How to Kill Monsters Using Common Household Items

by Jason Offutt

  Your Arsenal and Where to Keep It

  The number one thing to do if a clown knocks on your door is don’t let it in. If the clown goes away, it’s either a human who got the wrong party address, or it’s a slathering beast from the Pits of Hell that’s come around to the back door and is stalking you in your home as you read this. If that’s the case, let’s do humanity a favor and load the shotgun.

  Problem Three: The major difficulty in killing a Demon Clown is that one of its biggest defenses is smacking itself in the crotch, and a clown smacking itself in the crotch is pretty darned funny. But, since Demon Clowns don’t feel pain, this is a Venus flytrap move to lure you closer before it closes its jaws. Don’t be fooled. Just assume if something looks like a clown and honks like a clown, it wants you dead. So in case of a clown infestation in your hometown, keep these beast-killing items as close to you as a lover’s smile. Since I’m labeling the following clown-killing devices in Dungeons and Dragons terms, some of you might need to insert the word “mother” for “lover” and you might just live through the night.

  Things You Should Have in the Kitchen

  Pie of Death: A traditional clown gag is a pie to the face. Yeah, yeah, a pie pan of whipped cream mashed into someone’s pie hole. Ha, ha, very funny. This may be a Demon Clown’s biggest weakness. Keep a couple of pie pans full of concrete covered in Spackle in the kitchen in case of clowns. These beasts will all willingly take one of these death pies to the face. Heck, they’ll be happy to take one until the moment it crushes their skull. Cherries on top count as style points but only if they’re cherry bombs and result in painting the walls with a skull shard mosaic.

  Things You Should Have in the Bathroom

  Bucket of Pain +2: Bucket of Pain +1 is an empty bucket that might stun a clown when you smash it over its head, but the empty bucket won’t completely take out a clown. The Bucket of Pain +2 is full of gasoline and works well with a cheap Bic Lighter of Flaming. Is there anything more funny than a floppy-shoed demon beast screaming for its life through a ball of flame? I think not.

  Things You Should Have in the Living Room

  Floppy Shoes of Immobilization: Although this won’t kill a clown, it will keep it put while you grab something to stave in its skull. Slamming a nail gun into the big floppy shoes of a clown will pin its feet to the floor. While it’s struggling, grab a gun from the desk drawer, machete from the utility belt you should wear at all times, log from the fireplace, or if you’re fortunate enough to have a riding lawnmower that fits in your house, drive the thing over that squeaky-nosed cretin.

  Dunk Tank: What clown can resist a dunk tank? None. Not even Demon Clowns. Problem Four: A dunk tank takes up the spot in the room you were hoping to fill with a big screen TV. However, these clown magnets have saved the lives of countless prepared Monster Hunters over the years. To make your dunk tank the last dunk tank this beast will ever splash into, either stock it with piranhas or prop a plugged-in hair dryer precariously on the edge.

  Things You Should Have in the Garage

  Vorpal Ax of Clowning: OK, so this title won’t be found in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, but it’s effective nonetheless. While a Demon Clown chases you through your house, slipping into the garage and grabbing an ax off the wall will end your clown problem in one swift strike. However, if clowns happen once, they will happen again, so buy an ax for every room in the house. And after each kill, remember to clean and sharpen your tools carefully and put them away. You never know when you’ll need to whack off a monster’s head again.

  Bobby Felcher’s Unicycle of Doom: No clown, even a demonic, soul-eating clown, can resist riding a unicycle. They’re even bigger clown magnets than a dunk tank. The ability to ride a unicycle puts clowns above their lame French competition—the mime. In 1997, Aurora, Illinois, eighth grade drama student Bobby Felcher (Bad Ass Factor 7 out of 10) so intimidated a Demon Clown with his unicycle skills, the clown demanded a turn, after which Bobby pushed the white, pasty beast into heavy traffic, ending the clown threat, and saving the town. The lesson? Learn to ride unicycle to survive the clown apocalypse.

