There was a crunch as the phone fell out of Michael Wilson’s hand and landed on the ground. He had been staring at the screen as he was going up the stairs, which did not help when the step he expected vanished. He stumbled, barely stopping himself from sprawling across the suddenly flat ground. Not bad enough to drop the bag of breakfast bagels he was carrying, but enough that he cursed as he staggered forward.

  The stairs leading up to the second-floor office Mike worked in had vanished, replaced by heavy slate flagstones, slightly uneven in a dark room. He looked around, dazed at the change of scenery. The beige office stairwell he had seen a thousand times was now cyclopean stone walls, light by oily torches giving off greasy smoke.

  There were voices behind him, speaking in a language he did not recognize. Mike turned towards them, a spike of dizziness going through his head at the motion. Two figures in robes stood there, gesticulating wildly. Mike assumed they were arguing based on their body language and violent motion. Mike cleared his throat, but they ignored him.

  “Umm, excuse me?” Mike said louder, still not getting their attention. He leaned down and picked his phone up. Luckily, the crack had been the case and not the phone itself, so he stuck it in his pocket.

  “Excuse me!” Mike repeated louder as he straightened. Still, nothing. “Hey, dickheads!”

  That finally got their attention. They stopped arguing and turned to Mike. The figure on the left was older, with a large beard spilling out of the hood of his robe. The second was younger, with only patchy facial hair and a narrow chest. The older figure spoke something in a different tone, a heavier one, and gestured at Mike.

  His found himself unable to move, locked tight by… something. Mike tried to force himself to move, to walk, anything. He was panicking internally, trying to get anything to move. He could not even relax his fingers enough to drop the bag of bagels he was carrying.

  While he was mentally flailing, he noticed something. Just at the edge of Mike’s vision hung a tiny square. It had not been there before. Not being able to move even his eyes, Mike mentally focused on it. It grew larger, taking up more of his vision. A square picture of a cartoon man bound in rope, with a bar of darkness moving across it. Mike tried to speak, to question what he was seeing, but something else popped up beneath the cartoon.

  Paralysis:

  You are unable to move for the duration of this effect. You may be moved by others.

  Duration: Twenty-three out of thirty seconds remaining

  The younger figure advanced towards Mike, reaching into his robe. Mike’s focus shifted towards him and the cartoon figure shrank back to the corner of his vision while the text vanished. The young man pulled a piece of leather from his robe and wrapped it around Mike’s neck.

  Stepping back, the young man said something to Mike in their foreign language. The paralysis still affected Mike, so he could not respond. The man repeated it again louder, anger in his tone. The older man rolled his eyes and gestured again. Mike’s paralysis suddenly vanished and he stumbled forward, off balance again. He was finally able to let go of the bagels and the bag fell to his feet.

  “I don’t know what you’re saying,” Mike told the young man as he kept speaking. “Please, what is going on here?”

  Mike’s hand rose to his throat, reaching up to feel the leather that was wrapped around his neck. It was tight without choking or impairing his movement. He got two fingers under it and tugged. It was snug, barely jostling. Mike felt around it until he found the clasps. However, once he touched it, a shock went through him, throwing him to the floor.

  Seconds passed before Mike came back to himself. The young man was shouting at him while the elder was holding a long rod with a hook on the end. There was a new thing at the corner of his vision, a spread-eagle human form. The head and neck areas were orange leading into red while the remainder of the body was green.

  Remembering what had happened with the earlier display icon he had seen, Mike focused on it. Before a text box could appear, he was snatched to his feet. The older man had gotten the hook of the rod he had into the collar around Mike’s neck and pulled him to his feet.

  Alternatively pushed and pulled by the collar around his neck, Mike and the two robed figures exited the room and entered a hallway. It was wide, almost ten feet across and fifteen high. The rough stone walls matched the inside of the room Mike had been in.

  Out here, the torches were absent. The younger mage spoke and gestured. Two lights appeared, floating freely around his head. Mike halted, staring at them before he was roughly pushed down the hallway. His gaze fell to his feet as he marched along at the end of the rod.

  “OK,” he said to himself. “OK. What the hell is going on?”

  The figure of the human hung at the edge of Mike’s vision, and he took the time to study it. It expanded, growing to occupy more of his vision than the small icon had. Most of the body was green, with yellow and orange around the neck. A few more yellow spots dotted its knees and shoulders. There was a red one on the body’s right hand.

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  Mike’s gaze fell to his hands. Holding them out to examine them, Mike noticed that his right index finger had a split nail from where he had fallen while being steered. A thin trail of blood leaked from it. As he studied the wound, the figure taking up half his vision zoomed in, focusing on its right hand. Mike could see a similar wound there.

  The yellow spot on the shoulder matched an ache from where Mike had stumbled into the wall. Mike turned his head to see if he could get the figure to zoom in on that injury, but his attempt to turn his head resulted in a harsh shout from behind him. The rod shoved him forward, and he stumbled but caught himself before he fell.

