An hour later, Lieutenant Ratliff and his team had explored most of the buildings Longridge had to offer. They raided several abandoned pubs and a public library that still had all of its books in place. They only had to kill nine Deadmen so far, all of which were stuck behind the wooden fence of a ranch like cattle.

After killing a tenth Deadman, Ratliff and his group moved on. They walked down the street past a lonely neighborhood of rustic houses and stopped at an abandoned high school. Its main entrance was replaced with a large hole that looked like the result of a grenade. The rest of the building was still in fine shape and its size was big enough to invade the green space of the open field behind it.

"Are you planning on going in there, Lieutenant?" a female soldier asked.

"Of course, Pryor," he replied. "The DZI could use a spacious fortress like this." He then turned to the rest of the soldiers. "All right, lads! Let's explore!"

Ratliff, Pryor, and everyone else entered the building and journeyed down the hallway. The lights weakly flickered, accompanied by a clicking noise with every flicker. Bloodstains covered the wall, some of which looked like it had been purposely smudged all over it like a psychopath's sick idea of art.

"I thought Deadmen want to eat us, not decorate the walls with our innards," one of the soldiers spoke.

"It could've been a human," Pryor replied. "During the outbreaks, some of the bloodiest incidents were caused by the living."

Ratliff followed the trail of blood even when it turned at a corner. The trail kept thinning after a while, but its conspicuous, fading brown color kept their attention.

The DZI reached an intersection in the corridors. Two doors stood on opposite sides of the wall while the rest of the hall continued to the back of the school. The blood stopped in the middle of the left door, where it was messily splattered all over it like an inkblot.

"Holy hell," one of the soldiers said as he stared at the mess.

"What now, Lieutenant?" Pryor asked Ratliff.

Ratliff pulled out his assault rifle. "We split the squad down half and half. Danziger, you'll be leading the other half."

The other soldiers groaned in discontent.

"That's a terrible idea, Ratliff!" Danziger snapped. "If we split up, that'll make us easy prey, especially if there's an Abnormal around here."

"Bollocks," Ratliff said. "There hasn't been an Abnormal since the Spring-heeled Jack attacked during the reclamation of Chipping two years ago. And we killed the bastard anyway."

"All right then. Our funerals."

Danziger brought out his rifle, as did his half of the group, and they kicked through the doors, revealing the hidden room to be a gymnasium. The room itself was shrouded in darkness, but small beams of light entering from cracks in the ceiling revealed gore and mutilated corpses decorating the area like a Halloween attraction gone too far. Everything was morbidly soaked in red, and the smell of rotting flesh filled the room.

"That's fucking disgusting," he gagged. All of the soldiers covered their faces with their masks as they continued deep into the room.

Ratliff and the rest of his men put on their masks and entered the other room. While it wasn't as gruesome as the gym, it was still proof of the chaos that ensued in the past. All of the windows were shattered and some of the glass shards had bits of dry blood on their tips. Several decaying corpses laid peacefully on the floor, but lucky for the DZI each one had a gun wound in their skulls to prevent them from turning. It didn't help that most of the corpses were probably teenagers; to make things more depressing, two of the bodies were a young couple embracing each other with single gun wounds on their heads.

"Well, at least they didn't suffer," one of the soldiers said.

"Look for weapons of any kind," Ratliff ordered.

"Wouldn't it be more respectful if we look for a place to bury these poor children?"

"We'll do it once we've cleared this place of Deadmen. But first off, what the hell is this room?"

Pryor took the lead of the conversation as she retrieved a stethoscope from the neck of a deceased nurse. "From the looks of it, I'm guessing this is the nurse's office."

"Surprised this place isn't filled as much since most people would report to a doctor during an outbreak," Ratliff replied as he checked the room's medicine cabinets.

Gunfire erupted in the gym, followed by loud splashing noises. The cavernous size of the room gave each sound an echo, making it sound more horrific than usual.

"Lieutenant—" Pryor tried to say before Ratliff interjected.

"Nothing we can do about it, Pryor," he said. "Unless they request backup from us, they're fine on their own."

