Chapter 61: Guns Lead to Glory ~ 3
Clutching the zombie by its throat, Dion shoved the mouth of the shotgun between its jaws, and a faint sizzle hissed as the hot barrel burned through the slobber coating its teeth.
He pulled the trigger, and a large blast of brain, blood, and skull bone spattered backwards, streaking back across to carpet the street.
The street went silent for a brief moment thereafter, and then the ambient sounds returned, and beneath all of them, his sigh came.
Dion stood there with the shotgun resting over his shoulder and turned back toward the group.
"I thought about your offer," he said, once more swiping the hand that he had speared through the skull of the gnoll trying to get rid of the lingering blood. " And I’d like to join you."
Anton and Madeline had been running to help Irvin, with the former having run ahead of the latter.
By now, they had gradually brought themselves to a halt not far from where he stood in the middle of all the zombie corpses.
Anton looked at him for a long moment, then at the gnoll’s body, then back, and around at the zombie corpses.
His expression was surprised at first, then it eased into a kind of exacerbated relief.
"You can fight like that, and you were hiding in a gun shop?"
"I wasn’t hiding. I was making the attempt to loot what should have been mine, and you all interrupted me. Then, my distraction wore off, and the big bads came."
Anton let out a short breath of a laugh, shaking his head a little as he muttered under his breath, "You were seriously the one responsible for the car explosion..."
’That car dummy is what helped me shake off half of those runners! There is nothing shameful about it!’
"At least you’re honest about that." Anton had said to him, and at the same time he had slightly reached his hand out to shake Dion’s.
But then he pulled it back, seeing that the only one that was free was the one with blood still on it, and for both of their sakes, he pulled back and only sighed a little.
"You’re in. I’m Anton," He then gestured to each person as he named them, "She’s Madeline, and he’s Irvin."
"...Thank you," Madeline said in a lower voice, coming up behind him.
At the same time, Irvin had brought himself up off of the ground by this point, but he didn’t approach.
His jaw was still tight, and his attention had especially lingered on the gnoll’s corpse.
"It’s a pleasure. My name is Dion."
Everyone but Irvin gave their slight acknowledgement, and Anton turned toward the shutters leading into the Blackout Armoury.
"Basil, let’s go; Dion is joining us."
Soon enough, Basil came through the gap in the shutter with his hand in his pocket, pressing something flat against his thigh.
He looked at the gnoll’s body in the road and then at Dion, his eyes briefly falling to the shotgun in his hands.
"Dion? You handle that well for someone who was looting a gun shop, not running one."
"You think so? Well, thank you, Mr. Basil. I spent a few years around people who took their firearms seriously." His expression fell slightly wistful, and he continued in a lower voice, "Perhaps more than I should have been. My uncle sorted me out after that."
Basil nodded at that, and then his attention moved past Dion to the street beyond, where the bodies of the zombies lay in a scattered line leading away from them.
"There’s no need for the honourifics. Just Basil is fine." The man muttered as he continued looking.
They were all killed by the shotgun, clearly, but the gnoll that he had just seen? it hardly looked to have been damaged by anything that he knew any of them could do.
Thus, Basil had looked back at Anton.
"How did you finish the second one that quickly? It didn’t look like it was giving even Irvin an easy time."
"That wasn’t us."
Anton had spoken as he gestured towards Dion.
The man in question had, at this point, after faintly nodding in agreement to what Basil had said to him, crouched down to the shirt of one of the zombies.
He had been using the relatively clean patches of their clothing to wipe the slobber from the mouth of the shotgun.
He couldn’t do so for the blood on his hand, so he only sucked that up, consoling himself with trying to swat the gore off it.
Basil’s brows rose high at the revelation.
"He dropped onto it from the roof," Madeline said. "Drove it into the road, killed it, and then the rest of them before we could get to him."
Basil, having glanced at Madeline as she spoke, looked at Dion again, longer this time.
"Car’s three streets south," Anton spoke in the silence that had lingered. "We need to get moving quick. Since we didn’t find any more guns, we need to drop Basil and Madeline off before we head out to find food."
Dion hummed in agreement at that. They all began leading the way, and he hung back a little, his gaze to the dark night sky.
His jaw tensed a little with his irritation, and he shook his head.
’I’ll wait to see how bad it is with them, and then I need to get going again... If Sue is still alive, I can’t afford to stop because of rain.’
The streets were relatively clear through the path that they took to get back to the cars, with corpses strewn down the path.
Dion, glancing here or there, could clearly see that they had done the work to make sure at least their escape path was secure before anything else.
He kept walking with the shotgun on him, deciding not to reveal anything about his treasury.
"How many of you are there?" Dion asked.
"Sixty-three, as of this morning," Anton said, his eyes scanning the windows of the buildings they passed. "Sixty-four now, including you. We’re set up in the Greyland Capital building about four blocks east of here. Everyone is currently holed up on the eleventh floor, with the stairwells barricaded below the ninth. The elevator has been disabled so it’ll be a long climb when we get there."
’That is... a lot to be trying to manage and take care of at a time like this.’
Dion internally grimaced at the number, and even though mentally, he understood how wrong of a reaction that had immediately been from him, he couldn’t feel anything much emotionally about the dissonance.
’My emotions have been stranger since this new growth spurt of mine... just what the hell is going on?’ He thought to himself as his brows furrowed a little.
"How many of you are Awakened?" he asked to distract himself.