After I pulled my Honda Civic into the garage I didn’t even bother going inside. I went straight to my workbench and started brainstorming homemade weapons.

I wasn’t really all that handy. I’m not a craftsman or carpenter or engineer or metalsmith. Frankly, I’m not even sure why I have a workbench. It was the cleanest thing in the garage and just functioned as a macho table. It was going to earn its keep today though.

Sort of.

All of my ideas consisted of using duct tape to combine different tools and then trying to give them cool names. Too tired to be creative, each of them just ending up being a lame word mashup. For example, I attached the grilling fork to a crowbar to form a Crork. It seemed to be an effective design, but the name didn’t inspire much. I had an old wooden baseball bat that I intended to wrap in barb wire, but I didn’t have any. Much like my hockey stick, a bat was already a pretty good weapon in its own right.

In the end, I just taped sharp things onto other things to make spears of varying lengths. Within the hour I had assembled a decent amateur armory that would have fit nicely into a zombie home-defense scenario. How would it fare against a demented Pokémon? For that question, I could only shrug to myself.

As my usual self-reward, I opted to go have a beer. I was halfway up the cement stairs to the laundry room when I realized I was going empty-handed. Here I had just crafted enough weapons to battle a zombie horde and I walked away unarmed. My survival instincts were just not highly tuned enough yet. I turned back and selected one from my smaller collection.

The Drivehammer.

Admittedly, I liked the name more than the creation. It was simply a hammer with a flathead screwdriver taped to the handle so that I could whack and stab with it. But giving it a name made it feel more powerful somehow. The tool names fit pretty savagely together, much better than my steak-knife-tipped broom.

Sproom.

It just sounded silly.

Armed now with the garage equivalent of Excalibur I headed to the kitchen, tried to use Drivehammer to open a beer, failed, and started searching for the bottle opener. While I was doing this the door to the garage slammed shut with enough force to rattle the windows.

This was disconcerting. I hadn’t even begun to celebrate my new armory and I was most certainly not ready to wield any in battle. Without taking my eyes off the laundry room, I located the opener in the drawer and, with trembling hands, eventually popped the cap off my beer. Then, taking swigs with my left hand and having Drivehammer drawn back to strike in my right, I tiptoed back to the garage door.

It had indeed shut. Also, it had been locked, which should have been impossible, as the button was on my side. I clicked it a few times with the flathead end of Drivehammer and it operated as normal, but still the knob wouldn’t turn.

I had just been cut off from my weapon cache.

Then I heard something from the garage—the sound of all hell breaking loose. Crashes. Bangs. Glass breaking. Deafening pops. Ripping metal.

I backed up against the dryer, not even realizing I was still attempting to drink my beer until I felt the cold liquid spill down the front of my shirt. The cacophony of destruction continued for at least a full minute, which seemed forever when dealing with such chaos. Then it came to a sudden halt, the doorknob turned, and the door to the garage door swung open just enough to disengage the latch bolt.

It took me a while to work up the nerve to investigate. Even then I wasn’t driven by bravery or curiosity. If my new badass weapons and my car weren’t in there, I would have just shoved the washer against the door and called it a day. All of my options for fight or flee were in the garage. With Drivehammer ready I slowly pulled it open.

ALmond had made good use of my weapons.

On my car.

My Honda Civic—nearly paid off—was completely destroyed.

My homemade spears had been driven into the tires. Crork was buried in the rear windshield. The hood had been torn in half and peeled back like a can of tuna. Both front airbags had deployed, and the bat stuck handle-first out of the windshield.

There was no sign of ALmond.

“Okay, okay,” I said to the air. “Let’s get this hunt over with.” I snatched up my miners’ helmet and knee/elbow pads to assemble my Squirrel Combat outfit. This time I strapped on my toolbelt (never been used) and hung a cloth bag from it for all the damn almonds I was sure I was going to find. To supplement Drivehammer I took Sproom and the hockey stick from the remains of my armory and marched into the house.

I was sort of a passive person. It took quite a bit to make me angry, but this was just about as enraged as I’d ever been. Outfitted in my armor and carrying weapons I suddenly felt very powerful and righteous in my ire. I opted to add some liquid courage to the fire and stopped in the kitchen for a shot of scotch.

That’s when I noticed the whirring sound. Definitely electrical and certainly familiar, it still took me a minute to place it.

The microwave was running.

I blinked as my badass bravery evaporated in confusion. Had I been cooking something and forgot? I edged closer to it. Through the plexiglass door, I could see a green square.

It was a box. I squinted.

It was the box of shotgun shells.

I dove to the floor and scrambled to the kitchen island for shelter. Curling into a fetal ball to protect as many parts of myself as I could, I waited for the inevitable explosion.

Nothing happened.

I peeked over the island. The microwave continued running. The box kept turning and being pounded with radiation.

