Joel threw his arm up in the air, like an invisible string tied around his wrist had been yanked directly up, blocking Oliver’s scythe. The scythe buried itself in Joel’s arm, severing muscle and tendons and unleashing an ooze of dark brown viscous liquid. Joel didn’t react to his wound.

  “Shit,” Oliver yanked his scythe free and then stumbled back from Joel. Oliver took a deep breath, planted his feet, and lifted to swing again, but Joel ducked down and ran head first at Oliver, driving his head into Oliver’s stomach. The blow knocked Oliver to the ground. Joel slammed down hard on Oliver, with the weight of a creature that had no sense of self-preservation.

  “Heads up!” Caroline yelled from off to the right. A glass jar came hurtling towards Joel and slammed into his side, before exploding and bursting into flames. Joel tumbled to one side, as the straw packed into his stomach went up in flames. He only paused to pack handfuls of dirt into the straw to smother the fire. His health bar was still over three quarters full.

  Laura gripped her club and put a little more distance between herself and Joel.

  Oliver shoved himself to his feet and backed up to ready his scythe again as Joel inexorably hauled himself back on his feet, stomach incision still smouldering. While the scythe was clearly a very sharp tool, it wasn’t going to be an easy hit. Oliver was already having to swing at an unnaturally high angle aiming for Joel’s neck, and Joel was proving a lot more agile than they would have expected. But if Oliver couldn’t pull it off, then what were they supposed to do?

  Caroline, clutching another fire jar in her hand, seemed to also come to the realization that they might need a backup plan. She gently replaced the jar in the wagon and then book after book appeared out of her inventory. She huddled behind the wagon and flipped rapid-fire through the pages, presumably looking for some other magical solution.

  Unless she comes up with something fast, this isn’t looking good.

  Russell had Nate by the hand and was keeping him well out of the way of any active fighting. Nate’s expression remained vacant. The timer over his head still had 87 minutes remaining. Graham squinted, trying to see what was happening, while Mi-young pointed out whenever he risked tripping over something or blocking someone else from retreating.

  Hannah fired off a few shots that hit Joel in his already injured arm. Besides a few more holes and oozing brown liquid, it didn’t seem to affect Joel in the slightest. He continued shambling towards Oliver. Whether it was because he recognized Oliver as the primary threat, or because he still retained some kind of primitive grudge against Oliver was anyone’s guess.

  Oliver gripped his scythe and looked around, clearly trying to assess the terrain to see if he could gain some height—anything to make the attack easier.

  Caroline continued flipping through pages.

  Laura suddenly knew the answer. “Wait!”

  Oliver whipped his head around to look at her even as Joel kept moving towards him.

  Out of her inventory Laura pulled out the chainsaw.

  Item: Chainsaw

  Type: Level 4 Weapon - Short range

  Requires a minimum of 4 Dexterity and 4 Strength.

  She was still one point short in strength to be able to use it, which is part of why she’d almost put it out of her mind. Now there was a guilty sort of relief that she wasn’t powerful enough to yield it yet.

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  But Oliver could.

  His scythe vanished into his inventory and he dodged around Joel to run over to Laura. She shoved the chainsaw at him.

  “I’ll need someone to distract him,” Oliver said to her as Joel started heading their way. “This’ll still take some doing since he’s a level 7.”

  Clearly he meant Laura. Oliver needed someone working close range to keep Joel’s attention focused away from him. She hefted her club and locked eyes with Joel. Her hands were sweating and the untreated wood started to chafe her palms. Oliver quickly tried to circle behind Joel but Joel continued swiveling to track his movements. Oliver gestured at Laura. She needed to do something to get Joel’s attention off of him. She took a tentative step towards Joel.

  Her brain screamed at her, wondering why she was taking another step towards this thing that was only one level weaker than she was and that she couldn’t even kill.

  “Joel?” She said, now close enough to see every gory detail of his wounds, including his originally fatal one.

  Joel’s head swiveled back to look at her in an eerie facsimile of intelligence. She had a bizarre flashback to her first day, first waking up in the hotel and then seeing Joel’s face poke out into the hallway—the first person she’d met here in this bizarre place—and how the expression behind his glasses had been almost reassuring in how equally confused it was.

  She looked into his eyes now, behind those same glasses, and watched as a fly walked across one of his glazed eyes. He didn’t even blink. “Like Oliver said earlier,” Laura said, “this is nothing personal”. And she swung as hard as she could at Joel’s face. She knocked his glasses clean off.

  Then she froze. Because she hadn’t thought of a step two to her plan.

  Joel moved towards her, clearly not inhibited by his lack of glasses. It was hard to stand your ground when you knew you were the bait. Laura started to move back, knowing she wouldn’t ever be able to swing that club hard enough to actually take Joel out.

  She heard an annoyed sound from Oliver, and glanced over to see him gesturing at her to stay still, to keep Joel in place.

  Easy for you to say.

  Her anger flared. At Oliver for pushing her into this insane position. At herself for not having stuck with a plan that would have let her be able to better defend herself by this level. Even at Joel for letting himself be turned into this undead thing, even though she knew he was the last one who had any control over what was happening.

  She channeled that energy into lifting the club high over her shoulder, and bringing it down with all her weight, stopping Joel dead in his tracks as the club connected with his foot, the nails on the club pinning his foot to the ground. He didn’t show any more reaction to that than any of the other blows he’d received from them, but it did effectively limit his range of motion while he bent down and began tugging at the club, trying to free his foot.

  At the end of the day though it was Oliver who did the dirty work.

  When Joel was finally dispatched, Oliver sat down. Everyone else, who’d been hanging back at what seemed a safe distance, watched while Oliver pulled out his water bottle and cleaned off his face.

  “May as well rest now while we can,” Oliver said. “Hopefully that earned us a bit of a breather.”

  Even Hannah finally relaxed and sat down, as everyone else collected well away from where Joel’s beheaded body lay on the ground. Oliver just sat and stared at it while he took a long sip of water.

  He looked over at Laura.

  She went over and sat next to him. Along the way she pried her club up out of Joel’s foot and stored it away. Then they sat in silence for a few minutes. She wasn’t sure if there’d ever be a time where it wasn’t awkward to ask for her chainsaw back, but she was certain this wasn’t it.

  “You won’t be able to hide behind your stats forever,” Oliver said finally.

  “Is that what I’ve been doing?” She meant it to be a retort, but it came out too much like a genuine question.

  Oliver just gave her a look.

  “So what would you call what just happened? Because that felt like the opposite of hiding to me.”

  “If you’re going to be a close range fighter, you have to learn to follow through. When it gets really messy, you can’t hold back. You can’t be afraid.”

  “Did I seem like I was holding back?”

  Oliver took another sip of water. “I think it helped that you were just the distraction.”

  Laura thought back to the heart-pounding fear of being within arm’s reach of something that could kill her and intentionally moving closer. “Does it get any easier?”

  Oliver leaned his head back against the stalks. “You get more used to it. So sometimes yes. And then sometimes not.”

  Laura sighed. “Maybe I’m not cut out for this.”

  “Dig deep. It’s in there. Or you wouldn’t have kept finding yourself pushed towards it. Think of something that makes you really angry. That helps me.” He took another sip of water. “There was this cocky little pissant at my last French Open who thought he was better than me, even though he’d only just barely ranked and I’d already won the French Open two times before.”

  “Was he better than you?”

  “Of course. He was young 20’s and I was pushing 35. Almost done. But I used that anger. Really it’s that I was afraid. You’re afraid right?”

  Scared shitless.

  “He was playing just another match,” Oliver continued. “And I was fighting for my life.”