by Cedric Nye
“So how many of these crap-sacks do you think there are?” Jango asked. “Just a rough estimate?”
The brave girl spoke up again. “There are nineteen of them in all.” Then she hurriedly added, “But that doesn't count the slimy bastard or Mr. Banks.” Jango almost laughed out loud at the guilty look on the girl’s face when she realized what she had said.
“Nineteen guys?” Jango thought. That was a lot of men. A lot of armed men. But he looked at the determined faces of the twenty-three brave and desperate warriors who were depending on his guidance, and he felt as if his heart had been given wings.
“I want you to stay here,” Jango said. “But I don't want you to worry because I'll be close by. Just be ready for my signal.”
The girls looked frightened, and Jango could tell that they didn't want him to go. But the simple truth was that he did his best work alone. He was at his most dangerous when he had some room to maneuver, and no innocents to worry about.
The girls watched in nervous silence as Jango melted into the shadows of the woods without a sound. They had no frame of reference for what lay before them, and their stomachs churned as their one ray of hope disappeared into the inky darkness of the forbidding forest.
“Do you think he’ll come back?” The small girl named Sarah asked in a terrified whisper.
Melissa, who felt fierce pride in the fact that she had heard of their potential savior first, whispered scornfully, “Of course he will! Are you crazy?” Then she added in a softer tone, “He is so bad-ass, I’m going to be just like him one day so no one will ever hurt me again.”
The muscular girl stepped closer to Melissa, and gave her a one-armed hug. “I am with you, Mel. We’ll make ourselves so hard and tough that we can’t be hurt. We’ll have to protect ourselves, you know? He’s leaving when this is done, I can just tell.”
Melissa turned to her and said, “He won’t just leave us, Connie. He’ll make sure we’re safe. He’s a knight, but not like the stories. He’s a real life version. He’ll make sure, you’ll see.” She gave the strong girl a hug, and gently pushed her back toward where Jango had positioned her.
Melissa said, “Now just stay still. This is our only job, and you heard him. You already know what those bastard-asses will do if we don’t do this right.”
The girls all murmured their assent into the darkness. The stiffening of their resolve and their sense of purpose became an almost palpable force that pulsed through their hearts and minds in a wave of healing energy.
Unaware of the raw emotions that the group of girls felt, Jango silently made his way down the inside of the tree line. He followed the long and winding driveway that would bring the men into his make-shift kill zone.
He made his way through the woods for a couple of hundred feet, and then hunkered down to wait for the militiamen.
As Jango waited, he thought about the evil that men do, and wondered how humans could be capable of the things that they do. He knew full well that every human had the potential for miraculous acts of decency, as well as a depth of depravity that would boggle the mind. He knew that inside every human there was an angel and a demon, darkness and light, good and evil. He also knew that each human had the ability to choose which path they would follow.
“What you choose to do, that’s the truth,” he said out loud.
He didn't have long to wait. Less than half an hour after he had hunkered down, he saw vehicles coming up the driveway. He melted back further into the woods, and with the patience of death, he waited. He carefully watched, and counted each person in the vehicles that went past.
After he had counted nineteen people, Jango waited for several more minutes. When he saw that no one else would be arriving, he swiftly made his way back to where he wanted to position himself for the coming ambush.
By the time he had made his way back along the tree line, the militia members had all gathered on the aluminum bleachers that occupied one side of the corral. Careful to make sure that he wouldn't end up in the girls’ line of fire, he crept up to the very edge of the woods, until he was less than fifteen feet away from his targets.
Jango slowly slid his pistol from the shoulder holster, quietly released the magazine, and replaced it with a full one from his pocket. He placed the magazine that was missing one round in the pocket of his pants.
Jango listened to the rude jests and raucous laughter of the men as they bragged about what they would do to the girls later that night, and he felt the feral fragments of his shattered psyche surge forward to the front of his mind. Then, he felt something else stir inside of his mind, something hideous, powerful, and so full of rage that he felt himself mentally recoil from the mind-cage that held it. Jango’s reintegration with the two fragments of his mind, who he called the dog and the albino woman, had given him a greater knowledge of self, and he instinctively knew what it was that had stirred within his mind; it was the beast. The beast was a part of him that even the dog and albino woman had shied away from. It was the final fragment of his fractured mind. Jango was the part of their mind that took all of the pain, but the beast was the pain.
