Episode 37: How To Break Into Things With a Sword

“Dammit, get back here ” Zach screamed again, running at a speed that even some cats have envied. As he turned off of Norton Avenue-again-he sliced the head off of a passing zombie, again. Sunny was moving at an incredible speed, moving generally southerly, apparently propelled by the power of sheer hatred. Zach may have been propelled by the same thing, but as far as he was concerned, it didn’t matter. He wondered only casually how Sunny was moving so quickly. The fact that he himself moved so quickly in this situation, and not slipping in the rain, seemed perfectly natural to him. It didn’t seem normal at all, but Zach considered normality to be irrelevant to everyday life. Especially when the dead were rising from the dead.
A shotgun blast erupted from around the next corner. Zach cursed again-that was the third person that Sunny had shot since they had left Sally’s military base thing. He turned the corner and saw the man lying on the ground, breathing shallowly, and clutching at his mid-section as his blood, bile, and guts mixed with rain water. He gurgled a scream. Zach looked up from him, towards the sound of a running motor that he hadn’t heard initially beneath the rain.
“I hate driving!” Sunny screamed from the dying man’s car as he tore away.
“Shit,” Zach said aloud. Now he didn’t have time to kill this guy. “Sorry,” He said without sympathy as he dashed across the street, diving through the closed driver’s side window of a Naydeer Brand Pickup truck-which, despite obviously being twelve years old, was shiny, running well, and, to Zach’s benefit, extremely easy to hotwire. He didn’t know this, however, as he had never expected to hotwire a Pickup. He knew how to hotwire compacts, limos, hummers, and nearly every other sort of vehicle that Naydeer Corporation built. Except for pickups. He didn’t have time to figure out how they would have varied the wiring (as the Naydeer Corporation invariably did, with all its products, in a quite ineffective attempt at improved security) and so drove his sword into the dashboard, straight through to the engine. It started immediately, for absolutely no good physical reason. When he pulled the sword out (freshly dried by the sudden heat of the engine) the engine stayed on. He slammed down the gas pedal, and took off after Sunny, now moving generally north by northwest, though perhaps a bit more west than that.

