[Author's Note: This chapter marks the beginning of a new "arc," of sorts, so there's a bit of recapping in this one, to catch readers up to speed on Stu's situation. Hope you're enjoying this story!]

  Stu decapitated a third zombie. The monster's gruesome, half-rotted head flew from its shoulders, splashing into a puddle of muddy water, while silver-tinted blood fountained out of its neck. It remained standing for a fraction of a second, swaying unsteadily on its feet, then fell backward, hitting the ground with a thump.

  Cutting off a man's head -- even if he was a ravening and infectious zombie -- was not an easy thing to do, psychologically speaking. A few weeks ago Stu would have been thoroughly traumatized by it, and probably would have vomited at the sight. Though he had never been particularly squeamish -- he had seen plenty of horror movies, had played plenty of survival horror games, and had even stumbled across a few brutal internet videos of people getting maimed or killed -- he had been born and raised in a quiet suburban neighborhood and had never seen or experienced any violence or horror in his real life. He wasn't used to it.

  His quiet suburban life in his quiet suburban neighborhood had ended three weeks ago, however, after he had been kidnapped by two mystery men and marched through a portal to another world -- a zombie-world, full of horror and death. An outbreak had occurred here ten years ago, flooding the cities with zombies and killing off something like 99% of the population. Meku City had once been home to millions of people, but only a few thousand lived here now, and those few lived in constant fear -- and not just from the zombies, but from the marauding gangs that had taken over so many of the settlements. It was a nasty place.

  An ICON message popped up in front of his face:

  Level 4 Zombie defeated!

  No critical bonus this time? He frowned and dismissed the message -- wishing, for the umpteenth time, that he knew more about the ICON system and how it all worked.

  He looked down at the zombie he had just killed. Although its head had been rotted and infested with maggots, and its face was now half-submerged in the muck, he could still see its eyes, both of which were wide with shock. Maybe he had surprised it, in that half-second before he had killed it.

  He sighed. He had killed so many zombies over the last few weeks that he had lost count. He didn't like having to kill these things with his own hands, or seeing the blood and gore that inevitably followed, but it didn't bother him as much as it used to. He seemed to be growing numb to it.

  He wasn't sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

  "Nice one," Lucky said, looking down at the zombie. Lucky was only twelve years old, but he was a hardened veteran of these kinds of zombie attacks and if blood-spattered bodies and decapitated heads bothered him at all, he didn't show it. "I guess that's all of 'em, huh?"

  "Looks like it," Stu said, wiping off the machete. He had bought it from a trader in Beggar's Town, and although the blade was getting a bit rusty, it was still sharp, and it had a good heft to it. He preferred his aluminum baseball bat, but for quick-kills it was hard to beat a good machete.

  "Well, let's get out of here, then," the kid said, kicking a bit of mud. "You know how zombies are."

  "Yeah." As Lucky had reminded him more than once, zombies were like cockroaches -- for every one you saw, there were at least a dozen others prowling around somewhere close by. For reasons he did not quite understand, zombies tended to congregate together.

  Irregulars were another matter, of course. Irregulars were...well, irregular. They did their own thing.

  He slipped the machete back into its nylon sheath and followed Lucky through the remainder of the tunnel. They had returned to Meku City's dark and haunted subway system earlier in the day, in search of dynamo fluid -- according to Luna, they needed at least three more canisters of the substance to make it to Lon Halos. Dynamo engines, of the kind found in Luna's glider, were extremely efficient, but even they required fuel, and in this zombie hellscape dynamo fluid was a rare and precious commodity. Lucky had remembered seeing some in the storage room where they had battled the Brute a few weeks ago, but when they returned to the place this morning they found it had been ransacked by zombies and all the canisters smashed. "Probably a glowie got in here," Lucky had muttered, picking through the debris. "Drank it all."

  Glowies were a type of irregular that consumed dynamo fluid, which made their skin glow and made their blood flammable. Stu had encountered one of these already; it was like trying to fight a flamethrower. He hoped to never see one again.

  That was probably a forlorn hope, though. Irregulars weren't exactly common -- only one out of every ten individuals infected by the zombie-virus would go on to become an irregular -- but he had already seen most of the different varieties during his short stint in Meku City. Jumbos were big and fat and tough to hurt; ragers were ferociously strong and aggressive, and could actually use weapons and throw punches; speedies were fast; bombers had exploding bellies; and mutates were animalistic, transforming into creatures that looked more like dogs, lizards, or skittering insects than human beings. These were the most dangerous, according to Lucky, but brainies -- who maintained their human intelligence but were just as malevolent as any other zombie -- were apparently an especial threat as well. Stu hadn't seen any brainies yet.

