Chapter 49: Chapter 49: Lost and found

It was a bit nerve-wracking keeping an eye out for Eugene while having to deal with the zombies. Norman didn’t think the man would come back with an injury that severe but it paid to be diligent. Thankfully the zombies were dumb and Norman didn’t have to pay them much attention.

These weren’t like Toby or the former President. They were mindless killing machines… and Norman really wanted to keep them. Especially since they were completely passive toward him.

How cool would it be to toss out a handful of bones, only for them to explode into an army of attack zombies? ‘Pocket zombies?’ Norman chuckled at that thought. Screw Pokemon, undead were where it was at.

So rather than killing them off, Norman set to work trying to paint the magic spell onto them. Which was proving harder than he thought.

“Hold still, dammit,” Norman cursed at the zombie as it struggled under him. It was like trying to corral a dog for a bath. But Norman eventually saw the red glow letting him know the spell had taken root.

He rolled off, letting the zombie rise to its feet. Norman had noticed that anything that went into the storage came out of it in the exact same orientation. He wanted to make sure the zombies were at least standing up when he stored them.

As soon as the zombie was on its feet, Norman touched the spell anchor to the zombie.

There was a pop.

Norman stood there for a bit, contemplating his life choices before he removed his sunglasses, the blood and viscera now coating them slid off with a wet plopping sound.

He looked around at the mess. It looked like someone had filled a water balloon with a human-sized amount of blood and inflated it until it exploded. Blood and guts covered a large area around him, the shambling zombies all looking his way, almost stunned at what had occurred before turning around again as if they wanted nothing to do with the mess he made.

“Traitors,” Norman grumbled, then immediately regretted opening his mouth as he got some of the remains in his mouth. He spit out the foul corpse juice that had entered his mouth, careful not to let the stuff running down his face replace it. He gagged a few times but managed to keep from vomiting.

After his little episode, he looked around at the aftermath of the body exploding. Something was off but he couldn’t quite put his finger on why it looked odd. Then it hit him, there weren’t any bones in the mess. Norman was confused as to why this would be the case until he stumbled upon the spell anchor. Well, he actually stepped on it, causing the skeleton of the zombie to come bursting out and knocking him back.

At first, Norman thought he had figured out how to make a living skeleton, as the thing came out standing up. That hope was quickly dashed as the bones clattered to the floor, still connected by ligaments but nothing else.

Norman had to scratch his head at that. Had he screwed up the spell? It was certainly possible with the zombie struggling so much. Norman looked at the next nearest zombie. The thing seemed to feel his gaze and started shambling away slightly faster.

“Oh, no you don’t, get back here.”

Well… It wasn’t a mistake on Norman's part that caused the zombie to explode. He had two more fresh coatings of zombie's guts to prove that theory wrong. Norman ran his hands through his hair, squeezing out as much of the blood and viscera as possible while trying to figure out what had gone wrong with the spell.

As much as Norman would have liked to sit around experimenting or pondering the issue for hours, he was tired and he had work to complete. And by work, he meant killing the remaining zombies.

As he stated before, they were dumb, but also completely passive toward him. Which meant corralling them into one area was rather easy. He would toss something at a nearby table to make a sound and the zombies would all shuffle toward the noise. This kept them from wandering off as they had started to do when Eugene ran away.

Even though Norman didn’t think the man was going to come back, he still made sure to scan his surroundings every minute or so. He also screamed occasionally, just to see if any more zombies were playing dead nearby.

He chuckled at the play on words as he shoved the sharpened arm bone into a zombie’s eye, killing it. He needed sleep, he was getting a bit loopy.

He was also starting to feel bad for the poor zombies. It was like killing puppies or a special needs kid. They couldn’t even defend themselves.

Norman really wished he had time to figure out the issue with his Stasis spell. But he needed to clean up this mess down here, then rinse off in the company shower before heading home and getting some sleep. The last time he looked at his phone, it was already past midnight.

By the time Norman killed off the last zombie and dragged it onto an empty table, he had counted nearly seventy undead. Not all of them had awoken during the fight, but Norman’s screaming had eventually gotten the rest to stir.

He had also found the reason why there wasn’t a veritable army of undead now coursing through the city. Norman looked down at what he suspected was the cause of all this trouble and his unlikely savior tonight, the missing former gron President. The body was lying near one of the table slabs used for dead bodies, only the top of its skull was neatly severed.

It didn’t take Norman long to spot the reason why. There was a slight outline below the table. Norman may not have even noticed it, except the blood from the dead President seemed to have coagulated along a curved path that ringed the table. Norman realized it was due to a slight indent in the floor for the teleportation circle.

He made a note to be more careful around teleporters.