Everyone continued their business as if the violence going on in the other room was just child's play. They spent the rest of the time emptying the medicine cabinets and exploring the other rooms without encountering a single Deadman.

Ratliff and Pryor explored a dilapidated classroom. Books and papers were torn up and scattered all over the room like a bomb set off in a library. There weren't any corpses littering the room, but there was still a surprising amount of blood. The most lurid details were the dark red handprints marked on random pieces of furniture, mostly on the desks and a few pieces of paper.

Pryor picked up one of those bloodstained papers, one that had a small hand smacked down on the lower half of the sheet. The whole page had the same five words repeating on every line all the way to the edge of the sheet, but only the top part of the page was visible because of the blood.

Pryor read them out loud, sending a shiver down everyone's spines:

Beware the brain-dead's bloodletting butchery

"What author wrote that? Mary Shelley?" Ratliff asked jokingly.

"Can't be," one of the male soldiers replied. "First off, she's dead. And secondly, she wasn't known for alliteration."

"I was joking, you wanker."

The violent conflict going on in the gym was still present the whole time, but screams of pain joined in this time. Splattering noises also became more frequent, especially after something crashed into the wall with a loud thud. A puddle of blood leaked beneath the space under the gym doors.

Ratliff, Pryor, and the others abandoned the rooms and made their way back to the gym, Pryor still clutching the suspicious paper in her hand. Three DZI waited outside the doors with their guns out, each of them secretly full of fear due to the massacre hidden in the next room.

"You three, what the hell is going?" Ratliff asked.

"No idea, sir," the one closest to the door replied. "They've been at it for the past thirty minutes and haven't called for backup yet. Seems like things are—"

He was interrupted by the loud crashing of a bloody and beaten DZI soldier flying through the doors. He plopped down to the ground drenched in crimson, and he had a large open wound in his back revealing what looked like his shoulder muscles.

"KILL ME!" he yelled in agony as he grabbed hold of the soldier in front of the door.

"What the fuck happened to you?!" he asked.

"END THE PAIN! USE THE MERCY—"

Two pale, muscular arms abruptly burst out of the doors and dragged both soldiers back into the gym, followed by more horrific screaming and ripping noises.

"Get your guns ready!" Ratliff exclaimed.

At that, every DZI soldier prepared their weapons.

"Ready!" Ratliff continued.

Pryor fearfully repeated the message on the paper over and over under her breath so no one could hear her. "Beware the brain-dead's bloodletting butchery. Beware the brain-dead's blood-letting butchery. Beware the brain-dead's bloodletting butchery..."

"NOW!"

Ratliff kicked the door open and let the bullets loose along with everyone else. Many Deadmen were killed in the crossfire as their heads exploded with the impact of bullets. Their headless carcasses dropped to the floor, adding to the literal pile of bodies crowding up the gym.

Pryor sliced a few heads off with a machete, all the while reciting the message quietly under her breath. "Beware the brain-dead's bloodletting butchery."

After a while, Ratliff noticed some of the targets were falling down easily without needing a bullet to the brain. He also noticed that some of the targets screamed in pain before collapsing to the ground.

"Hold your fire!" he exclaimed, aiming his gun at the ground. However, everyone continued to fire their guns at the targets. "I said hold your fucking fire!"

Everyone finally halted.

The entire gym was a slaughterhouse. Corpses both undead and recent were scattered across the ground in what seemed like an ocean of blood. Dismembered limbs and body parts littered the room, and every skull that belonged to a dead body almost always had a hole in it. A few of the bodies wore DZI uniforms, indicating that there was indeed a body count for the uninfected. To add insult to injury, those corpses were the most brutally ravaged, each one with crude lacerations and deep bite marks on various areas of their bodies. Some even had limbs missing, instead replaced by mangled masses of flesh where the joints used to connect.

Ratliff and the surviving DZI explored the gym for other surviving members. Each one turned their flashlights on and aimed them at the grotesque decorations on the floor. From the way each corpse looked, it would be a miracle if someone survived. In fact, reanimation looked impossible in bodies as disfigured as they were.

