The dog still had its eyelashes.

Jerry hit it with his cudgel, hard enough to feel the impact through his wrist, and the lashes fluttered above its battered face. Behind him, something much heavier than a man came running down the corridor.

“Everyone in that room,” Jack shouted. “Go, go, go!”

The makeup lab offered two dangerous-looking dogs. The hallway offered an enormous security officer whose armour stretched across muscles the other corpses hadn’t possessed. Jack chose the dogs. He squeezed through the doorway carrying a paper cutter with its wooden base still attached, an office implement that had become a weapon chiefly through desperation.

Rufus slipped in beside Jerry and struck with his mop. The dog staggered but stayed up.

There were three rubber chew toys nearby. Jack grabbed one. It was unexpectedly heavy, packed with something that smelled appalling.

“Here, puppies.”

He threw it toward the far wall. It bounced, squeaked, and struck a kennel. The wounded dog turned after it; Jerry and Rufus caught it together as it passed. It fell and dragged a streak of mascara across the floor.

The second dog bounded over its companion and settled down to chew.

Squeak. Squeak.

Talisa couldn’t take her eyes off it. Dogs frightened her at the best of times. She reached among the bottles and aerosols on a bench, searching for something she understood. A flammability warning was almost reassuring. Chemicals behaved according to principles.

Behind her, Bobby shut and bolted the door. With Liz and Sinclair helping, he hauled a heavy worktable against it. Maxwell kept well away from both the barricade and the dog.

Talisa approached with an aerosol and a flame. Fire blossomed suddenly, making her flinch. The spray went wide. The dog continued chewing.

“Try the doors!” Jack called.

Liz opened one onto rows of cages: mice, rabbits, cats, medical equipment. She stared inside.

“I think they’ve turned too. I’ve never seen a mouse move that slowly.”

Jerry tried the other door. Locked. He listened, heard nothing, and worked through his keys while heavy footfalls approached the lab.

Talisa considered trying to burn the dog again. She wanted it destroyed; she wanted the certainty that it could never get up and come toward her. Instead it lay there, contentedly squeezing its rubber toy between its jaws.

A key turned.

“We got stairs, people!” Jerry shouted.

“Leave it,” Jack told Talisa. “We need to go.”

She lowered the aerosol and fled. The dog let her.

Rufus collected jars of slick laboratory goo and waited for the others to pass before breaking them across the floor. Making a mess on purpose offended something deep in him, but there were circumstances. They hurried into the passage, toward the stairs Maxwell had promised them.

There was thumping ahead as well as behind.

Jack reached the corner first. A second enormous creature in a security uniform lunged out.

He screamed. Its cudgel slammed him against the wall.

For a moment he had no breath for anything. Then he saw his own blood. He remained upright by pressing against the wall, refusing to look down again, and swung the paper cutter into the creature’s head. It did no discernible harm. The base broke loose and clattered away, leaving him with the blade.

Jerry came in behind the creature and struck the backs of its knees. Something cracked. The guard buckled without falling. Rufus landed a solid blow with the mop and was immediately shoved against a door, then down onto the floor.

In the lab, the first guard hit the barricade.

The table held.

Jack hacked at the arms reaching for him. He had spent years finding language that made unpleasant things manageable. Now he couldn’t find a useful word, and the blade hardly seemed more effective.

Rufus struggled upright. A syringe was stuck in the giant’s side. There was no time to work out what it meant.

Jerry struck the knees again. This time the creature fell.

“Everybody gang up on it!”

Liz stepped in, tried to hit it, and narrowly escaped its snapping teeth. Talisa attempted to pass. The creature caught her with a wet, slobbering bite; Rufus intervened, helping her pull clear. Shuddering, she aimed the aerosol at the prone security creature and tried the flame spray again with shaking hands. It failed to catch him.

Jack had seen its mouth close on her. He raised the paper-cutter blade.

“Die. Die. Die.”

The words came out as sobs. He hacked at its head in short, clumsy strokes until the enormous body slumped over. Blood sprayed his face and shirt. Beside him, Rufus stared at the spreading filth, his grip uncertain on the mop.

Jack backed away from what he had done.

“Go,” he managed. “Go.”

