“If even one of you little shits even THINKS of running away during this, I’ll personally blow those thoughts outta your skulls with a high-caliber. Got it?

  Ain’t no exile, no voting, no nothing. You worthless fucks are mine, so when I say jump, you start jumping and hope it’s high enough”.

  These had been the words Andreas had left us gophers with, once night had fallen and we’d traveled far enough from the old school building.

  Without the rest of the student body present, he was comfortable to show his real self.

  And considering it had been in front of the Miller sisters it seemed he’d already written them off as a loss.

  The past hour had dragged on in a dull monotony, a slow crawl through the landscape that felt more like a prison sentence than a journey.

  Our group of seven had taken a less traveled path downhill, led by Tina. So far, her choice had proven sound—there had been nothing but empty woodland ahead of us, no sign of any threat. After what Andreas had said, it wasn’t much of a stretch to assume all his goons had standing orders to shoot, or at the very least threaten to shoot, any gopher that tried to leave the groups.

  But it wasn’t the quiet that made my patience wear thin. It was Bill, trailing behind us with that damn shotgun of his, still gripped tight in his hands. His presence was a reminder that I wasn’t free to do what I wanted. If it weren’t for him, I might’ve cut away from the group, disappeared into the wilds, and left the others to their own devices.

  But Andreas’ warning echoed in my mind, steady and clear. "Don’t try to run. We’ll make sure you don’t get far."

  It wasn’t hard to believe. I had no doubt his men were under orders to make sure no one strayed too far from the group. If it was a choice between staying and facing whatever awaited us, or running and ending up with a bullet in my back, well… I had yet to test exactly what two barrel-fulls of buckshot would do to me.

  Considering that he was stink-eyeing me something fierce, there was little doubt in my mind that he was considering taking some sweet revenge for me knocking him out, only fear of the noise unloading that shotgun would cause, keeping him from just shooting me.

  But time and my patience were wearing thin, and over the past ten minutes I had been slowly, incrementally falling behind and getting closer to Bill. Once I was within a lunge’s length, I was going to tear that gun from his hands and bash him over the skull with it.

  After that, to each their own. The group would cease being my problem.

  “You sure we going the right way?” Bill asked, far too loud in my opinion, from the back of the group.

  Tina just hissed and swiveled back, looking to Bill. At least the woman was smart enough to know that keeping a low profile meant being quiet.

  “For the fifth time, this was our cardio route for practice, I know where we’re going”.

  “Yeah well, how long until we get there?” Bill asked again, just as loud, lighting himself another cigarillo.

  I muttered a curse under my breath, barely holding back a snarl.

  While not a habitual smoker, I did have a cigarette from time to time before this cataclysm, but it had always been far too expensive a habit for me to take up consistently.

  Either way, I didn’t have a problem with him smoking.

  My problem was the fact that those damn coffin nails of his stank to high heaven and might as well have been a dinner call to every monster in a hundred yards.

  “I told you to stop smoking. We need to stay on the down low, not…” Tina snapped at him, before I had a chance to say anything.

  Bill just blew out a large puff and sniped back.

  “Piss off, I need a distraction”.

  “You’re going to bring the whole damn forest down on us…” I muttered, the sound of a hammer cocking behind me my only answer.

  But it wasn’t the click of the weapon that had my jaw snapping shut. It was the noise that followed—a low rumble, like a herd of wild stallions in full gallop.

  “You really might wanna stop giving me lip, gopher, or I’m gonna finish what you started in the corrido….”

  “Shut up," I hissed, grinding to a halt, every nerve on edge as I tried to make sense of the sound.

  "The fuck did you just say to me?" Bill snarled, his face a storm, and his hand shooting for my shirt collar, fingers like claws.

  I launched in a blur of motion, my arms moving before he could react. One coiled around his shotgun, tearing it out of his slackened grip, the other clutching onto his throat with a grip of iron.

  The group froze, staring at me with saucer eyes, but I paid them no mind. The dark, malevolent thing in the back of my mind had burst into violent wakefulness and my stomach twisted with cold, growing fury.

  “I’m being hunted!” the thought, an instinct so primeval my rational mind could not logic why I knew it. I simply did.

  And the realization sent a wave of revulsion through the dark impulse. Through me.

  “SHUT! UP!!!”

  I hissed again, tuning out the noise of the man actively choking in my grasp, his flailing hands grasping impotently at my arm, eyes fixed on a point behind him.

