It was colder and darker than Marie had expected when she woke. Quieter too. It must have been very early in the morning.

  For a minute she was tempted to snuggle deeper into her sleeping bag, but her sleep had been peaceful and she felt rested. There had just been that one oddity, right before she’d woken…

  Whatever it had been, it was fading rapidly and the urgency of a full bladder soon became the most pressing thing on her mind.

  Serves me right for finishing the bottle before I went to bed.

  Said bottle clinked as she unzipped herself out from the sleeping bag and into the cool air of the tent. She shivered, reached round in the dark and pulled on the first t-shirt that came to hand, then struggled to wriggle into her jeans in the close confines, knocking half a dozen of her other belongings about as she fumbled for her glasses.

  Even if she’d put them on, there was no light for Marie to see herself in the few reflective surfaces she had in the tent, but she knew what they’d have shown: messy mousy-brown hair that reached half way down her back in waves, nut-brown eyes, good skin despite the hours she’d spent digging through sand and dirt every day for the past month. There’d be a tan coming in too; Tunisia might once have been part of France but its climate was a far cry from her native Dijon.

  A chinking sound informed her that the empty wine bottle had rolled up against her spectacles and she slipped them into her pocket as she rubbed her eyes and yawned. Pulling on her sturdy pair of boots she grabbed the shovel that served as a digging tool both for work and for her private business and stooped as she exited the tent.

  It really was too quiet.

  But she wasn’t going to complain about that as she began to pace away from the tents to find a spot to answer nature’s call. She frowned as the ground felt too hard and level beneath her feet, then almost tripped as her foot snagged on something solid.

  “Merde.” She juggled spade and glasses as she finally went to put them on, and heard movement and scraping off to one side. “Benny, if you are being careless with the bones again I will email Professor Stefánsson and have you written up!”

  Shuffling and the scuffing of feet on stone were her only response. She finally managed to get the lenses in front of her eyes as she turned to berate Benny.

  “Just because this is not a true historic digsite, does not me-AaAAAaArrRrGhHhH!”

  It was harder to tell who was more surprised in the moment: Marie, or the skeleton that stared back, empty sockets giving her a view of the inside of its skull in the thin grey light that shone through thick clouds overhead.

  The logical part of Marie’s brain shut off, and all she could think to say was “aaaAAARGH!” as instinct took over and she swung the shovel two-handed as hard as she could into the skeleton’s face.

  With a cracking clang, the skull was smashed off the top of the undead’s spinal column even as its hand reached out and dug into her arm.

  She screamed again and flinched back, eyes wide as the rest of the skeletal body clattered to the ground, whatever had been animating it failing as its head sailed over a nearby wall.

  Marie looked round, panting, and realised that this was not where she'd lain down to sleep.

  Putain, with what she was seeing, she was struggling to think it was even real.

  Grey skies. Wrecked stone buildings covered in dust and scorch marks. The ruins of a cobbled road beneath her feet.

  And a skeleton. A skeleton had attacked her.

  A shuffling over her shoulder made her spin, shovel raised.

  More than a hundred undead filled the square behind her.

  She took in the scene in an instant, processed the fact that half were beginning to look her way, turned around, and ran for her life.

  Images flashed before her eyes as she ran, glasses bouncing and sending her surroundings out of focus.

  Pain as she collided with a collapsed wall.

  A street full of bodies - dead but moving.

  Rubble, blocking her path.

  A row of houses, their fronts blasted off by an unimaginable force.

  More skeletons, with unnatural skulls - beastlike and squat.

  An alleyway, colder than the other passages, where frost formed on the walls.

  Thumping as footsteps from a creature too large to be human passed just out of sight.

  Her own arms, swinging a shovel as she turned down a road and ran into a trio of skeletons, fighting them off long enough to turn and run the other way.

  By the time exhaustion began to overcome panic, she’d been fleeing for almost an hour. She paused to catch her breath in the shadow of a ruined tower and realised she no longer needed to pee at the same time as she felt the cooling stain on her jeans.

  “Merde.”

  There was no time to do anything about it though, as the rattling of bones echoed from a nearby street. She needed to keep moving, but she couldn’t run all day.

