Chapter 2
Ben chewed at his lip as he stood there in the entry way.
The fact that Mr. Leery was dead really didn’t leave Ben with much in the way of a possible solution to his “going to become a zombie” problem.
Only to let out a slow breath and hang his head.
Sorry mom.
I’m not really sure how I’m supposed to keep putting one foot in front of the other, when the path in front of me suddenly just… doesn’t exist.
I can’t fix this medically, no one can, and even the maybe-not-really-magical answer is… dead.
Unable to process anything, Ben walked over to the very dead Mr. Leery.
Strangely, the man looked as if he had just died, other than the color of his skin. As if he could just rise up, brush off his pants, and demand Ben tell him what he was doing here in his home.
Ben took in a shuddering breath, then flinched as the sound of a door breaking in caused him to realize that his prior mistake had caught up to him.
The zombies had just forced their way in through the front door.
Immediately afterward, there were several bangs on the door at the top of the stairs. Which told Ben exactly what he feared was true.
Unfortunately, the monsters knew exactly where he was.
“Did I… even lock it?” Ben asked himself as he stared up at the door from the bottom.
Zombies didn’t know how to open doors but they would open a door with a lever lock without even meaning to. Their wild flinging arms and hands inevitably almost always found it for some reason.
Then, more often than not, knock it open as they did that.
The doors here were all lever locks.
I didn’t lock it.
They’re going to—
The door was roughly shoved inward after the door spasmed and the lever wildly tilted to one side. Swinging in easily as if he someone had just gotten home drunk and wasn’t being kind to the door.
It banged against the wall and hung there.
Three zombies all stood at the entryway, each of them staring down at Ben.
Surprisingly, none of them raced down to eat him.
Two of the zombies seemed as if they were trying to move away while the third was pushing ahead. To the point that it slipped in between the other two zombies and moved into the doorway.
Only for their left hand to explode the moment it crossed the threshold. The flesh vaporizing into a fine mist at the same time even as it blew apart.
“Huh?” Ben asked stupidly, staring up at the zombies.
As if no longer interested, and not wanting anything to do with him, the three of them turned away and shambled off. None of them looking back in their retreat.
To the point that they actually left the building entirely.
“Huh?” repeated Ben, still confused by the situation. “It… it’s hand blew up. Did… did Mr. Leery put up some type of barrier? Was he really a warlock?
“Wait, I came through. I didn’t explode or anything. I was bitten. Shouldn’t I be turning at some point?”
Ben held up his arm and pulled back the sleeve of his jacket.
He hadn’t bothered to dress or pack the wound because it wouldn’t matter. If the saliva had gotten into the bite, which it most certainly did, that’d be the end of it.
There wouldn’t be any need to dress the bite since you were destined to die inside of a week anyways. Some people died to it then turned, or turned directly.
You couldn’t tell.
The redness that’d been rapidly growing all around the bite was gone.
As was the seeping liquid and blood that’d been freely flowing from it.
At the moment, it just looked like a rather nasty bite, but without all the tell-tale signs of it being terribly infected.
Unable to help himself, Ben raised his other hand up and stuck it to his forehead.
Even the fever that he’d swore he had was gone. As if he wasn’t sick at all anymore.
“Mr. Leery… did you already… figure out an answer? At least for your own apartment?” Ben asked, looking to the dead man.
Given that the meal he had set in front of himself on the table was originally a soup and had become a dried out solid, it was quite obvious that Mr. Leery should’ve already been rotting away by now.
There was something going on here.
Something extraordinary.
Something magical, perhaps.
Ben could only assume that whatever was happening here in the apartment, was doing a few things at the same time.
First, it seemed to cure zombie bites, or so Ben would desperately like to believe. Given his current condition his hope didn’t feel misplaced.
Two, corpses didn’t rise up after death, nor did they seem to rot. Which might even stretch to the food considering the soup had dried out, but hadn’t gone to rot.
All that’d happened to the food was it had been dehydrated from what he could tell.
Three, zombies really didn’t want to be near the apartment.
