The Captain was a one armed dwarf, and so he didn't worry me much just sitting there on the whisky barrels... smoking his pipe.
It was his robot first mate that would make the job difficult. He was a big one. The wooden planks creaked under his weight, and I hadn't even noticed him until he moved.
The hardest part about being a zombie-ninja is the nose plugs -- since it makes you fundamentally not a zombie. A zombie's sense of smell is his grounding rod; everything in the zombie's universe is there - blood, rot and brains. You can take your echolocating bats, or your sonar-rific dolphins, or your eagle eyed raptors, and you can keep 'em all. Gave a zombie a good whiff and you've placed that zombie in the center of his world.
But the zombie's sense of smell, as I've told you before, is his greatest handicap. The slightest part per million of brain on the wind and you've reduced your zombie to a hungry maw with four writhing limbs (on a good day). The craving is all consuming, driving him to get him from point A to point B -- B for brains. Trust me; a non-smelling zombie is about as threatening as a blind human. Hummmm, blind human. Now you've made me hungry, damn it. Calm blue graveyards. Calm blue graveyards.
But the pirate/robot threat can not be ignored, and so every zombie needs to do his duty to the zombie nation. For me, that was the path of the ninja.
Years of study, practice, meditation... and a life without scent. Sometimes I worry that I've lost touch with what it is to be a zombie. After all this time, do I truly represent the zombie cause? Can the any zombie trust one that does not smell?
Enough. Philosophy is for the hungry, as my sensei always used to say.
As long as it was just the two of them there, Captain and mate, my path was clear. I would kill my principal, the Captain, and then I would attempt the robot. The robot would be tough... he could easily dismember me.
I went over my planned approach -- I would start beneith the wharf, clinging to the underside just above the surf. Slowly, patiently, I would creep towards them. When I got underneath and behind them I would spend whatever time it took to weaken the boards above me. Then, like some rotting black-clad kraken, I would burst upon them. I would need the surprise to plant the magnet on the back of the juggernautical robot's skull... bless their electromagnetic ways, it would disorient him just long enough for me to deal with the Captain. It would be useless for me to plan beyond that, as after the dwarf had recovered from the initial surprise there would simply be too many variables. But so what -- he was only a pirate, only meat, only a meal lovingly held in a tender cranium. No. Mustn't go there. Calm blue graveyard. Calm blue graveyard.
I eased from my cover... and crept silently towards my duty -- my duty to the zombie nation.
