This time when the deer came at them, they were ready.

  There were three deer this time, each with a giant tangle of sharp, pointed antlers on their heads.

  Russell’s group immediately fell back while the rest formed a semicircle around the deer. Nate also positioned himself outside of the circle. This was no time for hand-to-hand combat.

  Graham kept his distance while still remaining a part of the circle. Clearly he remembered his last encounter with the deer. He raised his shotgun to his shoulder and took the first deer down with a single shot.

  The second deer lowered its head and charged straight towards Caroline and her little red cart. Oliver stepped in to intercept and gracefully swung his scythe, severing an artery in the deer’s neck. Oliver’s swing looked as smooth and practiced as Laura imagined he would have delivering a serve on the tennis court.

  The deer tripped over its own hooves, and crashed to the ground as its health bar dropped to zero. It slid and smashed directly into Caroline’s cart. Laura held her breath as the cart was swept to one side and briefly tipped up into two wheels before smashing back down onto all four.

  “Oliver, do you want to set this whole place on fire?” Caroline yelled at him. The jars were still rattling and clanking together from the aftershocks. Deer blood was sprayed across her clothes and face, but it was hard to tell if she even noticed.

  “He would have bulldozed right through that cart if I hadn’t done anything,” Oliver said.

  Meanwhile the third deer was running in circles, clearly aware that he was surrounded by higher level fighters. After a moment of pawing the ground and snorting, the deer broke away and sprinted off through the wall of the corn maze, disappearing with a rustle of stalks and a flick of its tail.

  Everyone stared after it.

  “Never seen a mob just leave a fight like that,” Graham said.

  “For all we know it went to get some friends,” Brett said.

  “This maze is more like a marathon,” Oliver said. “I don’t think that one’s coming back, but there’s going to be plenty of other things to keep us busy.”

  Oliver was right, of course. For the next two hours they worked their way deeper into the maze. At one turn they had to hack through vines with foot-long thorns waiting to snag their clothing and skin. At another turn was a murder of crows that tried to live up to their name. They were only Level 3 mobs, but there were easily a dozen of them, and they were far more clever than the deer.

  Eventually they had to break to sit and take a drink of water. Graham particularly was looking winded. Which is probably why he made the mistake of letting his guard down.

  Both his hands were occupied getting a drink of water, so he’d set his shotgun down on the trampled corn husks next to him. Which meant that when the deer bolted out of the opposite wall of the maze and ran straight at him, he didn’t have the ability to do more than dive out of the way. Even Oliver was caught off guard. He’d been sitting down near Graham, which meant he didn’t have the space he needed for a good swing of his scythe, so he also had to dive out of the way.

  Oliver managed to clear the deer’s path, but Graham wasn’t so lucky. He received a healthy blow to his shoulder and back from the deer’s hoof as it leaped over him, its front hooves coming down right on where Graham’s glasses had fallen to the ground. Without thinking, Graham dove forward to grab for his glasses and ended up getting a kick to the head. He scrambled back, blood pouring down from his forehead.

  The deer wheeled around and thundered towards Laura next, moving so close she could feel the weight of its hooves hitting the dirt, and its hot breath feathered her hair. Unlike some of the others she hadn’t sat down once even though her feet were already aching. As the deer bore down on her, Laura summoned her club from her inventory and threw her entire weight into the swing.

  The sharp end of the embedded nails connected with the deer’s muzzle, and one even buried itself in its eye. The deer dropped to the ground, writhing and frothing at the mouth with the club still attached to its face as its health bar slowly dropped. Blood leaked out of its wounds, staining the ground.

  Everyone stopped and stared at the deer, which thrashed around, seemingly immobilized but still not dead.

  When Laura had first started seriously studying wildlife photography while she was in college, she had started by photographing whatever animals she could find locally, which had meant a lot of foxes, coyotes, deer, etc.

  One day she’d been sitting in a blind waiting for the next interesting photo opportunity to come along when a deer had come into the clearing. The deer had been stumbling oddly, but from her view it looked otherwise perfectly fine. She’d suspected chronic wasting disease until the animal had turned towards her, exposing a massive open wound on its right flank and stomach. Its internal organs were partially hanging out.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  She found out later from a farmer that the wound was probably from the deer getting stuck on a wire fence. “The thing was probably just running on adrenaline,” the farmer had said. “It’ll make them do some crazy things.”

  Laura had won a collegiate-level photography award with those pictures.

  Hannah caught Laura’s eye and nodded. Hannah hadn’t let down her guard either, and had her shotgun ready to go. She braced it against her shoulder and put a single shot right into the deer’s head. It was finally still.

  Laura waited until the health bar dropped to zero and the label converted to Deer Corpse before she approached the mob. She grabbed her club and yanked it free. It came loose with a spray of blood that splattered her face and open mouth. Unlike Caroline though, she couldn’t ignore it. Laura spun around and threw up into the nearest wall of corn stalks. She could only hope it wouldn’t lead to some kind of special retribution by the creatures of the maze.

  “I’ve never liked deer,” Graham panted, still sitting on the ground. “Filthy Disney rats.” Oliver, who seemed to have escaped unscathed, had already gotten up and was checking his scythe over for any damage.

  Caroline helped haul Graham to his feet. The blood had slowed to a trickle down the side of his face. “I suppose we’re all going to have our moments,” he said, holding his broken glasses and dabbing the blood off his forehead with his sleeve. He looked dazed.

