Author's note: If you've come here without first reading through chapter 7 of X and Zero: Sliders Extraordinaire, go back and read it first. I promise you this will make no sense without doing so.

Thanks again to my wife for providing support and inspiration, to MungoJerry for beta reading, and to you for your thoughtful comments and reviews. Enjoy!

Chapter 8: In which our heroes find themselves
among the ambient deceased.

Everything vanished. One minute I had Dr. Gate in my sights, I was dashing in and had my saber cocked to cut him in half, and the next minute saw me sprawled out in a hospital bed.

I jumped from the mattress and rolled to my feet in one hasty motion. A quick glance around the room confirmed my first impression: we had officially left Kansas. An unused IV stood by the bed, monitoring equipment sat cold and dead on a nearby table, and the entire place gave off the unfriendly feel of a room that belonged to a corporation rather than a person.

I checked myself for weapons and other gear. A compact, heavy firearm hung from an ammo-loaded strap around my chest; the hilt of a katana protruded from a sheath bound at my hip, next to two fragmentation grenades. A short-wave radio sat clipped to the vest of my body armor while a backpack hung from my shoulders. Just like before, we came in to the new place as well-equipped as we left the old.

I decided to put off investigating the backpack until later. The muffled sound of footsteps reached my ears from outside the room. I had been materialized as a human again (that was twice in a row now, dang it), but my senses retained enough clarity to make out a voice as well.

"Zero? Zero, are you here too?"

My heartbeat quickened and my body tensed further as I heard X's voice. I knew that Gate had gotten me, but X too? Anger welled up from inside as I thought of that egghead, laughing it up in his lab while he chucked the Red Ripper and the Blue Bomber out into some other dimension. When we got back there I'd kill him myself and put his body on a rocket on a crash course with the Sun. Now we just had to last long enough to slide back to our own universe to make that happen.

First things first. "I'm right here, X!"

"Okay!"

I went to my door and turned the latch. Other than X's voice, I didn't notice much besides a weird reek in the air. The door opened without any trouble and I—

What the heck? Oh, nasty! "X, it smells like frickin' rotting meat out here! What gives?"

The Blue Bomber, decked out in grey-green camo gear a lot like mine, stepped out of a door across the hallway from mine and nearly gagged. "Oh my goodness, it's worse than a chemical plant out here. I don't know how humans live like this."

I glanced either way down the hall. "Maybe they don't. This place feels deserted."

"A hospital? Deserted? That doesn't make any sense." X frowned and glanced around as well. His eyes lingered on the papers strewn across the floor. "People always get sick. Hospitals don't get deserted unless all the humans are…"

He left the thought unfinished. I clenched my teeth. "That Gate, sending us here. I'm going to wring his neck when we get back."

"If." X's expression drooped. "If we get back. Zero, I don't think there's anything to stop him from banishing us for good. We might be here for the rest of our lives."

"Ridiculous. We zapped back home after only a couple of hours both times before. What makes you think it'll be different here?"

The Blue Bomber tapped the butt of his weapon, his teenage-looking face somber. "Intended purposes. Gate's first Multi-Dimensional Interfaces had the purpose of sending us on there-and-back-again trade missions. We heard his autoforge going just before we arrived, right?"

I nodded. "Yeah. So?"

"So, I think he was building that weapon of his, or a copy of it, before we arrived. It looked like one of the MDI's we used to go sliding with before but functioned more like a weaponization of the same technology. If he built an MDI for the purpose of getting rid of us, why not program it to banish us to another dimension forever?"

I frowned. "You trying to stretch out your legs? 'Cause that sounds like a lot of big leaps you made right there. Don't get ahead of yourself."

X sighed but otherwise didn't reply. I rolled my eyes.

"Sure, go in your shell and sulk instead of arguing like a man. Sheesh, X, I don't know why I bother talking to you sometimes."

X0X0X

Zero took his gun in hand and sauntered off. I sighed again and followed him down the hallway.

Truth be told, I wanted my friend to be right. After all, we had rushed Dr. Gate into the fight with only seconds to think. Suppose he did build a new MDI as a weapon, and intended to use it to banish people permanently from our universe; he had probably never tested it, and his technology had behaved unexpectedly a number of times in the past. We had no reason to assume that the weapon he used against us would put us in this universe forever.

At least, no really good reason.

Probably not.