Laban swung the bastard sword that he now did believe had once belonged to his namesake through the neck of another zombie; it was the twelfth since he, Ujer, and Hanh had left the Underground complex. The two he was traveling with had mostly just stayed behind Laban, looking around nervously, in the case of Ujer, and cautiously, in the case of Hanh. Ujer occasionally let loose something explaining how the whole situation was impossible; Hanh would retort with a reference to God or something. Then Laban would kill another zombie, glare at them, and they would be silent for another few minutes. Laban was rather irritated with them. He could handle that there were zombies, that he had been chosen as some sort of redemption avatar, and that he had to do whatever the hell he was supposed to do with two unarmed and chatty teenagers, but the fact that those two unarmed and chatty teenagers had completely swapped personalities in the last few hours was just unnerving.
“You two need to stop being unarmed,” He said suddenly after that twelfth zombie fell to the ground, knowing that he couldn’t do anything about their personalities or excessive chattiness. He also knew that he really didn’t want to spend the entire night-or however long this took-doing nothing but protecting them.
“What weapons shall we have, great Laban?” Hanh said. Laban stopped moving once he had turned his head to stare at him. Hanh was gazing earnestly at Laban, apparently unfazed by the rainwater dripping through his hair right into his eyes.
“Great Laban?”
“Well, Elder Smith said that you’re...”
“Shut up,” Laban said. Ujer snickered. “You too.” Ujer stopped snickering and stared intently at Laban. “We’re going to get you two weapons. Then the three of us are going to kill every single damned zombie we come across. Then Laban will be redeemed or whatever, and we’ll all get to go back to our normal lives.” He turned and began walking. The two hesitated silently for a split second before following.
“Where are we going to get weapons?” Ujer asked a bit louder than usual to be heard over the rainfall, suppressing the hint of sadness in her voice, after a minute of uneasy silence.
“What religion do we subscribe to?” Laban replied, trying to sound Socratic.
“Mormonism,” Hanh replied.
“And what do Mormons have more of than any religion short of Scientology?”
“Truth?” Hanh suggested.
“Happiness?” Ujer ventured.
“Close. Money. And what company has, as its primary stockholders, Scientologists and Mormons?”
“The Naydeer Corporation,” Ujer said, wondering what he was implying. Honestly, he wasn’t implying anything, and neither was the author; it’s just a convenient connection, and has been a matter of curiosity for him for a long time. This is just his way of explaining it in an entirely different universe than his own.
“And where, according to the Naydeer Corporation, should one go to Shop Smart?”
“S-Mart,” Laban said, knowing the ad-campaign very well. Boomsticks and whatnot.
“And, seeing as we’re on a mission for Mormonism, where is, undoubtedly, the smartest place to shop without money?”
“S-Mart,” Ujer cried out. “We’re going to steal guns?”
“No, we’re commissioning them for the sake of Mormonism and the world,” Laban smiled to himself.
“Since we’re on a mission for Mormons, the Mormons” Hanh said reverentially, then looking off towards the distance so as not to suffer Laban’s new glare.
They arrived, ten minutes later, at a hill overlooking a still-glowing S-Mart sign, which was above a still-glowing glassy entrance to what, unbeknownst to the three of them, was the only S-Mart in the nation that had not yet been broken into. Standing between them and perfecting the robbing of S-Mart, there was a writhing mass of lost zombies, just above a parking lot paved with asphalt, oil and gasoline, and little bits of dead and undead people.
The rain picked up.
“Oh, shit,” Hanh said, characteristic more of Classic Hanh than New Hanh. Ujer and Laban both nodded in response.
“We need a plan,” Ujer said after a minute.
“A distraction.”
At that precise moment, an unnaturally shiny car burst into the lot from its east side, to the right of the three Mormons. They watched with utter bemusement as it tunneled through the sea of the undead. When it was about parallel with the a in the glowing S-Mart sign, an unnaturally shiny truck, moving about at the same speed as the car, burst in as well. It began swerving, seeming to intentionally hit zombies that the car had missed. They heard angry screaming from both cars, but couldn’t understand any of it. A moment later, the car was gone; a slightly larger number of moments later, the truck, too was gone. The majority of the undead, too, were gone. Or, at the very least, not moving anymore.
The rain died down.
“Oh, shit,” Hanh said once more. Ujer and Laban both nodded in response. Laban leapt up and started running towards the glowing, unbroken doors of the last untainted temple of capitalism in America. Hanh and Ujer were close behind him within moments. As he approached, he held the sword ahead of him, arms extended, point forward. He let loose a mighty battle cry and smashed through the door, first with his sword and then with his body. The glass sharded around him, but in a stroke of luck, not a single one cut him. Hanh slowed down to allow Ujer through first, and she suffered no wounds either. Hanh made it through safely as well. They had reached the store completely zombie free.
“Back of the store,” Laban said urgently.

Joan smashed open the door basement. The sword was both impossibly light, and impossibly smashy. As in it smashed things easily. She swung it-noticing only now that the blade was almost as long as she was tall-which, being an anachronistic weapons master, she knew was impossible. Then again, being an anachronistic weapons master assassin meant that most things that were supposed to be impossible weren’t. Especially when she suspected what she suspected about the people who had ordered her “creation”. But that seemed entirely irrelevant now. Now, she was killing corpses, which was so much more fun than mutilating people. In fact, while this paragraph has been narrated, she has killed, in various brutal ways, a dozen zombies. And this paragraph has taken less than a minute to narrate. Oh, wait, make that a baker’s dozen. Now fourteen. Now fifteen, and we’re caught up.
She felt satisfied with the relative clearing of zombies from the central room of the house-mansion, and so bolted up the stairs. She found herself in a strange looking hall, with a number of doors, some open, some not. There were also a number of zombies in the hall. Joan spun the sword stylistically and began slaying. It took only two minutes to clear it. She took stock of the situation once more; she then noticed the string dangling from the ceiling at the top of the stairway. Assuming (correctly) that it was the way to the roof, she jumped up and pulled it down. She climbed up it with the sword with no problem.
There were no zombies in this attic space. There was, however, in the corner-she could see by Excalibur’s glow-an overturned, small, wooden staircase. As she approached it, she noticed that above it there was an uneven square of space on the ceiling. She deftly flipped the staircase back to its rightful position and climbed it, despite its incessant wobbling and teetering. She studied the square of uneven space for a minute, and then thrust Excalibur upwards through it.


