Stu and Lucky left Sike's building and proceeded south, down Highway 8, all the while keeping their eyes open for zombies. "How far away is this school?" Stu asked.

  "I'm not really sure," he admitted. "I've never actually been there."

  "But you know the way?"

  "I think so."

  Stu frowned. "You thought you knew your way through the subway, too."

  Lucky scowled at him. "I know what I'm doing," he growled, "and I know where I'm going."

  "Okay, okay," he said, raising his hands innocently. Lucky seemed like a good kid, but he had a short fuse, and Stu didn't want to set him off.

  "It's on the other end of town," Lucky added. "I know that much. I've never been that far south, but I've been close. So it's...maybe ten miles from here?"

  "Ten miles?" Stu sputtered. "We have to walk ten miles?"

  "Ten miles isn't that far."

  "But the whole city's infested with zombies. What if we run into another jumbo, or one of those speedy things I saw down in the subway? What if these Wild Pack people show up?"

  "We'll fight them," Lucky said confidently.

  "We could die."

  The kid snorted. "You think I don't know that?"

  Stu blinked. "Aren't you afraid of dying?"

  "I don't want to die," he said, "but I'm not afraid of it. This is the world we live in, Stu. It's dangerous, yeah, and there's death around every corner. But you have to live your life. If all you did was worry about getting killed you'd never get anywhere in Meku City."

  Stu was impressed. Lucky was stubborn and temperamental, and he didn't always make good decisions, but the kid's bravery was beyond question. He was determined to rescue his sister, and he didn't care what kinds of dangers might stand in his way.

  Stu himself had never thought much about death. He had never had much reason to. He was relatively young -- still in his early thirties -- and except for a couple of aged grandparents, no one close to him had ever died. Of course he understood, on an abstract level, that death awaited everybody, including himself, but it had always seemed like a distant thing. The last few days had brought him much closer to it, forced him to face his own mortality. He didn't like that.

  He had never thought much about bravery, either, or courage. Again, he had never had much cause to. Until recently he had never found himself in any real life-or-death situations, where he might have been called upon to demonstrate those virtues. His teenage years had been uneventful, and he had spent more than a decade working a quiet job in a quiet neighborhood, where nothing very interesting ever happened. He wasn't an adrenaline junkie; he didn't have any exciting, dangerous hobbies. Compared to Lucky, he had lived a very sheltered life.

  So he quieted down, and allowed Lucky to lead the way. They continued down Highway 8, which was another thoroughfare littered with abandoned cars, but were often forced to duck into allies and circle around buildings in order to avoid zombies. At one point they spotted a very strange-looking zombie, about two or three hundred feet away, which was banging its fists against the side of a glider. Even under the bright sun, Stu could tell that its rotted flesh was giving off a sickly green glow. They were too far away from it for Stu's ICON system to identify it -- he needed to be within a couple dozen feet of a zombie for the ID to appear over its head -- but Lucky identified it for him.

  "That's a glowie," he said. "It's trying to get into the fuel tank."

  "The fuel tank?"

  "They drink dynamo fluid," he explained. "That's what makes them glow. Come on, let's go around. We don't want it to see us."

  "They're dangerous?"

  "They can burn you to death just by touching you. Yeah, they're dangerous."

  So they avoided the zombie, making their way around the block. They spotted a handful of other unusual zombies, too, as they traveled south: a female rager, who was screaming bloody murder in the middle of the street, a bigger zombie that Lucky suspected might have been a small jumbo, and a new type of zombie which Lucky called a shaker. This one looked like an ordinary zombie, but instead of shuffling and groaning and wandering about, it merely stood in the street, trembling.

  "What's it doing?" Stu asked.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  "Shaking," Lucky supplied unhelpfully. "That's all they do -- they just stand there and shake. They might try to grab you if you get too close, but they're nothing to worry about, really."

  And of course, in addition to these irregulars, they also encountered large numbers of regular zombies -- men, women, and sometimes even children. Seeing these undead children wandering around, with their ruined bodies and their innocent faces twisted into grotesque horrors, was almost more than Stu could stand; he found it unbearably sad.

  Children seemed to be fairly rare, though, compared to grown men and women. He asked Lucky about that.

  "Kids don't always turn into zombies," he said. "The infection kills them, but they don't reanimate. And the younger they are, the less likely they are to turn. That's why you don't see any zombie babies or toddlers."

  "Thank heaven for small mercies," Stu muttered. "But why should kids be immune?"

  "Beats me." He kicked an empty soup can as he walked. "There's a lot we don't know about zombies. Why do some of them turn into glowies and jumbos and mutates? How do their organs regenerate? How did the outbreak begin in the first place?" He shrugged. "We'll probably never know."

