"O'CONNOR!!!!!"

Aaron's name echoed through the Bowland Fells as Bloodletter continued screaming angrily. If he ever ran into him again, his life would be over before he could completely turn.

"No, no, no, no..." Aaron repeated to himself as he raced through the forest. He was wheezing and panting with exhaustion, probably the last few times he ever would.

He could see the destroyed hospital coming up beyond a path between two trees. He crossed through the trees, officially entering the Dead Center. Only a few Deadmen stood around the area. Aaron's heart ached when he noticed most of them were women and children.

He rarely saw undead children and he loathed encountering them. Not only were they the least reluctant to attack, the DZI were ordered to kill them on sight. The worst part was the fact that they had to use blades to commit a silent strike so they couldn't alert the other Deadmen. So when the job was done, you'd have the corpse of a child with a stab wound or deep incision in its head.

Aaron scanned the buildings around him. He wasn't awake when Harry took him to the Dead Center; he'd fainted at a shack in the middle of the woods. He could be anywhere in the Bowland Fells, and night was falling. He needed a motorcycle or even a simple bike to make it back to Matheson.

Most of the buildings around him were old shops. Each building was a two-story brick building that was either a cafe or a fish and chips shop. There were also two empty pubs, but he wasn't in the mood for a drink. However, next to one of the pubs was a closed garage. There was a small gap at the bottom of the garage door propped open by a cinderblock.

Aaron ran to the garage door, ignoring the suspicious views of the Deadmen around him. They seemed more like unknowing citizens witnessing a crime in progress rather than the flesh-eating monsters Aaron used to see them as. He struggled to push the door up, but several seconds later he sent it back up to the roof.

The inside of the garage was finally revealed to him. In the middle of it was a motorcycle, just like Aaron was hoping for. At the end of the garage was a desk with a lantern and a toolbox on it. Even a dusty radio sat in the corner.

"Well that's convenient," Aaron told himself. "Now, if this baby actually works, that'd be great."

Aaron walked into the garage and approached the motorcycle. He detached the chains and slowly rolled the motorcycle out of the room, still keeping the kickstand on the floor. He went back in to grab the lantern, additionally finding a note.

The note pretty much proved that things were mostly going Aaron's way that night, even at the sacrifice of another person's luck.

To the lucky/unlucky bastard who found this (unless you ignored this note and went ahead and stole my bike), congratulations! You have a ride out of this shithole of a forest. I doubt you have enough time to think about this, but you may be wondering what happened to the wanker who wrote this. That's easy: I'm dead.

Don't worry. I'm upstairs in my bed with a bullet in my brain, so there's no way they can get me. And I never had a family to care about or kill out of mercy. Now you just need to worry about getting your arse to safety. I put enough gas in the bike to get you to the closest Babel Towers (Lovecraft and Matheson, I think) and back. And there are matches in the drawer underneath this if you need to light the lantern. Good luck, mate.

And whatever you do, beware of the Man in the Red Mist! You can carry a weapon or cover yourself in Deadman blood, but you're royally fucked if that Bloodletter creature sees you.

- (names aren't important anymore)

"That's a real gent," Aaron said. "Kinda wish I could pay him back in some way."

He opened up the drawer beneath the note. Just as promised, there was a matchbox. He pulled it out and closed the drawer. He grabbed the lantern and returned to the motorcycle.

He hung the lantern off the front of the bike and lit it, creating a makeshift headlight since the real one was broken. With the key already inserted in the ignition, he turned the vehicle on, stuttering to life.

"What are you doing?" a Deadman said with a high-pitched voice. Aaron looked toward the open door to find the one thing he dreaded as much as an Abnormal. A Deadman child.

The boy looked no older than ten. He was bald and wore ripped overalls. Like all Deadmen, he had the same colorless eyes, pale-greenish skin, and dry blood lodged between his teeth. Yet like most children, he had a sense of harmlessness and innocence. It would've been impossible for Aaron to kill him.

"I need to get out of here," Aaron replied, turning his view away from the kid to decrease the fear. "Bloodletter wants to kill me."

"The Man in the Red Mist?" the child asked.

"Yeah. There's a reason why that mist is red."

"But you have nothing to be afraid of, sir. He says he'll leave us alone if you leave him alone."

"I broke that rule as soon as I came here."

"He can't hurt you, sir. You're one of us."

Aaron's heart nearly stopped. He knew this kid was trying to be sympathetic, but those were the last words he wanted to hear. Being compared to a Deadman wasn't his idea of comfort.

"I am nothing like you people," he growled, keeping his voice low to avoid becoming angry. "And until the day I die, I never will be."

He sped away from the undead child and drove down the path leading through the Dead Center. He traded looks with the Deadmen around him, all of them staring like they've never seen a motorcycle before. Meanwhile, he was trying to keep himself balanced. This was the third time he's ridden on a motorcycle and he broke his leg the first two times after toppling over at high speeds.

