Grey surveyed the corpse where it lay in his storage; it looked perfectly fresh, and would remain so, until he removed it. It might be missing a leg; and he might have no idea where that leg was; but that merely presented an opportunity.
Militia compound of unknown size. Most likely containing a collection of competent people, who are likely at least level 6, probably a few of ten or even higher. Organized, and all of them following a pattern; upgrading an AR-15 and a body-armor plate. Likely not
So. What could he pack onto the corpse that would allow it to handle things? A bomb? A poison gas? Some sort of toxin? He was vaguely familiar with how to make some of the various forms of toxic gas by combining cleaning chemicals, and knew you could use fertilizer to make a bomb.
He could always just flood the place with Undead, but he had a specific purpose for them. Each abomination he was making now; horrific monsters with odd-numbered limbs and four-mandibled heads; had a destiny to die while trying to kill Nightfire.
He’d sacrificed his non-fire-resistant corpses, for the most part, to sell parts for credits and get the Village; each chitin wasn’t even worth a single credit, but thousands of them added up rapidly.
The region around El Paso was getting to be remarkably safer as time went on; more and more of the groups looking to level up were departing for more rural areas, with more plentiful wildlife, every day. So unless he just started killing random civilians, he wasn’t going to have a ready source of corpses to make more minions.
On the other hand…. Why just use one zombie with an explosive? If one could do the job…..
***
Grey had never made a pipe-bomb before, or any other sort of improvised explosive. He sold cars. He knew a little bit about fixing them. He used to make a solid attempt to be a bit less of an asshole than a typical used car salesman; but none of that was really important, at present.
The web-searches he was making probably put him on a watch-list. But at the same time, whether it was the anarchist’s cookbook or the pages of 4chan, he was able to find extensive directions on putting together improvised explosives and toxins.
When he stopped by the hardware store, pushing the cart along, he was stopped at the entrance by a man in a blue apron. “Sir. Just to warn you… we don’t take cards anymore.”
He tilted his head a moment, studying the young man; the nametag read ‘Aaron’, and Examine said he was level 4. “Still take cash? Got… a few hundred in cash still.”
He nodded. “Yessir. But…. maybe not much longer. Honestly, I’ve been taking home a carload of merchandise every day. Most of the other employees, too; we figure its all gonna be on the barter system by the end of the week.”
Grey blinked. “...Why is that? I thought things were going okay.”
“...Must not keep up with the news. Its okay here. But up north, where there’s more birds, animals, stuff? Its…. bad. Really bad. Cities running out of food, towns getting overrun…. some dude with magic went in and erased everybody’s credit card debt, so the banks are refusing to honor any of it… stock market’s done….” He shrugged.
“I’ve been stocking up on lighters, tools, fertilizer, anything I think will sell, when it gets worse. Dry food and goods are probably gonna be worth more than gold in a month.”
That hadn’t been on the news yesterday. Either he was watching the wrong news, it was being cherry-picked, or things were going downhill swiftly.
“Well then. Are you even gonna really check me out when I leave?”
“Right now, boss-man says yes. We’re ringing people up, taking cash. Might change tomorrow.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “.... am I gonna find any fertilizer on the shelves? Or ant-killer? Cleaning supplies?”
“Not much, no.”
“..I’ll buy what I can with cash. But if you’ve got a private stock at home… if you’ve got enough to be worth my time, I’ll trade you an Uncommon-upgraded AR-15.”
The clerk studied him a moment. “...Looking to make some improvised explosives?”
“That can kill a giant raccoon, or be dropped down a hole to kill a whole bunch of ants. Poison, explosive, whatever. Could also use bait animals. Like rats or the like. Don’t have to be alive, just fresh enough for something to want to eat them.”
The clerk grinned. “..... Those upgraded guns are worth quite a bit right now. Less because so many people died after upgrading one, but…. Come around back. I’ve got a stash, if you’ve got the gun.”
***
One dead rat. One pipe bomb. One old abandoned house; and time for a test.