Four, they couldn’t cross the threshold either. Not without breaking apart like they got snapped out of existence.
“Well,” Ben muttered, then blew out a breath. “Seems like I’ll be living with you Mr. Leery… but I have no idea what to do with your body.
“Let’s… just… leave you there for a moment. Take a look around. Because there’s no way I’m going back out there.
“Oh! But first… I need to close up.”
Ben snuck up the stairs and made it to the door.
Peeking out, he saw that the front door was indeed knocked in to the apartment building itself. It hung askew and the hinges were torn out of the doorframe.
He’d have to fix that later.
Shaking his head, Ben closed the door to the apartment, locked it, and went back down.
Standing there in the entry, Ben realized now that this was just the dinning room. That there wasn’t anything else in here other than the dinning table and it’s chairs.
“Weird,” he muttered to himself. A basement apartment wouldn’t be that large normally.
This one room alone would’ve been combined with the kitchen and sometimes the living room. Which meant that there was something very strange here with the layout.
“Sorry Mr. Leery, I’m going to take a look around,” Ben apologized as he walked past the dead man.
Exiting the dinning room, he found it let out into the kitchen. Which was rather over-sized as well and had a great number of appliances, all of which were powered.
Which made no sense at all since the power had gone out a while ago and he had seen no generator.
From the kitchen there was a living room. It was also rather large though it had no windows.
In fact, Ben had seen no windows at all so far.
The living room had a sofa, a couch, a large TV with a series of what looked like external hard-drives stacked one atop another, a computer desk, with a computer and monitor on it, as well as a bookshelf filled with books.
There was a small bathroom attached to the room.
From the living room was a master bedroom and bath, both equally luxurious as everything else so far.
A doorway from the bathroom led into a massive storage area. It had a truly significant amount of canned food and water in it. As well as boxed up items and appliances along a wall.
Even several generators, that ran on various types of fuel.
All packaged.
Shaking his head, Ben left the storage area and went to the next door at the far end. So far, he felt as if he’d been moving across the entirety of the buildings basement. Not just a single apartment.
That the whole basement was Mr. Leery’s apartment.
Yet he hadn’t found the center of it. He wondered now if it was all concrete to support the building.
Exiting the storage room, Ben came to a complete stop.
Here there were a number of cells made out of bars and chain link. All of them only roughly three foot wide as well as deep, yet floor to ceiling tall.
Standing in one of the cells was a zombie. It was intact to the point of looking as if it wasn’t even a zombie, which was immediately spoiled when the zombie moved forward toward Ben and growled.
There were easily ten-cells all around and at the center was a altar. Or at least, an altar was the best way Ben could mentally describe it.
A stone column that rose up to four feet in height. All along the sides of it were strange blue and red symbols that Ben couldn’t made heads or tails of.
Strangely, at the top of the column was a tablet.
All of the symbols working their way up to the tablet and coming to an end there. The tablet itself was on and had a UI that looked to be a copy of the cell layout.
There was one red square and the rest were blue.
“Right,” whispered Ben and then moved away from the column. There just wasn’t much he could say about it and at this point, his mind was overflowing.
He’d spotted a door at the opposite side of the room.
Exiting the prison he entered a room that Ben felt as if it were a workshop.
There was a tool-bench, a desk with a bunch of strange odds and ends on it, a box of glowing items, a strange squared mirror on a wall that was easily six foot by three foot in size, and several diagrams that reminded him of the AC controls.
Picking one up, Ben looked it over.
It was indeed what looked to be a maintenance worker’s blueprint for the building. Someone, presumably Mr. Leery, had put down four red X’s on the paper.
“Uh… right,” Ben murmured and set the paper back down. It made no sense to him and wouldn’t matter. “Sorry Mr. Leery but… I have no idea what you were up to.”
“I was setting up defenses for the building,” said the mirror on the wall. “I don’t know you though. Where am I? That is, Mr. Leery?”
Ben blinked and looked to the mirror.
Inside of it was a strange fuzzy image. As if a person were standing behind frosted glass.