  “That seems to be a recurring theme here,” he whispered as he recovered. Mike shifted his gaze to study the walls around him and the figure shrank back to take up just a small portion of his vision. He made it grow again, then focused elsewhere. After a few tries, Mike had figured out how to do it quickly and easily, bringing up what he had started to call the diagnostic window in his own mind and releasing it just as fast.

  While Mike was messing with this, the robed men behind him started talking. The elder sounded aggravated, disappointed. The younger sounded apologetic, embarrassed. Mike did not understand or even recognize their language, but their tone carried meaning he could understand well.

  “My name’s Mike. Who are you all?” he asked, trying to be polite. This silenced both, but neither responded. After several seconds of silence, Mike continued. “Can you tell me where I am?”

  The older one said something angry, and the pole attached to Mike’s collar shook. He braced himself to be pulled off balance again, but instead they started to push him forward. Mike was able to keep his balance by moving into a jog. After a few feet of this, a green bar appeared beside the diagnostic window. Emptiness started creeping downward, leeching the green from the bar.

  “That must be my stamina.” Mike had played enough games in his life to recognize that. He felt it draining from inside him. The walk up the stairs to his office was the most exercise he usually got in a day, so the bar was dropping fast. He was panting by the time he was pulled to a stop.

  This was an archway, the only other entrance they had passed in the long hallway. It was much larger than the room he had appeared in, matching the large hallway in scale. Mike was forced into it, where sudden bright light made him slam his eyes closed.

  As he was marched forward blind, Mike heard voices coming from the room. Not many, but enough to echo in the large chamber. He blinked slowly, spreading his fingers to let him acclimatize to the light in the room.

  The flat floor was fifteen feet across, with a wall eight feet high surrounding it. The room was an inverse cone, with seats above the wall rising in tiers to thirty feet above Mike’s head. A dozen more robed figures were seated about. All of them were pointing at Mike, talking loudly to each other.

  The older man with Mike growled and twisted the rod. Mike was shoved down to his knees by the rod attached to his collar. The hard packed sand that covered the floor reflected the light upwards into Mike’s slowly adjusting eyes. He looked around, seeing another door across from him. This one was closed, with no one forced through in bondage.

  “I know this might be asking a bit much,” Mike said under his breath as the crowd talked. “But could everyone stop pointing and laughing at me? I’ve had one hell of a day.”

  Mike felt someone tugging on the collar he wore. He glanced back to see the younger man removing the collar. The elder of the two stepped forward, moving past Mike into the center of the sandy floor, and held his hands up for attention.

  He started to speak as the watching crowd went silent. There were gestures accompanying his speech, occasionally pointing to the youngster standing behind Mike holding the rod, with the collar still attached. The crowd was mostly silent, the occasional murmur meeting some of what the man was saying.

  Mike had no clue what any of it meant. He went to rise but the kid tapped him on the head with the rod, so he decided to stay on his knees. He did glance back at him while rubbing his head.

  “You all could just ask, you know?”

  His fragile self-control was starting to slip now that he was still. The room he was in, surrounded by shadowy figures in hooded robes, it was not part of the world Mike knew. Stone-walled dungeons full of people speaking foreign languages were not in his day planner at work. When he was being pushed around by the rod, he could focus on keeping one foot in front of the other. Now that it was removed, his hands started to shake as he could no longer deny what he was feeling.

  Insanity. Madness. The fear and terror, the uncertainty, it was building in his mind. Mike had started the day expecting a morning meeting addressing KPIs and leading indicators. Getting pulled from the familiar to be collared and steered like an animal was getting harder and harder for him to ignore.

  The icons in the corner of his vision mystified him as well. It was brand new to him, but he had an almost instinctive knowledge of how to work it. He closed his eyes, and they vanished but reappeared as soon as he opened them again.

  Balling his shaking hands into fists, Mike leaned forward, grinding his knuckles on the sandy floor. The sensation gave him something to focus us. He thought of grabbing a fistful and throwing it in the face of the young man behind him but decided against it. He was horribly outnumbered and had no idea where he was.

  Plus, he had never been in a fight in his life.

  The older man stopped talking while Mike gathered his thoughts. He opened his eyes to see the man walking past him. He turned to watch both men walk out of the chamber, sealing the door behind him.

  Hesitatingly, Mike went to one knee. When no one responded, he stood. The crowd was again, a quiet rumble in a foreign language that was not helping Mike make sense of things.

  “I demand to speak to the American embassy!” Mike shouted. The crowd quieted for a moment before there was some laughter. “Do you understand me? I have rights!”

  A voice spoke, louder than the old man. The crowd quieted, but Mike sensed it was not attention, but anticipation. The voice took on a different cadence as the crowd grew tense.

  Mike was looking for a source of the voice when it cut out suddenly. The sound was replaced by the grinding of the door opposite where Mike had entered. He turned towards it, taking a few faltering steps before he saw what was coming through it.

  They were human, or at least they were once. Now they were rotten, putrescent. Dead. Their eyes were white orbs, fogged by death. Their blood-stained lips were torn over their jagged teeth. Hands reached toward Mike, almost skeletal beneath the rotten, drawn-thin flesh.

  Mike was standing before what could only be three zombies. They started towards him, as slow and inexorable as death itself.