Pryor and another male soldier stared down at Danziger, who was now deprived of his legs and was practically drowning in blood. His right hand was covering a bloody wound the shape of a perfect circle in his side while the left hand was grasping onto a knife digging into a Deadman's forehead. He was wheezing with every breath.

"Danziger!" Pryor exclaimed. "What happened?!"

"You people killed me," he replied exhaustedly. He then uncovered the wound in his side and dug into it with his fingers until he pulled out a bullet.

Ratliff stared in horror from far away. He had a feeling the targets went down too easily. Plus, everyone knew Deadmen couldn't feel pain, so the screams occurring during the shooting seemed surprising. The worse part was that Danziger wasn't the only one taken out by his own squad mates. Most of the cleaner DZI corpses were covered in bullet holes.

"What the fuck happened in here?" the male soldier next to Pryor asked. "How did they overpower you and the others?"

Danziger slowly raised his right arm and pulled the other soldier down toward him until he was leaning on his knees. "The White Scythe."

"The what?"

Danziger let go of him and stared straight up at the ceiling to finish himself off. "M. Danziger. MercyMark, activate."

A loud beeping occurred and the crossbones symbol glowed on Danziger's MercyMark. A quick shock convulsed through his body, and blood burst out of his eyes, mouth, and nose, spraying Pryor and the other soldier. His head slumped over to the side as a last indicator that he was finally gone.

"Rest in piece, Lieutenant Danziger," the male soldier said as he closed his eyes and bowed his head, as did Pryor.

After several more seconds of silence, Pryor resumed talking. "Lieutenant Ratliff, I'm scared to ask, but how many were killed?"

"All five of them," he replied darkly.

"What!" she exclaimed, getting aggressive. "I knew it! I told you they needed backup, but no! You abandoned your own team!"

"Listen, Pryor. I didn't think everything would go to hell so quickly. I thought these dead excuses for soldiers would be able to handle a couple of Commoners. But clearly they couldn't fucking handle it!"

"Wait, sir," the other soldier said. "Danziger mentioned something called the White Scythe."

"What the hell is that?" Ratliff asked. "And what does that have to do with any of this?"

The male soldier became more aggressive. "You idiot! The White Scythe is an Ab—"

A large humanoid figure crashed down from the ceiling and sliced the male soldier in half down the middle, interrupting his sentence. The man's body split in half, and both halves tumbled down on opposites of each other like trees being chopped down. His entrails splattered all over the floor while Pryor shrieked in terror.

Pryor tried to aim her gun at the creature, but the swift move of a large blade sliced her head off and sent it flying across the floor. Her headless body landed flat on the floor without any other movement.

"PRYOR!" Ratliff exclaimed in horror.

The blade turned out to be part of the creature's arm. It appeared to be made of bone since the sharpest part of the blade looked like an ulna and the part connecting it to the rest of its arm were a humerus and radius.

That theory turned out to be true as the bones began shifting back into the physical bone structure of an arm. After the pieces reassembled, large masses of flesh and muscle began enveloping the bones like an amoeba until it had reached the tips of its fingers. The skin that now covered the White Scythe's secret weapons were as pale and white as its bones. Deadmen were known for being pale, but they often looked a little green up close. This one, however, was as pale as ash; one could say it was an albino Deadman.

"Ugly bastard," Ratliff said while aiming his gun and flashlight at the zombie.

He inspected its entire form and secretly felt terrified just looking at it. It was tall, maybe six-foot-eight. Its body was very muscular, like if the creature constantly worked out before and after reanimating. Its face was the ugliest part thanks to its blank eyes that were equally as white as its skin, but it had no bottom lip, revealing the long bloody mass that was its lower teeth and jaw. The only clothes it wore were black boots and a mangled up pair of jeans.

"Prepare to die, motherf—" Ratliff tried to say before being interrupted by the White Scythe's impossibly fast reflexes.

Its arms transformed back into blades as its flesh peeled off toward its shoulders and repeated the same process with its muscles and veins. It bolted toward the closest DZI and made an uppercut motion, slicing off his arms and chopping his gun clean in half before finishing him off with a diagonal slash from underneath his left arm. After that, the entire upper half of the man flew off the rest of his body into the pile, continuing to paint the gym red.

