Grandpa pushed past the hospital bed where he had so recently laid dying and glared at it in disgust, then picked it up and added it to his inventory. "Who knows?" he said at my look. The IV pole followed.
He crossed over to the couch that stood against the remaining wall of our living room. I explained about the weight limit. "What if we both pick it up?"
We gave it a try, but even with the couch lifted a foot into the air, it refused to go into either inventory. So we put it back down, took the cushions off, and went back to looting.
Deputy Young wandered in. “My AR was in the back half of my SUV,” he said in disgust. “All I've got is my sidearm. Found a couple more magazines, though.”
“We're taking everything, whether we think it's helpful or not,” I told him, "Anything you can put in your inventory, grab.”
He nodded and went back out as Grandpa lifted one of the display axes from the wall and hefted it. He had a series of three that hung over the couch for as long as I could remember. One was a genuine obsidian stone axe that his grandfather had knapped a hundred years ago. It was bound to its wooden handle by leather strips that Grandpa replaced every few years. It disappeared into his inventory, and then he took down the other two axes. One was a good steel tomahawk with a carved and painted handle that my mother had made years ago as a teenager. The other axe was a cheap, made-in-China tool like you could buy at any big box hardware store. Grandpa had a whole series of lectures about those axes, about how the stone one of them represented days, maybe even weeks, of a man's effort, and the modern axe was churned out by the thousands at some warehouse in China.
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He wasn't in the mood for any lectures today. Instead, he stuck both of the steel axes through loops of his belt. He had a bowie knife and a sheath already.
”Got any more knives like that?" I asked, pointing at his. Grandpa shook his head.
"I did. It was in the other part of the house."
"Want a kitchen knife?" Sage asked brightly. The sharpest vegetable cutting knife appeared in one hand, our meat cleaver in the other. I took the vegetable knife and put it in my inventory...
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