Living Dead Girl

  The horde hit us from both sides and I screamed, frozen, until the certainty of dying broke through the panic and got me moving. I chanted the invisible wall spell and split them down the middle, half on the necromancer's side and half on ours, then hauled Siegfried up off the floor. I'd expected him to be heavier in the armor. He wasn't.

  Black fire split apart on the invisible wall as the three of us fought. It bought us seconds and nothing more, but even after everything they'd been through, Siegfried and Hannah fought like they were made for it. I did what I could.

  A corpse leaned over me and bit down on my shoulder with a force I hadn't imagined possible, blunt and grinding through the fabric of my clothes, and it raked my face with dirty fingernails before I shoved it back. I couldn't focus enough to cast. But before the wall spell ran out my two surviving party members had hacked the rest apart.

  "Squirm! Beg!" The necromancer's screech echoed off the stone as he began chanting. One syllable, two, three. He kept going. Five, six. High rank, and I had no idea what it would do when it landed. I hit back with my three-syllable icicle spell, aiming for the interruption, and for one second I thought I had him.

  Fear is often irrational. That moment that overwhelms your reason and problem-solving instinct, that forces you down the path of fight or flight, is rarely one we consciously guide. The fact that this particular fear was shoved into my mind through a spell made it worse in ways that are hard to explain. It wasn't like being frightened. It was like being replaced by something that only knew how to be frightened. I froze completely. Beside me Hannah froze too. Only Siegfried raised his fist and charged, screaming.

  The mage didn't bother with spells. He raised his staff, used the reach it gave him, and jabbed at Siegfried's face in short rapid strokes. Siegfried dodged the first hit, dodged the second. The third took him in the eye. He staggered back and something fell from his face. I knew what it was and I couldn't look away and I couldn't move. The mage swept his feet and hit him with a short burst of force, and Siegfried flew back into the pack of zombies that had frozen with us. The fear spell released. The monsters, smelling blood, tore into him.

  Hannah broke for him. My adrenaline just converted from one kind of paralysis into another. I watched the necromancer walk toward me and tried to think through it, tried to find a spell, any spell, but my spellbook was long gone and the only sigil I had firmly in my head was the wall. He'd just walk around it. But a few more seconds of--

  The air left my lungs all at once. I was flying. I sailed over the mage's head and crashed into the table where we'd piled the loot, broke straight through it, and hit the floor in a broken mess of wood and metal. Hannah screamed somewhere behind me. I lay in the wreckage and tried to remember how to breathe and found I was crying, and I didn't care. I understood something then, flat on my back in the dark, that I hadn't understood before. Fear is the feeling you get when you still hope there's an exit but think you might not reach it. What I felt now was different. Quieter. I had no more hope of an exit, and it was almost peaceful, and the evil son of a bitch cackled across the room as I strained to sit up.

  Hannah had her throat slit to the bone. She was standing. She looked at me with blank eyes, and when the necromancer said "Kill him," she started walking, and stopped to pick up Bella's sword on her way.

  Two neurons were still running. I don't know what they were solving for or how. When she stood over me and raised the sword I had nothing, but my hand moved without me and my voice said the words without me and the shield spell stopped her swing. In the instant before she reset her grip I saw something in her eyes that wasn't blankness and wasn't fury. Relief. She was still in there.

  I don't know how I made the next connections that fast, and I don't know how my wrecked body carried them out.

  I rolled half a roll, which was all I could manage. I took off my hat. It increased your Arcana by one, so long as it was zero. Hannah's was. When her swing continued and missed I hooked her ankle and she went down, and I put the hat on her head and grabbed a scroll from my belt without looking.

  One in three. Better than zero.

  "Cast it," I said.

  "Die, mortal," the necromancer said, already building his next spell. Lightning crawled around his fingers and shaped itself into something like a blade.

  Her vocal cords were gone. It came out as a hissing exhalation, barely syllables at all. I thought: that won't work. I thought: that's it.

  Hannah turned and drove the sword through his chest.

  He threw the lightning spell as he fell. It caught her across the torso so deeply that it nearly cut her in half, and I caught her as she dropped and held the two halves of her together, somehow, while the necromancer went down without another word.

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  I saved one. I fucking guess.

  She was moaning in my arms, not words, just pain and noise. The wound went all the way to her spine. Every instinct I had said sit down, break down, let the last ten minutes hit you at once. I told all of it to wait.

  "Chum," I said.

  "Oh hell fucking shitballs, boss. She needs brains," he said.

  "Brains."

  "The body is consuming first the magic, then the mind, then the soul to keep itself running. Once you're dead, you're not supposed to still be here," he said.

  "Brains?"

  "Or anything magic she can eat or drink. A heart would do. A mana elixir would be better," Chum said.

  I found the last small bottle in my pocket and tipped it into her mouth.

  It was like watching someone surface from deep water. She didn't take a breath, because she didn't breathe anymore, but the wound at her throat knit slightly at the edges and when she spoke it was almost a voice.