  Behavior of the Demon Clown While You’re Trying to Kill It

  Filled with an insatiable hunger for human flesh, clowns will still try to eat you while you’re drowning them in the dunk tank. Fortunately, the roars, shrieks, insane giggles, and your shotgun blasts will attract the attention of people who may want to help you. Unfortunately, this may also attract more clowns. Demon clowns will not plead for their lives as you kill them because, frankly, the life of a clown has to suck, and they want to die. Don’t think about this during an attack. Actually, don’t think at all during an attack, just Go Clowning, by which I mean killing. Thinking takes too much time that’s better spent with your arm instinctively whipping out a Rambo knife and planting it in Whacko’s forehead.

  Because these evil entities try to appear as humans, they may try to play this game to its end by calling for help while you’re trying to kill it. This can only mean it’s attempting to distract you with police so it can slice off your head then honk into the night. You don’t want the police involved. Once the clown starts calling for help, running like a Frenchman is a viable option.

  Disposing of the Body

  Dump it at your favorite fast food franchise.

  Big Game Hunter Muldoon: They should all be destroyed.

  --Jurassic Park, 1993

  Chapter 8: Dinosaurs

  Given the fact that most scientists are convinced dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, this chapter should be irrelevant, right? No. Scientists are always saying something big doesn’t exist because they can’t see it, like dinosaurs, Bigfoot, and their junior prom. At the same time, scientists also claim something small does exist, even though they can’t see it, like photons, the pinhole that started the Big Bang, and their self-confidence at a singles bar. According to the accepted scientific theory proposed in 1980 by University of California-Berkeley geologist Walter Alvarez, at the end of the Mesozoic Era, a ten-mile wide asteroid smashed into the Yucatan Peninsula creating a fifteen-mile deep, sixty-mile wide crater that sent a massive cloud of debris into the atmosphere, blocking the sun and sending temperatures plummeting. This choked life from most mega fauna that wasn’t wearing coats. Sure, scientists found the crater and other evidence to support their hypothesis, but these people are, of course, idiots. Some dinosaur species survived; they’ve just been fortunate enough to stay the heck out of our way—for now. But the human race might just be minutes away from the Great Velociraptor Plague of the 21st Century. Nobody makes swatters big enough for that.

  Problem One: Although scientists are almost right about dinosaurs, big lizard sightings occur with uneasy frequency. More than five hundred witnesses reported seeing a horned, black-scaled “dragon” in July 2002 at Lake Tianchie in northeast China. In February 1976, three elementary school teachers in San Antonio, Texas, saw a pterodactyl with a wingspan of fifteen to twenty feet swoop over their cars. One of the teachers said the pterodactyl had wings like a giant bat. Were these teachers so high on coke they all imagined the same thing? No, of course not. No one can afford cocaine on a public elementary school teacher’s salary. So what did these five hundred people in China and the teachers in Texas see? They saw dinosaurs.

  History is filled with reports of living dinosaurs. Pygmy natives of the Lake Tele region in central Africa tell stories of the Mokele-mbembe, an animal with a long neck, long tail, and round tracks. When the Pygmies were shown a series of pictures, they pointed to a sauropod dinosaur. Similarly, people who live on the borders of Zambia, Angola, and the Congo have identified an animal in their area—the Kongamato, a red flying, featherless creature with a wingspan of seven feet—from pictures of pterodactyls. A carving on an ancient ruined temple in Cambodia shows a stegosaurus, and the ancient Anasazi Indians of what would become Utah carved a depiction of a dinosaur into rock. There are countless more reports just like this of plesiosaurs, tiny T-Rexes, and La
rry King.

  Are you scared? You should be. We’re sitting in the movie Jurassic Park right now. It’s only a matter of time before we’re plucked off a toilet seat and swallowed by a Tyrannosaurus. I’m not ready to be eaten. That’s why I have an assault rifle strapped to my john. Don’t mess with me when my pants are down (Bad Ass Factor 10 out of 10).

  How to Identify a Dinosaur

  If you don’t know what a dinosaur is, you must be a product of the public education system. Let’s take a step back. Have you ever seen the insurance commercial with the animated gecko? You know, the little lizard with the fake Australian accent you’d like to drive your car over? Now picture that gecko the size of a really angry city bus. That’s a dinosaur. Dinosaurs were the dominant animal on earth for more than 160 million years, which, to put into perspective, is a lot like watching all the Harry Potter movies back to back. The term “dinosaur,” meaning “terrible lizard,” was mistakenly credited in 1842 to British scientist Sir Richard Owen. He was actually talking about his wife. Before 1842, dinosaurs were called “dragons.” History has no idea what Owen called his wife before 1842.