I sighed for the third time, and rested my face in my hand. A total of one hour, ten minutes of mutually conscious marriage and Alia and I ended up separated again. Even the worst couples of the 21st century had lasted longer than that. Losing Alia after such a brief, sweet time with her—it hurt worse than anything.

Part of me wished I had never told her about the upgrade at all. My own pain aside, watching her new husband disappear must have put Alia in a state of total shock. A reploid's feelings can come unbalanced during glitches and system failures; only humans and androids, however, enjoy the privilege of overloading on emotion during normal operation. I had felt the sensation only too often during my first twenty years in the ethics testing capsule. Zero felt it on a regular basis, and inflicted the effects on everyone around him. How would Alia cope in the wake of what she saw?

How much time had already passed for her? How long had she gone without a husband? I didn't even know. A human woman's voice from long ago rang in my memory:

"Do you know what it is to be a lover? Half of a whole?"

I had inflicted that condition on Alia before deserting her. I charged headlong into battle with a man who had the power to make people disappear; I jumped in without waiting for backup, without devising a better strategy, without preparing myself for what lay ahead. I did it all without thinking of the possibility that I might not survive the fight. Now she had to deal not only with the pain of losing me to an unknown fate, but with the enemies that I was no longer there to face. And she would blame herself for everything.

At first I had thought to wonder: My love, will I ever see you again?

When in reality, I had to ask myself: Alia, can you ever forgive what I have done?

0X0X0

Trying to ignore the sighing sigh-person behind me, I strode quietly down the empty hallway. Rooms to either side held nothing but messy floors and abandoned paraphernalia.

Heh. That word's got "alia" on the end of it. She was probably the first one on the scene to take Gate down after we got thrown out. I'd peg her as the kind to kill first, ask questions later after seeing that he'd blasted her husband into the next dimension. Maybe she'd even be smart enough to find out where we'd gone and get us back.

In the meantime, this place looked like a wreck, and smelled like a defunct butcher's shop. Parts of the ceiling and walls hung half-torn from their housing. Wires and pieces of broken glass lay strewn across the floor. From the stink, I expected to see a cow or a bunch of puppies lying dead on the floor any minute now.

We reached a set of double doors in the hallway and that smell got even stronger on the other side. I felt like retching. This deserted hospital creeped me out worse than my old fan club on a Saturday night.

Seriously. Fangirls. Do they not understand the words, "No, I won't sleep with you, I'm a robot?" And don't get me started on the boys.

Anyway, the intersection opened up to a long hallway with more rooms and a short hallway with another pair of double doors. The lighting wasn't very good, but those doors looked strange. If hospitals in this universe worked at all like hospitals in ours, they opened up either to a way out of the building or to the operating room. I decided to move closer to check it out; X's footsteps followed behind me with occasional pauses to check the rooms we passed. He held out more hope than me for finding humans here.

In a few seconds we got close enough to the doors to make out more detail. The hairs on the back of my neck started to rise, and I walked closer to make sure I saw what I thought I saw. Eventually, about twenty feet from the big double doors, X and I stopped and stared.

I've been to a few hospitals. Not a lot, and not for my own repairs, since I have people for that at Maverick Hunters HQ—but I've been to a few hospitals. I've never seen the doors to the operating room locked and barred shut from the outside, covered with words written in dried blood. And if I had seen all that before, I wouldn't expect the words to be "DON'T DEAD OPEN INSIDE."

X0X0X

"'Don't dead, open inside?' What's that supposed to mean?" He read the top word on each door first, then the bottom two words. Zero sounded almost offended at the gory message.

"I think it's 'don't open, dead inside.' Read from top-down on the left door, then look on the right." I glanced up at the word "CAFETERIA" printed neatly in a sign above the entryway, then back to the message scrawled in wide, crusty letters across the doors.

Lights flickered on and off above us, casting inconsistent shadows across our view. A faint scuffling reached my ears through the doors. Every instinct in my body told me to run from this place and never look back. I came up beside Zero and glanced up at him; when he met my gaze, the look in his eyes mirrored mine.

As one, we turned and walked away from the double doors as briskly as possible. I spoke first. "We'll check for survivors and keep an eye out for anything dead and anything with dead meat things around it."

"The smell should give it away easily enough."

"Although, I'm a little afraid of not knowing what threat 'dead' represents here."

"I'm more afraid we'll find out."

"Hopefully we'll find someone who can help us get out of here safely."

"Either that or die trying."

