https://moelane.com/tag/operation-joe/
People ask me what it’s like to die, but fortunately I haven’t a clue. I never remember what it’s like, and I mean that literally. My ability to form new memories gets turned off, probably because it likely hurts like a sonofabitch to have your soul forcibly held on this plane of existence while a new body that might or might not be made from your corpse is woven around you. Which is probably prudent; God forbid that I develop any kind of psychological trauma from the death/resurrection process. I mean that literally, too. Nobody wants somebody like me to go insane.
What I do get out of the process is a collection of buzzing auditory hallucinations, the uniquely disconcerting feeling that my arteries have a thin coating of honey, and the embarrassing realization that some asshole just killed me. Me. That’s not how it’s supposed to work! I think that the reaction is designed to get me ready to go over and kill the asshole right back, but I don’t know. It might be a normal response for somebody in my circumstances.
So it should not be suprising that, as I reconstituted my body in the nearest intersection of ley lines and dimensional weak spots (ever find a spot somewhere that was felt creepy or dangerous or just plain different? One of those. Yeah, the blessed things are everywhere), my thoughts turned to bloody-minded homicide. Not murder. I won’t murder and the Illuminati doesn’t try to make me. Anybody I kill either deserved it, or is like me anyway.
Besides, this was a zombie polar bear. Everybody says that you can kill those. Most religions will even give you points for it.
The nasty little — OK, huge — thing was snuffling around where my body used to be, I assume upset that its meal had popped out of existence mid-gnaw. I gave it a look-see, but it didn’t look all that unusual for a zombie polar bear. Somebody had put a helmet and some strange-looking armor on it, presumably after it died; and it looked pretty beat up. I’m not really trained in that kind of magic, but if I had to guess it looked like Zombear had been in whatever had happened here earlier. Whether it was as an attacker or defender wasn’t immediately obvious, and I didn’t really give a shit either way.
If I was a heroine of song and story, I might have announced my presence fairly and given it a chance to face me. I might have even thrown a quip or two before the fight started. But I’m a paladin for the Illuminati, which gives me a certain tactical flexibility. So naturally I head-shotted the damned thing from alllll the way over there.
Unfortunately, Zombear was one of the zombies that doesn’t care about whether you splatter its brains all over the concrete. Or maybe that stupid helmet was good for something. Either way, it reared, half-stumbled as it turned around, and then just started charging. You’d think that it would have taken longer, or at least be less accurate, but I guess it could smell my magic and life on the bullets I had just shot it with. It made, heh, a bee-line right for me.