Maxwell emerged through the animal room’s other door. Bobby ran past, saying he thought he’d heard more footsteps behind them. Jerry waited until everyone had cleared the lab, locked the passage door, and followed them upstairs.

Jack shed his blood-soaked jacket on the way.

“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m fine. I’m fine.”

The executive floor looked almost familiar. Beyond the glass walls were the nicer offices they passed every morning on their way down to Rock Bottom. Ahead lay the foyer and the elevators to the surface.

Groaning came from that direction.

Jack stopped beside Rufus. The janitor was still shaken, looking at stains he couldn’t possibly clean while they kept running. Jack put a hand on his shoulder.

“I haven’t appreciated how much you do for this company,” he said. His voice trembled, but the words came more easily now. “You’re the linchpin of our whole floor. You keep everything running.”

Rufus looked at him. His breathing steadied.

“You mop well,” Jack added.

Rufus went to look around the corner.

“Oh, God. So many zombies.”

He said it much too loudly.

More than fifty wandered the foyer. An executive groaned into a cracked mobile phone. A mailroom worker slammed parcels onto the wrong desks. Two corpses stood by the water cooler, taking turns moaning at each other. Across all of them waited the surface elevators.

“I don’t think a mop’s going to be enough,” Jack said.

Several heads turned.

Light spilled from the opposite direction, where Jack remembered a dead end. He looked and found a blood trail leading to an opened section of wall. Beyond it stood a vast titanium vault door, also open, with pale yellow light showing through.

Perhaps there was a shutdown switch inside. Some emergency system. The company had concealed everything else; surely it had concealed a solution.

He moved toward the light.

Bobby and Liz ran ahead. The others followed as the foyer’s wandering bodies began converging on them. Behind them Maxwell appeared at the stairwell, panting.

“They’re coming! More behind us!” He saw where they were going. “Yes—to the escape pods!”

Escape pods. Jack kept moving.

The first zombies reached them in the narrow approach. Jerry knocked one to the floor and backed toward the vault, keeping himself between the dead and his coworkers. Annie screamed when teeth sank into her shoulder. Rufus helped lessen the injury, but she was limping by the time she made it through the doorway.

Maxwell was still outside, about to be cut off.

Jerry caught his arm.

“Move your ass.”

He dragged him past a snapping mouth. All nine reached the other side. The huge security officer appeared at the stairs behind the horde.

They threw themselves against the vault door. It moved slowly, with terrible indifference to their urgency. Hands reached through the narrowing gap. Jerry took a blow while pushing, then the door finally shut and they secured it with the locking wheel.

The pounding became quiet enough to hear themselves breathe.

Glass display cabinets lined the passage beyond. Inside lay carved stones, dusty books, scrolls. The images repeated themselves across different civilizations: god-kings receiving sacrifices, raising storms, calling dead servants back to work.

Talisa paused before a bright blue quartz ankh. Something like vapour twisted inside it. She knew the stories: the Ankh of Horus, a ward against evil. Nearby hung the jackal-headed necklace of Anubis, said to protect a wearer not yet ready for the afterlife.

Rufus recognized an enormous gold spear, fifteen feet long and marked with hieroglyphs. He had seen a programme about the Spear of Osiris. A mortal hero had supposedly wielded it against a supernatural attack. Standing near it, he could feel a hum.

Talisa took the ankh. Rufus took the spear. Maxwell claimed the necklace.

Jack scarcely looked. Beyond the cabinets, yellow pod entrances stood across a laboratory.

“Look. We can get out.”

He hurried toward them, Jerry close behind with his cudgel and the doughnut box he had somehow kept hold of throughout.

The laboratory occupied a great domed chamber. Computers and expensive equipment surrounded a lidless stone sarcophagus. Pieces of people in lab coats lay scattered across the floor.

Jack stopped trying to count them.

“We’re almost out. We’ve got to go.”

Bone crackled overhead. Dust and sand drifted onto his shoulders.

He looked up.

An enormous human shape unfolded from the gloom and dropped in front of him. It stood perhaps eight feet tall. Wrappings swung from its limbs. Then it spun, claws and cloth blurring together in a whirl of dust, and struck him twice before he could get away.

