Bob’s empty shotgun is pried from his hands as the fiends close in around him. Yellowed teeth bared, eyes glowing in the darkness, they drag poor Bob across the dirty pavement and into a nearby storm drain. Bob, a lone Ouachita freshman, was devoured by sewer mutants.
Bob was a noob. However, our beloved Ouachita faculty, with their steely wits and years of life experience, would obviously fair better against a mutant hoard if the need were ever to arise. Each of the professors in this article was asked to place themselves in the following situation, to see if they’d be able to save themselves, as well as the school, from the mutant menace.
The Situation: The campus has been put under military quarantine due to an infestation of sewer mutants. You’re trapped inside, but have keys to access every building and every room. Currently, there are twenty sewer mutants on campus with you, but every hour, twenty more will emerge from the sewers. They will try to attack you, and they will work as a team. However, due to genetic deformities and years of living underground, the sewer mutants only have the physical strength and mental capabilities of five-year-olds. Once you’ve slain 2,000 sewer mutants, the quarantine will be lifted and life at Ouachita will resume as it normally would. The fate of the school is in your hands. How many of the mutant scum could you take, and how would you go about doing it?
#1 – Tim Knight
Advantages: “Science. Also, in the email directory, his name is in all caps. That means he’s extreme.”
Answer: “The freshmen in Zoology / Genomics lab last fall isolated a phage that is lethal to sewer mutants. It was isolated from Ouachita River sediments downstream of the Arkadelphia Wastewater Treatment facility. This phage can infect, replicate and destroy sewer mutants in less than 8 hours. The phage will be dispersed using 99 cent spray bottles from Wal Mart and it only infects sewer mutants. Because it works so quickly and effectively the sewer mutants will never reach a population of 2000 and most of Ouachita and the surrounding community will only hear about this from the OBU signal after the threat has been negated. The heroes will be Dr. Nathan Reyna, Logan Kuhn and Dustin Walter – Ouachita’s mutant busters.”
#2 – Tully Borland
Advantages: “Reasonably awesome beard and hated.”
Answer: “My first instinct is to use logic on the mutants and reason with them; but sewer mutants are the most illogical beings on the planet (I mean, they enjoy living in the sewer…). No, they must be dealt with by brutal force. And there’s nothing the sewer mutants hate more than hand sanitizer, which the Pruett School has in abundance in all of its rooms. You see, hand sanitizer–although terrible for killing viruses–melts the mutants’ skin and penetrates right to their black souls (if you look on the back of “germ-X” it says, “Not recommended for infants or mutants.”) It works much the same way as a wooden stake works on vampires, a baseball bat on zombies, and Holy Water on Baptists. I would cover myself in hand sanitizer, pack my backpack full of it, and would run around campus cleaning house. And if that doesn’t work, I’m heading over to the OBU Physical Plant to scrounge around for a chainsaw, a blow torch, and a large set of pliers and will simply get medieval on their…sewer pipes. In short, how many mutants could I take down? As many as it takes.”
#3 – Kevin Motl
Advantages: “Has weapons at the ready (plank of knowledge) and a sick sense of humor.”
Answer: “I’m going to work within the parameters of the scenario you’ve give me, which allows me to make a few modest assumptions, so you’ll have to indulge me those.
“Twenty new sewer mutants per hour means that I must survive against them alone for just under four and a half days. Assuming I start this adventure in my office, I would immediately take up my plank of knowledge (a 2×4 resting against my desk with “You Will Learn” burned into the wood), and lure the first group outside. Having lived in a subterranean environment for years, the sunlight will doubtless prove disorienting, and compromise their eyesight, as well as their capacity to coordinate attack. So the first group gets dispatched with bludgeoning blows to the head from the 2×4. I anticipate a timetable of approximately twenty minutes for this deed, which will then free me for forty minutes before the next group surfaces. In that time, I head for the motherlode of resources: the facilities maintenance compound on north campus. It’s gated, giving me a minimum amount of security; it has no sewer access, so I need not worry about infiltration; and most importantly, it has chainsaws, weed trimmers, and multiple fully-fueled vans. I would make a brief pit stop at the field house to grab a half-dozen baseball bats for personal security, and then take a van back toward main campus.
“By then, I expect the next group will be actively seeking me out. I would park on the Student Village side of the bridge over the ravine and wait. The bridge is easily the best enfilade on the campus, and like the Spartans at Thermopylae, presents the best opportunity to neutralize numbers. Assuming a certain aggression on the part of the sewer mutants, and knowing that their tendency to cooperate will likely lead them to bunch up, I would wait for the main group to start across the bridge and, once they had no hope of backtracking in time, I would mow them down en masse with the van. Those that elected to jump would die from the fall, or be so debilitated from injury that I could deal with them later at my leisure. I would mop up those who survived with the chainsaw, weed trimmer, or one of the baseball bats. I might kick one or two over the side to maximize the entertainment value of the experience—I assume a sewer mutant would make for a delightful screamer. Once they were dead, I would finish the drive across the bridge, turn right at Walker, turn right again to head back to north campus, park again at the other side of the bridge, and await the next group. Depending upon my available time, I might break into a vending machine or two with one of the bats to get something to eat and drink.
“Now, with the intellect of five-year-olds, the mutants will likely not understand a flanking maneuver, which would involve a few of them going down into the ravine while the remainder crossed the bridge as expected. On the off chance that they do that, however, I will simply drive around, thin them out into smaller groups, chainsaw them into hamburger, and then return to my original ambush point at the bridge.
“100 hours—and 2,000 corpses— later, I would cancel classes for the day and take a nap.”
#4 – Bethany Hicks
Advantages: “Low center of gravity and experience with five-year-olds.”
Answer: “I would have to go with the assumption that these sewer mutants, like the infamous TMNT variety, are highly susceptible to pizza bait. I would first raid the caf and collect all the pizza from under the hotlights – lace it with Ambien and then place them at the manhole covers. My fellow historians and I would then lie in wait in the Hickingbotham clock tower with our muzzleloaders and take them out as they stumble groggily about the campus.”
The Command BROst is a weekly blog by staff writer Noah Hutchinson.
