The Bonnie Lass was a blazing pile of rubble and its proprietor was nowhere to be found.
“Bonnie!” Slade shouted his love’s name over and over with no luck.
Through the flames he saw…them. Shadowy silhouettes stood up and walked towards him. Undead Buchanan Boys, bar patrons and prostitutes lumbered forward with their arms stretched out, crying out demands for brains. Some of the creatures were missing body parts or had entrails pouring out of their bodies. Most were burnt to a crisp. Several were still on fire themselves but that didn’t slow them down.
One of the undead was missing the top left quarter of his face, but Slade could recognize those ugly buck toothed chompers anywhere. Alas, poor Waldo Fleming, part-time mayor, full-time barkeep, ad been reduced to a cannibalistic subhuman abomination.
Waldo reach out. Slade responded by plunging Gunther’s knife through Waldo’s eye socket. Then he stabbed an undead Buchanan Boy through the forehead. A hooker’s teeth snapped too close to Slade’s arm. He felt a little bit of himself die inside when he stabbed her through the ear. Slade had never so much as raised a hand against a woman before.
But it was time for another first. Slade had never run away from a fight before either, but he was outnumbered. Thoroughly ashamed of himself, he ran and didn’t look back.
If he had, he would have seen the undead fan out, heading toward different parts of town in search of brains. They weren’t very coordinated, or nimble, or even fast, but they were persistent.
An undead monster’s typical response to a wall is to just keep bumping into it over and over again. Unfortunately, that spelled destruction for many structures across town, as the still burning undead spread their flames all over Highwater.
As Slade ran back to the church, he heard the screams, the terrible cries of townspeople being attacked and eaten alive.
Bookshelf Battle 