Rachael heard the yells of other teams as more and more orcs began to notice them. She returned to her attacks with renewed determination, focusing only on her strikes and the sound of her breathing. The orcs fell, but where one went down, two more took their place as more and more were drawn to the sound of combat.

Slice, cut, dodge, stab. Her sword and dagger were a blur as she struggled to make a dent in the sea of monsters. Each time there seemed to be a lull, more orcs poured into the courtyard. She didn’t have the luxury of checking on her team to see if the screams were sounds of triumph or of one or more of her people dying.

Then she heard a blood-curdling scream of pain and terror come from the fence.

Rachael’s stomach dropped, and she lunged past the orc she was fighting, sprinting forward. She didn’t stop to fight, instead dodging under outstretched arms and clawing hands, ignoring the decaying faces. Right now she had one focus in mind—the girls at the fence.

The darkness near the barricade made it nearly impossible to see, and Rachael nearly tripped over a fallen orc sprawled on the ground. It snatched at her ankles, catching the leather boots with its sharp nails, unable to break the surface. She stomped on it a few times, driving shards of skull into its brain and silencing it forever.

The screaming had also stopped, though, and Rachael feared the worst.

Shapes moved by the fence, but Rachael couldn’t tell if they were friend or foe, so she sheathed her sword, keeping only her dagger out, not wanting to attack an ally by mistake. Still, when a small form hurtled into her from the darkness, only the sound of all too human sobs stopped Rachael from lashing out with the dagger.

“Kate . . . ?”

The figure nodded.

“Are you okay? Were you bit?”

Kate shook her head. “No, but . . . ” She couldn’t finish, her body wracked with sobs.

“Stay here,” Rachael ordered, and crept forward, counting the bodies along the ground, struggling to see who or what was in front of her.

Cursing the darkness, she pulled a small flashlight from her belt pouch and, holding her breath, flicked it on.

Four figures at the fence turned away from their feast, rotted faces in permanent snarls created by flesh ripped away from bone. She swallowed bile as she recognized the orc’s victims: Eden and Maria’s mother. Their prone bodies were torn open, their ripped clothes soaked with blood.

Rachael lunged forward, thrusting the dagger into the eye of one of the feasting orcs, tore it free and plunged it through the skull of another. She kicked a third into the fence. Pulling up one of the metal stakes providing extra support to the fence, she drove it into the fourth one’s head, before kicking the punctured skull off in time to finish off the remaining one with a power swing into its hideous face.