I was getting used to walking in grassy hills. The upward slopes were usually not so bad that it meant more than reducing conversation for a short time, and the downward slopes offered beautiful views. The sun could be a bit intense in the middle of the day, enough that I took off my jacket, but pausing to rest in the shade of a tree now and then helped, and I saw no reason to think we were going to run out of water. Even when there were no springs in easy sight of the road, Serru could always find one, even on the other side of a hill, by watching the birds and maybe other things I couldn’t entirely follow. I worried a bit about sunburn, but apparently they had a healthy and complete ozone yer and minimal precautions were enough.

  There were several of the kinds of pnts Serru wanted in this area. Two of them in particur were quite localized. One she’d said was a popur cooking herb, and the other was a fungus that was dried and used as a pigment.

  Since the herb grew low to the ground, while the fungus grew in the shadow of rge rocks, that took some concentration. The fungus was easy to identify with its location and colour as clues, but the clumps of ground-level herbs were conversely easy to overlook, since there was rather a lot of low green stuff and to my inexperienced eye they could be mistaken for a couple of others. Watch for one kind of butterfly in particur, Serru had told me, because it liked that pnt, but those weren’t always present as a hint. Fortunately, none of them were problematic to touch, no prickly or stinging bits, no reactive sap.

  So far, I’d gathered something like a dozen of the dye fungus and twice that of the cooking herb. Given that Serru was going out of her way to help me, and spending money on me besides, I really wanted to do whatever I could to make it up to her.

  I came over a rise and around a boulder, and in a hollow spotted a tree that was different. For one thing, it was huge, its widespread branches overshadowing an area that more than equalled some apartments I’d lived in. For another, it was heavily den with a mixture of flowers that ranged from pale-pink buds to deep-rose open blossoms and with round fruit the size of my fist that were cherry-red, the weight of them bowing the branches towards the ground.

  There was someone at it already, picking fruits and pcing them into a satchel-like bag. His back was to me, so about all I could make out was a generally masculine but fairly light build of medium height, and faded clothing in unexpectedly rough shape. Every motion was very deliberate, almost mechanical.

  Would it be rude to retrieve one of the fruits and take it to Serru to ask whether it was something she’d have a use for? It must not be dangerous to touch, at least. And there was a lot of it on the tree. Maybe if I just edged around one side to pick one? Or would it be more polite to say hi?

  While I hesitated, he moved to a different position to access more fruits, and spotted me. After a pause that sted a couple of heartbeats, he began to walk towards me. The speed looked normal, but there was something odd about the gait.

  Come to think of it, there was something just overall odd about this man. His face was sck, completely devoid of expression, like the nerves and muscles were just not getting any kind of signal from the brain telling them what to do. His skin had a greyish tinge, and as he got closer, I could see that it looked rough and dry, with a few cracks that demonstrated no hint of redness or irritation.

  Closer still, I could see how insanely bloodshot the whites of his eyes were, although the blood was darker than it should have been, how sunken and hollow his eyes were, and how dited his pupils were, swallowing any hint of colour. There was none of that indefinable sense of connection when they met mine.

  This was wrong. This was very, very wrong. No one who looked like that should be walking around. We were past medical care and in body-bag territory here.

  What I was seeing and what I knew should be possible collided in my head and fractured any attempt at coherent thought.

  “Uh, sorry, didn’t mean to intrude,” I said, retreating quickly. Anything that was behind me was better than what I was looking at right now.

  He drew a deep breath that rasped on its way in, and I winced. Had he even been breathing before now? I had a sick feeling he hadn’t.

  Could I beat him if I just turned around and ran for it?

  “You’re a newcomer.” There was a whistling wheezing note to it, but it was clearly understandable, more so than some patients I’d had. “Wait.”

  “New doesn’t mean stupid,” I said.

  “We need to talk.”

  “Maybe it’s zombie-ist or something, but not a chance.”

  He stopped where he was, simply looking at me.