  And there were a few other oddball types, like shakers, who merely remained standing in place, trembling, until they were provoked, and gigglers, who laughed like maniacs as they attacked but were otherwise no different from other zombies. According to Luna there were about fifteen or twenty different types of irregulars, but no one had ever performed a systematic study of the monsters and she had warned him that there could be other types of irregulars out there as well -- irregulars no one had ever seen before. They might encounter some of these on their way to Lon Halos.

  Stu was not looking forward to this trip -- the city was on the other side of the Astrian Union, thousands of miles away -- but he needed to get Lon Halos. Virge and Wayman, the men who had brought him to this world, had insisted that he go there and meet with a man named Dr. Snowe; Virge had claimed that Snowe had the power to send him back home. Stu had no idea why he had been brought to this world, and no idea who this Dr. Snowe was, and no idea where the mysterious ICON system had come from -- Virge and Wayman had both died before they could explain it to him -- but he hoped to find the answers to these questions in Lon Halos.

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

  Without that dynamo fluid, however, they were going to have a hard time getting there. Luna's glider -- a kind of hovering vehicle -- ran on the stuff, and it was the only transportation they had.

  "We could try asking Sike," Lucky suggested, seeming to read his thoughts as they walked along. "He sometimes finds old canisters with a few drops left in them when he goes out scavenging. Unfortunately..." He sighed.

  "Unfortunately?"

  "Well, Sike can drive a pretty hard bargain. And I don't think we have anything he'd be interested in trading for."

  "We saved his life when he was attacked by those zombies. Doesn't that count for anything?"

  Lucky snorted. "Not in Meku City."

  "We'll just have to keep looking, I guess. What about Marshal Tempo and the Pale Riders? Do you think they'd be willing to give us a few canisters?"

  "I couldn't even convince Tempo to give up that Centurion rifle," he muttered. "The gangs have plenty of dynamo fluid, sure. They hoard the stuff. The bigger settlements, too -- they need it to run their dynamo engines, to keep the lights on. They won't trade for it, and they certainly won't give it away."

  "Was there a supply back at Harbor?" Harbor was Lucky's hometown. "We might find some there."

  "The Wild Pack took it all when they raided the place. It was the first thing they went looking for, I'm sure, after they took all our food."

  "Oh." This was frustrating. They only needed three soda can-sized canisters of this fluid to make it all the way to Lon Halos, and yet... "What about all these junked-out, dynamo-powered cars we've seen in the streets?" he asked. "Couldn't we extract some dynamo fluid from them?"

  "Most of the cars on the road at the time of the outbreak were still running on gasoline," he said. "Dynamo engines have been around for a while, but dynamo-powered cars and gliders were still pretty rare when the zombies started showing up. The gangs and scavengers have already picked most of those clean, and what they didn't find, the glowies did."

  Stu nodded sadly. He had to remind himself, sometimes, that this zombie apocalypse hadn't happened yesterday -- it had happened ten years ago. The scavengers Lucky had described had already thoroughly looted Meku City; all kinds of supplies and resources were starting to run out.

  How much longer could these people hold out? What kind of future could they hope to build, in a fallen world full of barbaric biker gangs and zombies? He felt bad for them.

  He was so distracted by these thoughts that he didn't see the zombie until Lucky pointed it out to him; the kid had to stop him and warn him, nudging him with his elbow. Looking ahead, Stu saw a single, solitary zombie, standing in the middle of the tunnel, about fifty feet away. Just beyond it lay the subway platform, with its exit to the surface; Stu and Lucky had entered the subway through this station just a few hours ago.

  Stu's ICON system identified the zombie -- a set of words appearing over the its head -- but he was too far away from it to read its designation. It wasn't moving, in any case, or making any noise; it was probably just an ordinary zombie.

  It hadn't seen them. Lucky, nodding grimly to Stu, slung his railgun off his back and got down on one knee. He raised the rifle to his shoulder, pressed a button on its LCD screen in order to charge up its rails, and took aim. Stu crouched down with him, watching him work. Could he make the shot? Fifty feet wasn't far, but Lucky wasn't exactly a sniper.