  "Fuck," Hannah said, low and torn and ragged. "I am not doing well."

  She tried to move and stopped at a cracking sound from somewhere in her midsection.

  "Chum, will healing potions work?" I said.

  "Internal damage, elemental damage, psychic damage. Not a bisected chest," he said.

  "Alex." Her hand found my arm. "Listen. I feel numb, I can't feel emotions properly, I know I should be panicking and I'm not. If I can't move I am better off dead. Thank you for trying."

  "Fuck that," I said, and got to my feet.

  I was limping and my shoulder felt like hamburger and I had blood drying on half my face, but I didn't spend any time on that because Hannah was lying on the floor in two pieces watching me with dead eyes and I needed to think. She could move her arms. She could move her neck, could speak. She could move her feet, she just wasn't because every small movement separated the two halves of her further apart. What she needed was something to hold her together. Something rigid, tight, adjustable.

  I tripped over Siegfried. I'd been trying very hard not to look at him.

  I looked at him now.

  "Hannah," I said. "Are you in pain?"

  "Pressure. Soreness. Not much pain. A headshot kills a zombie cleanly, Alex. I won't feel it," she said.

  "I have a dumber idea," I said.

  The staple gun was in the bottom drawer of a supply cabinet. I brought it back, knelt beside her, and in the most grotesque act of intimacy I have ever performed, I pinched the inside edges of the wound together and started stapling. After the first two she understood and held herself together from the inside while I worked the outside. It took a long time and I didn't think about what I was doing, only about the next staple and the next.

  "This won't hold if I try to stand," she said.

  "This is step one," I said.

  I taped over the staples with electrical tape from the same cabinet. Still not enough. I looked at Siegfried again and made myself keep looking until the idea stopped feeling like a betrayal and started feeling like the only option, which took about four seconds.

  His armor was a full body suit, articulated metal over leather, with straps that could be pulled tight enough to fit someone considerably smaller than him. It took a long time to get it off. More straps than I'd expected, and his fingers and wrists had already begun to swell. When I finally got it free I left him on the floor and I didn't let myself think about that either. Not yet. There would be time later to fall apart about Siegfried, about all of it. For now Hannah was alive, in any sense of the word that mattered.

  She had figured out what I was doing and gone quiet. I got the chestpiece onto her and pulled every strap as tight as it would go, like roping an overfilled suitcase shut, and when it was on she shifted experimentally and said: "Shit. This might work."

  We got the rest of the armor on together. It didn't occur to either of us to split it between us, to take pieces for ourselves. That wasn't logic. It was just the only thing that felt right.

  When she stood up, I pumped my fist.

  She was pale as chalk with a slashed throat and dead eyes, and she bent down and lifted the greatsword and clasped her old cloak across her back, and she said: "I am going to kill whoever is responsible for this, Alex. Thank you for giving me the chance."

  "Any of us would have done the same," I said, and I believed it.

  "Hey, newbies." Chum's voice had the particular tone he used when he was about to say something that needed to be said and nobody was going to enjoy it. "Heartfelt moment noted. Still got a problem."

  "What kind of problem," Hannah said.

  "The kind where you're dead. An undead with self-control is a nearly unheard-of creature. Lots of things have to go wrong and then go right in a very specific order, most of which involves finding a necromancer stupid enough not to snuff the personality out as soon as he raises one. Then another wizard giving that undead a chance. Then the dead person being willful enough to take it." He paused. "So well done, all around. Still doesn't change what you're running on."

  "Which is what," Hannah said.

  "Magic. Pure magic, nothing else. The multiverse knows you're supposed to be gone and it will keep trying to correct that unless you keep magic flowing through you constantly. A mana elixir buys you about twelve hours if you don't take damage. In a pinch, the brain or heart of a recently deceased intelligent creature works too. The good news is," he said, and I was already moving toward the wreckage of the table, "a mana elixir is better."

  I found all six of them intact in the rubble, thick glass bulbs of blue liquid, apparently built to survive exactly this kind of disaster.

  "The less good news," Chum continued, "is that the meat isn't going to stay fresh. Life is what keeps meat fresh. Death doesn't give a shit. You'll want to invest everything into willpower and arcana, and if you level fast enough in your new class you might be able to slow the decomposition. Not stop it. And eventually, if you're not careful, you'll lose the mind holding it all together."

  "I feel fine," Hannah said.

  "Right now you do. Your body is going to spend the next while trying very hard to eat your mind the first moment it realizes there's no external mana keeping it in line. You will go mad eventually." He paused again. "But if you level hard enough, maybe you go mad with power. I've seen worse outcomes."

  Hannah looked at the six elixirs in my hands. She looked at the sword. She looked at me.

  I didn't say anything. There was nothing to say that the last half hour hadn't already said better.

  "I'm exhausted," I said instead, and walked out into the hallway and sat down against the wall.