  “Fine. I’ll find you ter. No problem if it’s after the Grassnds Quincunx site. Some people understand better after. But it’s important that you get the tutorial.”

  “I think I can learn anything I need from living people.”

  He wheezed a ugh and said, “No.” But he turned around and walked back the way he’d come. Only when there was some distance between us did I realize that I’d shifted my grip on my staff and raised it over one shoulder, like I was prepared to swing. Would I have? I’m not normally violent, but there was nothing normal about that situation in any way.

  That had to have been a zombie.

  Somehow, that was far more viscerally creepy than the rotting, shambling, brain-seeking sort that appeared in movies at home.

  I’d had patients die while I was providing care. I’d been called to scenes where people were already dead. It wasn’t clean and formalized like a showing at a wake; sometimes it was outright nightmare fuel, sometimes just depressing. I wanted them not to have died, usually. I definitely did not want them dead but active.

  Where was the road from here? I was pretty sure I knew the right direction. With any luck, Serru would be on or near it.

  I found the road, and calling Serru’s name brought her into sight on the far side swiftly.

  “There you are,” she said with a smile. “You must have gone some way off the road, you didn’t hear me call you.” The smile faded into a frown. “Are you okay?”

  I sank down on a mid-sized rock and told her about my encounter. I was shaking, I realized betedly.

  “That was a zombie,” she confirmed.

  “Why the hell was a zombie picking fruit?”

  “For the Zombie King, I assume. Those fruits are expensive for more reasons than their rarity. It would be worth trying to gather some to sell. It’s unlikely the zombie will stay in the area for long, or that it would attack two alert adults. Like the mosslings, they target rgely the unwary, distracted, or helpless. You handled that well.”

  “I don’t think I really thought through the idea of zombies. Dead bodies still walking around is just... that’s... just...” I shook my head.

  “Nathan.” Serru crouched in front of me and id a hand on my arm. “I think every world must have unpleasant things in it. This one, well, even the Zombie King’s magic can only sustain animation in the dead for two years at most, and usually less. Then the man you saw will be free to come back properly. It’ll be okay, for him and for you. Come, let’s get away from the road in the opposite direction. I spotted some berry bushes and a more common sort of fruit tree, so there will be water there. We can have some lunch and rest, and decide afterwards about going back to the cardinal tree or not. All right?”

  I nodded, got up, and followed her across the road. Despite the fact that it had never actually touched me, I had the urge to strip down and have a hot shower. I’d be able to wash up to some degree with the water she’d mentioned, but the shower wasn’t an option. Serru said that she enjoyed a hot bath when she was in an inn that offered them, but was perplexed when I brought up needing to shower regurly for basic hygiene. Once I thought about it, I realized that I wasn’t actually sweating, and had no beard growth at all, and my clothes weren’t showing the signs they should, of having been worn non-stop for this long.

  The break, and the chance to sit down and have a handful of berries, and Serru’s absolute calm, all helped my adrenaline to drop back to more normal levels.

  “Sorry,” I said finally. “I honestly am good at keeping my head in a crisis, but you wouldn’t know it by the way I’ve been acting since I got here.” We’d slept outside two nights, now—the second night we’d camped some way from the nearest shelter because it was in use, and while sharing peacefully was a cultural requirement, it would have been awkward. Less than seventy-two hours I’d been here, and it was growing increasingly difficult to tell myself that it was rationally more likely to be something wrong with my brain than something that was really happening.

  “Mm. I believe you. I think there’s a very rge difference between keeping your head when other people are experiencing something terrible, in order to help them as much as possible, and keeping your head when you’re personally in the centre of something difficult to understand and potentially devastating.”

  “Yeah. You’re probably right. Easier to stay calm and detached when you’re a step outside and have the power to do something useful, even if sometimes that’s mostly the power to help someone in the middle of it stay calm.”