The beast felt like scorched earth, broken bones, weeping widows, razor blades, and torn flesh in Jango’s mind. Even though it was caged and chained deep within the confines of his mind, the beast was still strong enough to influence Jango, the dog, and the albino woman. Jango forged the iron of his will into stronger chains and bars to hold the evil that dwelt within him, and the beast fell silent.
Jango shook himself out of his own mind, and focused on the men once more. They continued to joke and laugh, oblivious to the fact that a deadly predator stood so close to them.
Jango decided that the time to attack had come. He let loose a terrifyingly bloodcurdling and perfectly executed zombie hunting cry, “RheeeeeeeAaaaaeeeeeee-Eeeeeee!”
Stricken with horror by the closeness of the zombie’s scream, the militiamen all stood in fear and confusion as they tried to fumble the weapons out of their holsters and look everywhere at once.
Jango started shooting at the men, and a split second after he had fired his first shot, he heard the sharp “snap, snap” of 22 caliber rounds being fired, punctuated by the heavy boom of the double-barreled shotguns being fired. The militia members fell like wheat before a scythe.
The men danced, shuddered, and jerked under the relentless fusillade of lead that came from their former victims.
As the gunfire from the woods tapered off, it reminded Jango of making pop-corn. He chuckled, removed the partial magazine from his pistol, and replaced it with a full one.He placed the partially spent magazine in the same pocket as the other, and reminded himself to reload them as soon as possible.
Jango stepped out from behind his tree, and cautiously approached the bodies that were strewn across the aluminum bleachers. As Jango approached the men, he turned his head to his right and nodded toward the woods to let the girls know it was okay to come out.
When Jango finally stood over the bodies, he saw that they had been riddled by the girls’ gunfire. He didn't bother looking to see who'd been hit by his own fire, because as far as he was concerned, the girls had killed every last one of them. This was theirs, and he knew that they needed it. Some of the men were moaning, and Jango swiftly dispatched them with a single bullet to each of their brains. He holstered his weapon, and then went from man to man, and broke their necks. To make sure they didn’t come back, he twisted their heads until their necks gave way, and then jerked their heads around to make sure the spinal cords were fully severed. A couple of the girls vomited, and a couple of them cheered.
In the silence that followed, Jango heard a rustling in the woods, and with animal like speed, he rushed unerringly toward the sound. As soon as he hit the tree line, he threw himself to his right, rolled and then rushed back at an angle toward the spot the sound had come from. He saw a human form pressed up against a tree, and he rushed at it.
Before the person could react, Jango had his pistol
screwed into their ear, and his left hand had gripped the person’s larynx. He could smell a man’s smell as well as the sour smell of fear on the person.
“What do you want, Mr. Man,” Jango asked in the poison sugar voice of the albino woman. His mind would never be normal, and even though he had reintegrated the albino woman and the dog, the two fragments of his psyche would always have their own partitions in his tortured mind.
“I just came for my granddaughter, Mister, I don't want any trouble, but I know she's here and I won’t leave without her,” said the man.
Jango's eyesight had readjusted to the darkness and he saw that the man carried what appeared to be a pump shotgun hanging at his side in his right hand and a blocky semiautomatic pistol in a holster on his hip. The man wore large glasses, and a woodsman's clothes.
“Let's just step out into the light, and see if any of the girls recognize you. If they do, cool, then we'll go from there. But if they don't, you will be as dead as those piles of zombie-meat on the bleachers over there,” Jango said in his normal voice. He took his hand off of the man's larynx, and gripped the man’s left shoulder instead. Before stepping out of the woods, Jango told the man, “Don't even think about trying anything with me, because I will burn you down and leave you where you lay.”
As Jango and the man stepped out into the light cast by the circle of automobiles, the girl that he knew only as the brave one let out a squeal of joy. “Grandpa Don, Grandpa Don,” the girl squealed happily, as she dropped her rifle and ran to hug the man.
Jango pulled his pistol out of the man's ear, and backed up a couple of steps. When the man looked his way, he nodded to the man, and then turned away from their emotional embrace.
The rest of the girls stood and looked around silently, unsure of what they should do next. Jango solved that puzzle for them. “All right everybody, listen up. All our shooting was probably like a fucking dinner bell to all the goobers within a few miles of here. All those goobers will start their god-awful wailing, which will bring even more zombies down on us, so we need to hustle bustle and get our shit wired tight before they get here.”
Suddenly, Jango had a thought. He stepped smoothly to his left, and then slid forward. In doing so, he had placed the brave girl’s grandpa between himself and the woods. He stepped closer to the man that the girl had called Grandpa Don.
