Gary worked for another half an hour with no further heavy zombie incidents. The path to the side door was almost completely clear. As soon as he could get to the door, he could communicate with the people on the other side and tell them his plan. Then he could clear out the larger horde at the main door.

Before he had time to finish, however, a strange humming noise filled the air. The noise grew louder, but Gary couldn’t pinpoint its location until it reached a sudden crescendo. A sound like a thunderclap erupted behind him, along with a bright flash of light.

Oh no, he thought with a chill. Another necromancer?

He whirled round. Rather than a robed figure, he faced a swirling semi-circular mass of blue and white energy around eight feet in height. Its edges were white stone, with glowing blue runes carved into it across the whole semi-circle. The structure had appeared out of nowhere, a few hundred feet away from Gary.

Just as Gary was absorbing all of this, a man fell through the swirling energy mass, as if he had jumped backwards. He landed on the ground with a bow in his hands, letting loose a volley of three arrows as he fell through the portal. The arrows sailed into the portal.

Gary gawped as the man rolled to his feet.

“Come on!” he shouted at the portal, letting loose two more through the swirling white energy.

He was dressed in brown and greys, with a grey cloak and a sword and scabbard strapped to his side. His boots were knee-high leather, and the entire ensemble had a medieval look to it. He was in his thirties, with a trimmed beard and moustache. He reminded Gary of pictures of Robin Hood. The man was covered in scratches and his clothes were torn, but he didn’t seem disturbed by the injuries.

“Forge! Anna! Rain! Move your asses!” he shouted, as he sent another two arrows flying into the portal.

Two more figures emerged from the blue-white swirl. One was a huge, red-bearded man, six and a half feet tall, dressed in chainmail and metal armour complete with oversized metal shoulder guards. His armour was streaked with blood and grime, and he carried a huge double-headed axe as she tore through the gateway. The armour looked like it must weigh sixty pounds at least, but it didn’t seem to slow him. His hands looked big enough to crush a skull.

As soon as he was through the portal, he spun round and swung his enormous axe at someone or something that Gary couldn’t see from his vantage point.

There was an object strapped to his back. At first, Gary couldn’t quite work out what it was. It looked like a large backpack made from thick green cloth wrapped with rope. The huge red-bearded man swung his axe again. The thing strapped to his back shifted and wriggled, and Gary realised what it was.

The cloth and ropes had a person bound inside them, who the axe-warrior was carrying like a rucksack.

The third person to emerge was a woman dressed in white and gold robes, with sun-like patterns embroidered into them, and a helmet which protected the sides of her face. The helmet was also inscribed with the sun-like pattern. The white-robed woman wielded a long sword. Like the red-bearded man, as soon as she was through the portal she skidded to a halt, spun round and went back to fight the enemy that Gary still couldn’t see.

“Rain!” the bowman shouted, “Come on!”

“Close it! Close the portal!” the red-bearded man shouted as he took another swing at whatever else was trying to get through.

“Rain isn’t through yet!”

“Just do it!”

The archer stepped away from the axe-man and the sword-wielding sun worshipper. The bow blinked out of his hand and in its place a large book appeared, also of a medieval style. The archer read aloud from the book, using words Gary didn’t understand.

“Hurry, Morgan!”

The archer looked up. “This isn’t my forte, you know? I’m not the one that should cast the spells, that’s Delphine’s job! If you hadn’t tried to...”

“Recriminations later, okay?” the axe-man retorted, “I’ve got enough to deal with right now.”

The red-bearded man swore as something pushed him backwards, knocking him to the ground. Something twice the man’s size stepped through the portal, ducking down as it did so. It was a full twelve feet in height, its skin was grey leather and from its face huge horns protruded. Shaped like a human, it was a brutal mass of muscle, tusk and protruding bones. As soon as it cleared the portal, three shambling undead followed behind it.

Gary continued to gawp. The zombies, the church and all the other problems he faced were all forgotten in the face of this latest bit of insanity.

“There had better be a good explanation for all of this,” he muttered.

The red-bearded man roared and leapt back to his feet, jumping up and landing his axe square in the chest of the troll-like creature that had knocked him down. The troll-thing staggered backwards as its attacker pulled its axe out from its chest and kicked its midriff. It fell back through the portal, its flailing arms taking one of the zombies that had followed it back through as well.

The woman in the robes had taken out one of the shuffling corpses with a single swing of her blade. Gary wasn’t sure what happened to the third one. The robed woman just seemed to touch it, and it disintegrated.

Gary saw a shadow flicker out of the portal. It was so quick he wasn’t even sure he’d seen it at all. In amongst the chaos of the melee, he dismissed it as a trick of the light or his eyes messing with him.

