Out into the service corridor, his shoes touching down soft against the worn linoleum. Carver's weight pressed into his shoulders, every shift of the man's body a reminder of how little room for error there was. The knife stayed in his right hand, the metal cool against his palm.
He moved along the wall, keeping his shoulder close to the chipped paint, eyes locked on the far door. The moans were louder now, blending with the uneven slap of dead feet. The stench rolled ahead of them, sour and wet, thick enough to taste.
One more step and his foot struck a loose metal plate in the floor. It clanged sharp in the still air.
The horde reacted instantly. Heads jerked up. Jaws gaped wider. The moaning became a chorus. Then they began to move faster, their staggering steps gaining an awful, clumsy urgency.
Ethan pushed forward into a sprint. Carver's limp weight shifted and jolted against his back with every stride. The hallway seemed longer than before, the flickering lights smearing shadows across the walls. Behind him, the shuffle of the dead became a pounding rhythm, closer with each heartbeat.
The next intersection came into view, two branching corridors forming a crossroad. Ethan veered left, his shoulder brushing the wall as he cleared the corner. Ahead, a half-open rolling security gate blocked the way into a dimly lit staff storage area.
He covered the distance in a few pounding steps, ducking under the gate and dragging Carver through with him. The space beyond smelled of dust and machine oil, racks of boxes and plastic-wrapped pallets forming a narrow maze. The gate rattled as the first of the dead reached it, their hands and faces pressing through the gap, teeth gnashing.
Ethan kept moving deeper into the storage area, his breathing harsh in the stale air. It was safer than the hallway, but only for the moment.
Ethan's eyes swept the storage area, searching for a way out. A row of doors stood ahead, each with peeling paint and dented frames, but his memory offered no certainty. Nearly twenty years had passed since he had played the game. The only reason he had recognized the clown was because of how brutal that fight had been.
He tried to piece the map together in his head, but before he could choose, the overhead lights flickered and died. Darkness swallowed the room for a breath before the weak red glow of the mall's emergency lights seeped in. One of the doors ahead burst open, slamming into the wall. The smell hit him first—rot, stale blood, and mold—then the dead poured through.
The mark on his hand began to heat. At first it was only a faint warmth under the skin, but it sharpened quickly, a signal he had felt before. The last time had been in the Robert Jordan world, when he was desperate for an exit. The moans behind him carried the same weight now.
He shifted Carver's weight higher on his shoulders and moved through the narrow aisles of pallets and boxes. The mark burned hotter, guiding him, until he saw it.
One door stood apart from the rest, heavy steel with a square mesh-window fixed into its upper half. His steps slowed. He knew that door. It was the one to his cell in the real world or one close to it.
The moans grew louder. Shadows from the first of the dead stretched long across the floor as they stumbled into the storage room.
Ethan stood in front of the steel door, breath dragging in and out. He could go back. He could walk through right now, but it would mean walls, chains, and a cage. He would not do it.
His gaze fell to Carver. Leaving him here meant certain death. The thought pulled tight in his chest until it hurt.
He gritted his teeth, pulled the door open, and heaved the unconscious detective through. The mark flared with searing heat as Carver vanished into the dark beyond.
Ethan stepped back, the door closing under his hand. He failed to notice the oddly shaped wasp that fluttered through the opening before it shut. The steel face of the door rippled, faded, and then became nothing more than an ordinary door inside the storage area.
He pushed through the narrowing gap between racks as the dead swarmed in. The air was thick with the wet stink of them, the sound of their shuffling feet growing into a pounding, suffocating rhythm. He kept moving, the knife flashing, the pistol barking in short, desperate bursts. Two shots left.
He slammed through the storage area's far door and into the mall proper. The abrupt change in space was dizzying—overhead lights flickering above tiled walkways, rows of storefronts yawning open into dark interiors. His legs were close to buckling, every step a jolt through his burning thighs.
