"You can't swing for shit, genius," Alan observed from behind Clay.
Alan had been kind enough to lend his new assistant a machete, but hadn't ended up being very impressed with Clay's aptitude. The dummy he prepared in the alleyway outside their apartment complex seemed plenty happy with the situation, however, as Clay consistently failed to hack through its neck and decapitate it all in one go. The recycled zombie corpse stood tauntingly tall after four attempts, held up by two lengths of rope at its wrists that kept it hoisted after the other ends were tied to the railings on the fire escape above them.
Its expression almost seemed to be smirking at them, but any mirth it could get from the situation felt pitiful when one looked at its face and saw the way one of its eyeballs had popped into viscera when Alan shoved a knife into its socket earlier in the day.
Clay thought he'd be able to cut its head off all in one go if it was with a machete, but not even the freshly sharpened weapon and the 2 points he put into Strength were of much use to him.
"I'm more used to just smashing their heads open with hammers…" He murmured, cringing as Alan's gaze mocked him from out of his sight, "Is this really necessary? The best use of my powers are to have me shoot them and take away the sound, right?"
"You think ammo grows on trees, genius? Nuh-uh, you gotta at least be able to handle one Crowder close-range without getting all scratched up, if only because I need you to be able to watch my back. Not all of us got that Mario immunity you got!"
Clay's given up on being surprised when the referenced brand properties sometimes intersect with his world.
"Alright," Clay sighed while sliding the machete into a sheath that hung from his toolbelt, "but why don't I just stick with the hammer? Even a guy like me can cave a skull in when I swing it right."
Alan shook his head, "Nope! That hammer ain't got any range! The moment they get in close, it's totally useless! I let you keep it because it'd be better than nothing as a last resort, but it sucks way too much to be your go-to! Trust me, once you get a little stronger, the machete is gonna be your best friend!"
Do you have to talk so loudly? It's pissing me off…
"But why do I have to go for a decapitation? Wouldn't just bringing it down on their heads be good enough?"
"If you want to risk it getting stuck, sure. Listen, it ain't all about the oomph! You also gotta be extra precise!" Alan pointed at a spot on the side of the corpse's neck. "Aim for right about there and give it your best shot!"
Clay didn't nod or anything, but silently waited until his tutor stepped aside and allowed him to take another swing. He pressed the blade of the machete against where Alan had directed, like a golfer lining up their shot on the ball. He pulled the machete back and all at once went for a wide swing.
THUNK!
Low hand-eye coordination from years spent sitting in front of a computer.
Clay once again ended up hitting a vertebrae.
On subsequent tries, even when he managed to hit the part of the neck that had been pointed out to him, Clay couldn't manage to cleanly sever the head.
In the end, Alan had to show him how it's done by decapitating the corpse in one go.
"Well, it's a little about the oomph…" Alan said while trying to hide his pride, but he couldn't keep his lips from wiggling into a light smirk. "You might be better off just lopping off the top halves of their heads…"
Don't look so smug, I did 90% of the work on that one!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You didn't pay attention when I was talking, did you, genius?"
Alan told Clay where in his backpack to find a window-breaker, but Clay hadn't actually caught all of the details because Alan had been keeping his voice down. Not wanting to ask him to repeat himself over and over again, Clay resorted to fishing randomly through Alan's bag while it was still on his back.
"I, uh…" Clay stopped looking through the bag and took a step back. He didn't even know what a window-breaker looked like.
"Forget it," Alan said dismissively while allowing the straps of his bag to slip down his arms. He plopped the bag down on the ground and found the tool himself.
He held the pointed end towards the window of a ground-floor apartment that had taken the pair nearly two hours of walking to get to, with some stops to let Kissy scout ahead of them. After having pressed his face up against it for nearly five minutes, Alan was satisfied enough to say that the apartment was worth going into.
At the established signal, he popped his hand against the other end, and both watched as the glass lost its clearness in a web of cracks. Clay's [Sound of Silence] made sure any commotion caused by the shattering would be overlooked.
Clay spoke as Alan cleared away the remaining glass to make it safe to crawl through, "I don't think I fully understand why we're going in like this. There's no boards or other kinds of fortifications, so why don't we just use the front door?"
