operation Joe – Moe Lane

Operation JOE, Part 7.

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.

Operation JOE, Part 6.

https://moelane.com/tag/operation-joe/

The armory door was locked, of course. It looked like it could be unlocked with a four digit number put into a standard keypad, only the numbers skittered around the keypad and changed color every time you touched them and the wrong combo would throw you across the room and up against a wall, moderately bruised and slightly on fire. Also: 1234 was not the right number.

God-damned puzzle locks.

Oh, I get the point of them. We have a lot of enemies in this business who are bright enough to use guns, but not bright enough or well-versed in mortal culture enough to figure out even the simplest riddle or puzzle. Fine. The problem is, They don’t get people like me to design the puzzles or riddles. Oh, my, no. They get antisocial geniuses with obsessions on their obsessions to create the most ridiculous conundrums possible. And then people just write down the answers and post them by the lock anyway, because who has time to learn Enochian well enough to do acrostics in it?

Operation JOE, Part 5.

https://moelane.com/tag/operation-joe/

There were four of them left. The site was supposed to have about a hundred or so regular people around, which meant that this was indeed a standard Binah-Halav-Resh scenario, which translates out of occult bureaucratese as Something Ate One Of Our Super-Secret Facilities. Again. Yes, we have paperwork for that. By now we damn well ought to.

Unfortunately, none of the survivors were Illuminati: we had a couple of Templars (great guys, credit to this thing of ours, love them to death, no that was not supposed to be literal), somebody from one of the smaller groups that orbit the three (or four, or five) big ones that run the show — and somebody from the Council. That was going to be a problem, because the Council is convinced that they’re in charge and they make their underlings toe that line. But it was only a small problem, because my bosses have always made it clear that I get to ignore that in an emergency, and I figured that most of the base being dead qualified.

Operation JOE, Part 4.

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.

Operation JOE, Part 3

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.

Operation JOE, Part 2.

https://moelane.com/tag/operation-joe/

Which made my choice of ride entertainingly ironic, given that nobody else was in the bomb bay and it was too cold for electronic devices. So I took a nap; sleep may be another optional feature for me, but I like it. I just rarely have an excuse to go have some, and I wasn’t going to waste the opportunity.

The Air Force was kind enough to give me a claxon when we were five minutes out from the drop zone, which was plenty of time for me to wake up, check that nobody had inexplicably managed to steal my gear while I slept, and position myself for when the bomb bay doors opened. I allowed myself the luxury of a little sweat, then. I’m not entirely sure why, although I suspect that it’s all tied up with my need to think of myself as still being human. That’s ridiculous of me, probably. Humanity is a state of mind, right?

Operation JOE, Part 1.

This is not this month’s story: it’s a surprise for my MMO cabal. I’m pretty sure none of them read this site, so it should stay a surprise, too. It’s not going to be going on forever, either: I want it done in time for Christmas.

Moe Lane

PS: This was what I was working on yesterday. But it was crap, so I threw all of it out and started over. Sometimes you just gotta.

Operation JOE

I flipped through the mission folder with increasing incredulity. Bad enough it was physical — the Illuminati never use a digital mission brief for anything seriously classified — but the mission objectives were out of the ordinary, even for me. I was so startled I actually let that register on my face.

“Seriously?” I said. “You want me to ride shotgun for the JOE? The JOE? Since when did we get into that business?”