  Far behind us, almost half a mile away, through the pitch-black night that shone like day to my eyes, I saw them. Sinuous reptilian bodies, loping on all fours in an orgiastic display of predatory fury and grace.

  The dog-like aberrations that I’d seen travelling with their goblin handlers before.

  They were tracking us. Charging toward us. Too far for the others to hear or see. But not to me.

  “Goblin Hounds” I muttered and flung Bill away, sprawling him onto the mossy forest floor, levelling the shotgun towards the hunting pack’s direction.

  Mina was the first to react, raising her night-vision monocular, following my gaze.

  “I’m not seeing anything…” she started, voice trailing off, confusion edging her tone.

  Then the color drained from the petite woman’s face

  "What… the hell… are those?"

  Her head snapped back to us.

  “He’s right… monsters are running behind us!”

  “Shit…. shit…. we gotta run” Bill whimpered, words slurred by a burgeoning panic so complete he wasn’t even bothering trying to recover his weapon.

  “No. They’ll catch up to us” I answered, clicking the shotgun open. Two shells. Buckshot. Good for mid to short range.

  No point in calling out for more shells. Considering the speed of those monsters there’d be no time to reload after the first salvo.

  “How do you know?” Bill snapped, hysteria edging his voice.

  “I told you I fought the Goblins before, no? That’s a pack of Goblin Hounds, or Dogs, or whatever, I don’t know, I’ve seen them with Goblin hunting parties. What I do know is that they’re fast. We can’t outrun them”.

  “I’m not gonna stand here and wait. I’m running” Bill shrieked.

  “Then do it and die tired,” I snarled, stepping in front of the group. With a quick snap, I folded the weapon closed, my stance shifting back into a shooting position, unwilling to argue with Bill any more.

  I was fast and tireless.

  I was fast. Tireless.

  But I knew those creatures. I'd seen them scout ahead of their hunting packs before—moving like motorcycles born of sinew and muscle. They weren’t just fast; they were relentless, a blur of strength and speed.

  Outrunning them?

  It would be an exercise in pointless desperation, even for me.

  The only option was to fight.

  To either side of me, the others braced themselves, as ready as they could be. Tina and Tim were on my right, the other two on my left, with Mina safely tucked behind her sister, eyes wide and terrified but trying to hold her ground. Bill was still shouting something from behind, but we paid him no mind.

  Then, within ten seconds, the ground itself seemed to tremble as the thunderous gallop of the Goblin Hounds filled the air. The sound was deafening now, so close, even Bill fell silent and took his position, not that we had any choice.

  And conveniently enough, he took his place right behind us.

  Damned coward.

  They exploded from the underbrush—three of them, a savage blur of bestial savagery, tearing through the night with a cacophony of hisses, barks, and a disturbing yipping that carried an almost human-like edge to it.

  The one I’d seen with the goblin patrol had been a pup, a mere whelp. These—these were something else. Each one was larger than a hyena, their bodies shaped similarly, but that’s where any resemblance to the natural world stopped.

  Leathery flesh, a grotesque patchwork of scales, ragged tufts of coarse fur, and infected, leprous growths, clung to their twisted bodies, all rippling muscle and jagged bone jutting from their frames. Their elongated muzzles—unnaturally stretched—were filled with row upon row of rotting, thumb-long fangs, each tipped with an opaque froth that dripped like poison. Their eyes were the worst: huge, bulging, a sickly yellow that seemed to glow in the dark, brimming with a hunger that went beyond mere predation.

  And those tails. Long, bare, and barbed, they lashed at the earth like serpents with a mind of their own, the heavy, reptilian claws scraping the dirt beneath them as they stalked forward, each step a promise of violent intent. These creatures weren’t just predators—they were the very embodiment of disease and death. And they were closing in.

  “Holy shi…” Tina managed to squeak out only to turn the words into a scream as the monsters charged.

  I unloaded into the lead monster, its oversized head snapping back violently as two barrels worth of buckshot struck it dead-on. And yet, it did not stop.

  Half its skull reduced to a gory mess of ruptured flesh and splintered bone, the abomination still charged.

  And I did the same.

  The world became chaos as everyone around me drew back, shrieking and screaming. A roar tore from my throat and I surged forward, aiming straight for the one in the center.

  Man and monster collided into one another and I felt the bones rattle inside me as my hand shot out, grabbing the hound’s throat with a grip born of sheer vicious intent, keeping its snarling, drooling maw just inches from my face, rearing my other arm back and ramming the sawed-off’s wooden stock into its head.