Ratliff and the last remaining DZI fired their guns at the White Scythe. A new problem arose as the bullets simply wedged in its skin like if they were firing into a dense wall. It ran toward the two through the storm of bullets like nothing and quickly decapitated the last DZI soldier, sending her head through the gym doors. It jabbed its arms through the corpse and sliced upwards, violently dismembering her arms from the rest of her body.

Ratliff stared in horror at the mutilated bodies around him that used to be his team. He was up to his ankles in entrails, and his boots were almost completely red because of the surface he's been walking on.

He wanted to vomit. But instead of doing that, he pulled out his walkie-talkie for a final sendoff to Zach Shaw. Guilt consumed him as he began thinking about how these deceased soldiers' families would feel about how needlessly brutal these men and women's deaths were. And even worse was how every single one of them probably could've been avoided.

"Commander Shaw, this is Ratliff," he said. "Not even sure if you're listening to me right now, but the reclamation has gone to shit in the western part of Longridge. If you are listening, I'd like to say that it has definitely been an honor working with you, but fuck you. Seriously, fuck you. Thanks to you, everyone in my squad, including me in a few seconds, has been butchered by the Abnormal Deadman known as the White Scythe. You remember that thing, right? Blades for hands? Practically bulletproof because why the fuck not?"

The White Scythe was directly in front of Ratliff by now and staring down at him. It still had its blades by its sides and formed a terrifying, sadistic grin. Blood dripped down the empty wound where its lips should've been.

"Well, I'm gonna need to shut my chew-hole now. It's my turn to die. So, to finish off, good luck completing the reclamation. But if you don't kill this ugly son of a bitch soon, you and the rest of the cavalry are gonna have a bad time."

Ratliff turned off the walkie-talkie and threw it toward the edge of the gym, shattering it apart as soon as it made impact with the wall. He unholstered his pistol and carelessly shot the White Scythe in the eye, turning it into a small bloody hole.

The creature returned the favor by stabbing him straight through the chest and lifting him into the air like a prize from fishing. Ratliff began throwing up blood, but he planned on spending the last few seconds of his life staring into the eyes of an Abnormal.

"You...gave...up," the White Scythe said in a deep, inhuman voice. The tendons in its jaws were visible due to its lack of lips and stretched up and down with every word.

"And you can talk, too," Ratliff replied weakly. "You Abnormals get all the cool shit."

"Tell me...what I need...to know," the White Scythe continued slowly. "Then...you can die...in peace."

"Shoot." Ratliff coughed up blood all over the Abnormal's bony blades.

"Where...is...Troy Schaefer?"

Ratliff tried scooting up but instead dug the blade deeper, sending an extra jolt of pain through his already-suffering body. "I'll tell you something else."

The White Scythe brought him closer to his face.

"N. Ratliff. MercyMark, acti—"

The zombie bisected Ratliff by slashing his blade up right through his head. His entire face and head were split open, spilling out blood and small pieces of brain matter. His body crashed to the ground in a crooked position like a rag doll, his head separated into halves.

The White Scythe let out a loud, terrifying roar as it continued dismembering Ratliff's corpse until his body was nothing more than a collection of divided chunks of meat. It transformed one of its arms back to normal and began feeding off the pieces.

After making a quick snack out of Ratliff, the White Scythe's teeth were dyed red, with small pieces of flesh stuck between them. The bloody hole where its eye used to be filled up with a new eye, which grew out of the socket like a fruit on a tree. It marched out of the gym, crushing Ratliff's skull into a pulpy pile of brain matter. It waded through the piles of corpses and gore like it was casually strolling through a shallow pond, crushing several more body parts underneath its powerful feet.

Once it finally reached the doors, it punched them off their hinges, causing them to crash through the room opposite from the gym. It continued walking down the corridor out of the school, a trail of bloody footprints left behind.

The White Scythe stopped in front of the entrance to the school and sniffed the air. It then licked off the remaining vitals lodged in its teeth.

"That...smell..." it said sinisterly. "Smells...like...prey."