Despite being winded, Jack couldn't take his eyes off the neighboring yard. He was panting, transfixed, and unmoving due to grim fascination. He could clearly hear the mower buzzing through the window. Which meant those things could too.
Moments seemed to pass. Maybe he had gone crazy, and all of this was in his imagination. There were just people out there, now curious about his unfathomable actions and watching his home with caution. Maybe he was already dead from the first notification, and this was his mind trying to make sense of it all. Maybe there were zombies, but some other, crazier guy already came through and killed them all...
The soft shattering of glass woke him from his theories. He couldn't see. The angle of his window was blocked by the adjacent house's wall, but he heard it. He thought he might have heard something else too, but it was deafened by the sound of the mower. Then another high pitched crackling of glass. Followed by again more silence. Jack waited. More time passed than he would have liked. He would have checked his watch, but he didn't own one. It had definitely been too long. Maybe he had misheard? Maybe-
Then he saw him. Frank. Old, obnoxious Frank. Sprawled and barely moving on his yard. And he was hurt. Why was Frank hurt?? Frank shouldn't be hurt. But he was, and so badly he couldn't stand up, crawling and gasping on his lawn. Jack needed to go help him. Was it his fault? Maybe he had startled the old man into tripping and hurting himself. He was such a fool.
However, as Frank struggled forward, dark blood became more and more visible on his lower body, culminating in a lower back eviscerated by chunks of glass. Frank had cut his stomach open and was dragging his intestines behind him. His legs weren't working, but he used his hands to pull himself forward with single-minded determination. He wasn't calling for help. He was purely focused on the lawnmower in front of him.
Jack brought himself back to his situation. Frank wasn't Frank anymore. He couldn't be. Frank would have complained by now. And. No human would or could ignore their wounds like that. Frank had to be one of them. One of 'God's zombies. Jack had successfully drawn him out into the open. ...Which meant that in some way Jack had wanted this to happen. And that he wasn't schizophrenic.
At that thought, Jack felt a wave of nausea, fueled by a sense of guilt. He had been right, wanted to be right, and knowing he wanted... this made him want to puke.
But again, he cut that thought process and forced his feelings down. If he didn't, he would not only lose time, but also fall into an annoying trope-brand trap. He refused to be the 'vomit guy'. Vomit guy always gets killed or, like, betrayed or something in zombie stories. Vomit guy was a side-character. Jack had to be better than that. Fuck Frank. It was sad what happened, but if he rushed out there to help he'd be 'too-nice-to-live guy'. Jack didn't want to be any of the 'guys'. If he had a choice, he wanted to be Batman.
So Jack, deciding to handle coming events like a Bat-wannabe, firmly forced himself to look back down at Fra- the criminal zombie scum polluting the streets of Gotham.
...Being Batman wasn't helping. Frank's corpse, however, had inched closer and closer to the upright lawnmower. At a tenuous speed, it raised it's hand to the source of the noise... and pushed it directly into the bottom of the machine. That hand was promptly chopped up like a tomato in a late-night infomercial. Chunks of manus went flying as the creature continued to push it's limb further in. Black blood started spiraling out of the sides of the machine, into the air and drawing lines in the grass or on the fence, following the path of the blades. In reaction to this, Frank didn't scream or even blink, but it did seem to notice that it's grab was failing to solve the problem. Taking the stump of its forearm out, it pushed the limb into the dirt to anchor itself, then brought its mouth up to bite at the disrupting machine.
Jack watched in silence as his neighbor violently removed his own face. Frank finally stopped moving when the machine had fully chewed through the head and sent pieces of the man's skull to decorate his lawn. To Jack's surprise, the lawnmower hadn't broken from this. Frank really had bought one hell of a mower. However the blades did bend, now producing rhythmic screeching to accompany the normal sound of the machine.
It took a moment for him to process... all of that. But he eventually felt... better? Despite what he'd expect, and the extreme amount of gore, that thing had proven itself NOT to be Frank. That thing had just shown no awareness, no self-preservation, and no rationality. He didn't have to doubt himself anymore, and he didn't have any role in killing the people that these things had been. Instead, putting one down would be an act of kindness towards that person. Like burying an (animated) body.
Jack felt a small part of the emotional knot in him loosen, and things became just a bit simpler. Removing his eyes from the bloody mess below, he smiled ruefully when he saw the orange box floating near him.
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*Achievement Granted!
Automatic Achievement- Zombie Killer
Altered to: Lawnmower Man
+.05 points*
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"Automatic? Altered? And even less points this time?" Jack said, voicing his questions before choosing to read the achievement description. By doing so, he hoped the being watching would provide answers.
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*Description: This is an automatic achievement awarded for certain likely situations, in this case your first zombie kill. It's a hastle to make all of these on the fly you know? But yours was fun, so I added some spice. BRRRRRRRRchukchukchuk lol. Did NOT think you still had that in you.
PS. Stop whining about the points. You got double, but, like, what am I your dad? The first taste was free, but now you gotta EARN em baby boi.*
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Jack smiled ruefully. God was both open to communication and incredibly stingy. However, the new achievement added to his oddly elevated mood. He lifted his arm through the notification, dissolving it, and presented a middle finger to the sky. Then, looking down to the now screeching mower, Jack saw another zombie approaching.
Mrs. Jackson. She had been a shut in, seemingly afraid of everyone and everything. She was now at her bravest, shuffling steadfastly toward the machine. However, despite her new found confidence, she was clearly less agile than she had been in life. Arriving at the mower, she tripped on poor Frank's body and fell head-first into the cutters.
One of the blades broke, but went through most of her neck before doing so. When the blade snapped, likely when going through the spine, it provided enough force to fully decapitate her. Now free, Mrs. Jackson's head bounced a few times before rolling towards the shed, stopping when it hit the side wall. In a perverse way, it reminded Jack of a soccer ball. Like he had scored a backyard goal while playing the Aztec version of the sport.
It had been rather lucky that the mower trap had successfully killed two zombies, but the remaining blade didn't look reliable enough to score a third point. It spun around with far less force, and the mower engine began to sound like something inside it was grinding. However, that noise alone was enough, as it would continue to draw the surrounding creatures into the yard for a substantial period of time. Once a large enough group formed, Jack's trope-identification powers told him that it would be self-sustaining. The clustered zombies would create enough noise with their own actions as to call others into the group as it moved about, eventually forming a horde.
For the purposes of securing his home and neighborhood, Jacks goal would be to strike right before that point. He needed to eliminate as many of the surrounding undead as quickly as possible, but it would be dangerous to go through the confined homes on his own. So, he'd make them come to him. Just kill all of them in one go, what could go wrong?