Almond (ONC2021)

Chapter 9 - First Blood

After I pulled my Honda Civic into the garage I didn't even bother going inside. I went straight to my workbench and started brainstorming homemade weapons.

Admittedly, I wasn't really all that handy. I'm not a craftsman or carpenter or engineer or metalsmith. Frankly, I'm not even sure why I have a workbench. It was the cleanest thing in the garage and really just functioned as a macho table. It was going to earn its keep today though.

Sort of.

In the end, all of my ideas consisted of using duct tape to combine different tools and then trying to give them cool names. I was too tired to be creative and each of them just ending up being a lame word mashup for the most part. For example, I attached the grilling fork to a crowbar to form a Crork. It seemed to be an effective design, but the name was uninspiring. I had an old wooden baseball bat that I intended to wrap in barb wire, but I didn't have any. Much like my hockey stick, a bat was already a pretty good weapon in its own right.

In the end, I just taped sharp things onto other things to make spears of varying lengths. Within the hour I had assembled a decent amateur armory that would have fit nicely into a zombie home-defense scenario. How would it fare against a demented Pokémon? For that question, I could only shrug to myself.

As my usual self-reward, I opted to go have a beer. I was halfway up the cement stairs to the laundry room when I realized I was going empty-handed. Here I had just crafted enough weapons to battle a zombie horde and I was literally walking away unarmed. My survival instincts were just not highly tuned enough yet. I turned back and selected one from my smaller collection.

The Drivehammer.

Admittedly, I liked the name more than the creation. It was simply a hammer with a flathead screwdriver taped to the handle so that I could whack and stab with it. But giving it a name made it feel more powerful somehow. The tool names actually fit pretty savagely together, much better than my steak-knife tipped broom.

Sproom.

It just sounded silly.

Armed now with the garage equivalent of Excalibur I headed to the kitchen, tried to use Drivehammer to open a beer, failed, and started searching for the bottle opener. While I was doing this the door to the garage slammed shut with enough force to rattle the windows.

This was disconcerting. I hadn't even begun to celebrate my new armory and I was most certainly not ready to wield any in battle. Without taking my eyes off the laundry room, I located the opener in the drawer and, with trembling hands, eventually popped the cap off my beer. Then, taking swigs with my left hand and having Drivehammer drawn back to strike in my right, I tiptoed back to the garage door.

It was indeed shut. Also, it was locked, which should have been impossible, as the button was on my side. I clicked it a few times with the flathead end of Drivehammer and it operated as normal, but still the knob wouldn't turn. It was magically frozen.

I had just been cut off from my weapon cache.

Then I heard something from the garage—the sound of all hell breaking loose. Crashes. Bangs. Glass breaking. Deafening pops. Ripping metal.

I backed up against the dryer, not even realizing I was still attempting to drink my beer until I felt the cold liquid spill down the front of my shirt. The cacophony of destruction continued for at least a full minute, which seemed forever when dealing with such chaos. Then it came to a sudden halt, the doorknob turned, and the door to the garage door swung open just enough to disengage the latch bolt.

It took me a while to work up the nerve to investigate. Even then I wasn't driven by bravery or curiosity. If my new badass weapons and my car weren't in there, I would have just shoved the washer against the door and called it a day. All of my options for fight or flee were in the garage. With Drivehammer ready I slowly pulled it open.