  But the monster’s skull was like a slab of granite, solid and unyielding. Had I still been mortal, it wouldn’t have done a damn thing.

  I wasn’t mortal anymore, though. Not human. And my strength exceeded that of a professional strongman.

  Both the wooden stock and the rest of the Hound’s muzzle splintered and broke on impact. I heaved and launched the aberration back, sending it in a thrashing heap, yelps gurgled and wet as it suffocated on its own blood.

  The stench of rot and death filled my nostrils, and a piercing pain tore into my right arm, the sudden force and weight of a second Hound snapping onto my forearm and jolting the sawed-off out of my hand, sending it spinning into the shrubbery.

  Yellowed fangs tore into my flesh deep enough to scrape against bone and I roared, lunging with my free hand, fingers digging into the scruff of its neck.

  The beast wasn’t nearly as heavy or powerful as an orc, but it wasn’t lacking for ferocity. The thing was wiry, fast, and its strength—though nothing like mine—was enough to make it a nightmare to hold onto. Like a Goblin on steroids.

  It thrashed, twisting and writhing like a rabid creature, carving deep trenches into my forearm. Had it not been for the increased durability of my body, it would have probably snapped my bones by now, if not torn my arm right off.

  But then, I found my leverage. I tightened my hold, muscles straining, and with a grunt of effort, I lifted the hound off the ground and swung it above me, slamming it down onto the ground with a bone splintering crack.

  Its weight was nothing.

  80 kilos. As much as a grown man. Might as well had been a toddler to my improved strength.

  The impact tore through its wiry body, unlatching its maw from the red ruin my arm had become. The monster lay there for a moment, stunned, and I could hear its breath rattling through its chest as it struggled to recover. But it was too late. I had the upper hand now.

  *THUNK* *Crack*

  The Hound’s ribs folded and snapped around my knee as I struck in a second, then third knee-strike to its ribs, feeling the monster’s bones pop and break with each blow, all the while squeezing both hands around it’s throat, throttling the abomination for all I was worth.

  Its skull may have been hard as stone, but the rest of it was not as tough.

  By the third hit, a gout of bloody froth exploded from its muzzle. Its own broken ribs must have pierced its lungs. I wasn’t done.

  With an animal snarl of my own, I drew my arm back and brought it down across the monster’s exposed neck, putting all my weight and strength into the open palm blow. For all that my right forearm had become a mess of torn meat, I could still use it. And it would heal.

  The Hound’s windpipe shattered, but I still wouldn’t let go of it.

  I reared my arms up, letting the blood in my gut travel up, waxing my hands into grotesque claws, and tore into the monster dog’s chest. Skin parted, flesh sundered and fractured ribs snapped under my talons as I savaged it.

  A glint of blue caught my eye and I immediately tore out the Aether Stone peeking out from the mess of ruptured flesh and shards of bone.

  “Aaaaaah… please help….” a desperate, blood curdling scream from behind forced me into a quick pivot.

  It was chaos.

  Pure chaos.

  Tina, Mina, Tim and the “gopher” with the wounded arm were doing their best trying to clobber down one of the Hounds. They struck its head and flanks with their lengths of iron, trying desperately to get it to unlatch its jaws from the screaming, bloody face of the third “gopher”.

  A little further back, Bill, prone on his back and screaming to high heaven, was slamming his fist over and over again into the face of a hound that had latched onto his shoulder and was shaking Bill the way a terrier would a fox.

  Neither group was succeeding. The Goblin Hounds were simply far too strong for humans armed with improvised weapons to deal with.

  Before I could even begin to move, the second Hound lurched and tore the “gopher’s” head clean off, blood and shreds of meat spraying those around it, sending them recoiling back.

  “Damn it!” I roared and charged in, as fast as my vampire anatomy allowed, uncaring anymore of whether people noticed the wrongness or not.

  Yes, I had intended to leave the group.

  Yes, I was still intending to do that.

  But this? This wasn’t leaving the group, this would have been abandoning people to their deaths. And if I did that, if I abandoned them right now, I couldn’t play pretend that they’d be fine later on.

  I’m no saint.

  Just a bastard with a few rules. And leaving people to die when I could do something about it, would break one of those rules.

  “Hypocrite. Those are semantics and nothing more. The end result is still their death” The dark impulse hissed in the back of my head, speaking in a concerningly clear parody of my own voice.