"Maybe they trapped a thing inside the cafeteria and gave it dead animals to eat?"

"That's probably too much to hope for."

We moved quickly through the abandoned hospital, busting in the doors of each room in turn. After a surprisingly short amount of time, our efforts bore fruit; towards the end of the first long hallway, I busted in a door to find a not-rotting man lying in the bed. I stopped and raised my gun. "Zero, here."

"Yeah? Hey." My fellow former android looked over my shoulder at the man. "Good. He's breathing. And look, he's twitching, too. We found a live one."

I looked around at the room's general state of clutter. This part of the hospital looked less like a disaster zone than the area near the sealed-off cafeteria, but I still got the definite impression of disuse. Stepping in and running one finger over a nightstand, I found a thin layer of dust that signaled perhaps a few days' neglect. Zero moved past me to check on the man with his eight-inch boot knife in hand. We had no reason to take chances, I suppose.

0X0X0

While X checked up on the housekeeping for whatever reason, I drew a knife from my boot and walked up to poke the sleeping man's face with my finger. His skin kept the impression of the poke until I reached out and poked him again, and the color of it struck me as odd. The man's chest definitely rose and fell with breaths, but they came less and less deeply as I watched.

"X, this man's dehydrated. Find some water and bring it here in a clean thing. He's going to wake up or have spasms or something in a minute here."

"Okay." He had already gone into the bathroom; I heard water running. "Got it."

While he brought in the water, I inspected the rest of the man's situation. An IV drip ran into his wrist, a big white bandage covered part of his belly, and a hospital nightgown incompletely covered the rest of him. Untrimmed brown beard hair adorned the lower half of his face. Wires attached to his forehead and chest led back to a lifeless black box sitting on the counter beside the bed; a monitoring device, now unpowered.

Hanging from its stand on the other side of the bed, the bag for the IV had long since run dry. I turned to stand side-on to the man and shook him with my left hand. Hidden on my other side, my right hand gripped the knife from my boot, staying carefully out of the man's line of sight. No need to alarm him unnecessarily.

The man in the bed spasmed upright like an epileptic freak on steroids. I stood back and watched his eyes dart from me to X and back to me, then settle on the vase in X's hand. Water sloshed gently over the lip of the container.

X0X0X

Our new friend drank the water greedily. After he finished the water in the rinsed-out vase, I refilled it and brought it back again, and again, until the man stopped drinking from it. I put the vessel down and stood to one side, waiting for him to regain his wits.

It took a few seconds for the man to settle down enough for a conversation. In the meantime, I reflected back on the message written on those cafeteria doors. What did their writer mean by "dead?" And what intelligence or savagery had driven the people from this area? Was it a local problem, or more widespread?

I had more questions than answers. At any rate, the man's breathing had slowed down to normal. He turned his startlingly blue eyes on me and spoke his name from lips cracked by their long dehydration.

"Rick. I'm Rick Grimes. Who are you?"

"Call me Light, Xavier Light." I extended my hand towards him. He took it automatically and shook, scrunching up his forehead as he processed what I had said. In the end he decided not to comment on the name.

"Who are you? What's going on? I was—" he put his hand to his forehead as if to help bring back the memory—"I was in a shooting, this guy popped up out of nowhere…"

"You're a fighter, then?" Zero brought his knife into the open and twirled it idly. "That makes three of us. Remember anything else? Like how everyone disappeared and left behind a reek like the dead?"

His expression turned more confused than ever. "What? No, what happened?"

Zero and I traded glances. He spoke first. "So you don't remember anything?"

Rick started to shake. "No, nothing. Tell me what happened! Where's my family, are they all right? Who are you?"

I pursed my lips. Did he think his family had sent us? "I was hoping you could tell us. I'm sorry, Rick, but there's a lot we don't know about what's going on here. We're travelers passing throu—"

Zero suddenly jerked his fist to the square to signal for silence. Rick didn't get the gesture at first, so I put a finger to my lips and looked meaningfully out the door.

We smelled it before we heard it: the reek of rotting flesh, coupled with a faint, meaty shuffling. Zero drew his sword with the faintest ring of metal on scabbard; Rick's eyes followed the blade with surprise that bordered on disbelief. Readying his P-90 automatic firearm in the other hand, my friend peeked around the busted doorframe and watched the hallway for a few seconds. When he ducked back in, the man's face bore the most disgusted expression since finding Fourchan back home.