  They kept moving, but their progress was slow; they were constantly stopping and occasionally backtracking to avoid zombies. They also stopped a couple of times to rest and rehydrate, but Stu found that even after spending most of the day on his feet, he was not particularly tired; in fact he felt that he could keep going for many more hours if he had to. Where had this stamina come from? Was it the Strong Arm skill, increasing his leg strength, or was it simply a consequence of his rising stats? He didn't know, but whatever the reason, it was certainly a welcome development.

  The zombies started to thin out a bit as they made their way further south, but here they began to encounter a new threat. As they were walking down the main highway, weaving around all the junked-out cars, they suddenly heard distant voices coming from somewhere up ahead. These were not the usual groans and moans of zombies; these were ordinary human voices. Stu could hear laughter and bits of conversation.

  Lucky quickly grabbed him by the sleeve and pulled him down behind one of the cars, so that they would not be seen. "This is Wild Pack territory," he reminded Stu.

  "You think these are Wild Pack guys?"

  "Who else would they be?"

  "What's the plan?"

  He bit his lower lip, thinking. "We should wait until it gets dark," he decided after a moment. "Zombies are bad, but people are worse. We don't want to get caught out in the open."

  Were people really worse than zombies? But Stu didn't argue the point; he simply nodded. "All right. Let's find a place to camp out."

  They waited for the voices to recede into the distance, then entered one of the many derelict buildings on either side of the street -- this one contained a small cafe on the first floor. After quickly searching the premises to make sure that it was zombie-free, they hunkered down behind the counter and waited for nightfall, which was still about an hour away.

  "Tell me about your world," Lucky said.

  Stu turned to look at him. "I thought you didn't believe my story."

  "I don't. But I like hearing you talk about it. It's...entertaining."

  He shrugged. "What do you want to know?"

  "What was the name of the country you were from again?"

  "The United States."

  "Nice place?"

  "I guess so. It's one of the biggest and richest countries in the world."

  "But you didn't have gliders or anything like that."

  "No. But we had satellites and rockets and AI. We even went to the moon."

  Lucky snorted. "Yeah, right."

  "You don't believe that?"

  "The moon? Are you kidding me?" He was clearly amused. "So what did you do for a living in the other world?"

  "I fixed computers." He paused. "You do have computers here, don't you?"

  "Well, we did," he said. "You don't find many in good condition anymore. Tali had one, back at Harbor, but the only thing she could do with it was watch old movies and type out her memoirs, which no one was interested in reading anyway."

  "You could do a lot more with them in my world," Stu said. "We had this thing called the internet--"

  "What did you do for fun?"

  "Fun?" He tapped his chin. "I played video games."

  "Oh, those. I've seen those. Aren't they for kids?"

  "Some of them are," he admitted, a little defensively. "But not all of them."

  "What else did you do?"

  He thought about it. "I went out with my girlfriend sometimes."

  "You had a girlfriend?"

  "I did," he sighed. "She dumped me a few months ago." Reminded of Berly, he took the newspaper out of his backpack and showed the Hardcore advertisement to Lucky. "This was her."

  Lucky looked at him like he was a mental patient. "Suuure," he drawled.

  "Really. I can't explain it, but that's her in the ad, Beverly Nightingale. She wasn't a famous actress in my world, though. She worked at a deli."

  He shook his head again. "You're crazy." But then he leaned back and sighed. "A world without zombies. It sounds like a paradise."

  "I liked it better than I like it here," he said. "All I want to do is go home. My friend Zach, my boss, my parents, everyone else I know...they probably think I'm dead by now." He looked at the newspaper ad, and wondered what Berly would think, when she found out that he was missing. Would she regret breaking up with him? Would she shed any tears at all? They had been together for two years and had only recently broken up; surely she still had some feelings for him.

  He needed to get back to his own world as soon as possible. Unfortunately...well, unfortunately, Lon Halos was thousands of miles away, and he wasn't even sure if this Dr. Snowe Virge had told him to look for was even alive at this point. This Dread thing, whatever or whoever it was, had evidently been assaulting Dr. Snowe's compound right before Virge and Wayman had shoved him through the portal, and the situation had sounded desperate.

  Could Dr. Snowe really send him back to his own world? He didn't know, but it was his only lead, his only chance. He had to find a way there.

  He glanced at the newspaper ad again. Hardcore, the show was called. He wondered if he might run into Berly's doppelganger in Lon Halos; after all, Lucky had mentioned that they used to shoot movies there. Maybe it was some kind of rough equivalent of Los Angeles.

  He dismissed the thoughts and stuffed the newspaper back into his backpack. He didn't have time to think about Berly -- he needed to focus on himself, on survival. He needed to find Lucky's sister and complete this quest. He needed to get stronger, to boost his stats and acquire more skills. He didn't know how or why he had ended up in this world, but he wasn't going to let it beat him. He was going to see this game through to the end...and he was going to win.