  It wasn’t wrong. But I still wanted to be able to stand looking at myself in the mirror after this.

  “Phah!!!” the dark impulse spat, as if it had read my reasoning and found it less than convincing.

  My boot collided with the Hound’s muzzle as I launched into a kick, full sprint, right into its face and sent it flying back airborne for a solid five feet before it hit the ground with a sickening thud.

  Before I could make another move, there was a blur beside me. Tina Miller. Face twisted in a mix of fury and fear, her eyes locked on the downed beast. Without hesitation, she launched herself at the hound, a predator closing in on its prey.

  In an instant, her arms coiled around the monster’s thick neck, muscles flexing as she locked into a perfect stranglehold. The sheer force of her grapple took the creature completely off balance, and with one last desperate thrash, it was on its back. Tina wasn’t finished, though. She wrapped herself tighter around it, her legs snaking around its body, her arms a vice around its throat.

  The hound’s claws flailed wildly, kicking at nothing but empty air as it struggled in the grip of the woman who refused to let go. The beast was strong, but Tina was something else—every inch of her was pure raw power, technique seeping through every movement. But she wouldn’t be able to keep it up. Veins were swollen around her temple and she was holding on, but the monster’s movements were spasming thrashes, and despite her perfect technique, she didn’t have nearly enough strength to choke the monster out.

  Its neck was too thick, too armored with muscle for human strength.

  I snatched the length of metal from Tim’s hands and launched myself at the prone beast, stabbing the iron right under its sternum. It screeched and wailed, but to her credit, Tina’s hold was unrelenting.

  With a hiss, I pulled the iron and stabbed again and again, piercing and twisting it inside the wounds, opening red hemorrhaging tranches into the creature’s body. Again, the glint of blue shone and, with one final pull, I tore it’s chest open, letting the Aether Stone fall out, right into my waiting hand.

  Only when the monster went still, did I raise myself off the corpse and looked to the last Hound. Bill was still trying to wrestle it off his shoulder but it was going bad and, as much as the vindictive bastard in me considered it just rewards for Bill’s general way of being, this was far too ugly a death to wish on anyone.

  Taking a page from Tina, I lunged into the struggle and wrapped my arms around the Hound’s neck. It was nowhere near as good a grapple as Tina Miller’s, but where she was human, I wasn’t.

  Thick with scales, coarse fur and corded muscle the monster’s neck may have been, it gave way like candle wax to my strength, instantly choking it out, forcing its maw open off of Bill’s shoulder.

  I heaved and rose the monster in the air, tightening my hold with every passing second.

  With an almost anti-climactic suddenness, the Goblin Hound’s eyes burst from their sockets the very same instant I felt the pop of its trachea and vertebrae snapping. It went limp and I chucked it to the side.

  Without so much as a “thank you”, Bill immediately scrambled away.

  I grimaced but took advantage of the momentary lull, sinking my fingers into the corpse’s chest, raking the stringy meat and digging out a third Aether Stone.

  Before anyone was the wiser I’d already squirreled it away in my pocket to join the other two, hands swiftly reverting to its normal form.

  There was no way of knowing if anyone had noticed. It was still pitch-black night in the woods and everyone had been too busy trying not to die. Too busy to pay attention to me, my fights or my hands.

  Maybe, with a bit of luck, they were none the wiser.

  Or maybe it was just wishful thinking.

  Well, not like it mattered. The crisis had been averted. I could leave now.

  “Tina? TINA!!!”

  I immediately turned, ready for another monster to snap for my face, only to see little Mina trying to pry her sister’s arms off the dead Hound’s neck.

  Her eyes were screwed shut and her face was still locked in that very same grimace of hate and fear, arm muscles bulging with the strain of still trying to throttle the Hound’s corpse. The poor girl was so afraid she didn’t dare release her hold even for a moment.

  If nothing else, my respect for her sheer grit only grew. Beside herself with fear, she had still chosen to fight rather than flee.

  I reached out and tried to pry her arms away to no result. Trying to speak to her was just as pointless. In the end the only thing that came to mind was a bit rude, but nonetheless effective.

  My open hand smacked hard against her face as I slapped her. As light a tap I could, but hard enough to elicit a gasp and a snarl from her sister.

  Tina’s eyes snapped open and for a few long seconds she just glared up at me.

  “Ow! Prick!”

  “Worked, didn’t it?” I smirked and she stuck her tongue out, finally letting go of the Hound’s corpse.

