- Call of Duty taught us well. Don’t let those memes go to waste.

  - Always have a backup weapon. Trust me, your first choice will betray you someday.

  - Loving “Ol’ Reliable” is cute. Dying for it isn’t. Don’t marry your weapon. Date around.

  - [Jules’ Edit]: Your hatchet literally snapped in half. You cried. I saw it.

  ---

  We were trying to raid a camping store on the edge of a suburb. Looked empty. Felt quiet. We’d done our routine: knock, listen, circle, scan. Nothing.

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  So we went in.

  Everything was fine until it wasn’t. A display rack fell over, and a pair of munchers came crawling out from under a tarp like nightmare raccoons. Fast ones. Hungry.

  I raised my hatchet—Ol’ Reliable, my first real weapon (While I had a crowbar, it wasn't a weapon). I found her in a safety cabinet right around when I first met Jules. We'd been through hell together since.

  But today it snapped. Handle just gave up. Metal hit the tile like a wet sigh.

  Cue panic.

  Jules yelled something, tossed me my crowbar that she was holding onto. I barely caught it, swung, and planted it into the side of a zombie’s head. The other one lunged and took a boot to the face. I didn’t even think—just moved.

  We survived. Barely.

  Afterward, we sat on the rooftop, catching our breath. I held the broken hatchet in my lap like a fallen comrade.

  “She was a good one,” I said, solemn.

  “You’re so dramatic,” Jules replied. “It was a hatchet, not your dog.”

  “It was Ol’ Reliable.”

  “She wasn’t that reliable.”

  "So was your Last Word. Now that it had no bullets, now it's the Word Unspoken."

  We laughed. Again.

  But I made damn sure I had a new backup weapon that night.

  And a backup for the backup.