Jack hit the floor bleeding.

Jerry skirted the creature and ran for a pod.

Talisa held the blue ankh. Her hands steadied at last. She raised it toward the mummy, and the thing recoiled. It fled across the chamber as though driven by something she could neither see nor measure.

Jack swung feebly as it passed. Missed. Tried to keep moving.

He collapsed in a widening pool of blood.

Annie reached him and knelt despite her own injuries. Her efforts kept him alive, but he remained unconscious and the bleeding continued. Sinclair tried to help. Bobby tried. Annie tried again. Nothing stopped the blood.

Across the room Jerry pressed the button marked LAUNCH.

“Please sit down for your safety,” the pod instructed.

He sat. The chamber shot upward with a pneumatic rush. Moments later the doors opened onto an identical empty interior.

Maxwell approached Rufus and put the Anubis necklace around his neck.

“This should protect you. Just stab it.”

Rufus thrust the long spear at the mummy. The point missed. He had given it a try; he wanted to live. He headed for a pod.

Behind him, Annie screamed.

Talisa saw her features change. The mailroom worker folded to the floor and lay still beside the man she had helped save.

Talisa bent over Jack. This time her hands found what they needed. She worked quickly, with a concentration that shut out the sarcophagus, the corpses, the thing across the room. Jack stirred and opened his eyes. He was stronger, conscious again, although the wounds still bled.

Talisa raised the ankh once more. The mummy retreated farther. Its furious screech filled the dome, but nobody stopped running.

Jack crawled toward the open pod, leaving a red trail.

Rufus launched. Liz followed. Talisa started toward safety herself, then looked back at Jack.

“God damn my medical responsibilities.”

She tried to stop the bleeding. It defeated her. She could still keep the creature away, and she did, lifting the ankh again while Jack dragged himself onward.

Maxwell escaped.

Annie stood up.

She caught Sinclair unprepared and bit into his neck. His scream turned Jack’s stomach, but he didn’t look back. He reached the pod and slapped the launch button with a bloody hand.

“I don’t want to die.”

The doors closed.

When they reopened, Talisa could see neither Jack nor the blood he had brought inside. She entered a pod herself and launched. Bobby and the wounded Sinclair were still below when she left.

The acceleration pressed the breath from her. Then it eased, the hatch opened, and there were stars.

Fresh air touched her face.

Six of them emerged on the hillside: Jerry, Rufus, Jack, Talisa, Liz and Maxwell. Nearby stood the modest building that hid the Hollow’s entrance. They waited beside the pods.

No one else came up.

Below them, the city gleamed. At first the lights looked like safety. Then they noticed smoke rising from buildings in different districts.

A helicopter approached. A Black Hawk settled nearby, beating the grass flat, and armed men in black climbed out.

“All employees, report back to headquarters. Get in.”

They got in.

Someone bandaged Jack. Someone else handed around copies of the nondisclosure agreements they had signed when they joined Cornwell Consolidated. The penalties for speaking about what had happened were severe.

Jack held his copy with hands that were beginning to shake again.

“Bad egg salad sandwich,” he said. “That’s what happened to me.”

No one laughed very much.

The helicopter lifted. Jack watched the burning city recede, then lowered his eyes to the familiar document in his lap. His signature was already there.

