I Ledge, threw my pots and pans down and drew my battle axe above Janice’s neck to end her life where she lay.

  “My son, my son.” Rune’s father pulled the lance out of him. Rune lay motionless. “Don’t die young, please all-powerful Water Spirit, do something…”

  “Eek!” Janice yelled as I dropped my battle axe to the side and rolled to my knees in a great overwhelming depression. I decided her life was not worth taking, besides, if Janice died, I would have to be poor or a beggar.

  “My best friend Rune is gone, now I have no one,” I said and felt hollow inside.

  A feeling of death and sorrow filled the camp, but more than that. No one felt like eating as a smooth-smokey green fog emerged, it smelled and tasted more horrid than my hog pen at the ranch. Like death. There was a howling wolf on a distant hill I could hear.

  Two shrouded dwarves walked down Dunharn road, bent forward and back. I was horrified they were coming our way.

  “By dragon’s breath,” Goin heaved and puffed, then shouted. “Those are the undead, Zarlock’s forces are emerging in Dunharn, to arms knights.

  Goin charged madly with his aquamarine broad-cape flapping in the wind, inscribed Knight of Atlativanne, accidentally squishing a scuttling black widow. He knocked the zombies off their feast by busting their kneecaps with his hammer. They both fell. Then I finished them off with my battle axe, decapitating both of them. I developed my battle skills when I was very young from my battle-hardened father, but he never came back from the War of the Dragons. The worst time of my life. Now I am fighting back.

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  The peasant rolled behind with the rickshaw and left it. He decided to look for Rune’s missing pony as Goin put Rune’s corpse in the rickshaw. He went to bury his son in the Dunharn graveyard, which felt creepy.

  Morning approached and the fog did not dissipate. Sunlight scattered, revealing fifty zombies broadly about us devouring our ponies. We lost our mounts. At length to Dunharn, Goin pulled Rune down the road in the rickshaw, as the Dragon Slayers slayed many zombies making a path for them. The zombies were slow creepers and only posed a threat when bunched together.

  Goin began to sing of his untimely demise to Rune as his son stirred and suddenly awoke. Goin thought Rune was a zombie. Somehow, the hole in his chest was gone and he still lived.

  Rune hated his father’s annoying habit. He sang for many hours about their terrible demise by zombies. I laughed at Rune when he came back. I know Rune hated his father’s singing. Har, har!

  We fought all the way to Dunharn, the logging town, with Janice and I covering the rear. Fellow dwarves were fighting for their lives as there were nearly a thousand zombies rising from their graves, a hundred of which were burned on a mound of hay. And the poor dwarves of Dunharn lost their town.

  The king was making common dwarves like me knights, even beggars. There must be a reason for this, maybe I’ll have to go to war against the forces of Zarlock to die an honorable death for Atlantivanne like my parents.

  Lightning scorched the heavens. After a brief pause it began to pour, and the mist soaked into the depths.

  The party and I ended the undeath of seventy-five zombies in town on that horrific day and rescued several stouthearted dwarves, one of which was the mayor that led us to a cave. Where we held off the zombies until we were safe for the moment. Goin seemed to admire this cave.

  Some zombies crawled, so the dwarves piled rocks to knee level at the entrance as the Dragon Slayers used their lances to fend off the undead that approached. There must have been ten thousand, since many of them found us hiding in a cave.

  The four Dragon Slayers from the King of Atlantivanne were ready to faint or pass out, since they were weary of slaying so many zombies.

  The dwarven mayor of Dunharn wanted to hold a meeting, but time was running out fast like water in an hourglass.