Stu began by making a checklist in his mind. He needed a goal, an objective. He needed a weapon. He needed some water. In a few hours he was going to need to find a safe place to sleep, if sleep was possible. He was going to need to find some food, eventually. And he needed to find someone to talk to, someone who might be willing to explain the situation to him.

  Was anyone alive in this city, though? The streets had been crawling with zombies. And if he did happen to encounter any survivors...well, he had seen enough zombie fiction to know that survivors didn't always welcome strangers with open arms. They might shoot first and ask questions never.

  He would have to be careful of anyone he met.

  As for finding a weapon...he still had Virge's gun, but it was out of ammo, and he had no idea where he might find more. Inspecting the gun, he discovered that it was a Hughes & Samson Midnighter in .45 ACP. He was familiar with the ammo type, but he had never heard of a gun company called "Hughes & Samson", nor of a model called a Midnighter. This, combined with the unusual dollar bill he had found on Virge's body, the weird maps and subway signs he had seen, and the fact that a zombie outbreak had obviously occurred at some point in the past, was leading him to conclude that -- as preposterous as it might sound -- he had landed in some kind of alternate reality. It was similar in many ways to his own reality -- it had big cities and subway tunnels and cars and advertisements and public bathrooms -- but he was finding more and more subtle differences as he went along.

  Where might he find a useful weapon? He looked around the bathroom, thinking he might pry a pipe or something out of the wall, but there was nothing handy.

  He frowned. Could the ICON system provide him with some kind of weapon, or physical advantage? He opened up the menu and started looking through the skills again. "Strong Arm" would increase his strength and "Speed Freak" would give him supernatural speed, according to their descriptions, and both of these could be further leveled up a total of five times. Strength and speed would definitely be useful, as would some of the other skills...but he had no "skill points" at the moment, and the only way he knew to get more was to go out and kill zombies, which was not exactly an appealing prospect. The last one had nearly killed him.

  Still, it was worth keeping in mind.

  Food? Water? He was unlikely to find either down here, unless he was willing to resort to drinking the filthy dirt-water of the flooded-out tunnels he had passed through earlier. This was another unappealing prospect, but he was so thirsty right now that he found himself unwilling to dismiss the idea out of hand.

  An objective? He stopped, thinking hard about this. While his ultimate objective might be getting to Lon Halos and finding the mysterious Dr. Snowe, his more immediate objective was equipping himself for survival, finding a way out of danger, and perhaps acquiring some kind of transportation. It would help to know where he was, too.

  He found himself wondering about the portal Virge and Wayman had opened. Was it still open? He didn't think it was, but if there was even the slightest possibility...

  He should at least check it out. It was a long way to walk, but now that he could see in the dark -- until his Night Vision ran out, anyway -- the prospect of it was not so daunting.

  Besides, what were his other options? The streets were crowded with zombies, and he would be in plain view of them if he returned to the surface. There seemed to be fewer zombies down in these tunnels, at least, and he might eventually find another platform, further down the line, with an exit to a street that was not quite so full of the undead.

  He got to his feet and stepped out of the stall, pausing for a moment to look at the zombie he had killed earlier. With his new Night Vision, he could see it in all its gory detail, with its torn sinew and half-rotted limbs. It was wearing a blue jumpsuit; perhaps it had been a janitor or maintenance man of some kind.

  He started to look away...but then he noticed something strange about the zombie's blood, which had now leaked all over the tiled floor. The blood was a blackish red, but there were streaks of silver in it, as though the creature had had liquid mercury flowing through its veins. Stu couldn't begin to guess what that meant.

  Dismissing the sight -- he had no desire to study this horrible thing in any greater detail -- he left the bathroom, once again stepping out onto the subway platform. With his Night Vision, he could now see the whole area with much greater clarity -- the broken walls and windows, the blood spatter, the garbage and discarded newspapers...

  Discarded newspapers? A newspaper, he suddenly realized, might give him some insight as to where he was and to what had happened here. He picked a page up off the floor, smoothed it out as best he could, and examined it.