  The stinging laceration on her arm had faded into a dull ache and the trickle of blood had almost stopped. The vision in her right eye was off for some reason.

  She whispered aloud to herself, if only to have some sense of normalcy or sanity in this dead and forsaken place.

  “Ok Marie, problems. We have a lot. First thing, find a place to stop and take stock. You’re dig-site fit, not runner fit. Find somewhere free from these… bones. That’s all they are. Moving bones. They are not fast. You can hit them. But they are not stopping. So, find a place to hide.”

  With an effort that was as much mental as physical, she fell away from the wall she’d been pressing herself up against and forced her tired and blistering feet to move at a slow, shuffling jog, spade held up as a barrier to anything she might run into.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  This time she took stock of her surroundings and analysed what she was seeing.

  A large structure, detached from the surrounding buildings but nearby. A warehouse or storage facility of some kind? The space inside was entirely open from what she could see through gaping holes in the wall as she ran past, panting as she spoke to herself.

  “Must have been a fairly advanced culture to build something of that scale with no internal support. Too exposed though.”

  At the corner of the ruined building she came to a crossroads. Ahead and to her left were the telltale rake-thin silhouettes of these… creatures… which left her with only one option.

  Turning to the right she hurried down a narrower street. Collapsed walls and strewn rubble speaking to terraced buildings - houses? Glancing into one as she rushed by, two smaller skeletal figures all but confirmed her instinct. She was almost at the next junction when a large figure shambled into view a hundred yards ahead of her.

  It had to have been more than eight feet tall, and wide to match. Even from this distance the bones of its arms looked thicker than her full leg.

  More terrifying than that though, its canines were twice as long as a human’s would have been, and its jaw and cranium both extended uncharacteristically far. It resembled a bipedal bear more than any relation of homo-sapiens she knew of.

  She froze in the shadow of a house marginally more intact than the others - which meant a full half of its front wall was standing.

  The road split twenty yards ahead, leading left or straight on to where the undead monstrosity was walking out from. To avoid it she’d have to hope it turned round or risk a dash for the left street and pray it didn’t notice her.

  Marie considered her options and chose a third, slipping through the empty doorway of the ruined house she stood beside.

  Creeping across the wreckage and rubble, she positioned herself where she could see out of what once must have been a window. Perhaps a dining room window if the structure at the back was a chimney, or perhaps the kitchen given the size of the place. She had a good view down the street and cursed when the monstrous skeletal figure continued heading in her direction with no signs of deviation.

  Had it seen her?

  Marie had seen too many horror films to risk crouching in fear beneath the wreck of the window ledge and instead began to pick her way through the collapsed rearmost rooms as quickly and quietly as she could.

  She cursed as her foot shifted on a loose rock but kept creeping further up and back from the road. If she could clamber round and up to the remains of the first floor wall…

  …she stifled another curse as she reached the back of the house, wedging her knee between what was left of the chimney and a petrified timber that must have been part of the roof at one stage.

  The curse died on her lips and a shiver of fear began as she suddenly saw where the left road led to.

  Her vantage point was only one storey up but given the state of most of the rest of the surrounding city, and the fact that this row of houses had been on a slight incline, the view - or the extent of it she could see with the vision of one eye off - covered more than a mile.

  The city was huge. Bigger than Dijon. Maybe even bigger than Paris.

  And it was full of the dead.

  She gave a silent prayer of thanks that she hadn’t followed the road and turned left. Just past the end of the houses was a bridge that crossed a river of sludge - with things moving under the surface. Across the bridge the street continued on, widening into an avenue lined with the wreckage of shops or houses or taverns or warehouses. Further in she could even make out what could have been walled manors, towers and maybe…temples? But packed densely as the living in any capital city on Earth were thousands upon thousand of undead. Not just humanoid ones either. Just on the other side of the river she picked out skeletal knights on undead horses, and not much further off were colossal skulls and scapula rising above the ruins of houses that put those bodies at two or three stories tall. There were even shapes flapping ungainly through the skies, though thankfully not this far out.

  The hint of a sparkle in the far distance suggested this had once been a port city, but her eye was drawn further in, closer to the centre of the city.

  Something was there.

  Something truly massive.

