Nightshift 42: Bill's Hardware
[from here]Lockdown kicked the door to the hardware store down and barged in. There was already a zombie in here, a big one, who the bounty hunter guessed was the owner of the store. There were also two other zombies with him, so Lockdown was already outnumbered. But that had never stopped the bounty hunter
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Not that this place was any better. The inside smelled like a battlefield (a rotting and maybe seven days old one), and Sanae nearly tripped down a random aisle to escape the grasp of what had probably been a customer only some minutes ago. No good: painfully slow though they were, zombies had good reflexes, and soon he found himself backing up in a panic, scrambling for something to defend himself with as said ex-customer lurched closer and closer.
Partner...pact...psyche...paint! Sanae's mental alliteration cut off as his hand closed on a canister of spray paint - one of the industrial kinds they used for street construction. On reflex he wrenched the cap off, swung the can up, and managed to direct a spray of neon orange paint directly into the undead's eyeballs. Although it certainly wasn't enough to kill the thing, it was good enough to bring the zombie temporarily to a halt, giving Sanae time to grab another can and sprint off deeper into the store.
The main problem was that without good lighting, he couldn't see shit. "Ah!" Sanae ground to a halt, nearly crashing into a man in front of him. "Sorry, sorry..." His index finger crept to the nozzle just in case.
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The voice processed first, long before he managed to take in enough of the man's appearance in the dim light to see that he didn't appear to be rotting. None of the dead seemed to be able to do anything but moan, so using actual words was as close to a good sign as there was likely to be.
Tony managed a smile, grim and fixed rather than the nonchalance he was aiming for, and lowered the prybar enough that it was no longer threatening. Not enough that he couldn't bring it to bear when another of the walking dead inevitably tripped down the aisle, though. "Don't worry about it. Just one of those nights."
His eyes lit on the paint can in the other man's hand, and that grim smile mutated slowly into something manic. "Where'd you get that?"
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"Y-yeah, just one of those nights." Sanae laughed weakly; it didn't seem appropriate at all given the atmosphere. (Yeah, whatever happened to 'enjoy the moment'?)
"Uh..." He caught the shift in the other man's expression and resisted the urge to spray him with a deluge of paint. "Straight back there." Sanae jabbed a thumb in the direction he'd come from. "There's one of 'em waiting, though. I got him in the eyes and well...it wasn't enough, obviously." But that was where that prybar came in handy, he guessed.
Speaking of which, if he was already armed, why did this guy want paint in the first place? It was mostly a deterrent; Sanae had only grabbed some because he'd been looking for some spray paint for a while - the artist in him reacting first. It wasn't like it was -- wait a minute. Suddenly he remembered all the little warning labels he'd always disregarded.
"What, you got matches?"
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His mind turned over the possibilities; they were endless, really. All they needed was a spark, and the accelerant would do the rest. Of course, aerosols weren't the best forms of makeshift flamethrower out there, but unless they could find something better...
"Did you see any fuel? If I can rig something with a proper seal, I can keep us from getting back-flow." While an explosion of flammable chemicals seemed infinitely preferable to being eaten alive, it was still low on his list of experiences he was looking to have any time in the near future.
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Sanae took a deep breath. He had to stay calm or else things would start going to pieces, starting with his nerves and ending with his sanity. Okay. It was a Game. He had done this before. No. Sweat. "I'll look for a fuel source; make sure we don't explode." Unlike Josh, he couldn't teleport them out of the way of any flares, regardless of level.
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Having a task helped. He knew what he was doing, building things. He'd done it before, rigging weaponry from unlikely pieces. Granted, both the pieces and the workspace had been much more suited to the task, and lacking in zombies, but the principle was the same: survive, get out.
"Watch your back," he said as he turned towards the counter to look for an ignition source. Splitting up might be riskier, but it would make the task shorter, and there was value in that. The sooner they were both armed with something more substantial than paint cans and blunt instruments, the better.
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There were zombies everywhere, but thankfully there were now more people in the store looting to their hearts' content - which meant more targets that weren't him. Leaving his fellow patients to do the re-killing for him, Sanae raced down the aisles, squinting in the dark as he tried to make out the tools on the shelves.
He'd just made it to a likely section when he heard a loud moan behind him. Just my luck. Without turning to look he spun and sprayed a cloud of paint into the zombie's face before sprinting down the aisle, eyes darting from shelf to shelf as he tried to find a torch before the zombie got to him. By some miracle he managed to make out the outline of a torch head encased in some sort of kit, and Sanae pulled up short to take stock of the options.
Plastic casing was a pain to open unless they had a blade of some kind; the suitcase-type ones seemed a lot easier to deal with, so Sanae grabbed one and spun around.