The zombie rat was only level 1; and without any sort of Empowerment, he could control a veritable swarm of them… and thanks to his Awareness upgrade, see what it saw, and better control it.
Which, hopefully, meant that he could command the thing to crawl into position, flick a lighter, and then charge forward and explode.
It looked absurd; a tiny animal with a length of metal pipe strapped to it; and he could feel it, sense what it sensed, as it ran down the driveway to the house.
He considered, as it ran. Should he strap bombs to the ants, for the work against Nightfire? No…. she’d just detonate them all before they got close.
When it was about ten feet away, he ordered it to light the fuse; focusing on the tiny paws, flicking the cheap Bic lighter….
It couldn’t do it.
He grumbled… and considered his options. The zombie rat was still struggling to light the fuse, but he wasn’t having any luck; and no reason to think a different rat would do better, or worse.
That left three options. Electronic detonation; which he had no clue how to do and was much more difficult. Matches… which might also not work….
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Or he lit the fuse himself and sent the rat on its way, with a timer til it went off.
He wasn’t going to trust a rat with a match, after it failed with the lighter. And he had plenty of fuse. So. One box of zombie rats. One box of pipe-bombs. Time to see what that was worth.
***
Tracking down the militia compound was easy. Trivial, even. They had a website, though they’d changed it up a bit; it used to be a white supremacist organization. Now? Human supremacist.
He couldn’t tell what the old name was; but now it was the Humanity First ‘Club’, or the HFC.
Unfortunately, there were a few problems. The approach was wide open; no way he was going to get in unnoticed. And considering he needed to be reasonably close to control his zombies, that meant he needed a distraction.
As he drove up the half-mile driveway towards the compound, he glanced at his distraction; a one-legged zombie, with a pipe-bomb peg-leg stuffed into a boot… and as he approached the front gate, he slowed down to a halt, rolling down the passenger window…. And made the zombie lean out, waving an arm, mask missing.
It looked… bad. Beaten. But still recognizable. Hopefully they would recognize their friend and let him just drop him off and go.
The gate slid open… and two men with rifles stepped out; masks, camo, body-armor… they could be copies of the ones he killed earlier.
The first stepped up to his window, while the second hung back, watching. He looked at the zombie in the passenger seat, then at Grey…. And shook his head. Grey smiled; he was pretending to be friendly. And not very good at it.
“Just making a drop-off.”
The man glared at Grey through his mask. “The fuck you are.” And raised something in his left hand. Grey felt… something. Terrible pain running through his body. The world faded to black.
***
When he could see again…. His arms were twisted behind his back, over his head, in a position so that if he did somehow summon a weapon, he couldn’t use it…. And strapped to the ceiling. His feet were just barely on the floor…
And he was in what looked like an old-fashioned prison cell, clearly underground. He wasn’t alone, either… there were at least eight of the cells… and he could see women in the others. Barely clothed; either wearing rags or lingerie; most of them wearing collars, leashed to the wall inside their cells.
He was alone, at the moment. Undoubtedly someone would be coming soon to question him about their friend…
Grey noticed footsteps… a man… massive, well-muscled, with a long series of tattoos; at least one a swastika, though he didn’t recognize the others; heading towards him down the dusty hallway.
He closed his eyes, focused.
The one-legged human zombie was lying on a table in a room… he’d gone completely inert the moment Grey had been knocked out. They must have assumed he was truly dead now. Either way…. They hadn’t removed his leg, or found the bomb.
There were four of them around the body, talking about something… standing in what looked like an infirmary. One of the four people the Zombie could see was also wearing a collar, like the women; undoubtedly a doctor, probably with a healer class, they’d taken prisoner.
So, their healer and three of their people, likely including a leader?
All of them looked startled as the zombie sat up… and started removing the boot.
One of them stared, and when a soft hiss sounded as the fuse was ignited, even started for the door….
The compound shook. He lost vision of the zombie, and the man approaching him suddenly stopped… and scrambled back for the stairs, running back up to investigate.
