Rebirth: A Zombie Apocalypse LitRPG (Necrotic Apocalypse Book 5), page 1
REBIRTH
Necrotic Apocalypse Book Five
DAVID PETRIE
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Epilogue
Afterword
About David Petrie
About Mountaindale Press
Mountaindale Press Titles
Appendix
CHAPTER ONE
“Who the fuck are you?” Becca stood staring into the crimson eyes of a woman shrouded in darkness.
“You can call me Abby.” She stepped forward out of the gloom and gestured to a name tag pinned to the lapel of a black vest.
Becca read the name over three times, having no idea if it should mean something to her or not. The last thing she remembered was being betrayed by Bancroft’s men and trapped aboard a sinking cargo ship. Digby and Parker had found her, but she had been bitten by a revenant and the sun was setting. She’d been left with only one option to protect her friends.
“I killed myself.”
Becca remembered plunging an icicle through her own heart.
There hadn’t been time to think of anything else. Taking her own life had just seemed like the most reasonable thing to do given the circumstances. A memory passed through her head of Digby reaching toward her as the ocean dragged her away into the bowels of the ship. She forced the image away. She didn’t want to remember the devastation on the zombie’s face. It felt like it had happened only seconds ago.
Now, somehow, she was a long way from there.
The shadows filling the edges of her surroundings retreated little by little, revealing more until the entire space was visible. She was standing in the aisle of an old-style train, with wood paneling and brass covering nearly every surface.
Becca pressed a hand against her chest. Her body was as solid as she had been while she was alive, complete with a steady heartbeat. The rumbling of the tracks below matched the vibrations she felt in her feet. From the motion of the car she rode in, they were traveling in a circle along an incline. Becca glanced from left to right, finding a row of bench seats facing forward on either side, each upholstered with red velvet. Windows lined the walls but she couldn’t see anything outside.
“We’re going up?”
“Yes. Think of it as decompression. The essence that surrounded your spark before is not compatible with this realm, therefore you need to absorb more to be able to interact with anything here.” The strange woman stood in the aisle facing her. Her hair was green to match her fingernails. She was dressed in a black vest and matching slacks, making her look like some kind of caterer or bartender.
“Okay, Abby? Where the hell am I?” Becca took the offensive.
“You’re dead.” The woman shrugged. “And you could stand to be a little more polite.”
Becca hesitated, breathing in a lungful of air. It smelled earthy but somehow clean. “Why do I feel so real?”
“This realm is one of perception. Being real is all you have ever known, why wouldn’t you perceive yourself the same here?” She placed a hand to her chest, displaying the flawless green polish that covered her nails. “I don’t normally come to meet new arrivals, but considering that you showed up on the same day that another two Heretics somehow opened a passage to this realm, I thought I should check in.”
Becca glanced to her HUD.
It was gone.
Obviously, the two Heretics that she mentioned had been Digby and Parker.
“How do you know I’m a Heretic?” Becca fished for more information, trying to get an understanding of who she was dealing with.
“You were a Heretic. You stopped being one when you passed,” the woman corrected. “And it’s one of the few things I am informed of when someone arrives here, along with how they died, of course. You seem to have passed when a curse pushed your spark from your body.”
Becca caught a detail that didn’t make sense in her words. Surprisingly, her mind hadn’t tried to dispute the fact that she was dead, but instead, the manner in which her death had happened. “I didn’t die from being bitten by a revenant, I died because I stabbed myself in the heart.”
Abby clicked her tongue. “That’s not what I was told.”
“Well, that’s what happened,” Becca snapped back, unsure why she was even angry about it.
“What did you stab yourself with?” Abby folded her arms.
“An icicle.” Becca gasped as soon as she said it, realizing the mistake she’d made in the last chaotic moments of her life.
The reason for the discrepancy was obvious now that she was able to look back on her actions. Icicles were great for killing revenants since they held the wound open to stop the creatures from healing. Then again, that only worked if the icicle stayed in position. In her case, she had been washed away by the ocean right after impaling herself. The combination of her body heat and the rushing water must have dislodged it. The passive healing that came with the curse would have handled the rest.
“Oh no.” Becca leaned on the back of the seat next to her as the horror of her mistake sunk in. “There’s still a revenant of me down there on Earth.” She paused, looking back to Abby with a worried expression before adding, “Or, up there on Earth?”
“It’s not quite as simple as being up or down.” The red-eyed woman sucked air through her teeth.