Now to get past that zombie. The monstrosity was nearly blocking the entire aisle, but thanks to typical zombie behavior, its arms were outstretched and nearly horizontal, giving him some space - by the broadest definition of the world - to maneuver. With a half-mumbled prayer Sanae charged forward, swinging the kit in an attempt to catch the thing off-guard. A decaying hand was smashed aside (he'd just confirmed that two-handed grips indeed increased one's force) and he twisted sideways to avoid the other one, nearly tripping over his feet as he righted himself.
Oh right. They needed fuel. Sanae stopped to grab a gas tank and, focusing all of his strength into his right arm, managed to start dragging it down the aisle. By now he could hear the shuffling of other zombies proceeding from other areas of the store toward him because of the racket, but for whatever reason the god of zombie mechanics had decided to bless the undead with a speed equal to that of an unathletic man dragging a nine-pound tank around, leaving the distance between them a happy constant.
If he made it out of Landel's ever, he'd light some incense for that benevolent deity.
Sanae arrived back to find his partner in the process of constructing their soon-to-be weapon. "Got a whole kit," he said, panting. "Gas tank too. 'Bout five or six zombies behind me." He set the suitcase kit down, flipped open the latches, and opened it to reveal its contents. Torches had never seemed so beautiful.
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He hurried back to the rear of the store, pausing along the way to collect a handful of necessities from the loose bins of screws and bolts and gaskets. Whatever his partner returned with, there was a good chance he'd have to jury-rig a seal for it, and the more components he had to hand, the less time they'd have to spend searching through the corpse-ridden store.
At Sanae's return, Tony looked up from the collection of bolts and gaskets he'd been organizing to useful purpose, and grimaced. "Shit," he muttered. A quick mental calculation gave him the likely time needed to turn torches into flamethrowers, and while it wasn't as large an amount as it could have been, racing against the zombies' approach to do it seemed like a dangerous option.
He pushed to his feet, casting an evaluating gaze over the shelving before striding to the nearest piece of it. "Here, help me tip this. We can use it as a barricade, buy ourselves a little more time."
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"How much time do you think we've got?" They had several minutes by his own estimate, made in approximately ten seconds.
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"A few minutes, anyways," he replied. "Maybe more, if they just throw themselves at it. Keep an eye out behind us, in case any of them are smart enough to circle around." They'd hear them first, he thought. Most of them seemed too hell-bent on getting their claws and teeth into anything not already dead to bother much with stealth. They could only hope that would hold.
He knelt back down and began working on the torch set with the tools and parts he'd scavenged. It was dark enough to make it difficult to see what he was doing, and after a few slips, he paused, expression gone from focused to reluctant. They could go searching for a light source...but he had one. He just didn't really want to use it.
The crash of a zombie stumbling over something made up his mind for him. He looked briefly up at Sanae, expression grim. "Keep this quiet," he muttered.
One would be forgiven for wondering about his sanity as he tugged the zipper to his hooded sweatshirt down to beneath his breastbone. One would be forgiven even more for wondering at the pale blue light that streamed out, illuminating a narrow circle around them, first dimly, and then more brightly as he tore away the bandages covering the reactor embedded in his chest. He bent back to his work on the torches, jaw set and hard in the weird illumination.
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He turned back to find Tony acting like a human flashlight - which was new as far as oddities went. Sanae gaped for a few seconds before regaining his poise. "Won't tell a soul," he swore (with his fingers crossed: Joshua would love this.), "but uh...how're you, you know, lighting up exactly?"
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"Hold this." 'This' was a complicated bit of valve work, small enough to potentially get lost, and round enough to roll if set down carelessly. "The light's incidental, but apparently it comes in handy." There was a hint of self-deprecation in the statement, a hint of bitterness, though he made no attempt to explain either; likely he didn't notice, with most of his attention on assembling weaponry.
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"Hey, you got that light, you might as well use it," Sanae said cheerfully. "Don't waste, after all." Yeah, he could see reasons why he'd keep something like that under wraps, but sometimes those little individual things just had to shine, no pun intended.
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His shoulders tensed as something thudded against the other side of their makeshift barricade, and he looked critically at the not-quite-yet-a-flamethrower before him. It was a definite race against time, and he redoubled his efforts to complete the project, determined to win.
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Speaking of zombies..."Oh geez." Sanae twitched when he heard a dull thud on the outside of their barricade. "Already?" He knelt down to find something blunt and heavy while still keeping a firm grip on the piece of machinery Tony had entrusted to him for the moment. "Actually wishing for my feathers, wow," the barista muttered, almost too soft to hear. He twisted to face Tony. "Tell me when I gotta give this back." He waved the valve-thing briefly.
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He ratcheted the valve into place once it had been handed back, and twisted tight the sections of the re-purposed torch before connecting it to fill with fuel. He did not quite hold his breath as the seconds ticked down, but his mental count became more urgent.
The rasp of the lighter as he finally lit the pilot flame was almost lost beneath the sounds of the shambling undead. There was no resulting fireball, and Tony let out a low, relieved breath. "So far, so good."
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