He felt around… the Rats. There were dozens of them in the box, but no way to set their fuses. He ordered them all to crawl out of the box… the tiny zombies surprisingly fast and limber compared to their human equivalents… and scattered most of them into the darkness… aside from two.
Keeping his eyes closed, he ordered those two towards himself… and when he found a vent cover, the two chewed through it.
One got stuck; the pipe-bomb leaving it trapped at the entrance; while the other… rapidly crawled through the darkness. He could hear a few of the women shriek, backing away… as the rat crawled up his body, to his arm…. And started chewing on his bindings.
It didn’t take long for his hands to be free… and he grunted as he leaned against the bar, working his fingers to get the blood flowing.
If he called something from his extradimensional space, it would appear in his hands. So they likely had dealt with folks with that power before.
One of the women was standing against her bars, watching him intently… as he summoned just what he needed for this particular moment… an old kerosene camp torch. He ignited it, and set it into the vent…. Before sitting down on the rusty old bed sitting in the cell.
He leaned against the wall, closing his eyes… and started directing the rats.
The first one, which had been waiting, used one tiny paw to light its fuse… and then sprinted off across the compound… running up to the window of what appeared to be a kitchen, where two armed men were arguing… one of them raised his rifle, pointing and opening fire as soon as he saw the rat outside the window; which was pointless.
Shortly after the zombie was crushed… the pipe-bomb exploded, catching the building aflame, and sending shards of envenomed shrapnel through the window.
More of them came scurrying through the darkness. Lighting their fuses. Running off to find victims, targets.
Some of them found nothing. Exploding uselessly in the darkness, just adding to the chaos. One found the armory; Grey had mixed feelings about the results; a chain reaction detonation of the ammo would have been good for clearing out the Militia members, but he might be able to sell those bullets later.
Not many guns, though; he’d only seen a handful when the rat had gone off, trying to crawl up the pant-leg of a screaming militiaman.
The reactions were heavily varied. Some of them ran. Some immediately drew weapons and fired. But over the next few minutes, thirty-two rat zombies exploded in a series of detonations scattered across the complex… and taking most of the Militia with them. He nodded to himself…. And called the Abomination out of the shard.
The massive, envenomed monster was a patchwork of multiple ant corpses forming a single hideous blend; and while one of the women just passively stared, the others backed away in their cells, shrieking further as the undead started shaking the cell door… and snapped it open.
It appeared to have damaged one of its limbs in the process; but the results were what mattered. He sent it upstairs; it was tougher than the regular ants, and could spit accursed venom from both mouths, but these Militiamen had fought swarms of ants before. He had to hope the chaos would help; he didn’t want to have to unleash dozens of them.
He studied the women, frowning. They were a problem. Law and order was falling apart, yes. But until it did, what he was doing here was technically illegal, and they’d seen him use the Abomination, and might tell others about it.
On the other hand… Sledge and Star would undoubtedly know it was he who did this. If they found out the Militia was gone, they likely wouldn’t do anything about it; but a basement full of dead prisoners? This was one of those problems that, if he solved with violence, it would likely spiral into an endless string of corpses.
As the abomination upstairs started to stalk the Militiamen through the ruins… he could see as it crept up behind one of them and spat a stream of horrific fluid onto him, leaving the man shrieking in pain before his muscles seized up and he collapsed…. And then crawled into the rubble to wait.
Gunshots were going off all over the compound; but since he hadn’t released anything but the one abomination, he wasn’t certain what they were shooting at.
He looked at the women in their cells… and when one of them started to softly glow, closing her eyes, apparently undergoing a racial transformation for hitting level 5 from absorbing mana from all the dying Militiamen… he made up his mind.
He dropped the manhole cover to the floor, stepping onto it… and called up a few ant corpses; this time the smaller, less valuable, worker ones. He’d use five of them at once, see what sort of abomination it would make, ideally something good at tearing open cell doors… and make a single one to do a bit of housekeeping.