The dead were behind him, their moans echoing off the glass and tile. He forced his body forward, half-running, half-staggering. A pair of zombies lurched out from a shop on his left. He did not think—just let the knife lead his arm. One went down with a blade through the eye socket, the other fell after he opened its throat and kicked it backward into a display rack.
The fight was raw, rawer than anything he had faced in Afghanistan. There, he had dealt with chaos and blood and death—but this was closer, dirtier, more animal. A bite meant infection. Infection meant death.
He stumbled over a fallen trash can, nearly pitching forward. His boots skidded across slick tile streaked with drying blood. His lungs burned as he sprinted past a shuttered clothing outlet.
Another of the dead came from the right, a small woman with most of her stomach torn out, intestines dangling out in wet glistening ropes, teeth bared. He slammed her into the glass front of a jewelry store and drove the knife under her jaw until she stopped moving.
He ran on, nearly blind from exhaustion and adrenaline. The Hunting Shack sign loomed ahead, lit in a sputtering neon green. Salvation—or at least a last stand.
A strange exhilaration worked its way through the fear. His mind knew the stakes, knew one slip could end him here. But his blood was singing. His heart pounded with the same reckless joy he had felt in firefights overseas. The same feeling that had driven his ex-wife to tell him she thought he loved war more than her. She had not been wrong.
The guilt came just as fast. That she had seen it. That she had been right. That even now, sprinting toward possible death, he could admit to himself this was the only time he felt truly alive. The enemy was clear, the stakes absolute, and the fight his alone. Idly, perhaps a little feverishly, he wondered what this place, this reality.... this game had for a difficulty setting.
The doors to the Huntin' Shack were ahead. He could hear the dead behind him, closer now. He tightened his grip on the knife and the pistol and pushed himself into one last sprint.
The Huntin' Shack doors were just ahead when three of the dead came from his right, bursting out of the darkness inside a candle shop. One of them—a big man in a torn plaid shirt—crashed into him before he could bring the pistol up. Ethan hit the glass door of the Shack hard enough to rattle it in its frame.
The impact jarred his ribs and nearly took his breath. He shoved back, driving his shoulder into the man's chest. Rotten breath washed over his face as broken teeth snapped inches from his cheek. Ethan's knife hand came up under the jaw, quickly becoming his go-to move for these things, the blade punching through soft tissue until it jammed in the roof of the mouth. He yanked it free in a spray of black-red. But as he did the blade snapped, and part of it remained inside.
The second zombie, a bald figure with one eye bulging from its socket, clawed at his arm. Its nails scraped his skin through the fabric, hot pain blooming in his forearm. He twisted and slammed its skull into the edge of the doorframe, once, twice, until the bone gave way.
The third came low, fast, a woman missing her lower jaw. Her teeth still clacked together as she lunged for his thigh. He kicked her in the sternum, hard, sending her backward into the tiled walkway. She hit the floor and rolled, but her fingers still clawed toward him.
More were coming. He could hear them—heavy, wet steps and the low, awful chorus of moans.
Ethan spun, slammed his body into the door, and felt it give. He shoved his way inside, the fluorescent lights above buzzing weakly. Rows of racks lined with hunting rifles, shotguns, and ammunition gleamed under the failing light.
Before he could think of the weapons, the woman without a jaw was on him again, half-crawling, half-lunging. He stepped into her, stomped once on the side of her head, and felt the skull give under his heel.
The sound was drowned out by the pounding of hands on the glass behind him.
Ethan backed into the store, breath coming in ragged pulls. The pounding on the glass doors behind him grew louder, the moans swelling into something hungry and insistent. The first sharp crack spiderwebbed across the pane.
He scanned the racks, his eyes locking on a pump-action shotgun hanging from the wall display. He crossed to it in three strides, yanked it free, and dropped to one knee by a shelf of ammunition. His hands found the familiar red shells without thought.