Alan responded airily from inside the building after hopping through the window, "It's not always the huge mess of Crowders you gotta worry about. There could be Jumpers waiting to pounce on anyone who uses the obvious entrance."
"Do Jumpers have a concept of an 'entrance'?"
"They have a concept of openings that people use a lot, that's for sure. I reckon an entrance to us is just rollin' around their heads as a 'feeding hole.'" Alan gave Clay room to come in through the window as well and didn't seem all that surprised when the following entrance was way less graceful than his own. Overly careful of any remaining crumbs of glass, Clay ended up flopping on the ground and quickly standing up from embarrassment.
They searched the apartment first, careful of any straggling zombies.
"Even if it ain't a horde," Alan carefully told Clay while they examined the vacant home, "a few loose Crowders is all it takes to fuck you up if you're not careful. It's best to start from a single room that's closed off from the rest of the building so that any Crowders that might be camping here become easy pickings. Strolling in through the front door is dangerous because, even if there ain't a Jumper, it's a lot more likely you'll get seen before you can make any progress if there's zombies chilling out in the hallway. Then your ass is sprinting back outside and possibly attracting even more Crowders. If this apartment is clear, we can fall back to it if we end up getting ambushed in the hallway."
Clay was surprised that someone like Alan, who honestly gave him the impression of being a little simple-minded, was capable of thinking this through so much. All of this stuff sounded so obvious when it was explained to him, but it was the sort of thing that had probably come from having to carefully consider every option at the threat of death.
Then Clay had another realization. Ah, that must have been why Alan was peering through the window so intensely; he'd been making sure the front door was closed and checking for any signs of movement inside.
After guaranteeing there were no errant zombies in the apartment with them, Alan instructed Clay to proceed carefully with the intent of bringing anything they found back to this room for future transport so it wouldn't weigh them down in the moment. The idea was that if they ended up finding a ton of stuff that they couldn't lug back home in one trip, they could come back and just pick it up from this already secured room without venturing the hallways again.
Alan was the one who opened the front door, as slowly as possible to keep any noisy hinges from bringing doom down on their heads. He created a tiny gap to peer into the hallway, then silently held up two fingers.
Two zombies in the hallway. If they'd come in through the main hallway like Clay first thought to, they would have probably been spotted.
"I have the sound of the window shattering," Clay whispered. "I can use it to lure them in a better direction for us."
Alan shook his head, closing the door a little bit to quietly respond, "If you just slam down the sound of a window breaking here, we might end up luring out way more than two Crowders. We gotta secure this building a little bit at a time."
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
"I also need to be the one to kill them," Clay reminded him.
"No complaints here." Alan still unsheathed his machete. "Havin' a guy who's immune and wants to kill these assholes for me is already bringing up my mood, but I'm still gonna step in if you start getting messed up."
Clay nodded and prepared his own machete. He would have preferred the sureness of a long, blunt-force weapon—something like a crowbar, but Alan told him that carrying anything too heavy that could make a lot of noise when dropped or smacked against something was bad for a scavenger. He even recounted a story where he had to flee the scene after a crowbar hanging from his bag clanged against a wall after someone else assured him it was the perfect zombie survival weapon.
That didn't exactly sound universal to Clay, though he didn't want to contradict him.
He wasn't prepared to completely give up on the utility of a crowbar, but Clay knew that he needed to keep his weight light to travel properly.
This is the first time in two weeks he's had to actually deal with zombies, and the first time since his mishap with the scratchy one that he was going to initiate the conflict himself.
Clay peeked out into the hallway and confirmed the two zombies skulking around. Two men, both his height or a little shorter.
After directing Alan to back off, Clay tapped his machete against the doorway to get the Crowders' attention. The moment they turned around and spotted him, Clay took a step back into the apartment and readied himself at the side of the door.
If he didn't have the strength or the coordination to cut their heads off on his own…
As soon as the first one entered the apartment in pursuit, Clay swung into its head with the machete as hard as he could. He attempted to clothesline the zombie and use its momentum against it to cleave open its face and take the top half off of its head in one go.
Unfortunately, while he did kill it, his machete hadn't gone all the way through. Once the zombie died and fell into a motionless heap, Clay had to let go of the machete that was now stuck halfway in its head.