Norman dragged the body of the president away from the circle. It was night and nobody should be teleporting bodies in and out of this room but better safe than losing an arm or something.

At least with the top of the skull missing, Norman got a good view of what had transpired inside the corpse's brain. But he wanted to be thorough, so he dug the whole organ out and cut away the nerves that ran to the spine.

He then cut the brain in half, which was easier said than done with just a shitty pocket knife.

The brain seemed to have reached a weird equilibrium, similar to the President that died. Portions of the brain were pink and healthy. Others were blackened, which Norman now knew signified the conversion to an undead. Then there was the rot he associated with the witch poison.

There was significantly less rot though. It was almost like the potion needed there to be more rot before it could convert it into undead tissue. It didn’t explain what happened down here though. Norman would have to do some more experiments to figure that part out.

Quite frankly, Norman found it fascinating and if his phone hadn’t decided to ring at that moment, he might have forgotten he needed sleep.

“Hello?” he answered tiredly, not bothering to look at the name.

“Oh good,” the President said. “I saw your friend from the picture fleeing the building you worked in and feared the worst.”

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“Yeah… We had a bit of a kerfuffle, but I’m fine. Are you still tracking him?”

“Unfortunately, No. Before he disappeared from the cameras, he used some sort of device I am not familiar with. Although, he wasn’t looking too good. Did you do that to his arm?”

Norman wasn’t sure he wanted to answer this question. In the end, he figured it didn’t matter.

“Eh, sort of.”

“Well, I must say, that is some truly fascinating magic. How did your studies go? I heard only one of them made it…um, alive.”

“I think I got the process figured out. Well, figured out enough. Unless you have more willing test subjects?” Norman asked hopefully.

“I do not.”

“Oh well. Anyway, Grobert was fit as a fiddle. Said he was gonna see the sights for a bit.”

The President grunted. “That does sound like Grobert.”

“As for the others. I got the second President just before the end of the day. Conversion failed completely. I knew I needed to find the last President, which is why I texted you about the storage area. Thanks for that by the way.”

“That was no trouble at all. I sometimes use that area to slip past certain checkpoints,” he chuckled.

Norman was now really glad he decided to clean up the zombies.

“Anyway, I found the last former President. That was after my little run-in with Eugene. Seems he was turned into a feral undead.”

“A feral undead, what is that?”

“Oh, um… humans call them zombies usually.”

“Is that not what your friend Toby is?”

“Eh, technically. Only feral means they are mindless. You gotta remember, all of this is new. There really aren’t any actual classifications for the undead as such. Humans have many terms for intelligent undead: vampires, ghouls, ghosts, mummies, revenants, liches, and probably a few others that I’m missing.”

“But I thought humanity didn’t have magic before the fall?”

“We didn’t, these were all from stories and fantasy creatures we made up.”

“Ah, that makes sense. Much like our stories of the hum, which doesn’t always paint you, humans, in a good light.”

At least Norman now knew it was hum and not hums like that drunk idiot kept spouting.

“So what does that make Toby and Grobert?”

“Closest analog I can think of is a mummy, except without the faith magic to keep them going. But you could easily classify them under most of the names I gave you. Hmm, maybe I should come up with a new name?” Norman pondered that thought as the President spoke.

“Perhaps you should. But for now, I must be going. When did you want to perform the service for me?”

Norman thought about it. He had a spell he needed to finish first, not that it had anything to do with the President, he just wanted it done sooner rather than later.

“Give me three days. I will also need another bottle of that poison. If you could supply me with a few spares and the recipe, that would be appreciated.”

“I will see what I can do. Have a good night, Norman. And try to stay safe.”

Norman stuck the sticky and blood-covered phone back in his blood-soaked pocket. Then he looked around.

“Well… there’s no point wasting my walk back.”

With a smile on his face, Norman hurried through the rows of dead, storing all the non-gron dead he could find. And he found more than a few new species he couldn’t put a label on. At least not their actual label. He found ones that looked like goblins, orcs, and even a lizard-like humanoid. All of them went into the spell anchors. He had more than enough bones to use as spell anchors thanks to his failed experiments on the feral zombies.

By the time Norman exited the storage area, he had collected over two dozen new bodies and six different species including two human corpses.

Despite the fact that Norman was coated in blood and guts, was jumped by a man that wanted to kill him, and was nearly a chew toy for the undead, he was in a surprisingly good mood. His plans to create an army of undead – that would cater to his every need – were starting to take shape. He only had to iron out a few small details and one big one. The big one was of course Eugene. He also had a few spells that he needed to finish up to put his plan into motion. But if he managed to figure out the spells, the other issue should resolve itself.

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