Enia: Wow, would you look at this! It's a new chapter! It's been a long, long time. Just a quick recap for those of you rejoining us: About a year and a half ago, I decided that the writing in this story was wildly inconsistent, so I set about rewriting the whole thing. Every single chapter. I will admit that it took longer than expected. You don't have to go read the rewritten chapters – nothing plot-wise has changed – but it might be fun.

Textbooks are Dangerous

The Library

Teemo, Arin, and Samik snuck out of the library through a second story window, one by one leaping the empty space to the great wall and dropping down to the street on the other side. The full moon illuminated the neighborhood with a silvery light, and at some point during the night, it had started to snow. The fat, white flakes danced and whirled through the air, the moonlight glittering off their multi-faceted sides, softening the harsh edges of the wrecked landscape.

One landed on Arin's nose, and she sneezed.

The moonlight also lit up a trio of munchers trundling towards them, arms outstretched. In the darkness, they were mere silhouettes, just three more unidentifiable members of the never-ending legion.

Teemo flashed forward before the other two could move, crossing the short distance in less than a second and knocking the munchers to the ground with a whirlwind of chipped cement. They fell in a tangle of flailing limbs, not realizing that it was too late for them until a spray of black blood arced across the snow, pattering to the ground in the shape of a few, perfect semi-circles.

"Hog," Samik grumbled as Teemo came sauntering back.

"They dead," he announced proudly, grinning.

"No shit," Arin replied.

They left the corpses there, mangled and forgotten, and Teemo linked his arm through Arin's as they hurried down the street, breath misting in the frigid air.

"So where do we want to go?" Arin asked after a few beats. "And how do we want to kill any munchers we encounter?"

"Enia always joked about how she could probably brain someone with any one of her textbooks," Samik answered. "We could head back to the university and test her hypothesis."

Neither Teemo nor Arin saw any problems with the plan, so they set off through the dead town, relying on Arin's nearly infallible sense of direction to get them to their destination. After a few minutes and several decapitations, they arrived at the college campus. The brick science building from their liquid nitrogen rampage loomed up before them, but Samik ignored it, looking left and right until his sharp, elven eyes picked out the letters on a dented, bullet-riddled sign.

"That building is the library," he said, pointing down the wide sidewalk. "I bet we'll find what we're looking for in there."

He led the way over to the three-story building. Most of its walls were made up of giant windows, almost a quarter of which were shattered, allowing the winter access to the vulnerable books inside. Snow had snuck across the floor, great drifts of it, and was dented by the passage of countless animal paws and booted feet.

The three elves ignored the shut and chained doors and entered the library through one of the empty window frames. Teemo suddenly stopped and retched, no more than a few feet into the building. "Gods, what is that?" he demanded, pulling his shirt up to cover his nose.

Arin's face turned paler than the snow outside when she delicately sniffed the air. The stench of death giggled malevolently at them. Its companion, rot, was busy painting tableaus in the air with a prudent hand, while the scattered remains of fear and desperation got wasted in the corners.

"Light, please, Teemo," Samik suggested, though he didn't think he wanted to see whatever had birthed these monsters.

Teemo opened his clenched fist, and a fireball popped to life. It zoomed up to the ceiling and dripped light on the horrors scattered across the library floor.

A tapestry of defiled bodies. A dead carpet coating the floor, draped over perfect rows of utilitarian green cots. The thread made from blood which ran in rivulets down limbs and across faces, dripped down cot frames, and pooled on the floor, half frozen. A round hole in each head, glistening darkly in the firelight. Faces caught in terrified masks just like the children caught in their parents' arms.

"What happened here?" Arin gasped, hand over her mouth. All the mirth, all the cockiness, had drained out of the group like water swirling down a pipe.

"I think this was a refugee camp," Samik said. Squaring his shoulders, he moved a little closer to the catastrophe. A few of the bodies had arms distorted by ragged bite marks, and others had unhinged jaws and bloody teeth, the skin grey and drooping in the distinctive muncher manner.

Some of the dead were dressed in army fatigues, all with identical third eyes. The wood bookshelves were splintered with bullet holes, and many of the books had been torn in two, flakes of white paper mixing with the snow. Some of them were nearly disintegrated, the edges blacked by gun powder.

"It looks like a military refugee camp. Either someone turned within the camp, or a horde broke through the window," Samik mused. "The firefight knocked out a lot of the windows, and then the survivors…took care of the infected."

"All these people were bitten?" Arin asked, staring at the dozens and dozens of bodies.

Holding his breath, Samik stepped over the outer edges of the dead carpet, past the obviously turned corpses, to a mother-daughter duo. The mother was curled around her child like a shield, and she had a hole in the back of her head. She had been shot at point-blank range, and the wound was huge and gaping, the edges blackened and burned. The grey curls of her brain had been disrupted and torn to shreds.

Samik crouched down, balanced precariously in the empty spots between the bodies. The little girl slumped in her mother's stiff arms. She was probably about five. The same bullet that had killed her mother had killed her too. Samik quickly examined their bodies, searching for blood not caused by the bullet wounds.

They didn't have any bites.

"They weren't infected," he said, standing and carefully picking his way back to his friends.

"You mean they were just…executed?" Arin demanded, horrified, and Samik nodded somberly.