>+10 XP!
As the second one sprinted into the room a moment later, Clay jumped back and took the hammer from his toolbelt. In the pouch next to it was Kyle's revolver, which he would have definitely gone with if it weren't for Alan keeping all the ammo with him.
But before a proper battle could take place, Alan moved in from the zombie's blind spot and cut its head off without any fuss. The decapitated head's teeth chattered eerily a few times as it fell next to its companion's body, then all was still.
Clay wanted to make some fuss about the fact that he's meant to be the one killing them, and Alan probably knew as much by reading his expression.
"I'm not gonna let you get into a tackle-match, genius. The second you lose your machete, all I'm gonna think is 'this kid is super dead if I don't step in.'" Alan kicked the first zombie over and planted his foot on its chest so he could wrench Clay's machete out of its head. "I think you were onto something with that swing from the side you did, but you need more arm strength if you're not gonna try and go for the weak spots I told you about. Try something else."
After being given his machete back, Clay was made to take the lead in opening doors because of his immunity. Commonly, these doors would be locked, but Alan told him that he had tools for unlocking them they could employ later after scoping out the rest of the building.
In one apartment, Clay was bent down in a bathroom and rifling through the cabinets underneath the sink. Inside were cleaning products that could be brought out into the living room and later retrieved as 'low priority cargo.' Keeping things spotless became less important, Clay had been informed, but there were still plenty of uses for chemicals; not that Alan could figure it out. Sometimes wandering survivors traded for them, and that was about the only reason Alan kept a small stockpile.
Thunk-thunk
Clay took two of them by the handles and made a small bit of noise as the hard plastic containers bumped against each other and then the ground next to him.
At once, the shower curtains next to him deformed and fell down completely after enough weight was put on the shower curtain to cause it to collapse. Properly on edge, Clay kicked off the wall next to him to slide out of the way before the writhing shape could fall directly on top of his body.
"Al-!" He started, but cut himself off. Clay told Alan that this apartment was clear, so he already moved on to the next one. He'd have to call out pretty loud to be heard, and that would be a pretty stupid thing to do when they went through so much trouble to keep quiet.
The hand that emerged from the curtain and gripped onto his ankle, hard enough with its nails that he could vividly recall that day in the alley two weeks ago, told him this was just another Crowder. It was also disabled further by the shower curtain it didn't have the wherewithal to get out of.
Clay could at least handle this, right?
He'd sheathed his machete to loot the bathroom, and the new sitting position made it awkward to retrieve, but he brandished it quickly enough to bring it down on the zombie's wrist. With surprising ease, Clay amputated the creature's hand at the wrist. He felt it seize and squeeze tighter for a short second, then relax completely.
Clay was back on his feet a blink later, looking down at the zombie as its revealed arm continued waving in his direction, as if someone had forgotten to tell it that it no longer had a hand to grab him with. From this superior position, he had a moment to think.
Like the blue-collar worker on the roof, this might have been someone who was bitten and hid themselves away. The hand he'd taken from it, with bits of bone and muscle clearly showing, told him it was also possible that this was someone who'd gotten infected earlier on and curled up in their bathtub, terrified and waiting for the storm to pass without knowing they were already doomed.
Watching it clumsily try to unwrap itself from the curtain and attack him made Clay feel sorry for it. It was easy to compartmentalize in the moment when they were vicious monsters attacking him, but these had been people like him at one point. He wondered if the moments where he remembered that would become less frequent as time went on, if he'd just stop caring.
That'd probably be for the best, Clay mused. He could only afford to become so melancholy every now and then, and only when he had the upper hand. It was only from this position of strength that he was allowed to pity the things that wanted to hurt him. Despite its pathetic state, it had given him an important hint.
Thanks, friend, Clay silently recognized its help as he brought the machete above him and aimed for the head-shaped lump.
Whatever sort of afterlife there might be, I hope you won't be scared anymore.
Despite the ceremony, its death wasn't as quick and clean as Clay would have liked. He told himself that was just life.
>+10 XP!
