Free Deadman's Switch & Sunder the Hollow Ones by Saul Tanpepper

quickly move away from Reg. I can feel his eyes tracking me, full of worry. I have a feeling he’s going to be watching me very closely.
    We find a single complement of limbs—or limb parts, anyway; too much is missing—but no sign of a second body, whether dead or alive or otherwise. No second skull, no clothes, no nothing.
    â€œThat was one hungry, hungry zombie.”
    Kelly steps away from us and begins making a circuit of all the doors in the hallway. He cocks his head at each one, listening. They’re all closed except for the one that Mabel was using as a makeshift quarters before she died; the door to that room has been propped open with a piece of cardboard stuck underneath it since before I escaped. The computer server room also stands open, the pieces of the door Reggie and Jake destroyed stacked up against the wall. Kelly approaches this room with extreme caution before peeking inside.
    â€œClear.” He starts the circuit again, this time placing an ear against each door and gently tapping.
    â€œWhat’re you doing now?” Reggie asks. “Is he always this thorough?”
    I shrug.
    â€œWe found one body. Which means one person is unaccounted for. They could be hiding in one of these rooms,” Kelly quietly explains. “We don’t know if they’re infected or not. If they are…” He clears his throat. “They may not be. Anyway, now that the doors are all locked again, they won’t be able to get back out. Either way, we need to know.”
    â€œI say screw them.”
    After Kelly finishes the entire circuit, he shakes his head. “Didn’t hear a thing. No active zombies, anyway. Now comes the hard part.” He exhales deeply through his nose and looks at us.
    â€œWhen’s it going to get easier?” Reggie asks.
    We go through and inspect each room thoroughly, one by one. It takes a half hour and we find nothing. They’re all empty. The only clue we come across are the man’s shoes inside room 3. They look like they were thrown in there. We each have our theories about what happened, but in the end, we know no more than we did before we found them.
    â€œShoes. Huh. No Link. No other clothes. Weird.”
    â€œThink it’s possible Nurse Bitch ate him?” Reggie asks. “Or her?” His gaze flicks between the dried-up blood on the floor and the blackened smears on the wall where I trapped her against the bed last night. Old blood, not new.
    The IV stand still dangles by its base, still embedded in the drywall where I’d swung it to keep her from biting me when I relieved her of the cardkey. How is it possible that it was only a few hours before?
    â€œA whole person?” Kelly says, shaking his head incredulously. “Bones, clothes and a pair of shoes, too? I’ve never heard of a zombie doing that. It’s mostly the brains they go for.”
    â€œYeah, but we don’t really know what we’re dealing with here, do we?”
    Kelly frowns. “What do you mean?”
    â€œNurse Bitch,” he says. “She was, like, ten times faster than I’ve ever seen the Players in Survivalist ever move. Ten times more vicious, too.” He glances quickly at me, and I can’t tell if it’s because I was the one who killed her in the first place or if it’s something more, something related to my family’s personal history with creating the Undead.
    It was my father and grandfather who made the first Reanimates; everyone knows that. Just like everyone knows my father was murdered by one of them as a direct result of what he’d done. I was teased incessantly about it in elementary and middle school, which partially explains why I took up hapkido. I was tired of always being a defenseless victim, the butt of every bully’s taunts. It wasn’t so I could defend myself against the Undead, but so I wouldn’t have to suffer as much from the heartlessness of the