He took what he hoped was his last glimpse of the Dead Center before disappearing into the forest. After passing by several rows of trees, he was surrounded by darkness. The orange glow of the lantern was the only thing lighting his path.

There was no road. The only thing beneath the motorcycle were rocks and dirt, some of which almost bumped Aaron off his ride. The darkness of night surrounded him, with only the dim white glow of the moon lighting his path. The trees around him stood above like giants, their branches hanging low like hands trying to grab him.

"I'm not lost," he whispered to himself as he continued driving through the woods. "I swear to God I am not lost."

He was about a mile away from the Dead Center and he started noticing corpses lying around him. Most of them had bullet holes in their skulls, remnants from a DZI attack, but others were almost clean of injuries. He knew waking them up would be a bad idea.

Fortunately for him, he found a road coming up behind the trees. Now that he had a better look at it, he realized it was the same road he and the DZI took to Longridge the day before. However, he didn't remember the corpse impaled on a tree branch being there.

"What the hell?" he said.

The motorcycle flipped over after crashing into a rock, sending Aaron flying off the bike. He crashed to the ground, banging his foot against the same rock that took down his ride. The lantern landed beside him with a crack, and the kerosene started dripping down the side like wax on a candle.

"Seriously?!" he exclaimed, staring at his crooked foot. This marked the third time he broke a bone while riding a motorcycle. "I didn't even feel it!"

He pulled his leg closer to him as he waited patiently for his foot to shift and crack back into its correct position. He switched his view back to the corpse. A tree branch was gored through its stomach. Loops of intestines hung out of the large hole in its abdomen. Aaron noticed that it wore a DZI uniform and had a bite mark on its wrist.

The corpse snapped to life, frantically waving its arms all over the place. "I swear I wasn't asleep!" it exclaimed.

Aaron fell back. He frantically looked around for the lantern and pulled it closer to him once he found him.

"Hey, mate, what are you doing with that fire?" the impaled Deadman asked, ignoring the branch digging through his stomach.

Once Aaron's foot had healed, he leaped off the ground and charged toward the Deadman while he was vulnerable. He lobbed the lantern toward the Deadman like a shot put and watched as it shattered to pieces against the tree, the flame quickly engulfed the creature and the tree he was stuck on.

Thanks to the Deadman blood coursing through Aaron's veins and his newfound ability to speak to the dead, he learned a horrifying truth as he watched the Deadman burn to his second death. He was screaming. And not just any kind of scream. One filled with genuine, unbearable pain.

"Holy sh..." Aaron tried to say, but he cut himself off. He felt like he just burnt a living human at the stake.

"HELP ME!" the Deadman screamed in agony. "HELP MEEEEEEE!"

Aaron pulled the motorcycle back up and quickly zoomed out into the road, doing everything he could to ignore the pain he caused this Deadman. He never thought he'd ever say that sentence in his entire life. For the longest time he believed they couldn't feel pain.

But now he knew the truth. Then he connected the dots. The Brit's Guide he read hours earlier stated how fire was the Deadmen's main weakness. He also realized why they screeched louder and more dissonant when set ablaze.

Fire was the only thing that could cause a Deadman to feel pain.

Would you look at that? he thought to himself. I guess there really is a little bit of human still left in them.

He stayed silent for the entire ten minute ride back to Matheson. A few more morbid thoughts helped him reach the tower, and he didn't realize he was approaching it soon until after he noticed the disappearance of trees. Matheson was in a field almost devoid of trees, and the only trees there surrounded the clearing like a bowl.

Shit, Aaron thought. How am I supposed to get back in?

He thought of sneaking in with the DZI, but the chances of getting his ass kicked were too high. He drove around the tower and saw that the window he fell out of was still open. Was anyone even paying attention to it?

He jumped off the bike at the last second, letting it crash into the stream trailing beside the tower. He ran to the wall of the tower. Fortunately for him, he only had to climb two stories and the exposed pipes and railings that supported the wall worked to his advantage as he climbed the building.

Once he reached the top, he jumped through the hole and stared back through it, thinking about whether or not he should close it. It could be his secret entrance and exit to and from the Dead Zone, but he didn't want to run into Bloodletter again.

He closed it.

He ran to the elevator and waited for it to ascend to his floor. As soon as the doors parted, he rushed through the hallway, burst into his flat, and locked the door behind him.

The first thing he did was look at his reflection in his mirror. He was more pale than ever and his sleeve had a massive tear from when Bloodletter tried to slice his arm off. Dry blood dotted his exposed shoulder and his ankle.

All in one day he tried to eat someone's hand, almost got killed by that same man, survived multiple encounters with Deadmen, witnessed them in all of their gory glory, and even encountered the infamous Bloodletter himself. If he were in the DZI, this would've been the most fun he had in years.

But since he was no longer special, he was only Aaron O'Connor, soon-to-be-Deadman and declared traitor.

He slid to the floor, curled up into a ball, and cried.