Endtown by Aaron Neathery for December 17, 2021

It’s the little bits of humanity left over that makes the monsters extra terrifying..!

“Heeeuuffghoom”: translation is “don’t shoot, I am Bob!”

Is… Is that first creature opening the doors crying?

Have to admire the two topsiders who chose to stay and buy time.

I wonder if those guns are happy now.

When one door closes, another opens.

I see a leg still in a suit with that little pack they all carry. Be careful, guys, these may be someone you know.

It’s interesting that the creatures don’t see each other as an easier “dinner” than going through all that work prying open the doors.

May their deaths not be in vain. Which means, quit arguing mutants, and get the hell out of Dodge!

It seems to me that there are two threatening groups. There’s the group of Topsiders infected/controlled by “Eye”; and then this set, which are mindless vicious beasts formed from badly-grexed Topsiders that had their suits breached. I wonder what the other set is up to.

That was good for me, was it good for you?

For once Topsiders killing the correct mutants. Just save the last round for yourself.

Seems to me that the first door held up for a while. The second door would have too, if they had all gone through it. Certainly long enough for all of them to pile onto that lift and escape into the vortex thing. I suspect these last two heroes decided they’d rather have a certain death than risk that.

That’s assuming they get killed, and not just turned into monsters themselves, which would be a lot worse for them than certain death.

Someone needs a much larger weapon!

Third Topsider: “And…., I’m out.”

What an excellent strip for another year :)

The Zero Gun is the staple sidearm of Topsiders on patrol and the most common zero weapon in circulation. Like all directional Zero weapons, it emits Amesworth radiation guided by a stream of plasma. It is relatively light in features with only real two moving parts, the trigger and the handle which can be folded into the casing to make it more compact. There is no way to manually adjust the amount of energy released. Like most Topsider technology it also houses a plasticized brain system as a processor. The beam’s effects anything organic. Like all Zero weapons, the energy from zero guns’ pierces through solid matter and can affect objects past it so a barrier or object may block a zero beam but the beam will pass through the object and disintegrate anyone it hits on the other side.Thanks to the computational force of its brain unit Zero Guns can maintain a sustained blast indefinitely.

“The power of each Zero weapon is dependent upon the weapon. Each Zero weapon operates at its maximum capacity. A Zero gun can’t disintegrate a tank, but a “Zerozooka” could. A Zero gun with a sustained stream of Amesworth radiation (with plasma as a carrier) could bore a neat, wide hole through a tank in less than 15 seconds. The problem, however, is that concentrated Amesworth radiation will “dust” organic material before it affects inorganics like steel, so someone standing dead center behind a steel door being bored through by an energy stream from a Zero gun will disintegrate before the hole is actually drilled all the way through. A mutant can be killed by a Zero gun without standing dead center in the plasma stream. The field of influence for directional Amesworth radiation is something like a foot in any given direction beyond the stream.” -Aaron Neathery.

Those two are really brave.