Chapter 82: Book 2 Chapter 10: Armed and Dangerous (To Herself and Others)

“Decomposing zombie motherfuckers,” Harley said. She slammed one more door shut and barred it shut with a chair. The window of the door cracked open, and zombies reached their decaying fingers through, clawing for whatever scrap of flesh they could reach. Harley slammed a locker against the broken window, crushing every finger in the way.

“I hate every fucking one of you zombie shits. Except you, Zombie Cane,” Harley amended. “We’re still cool. Unless you eat me, but odds are that’s not happening.”

Zombie Cane grunted impassively from the other side of the door, no longer able to comprehend her words. Harley followed the rest of the loopers deeper into their storage room, to fetch weapons for the new loopers.

“In retrospect we really should have done this, uh, a lot sooner,” Vell said. “Sorry. I thought we should plan for it, you know, at the end of last year but that, uh, didn’t happen.”

“You were rather distracted, Vell,” Lee said.

“Yeah, there was the kidnapping, a, uh, pretty complicated romantic situation,” Vell said.

“Still ongoing, by all appearances,” Harley noted. Vell and Kim had placed themselves very deliberately on opposite ends of the group. “Point is these guys don’t have any firepower yet. Though actually, it’s probably a good thing we kicked out Derek before we got around to this.”

Harley tossed open the nearest locker, spilling swords all over the ground. She nearly lost a toe to a Masamune, but managed to step back in time.

“Dude would’ve been a way bigger pain in the ass if he had a magic sword,” Harley said. Derek had seemed like the kind of person who gravitated towards swords. “Anyway, either of you two want a magic sword? We are absolutely up to our tits in magic swords.”

She kicked the pile carefully, displacing a few dozen legendary blades and nearly losing a toe again in the process.

“No thank you,” Hawke said, panting for panicked breath. “I want something that puts me very, very, very far away. As far as possible. Possibly miles away, please.”

He lifted a sweaty, trembling palm to point at Vell, who had one of his revolver’s trained on the door.

“Do you have any more guns?”

Lee cringed hard enough that it could be seen across the room.

“What?”

“We only really have the one other firearm…”

“Why don’t you sound excited about it?”

“Well, there’s good news and bad news about that particular firearm,” Harley said. “The good news is it fires magic bullets.”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“That sounds nice.”

“The bad news is it killed JFK.”

Hawke did not react to that, until he racked his brain for what little info on American history his New Zealand education had granted him.

“Oh. Oh, that’s that one president who was...uhh…”

“Yeah. Him.”

“Okay yeah, I think I’ll pass on that one,” Hawke said. “But I still really sort of want to be far away, so maybe do you have any really long spears or something?”

“Oh yeah, we got just the thing,” Harley said. She dug around in another storage box and then tossed Hawke a small grey rod about the size of a pencil. He caught it, and though it was surprisingly heavy, it remained quite small.

“This is specifically the opposite of what I requested,” Hawke said.

“Well tell it to get bigger, then,” Harley said. “You know how to make a rod get bigger, right?”

The thick tattoos on Hawke’s cheeks made it difficult to tell when he was blushing, but he was definitely blushing now. Lee gave Harley a gentle bonk on the head with the handle of her whip, and then offered more sensible advice.

“It’s the Ruyi Jingu Bang,” Lee said. She had cataloged just about everything weapon in the room, though this was one of the more notable entries. “The legendary staff of Sun Wukong. Simply command it to grow in size and shape, and it will do so.”

Taking Lee’s advice to heart, Hawke made the staff grow, and very nearly poked a hole in the roof as he did so. A bit of ceiling tile rained down around him as Hawke shrank the Jingu Bang back down to a manageable size and tried to act casual.

“Now, as for you, Kim, does anything stand out?”

“I...maybe this one?”

Kim picked up a magical sword at random and gave it a few swings. In spite of having some enhanced mechanical strength, the weight of the blade still surprised her, and one of her swings went wild, nearly catching Harley in the shoulder.

“Hey, watch the sword!”

“Sorry, sorry,” Kim said. “Let me search up how to use this real quick.”

One of the benefits of being mechanical was the ability to download new information on the fly. Unfortunately, no amount of pdf’s could translate the actual weight and balance of a sword, and her next attempts also went wild. Everyone was standing further away this time, though, so no one got hurt.

“Maybe a sword isn’t your thing,” Lee said. “Perhaps a bow? We have the Hunting Bow of Artemis right here.”

Lee occasionally dallied with the bow when she needed a ranged weapon, though her preference was for her whip. She handed the arc of solid moonlight over to Kim and then made sure everyone was standing behind her as she took aim and fired. Kim followed every piece of advice she could google, taking deep, slow breaths as she drew the string back and fired.

The arrow had been aimed at the wall, but thanks to Kim’s inexperience, it ended up going in the direction of the door. Specifically, the chair Harley had used to bar the door shut. While lacking in accuracy, Kim’s shot was not wanting for power, and the chair shattered instantly. The now loosened door started to swing open, and a mass of rotting zombies began to stumble through.

“Sorry!”

“Maybe just grab something short and blunt and stay in the back for now,” Harley said.

“See, this is why we should’ve done this sooner,” Vell said, between cracks of gunfire. “The pressure doesn’t help anything.”

“I’ll put it on a schedule for next year, Vell,” Lee said.

“But not like, right away, in case we get another fuckboy like Derek,” Harley said.

“Noted!”

After that point, everybody became a little too occupied with the ravenous horde of hungry dead to concern themselves with scheduling -or with Kim sighing sadly in the back of the room. Until the zombies started to overwhelm her too, of course. Being inept with every weapon she touched, Kim settled on punching. She was almost good at that.