  “So, what did I miss…” she began only to get cut off by her sister’s desperate voice.

  “This is not good. Not good. These hounds have iron collars. We gotta go. We gotta run” Mina spluttered, hyperventilating.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  “Calm the hell down, we won didn’t we?” Bill snarled, massaging his ruined shoulder, squatting in a crouch.

  “AND WHERE’S MY DAMN SHOTGUN!”

  “Mina, sweetie, it’s over…” Tina started, eyeing Bill with a murderous look.

  “No no no, you don’t get it. Jon, you said that these things were traveling with the Goblin patrols right?”

  I nodded to her.

  “Then we definitely gotta go. Because we just got flushed out”

  Her words put everyone in a state of frozen silence. Mina didn’t use specific words carelessly. So the term “flushed out” definitely warranted our attention.

  “What the hell do you mean, flushed out?” Bill snarled, eyes darting everywhere.

  “Everything I’ve seen and heard of these Goblins is descriptive of a primitive hunter society. Hunting dogs being used to flush out prey has been a thing in the human species ever since the first wolf was tamed. It’s not that much of a stretch to assume the Goblins work in a similar way. So…”

  “Oh…” I began. Mina’s words were a bit of a stretch, a series of educated guesses made on assumptions, but as soon as I heard the faint crack of dried leaves being stepped on somewhere in the distance, I knew she had just made the correct guess.

  Damn this smart girl, why did she have to be right again?

  “...We gotta go. Now. Go GO GO!!!”.

  The stunned silence shattered with the suddenness of a lightning strike, and everyone exploded into motion.

  Tina grabbed her sister’s hand, fingers tightening around it, and in one smooth motion, she flicked on her phone’s flashlight. Bill and the other “gopher” were quick to do the same, their own lights cutting through the darkness.

  "Stay on the path," Tina barked, her voice sharp and urgent. "We’re sprinting all the way to the Mall. Don’t trip on the roots."

  Everyone nodded in grim agreement, readying themselves for the longest, most grueling sprint of their lives.

  And I did see it as their lives.

  Leaving them alone against the Hounds would have been tantamount to signing their death warrants, but this was different. If they ran fast and hard enough, they could outrun the Goblin hunting party. From this point on, their safety was their own concern and I was going to use the opportunity to “lose” my way in the forest.

  With a bit of luck, I could circle around and double back to find the shotgun in the bushes. Bill didn’t seem too keen on searching for it anymore. The stock may have been ruined but it was still functional, and I was pretty certain of the general area where it had fallen, even though I couldn’t see it just yet.

  Ah, but Bill still had all the shells. Maybe I should just shake them off him? Compensation for saving his life.

  Or not even bother circling around, and just stay behind to look for it while they ran. Goblin Hounds I couldn’t outrun, but regular Goblins with their stumpy legs I could marathon circles around.

  Before I could even take a step toward Bill, ready to tear the backpack from his shoulders and rip the shells from it, something stopped me cold, knocking all ideas and thoughts clean out of my head.

  A whimper, soft and trembling, coming from just behind me.

  “G-Guys?”

  I turned back, and my eyes went wide. Tim was struggling to move, his steps awkward, each one more of a limp than a stride. His face was a mask of panic, and with a desperate twist of his body, he turned his left leg to the side.

  The torn red gash was obvious now, slashed across his jeans right over his hamstring. It wasn’t deep or wide—probably just a glancing hit from one of the Hound’s barbed tails, nothing that would kill him outright.

  But it didn’t need to be deadly.

  It was the hamstring. His ability to run, to escape, to fight—gone in an instant. The very thing that could have saved him had just been ripped away.

  “I-I-I-....” Tim babbled, his face contorting into a mask of fear. “..can’t run….”

  “Tough shit, gopher” Bill’s voice sniped followed by the sound of his boots hitting the ground as he burst into a run.

  “I’m…. I’m sorry, man” the other gopher said and swiftly followed.

  Mina and Tina just stood there, looking as though they were torn between the rational choice and the moral choice.

  “We can’t just…” Mina spoke and stuttered looking at her sister whose gaze was snapping from Tim to the path and back to Tim.

  It was a losing battle, I could tell.

  As good and wholesome a person Tina Miller seemed to be, her priority was her sister’s safety.

  “J-Jon…? please…?” I turned back to see Tim looking directly at me “... I don’t wanna die man…” he continued with some weird, desperate combination between a smile and the grimace.