The rhythm came back in an instant. Thumb a shell from the box, push it into the loading port under the receiver, press until it clicks into the magazine tube. Repeat. The shells slid home one after another—one, two, three, four—smooth and fast, the muscle memory as clean as if he had drilled it yesterday instead of years ago. The weight of the weapon shifted as it filled, the heft settling into his grip like an old friend.
Another crack split the glass, this one louder, the web of fractures spreading outward in jagged lines. A dark shape slammed against it from the outside, face smearing across the surface.
A half-memory surfaced through the exhaustion: in the game, staying inside the mall stores had been a death sentence. They funneled the zombies toward you. You had to keep moving.
But his body was finished. His legs felt like they were running on borrowed time, his shoulders and back screaming from the fight, from carrying Carver, from his earlier struggles with the Betrayer of Hope. His vision pulsed faintly at the edges, and each breath felt heavier than the last.
The glass flexed again under the weight of the dead, and a long, splintering sound filled the air. It then burst inward with a thunderous crack, shards exploding across the tile. A gray, bloated arm pushed through the gap, fingers clawing the air. Ethan worked the shotgun, the motions as smooth as breath, and fired. The blast ripped the arm away at the elbow, spraying black rot across the frame.
The doors collapsed in a roar of splintering metal and breaking glass. They came at him in a press of bodies, snarling, staggering, tripping over one another. He stepped forward into them, firing into chests and faces, each pull of the trigger slamming against his shoulder like a hammer. The buckshot tore through the first rank, dropping three, but four more filled their place.
Pump. Fire. Pump. Fire. He counted in his head. Three rounds left.
One got too close. A man in a soaked leather jacket lunged, teeth snapping at Ethan's cheek. Ethan dropped the shotgun to its sling, grabbed the second knife from his belt, and jammed it under the man's chin, twisting until bone cracked. He shoved him away, yanking the blade free in a spray of gore, and immediately drove it into the temple of a woman missing her right eye.
The knife snapped on the second kill, the blade shearing off in her skull. She fell, but others were already coming through the breach.
Ethan's chest felt like it was ready to burst. His ribs burned, every breath shallow and ragged. His arms ached as he hauled the shotgun back up, firing the last round into a pair of staggering figures that tried to flank him.
Empty. No time to reload. One surged at him from the left. He swung the shotgun like a bat, the wooden stock cracking into its temple with a sound like splitting fruit. It went down twitching, but he was already stepping over it.
His shoes slipped on blood-slick tile as he snatched a hand ax from a rack by the counter. The weight was perfect in his palm. The first swing split a skull from crown to jaw, the second buried in a shoulder before he wrenched it free. Another zombie grabbed for his throat. He slammed the ax into its ribs, shoved it away, and caught the next one by the jaw. With a sharp twist and a savage pull, he broke its neck.
The press of bodies eased, then surged again. His breath came in gasps. Sweat ran into his eyes. His arms felt like stone, but the fight still had to be finished.
A scream tore from his throat, raw and animal, as he hacked and smashed his way through the last of them. One went down with the ax buried deep. Another he crushed under his foot, his heel grinding until the skull collapsed. The final one came slow, a woman in a shredded sundress. He swung the ax in a wide arc, the blade shearing through her neck. Her head hit the counter with a wet thump.
Silence followed, broken only by Ethan's ragged breathing. The floor was littered with bodies, the stink of rot thick enough to choke on.
He stood among the dead, the ax still dripping in his hand. His legs trembled, his chest heaved. He hated himself for the thrill that still burned in his blood, for the way the fight had felt like coming home. He hated himself for the way a part of him was grinning even now.
The grin broke into something else—something sharp and wet in his eyes. His shoulders sagged, and for a moment the only sound in the Huntin' Shack was the quiet, shuddering breath of a man both victorious and undone.
"It was on easy, wasn't it?" He gasped to himself before suddenly laughing. Seemed he had been exposed to more laughter today than in any other time in his life. His own sounded close to the other laughs he had heard.