"X, that is the sickest monster I've seen in a long time. Look at it."

0X0X0

X traded spots with me and looked. When he came back inside the room he regarded me with a face that bordered on tears. I gave him an expression of disbelief until he explained.

"I think she was human once."

"No way." I peeped out again. "Human bodies don't keep moving after that kind of damage. It has to be a monster, a modified organic machine or something. That thing can't be a human."

Rick looked at us both with growing horror. "What is going on?"

I sighed. "X, take those wires and crap off him. I'm going to kill that thing. All right?"

He nodded. "Right."

I turned to the door, popped my head around the corner, and let off one shot with the assault rifle. The half-formed eyesore slumped lifelessly to the floor about a dozen yards from where I stood. While X finished extricating the survivor from his hospital bed, I watched for any further signs of movement from the monster's disgusting corpse.

X0X0X

The gunshot rang loud in my ears, much louder than weapons fire back home. Rick looked less surprised than I felt, but then, he'd probably used weapons from this world many times before now. I hid my own astonishment at the noise by focusing on the man in front of me.

"Rick. Please don't worry. We have everything under control for now. You will see that creature in a minute." I steadied the man's shoulder with one hand and carefully pulled the IV needle out of his arm. "As soon as you're ready, we're going to search the rest of the hospital for any other survivors. How does that wound feel?"

Rick stared at me in confusion for a moment until I pointed down at his stomach. He gaped at the bandage as if seeing it for the first time. In all likelihood, he really never had seen it before. I've seen people go into comas for less reason than a gunshot wound, and based on his state when we found him, a coma fit the picture strikingly well. Either way, the man quickly made his decision about the wound.

"It feels fine. I can walk. What's going on here? And why the **** is that man carrying a sword?"

Rick's bright blue eyes searched my expression for answers. Unfortunately, I had none to give, not about the important questions. I looked down. "I'm sorry. I don't know anything about that yet. Zero and I only arrived here today, and we've been out of contact with anyone else for a long time. I wish I had more to tell you."

"Are you two Nancy's done in there? We need to move." Zero peeked inside to see me still getting Rick out of bed. "This guy can move, right?"

"Yes. Yeah, I can move." The man jumped to his feet as if to prove the point and nearly stumbled to the ground. My arm caught him and kept him upright. Despite this apparent setback, a determined look formed on Rick's gaunt face. "I need to find my family."

X

We moved out into the hallway and past the rotting female corpse Zero had shot. I say female, but only the stringy once-blond hair falling from her scalp gave me the impression of a gender.

The three of us stepped carefully around the poor woman's remains. I had no idea what had kept her body moving; I wanted to believe her mind had long since gone. Unless she had been anemic before, at least 70% of the woman's flesh and muscle mass had been removed from her body, including parts of the face and nearly all of the legs.

In short, the creature had dragged herself along the floor towards our location with no respiratory system and using arms with barely enough muscle mass to function. What if a bullet to the head hadn't stopped her either? And what if another creature like that had a fully intact body to work with? The thought made me want to check over my shoulder any time I smelled that terrible odor of rotting meat.

Inexplicably, and disturbingly, it also struck me as a little familiar. Déjà vu.

As for the method of the creature's disfigurement, decay and blackened clothing obscured the evidence, but what I saw of the wounds reminded me of the remains of a deer after an attack by wolves. Besides tooth marks everywhere, the internal organs had been removed from her torso, exactly as large predators do first to prey in the wild. Everything I saw pointed to a carnivorous frenzy—except that most large predators only begin to feed after the prey has died.

At least we had brought an end to the creature's sad existence. I hoped we had, at least. Zero's bullet had entered cleanly through the forehead before coming out again through the back of the skull. Evidently, shock to the brain accomplished what other trauma had not. In that one way, the creature maintained a disturbing similarity to Mavericks back home: only destroying the brain permanently ended the threat.

That was the first time I considered the analogy while in that universe. It was not to be the last.

We didn't find any other survivors in the hospital, awake or otherwise. We did find a dead body in a hospital bed like Rick's, and another corpse lying in a hallway, but neither showed any signs of walking or crawling around. The middle-aged man in the hallway displayed a gunshot wound through the temple and no other marks besides a bloody scratch on the arm; the corpse of the little girl in the bed looked untouched. I wanted to conduct further examination to find time of death, or see whether the bodies had moved afterwards, but without all the information on the threat the dead posed here we dared not investigate too closely.