“Rain’s through. Now finish it, Morgan!”

Morgan, the archer and now impromptu spell-caster, continued reading from the arcane book. With a sudden popping noise, the portal vanished.

The trio took a moment.

“That was too close, Forge,” Morgan chided red-bearded man.

“Ah, we’ve seen worse. Kind of.”

“Worse? Delphine is dead!”

“Well, not really, I mean...”

Forge, as Gary had gathered the red-haired man was called, indicated the package he was carrying with his thumb.

“Anyway, whatever,” Forge continued, “Annabel, can we get the sanctuary set up, please? Then we can work out where we are and track the glitch.”

The gold and white robed woman nodded and waved her hands over a patch of the tarmac. A glowing circle around forty feet in diameter appeared.

“Oh, terrific,” Morgan muttered, “Look.”

He was pointing at Gary.

Or so Gary thought at first.

In fact, he was pointing at the undead horde behind him. The zombies and skeletons that Gary had been chipping away at had turned, enticed by fresh, living flesh.

“We’ve come out next to a graveyard. Of course we have. Brilliant. Just once it would be nice to catch a break, right?” Morgan continued.

“Oh quit whining. You know you’d get bored if things didn’t stay interesting. I’ve got it,” Forge shrugged, “Rain, find what we’re looking for, yes?”

Gary frowned, unable to see this Rain person they kept referring to.

“I mean, he is right,” the white robed woman called Annabel said. “If things didn’t stay lively, you’d just be getting into your own kinds of trouble, anyway.”

“That’s fair,” Morgan grumbled. “It’s just that for once it would be nice if it was trouble I’d made instead of trouble we keep falling into.”

Annabel, her hands still tracing out the glowing circle on the floor, barked a laugh.

“Good gods, you can’t be serious. Every place we land you end up causing more trouble than we were sent there to check out.”

Morgan grinned. “Yeah, yeah, okay. It’s true.”

Gary saw and heard all of this, still too stunned to react.

I have so many questions, he thought, so, so many questions...

The spellbook Morgan held vanished and was replaced by the bow he had used earlier. He let loose two quick arrows, each one causing a zombie shuffling past Gary to drop to the ground. This roused Gary out of his confused stupor.

One of those nearly hit me!

As the horde of undead shuffled past Gary and towards the trio, Forge took up a stance designed to block them from reaching Annabel. Morgan stood to the left and behind the larger man, providing support with his arrows.

This was a group that had practised their moves together.

Gary decided the best thing he could do was stay out of the way. As the moaning horde moved towards the plate-armoured axeman, Gary shifted sideways, back towards the cars where he could observe from cover.

Morgan let loose three more arrows, and three more bodies fell.

“They’re just level ones,” he said, his voice more cheerful, “Target practise!”

Forge grunted as three zombies and two skeletons reached him. He swung his double-bladed axe and, with one mighty cleave, chopped all five of the undead in half, dropping them to the floor.

Gary was astounded.

It had taken him five or six blows with his shovel just to take down just one of the undead. The red-haired warrior had disposed of five of them with a single blow.

“Where were you guys when I was trying to clear the area?” Gary muttered.

Another dozen of the undead fell at the hands of the archer and the axeman.

“Annabel, they’re getting closer!” Morgan warned the sun-worshipper.

“A second,” Annabel called back as she continued to wave her arms around the glowing circle on the floor.

Another six of seven of the dead went down with ease, but Gary saw there was a problem. Morgan and Forge could kill them by the dozen. Eventually, though, the sheer number of the undead was going to overpower them. Already, some zombies were shuffling to the left and right of the primary group. If the trend continued, they would flank the group.

Unexpectedly, one of the zombies closer to Gary dropped to the ground. Then a second fell, then a third.

Gary frowned as he saw the shadow that he’d spotted but dismissed earlier. It was flitting between the undead, twisting and turning with impossible speed. It took Gary several seconds to work out that he was looking at a person, swift as the wind, clad all in black, wielding two wicked looking knives.

I guess that’s Rain, he thought as the woman ducked, spun and twisted through the undead. The flickering shadow of death prevented any attempts to flank Forge and Morgan on their left side.

Within a few minutes, the group had disposed of as many of the undead as it had taken Gary an hour to get rid of. Which was even more impressive, considering that the undead were trying to fight back now.

“Done!” Annabel called out.

She stepped into the glowing circle on the tarmac and vanished. Forge and Morgan did the same as the undead horde closed in on them. Rain was last to follow, twisting her way through the clawing bodies without a single one touching her, before she too vanished. The circle stopped glowing.

The only trace that the foursome had been there was the pile of corpses left in their wake.

Gary blinked as he peeked over the top of the hearse.

Did they just leave?