  The kid squeezed the trigger. Stu hoped to see the zombie fall, but it didn't; the projectile zipped past its head. "Shit," Lucky muttered. He pulled the trigger again, and missed again.

  The zombie, now alerted to their presence, turned to look at them. Stu, sighing, started to pull the machete of its sheath...

  ...And suddenly the zombie was right there in the front of them, having closed the distance between them in less than three seconds. It snarled in their faces, batted the railgun out of Lucky's hand, bowled him over, and tried to latch on to Stu's shoulders and bite him in the neck.

  The damn thing had moved so fast that even Stu, who possessed a kind of super-speed of his own thanks to the ICON system's Speed Freak skill, couldn't follow its movements. He did catch a glimpse of its designation, though:

  Level 3 Speedy

  It was an irregular, a speedy, a zombie capable of moving and reacting incredibly quickly. Stu had encountered a Level 3 Speedy down here a few weeks ago, in a subway car; he wondered if this was the same one.

  He only had the machete halfway out of its sheath when the zombie reached him. Reacting more out of instinct and self-preservation than anything else, he snapped the sheath off his belt and, with the machete still in it, used it to slap one of the zombie's arms away, just as it was grabbing for him. But the zombie's speed was unreal; instantly, its other arm shot out and seized him by the throat. He could feel its cold fingers digging into his flesh.

  The speedy tried to draw him close and bite him -- the infection spread through bites; it was always a zombie's first priority to try to bite its victims -- but it hadn't reckoned with Stu's strength. In addition to the Speed Freak skill, he had acquired the Strong Arm skill as well, which, according to his best estimation, made him at least three times as strong as an ordinary person. Stu resisted when the zombie tried to pull him into its embrace -- he planted his feet on the ground, seized the zombie's arm with both hands, and snapped it up at the elbow. The arm fell to the zombie's side, useless, but it did not give up. Using its remarkable speed, it whipped its other arm out, striking Stu in the face, then lunged for him again, jaws snapping.

  All of this action happened with a fraction of a second -- too fast for Lucky to keep up. Just as the speedy was reaching for Stu, however, the kid managed to crawl forward and wrap an arm around the speedy's leg. It looked down at him and tried to kick itself free, which gave Stu the second he needed to grab the speedy's other arm, and to break it as well. Now both arms were flopping at the zombie's sides, but it still had its snapping teeth, and its incredible speed; it kicked away from Lucky, disentangled itself from Stu, and began running around crazily, feinting here and there, looking for another opportunity to attack. Stu couldn't believe how fast the thing was; it was practically a blur.

  And then it was coming at him again, lightning-quick, snapping at him like a cobra. He slid the machete out of its sheath and swung, aiming for the zombie's neck, but the damn thing ducked it, and then leapt up at him from below, trying to get at his unprotected neck again.

  His only option, as silly as it sounded, was to headbutt the thing. As its head came flying up, Stu reared back and brought his own head down, striking it right in the forehead. The impact stunned them both. Stu saw stars.

  He recovered more quickly than the zombie, though. While it was still staggering, he called upon another one of his skills, Dead Aim, which allowed him to throw an object with perfect accuracy. Whirling the machete around, he launched it at the speedy, from a distance of only a few feet.

  The sharp edge of the blade sliced into its neck and stuck there, sideways. It might have tried to pry it out, but both of its arms had been broken, and all it could do was stagger around some more. Quickly, Stu jumped forward, grabbed the machete's grip, and used it to drive the zombie into the wall of the tunnel, pinning it there while he sawed the rest of the way through. Its head now parted from its neck, the speedy collapsed, its knees buckling.

  Stu, breathing hard, and still holding the bloody machete, stumbled away from the zombie's body. That had been close.

  The ICON system gave him a message:

  Level 3 Speedy defeated!

  Level Up! 18-20!

  Gained 2 SP!

  New classes available!

  Access Menu?

  Stu had seen these kinds of messages before, which popped up like computer screens in his vision. Still dizzy from the headbutt, he started to close the screen, but then stopped, suddenly noticing that extra line. New classes available? What did that mean? He had never seen anything like this before.

  There were more important things to worry about right now, though. "You all right?" he asked Lucky, helping the kid to his feet.

  "Yeah," he replied. "Sorry. If I hadn't missed that shot..."

  "It's okay. Let's just get out of here."

  And they made their way back to the subway platform.