Rick stared at each corpse as if he had never seen one before. Apparently his town had never witnessed violence like this; I wished for his sake that it had remained that way.

In our world, unfortunately, peace remains a dream deferred for now.

SXSXS

"Chrome Tiger, don't let those hostiles escape. Shoot on sight but keep Gate's head and the metal box intact. You're in charge of the operation. Understand?"

"Yessir, General Signas. We'll bring them down hard." The comlink broke off.

I stood in the 0th Shinobi Unit's operator room. Layer, the head spotter, typed furiously at her console to keep track of the enemy hostiles on base. The look on her face gave away her unease.

"They move too fast, sir. I'm teleporting our fighters into strategic points on base to stop their escape, but…"

Klaxons blared in the background, along with a repeated message in my voice. "Invaders on base. Repeat, we have invaders on base. All non-combat personnel remain in your rooms and lock your doors. Invaders on base—"

I frowned. "You already sent pictures of the hostiles to the other operators?"

"Yes, sir," one of Layer's subordinates piped up. "Every combat reploid on base knows what to look for and what weapons we've seen them use. And it looks like the 17th Unit's spotters have sent medical personnel to take care of their fighters."

"Good." I wished for a strong, hot cup of boric acid to drink. My nerves needed the calming.

Another transmission came in from Lt. Alia. I listened to her over the comlink. "Yes, Lieutenant?"

"General. Have you caught them yet? Tell me you caught them!"

The ferocity in her tone hadn't gone away. I had hoped a few seconds of cooldown time would help, but no. That robot had a worse temper now than ever before. "We're working on it. Any guesses on how they got in?"

"I have a hunch," the spotter admitted darkly. "Layer says we didn't get any teleport signatures?"

"No. Our people can't find any record of them on our surveillance cameras or personnel logs, either." I glanced over at Layer. Her screen showed the 0th and parts of the 4th and 10th units engaging the hostiles that had appeared in Gate's laboratory. They had almost reached one entrance when Chrome Tiger's unit blocked the way with a river of weapons fire. I nodded in approval of the move. Zero had trained them well.

Alia paused on the other end of the line. "Of course not. Oh, no…"

"What is it?"

"Of course they can't find records of them." New bitterness filled Alia's tone. "We were so stupid. We let that reploid come in here, build his equipment with Maverick Hunter research funds, and use our own people in his work without even attempting to understand all the implications. I can't believe we let this happen."

We had tried to understand his work. No one could. But another part of what she said bothered me more. "Let what happen?"

"What just happened! General, he had to have used his technology to bring in allies from somewhere. I don't know how, or where he got them, but—gah! General, why didn't it set off warning flags when we found out no self-respecting human scientist would touch Gate's theories? Why didn't we pay more attention to his personality profile? All this time, he was a bomb waiting to explode!"

I pursed my lips. The invaders had already moved to another part of the compound. The way their signals blipped around, it looked like short-range teleportation, but Layer had all teleportation in the area locked down. Troubling. "Hindsight is always 20/20, Alia. I know you're upset that X and Zero are gone, but I need you calm and rational. You saw all of Gate's work. If you can reproduce his results, we can still get our people back. Commanders X and Zero and maybe even Private Sporkachev and Corporal Blue Rider."

ASASA

I stood in the deserted office above Gate's, the reploid's translucent green coolant dripping slowly off my armor. The anger in me transformed to sullen hatred mixed with guilt, which settled like a poison in my gut. I trembled with the aftershock of what had happened.

I had forgotten about Blue Rider and Sporkachev. In light of what I had just seen, though, their disappearance must have marked Gate's first known hostile use of the wormhole technology. He had used them to test the method before trying it against X and Zero.

That part made sense, then. But where had he brought those two other reploids from? Had the antisocial Dr. Gate, graced with all the charisma of a dead snail, made allies loyal enough to retrieve him and attempt a revival? Or did they have another agenda in mind?

I shook my head. If Gate had in fact brought them in with his subspace-manipulating wormhole technology, we had no way of guessing their intentions with any surety. Worse, if my hunch proved correct, we had no chance of beating them on an even playing field. As the scientist-reploid overseeing Gate's work, I dealt with him and his project more than almost anyone else on base; while I hadn't made head or tails of his comments as a reploid, my new android brain started to put together the pieces. I didn't like the picture beginning to form.

