He did eventually fall asleep, despite himself, but it was a fitful sleep, full of dark and unpleasant dreams. When he finally woke up -- not in his own bed, but on the floor of a grimy underground police station in this zombie hell-world -- he swore. He had been half-hoping that the events of the previous day had been a dream.

  Lucky was still snoozing, so Stu woke him up. Immediately, his eyes snapped open and he started scrambling for his railgun. "What? Where?"

  "Relax," Stu said. "It's morning."

  The kid relaxed, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. "Morning? Oh."

  "Don't you think we should get moving?"

  "Yeah. Yeah, let's get out of here." He yawned, hitched up his pants, and collected his things, while Stu grabbed his own duffel bag. They left the police station and made their way across the platform, to the exit. The morning light, streaming down from the surface, was so bright that Stu had to shield his eyes, and it took several minutes for him to make the adjustment.

  Emerging from the underground, they found themselves standing on a long, straight avenue in a neighborhood full of old brick buildings. The enormous skyscrapers Stu had seen earlier were about a mile away.

  There didn't seem to be any zombies on this street -- at least, none that he could see. The street itself was cluttered with ruined vehicles, however, some of which looked very strange to Stu's eyes. They were long, with slender bodies and futuristic stylings, and they didn't have wheels. They looked vaguely like miniature F-16's.

  "What kinds of cars are those?" Stu asked Lucky. "The ones without wheels."

  "Gliders," he replied.

  "Gliders? You mean they hover over the ground?"

  "Yeah."

  "How does that work?"

  "Grav boosters. Gliders have dynamo engines built into 'em. Didn't they have gliders in your world?"

  "No. I think your technology might have been a little bit more advanced than ours. We didn't have railguns, either...or maybe we did, I don't know, but they weren't common, anyway."

  "And there were no zombies, where you came from?"

  "No. Well, I mean, they existed, but only in fiction -- books and movies and stuff. They weren't real."

  "So your world was like our world, before the outbreak."

  "Sort of. Like I said, we didn't have some of the things you have, like hover cars or dynamos. Just what the hell is a dynamo, anyway?"

  "It's a kind of engine that runs on dynamo fluid. They're great. They're really efficient, and you can use 'em to power all kinds of things, like net sets and water pumps and and grav boosters. They were invented about twenty years ago." He sighed longingly. "They were just starting to replace cars with gliders when the outbreak happened."

  "Oh." The interdimensional portal which Virge and Wayman had opened, and the ICON system implanted his mind, were probably also examples of this superior technology, although the existence of these things, apparently, was not widely known -- Lucky, after all, had dismissed his whole story as a fantasy. And while flying cars and railguns and alternate energy sources were relatively easy to understand, he had no idea how something like the ICON system might work.

  Reminded of the system, he opened up the menu as he walked and started scrolling through the skills, trying to decide how to spend the four SP he had acquired after killing the Brute. Once again, he was struck by indecision -- should he buy several "cheap" skills, like Artful Dodger or Silence, or should he use his points to buy a more expensive (and potentially more useful) skill? He had always had trouble deciding these things when he played video games, but this was real life, and he didn't want to make any rash decisions.

  He only had two skills so far: Night Vision and Dead Aim. Both were useful, but both had limitations -- Night Vision could only be used for thirty minutes a day and Dead Aim could only be used once a day. It would be nice to have a skill that didn't have these kinds of restrictions.

  Unfortunately, most of the combat skills did have these restrictions, or similar ones -- "Chainsaw Ballet", "Guns Blazing", "Boulder Smasher", and "Marksman" could only be used once a day, although it was possible to use some of them multiple times a day by allocating additional skill points to them. Others, like Night Vision, had time limits -- "Turtle" would briefly increase his defense stat by 100%, and "When In Rome..." would allow him to blend in with zombies, but only for fifteen minutes at a time with the base skill.

  There were exceptions, though. "Strong Arm" and "Speed Freak" would both permanently enhance his strength and speed, respectively, and "Regeneration" would allow him to rapidly heal from injuries. He recalled that Virge's wounds had started sewing themselves back together after his fight with the mutate; the man had probably possessed this Regeneration skill. Even better, there were no apparent restrictions on it; it could be used as often as he liked. Unfortunately the base Regeneration skill cost twenty SP, and so was far out of his reach right now.

  The base Strong Arm and Speed Freak skills each cost 2 SP, however; he could afford these. And the idea of increasing his strength and speed appealed to him -- just how strong and how fast would these skills make him? Virge had been superhumanly tough; he remembered how the man had dragged him over the counter and how he hadn't even flinched when Stu had punched him in the face.

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  He worried that the base skills would enhance his strength and speed only slightly, though, and that he wouldn't notice much of a difference unless he maxed them out.

  He continued scrolling through the list of skills. Some of them were very strange -- "Sniffer" would enhance his sense of smell; "Dangerous Trade" would swap his HP with his total SP, allowing him to use more skills at the expense of his health; and "Zombie Master" would give him the ability to "hypnotize" a single zombie and make it do his bidding. There were also skills that had nothing to do with fighting or enhancing his physicality -- "Don Juan", for example, would make him more attractive to women, and "Wild Kingdom" would give him a rapport with animals. The idea of making himself irresistible to women was certainly intriguing, but it was another very expensive skill, costing twenty-five points, and in this zombie-world he was more worried about surviving than seducing women.

  He finally decided to buy the Strong Arm skill, while keeping his remaining points in reserve. He didn't want to burn through his skill points as quickly as he acquired them; he wanted to save up for something like Regeneration.

  He confirmed his purchase of Strong Arm, and almost immediately a strange sensation rolled over him -- he felt his muscles stiffen and tense for a second, almost as if some kind of electric charge had raced through his body. And then, just like that, it was gone, the sudden stiffness melting away.