  Oliver exchanged a look with Agnes. Laura took a deep drink of water to clear the sour taste of bile out of her mouth, then went over to check on Graham. He was brushing corn silk and some leaves off his slacks. Blood still stained his hair.

  “Are they a complete loss?” Laura asked, indicating his glasses.

  He held them up to show the metal frames were bent, and one side was missing a lens. The other lens was cracked.

  He put them on and closed the eye on the side that was missing a lens. Then he shook his head. “Worse than not wearing them really.” He took them off and the glasses vanished. Presumably into his inventory.

  “How bad’s your eyesight?” Caroline asked. Her arms were folded and she had stuck close to check up on him.

  “I’ve been nearsighted for at least a decade now. It gets a bit worse every year. I can tell each of you apart, but not easily.”

  Laura didn’t even want to ask about what that meant for his ability to aim a shotgun.

  “Why don’t you hang in the back with us,” Russell said gently, tapping Graham on the arm. “Safety in numbers still, right?”

  Caroline had a grim look on her face. If they were meant to be convincing Oliver that sticking together was a good idea and not a liability, they weren’t off to a great start.

  “So what should we expect next?” Caroline asked Oliver and Agnes. She was near the front of the group again, the jars in her red wagon clinking as the wagon bumped over mounds and furrows in the dirt.

  “Hard to say,” Agnes said. “Not sure if it’s changed since we were here. I get the feeling it’s the kind of place to keep you on your toes.”

  Oliver gripped his scythe tighter. He hadn’t relaxed one bit since their surprise repeat encounter with the deer.

  They walked on in silence for a little while.

  “Do you think I was supposed to leave a tip for housekeeping?” Mitch said, finally breaking the silence.

  “Do you always deflect discomfort with humor?” Caroline said back.

  “Yes,” Hannah and Mi-young said at the same time.

  They had taken anything they didn’t want to leave behind but otherwise left their rooms as they were. Laura had made her bed, out of who knew what sense of obligation. As they’d been told on check-in, if they did make it to another area their rooms would be considered vacated. Would the same thing happen to their rooms if they were dead? Maybe that could have been their first clue that Russell and the others were actually still alive, the fact that their rooms were still marked as occupied.

  They rounded yet another corner just to be faced with another empty aisle between the towering walls of corn that stretched away towards another abrupt turn.

  The maze seemed designed to wear a person out while never letting them get too complacent. It was full of long stretches of walking paired with blind turns where you never knew what you’d encounter next. More often than not it was another long stretch of walking.

  Occasionally it would be a dead end that would require them to quickly reshuffle their order and backtrack, always keeping Oliver and Agnes towards the front, and the lower level fighters away from any imminent danger.

  Sometimes it would be something worse.

  Laura should have known they were due for something bad. The last several turns had all been uneventful.

  Even still, she wasn’t prepared for what she saw. Clearly neither were Oliver or Agnes—Laura almost smacked directly into them when they froze in their tracks.

  In the middle of the path ahead, stood Joel.

  He was still wearing his glasses, even though he clearly didn’t need them anymore. His t-shirt was in tatters, hanging open around the gaping stomach wound, which had been stuffed with straw. If his halting movements and the decayed color of his skin and eyes didn’t make it obvious, the new label on him did.

  Reanimated Player - Joel (Level 7)

  Weakness: Beheading

  The corpse mob didn’t have a weapon. Somehow that didn’t make Laura feel any better. Anyone under a Level 7 immediately fell to the back of the group. Nate stepped up next to Laura, ready to fight. Oliver and Agnes however were still frozen in horror, or perhaps guilt, either way seemingly unable to engage with the threat that was slowly moving towards them.

  Laura’s skin crawled, and sadness and rage closed up her throat as she watched the pile of meat that had been Joel shamble towards them, dropping bits of straw as it shuffled along. She felt Nate gently press on her arm, giving her an out if she felt she needed to drop back. She summoned her club instead.

  She remembered how it had felt as the nails on the club sunk into the deer’s muzzle and eye, and hoped she wouldn’t have to use it. But she wasn’t about to make someone else fight when she was able to.

  Graham was the first to break the tension and take a shot. The shot tore away a chunk of Joel’s neck and shoulder, but it didn’t slow it down. Instead it kept moving inexorably towards them.

  “Beheading…” Laura had a sinking feeling in her stomach. “Oliver,” she said. “I think you’re the only one who is possibly equipped for this.”

  Oliver shut his eyes and let out a long breath. He looked borderline queasy, which was uncharacteristic of him. He opened his eyes and stared at Joel. Finally he lifted his scythe and took a step forward.

  Joel’s corpse darted towards the nearest person it could get its hands on, Nate, and bit him hard on the arm. A notification popped up over Nate’s head.

  Debuff: Mind Addled - The affected person will remain disoriented and mindless for a minimum of 60 minutes up to 2 hours depending on severity.

  A 90 minute timer popped up over Nate’s head. His face went slack.

  “What’s wrong with him!” Yelled Mitch, scrambling to put even more distance between himself and the unpredictable reanimated mob.

  Oliver ran to close the distance before Joel could do any more damage, and swung his scythe at the mob, but Joel lurched out of the way. Oliver shifted his grip on the scythe and grit his teeth.

  “Joel, if you’re in there, it’s nothing personal.” And he swung again, hard, this time fully committing to the swing.