The general reopened our comlink channel to address me again, and the awkward pause before he spoke told me everything I needed to know. Those two unknown reploids had proven their logistical superiority from the very beginning; now, twelve dead recruits and a hundred thousand plus dollars in damage later, they had escaped MHHQ with Gate's body. Attempts to trace their movements after leaving the area had so far failed. I devoted a fraction of my processing to absorb any more important details while the rest refocused on the problem at hand.

X and Zero's teleport-less disappearance—Gate's wormhole technology—these two new reploids and everything strange about them—Gate, his escape from the brig, and everything strange about him—they all fitted together. I simply had to take the tools Dr. Light had given me and find out how. Finding out that connection would lead, must lead to finding my husband and our friend.

As I turned to leave through the gaping hole in the floor, I tried without success to drive away the nagging question:

What if I no longer had a husband to find?

XAXAX

Gutteral moans and inarticulate screams surrounded us, scores of jumbled voices merging into a single primal growl. Rotting fingers reached for us like claws, carried forward by shambling feet and bodies clothed in decomposing rags. Sightless eyeballs fixed on us like a hundred white-shuttered windows to the next world. The pharmacy department countertop barely separated us from a host of corpses, some lying in grisly piles while the rest came at us like a legion of the damned. It seemed we now knew what threat the dead of this world posed.

Tears falling from my eyes, I aimed at another of the walking dead and fired.

With a bang, a newly dead woman fell, her beautiful brown skin almost untouched by decomposition. I thought she looked old enough to have been a mother. Did her children miss her? Or had she killed them herself? My bullet entered cleanly through her forehead and ended the hollow mockery of life that had possessed her.

Zero's voice interrupted my private world of misery. He had to shout for myself and Rick to hear over the constant ringing in our ears. "They just keep coming. Well, sorry I got us all caught up in this."

He moved his P-90 swiftly and precisely, pulling the trigger twice a second at times and sending another zombie to the floor with every shot. I probably had similar aiming capabilities but couldn't bring myself to shoot without at least registering the faces of the victims.

I took aim at another, a boy in his teens, one arm missing and clothes torn and bloody. He wore a necklace with a cross on it and a pink band around his remaining wrist that said something about cancer. His face bore no semblance of human expression. I fired a round that dropped him lifeless to the ground. "You were trying to keep us safe, Zero. Besides, you helped hotwire the ambulance in the first place, and we wouldn't have gotten anywhere without that."

"Yeah. Stupid of me to start shooting, though. I should've guessed the stupid walking slabs of meat could hear gunshots and smell fear."

"Guys, I think we have another group coming in from outside. We've gotta make a move." Rick shouted over the noise of his .22 pistol. Fed, clothed and shaved, he added to the group not only his local knowledge and steady aim, but the square chin and charisma of a natural leader. "We'll run out of ammo sooner or later and get swarmed real quick. We have to get to the sheriff's department."

I nodded; as it turned out, when we saved Rick, we rescued no less than a deputy in the King County Sheriff's department. After we commandeered a vehicle from the hospital, he had directed us to his house; while Rick's family had gone missing, his clothes and some food storage remained intact. After the man had dressed, the three of us sat down for a meal and a good, long discussion of what to do next. Finding food, getting more guns and gasoline, and finding Rick's family came up on top of the itinerary for the days to come.

Unfortunately, our supposedly well thought out plans had landed us here in the neighborhood food mart, holding off a hoard of zombies from behind the counter of the pharmacy. I pulled the trigger on another of the walking dead and watched it fall back into those in the rank behind. They pushed the corpse down and trampled over it without a second thought. Probably without a first thought either.

All in all, I didn't consider this one of my happier days.

0X0X0

I pegged another couple of zombies incoming from the cereal aisle. They fell all over the boxes I had tried to snag before this all started, which made me grind my teeth. I had hoped to get out of here with my Wheaties. "Yeah, all right, whatever. It looks like there's not much good food left here anyway. Dang it, that's half an hour gone out of my day for nothing."

I didn't shout most of this, so no one else heard it over the gunfire. At any rate I finished the clip on my P-90, popped it out, replaced it with a full one, and put the empty one with all the others in my backpack to refill later. Time for a style change. "I'll clear a path through the canned food aisle. You guys grab some tuna or something on your way through. Let's go!"

