Z 2134

only three player casualties so far, and none of them was Liam. But she also didn’t see him among the survivors, though there were some people on the other side of the fire that she couldn’t see from her angle.
    Ana scanned the field, spying a heavyset man swinging a two-handed sword at four zombies who were backing him toward the woods. He made several wide-arcing swings while falling back in retreat. After a half-dozen steps, the man suddenly roared, then charged toward the swarm, bringing the edge of his blade crashing down into the closest zombie’s head, raining blood like a bucket of dark-red paint over the others. With a second bellow, he swung the sword in a wider arc, shearing a pair of zombie heads from their shoulders before pulling the blade back, then plunging it deep into the fourth zombie’s chest like a knife into pie.
    The final zombie twitched on the ground as the heavyset man thrust the blade one more time into the creature. Ana stared in both horror and a sort of admiration, wondering how the man had grown so skilled with a sword.
    And then she saw something the man had not — a small red-haired girl, who couldn’t have been an hour older than 12, the earliest age allowed into The Darwin Games, racing from the woods toward him. The girl was holding a wooden board over her head as she ran. The man must’ve heard the little girl because he turned back, but he was too late.
    The girl swung, and the back of the board smacked into the man’s head and stuck there as the man fell face first into the snow. The man was wounded but not yet dead.
    The girl ran to grab the man’s sword from where he’d dropped it, but it must’ve been too heavy for her because she dropped it, then went back and started yanking the board from the man’s head, where it was still stuck. It was then that Ana realized the board must’ve had nails in it.
    The girl pulled the board free and began bashing the man again and again, until he stopped moving. She looked around and froze for a moment when it seemed like she was looking right at Ana.
    Ana’s heart leaped into her throat, suddenly afraid the girl would come after her next.
    Instead, the girl scurried off from the direction she’d come, board in hand.
    No matter how many times Ana had seen the brutality on live TV, nothing prepared her for the brutality of in-person gore. She stared at the crimson-soaked corpse, stunned.
    Just beyond the burning shed, Ana spotted a handful of players working together to stave off a sea of approaching zombies who were streaming in from the north end of the woods. It looked like there were as many as 40, the entire swarm seeming to move faster than normal, though she had no idea if they were actually faster, or if it was the difference between living it and seeing it on TV.
    She wasn’t sure if the rest of the players were among the dead, had taken off into the woods, or what, but it seemed like these were the last humans on the Halo. She squinted her eyes trying to see past the flames and billowing smoke.
    Ana gasped, seeing Liam’s long hair whipping back and forth as he came into view, swinging a machete with wild abandon. Seeing Liam fight for his life, with a machete no less, made Ana think of her father, flooding her with an aching guilt she couldn’t afford to nurse.
    Liam cut four zombies to nothing in twice as many seconds. Helping him was a large, black-bearded man swinging an oversized mallet into one of the zombie’s skulls, sending it to a twitching heap on the ground.
    A horn brayed in the distance, and though she’d heard the horn countless times before, it still filled her with icy panic.
    The Fire Wall!
    Ana stood frozen, not knowing what to do next. She’d completely forgotten about the Fire Wall.
    Between 10 and 15 minutes into each game, a massive wall of fire erupted through a seam in the earth. The seam, which was made of a six-foot-wide metal pipe, ran north and south for miles in both directions, across the Halo and through a charred clearing in the woods. The snow around it was already melting, and she watched as the thaw created a dark line that split the Halo into halves.
    From her angle, it seemed as if Liam’s group was practically on top of the seam. They would have to pick a side — right or left, east or west — and get there immediately.
    Ana looked down to see that she was on the right side of the seam by a few feet. The Fire Wall was meant to divide players early on. She couldn’t