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By: Max Fallone

Bullets flew through zombies like needles through cloth, and doing as much damage. The four soldiers were the last of their platoon; the rest had long since fallen to the swarms of the undead. They had since found out that their assault rifles had no effect, now only firing to cover up the ceaseless moaning of the zombies.

One by one they ran out of bullets and hope. As the crowd of walking corpses closed in on their prey, the soldiers resigned to their fate. Was this really how it was to end? Defenseless, outnumbered, and surrounded? And as a final insult, they would soon join the black army’s ranks as one of their lost souls. They would become the very thing that they had fought to defeat.

As the first zombie reached them and prepared to deliver the fatal bite, a bare foot collided with the side of its skull, shattering its brittle cranium like so much glass.

Only now did the soldiers notice the new combatant, dressed in traditional martial arts uniform, his black belt stained crimson with the blood of the undead. His eyes were the very antithesis of the glossy white, purposeless eyes of the zombies, which held nothing but a window into madness. This warrior’s black eyes held an obvious purpose, and that purpose was justice.

Without a word the fighter went about his grim work, hands and feet destroying the walking dead with cometary force. On more than one occasion he took down two or more foes with a lone kick. With each victory, the horde thinned, and eventually dispersed.

The invincible evil, the undefeatable force that had blanketed the world in a shroud of darkness, was starting to lose ground. The soldiers looked upon their savior, in awe of his martial prowess. He had achieved with his bare fists what entire armies couldn’t do with machine guns and grenades. Without waiting, the warrior moved to leave, his oneman crusade against the undead forces not yet complete. Maybe it never would be, but he couldn’t stop now, not while the evil still lurked just beyond the next corner...

“Wait!” one private managed to say. He couldn’t have been older than twenty. “You might need this,” he said. The tiny man held out a six-inch combat knife. The warrior took the knife and looked at it as if he had been given a toothpick. With unpracticed politeness he handed the weapon back. “I already have the most powerful weapon imaginable,” the fighter said as he flicked a piece of zombie gore off his shoulder as if it were nothing more than a wayward piece of dust. “And that weapon is in me.” With that, he turned around and walked off toward the distant but ever present moans of the undead scourge, his hands clenched into fists that held the power to destroy worlds.