  The page he had picked up, luckily enough, was the front page. The name of the paper was "The Meku Daily Herald" and it was dated ten years ago. Wasn't that when Virge had said the zombie outbreak had taken place?

  The paper was entirely in English. The top headline read, "President Paulus Arrives in Rurik for Peace Summit." There didn't seem to be any stories about a zombie apocalypse; perhaps it had crept up on them. In fact the whole paper was full of oddities -- he didn't recognize any of the names or countries mentioned in the peace summit story, and the advertisements, just like the advertisements in the subway, were for products and companies he had never heard of. There were ads for high-tech humanoid robots, vehicles that seemed to hover over the ground, and websites and services that were unfamiliar to him.

  He was able to glean, however, that the paper had been published in a place called Meku City, which was situated in a country called Astria, or the Astrian Union.

  He turned the paper over to look at the back page. He stopped and stared.

  The entire back page of the paper was an advertisement for a TV show called Hardcore. It seemed to be some kind of thriller; the ad was illustrated with a photo of a beautiful actress, her face partially obscured by smoke and shadows, holding a gun. She was standing on a dark street, and looking sideways at the viewer.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  Stu couldn't believe what he was seeing. The actress in the ad, the star of this show Hardcore, was none other than Berly.

  He was so surprised that he spent a long moment just staring at her face. How could it be? How could Berly be here? Thinking he might be mistaken, he tried smoothing the paper out a bit more, but there really was no mistaking it -- the girl in the ad was obviously his ex-girlfriend. In fact, at the bottom of the page, he even found her name: "Starring Beverly Nightingale."

  Stu had spent the last hour or so trying to make sense of what was going on, and just when he had thought he was finally starting to get a handle on it, he had once again been thrown for a loop. What was Berly doing in this ad?

  He wanted to study the ad more closely -- he wanted to read through the whole paper, in fact -- but he was quickly using up his Night Vision skill; according to the countdown timer, he only had about twenty-one minutes left. So he rolled it up as best he could and put it in his back pocket.

  He left the subway platform, climbing down into the tunnel and making his way back to the place where Virge and Wayman had opened the portal. Everything looked different now, with his Night Vision active; he could see it all perfectly. But he was still tired and thirsty and he suspected it would take him at least thirty or forty minutes to get back to that spot. He was going to have to rely on Wayman's flashlight after his Night Vision ran out. And if the flashlight's battery ran out...well, he didn't even want to think about that.

  Ten minutes later he came to a crossroads -- here, the tunnel split into two, one set of rails going right and another going left. It had been so dark, when he had come this way with Virge and Wayman, that he hadn't even noticed this, and he had no idea which path was the correct one. He finally decided on the left path, but more because he was hearing some strange, frightening noises -- groaning noises -- drifting out of the right tunnel.

  He kept walking, and walking, sometimes stumbling over the rails. By the time he realized he had gone the wrong way -- he should have passed Wayman's body by now -- it was too late to turn back; his Night Vision was nearly gone. So he kept walking, hoping to find some succor further down the line.

  What he finally found, however, was a row of piled-up sandbags and a bunch of dead soldiers. It looked like they had attempted to make some kind of last stand here in the tunnels -- in addition to the sandbags, the men had been equipped with radios and boxes of ammunition. He checked the ammo boxes, hoping to find some .45 ACP for Virge's Midnighter, but the boxes were empty. Checking further, he realized that the scene had already been looted, for there were no guns to be found here, either, and the men -- who had been obviously been dead for years; they were little more than dry, desiccated corpses now -- had been stripped of most of their belongings, even their boots.

  After searching for several minutes, however, he did find a combat knife, stuck in the ground. The blade was a little rusty, and not very sharp, but it was better than nothing, so he picked it up. He was in the middle of examining the blade when the zombie attacked.