Long seconds passed. I wouldn’t have imagined it took this long for gunpowder to reach critical mass. Maybe it was a trick, and the box had been emptied. Starting to feel stupid I stood up.

The first shell popped, and buckshot rattled around the microwave interior. I threw myself back to the floor and resumed my cowering. The rest of the shells burst in sequence, like dangerous popcorn, but without the explosive power of being fired from a gun. Eventually, the door cracked, and a few pieces of buckshot squeezed through to ping around the kitchen.

By the time the microwave dinged and came to a stop I was thoroughly demoralized in my makeshift kitchen foxhole. At least the microwave muffled the gunshots for the sake of my nosey neighbors.

***

The hunt must go on and I started on the first floor, figuring that since I spent most of my time here it’d be wise to clear it immediately. Using the hockey stick I slid open the sliding doors to the foyer closet and gave all the shoes and hanging coats a thorough jabbing with the blade as if I were mixing a big salad. When nothing attacked me, I set the stick aside and began my search.

I dumped out the shoes, opened the umbrellas, turned the winter hats and gloves inside out before moving on to all of the coat pockets. Already I had a decent haul of almonds. Maybe this would be easier than I thought. I didn’t count them at this point and just dropped them all into my pouch.

I patted down Beth’s snow jacket and pocketed one more and then pushed the hanger down the rack. The next hanging hoodie yielded two more. I pushed it aside, reached for the next one, and screamed.

ALmond dangled from the next hanger. As it had with the refrigerator, the thing had compressed itself to about an inch thick. It looked like a thick piece of furry cardboard with arms and legs hanging there. As I gaped at it, it swung its lower body up, like an acrobat on the trapeze, and gave me a slashing kick to the face.

I stumbled back, hands clutching my cheek, sure that it had just about sliced my face off. But the wound, which ran from my nose to my right ear, was more of a bad scratch. ALmond dropped to the floor and followed up the attack by giving me another slash across the thigh. While this tore cleanly through my jeans, this cut was also shallow, albeit painful.

What it did succeed in doing was ripping a hole in my pocket that resulted in my phone falling out and landing on the floor. In the blink of an eye, ALmond scooped it up, turned, and did its signature speed-waddle out of the room.

It took me a second to register what had just happened and I suddenly felt very naked without my phone. Sure, there was no one I could call for assistance but at least having the option of a desperate cry for help provided a sort of reassurance, even if hollow.

I snatched up Sproom and gave chase, but ALmond had pulled its vanishing act. There was no sign.

I had no car. Now I had no phone. At least I still had the option of running out the front door screaming.

There was nothing to do but forage on and I opted for the basement as my next best location for almond booty. We kept our basement pretty clean and well organized so there was nothing inherently creepy about it. It was also well-lit, but I clicked on my helmet light just in case ALmond got the bright idea of cutting the power.

Beth and I owned way too much shit. This was going to take forever. With the screwdriver end of Drivehammer, I started cutting open boxes. I found almonds here and there. A couple mixed in with our wedding albums. Several more in a board game. Another in some of Beth’s old arts/crafts supplies. My almond sack developed a nice heft.

I was down there long enough to fall into a mundane rhythm of opening boxes and bins and sifting through things. It made ALmond’s sudden appearance that much more terrifying.

I opened a shoebox labeled “seashells”. However, there were no shells in it. ALmond had replaced them. The creature had taken on a shoebox shape, with its muzzled face squashed down to fit. The sudden shock allowed me to throw the box before the creature could attack. ALmond dropped from the box mid-flight, like a small pilot abandoning a plane, hit the floor running, and disappeared into the mess I’d created.

Snatching up Sproom I began jabbing away at the boxes the thing had taken cover behind. Once again, it was gone. Poof. Just like that.

Wearily now, I continued through the basement and an uninterrupted hour later, I headed upstairs. Dumping my sack onto the kitchen table I got to counting. When I was done, I added them to the bowl.

I now had a grand total of seventy-six almonds.

The doorbell rang.

Shit. If someone called the police again, I was screwed. No lie would save me with visible injuries now. Eh, maybe being arrested would be better.

I opened the door to a pizza delivery man. His eyes popped a bit at my outfit, but he recovered quickly. I bet these workers see things stranger than me on a regular basis.

“I didn’t order a pizza.”

He looked at his form. “It was ordered online. Paid in full with a nice tip. The name on the order is Almond.”

I took the pizza, said goodnight, and headed for the kitchen. Now I was stewing. This mutant monstrosity had terrorized me, killed my squirrels, destroyed my car, and stolen my phone, but somehow the idea that it was having dinner delivered felt worse than all of those.

Then I saw the table. There was a clean plate, knife and napkin laid out. Next to the table setting stood a beer and the bottle opener. In the center of the table sat the bowl of almonds, moved there from the kitchen island. The note had been updated in the short time I had answered the door. It read “24”.

The pizza had been ordered for me.

And I have to admit, it was the best pizza I’d ever had in my life.