“I’m… Ben?” answered Ben. He was feeling very mentally weak at the moment. Too much had happened too fast. Honestly, it still felt like his head was ringing from the blow he’d taken. “I live across the street. I got bit so… I came to see if Mr. Leery could help me. I grew up here. Everyone thought he was a warlock.”
The hazy person in the mirror laughed at that then sighed.
“I’m dead then? If you’re here and talking in that tone, something happened?” asked the mirror.
“You’re Mr. Leery?” Ben asked.
“Yes and yet no. I’m just a fragment of him. I found it, or he found it, helpful to have someone to talk to when we were building magical constructs. I’m, myself, a magical construct,” answered the mirror. “Now… me?”
“You’re dead. At the dinner table. I don’t know why. You don’t look dead but very pale, but… you’re not breathing.”
“Ahhh… heart attack or choked on something then. Something along those lines I suppose. Maybe a stroke?” mused the mirror Leery. “Ah well. That’s how it goes.
“I suppose with you here though, it’s a wonderful time to offer you his inheritance. Since… well… he’s dead and I didn’t enjoy sitting here in the mirror without anything to do for four days.
“And realistically… if I’m dead, my days are numbered.”
Four days?
The corpse didn’t do anything for four days.
Didn’t rot, didn’t get up, didn’t bloat, didn’t even stink.
That’s amazing.
That confirms everything.
“Okay… well… uh… numbered?” Ben asked, feeling incredibly awkward all of a sudden.
“Yes. I’m tied to myself, of course. I can help you inherit everything that I left behind, but in maybe… three more days I’ll fade to nothing,” admitted the mirror. “The alternative is to help you get the inheritance, which would eliminate me immediately.
“That’s infinitely better than fading to nothing without leaving behind my legacy.
“First of all… you need to go to the top floor, apartment twenty-one, and use that stencil marked ‘twenty-two-B’. You’ll roll the red crystal back and forth over it and that’ll do the work for you.
“Then move to apartment one on the same floor and use stencil ‘one-b’ with the same red crystal.
“After that’s done, come back down to me. We’ll see about handing everything off to you then. Until that happens though, the building is vulnerable.
“The user HUD won’t function fully, how it was intended, until that work is done.”
“User HUD?” Ben asked.
“In the basket on your left there’s a tablet. Pick it up,” directed the mirror.
Still confused, not really understanding what was going on, Ben just did as he was told. He looked over to the basket, pulled out the tablet inside, and looked to it.
What he saw there looked a lot like a video game HUD from a building management sim game.
“Oh,” Ben mumbled and then tapped at it. Almost entirely intuitively grasping the information from that single glance.
A screen popped up on the apartment he’d tapped and a box appeared.
“No information available, system not implemented,” he read aloud.
“Yes. Exactly that,” confirmed the mirror.
“I’m so confused,” huffed Ben. He had just been fearing for his life in more ways than one and now it felt as if he was dreaming and in an alternate reality of some sort. “What’s going on?”
“Ah… well… I was going to secure the building. Completely. Make it my mansion, of sorts,” said the mirror. “I was a Magical Engineer, not a warlock. I had no magical abilities whatsoever, but I understood magic, turned it into sets of mathematical equations, and made myself an engineer for it.
“Rather than let my discoveries go to waste, best I give it to you as an inheritance. Be sure you credit me down the road. Now… is that enough?”
Ben shook his head. It really wasn’t enough.
But it might have to be.
“I’m not sick anymore, am I? The apartment really did repel the zombies?” Ben asked.
“Yes and yes. Unless you wish to bring a zombie in, like to the prison.”
“Okay… will it bring zombies back to life?”
“No. Death is death.”
There was a brief pang in Ben’s heart. There had been a fleeting moment where he’d wanted to find his mother and do something about what’d happened to her.
“It looks like a video game,” said Ben and waggled the tablet. “How’s it powered? How’s anything here powered?”