Dread bubbled through Becca’s stomach as she tried to convince herself that her mistake hadn’t gotten anyone killed. That her revenant hadn’t hurt anyone she cared about. “It’s okay, it has to be. Digby is dead, I wouldn’t have attacked him. And the seawater probably carried me far enough into the ship to give the others time to escape.” She snapped her attention back to the woman waiting patiently for her to work through her trauma. “I didn’t hurt anyone, right?” Becca spun, making sure the train she was on was empty beside her and the crimson-eyed woman. “They would be here if I had killed them, right?”
“I don’t know.” Abby shrugged.
“How can you not know? You’re Death, aren’t you?”
“Oh, no, I’m not.” Abby suddenly looked embarrassed. “I was the Heretic Seed’s original caretaker before it was shattered. I’m as dead as you are. I just have a few perks because I used to manage the Seed’s connection to magic and the weirdness that comes up with it. I had thought my job was finished when I died, but with you Heretics showing up here, I guess I was mistaken.”
“And where is here?” Becca let out a frustrated growl.
“We call it Dusk.” The woman, who was apparently not Death, gestured to the train around them. “As in the fading light before the dark. And like I said, this place isn’t that simple. You’ve hit somewhat of a speed bump on your way to the great beyond. Not everyone does. In fact, coming here is rare in the grand scheme of things. That is why I don’t know anything about your companions.”
Becca slapped a hand to her head and dragged it down her face, having trouble processing the information. “I’m so confused.”
Dying was somehow the least of her trouble.
Becca had never been religious. Hell, she had always just assumed there was no such thing as an afterlife. Now, not only was she wrong, but apparently, the afterlife was different from what anyone had predicted. To make matters more confusing, she was talking to some random ass woman claiming to be the Heretic Seed’s original caretaker, whatever that was. From Abby’s description, a caretaker sounded a lot like some kind of system administrator.
Was that even possible? Could the Heretic Seed be that straightforward?
Becca let out a long sigh as she lowered herself into one of the train’s bench seats. She dropped her head back, leaving her feet in the aisle as she stared up at the ceiling.
“You’re confused? How do you think I feel?” The Seed’s original caretaker scoffed before plopping down in the seat across from her. “I haven’t seen a Heretic in centuries. And suddenly the world ends and you all start popping up again. It’s great that there’s someone to stand up against Autem back there in the world
“Wait, you said not everyone comes here? That this is just a speed bump on the way to the great beyond?” Becca sat back up. “Could I go back?”
Abby’s mouth fell open at the absurdity of the question. “That’s not really how death works.” Then she closed her mouth. “Wait, what did you just say a moment ago about someone being dead?”
Becca jabbed a thumb into her chest. “Yeah, I’m dead.”
“No, not you.” Abby waved a hand back and forth. “You said Digby is dead, so you wouldn’t have attacked him as a revenant. What did you mean by that?”
“Oh yeah, Digby, he’s probably one of the Heretics you met. He’s a zombie.” Becca shrugged, having nothing left to offer.
The woman’s crimson eyes widened as she dug her green fingernails into the cushion of her seat. “Oh no. I knew there was something off about him.”
“What do you mean by ‘oh no’?” Becca arched an eyebrow.
Abby cringed a little. “Just, um, out of curiosity. How important to the fight with Autem is your zombie friend?”
“Very important, he’s the leader of the Heretics. There wouldn’t be anyone to fight back if it hadn’t been for him.” Becca narrowed her eyes at the woman. “Why, what did you do?”
“What did I do? Nothing.” Abby raised a hand, holding her thumb and pointer finger an inch apart. “But I may have given your friend just a tiny bit of bad information about his spark.”
“What?” Becca leaned forward, staring directly into the woman’s otherworldly pupils.
From there, words began falling from Abby’s mouth in a long sentence filled with assumptions and misunderstandings. “Well, you see, your friend told me he had a shard of the Seed lodged in his heart, which I assumed meant it was embedded in his chest next to his heart, not in his actual heart, because, well, you know, if it was in his heart, he’d be dead, and the idea that I was talking to a zombie wasn’t exactly my first thought. I was more concerned with how two people from the mortal world had somehow opened a passage to the realm of the dead.”
Becca shook her head. “But why is that important?”
“It’s important because your zombie friend wanted to know how to access the Heretic Seed’s full power, and I told him that to do that, he needed to remove the Seed’s fragment from his chest and put it back. That doing so would allow the Seed to absorb his soul and convert it into a new caretaker.”