The red firelight turned Teemo's face into a flickering, demonic mask. The crackle of his power rose, the taste metallic, sparks jumping in his hair. "Who would do something like that?" His voice held all the thunder of an erupting volcano.

"The military, I think," Samik answered.

"Why?"

He shrugged. "Maybe it was a mercy killing. Or maybe they panicked. This seems like it happened a while ago, maybe at the very beginning."

"Shit," Arin breathed, and her tone summed up how they all felt. It was simply unbelievable.

In the hallway off the back of the big room, barely illuminated by the firelight, something rustled and thumped. Samik's head snapped up and around, and Teemo unhooked his arm from Arin's so he could be ready to fight. A group of munchers lurched out of the shadows, bumping off each other as they came into the light.

There were five of them. Two were military, dressed in bloody fatigues, and the rest were civilians, munchers who had wandered in off the streets.

Teemo moved to a nearby bookshelf. He ran his finger along the weathered spines and pulled out three of the thickest hardcovers he could find. He tossed one to Samik and Arin, and when Samik turned his over in his hands, a Chemistry 1 cover scowled up at him. It was probably over a thousand pages, a DNA strand on its front.

They moved off to the side, so the munchers would have to angle towards them rather than trample through the graveyard. Samik led the way, Arin and Teemo flanking him. As they drew closer to the munchers, they split up, textbooks held between clenched fingers.

Samik stepped towards one of the military munchers, a large man with a badly done crew cut and a squashed nose. When it snarled, it revealed bloodied teeth broken off into ragged points. Samik hefted the massive textbook over his head, timing the downswing to the muncher's attack. The top of its skull gave way beneath the book, bone shards flying in all directions. Grey brains oozed out around the edges of the odd weapon, and cold, gummy blood spurted across Samik's hands, sneaking up his sleeves. The top half of the muncher's head stuck to the cover of the textbook as the rest of the body slipped away.

Off to the side, Teemo let out a battle cry as he swung his textbook sideways through the air. The flat cover crashed into a greying ear, and the book carved a path straight through the corpse's skull. Teemo used the momentum of the swing to spin in a circle and smack the book into the head of a second muncher who had stumbled just a little bit too close.

Arin spun her book until one of the corners faced out. The second military muncher bumbled towards her, and Arin backed up a couple of steps until there were a few feet between them. Then she bounded forward and stabbed her arms up at the last second, book outstretched. The corner punched through the bride of the muncher's nose, the sharp shards driving into the brain just far enough to drop the reanimated corpse.

That left just one muncher. It wore a tattered suit and glasses with popped-out lenses. Teemo shot towards it. He was the furthest away, but he'd be damned if he let someone else get there first.

"No, you don't," Samik snarled. His leg snapped out, and his foot collided with Teemo's upper arm, sending him flying off to the side. He crashed into the wall with a thud that knocked a few of the pictures off the wall.

Samik smirked. The prize was his. He lifted his bloody, dripping textbook back into the air and stalked towards his prey like a lion slipping through grass. The muncher gnashed its teeth at him, and he prepared to knock every single one of them out.

But before he got the chance, the muncher collapsed in front of him, revealing a grinning Arin with her textbook extended, fresh blood dripping off the corner. Samik gaped at her disbelievingly. "How dare you!"

She shrugged blithely. "You snooze, you lose."

Samik narrowed his eyes and flipped her off.

Behind them, Teemo groaned dramatically, still draped across the ground. "I think you broke something."

"You're fine," Samik told him, unconcerned.

Arin took pity on her husband, dropping the textbook as she walked over to him. He took her hand, and she helped him stand, gently rubbing his supposedly injured arm. He alternated between giving Arin puppy dog eyes and glaring at Samik scathingly.

Eventually, Arin managed to convince Teemo that he wasn't permanently crippled or dying. To leave, they didn't walk back past the graveyard of the massacred. Instead, Teemo and Arin followed Samik up the hallway that the munchers had appeared from. It led them around to the front entrance of the university library. The doors were locked from the outside, Samik remembered, as if someone had tried to lock the infected and the refugees inside. It obviously hadn't worked.

"What I don't understand," Teemo said as they walked down the wide hall, "is why they chose this place as a refugee camp. The whole wall is made up of windows."

"Maybe it was the only choice," Arin answered. She took his hand again. "Or maybe it was only supposed to be temporary."

"Doesn't really matter anymore, does it?" Samik pointed out.

"I suppose not," she agreed.

They pulled up beside the shut doors, dirty paper and discarded trash piled up around the bottom. Across the old, oak wood, someone had spray painted a message in large, black letters, their hand obviously shaking.

"INFECTED INSIDE
CAMP FALLEN
SQUAD RETREATED TO
MAIN CAMP AT FARM"

The author lay slumped in a corner, pistol in hand. Half her forearm had been torn off, and there was a wide hole in her head.

"Main camp," Samik murmured, stretching out one hand to trace the letters with his fingers. "I wonder if its still alive."

"Hard to say," Arin said. "I hope so."

Teemo lashed out with one leg, and a powerful gust of air burst from his foot, blasting the doors open. They banged against the walls outside with a crash that reverberated around the neighborhood.

The three elves walked outside into the quiet morning air. The sun was just beginning to show behind the buildings, staining the land the same color as the blood across Samik's hands.

Enia: I hope you all enjoyed the first new chapter! Please leave a review and let me know what you thought!