“Magic! Anything in the apartment is automatically powered by magic. The tablet included. As to why it looks like a video game, well, I had a job as a programmer for a long time. In game design and development,” admitted the mirror with a laugh. “I got too old and they didn’t care for my politics so they pushed me out. It was just easier to make it look like a game.
“It wasn’t as if I could make money with magical engineering, you know, I had a dayjob for a reason. This little zombie apocalypse definitely ruined my plans, but it was going to give me a chance to be much more than I was in the civilized world.”
“And I can learn all this? To become a magical engineer?” asked Ben, unsure but wanting to believe.
“Indeed! Once I subsume myself, I can impart all the knowledge you’ll ever need into a tablet so that you can review any lesson at any time.
“Or at least, everything I personally knew, hypothesized, or designed. After that, you’re on you’re own!”
Ben ran his free hand through his hair. He really still felt horribly confused. That none of this quite made sense.
Staring at the tablet he saw that there was a small icon of himself in the bottom apartment.
He tapped it and was presented with a character sheet for himself.
The stats listed were weird and were more akin to a range than a number. For many of them, in fact.
His strength had a floor and a ceiling.
I suppose… that’s true, though. Human’s aren’t machines.
We have variable limits that can shift and be swayed. Or maybe if I’m tired or I’ve just downed six energy drinks.
Ben looked back to his character sheet.
His clothes were also listed on a doll version of himself as well as everything he had in his pockets and on his person.
The medical tab also listed the bite on his arm, that it was uninfected, and could use treatment.
“Okay,” Ben finally said. “How do the defenses work? Zombies couldn’t come through the front door just like the apartment?”
“Indeed. As well as the fact that the building itself would partially phase out of reality. Unless you wanted it to become visible, it wouldn’t be.
“If someone did walk into the building, they’d just go right through it. It was the last thing I developed. Specifically to protect my building, you see.”
“Right,” whispered Ben. Regardless of how he felt about it, this was reality, and he wasn’t going to let it slip by. “If… the defenses go up, will the zombies inside be killed?”
“No. You’ll have to clear them out on your own. Given that no new ones will be arriving from outside after the defenses go up, however, you wouldn’t have to worry about noise.”
“Would… the defensive perimeter on the door still work?”
“Yes. Why?”
“If I got them to come down to the apartment, I could drag them through the doorway and kill them?”
“Ah! Yes, that’d work just fine. Good show. Now you’re thinking with your head. Always try to work smarter, not harder.
“Now, get going,” advised the mirror. “Leave the tablet here so I can make sure I start condensing myself down the moment you’re done.
“I’ll need every moment possible to make sure I squeeze everything out for you.”
“Is… there a weapon or something around?” asked Ben.
“Yes, yes. There’s several baseball bats in the storage room. There’s also a number of other items.”
Unable to muster up another question, Ben set the tablet down instead.
Picking up the stencils that he was supposed to as well as the crystal and put them all in a nearby messenger bag.
Now prepared, he glanced at the mirror, saw nothing at all, and went back into the storage room.
In short order he found exactly what the mirror had been talking about.
There really was a wooden box that had several metal baseball bats, several lengths of rebar, a handful of axes, and even a crowbar.
“Heh, I wonder if Mr. Leery got the crowbar for obvious reasons,” Ben muttered with a dark humor. He picked it up and let it sit in his hands. “Maybe I’m a… freeman… now.”
Ben let out a slow breath and then shifted the messenger bag.
He had a job to do and a reward in mind.
“Hell, it’s like a tutorial,” spat out Ben after a pause. “That’s kinda neat in a way. Now I just have to survive it and… and get my rewards. Then I can change classes from peasant to Magical Engineer and get a leg on.”
Moving back to the dinning room, Ben paused next to Mr. Leery’s body.
“When I get back, I’ll… see if I can’t bury you in the back or something. At least take care of your remains in a respectable way. After all, you’re my teacher I guess,” said Ben.
Then he worked up his courage and climbed the stairs to the exit of the apartment.
“Wake up, Bernard. Wake up and smell the ashes,” he said to himself with a smirk, then stepped out of the apartment.