  He never saw it coming. It suddenly sprang up from behind the stacked-up sandbags, threw itself on top of them, and reached for him, seizing his shirt. He yelped in surprise and reacted instinctively, slashing at it with the knife in his hand and cutting deeply into its wrist. If it had been an ordinary human, it would have recoiled from this, but the zombie didn't even seem to notice it, and continued grabbing for him. He finally managed to extricate himself from the zombie's grasp by cutting at his own shirt, causing the zombie to tear off a section of it; he then backed away from the monster, as his fight or flight instinct kicked in.

  The words "Level 4 Zombie" were hanging above the head of this one, and indeed, it looked tougher than the "Level 1 Zombie" he had battled earlier. It was bigger, for one thing -- over six feet tall and still carrying a lot of weight. Its face was a mess of sores and seeping wounds; it eyes were black. Its skin was sloughing off its brawny arms, but it still had enough muscle tissue left to drag itself over the sandbags and climb to its feet. Like the zombie he had killed in the bathroom, it was wearing the tattered remains of a janitor's uniform -- or maybe it had been some kind of maintenance worker; it was hard to tell.

  It didn't slow down, after getting to its feet -- it immediately started stumbling towards Stu. Stu, for his part, had no interest in fighting this thing, but just as he was turning around, intending to make a break for it, a red timer suddenly appeared in his vision.

  He had just one minute of Night Vision left.

  He stopped. Wouldn't it be better to try to kill this zombie here and now, then to allow it to follow him as he stumbled around in the dark? Besides, if he successfully managed to kill it, he might acquire more skill points.

  On the other hand, the zombie was a disgusting nightmare and Stu had no idea how he might go about killing it. And what if he was bitten in the process?

  He took a second to weigh these options. Fight or flight? Meanwhile the timer in his vision continued to count down. Fifty-two, fifty-one, fifty...

  He decided to fight. Swallowing down his fear, he turned back to face the thing, looking it over, trying to figure out how to take it down. He noticed that it was shuffling a bit as it stumbled forward; there was something wrong with its right leg. So he started moving to his left, circling it, forcing it to turn on that leg. He led it around the sandbags, and then back around to where the soldiers' corpses lay. It kept after him, snarling and growling and baring its broken teeth at him, but also tripping over all the obstacles in its path. Stu, now on the opposite side of the sandbags, started feinting, trying to bait it into throwing itself over the sandbags as it had earlier. After a moment it obliged him, throwing its body across the bags in a frenzied attempt to reach him.

  Quickly, before it could scramble over the top, Stu went to the wall of sandbags and, with all his strength, heaved one up, so that it fell across the zombie's torso, pinning it down. Then he climbed up on the zombie's back himself, securing it with his own weight, and drove the knife into the back of its neck. It took some serious effort -- and the dull knife didn't make it any easier -- but as with the zombie in the bathroom, he eventually managed to saw most of the thing's head off. It soon stopped moving, black-and-silver blood gushing grossly out of its severed neck. A moment later, his Night Vision ran out, plunging the subway tunnel into darkness.

  He let out a long, shuddering breath. He had done it, somehow.

  A familiar screen popped up in front of his face:

  Level 4 Zombie defeated!

  Level Up! 2-3

  Gained 2 SP!

  Access Menu?

  He tiredly climbed off the zombie and checked the menu. He had, indeed, gone up a level. His HP, which had been 25 before, had risen to 35, and his other stats had gone up by one or two points as well. He didn't feel any different, but maybe a couple of points wasn't enough to make any difference. His current HP, in any case, was 19, which possibly reflected his weariness, because apart from a few cuts and bruises he did not seem to be seriously injured.

  He also had two additional skill points, so he opened the skills screen. He hesitated here -- should he "buy" another low-cost skill, like "Silence" or "Artful Dodger", or should he wait until he had a few more points and buy a more advanced skill? He couldn't make up his mind, so he decided to worry about it later; he closed down the menu screens, wiped the bloody knife on the sandbags, and got out Wayman's flashlight. Then, with his hands bloody, his shirt ripped, his jeans covered in filth and grime, and his heart still gripped with terror, he continued down the tunnel.