  The kind of desperate look one had when they were moments from bursting into tear-filled begging.

  This.

  Right here.

  This was why I didn’t want to bear the responsibility of someone’s safety.

  I was just some guy. People like me didn’t get to be the leader or the hero. We were the extras who died when we got too “uppity”. And I had no doubt that doing the “right thing” here would come and bite me where the Sun don’t shine.

  But I also knew I’d already made the decision.

  After all, there was no way I could ever live with myself if I ignored that pleading look.

  It didn’t mean I had to like it.

  What it did mean, though, is that my chance to make myself scarce had just gotten shafted.

  “Son of a….” I cussed and immediately grabbed Tim by the collar of his shirt, hoisting him on my back.

  “Grab a good hold onto my neck and DO NOT let go, you hear me? If you fall off I am NOT stopping to get you again” I snarled.

  “Yeah. Thank you.. Thanks Jon, I mean it…” Tim began as I hauled him into a piggyback.

  “Pathetic. Still clinging on to the pretension of being a “good man” when all it’s brought you is misery. And for what? To maintain a pretty lie you tell yourself?” the dark impulse hissed mirthlessly, disdain dripping like venom in the back of my head.

  “SHUT IT!!!” I snapped.

  “Yeah, sorry, sorry” Tim babbled, arms crossed over my neck in a death-grip.

  “Not… actually, yeah, you too” I snarled and launched myself into a full sprint. Tina and Mina joined me immediately, something new and altogether foreign to me glinting in the way they looked at me.

  Respect?

  Appreciation?

  Who knows.

  Who cares.

  The only thing that mattered was to run.

  And run we did, swiftly catching up to Bill and the other gopher. By the fifth minute, I was having to ignore the cacophony of wheezing, misty breaths around me. Apart from me and Tina, not one of them had the physical condition necessary to maintain a sprint for so long, even a downhill one.

  Moreover, we had to slow down more than once, not because we were out of breath, but because people kept tripping over exposed roots and slick, wet grass in the pitch-black woods. The flashlights from their phones barely cut through the darkness, offering little more than fleeting glimpses of the ground beneath us.

  It was frustrating, maddening even, but not unexpected.

  Even with Tim, a buck forty of dead weight, clinging to my back, I ran without breaking a sweat. My stamina was endless, my vision sharp even in the deepest darkness, seeing as though it were daylight. For all intents and purposes, Tim might as well have been a small rucksack. Barely noticeable.

  “5 minutes…. until….. we reach the edge” Tina sputtered.

  A hissing, wheezing intake of breath made me slow and turn to witness little, light, anemic Mina effectively collapse in her sister’s grip. She was exhausted.

  “I…*wheeze*... can’t….*wheeze*... go on….. Go…. without….” Mina tried to speak.

  Her sister didn’t even let her finish.

  With an effortless heave, she pulled Mina across her back, mirroring the way I was carrying Tim and immediately started running again.

  “Show-off!” I muttered as I rejoined her in the sprint. She barked something in between a laugh and a gasp.

  To call the giant, three floor rectangle of metal sheeting and blue paint a Mall was an overreach if ever there had been one. But the 300,000 square feet of commercial spaces and leasable area was the closest thing our provincial Texan city had to an outskirts shopping center.

  It lacked the over-the-top, modern minimalist architecture typical to most malls, and save for the front it was more an oversized warehouse than anything.

  But to us, as we burst out from the forest’s edge and into the back-entrance parking lot, just a hundred feet ahead of two dozen shrieking Goblins, that barren, uninspired rectangle was safety, rest and the most beautiful damned thing we’d ever seen.

  The parking lot, slick with dried blood and viscera, stretched out before us, concrete illuminated with a pale hue from the gibbous moon. It was a massacre site and ripped through the burgeoning illusion of safety, exposing grim reality in all its uncompromising brutality. But there wasn’t time to dwell on it.

  No time for anything except getting inside that damned mall.

  “Keep going, just a little more,” I growled, fighting the urge to break into full throttle and leave them all behind. I could outpace them twenty times over, but for some idiot reason, I hadn’t. And with every passing second, the goblin horde was closing in.

  Was.

  Past tense.

  I was the only one in the group who still had the stamina and wherewithal to sneak a look behind us. The others were too exhausted. Even Tina, with her impressive stamina, was barely holding on, breaths ragged and steps slowing.

