy toll of his charge—he raised his hand, shouted some orders, and started what would probably become a very costly retreat.

  Frustrated, one of the Mongols shot an arrow from the distance.

  Only [Traitor’s Premonition] protected Mark from being hit in the back. He felt a cold shadow piercing through his shoulder, and not wanting to jump to the side, leaving Arthur exposed, he reacted by grabbing a zombie and putting it in the direction of the projectile. He felt the impact on his arms when the arrow hit the undead, and could see the point that had pierced through the zombie. The undead tried to bite him, and Mark simply pushed it away with a kick to the stomach, and continued running.

  [Traitor’s Premonition] was depleted. No more Skills.

  Arthur looked back towards him.

  “Go faster, it’s fucking closing!” he said.

  First, the undead avalanche had gotten the now-retreating Mongols.

  Then, just fifty yards away from the treeline, it got Arthur and Mark.

  The gambit had been too dangerous.

  The horde had closed the path.

  Mark and Arthur tried moving to the sides, to find some miraculous path. They retreated a couple of times when the crowd of zombies got too dense…

  But it was impossible to keep moving. There were too many undead around, too many grabbing hands harassing them.

  So close. They had been so close…

  “Fuck!” Mark shouted, getting ready to die.

  They fought side by side. Arthur with his sword and a shield taken from the ground.

  Mark yanked another dagger from a corpse—and with one dagger in each hand, he started fighting desperately. A dagger through an eye, a push with his leg to get the zombie away, and repeat, over and over, until they were swamped with more undead than they could handle.

  None of the Gamers were at the treeline. None of them had reached the agreed-upon meeting spot.

  “Where are they?” Arthur asked, hitting a zombie in the head with the shield and then running its brain through with his sword. His eyes scanned the treeline, wide and searching. Nothing.

  “They fucking abandoned us,” Mark answered, after losing one of the daggers that had remained stuck in a zombie’s temple. “Exactly what we should have done with them! Fuck!”

  They acted as cynics who had seen everything. And they had just lost their lives trying to help everybody.

  Stupid. Stupid. Stupid….

  Then the shouting began. First, it was Emily, from some position within the forest, to the right.

  “THE WALKING DEAD WAS GREAT! THE LAST SEASONS HAD SOME REALLY INTERESTING MOMENTS!”

  Then it was Liam, the sixteen-year-old, shouting from a different position within the forest, to the left.

  “THE LAST SEASONS OF THE WALKING DEAD WERE PURE SHIT!”

  “WHAT ABOUT THE SPIN-OFFS? AMAZING STUFF!”

  “FUCK THE SPIN-OFFS!”

  “YOU’RE YOUNG, SO I’LL FORGIVE YOUR SHITTY TASTE! YOU PROBABLY HAVE THE ATTENTION SPAN OF A GOLDFISH!”

  Arthur and Mark looked at each other, without really believing it. The shouting started to attract many zombies away…

  And the rest of the Gamers arrived, charging from the forest. Tobias roared and used a mace to bash down a zombie’s head. Gustav kicked a zombie to the ground and stabbed it in the head with a sword. Jackson and Wyatt used spears to hit the zombies from a distance, keeping them away.

  They fought with courage.

  They fought together.

  And they managed to open the path.

  “You guys found the book?” Gustav asked when he arrived next to Arthur and Mark.

  “Yes,” Mark answered.

  “Better be worth it. Or I’ll kick Johan’s ass.”

  “You and me both.”

  He looked at Gustav. Just a few hours before, he had been willing to kill him. And he was almost sure Gustav had felt the same about him.

  “Thanks for coming back,” Mark said, a little uncomfortable.

  “Don’t mention it,” Gustav answered, a little uncomfortable too. “Hard to leave you behind after you pulled this crazy stunt.”

  At that moment, Jackson cursed—his spear was stuck in a zombie’s neck. The gamer took a step back, trying to pull it out.

  And he tripped on a stone, falling to the ground.

  And a zombie fell upon him.

  Mark and Gustav ran to help, but it was too late. Mark killed the zombie by plunging his dagger through the base of its skull, and when Gustav dragged the undead from the struggling Gamer, they both stared at the blood spurting from Jackson’s neck. Gustav tried to close the injury, to stop the flow of blood—but it was impossible; the bite must have ripped the jugular. The terrified eyes of Jackson stared at them while he bled to death.

  They had been so close to escaping without losing anybody…

  And Mark couldn’t stop looking at those eyes, even when Jackson was no longer there. He vaguely realized that Arthur was pulling him by the arm, taking him away from the dead Gamer. Wyatt was pulling Gustav, who also seemed too dazed to move by himself.

  They reached the forest in complete silence, and after running for about half a mile, Tobias gestured for them to stop.

  Emily and Liam joined them a couple of minutes later.

  “We did it!” Emily said happily. She seemed about to jump around to celebrate when she noticed the defeated expressions of the rest of the group. She noticed Gustav was wasting all his water trying to clean his bloodied hands.

  And she realized Jackson wasn’t with them. She covered her mouth to silence a gasp.

  The Gamers didn’t have time to mourn. They only stopped for another minute. To catch their breath and to explain to Emily and Liam what had happened.

  Mark showed everybody the book, and where he was keeping it—inside his holding bag—so they knew where it was in case something happened to him.

  They would have liked to stay longer. To maybe say some words about Jackson’s sacrifice.

  But there was no time.

  There were thousands of zombies pursuing them. And in the distance, the torches of the Mongols were moving through the forest, circling the battlefield to get them…

  “Now what?” Tobias asked. He was very winded, grabbing at his side and struggling to breathe.

  “We keep running,” Arthur answered, approaching Gustav to gently stop him from frantically trying to clean his hands.