  “We should be at the first Quincunx site tomorrow, by my estimate. I hope that after that, we’ll have a better idea whether that will be a viable approach. If not, I have a couple of thoughts regarding people we could talk to. The closest is much farther from here than the Quincunx site, so I still think that’s worth trying first.”

  I nodded. “Thanks. You’ve gone hugely out of your way to help me, despite owing me absolutely nothing, and I’d be really lost without you right now.”

  That made her ugh. “Of all people, you’re surprised that it’s possible to help someone just because they need it and you can? Travelling with you and taking this road specifically is not the hardship you think it is.”

  “It is costing you, though. I’m pretty sure I remember where that amazing tree was. If the fruit’s that valuable, we need to harvest some.”

  “I’d certainly like to, and the zombie has probably left by now, but are you sure you’re comfortable with that?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. There’s no hurry, though.”

  Landmarks are difficult when everything follows the same temptes, but Serru was always paying attention to a lot of things that apparently gave her clues about navigation. More easily than I really expected, we found our way back to what Serru had called a cardinal tree. While we approached with caution, there was no sign of the zombie.

  We gathered quite a lot of the fruit, and ate a couple each ourselves. I had nothing I could compare it to, but it was like just the best bits of a whole sad of fruits, all in harmony. No wonder it was in such demand.

  It was a good thing that items stored in magic inventory bags had no significant weight or bulk, otherwise it would have been another couple of days before we could stagger into the Quincunx. It wouldn’t st forever, but it would still be fresh when we reached the next rge settlement and it was guaranteed to sell for a high price—she estimated that it would be enough on its own to cover what she’d spent on my bag, med kits, staff, and miscelneous smaller items, even without considering the other things we’d been gathering on the way. That went a long way to making me feel better.

  As it was, the terrain changed quite a lot over a short span te that afternoon. The road trended downwards with less upwards to bance it, and finally levelled out entirely. This looked to me like a broad expanse of ancient gcial rock, ft with retively thin soil, more scrubby weeds and wildflowers than grass. Trees grew in the cracks between where they could drive roots deep enough to support them and perhaps to reach water, and the sizes were all on the smaller side. There were a lot of ponds, sometimes so shallow that the bottom was bright with sunlight, sometimes deep and dark and rather ominous-looking. We must be down near the water table, if the concept even applied here. How this whole area could exist in the midst of the smoothly-rolling hills of the Grassnds was a mystery to me, but then, my knowledge of earth sciences was limited.

  It was obviously popur with wildlife. Though we kept our distance, we saw herds of cattle-like critters, antelope-like critters of several kinds, horse-family critters, ostrich-like critters, all with traits that made me think they might be different from the ones in my world but simir enough to be recognizable as the same approximate type. We spotted hares, too, and plump chicken-sized birds that preferred to run, and lizards sunning on rocks. We paused to watch baby bison pying, which was adorably cute. The adults didn’t look entirely unlike the bison I was vaguely familiar with, although I thought their legs might be proportionately longer, but I wasn’t at all sure. Watching random documentaries when I couldn’t sleep meant I had a lot of bits and pieces in my head but wasn’t confident about much of it. I thought there was a broader colour range here too. The babies were fuzzy and reddish or blonde or light yellowish-grey, unlike the darker adults that ranged, in their shaggier front half, from a darker reddish-brown to golden-brown to a bluish-brown and, in a few cases, near-bck, with lighter shades to the shorter fur at the back.

  There were new kinds of pnts to gather on this terrain, and Serru patiently taught me which ones were useful. That kept my mind and hands both busy until we finally camped. We’d passed a shelter, cleverly built of dry stacked stone, but there had been a pair of long-eared horses or donkeys or something tethered outside so we’d quietly gone on. We stopped next to a shallow pond. The tents worked just as well regardless of what was under them, and Serru assured me that thirsty wildlife would ignore us.

  My first two nights had both involved bad dreams of red and white and blue light slicing apart the darkness and someone crying, but that night, that was interspersed with patients dying under my hands and then talking and walking and asking me why I was alive but they weren’t.