  Miles off from where she hugged the crumbling walls of an ancient house in terror, something moved, and she saw the shape of something that would have dwarfed even the largest buildings had they still been standing, and the rational part of her mind fled and left her trembling.

  The pain of her knee smashing into the stone of the chimney brought her focus back to the tenuousness of her position and she shut her mind off from thinking of what lay deeper in this city of the dead, but her heart almost stopped again as the grey brick she’d knocked up against shifted and then began to tumble to the floor below, leaving her with only a second to act.

  It could have caught on the edge before it fell. It could have dropped onto a pile of dust with a silent thump. It could have slid down to rest next to hundreds of its kin.

  It did none of these things.

  The stone clattered down to the ground floor, sending a scree of rock lumps and dust down with it, the noise ringing in out in the silent street.

  Silent save for the thump of overly-large bone feet stomping down the ruined cobblestones.

  Except for a few moments now, those feet stopped.

  Outside the house she was hiding in, Marie could sense the attention of the undead creature. She could see a vague shadow on the half-collapsed wall that had once been the side of the house and in a panic ducked into a gap in the chimney.

  Then there was nothing she could do except brace herself with all her might and pray.

  Seconds stretched to minutes.

  Her legs began to cramp. Stone was pressing into her palms and knees hard enough to bruise, if not draw blood. Muscles in her ribs and stomach screamed in agony, which was nothing compared to the pain of the cut in her arm when it reopened from the tension. Her foot slipped an inch.

  Five minutes must have passed before the lumbering skeleton passed on and his footfalls faded into the distance, and another minute for Marie to relax from her position.

  The young French woman slid out of the bottom of the chimney and collapsed in a heap, muscles and joints on fire from holding herself suspended in such a cramped place. A cloud of ancient ash followed her, coating her hair and face and clothes, with a few more bits of masonry tumbling after to smash against her back as she lay in the rubble trying to recover.

  As the last of the debris settled she let out a relieved groan, but something had registered on her senses as she’d lain there, and when she finally managed to lever herself up into a sitting position she looked around until she found the source of the only sound she’d heard since she’d first run screaming that wasn’t an unwelcome one.

  The clink of small bits of metal on metal.

  Marie knew that sound. It was one every archaeologist fresh out of university would be ecstatic to discover on their first dig.

  Marie’s first and only, and current dig since leaving university, had been for a private individual wanting to unearth old film sets in Tunisia. She’d resigned herself to the academic ignominy of the task - who wanted to dig up a fibreglass krayt dragon foot when true relics of ancient civilisations lay beneath the desert sands? - but she’d justified the work with the knowledge that she could stay on and get involved with some digs of her own after.

  She wasn’t in Tunisia any more. She wasn’t even on Earth to her best knowledge. But the sound of money was the sound of money….assuming this civilisation had used metallic currency.

  She was exhausted, but she found she had the energy to dig through the debris until her fingers felt the unmistakable form of a leather pouch.

  It was intact, which was a marvel given the lack of any organic matter she’d come across since waking. She pulled open the drawstring with delicate fingers that she forced to stop trembling through sheer willpower, and tipped the contents into one hand, focusing on them with her left eye as she realised the right lens of her glasses had cracked some time in her flight.

  There was more than she’d thought from the weight. Half a dozen coins in different types of metal and a range of sizes, and a palm-sized stone with a strange carved symbol in the centre.

  “Some sort of ward or charm? Not uncommon for superstitious civilisations.”

  Her breath was ragged. Dry.

  Marie looked up through the collapsed roof to the dull grey sky, considered the city around her and the teeming hordes of undead.

  “Doesn’t seem like it worked.”

  She began chuckling to herself, then laughing. Hysterically. She clamped her hands over her mouth to stifle the sound as she rolled on the broken floor and ash, tears leaking from the corners of her eyes. She gave a final heaving series of guffaws into her cupped hands and passed out.

  [Fighter Class Obtained!]

  [Fighter Level 2!]

  [Skill – Basic Proficiency: Improvised Weapons gained!]

  [Skill – Swift Blow gained!]

  [Scholar Class Obtained!]

  [Scholar Level 1!]

  [Skill – Baseline Appraisal gained!]

  For a moment, the shock roused her, but all Marie managed before blackness overtook her again was a profound “Huh?”

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