Session Notes

The Makeup Lab Fight

  • Jerry struck one of the two large dogs with his cudgel, and Rufus attacked a dog with his mop. Jack threw a foul-smelling chew toy across the room to draw the dogs away. As one dog ran after it, Jerry and Rufus struck it until it fell, leaving a streak of mascara. Rufus spent a banked luck point to turn the Doom Clock back by one. The other dog stayed occupied chewing the toy. The dogs’ nature was unknown. Afraid of the dogs, Talisa improvised a flame spray from a flammable aerosol, but missed when she tried to use it.
  • Maxwell, Bobby, Liz, and Sinclair joined the group. They barricaded the door with a heavy worktable while looking for another exit. Liz opened an unlocked animal-testing room with caged mice, rabbits, and cats. She suspected the animals might be zombified because a mouse moved unusually slowly and a cat showed no interest in it, but their condition was uncertain.
  • Jerry listened at a locked door, heard quiet, then selected a key that unlocked it. Beyond it, he found a hallway and stairs leading up. Rufus found jars of slick liquid and used his turn to prepare a slippery hazard for a pursuer. As Jack headed for the stairs, a second security-uniformed creature attacked him, struck him against a wall, and caused six damage. Jack’s paper-cutter blade did not seem to injure it, but he freed the blade and kept it as a weapon.
  • Jerry and Rufus fought the creature. It knocked Rufus down and injured him; Jerry’s next strike brought it prone. Jack repeatedly struck its head with the paper-cutter blade, and it slumped over. It was down, though whether it was dead remained unclear. A syringe was stuck in its side; its contents were unknown. Talisa was bitten as she fled past it, taking two damage. Rufus used Fluky Fortress to reduce the damage by one, leaving Talisa with one damage. She then tried the flame spray against the prone creature and missed. Talisa later succeeded in steadying her nerves. With more banging behind them, the group escaped up the stairs, and Jerry locked a door behind them.

The Executive Floor

  • Jack steadied Rufus, whose fear had not yet passed, before Rufus tried to scout. The executive foyer was packed with more than fifty zombies, blocking the elevators to the surface. A blood trail led to an open secret door and a massive titanium door with pale yellow light beyond it. The source of the blood trail was unknown.
  • The group ran through the secret entrance as the horde approached. Bobby and Liz went first; the others were briefly caught by zombies but made it through. Annie was bitten on the shoulder. Jerry knocked down a pursuing zombie and pulled Maxwell through. The huge security-uniformed creature came up the stairs behind the horde as more zombies followed. Jerry was struck as the group shut the heavy door. Thumping from the horde continued against the steel.

The Immortality Laboratory

  • Beyond the vault door, a quiet corridor displayed rune-marked stones, dusty books, and scrolls. Their stories and images centered on immortality: ancient god-kings receiving sacrifices and gifts, wielding supernatural powers, and returning servants from the dead. Talisa recognized the Ankh of Horus, reputed to ward off evil, and the Necklace of Anubis, said in stories to protect its wearer from death. Rufus recognized the Spear of Osiris as a legendary weapon in stories. Their reputed powers had not yet been tested.
  • Talisa took the Ankh, Rufus took the spear, and Maxwell took the necklace before placing it around Rufus’s neck. Maxwell said it should protect Rufus from the creature and urged him to stab it. Jack and Jerry pressed on toward the escape pods.
  • In a domed laboratory, the group found a lidless stone sarcophagus surrounded by bloodstains and scattered body parts in lab coats. Dust and sand fell from overhead, and an eight-foot wrapped, clawed figure dropped from the ceiling. It attacked Jack, cutting him and leaving him bleeding. Its identity and connection to the sarcophagus remained unknown.
  • Jerry reached a pod but could not activate it yet. Talisa steadied herself and used the Ankh against the creature. It failed a Heart check, took three soul damage, and fled toward a corner. Rufus’s attempt to hit it with the spear missed. Talisa used the Ankh again; after failing another Heart check, the creature took three more soul damage and fled again. It remained alive in the laboratory.
  • Jack’s bleeding worsened until he collapsed unconscious at death’s door. Annie stabilized him at one health, unconscious but stable and still bleeding. Talisa’s critical success with her Medic ability healed nine wounds and woke him. Her separate check to stop his bleeding failed, advancing the Doom Clock by three. Jack later crawled to a pod and launched while still bleeding.
  • Liz, Maxwell, Jerry, Rufus, Jack, and Talisa escaped in separate pods. Annie, who had been bitten earlier, reanimated and bit Sinclair on the neck. Sinclair was bleeding, and he and Bobby remained behind in the laboratory area; their later fates were unknown.

Return to the Surface

  • The pod occupants emerged on a hill near the concealed facility entrance beneath a starry sky. Smoke rose from several buildings in the city. A Black Hawk helicopter arrived, and armed personnel ordered the employees to report to headquarters and get aboard.
  • The survivors boarded and received copies of their signed NDAs, reminders of the penalties for discussing the incident. Someone bandaged Jack after the pod journey, but his later medical condition was not established. The helicopter flew away as the town burned.