Free AZU-1: Lifehack by Joseph Picard Page A

parts matched up in between them.
    The battery was charged now, too. She
grabbed a nearby bag of junk food and had breakfast while staring
at her little project, remembering where she left off.
    This wasn’t good. Her best case
scenario was Harold being trapped in AutarLabs, and here she was
playing with a jigsaw puzzle.
    Well, the best case scenario would be
that Harold was out, and safe long ago. But then that would mean
Regan went through all this for nothing.
    In that case, the best case scenario
would be that she had dreamt all this, and would wake up in
Harold’s guest room with her biggest problem being her lack of a
job.
    For that matter, maybe she should just
wish that Kris wasn’t a bitch. Then she wouldn’t have even come to
Autar. Regan allowed her idle thoughts to stray further on Kris.
The hate she had for Kris was now almost a comical distraction
compared to her current situation, and it made the work go faster.
It beat letting herself get trapped in hopelessness
again.
    About an hour and a half after she woke
up she was convinced she had the weapon put together right. She
pulled the lining of the case out to get at the ammo and dropped
three slugs into the weapon’s ammo chamber. It only held three.
That left three in the case. There was some kind of paper showing
under one of them.
    Regan pulled it out. It was a booklet
labeled ‘AP MASS IMPACT ACCELERATOR: MANUAL, MAINTENANCE AND
ASSEMBLY’
    “ Fucking hell!” She kicked
the case across the floor. Ok, spilt milk. She had a big ‘AP’ gun,
and a big zombie to shoot with it.
    She slung the hardware over her
shoulder, and gathered her usual traveling gear including the P90
and the remaining ammo for the AP weapon.
    She stepped outside, and considered
testing the weapon. She aimed it at the ground ten meters ahead of
her or so, and flipped a switch onto ‘standby’. A light on the
battery came to life, and an ominous hum built up, fading to
silence after about four seconds. A little green light came
on.
    She raised it to her shoulder, double
checked her aim, and pulled the trigger.
    A sound that could only be described as
both dull and sharp erupted. Regan was tossed onto her back and the
weapon slipped free, and slid back another couple meters with an
odd rattling sound.
    “ Oh - kay. Note to self.
Recoil.” She’d remember to have a better stance next time. She
should have figured. The lesson the P90 taught her the first time
she fired it came to mind. She sat up and looked at where she had
aimed. Yup, there was a hole.
    A very tidy little hole, actually. The
ground around it looked ‘swollen’ around it, having been pushed
around by the impact. She got closer and looked down the hole. It
was deep enough that she couldn’t see the slug. Maybe dirt had
caved in behind it, she couldn’t tell. Either way, it should do the
trick.

    ~~~~~
    Chapter 12: Assault
    ~~~~~

    On the trip to AutarLabs when she felt
safe enough, she flipped through the AP weapon manual. She found
out that it could hook into the visors the same way the P90 did,
thankfully. She’d never be able to aim the monster at any decent
range otherwise. Finding the manual late was better than never. She
hadn’t even thought as far ahead as aiming it.
    Her position from before was not an
option now. It was casually littered with zombies who may have very
well been remnants of the group that had been sent after her
before. She spotted them long before she was near and they didn’t
take notice of her. If she wanted she could have taken them out
easily at this range, but that would have alerted the rest and
she’d be running again before firing her new toy at the
General.
    She snickered to herself, half with
confidence, and half at her confidence. It was not long ago that
she was cowering in a bank vault while local authorities fled,
and/or died. Now here she was planning this attack like she was
Rambo or something.
    Focus. There’s a task at hand, and she
needed a new perch. About