https://moelane.com/tag/operation-joe/
Dumb of it; I was now squared away for zombie-killing. But you don’t expect smarts from the Undead, even when their heads aren’t leaking. I had to dodge a few times before my arcane focus spat out enough magical death (not to mention bullets) to make it a good Zombear, but that’s par for the course. People pick an assault rifle for a ‘magic wand’ when they care more about accuracy and range than pure force. Not that there’s anything wrong with wanting to be hitting like a sonofabitch right for the start, of course. It’s all a question of personal style.
The Zombear immediately started collapsing into a pile of goo upon its death, like Undead things do. But it had left enough traces of its passage to let me follow the path through what increasingly looked like a thoroughly-wrecked clandestine occult defense facility. It was a mess, what with all the obligatory dead base staff flung around. Some were lying on the ground, some were slumped at the base of a wall — and a few were getting up and starting to shamble.
Fortunately, the shamblers were just getting rejuvenated from all the ungrounded ambient magical energy in the facility, not an actual spell. That meant that I could just headshot them and move on, although I started putting magical bullets in corpses that weren’t moving, just on general principles. I was looking for either survivors or a communications array at this point; that same ambient magical energy was playing havoc with my own comms, and it was probably a good idea for me to call in before the Illuminati called in an orbital bombardment from space, just to be sure. That would probably really hurt.
Oh, it’s a grand life being immortal and mostly unkillable, sure. But I can still lose. Somebody hit this facility for a reason, and maybe that reason involved my own mission and maybe it wouldn’t. Either way, it well and truly sucks to watch somebody who isn’t immortal die because I fucked up too badly. I am also immune to the temptation of using seppuku as anything except a temporary technique for conflict avoidance, but that’s not as much of a problem.
It was cold enough for the blood pools to start slicking over, and Greenland in December is pretty damned dark anyway, so I started checking the buildings that still had power. I figured I’d find only corpses or shamblers in the dark ones, and a radio without power would be about as useful to me as no radio at all. I also wanted to figure out what the Hell was going on here, and for that I’d need people alive and willing to talk to me. The only nice thing about finding survivors of a horrifying supernatural massacre is that you usually couldn’t get them to shut up about it even if you wanted to. I was looking for that kind of data dump.
The first three buildings were useless — powered up, but no heat, and thus nobody alive moving in it — but the fourth one was promising: somebody in it shot me. Which, yes, ouch; I ducked down and bit back my snarl. And then I decided that a snarl was appropriate: “Goddammit, asshole!” I yelled. “What the Hell are you doing?” I heard a muttered curse from inside the building, which was promising.
“Who are you?” came a voice from inside the building.
“Well, sir, I’m the girl from the post office, and I need you to sign for this package!” I yelled back. “What do you care who I am? I’m not moaning ‘Brains,’ am I?” I stood up, and started walking to the door. “I’m coming in. Don’t even think about shooting at me again.”
He didn’t, of course. Smart man. I might have smacked him silly for wasting the bullets.