  Dinosaur Powers

  A dinosaur’s greatest power is its ability to defy physics. Do you know someone who’s been obese for a really long time? If you’re an American, the answer is yes. Their weight eventually gives them back and joint problems, and that’s just lugging around 350 pounds of Taco Bell goodness. That’s nothing for dinosaurs. Some of them weigh as much as Oprah. To see how something that large can work in our gravity, let’s look at King Kong.

  In a December 2005 Forbes Magazine article, “The Biology Of King Kong,” University of London Royal Veterinary College researcher John Hutchinson said that although Kong, a 25-foot tall and roughly 20- to 60-ton silverback gorilla, would be able to breathe, he probably wouldn’t be able to move and groove. “Given that Kong would be supporting his mass on two legs, I strongly doubt he’d be athletic at all. He might even have a hard time moving faster than a slow shuffle,” Hutchinson told Forbes. “In a worst case scenario, which is still quite likely, he couldn’t even stand.”

  Okay, so if physics says King Kong can’t exist at 25-feet tall, let’s look at the sauropod dinosaur Amphicoelias that was nearly 200 feet long and 122.4 metric tons. Are you kidding me? If a giant ape can’t move in our gravity, how the heck does an Amphicoelias do it? I don’t know, but it does. Yeah, I consider that a power.

  Dinosaur Weaknesses

  Many dinosaurs are big. Really big. The Facts of Life cast around Season Nine big. Unfortunately, this bigness is their biggest weakness. The size and weight of a dinosaur can be used against them, especially if you can drop Tootie or a Brachiosaurus off a really tall building, which isn’t at all likely. I mean, how would you even get Tootie in an elevator? However, smaller dinosaurs, like Velociraptors, can run like a cheetah and have the appetite of a school bully. They have no real weakness. Buy lots of bullets.

  How to Avoid Dinosaurs

  The best way to avoid an encounter with dinosaurs is don’t go into the past, subcontinent rainforests, or unauthorized Costa Rican theme parks.

  Who’s Going to Help You

  Lara Croft (Bad Ass Factor 9 out of 10). Yeah, I can handle that.

  Your Arsenal and Where to Keep It

  Problem Two: Depending on the household, killing a dinosaur may or may not be easy. Do you have an upscale 90210 household that’s most dangerous instrument of death is a copy of Variety? Or are you a serious gun-toting redneck whose smallest firearm can take the head off a caribou? By the way, when the monster apocalypse occurs, rednecks will outlast everyone.

  Dinosaurs, being big, need lots of firepower/striking force/explosives to take down. It doesn’t help that the average brain of a dinosaur, regardless of the monster’s overall weight, is the size of a package of PEZ. You can pump a clip from an AK-47 into the face of a T-Rex, and it won’t feel pain until after it’s dead. Of course, then it might fall on you. What you need is to be creative. So I checked the Internet and found these instructions in the eHow article “How to Kill Dinosaurs” by Krystle Vermes. The Internet rocks.

  Difficulty: Moderate

  I’m cool with that so far.

  Using the Shotgun

  Sweet. Shotguns are what separate us from the apes. We’re out of luck when the apes get them.

  Step 1: Walk up to the shotgun ammunition you find in the wild to add it to your inventory. It is red and shaped like a bullet.

  Step 2: Select the shotgun in your ammunition inventory to prepare it for use.

  Step 3: Press the A or B button (depending on which settings you have selected) to launch a bullet when you are directly in front of a dinosaur.

  Step 4: Shoot three or four times until the dinosaur collapses in front of you. Stock up on shotgun ammunition if you plan to use it as your main weapon. It takes a handful of bullets to kill a single dinosaur.

  Using a Rocket Launcher …

  Hey, wait a second. The shotgun shells are red and shaped like a bullet? Press the A or B button? Rocket launcher? Crap. These are instructions for the NES Jurassic Park video game from 1993. The Internet sucks.

