Day 4, Year of the Catastrophe – Tuesday, 3rd of May, 2020.

01:18 pm – Courthouse of Lady Allyna Saprobic – hallway –

When the Red Claw turned towards him, Daniel spotted something interesting. Its left arm was missing! With no time to think of why and how, Daniel decided he would fight it. He was still confident and his body felt unnaturally light. There was a tiny voice inside his head, telling him to run and to be careful, but in this moment he did not want to listen.

But for fighting he needed something else. The wooden katana would hardly do anything. He looked down the hallway. There were two doors on his side of the corridor, before the main door and another two doors on the side of the Red Claw. He would maybe have time to get inside one of those two rooms. Left or right? Like a coin flip, Daniel relied on his instincts and sprinted towards the right door in front of him. As he started running, the Red Claw did not waste any time and dashed forward as well. At least it did not shriek to attract more undead this time.

But it was fast. Very fast. It leaned forward, dashing with its claw-like feet ripping open the wooden floor. Daniel barely got the door open and was half inside the room, when the claw ripped through the wood and missed his head by a few centimeters. The hard impact nailed Daniel against the doorframe for a moment, before the claw retreated and he made it inside. A large office revealed itself before him. Well, he wouldn’t find much in the sense of weapons here. Frantically he looked for… Something.

Books, shelves with more books, pens and paper. The most dangerous thing was the bloody letter opener or maybe the scissors. Behind him he heard the familiar splintering of wood again. He needed to restrict its movement somehow, to finish it off more easily. There was, of course, also the option to escape through the window and just make a run for it. But run where? Dozens of undead outside and it’s not like the Red Claw was not going to follow. Daniel swiped the curtains aside to confirm his suspicion. Yeah. About twenty of them.

Wait… Curtains? This could work. Immediately he pulled the heavy wooden chair from the work desk closer to the window and climbed up to reach for the curtain rail. It was fixated pretty well, but Daniel just decided to jump with his entire weight while hanging onto it, which broke it immediately. The curtain rail was a wooden pole, around 3 meters long.

Daniel munched on some chocolate in the bunker, which made him feel more motivated for this fight. He was still pretty nervous about his second body though. Just as he ripped off the large curtain, the door broke and the Red Claw rushed in. With menacing dark eyes it evaded Daniels thrust with the pole easily. Just as it reached him, Daniel sidestepped the sharp claw that was coming for his head in the last moment. Then he threw the curtain right over the head of his enemy. It worked like a charm. The mutant apparently relied heavily on its eyesight, and Daniel did not stop there. He grabbed the curtain pulling it around the undead as it struggled. The claw sliced apart some of the curtain, but there was way too much fabric to cut through with only one hand. There was no way this would have worked if it still had two claws. Daniel ran out of curtain and grabbed the pole again. The dull wood would not make for a good weapon, but it length provided a very nice lever. The thrashed around wildly, destroying a office chair in the process, but the pole between its legs, remained unnoticed until it was too late.

As Daniel rushed around the corpse to bring it to fall with the pole, he noticed that it was still too little. A few blows to the head would hardly solve anything with his wooden katana. He rushed towards the wall and placed his pole between wall and the largest bookshelf. Then he pulled and the large wooden construct fell on the struggling mutant in a storm of paper. A lot of dust was thrown into the air, which made it impossible for Daniel to see anything for a few moments, but when the dust settled, the Red Claw was trapped below the small mountain of books and wood.

Coughing, Daniel grabbed the letter opener from the desk and a book from the ground and approached his enemy. The claw was still moving around weakly, trying to work its way through the shelf that restricted its movement. Daniel smacked the book two times into its face in anger before he put the letter opener against the skull and hammered it deep into its brain. The movement stopped immediately. Tired, Daniel sank down against the desk and grabbed a can of cold coca cola with his other body. The liquid did not relieve the thirst his second body felt now, but it felt like a victory and he just had to celebrate every little moment.

After a bit of rest, Daniel rose again. He still had to secure the house in some way. He opened to door next to the office, anticipating undead rushing out, but it was just an empty toilet room, with a sink. He drank some water from it while his other body drank cola, giving the illusion of the water actually being cola. It was a funny thing to do. Mixing flavors did have its perks.

After this win he was really in very high spirits. He had been eating all day with one body, which for whatever reason had been possible, and succeeded in killing the biggest threat around by pure luck. No idea what happened to the other claw but he would take any advantage he could get. His luck also seemed like it was not running out. The front door was merely open, not destroyed or broken down and it looked pretty sturdy too.

Quickly Daniel shoved out a zombie that was just entering the house, closed and locked the door and focused his attention towards the house. He opened doors from a safe distance with his pole, ready to apply similar tactics again, but the rooms had all been empty. Only the old lady upstairs and the four guys in the garage had been in the house. The old lady was a bit tricky to deal with, especially since she was barricaded and locked in. It took a while since he had no key and he did not want to destroy anything at first. Then however, he just broke the door off the handles with his old friend: brute force.

Getting the barricade away took a while, but soon the door was open wide enough for the zombie to slip out and follow Daniel. Luring her downstairs she fell and he bashed her head in with the pole. The four guys in the garage he did not want to deal with after spotting a very interesting thing: an oven that used wood to heat the house. A large stockpile of wood was piled up next to it as well. This was perfect for Daniel to test something he had been curious about.

How well did the undead burn?

Fire was a light source that apparently attracted them at night. If the dead also burn nicely, he would be able to set up large fireplaces for hordes to walk into, turning them all into ash pretty effectively. For all he knew he could be outnumbered by a million or more to one. Just bashing ins skulls would never clear the area. And he needed a relatively safe environment to set up better defenses in the near future. Luckily he now had everything he needed to test his theory. He dragged the old lady and the Red Claw corpse towards the fireplace and went into the kitchen to search for a good butchers knife.

He did not find one, but a set of various kitchen tools would probably do the trick. The ground floor had ceramic tiles, so cleaning them would be easy even if Daniel made a bloody mess. And a few stains can always be covered by a rug. First he set up a large fire, that grew slowly, but time was flying as he disassembled the corpses as well as he could. When the fire had burned down quite a bit and most of the fire was ember he threw in the first few fingers of the zombie woman. They did not take long to burn. At first not very well, but as the remaining liquid had evaporated, it burned like cinder. Daniel shoved in as much of her as he could, nearly killing the fire in the process a couple of times. Setting up large fires would probably work for eliminating them, but if there were too many… The fireplace would have to be gigantic in order to not burn out from fresh bodies arriving too fast.

The Red Claw did not burn very well though. It burned after he left it in the glowing embers for around two minutes, but that was quite some time. But if there were more of them, they would probably be smart enough not to enter flames from what he had seen. If they did not prevent the other undead from entering outright. These things would be quite the hassle. Daniel really hoped there were not more of them. That was some shit he really did not want to deal with.

It took all day and the better part of the evening to clean the house and the fireplace afterwards. Then he found something in the ashes.

A orange colored crystal like the one he had found on one of the corpses before and a dark red one that was about twice the size....