  Risking a quick glance over my shoulder, the world behind me blurring into a chaotic mess of shape and color, I noticed that the goblins had stopped, right at the edge of the forest, their movements strangely coordinated.

  They were pulling something out from their packs—strips of leather, twirling them with unnerving alacrity.

  Slings?

  Shit.

  Before I could even process what they were trying to do, the first of the projectiles soared through the air, landing just a few paces ahead and behind us. The arcs were off-mark, but that wasn’t the point.

  It was only because of my unnatural vision that I caught the details mid-flight. They weren’t stones, or balls of iron as I’d assumed—but tiny ceramic jars, dirt-brown and no bigger than a child’s fist, wrapped in thick, coarse twine.

  Where they landed, they didn’t just hit the ground. But exploded.

  With thunderous cracks, the jars burst on impact, sending plumes of acrid smoke billowing into the air. The stench of sulfur and brimstone mixed together in a nauseating cloud that made my stomach churn. The sound was deafening, like a dozen firecrackers going off at once, followed by the heavy, choking scent of burnt air.

  And only then did the intent become clear to me.

  I hissed, a string of curses flying from my mouth so fierce and creative, it would have made a sailor blush.

  Drawn by the pops and cracks that echoed loud in the still and quiet night, they crawled out from under cars and rose from the mounds of corpses and viscera, dozens upon dozens of rotbloods, hollow-eyed and slack-mouthed, shuffling and limping on rotting and pus-covered legs towards us from every direction.

  Like the spiteful bastards that they were, the Goblins hadn’t followed us into the parking lot because it wasn’t their territory. But they were making damn sure that we were going to die either way, by making as much noise around us as they could.

  “... No…. *wheeze*…. the entrance” Tina gasped and I looked towards the large revolving door of the mall’s back entrance. It was clogged with corpses, a number of which were getting up and beginning to shuffle towards the noise.

  Towards us.

  I cussed again.

  “Keep running” I roared. If we stopped they'd all get overrun in minutes. I had to think. Find some way inside.

  “Let them die! We will find more meat!” my own voice, warped and guttural, hissed at me from the back of my head.

  “You keep your hole shut” I growled back.

  A long, bone-chilling howl tore through the air, snapping my attention away in an instant. My head whipped to the far right, where the sound had come from.

  Behind a towering, three-meter fence, scaffolding crept up the side of the metal wall, climbing all the way to the roof. And there, perched on the edge of the building, was something. A shape, pale and ethereal, its form almost translucent under the moonlight. It looked like a ghostly-white hound, its outline blurring against the night sky.

  I’d been so damn focused on the entrance, so consumed with what was behind us, that I hadn’t even thought to check the other side. But with the moonlight slashing through the gloom, anyone without my eyes would never have seen the scaffolding—or the creature standing on the roof.

  Not until it was too late.

  “Of what fresh, succulent bullshit is this?” I muttered.

  As soon as I blinked, the shape was gone, as if never there to begin with.

  I was starting to get really tired of all these unanswered questions.

  “Over there” I yelled and took a hard right turn, zigzag-ing through the abandoned cars.

  “But the fence” Mina yelled from her sister's back, as soon as she noticed the scaffolding.

  “Just trust me!” I roared back and leaned into the run, giving it full throttle and visibly speeding in front of them.

  That did it.

  Even if, by some miracle, they hadn’t noticed the strange shifts during our fight with the Hounds—the claws, the unnatural speed, the things that set me apart—there was no way in hell they wouldn’t start asking questions now.

  I’d carried a grown man on my back for over fifteen minutes and hadn’t even broken a sweat. And now, I was sprinting like an Olympic athlete, my feet barely touching the ground.

  But it didn’t matter. Not really. It was a problem for the future, if anything. Not like I had to answer anything. By the time we were on the roof, they’d be too winded to ask a damn thing. And once I got them there, safe enough to breathe, I could slip away, and finally, with a clear conscience, leave it all behind.

  I snarled, steeling myself against what was to come. A few straggler rotbloods had emerged from under the cars in front, effectively cutting our path to the scaffolding.

  “Jon… jonjonjonJON!!!!” Tim shrieked in my ear as I barreled into the first one, slamming the walking corpse off its feet and into the windshield of a car.

  “Just hold on!” I snapped back as I charged full tilt into another, then another, my weight, speed and strength sending the rotbloods flying, pulping their flesh and shattering bone against cars and concrete.

  It wasn’t enough to kill them, but more than sufficient to incapacitate, at least for long enough to clear a path for the others.

