https://moelane.com/tag/operation-joe/
Something had turned all the zombies on while I was getting the bullets, of course. And as usual. I think that they do it to say ‘hi.’ Or possibly ‘screw you, your friends aren’t immortal.’
“They’re only sort of my friends,” I muttered as I walked another burst across a knot of undead running down the hall towards me. Bad movies aside, you don’t need headshots for zombies. Well, you don’t if you use magic bullets. “A couple of them probably hate my guts.” That’s when one of the bastards grabbed me from my blindspot and tried to eat my hands. I twitched my fingers in a particular way, and glowing spikes erupted from both fists just long enough to shred the zombie’s head.
…Well, there’s nothing wrong with headshots, either. But there were still a damned lot of zombies, and I was probably on a timer. Dawdling would just get mortals dead, which was probably the point; if I wanted to get back before it was too late, I’d need to get messy, and loud.
Let me tell you, there’s no messy like an occult assault rifle on full auto indoors, and not that much that’s really louder, either. If I was firing a normal gun I’d have emptied it in about four seconds, but I know a few tricks to squeezing extra magic bullets out of the universe, and I wanted the zombies to be paying particular attention to me, so it was fire and move, fire and move. All the while keeping an eye on all the liberated death energy that I was collecting around me. The collected energy was persistent, but not stable, but I didn’t want stable; stable doesn’t explode. Really, it’s the exact opposite.
Fortunately, shambling dead are dumb, and live by their sorcerously-imposed urges, so getting their attention was simple and keeping it was almost as easy. The trick was to find a spot that was clear enough to get the buggers nicely packed in, without losing pieces of me that I’d find annoying to retrieve later, but that wasn’t beyond my skill. It helped that the really rambunctious zombies had to get through their marginally dumber comrades to get to me, which they could only barely manage. I suppose that from above we all looked like some sort of breakdancing shoggoth, only with slightly more of a viscera trail. And no, I’ve never fought one of those. Did order an orbital strike on one once, though. It splattered very entertainingly.
What? They’re bad! It’s OK to enjoy killing bad things.
Anyway: in the end, I lost control of the collected energy. I mean, I was on the verge of detonating it anyway, but my own superior zombie-fighting skills were working against me there. You can only juggle mystical nitroglycerin for so long before it all comes crashing down at your feet. And, again, that was the plan. I wanted to blow up zombies, I was at ground zero of all of these zombies, it was only logical that I set it off without trying to escape.
I didn’t quite die from it. I didn’t intend to die, and I didn’t. Go me. But that just meant that the explosion hurt like a sonofabitch.