With that, I put a hand on the pharmacy's bloodstained old counter and vaulted clean over it. On the other side I drew my katana and dashed down between the soup and the cup ramen to take out the first moving corpse I saw. X and Rick ran after me. X running sounded like a million pills shaking in their bottles since he had stuffed his backpack with drugs for some reason. Maybe taking some of them would make him stop crying like a sissy. I mean really, for a guy who's taken down Sigma more times than some people have fired a gun, X gets soppy about the weirdest things.

I had tried out the katana earlier, when we met our first few walking zombies outside the hospital, and it worked like a charm. Cut right through the soggy old rotting meat and hardly made a sound. Not like my stupid P-90 or .44 magnum, which make enough noise to wake the dead, apparently. Nope, for low-profile combat, it has to be the shiny new metal Z-saber.

I met a fresh (but not fresh-smelling, sadly) stream of zombies coming down the aisle and put the new Z-saber to work, ignoring for the moment the groans and moans from zombies in the adjacent aisles. With good power strokes and the right timing I took down zombies two or three at a time. I didn't care if they actually died or not; anything not connected to the brain stopped moving, and a dismembered head poses about as much of a threat as a plastic fork left with the pointy end up. Namely, none at all if you're wearing boots. Armless guys don't amount to much either in my book.

[X's note: I'm sure Zero means to imply no offense to handicapped people of any kind. I'm genuinely sorry to anyone bothered by his comments.]

My katana whirled viciously from zombie to zombie, lopping off heads, severing arms and legs, and slashing tendons and spinal cords when I felt like a change of pace. They didn't stand a chance of defending themselves. Still the meatslabs kept coming, reaching out with their nasty decrepit fingers and making noises like a pig in heat.

Don't get me started on how I know that noise. Bad, bad day to be me.

I kept up a good pace until zombies on the adjacent aisles started pushing through the shelves to get at us. Cans tumbled all over the place, as if the place wasn't messy enough to begin with, and I had to deal with arms groping at me from the sides along with the eyesores in front. Naturally, one of them went for my ponytail like Cortes after El Dorado; I had to duck and dodge to avoid a major hair disaster. And on top of all that, everything still smelled like the inside of a dead cat. Gross.

Nothing for it, though. I grabbed up the P-90 in my left hand and gunned down the zombies in front while chopping off the reaching hands and arms with one-handed slashes from the Z-Saber. Concentrating on both at once took a lot more effort than I expected, though; human brains must not be very good at multitasking. My pace slowed from a jog to a brisk walk. X and Rick slowed down behind me, too, both of them still firing their weapons as often as not.

We moved down the aisle towards the light that came from the windows at the entrance. Towards the end, the press of zombies started to let up. Had this dumb little town run out of dead peopleto throw at us? Good timing, since we had to make a final dash to the door in another few seconds. "Hey X, Rick, you ready to get out of here? The ambulance is right outside."

"**** yes I'm ready."

"Whenever you are, Zero."

I nodded, a grin slowly creeping across my face. Sure, I had left my 0th Shinobi Unit back at Maverick Hunters HQ—but there's nothing like fighting alongside an old friend like Megaman X and a new recruit like Rick Grimes. "Right. Let's go!"

X0X0X

We ran into the flood of sunlight outside weighed down with food, medicine, and basic survival supplies from the neighborhood mart. The few zombies outside moved too slowly to keep us from getting to the ambulance, and once inside, we had no difficulty driving away to the sheriff's department. With its gas-powered generator, strong walls and fence, and still-intact supply of weaponry and vehicles, the department made an excellent place to rest and resupply for the night. Rick needed the rest most of all, having recovered from a coma earlier that day to plunge immediately into a much worse crisis.

As I applied some antibiotic ointment to a scratch acquired during the grocery run, I worried about how far that crisis had spread. Cell phones, television, internet, and radio had lost all service, painting a grim picture of the world outside King County. I held out hope, however, that whatever caused the dead to change into zombies had only hit a certain area and left most of the world unaffected. Seeing King County filled with walking corpses had provided more than enough horror all on its own.

We went to bed early with plans to leave the area early the next morning. Family pictures and clothes missing from his house had given Rick hope of finding his family outside town. Even after all the devastation we saw that day, all the indications that the apocalypse had come for his world, he remained convinced he could find his wife Lori and child Carl out there somewhere. I admired his courage and the strength of his convictions.

I, too, meant to find my family again, no matter how long or how hard the road.

No matter what.