  By the time I put the eighth rotblood’s skull through the back window of a Buick, the rest of the group had caught up and the path was clear of stragglers.

  30 meters, if even that, and we would reach the fence, but just behind them, a tide of rotting, snapping teeth followed. The group was so exhausted their run had reduced to a shuffling, gasping jog. They’d never be able to clamber up the fence in the state they were in.

  I threw myself into another sprint, overtaking the others quickly and shot like an arrow straight for the fence.

  Three meters tall, made of interlocking sections of wire fencing edged in thick iron pipes, all connected by thick chains and secured to the ground with blocks of concrete, it would have been easily scalable.

  Tina would probably have been able to scale it, exhausted though she was, but Mina and the other gopher? They looked about ready to drop dead. And the herd of zombies was too hot on their heels, spasming and jolting in a grotesque parody of a lurching run.

  I launched myself off the ground, covering the last five meters in a leap that ended with my hands grabbing the top edge of the fence. With a grunt, I hoisted myself up, straddling the metal before reaching up to pry Tim’s arms off my neck.

  “Sorry man!” I shouted over the chaos, before tossing him off my back, sending him flying over the fence and onto the scaffolding’s metal platform.

  One. Safe.

  There was no time to apologise about manhandling the poor guy like that.

  “Grab on” I roared, leaning down, holding my hand out, securing the perch atop the fence with my thighs alone.

  Tina was the first to reach me, snaking her hands under her sister’s armpits and making to hoist her up. She didn’t even get halfway through when Bill barrelled into them and sent both girls splayed onto the ground, grabbinbg my hand with a deathgrip.

  “Motherfu….” I cussed and flung him.

  If it hadn’t taken valuable time the others did not have, I would have caved his face in and left him down there with the zombies for that.

  If manhandling Tim had been a product of urgency and circumstance, Bill was a different story entirely. I didn’t just hoist him onto the fence, I swung and slammed him onto the scaffolding platform like a rancid sack of potatoes.

  I immediately leaned back onto the other side.

  “Hurry! Both of you!”

  To his credit, the other gopher had already pulled the twins off the ground, his hands working quickly as he lifted the smaller sister toward me. I reached out with both hands, grabbing Mina with one and Tina with the other.

  If not for this newfound strength of mine, there was no way I could’ve pulled them up from such a precarious position. But I was strong—stronger than any man alive. When I hoisted the two girls up, it was effortless, like lifting two small cats. To me, they weighed nothing at all.

  As soon as I tossed both girls onto the platform, I bent down again, my eyes catching the gopher trying to scramble up the fence. He was panicking, stumbling, and the rotbloods were too close now.

  There was no way he’d make it.

  I didn’t hesitate. My hand grabbed the back of his collar and, with one fluid motion, I lifted him up like he was nothing, placing him onto the edge beside me, just as the tide of shuffling dead hit the fence below us.

  He stared down with big, bulging eyes and I could almost smell the adrenaline pumping in his blood.

  “Thank you… Tha…”

  Another lurch as the tide inexorably pushed into the fence.

  “No time! Tina catch him…” I began, ready to throw the poor guy onto the scaffolding.

  “BILL, NO DON’T…..” Mina’s desperate cry cut through the night.

  *BOOM*

  The gunfire sounded like thunder in my ears and I froze as half the gopher’s head disappeared in a geyser of blood and bits of flesh, spraying my face with gore.

  I turned just in time to witness Bill point the shotgun at me and discharge the second barrel straight into my upper chest.

  The vindictive, cunning bastard had actually found the shotgun while I was dealing with the Goblin Hound. Squirreled it away in his backpack and just pretended to not have it. Only to use it against me while I was busy helping people. He'd played all of us by calling out for it right after the fight against the dog-monsters.

  Duplicitous little shit.

  Should've broken his arms when I had the chance. Should've.... killed him.

  What’s that old saying?

  No good deed goes unpunished.

  In a singular moment of perfect pain, I felt the eight white-hot buckshot pellets pierce my clavicle and shred my trachea, tear into my flesh and lodge themselves deep in my body. Then the impact struck me like an angry bull.

  For all my strength and durability, the buckshot round from near point blank tore me from my perch atop the fence and both I and the other gopher, fell back.

  Faintly, distantly, I thought I heard Tim and Mina scream my name and saw Tina rear back her arm, launching herself towards Bill.

  Then I landed into the sea of rotbloods and all became pain.