With the apartment well and truly clear, he continued gathering any useful supplies onto a coffee table in its living room. Not a lot, but it could add up if the other rooms ended up providing similar hauls. He did not mention the mishap to his de-facto mentor, even if it was impossible to hide moments like these from the presence in his coat pocket.
Squeak!
Clay and Alan moved to the next floor together, observing that two of the apartment doors were already wide open. Kissy was dispatched to investigate them and came back with news.
Clay pointed at the doorway on the right.
Kissy made no noise.
Clay pointed at the doorway on the left.
Squeak! Squeak! Squeak!
"Correct me if I'm wrong, and I hope I am," Alan placed a hand on Clay's shoulder and spoke into his ear, "but is your rat saying there's three Crowders in there?"
Clay nodded sadly.
Alan groaned, "All in one room, too. Alright, time to whip out the gun, kid. Put them hands out for your bullet rations."
"As much as I'd like you to pour bullets into my hands like Skittles, there's something I want to try first. It might let us conserve ammo."
Alan gave him a questioning look and Clay suddenly became nervous. This was the first time he'd taken initiative and volunteered anything, which he thought should be a good thing, but maybe he'd overstepped.
"What're Skittles?" Alan asked, his voice losing quite a bit of its seriousness.
Clay blinked and looked to the side. "Ah, it's foreign candy…"
---
The plan started with Alan slamming the hilt of his machete against the ground, which allowed Clay to steal the sound.
That slamming sound was then deployed into the empty apartment across from the occupied one, luring the zombies towards it. Crowders didn't start sprinting until they actually located a human or were following a horde, so they moved slowly. When the first one exited the apartment, they sprung into action.
Clay emerged first, stepping into the first zombie's view from inside the vacant apartment and absorbing its attention.
Then Alan slipped forward from down the hallway, behind the zombie that had exited the apartment. It ignored him; rather, it hadn't even seen him after becoming laser-focused on Clay.
At the same time as it was taking its first, predatory steps towards Clay, Alan reached in and closed the door before the other two zombies could exit as well.
He didn't have to hold the door after it was closed since there was no worry of them turning the knob. They would start to throw themselves against the door and cause a ruckus now that they caught a glimpse of him, though. This meant that they'd need to finish things quickly before it got too loud.
As Alan was turning around after closing the door, Clay took a step back to let the isolated zombie enter the apartment after him. Its hands were reached out towards him, crossing the threshold before the rest of its body did.
Now!
Getting grabbed is how you get bit. He remembered their grip and the sharpness of their nails. If one was caught by one or two Crowders, it was a clear sign of ineptitude from Clay's perspective. His ineptitude.
It was even more frustrating than being bit by the Jumper.
Clay moved to the side and swiped his machete down on one of its arms close to the bicep. As its dismembered limb fell to the ground, he heard the first zombie slam against the opposite door.
Uncaring of its lost arm, it continued to pursue him, which gave Alan enough room to enter behind it from its blind spot and promptly repeat Clay's move on its other arm. The second slam came.
Now armless, there was little risk for Clay as he attempted a finishing swipe at the top half of its head. However, it ducked under the swing with alarming coordination, but this was only because it now registered that it had to bite Clay without restraining him with its arms, so it lowered its position to bite him just in time for his swing to go wide. The third slam rang out.
"None of that," Alan said calmly.
Before it could take advantage of the miscalculation and properly attack Clay, Alan had hooked his hand into the waistband of the zombie's pants to keep it from closing the distance when Clay took a step back.
Clay didn't even bother saying thanks. He just took another, more accurate swing at its head and turned the top half of its skull into a blur that scattered viscous fluids to the ground. The fourth slam.
>+10 XP!
The two already knew what they had to do next and moved without skipping a beat back towards the closed door. The fifth slam.
Alan opened the door and pushed it towards the zombies enough to create a crack. The moment one of them reached for him through it, thus showing its face, Clay appeared and shoved the muzzle of his revolver into it. [Sound of Silence] made sure that the shot that killed it made no noise whatsoever.
>+10 XP!
With one of them gone, Clay and Alan both took a step back and allowed the final zombie free reign to exit the apartment. Once it did, it immediately attempted to attack Alan, which was Clay's cue to take one of its arms away as punishment for ignoring him.
After that, it just felt like bullying.
>+10 XP!