Nightshift 42: Bill's Hardware

[ruthless_hunter]

[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

Comments

[number_crunch]

As the light's dimmed, Sho's mind grew brighter. Having spent most of the last hour or two in a vague stupor counting windows, calculating wind speed velocities, devising algorithms for rearranging the landscaping and attempting to derive the chemical make up of some liquid in an abandoned soda cup by the side of the road by visual cues only - one whiff told him that gathering data through other sensory methods would not be advisable - Sho had eventually wandered into Bill's Hardware, looking for tools with which to make art. He proved irate enough when bothered that the employees generally left him alone to wander the aisles, pick up tools, put them back, pick them up again then drop them on the floor, though they did manage to herd him towards the back of the store. It was there that he came to his senses as night fell and the scenery drastically changed. Blinking in the semi-darkness, he had to admire the stack of tape measures and ball-peen hammers someone had made. He suspected it might have been himself.

"t, t, what's t... " he mumbled, looking around for a clock. His search was interrupted by a low moaning. Turning, he found himself being confronted by someone who looked much, much sicker than he felt, which was saying something as the Tylenol, fever and sedative were still attempting to form a multi-dimensional scalene triangle made entirely of right angles, which did not bode well for the space they were trying to do it in - his head. "Get away!"

Sho pushed the sickly looking man away, only for his hand to squish into the other's flesh in a way that suggested a far lower resistance than it should have met. As he pulled his hand back in disgust, the Reaper noticed the putrid smell of rotting flesh that came from the new, hand-shaped imprint on the oncomer.

"What the factor is this!?" yelled Minamimoto, jumping back as the zombie made a short lunge at him. Dodging its clumsy attempt, he gave it a swift kick, knocking it on it's back. "Stay horizontal, you necropascal!"

The zombie did, clawing obstinately at the air, but unfortunately, two more zombies came trundling down the aisle towards him. Sho backed away, noting that his central gravitational point seemed to be hard to triangulate properly as he stumbled awkwardly.

"Psyche, pin, need something," he muttered, looking around. He spotted some axes and other sharp implements further down the aisle from which the zombies had come, but down another clear aisle were other options.

Sho went with option B, running from point A to aisle C and picking up shovel D.

"Come get me, you dead degenerate derivatives!" he yelled at the shambling masses, whose numbers were starting to increase.

[number_crunch]

Now came the problems with Zombies E and F. And G, H, I, J...

"Outta my way, necrotic negatives!" shouted Minamimoto, hitting the closest zombie in the head with the shovel. It rang out with a satisfying sound like a bell being rung with wet meat as the zombie stumbled back before promptly falling over. Unfortunately, there were others were that came from.

"Someone's been studying their multiplication tables," he grumbled as two more zombies came up. The one he had hit was still moving also. Introducing the new factors to the sharp edge of his weapon, he ran past without waiting for them to fall over, leaping lithely over the first felled creature, its rotting fingers just barely missing contact with his pant leg as it flew by.

A quick calculation of vectors and several applications of force and momentum to any objecting obstacles later and Sho was out of the aisle and to the front of the store, leaving several dazed but quickly recovering zombies behind him. What he was now facing though... looked to have the exact same parameters as what he'd just left behind him: lots of zombies.

"What the factor is this!?" he yelled again. Everywhere, zombies and screaming. And a zombie head on a rake. Y=ax+b. Just, why.

"I'm outta this cubic," he spat wanging another zombie on the head before jumping out through a broken storefront window.

[To here]