But there was no crash, no press of undead corpses stacking up against the door. It was quiet…Had the zombies been too stupid to follow us? That was possible depending on the type and strain, and those had been slow shamblers, the stupidest type I knew of. Or had the Nachtmar’s magical effect worn off? If I opened the door, would they be gone and the casino turned back to normal, or would they be there waiting? I got up, realizing as I did so, it was no longer cold. In fact, it was hot. A deep, thick, muggy heat that made me feel like I was back in Alabama. The sudden temperature change made my skin tingle painfully.

“Heh…” Trip laughed absently. “This is really bad.”

I looked back to the door. Still no zombies. But then I realized what Edward had used to jam the door handles closed. It was a pickax, and the metal tips were coated with congealing blood and tufts of hair. “Trip, where are we?”

“This is where I found out monsters are real…We’re in Florida.” Trip said. “Lord help us, this is my high school.”

John Jermaine Jones, or Mr. J, as he was commonly called back then, had been a teacher at a small-town high school in rural Florida when the zombie outbreak had occurred. Some local teens had antagonized a witch doctor, with gruesome results. The outbreak had been a small one by historical standards, but still bad enough to warrant a Level Three containment by the Monster Control Bureau. Luckily for them, the events had occurred only a few days before a hurricane, which provided a handy scapegoat to explain the number of dead and missing in the media. There had only been a handful of firsthand eyewitness survivors, and all except one had been rather easily intimidated into silence, but that one had been recruited by a private Hunting company and had signed all of the applicable NDAs, so by Monster Control Bureau standards, the Leonard, Florida, outbreak had been handled flawlessly.

Those facts were all irrelevant to Mr. J, who had spent the evening hitting his students in the head with a pickax.

Trip stumbled and crashed into one of the puke-green lockers. He was beginning to hyperventilate. I ran over and caught him before he could slide to the floor. “This isn’t real! Trip, he’s messing with your head. We’re not really here.” Probably.

“I can’t do this again.” Trip grabbed onto my arm so hard that it hurt. “Not this. I had to kill them, Z. I had to kill them all. I tried to save them, but there were too many. I had to leave some of the kids behind.”

“That was a long time ago. You did the best you could. We’re going to walk out of here. This is all an illusion.”