“And you wouldn’t have told him that if you had realized he was dead?” Becca tried to follow along.
Abby hissed air through her teeth. “I might have at least given him a warning.”
“A warning about what?” Becca tapped a finger, her body tensing in anticipation of the answer.
“That depends.” The Seed’s original caretaker frowned. “How stable would you say your friend Digby is, you know, mentally speaking?”
Becca folded her arms, deciding not to sugarcoat things. “He’s an impulsive narcissist, with delusions of grandeur, whose primary motivation is spite.”
“That,” Abby paused before adding, “is less than ideal.”
“Why?”
“Because giving up his spark to create a caretaker would basically leave his body without a soul.” She nodded as if still doing math in her head. “If I remember correctly from my time in the Seed, if your friend was human, that wouldn’t be a big deal. Humans can exist fine without a soul for quite some time. Most will reach old age and die before it presents a problem. Obviously, having the lifespan of a Heretic complicates the issue. Over time, they may begin to lose things like empathy and self-awareness, but it is still quite manageable. The worst that can happen is that a soulless human might become somewhat of a jerk. And the world is already full of those.”
“But,” Becca added the word she knew was coming.
“But, for a zombie, things are a little trickier.” The past caretaker tapped a finger on the back of the seat in front of her. “A zombie with a soul is not unheard of. After all, the heart is an important center for the mana system and as a part of that system, the spark flows through the heart continuously. By eating enough hearts in a short amount of time, a zombie can consume trace amounts of their victim’s souls, and that can create a stable spark within them if done so fast enough.”
Becca gasped, finally understanding how some of the other conscious zombies she’d met had been created. Zombies like Rufus back in California and Clint who had been produced by Henwick. They both had been zombie masters and had eaten plenty of hearts before becoming aware of their actions. After that, they had seemed downright human despite being walking corpses. She filed that bit of knowledge away as Abby continued.
“The problem is that in a normal human, the spark acts in tandem with their mind, with both reinforcing the other. Each part holds the same information to make sure the other remains balanced. The human brain is like a machine, one that needs to be maintained so that it continues to operate as a true representation of the person it belongs to. The spark monitors and updates itself with every new development so that when the person dies, it can carry them into the afterlife.”
“Okay, so the soul is a backup system.” Becca nodded along.
“Yes, and the reason a zombie that possesses one can continue to operate with a mostly normal human mind is because their spark is constantly restoring the information in their necrotic brain.”
“Oh shit.” Becca started to see where things were going. “And what happens if there’s no spark to restore a conscious zombie’s mind?”
The Seed’s original caretaker cringed again, before quickly adding, “A rapid descent into madness, followed by a complete unraveling of their consciousness. After that, they would become nothing more than a mindless walking corpse. It would be a true death in that they would simply cease to exist. The only thing that would remain would be the soul that still exists within the Seed as its caretaker. Though, there is a limit to how that version of him can communicate with the outside world.”
“Well, shit. Why the hell did you tell him to give up his soul?” Becca sprang up from her seat.
The caretaker jumped up as well. “I didn’t know the whole situation. I told you already, it’s hard to stay up to date with everything back on Earth when you’ve been dead for centuries.”
“Why, then, didn’t you ask questions before handing out life-altering advice to a couple of Heretics that had popped in for a visit from the mortal realm?” Becca’s voice climbed with each word.
“I was trying to be mysterious.” Abby stomped a foot. “Your friends aren’t exactly the brightest, and I thought that maintaining an air of authority was the best way to make sure they took me seriously.”
Becca groaned and walked to the rear of the train only to pace back to Abby. “Okay, I get that you’re some kind of age-old system admin, but with all due respect, what the hell?”
“It’s alright.” Abby stood up from her seat. “We can fix this.”
“How?”
“The caretaker!” She brightened up.
“Isn’t that you?” Becca eyed her.
“No, not me. The other one. The version of your zombie friend that has joined with the Seed. He should be able to…” She trailed off, only to add a disappointed, “Shit.”
“Shit, what?” Becca was getting sick of asking for clarification.
“The Seed’s caretaker is too new.” She deflated. “When I took the job, it took weeks to learn how to fill the role. I’m sure the Heretic Seed’s caretaker would be able to save the zombie version of itself if given the time, but time is not a luxury that we have.”