  Things You Should Have Everywhere

  Shotgun: These weapons are effective, but you’re probably not going to kill a dinosaur with a shotgun. Even something the size of a Velociraptor will probably just get irritated by a shotgun blast. Unlike werewolves, space aliens, and demon clowns, you don’t want to shoot a dinosaur in the face; there’s just too much skull to go through. However, bipedal dinosaurs are basically giant, hungry birds, so although their drumsticks are meaty, the rest of the leg is not. If you can take out the knee or shin of a T-rex or velociraptor, it’ll drop like Homer Simpson down a flight of stairs. But unlike Homer, it won’t pop back up and ask for a beer. As the now-crippled theropod dinosaur thrashes about, destroying your living room and/or neighborhood (depending on its size), you now have a safety cushion to pick up a more deadly weapon and kill it—with no mercy.

  A bunch of junk: If you’re an anal retentive personality, this doesn’t apply to you. But if you’re an anal expulsive “I’ve got stacks of boxes/magazines/newspapers/beer cans all over my house” kind of person, you have more cover than Special Ops forces in the jungle. If a dinosaur small enough to enter your home starts wandering around, bumping into four-foot piles of vintage Playboy magazines and spiky Kaiser war helmets, and not finding anything to eat because you’re buried under a pile of Civil War blankets swarming with small pox, it will leave your house and go find someone who smells like ham. It’s at this point you blow it up.

  Space alien technology: If you’ve followed the instructions in Chapter 5, you’ve already taken care of the little gray monsters and have, hopefully, added their weapons to your arsenal. High-powered gray alien laser guns will punch through a dinosaur like Christian Bale punching his mother (although Bale is Bad Ass Factor 11 out of 10 when portraying The Batman, the dude once punched his mom, so Bad Ass Factor Shut the Hell Up Christian).

  Things Outside Your House

  Their appetite: Dinosaurs are hungry beasts, and trying to keep a nine-ton T-Rex satisfied when they can bite off five hundred pounds of meat in a single chomp is impossible. If you want a dinosaur dead, starve it. Deserts are good, as is tundra, so living there will usually take care of your dinosaur infestation. However, carnivores usually last longer than herbivores because giant herbivores need to eat tons of plant matter every day, whereas all a carnivore needs is a nice big herbivore. Even living in a food-free environment doesn’t mean the occasional Spinosaurus won’t come knocking over your house. If you live in the Midwest with its endless rows of corn and fat cattle, you’re probably dead right now.

  Their weight: If you’re being chased by a big dinosaur—one of those really huge Destroy Tokyo dinosaurs—your biggest weapon is its own weight. All bridges have a weight limit. If the Japanese had thought to lure their giant dinosaurs onto really tall bridges, they wouldn’t have had su
ch a monster problem.

  Things You Should Have in the Garage

  Sledgehammer: An injured dinosaur is more dangerous than a healthy one. A healthy dinosaur has a set pattern of behavior. It sees you, it eats you. An injured dinosaur is like one of those novelty weasel toys that skitters across the floor like it’s on meth, except this novelty weasel toy has teeth like a shark and weighs more than your car. If this is a lone dinosaur and you have slightly more patience than a teenage girl, just wait for the thing wear down. Sure, it’s going to bleed all over the couch and probably swallow your dog, but the monster will eventually get weak and collapse, pathetically wheezing as its life oozes out of its wound. That’s when you take a twelve-pound sledgehammer and bust open its skull.

  Explosives: If asked the question, “On an average day, would you rather have explosives in your home, or fudge,” most homeowners would probably pick fudge, regardless of the sugar and fat content. Well, mister, fudge doesn’t cut it when it comes to killing a dinosaur. What you need is a tightly sealed pipe filled with black powder and match heads. The problem with a pipe bomb is getting it close enough to the dinosaur running through your house to kill it before it wrecks the carpet. That’s why you always keep lots of meat on hand. A lit pipe bomb shoved into a roast is irresistible for a hungry dino. And if it’s chasing you through your house, it’s hungry. Blow it up; I hope you’re not too attached to the wallpaper.