  So was he stronger now? He touched his chest and biceps, but they didn't feel any bigger. Looking around for a way to test his strength, he spotted a small, broken-down car on the street -- the vehicle looked like it weighed at least a ton -- and reached beneath it. It took considerable effort, but to his surprise, he discovered that he was able to lift one side of the car off the crumbling asphalt with just one arm. He got it about a foot off the ground.

  It wasn't exactly Superman-level strength -- a really good weightlifter could probably do something similar -- but he was pretty sure he wouldn't have been able to do something like this before. Stu had never lifted weights in his life.

  But how did it work? Was there a rational, scientific explanation for all this? How could pressing a button on a menu suddenly give him the strength to lift three or four times his own weight?

  Was this whole world just a simulation after all? Was he stuck in some kind of game? It felt completely real -- the sights, the sounds, the smells, the sensations. The morning air was cool; the sun was still low on the horizon. He could hear seagulls crying in the distance. His new jacket, which he had taken off the subway, retained its bad smell. And up ahead, Lucky, who hadn't noticed him picking up the car, was chattering away, explaining something about how dynamo engines worked.

  "It's too real," Stu muttered to himself. He set the car back down, as gently as he could.

  Lucky glanced back at him. "You comin'?"

  "Yeah. Sorry."

  They walked for a few minutes more. "You said the Harbor's not far away?" Stu said.

  "It's six or seven blocks east of here."

  "How many people live there?"

  "About a hundred."

  "Is that a lot?"

  "It's not a big settlement," he said. "But it's not a small one, either. Beggar's Town is the biggest village in Meku, and it probably has about five hundred people."

  "How many settlements are there in the city?"

  "I don't know. A dozen, maybe."

  "A dozen," he repeated quietly. "There must have been millions of people in this city before the outbreak. Now there's maybe a few thousand left, living in these little villages?"

  "Plus the gangs," he said.

  "Tell me about them."

  "The gangs? There's not much to tell. They rob, they steal. They get off on killing zombies, although they're usually not very good at it. Some of them are slavers, too, but there's not too many slave gangs around anymore. The Banshees killed the worst slavers years ago, and slaves are expensive, you know? You have to feed 'em."

  Stu was a little unnerved -- the kid was talking about slavery as casually as he might talk about the weather. He couldn't imagine what it must have been like to grow up in this world.

  "Anyway, the biggest gangs are the Pale Riders, the Wild Pack, the Banshees -- the Banshees are all girls, did I mention that? -- the Bad Guys, the Bladers, and the RNT's. They're always fighting each other, fighting over territory."

  "Which of the gangs run the Harbor?"

  "None," he said. "Harbor is sort of independent. We have an arrangement with the Pale Riders -- they keep the Wild Pack out -- but there's not that many Riders on this side of town, so we have to have our own security, too. Penelope's in charge of that." He frowned. "Of course it's not just the gangs we have to worry about."

  "Zombies?"

  "Yeah. We can handle the ordinary zombies, most of the time, and the Harbor's pretty quiet anyway. Irregulars, though...they can be a problem."

  "Like the Brute?"

  He nodded. "We get bombers and ragers sometimes, too."

  "What about mutates?"

  "Mutates are rare," he said. "I've only seen a couple in my life."

  It seemed like a sensitive subject -- his head was lowered, and his eyes were sad -- so Stu didn't press him for any more details. Instead, he concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, and they continued on, headed east.

  They spotted zombies, occasionally, in the distance, shuffling through the ruined city, but they had no trouble avoiding them -- Lucky, who seemed to know these streets pretty well, was always taking them through some dark alley or cut-across, which kept them out of sight and out of trouble. They climbed over fences, up fire escapes, through derelict buildings, and over rooftops. It was on one of these rooftops that Stu finally got his first really good look at the city's skyline, which was impressive -- there were hundreds of large skyscrapers clustered together in the downtown area. Meku City was at least as big as New York, maybe bigger -- a huge megalopolis stretching north to south, from one end of the horizon to the other.

  That was looking west, however. To the east lay a vast, sparkling sea -- this world's version of the Atlantic Ocean, perhaps -- glittering brightly under the morning sun. This was the direction they were headed.

  "We're almost there," Lucky said, as they climbed down from the rooftop. They made their way down a few more streets and alleys; Stu suddenly realized that they were very near the waterfront. Finally, on turning a corner, Stu found himself looking up at the remains of a huge, makeshift gate, made up of sandbags, barbed wire, trash bins, pieces of lumber, and junked cars, which had been built up in the middle of the street. Most of it had been torn down; there was debris all over, and it was obvious that a battle had taken place here recently -- there were a handful of bodies and body parts lying around. The gate itself, such as it was, had been blown open, probably by some kind of explosive -- there were black burn-marks on the street, and some of the surrounding debris was smoldering.

  Lucky was staring at the ripped-open gate, open-mouthed. "What...what happened here?"

  "This is Harbor?" Stu asked.

  "This is the Highwater Gate," he said. He was obviously in shock. "Where's Penelope? Where are the Harbor Guards?" He started checking the bodies, turning them over to see if he recognized anyone. He recoiled when he saw one man's face. "Ben? Oh, shit, shit. What the hell happened?" He looked up suddenly, his eyes full of fear. "Luna. Where's Luna?" And without a word to Stu, he ran off, through the open gate, headed for the large warehouses that lay beyond it.

  Stu had no idea what was going on, but whatever it was, it was obviously trouble. Gritting his teeth -- and doing his best to ignore the smell of rotting flesh and burning debris -- he followed the kid into the compound.