The man that Sunny had shot and Zach hadn’t had time to finish was named Steve Irving. He had been a huge fan of animals of all sorts, and had in fact once survived the sting of a Stingray’s barb to the heart. He had not been able to survive man’s weapon, the shotgun. But he had managed to resurvive it, and was beginning to shamble to his feet. His second life was cut short, though, when a nearly unidentifiable object smashed through the walls of his house, cut his head clean in half, and vanished through the house across the street...

“Jesus Christ!” someone on the roof screamed. He had been watching the crating that had been placed over the gaping hole in the roof all night, even through the rain. He wasn’t sure why, but he had been. And, of course, he had been watching when an incredibly long, shiny, and pointy thing burst forth from it. There was utter silence on the roof for a moment as the pointy thing sat there. And then it began moving around; had the sword been shorter, it would have looked to the roof people like a shark’s dorsal fin.
“What the...?” Steve leveled his shotgun at the crate.
Splinters of whatever kind of wood the crate had been made with-something dark-scattered across a very small area of the roof. They rested in small puddles, that began to grow around them. Suddenly, the shiny, pointy thing vanished. The roof froze once more.
A young, pretty girl with brown hair pulled herself up through the rounded hole in the crate. With her, she brought a very large sword.
“That’s a big fucking sword,” someone said a moment later. Joan nodded in response.
“I think that you were the people stuck on the roof?” Joan asked conversationally. Steve stopped for a moment. The question confused him. They were obviously on a roof. He wondered if maybe he really was tired.
“The house is empty now, I think,” Joan said, not waiting for the response. “You should probably leave now, before more come.” She dropped herself back down the box. After a moment of confusion, the roofers pushed the crate away, and began descending back down the staircase. Steve stared at Lucy.
“That was weird,” she said, shrugging. She headed for the staircase. Steve nodded and followed.

As in all S-Marts, the firearms were kept at the back of the store. As in few S-Marts, the firearms were still hidden behind glass. Laban quickly rectified this by smashing it open with the Sword of Laban, which was an action that most people would have taken with a baseball bat or sports bike. But Laban decided that, if it was a cutting weapon and a stabbing weapon, it should also be used as a bashing weapon. He broke open all the glass cases-a courtesy taken by most of the first invaders of S-Marts that night-before beginning to take the weapons that personally desired. He stuffed some sort of pistol and a box of rounds into his pockets. He then went searching for a shotgun.
Ujer and Hanh reached the firearms just in time to see Laban smash open the second to last of five cases. Ujer automatically went to the farthest case, and Hanh went quickly to the nearest. Ujer took some handguns; Hanh took a rifle and a case of rounds.
Laban had found the case with the shotguns, but all of them were too unwieldy. He picked up a nice one and examined it carefully. He looked around the area; he needed something to saw off the end of the shotgun, so he could carry it. Nothing he could see; so he moved to gardening tools.
Sure enough, he found a nice chain-saw there. He tried to turn it on, but it wasn’t gassed up. He remembered there being a gas station outside the store. He thought about it for a moment. Should he go fuel up the chainsaw just to have an extra, very strong weapon? Then he had another thought. He looked carefully at the chainsaw. Then he looked carefully at his left hand. Then he looked carefully at the chainsaw again. He nodded to himself, and dropped the chainsaw, and the shotgun. He returned to the firearms case, took another box of slugs, and turned to his companions.
“Ready to go?” He asked genially, in his cheered-up sarcastic manner. Both of them nodded. “Good. Because we’re going to fuck up some zombies!”

Zach marveled at how resilient Naydeer Corporation automobiles really were. He had read online that they could take a beating, but this was insane. Sunny had taken the car over several medians, through a parking lot swimming with zombies, and halfway across both Moda Garden and Denver, all the while slamming as hard as he could into anything that seemed to move. Zach had followed Sunny in his truck through and over every obstacle, and even gone out of his way to strike missed zombies in that parking lot. He went after most of the moving things that Sunny missed; that is, two zombies. Now, Zach was pointing his katana at Sunny as Sunny, holding a scruffy looking man around the throat with one arm, pointed his shotgun at Zach with the other in a crowded news room. Halfway into the news room was Sunny’s barely dented stolen car, along with a pile of rubble that half buried it. Just outside of the building, pressed against Sunny’s car, was Zach’s truck, which, despite being probably twelve years older, was only slightly more dented than Sunny’s car.
“I hate crashing ca...”
“Oh, shut the fuck up!” Zach screamed. Sunny furrowed his brow, hating being interrupted. He squeezed the trigger.