“How exactly did you come to be here right now?” Jango asked him. “Where did you come from, and how did you manage to be here at the exact time we were shooting these mother-fuckers into pieces?”
“And more importantly”, he whispered into the man’s ear, “Who’s with you, and where are they now?” As he spoke, his eyes searched the darkness of the woods for any signs of movement. Jango, who had seen the unnatural speed of the zombies too many times to count, knew that time was of the essence, and that he needed to resolve the issue of Grandpa Don’s cohorts quickly.
“You’ve got like two seconds or so to get your friends out here where I can see them. If they aren’t out here by then, I am going to blow your gonads up your ass-hole, and then take pictures of it.” Jango had spoken loudly so that he would be heard by anyone who might be in the woods.
“Okay, okay, you nasty, foul-mouthed little shit,” said a woman’s voice from within the darkness of the woods. “I’m coming out, for Christ’s-sake. Just don’t shoot him in the nuts.” A matronly looking woman in her mid-fifties stepped out of the woods slowly. She was about the same age as the man and was dressed in similar clothing. She held a pump shotgun at her side, finger on the trigger, with the barrel pointed toward Jango.
Jango jammed his pistol into the man’s groin, and said, “Don’t get cute, old woman, or I’ll add both of your asses to the goober roll-call.”
The woman slowly lowered the barrel of the shotgun, and took her finger off the trigger. “Okay, okay, just stay calm,” she said in a soothing voice.
“Fuck calm, lady. While we stand here dicking around, there's probably a load of goobers on the way here right now. Now tell me exactly what's going on, and do it fast.”
While Jango had been dealing with the old man and the old woman, he hadn’t paid attention to what the girls had been doing. He noticed movement slightly behind him and to his right. When he turned to see what it was, he saw that the young brunette girl had a rifle pointed directly at him.
“Don't hurt my grandpa and grandma. They won't do anything to hurt you. They are just here to get me,” the girl said with a determined look on her young face.
Jango, unused to expressions of love and loyalty, had to give himself a moment to process the new information. He knew the rifle was unloaded, since he could see that the clear plastic clip was empty, and that the slide was locked open. Therefore, he wasn’t worried about the girl shooting him. He looked at the determination writ hard and true on the faces of the two grandparents and the girl, and then the truth was apparent to him. He released his grip on the man's shoulder, pulled his pistol away from the man's groin, and holstered his gun. With a grim nod at the man, woman, and their granddaughter, he said, “We need to get our asses in gear and figure this out.”
Ever since he had fired his first shot at the men, Jango had heard the wailing yells of the undead coming from the large garage. Below the soul searing screeches of the living dead, he heard the frightened cries, yelps, and barks of what sounded like dogs. He snatched a rifle from one of the young girls, removed the empty clip, reversed it and inserted the fully loaded clip into the rifle. He pulled the slide back to chamber a round as he turned toward the uninviting structure.
Jango quickly headed toward the garage. When he got to the steel-banded door, he realized that it was locked. For some reason, the locked door made the beast shake its chains and strain against its cage. Jango felt a horrible strength begin to flow through his frame. He looked at the heavy door. His lips drew back in a silent snarl as he spun his hips counter-clockwise, and unleashed a side-kick at the door. The door stood no chance against the lunatic strength of Jango's rage-charged leg. The door creased up the middle, and the doorjamb disintegrated beneath the strength of his kick.
When he entered the garage, he saw that it was actually more of a barn, and that there were cages on each side of the enclosed space. On one side, the cages were filled with what looked like twenty or so zombies, and on the other side were ten starved looking dogs. Immediately, he rushed over and began opening the cages of the dogs. Jango was many things, debatably insane, ultraviolent, and as paranoid as a meth head that had been up for a week straight. But he was also a compulsive supporter of the underdogs of the world, and he would gladly give his life to save just one. Seeing any innocent creature caged or abused brought out the very best in him, and awoke the very worst in him at the same time.
As he let the dogs out of the cages, he waved his hands at the girls, the man, and the woman to get out of the way. He quickly led the dogs out of the garage. With the bone-deep survival instinct, which most carnivores possessed, the dogs followed him. He swiftly led the dogs to the dead bodies that lay strewn across the bleachers. Drawing the LMK from its sheath, he began cutting the clothes off some of the men. After swiftly cutting the clothing off five or six of the men, he made sure to slice open their flesh a little bit so the dogs would be able to eat more quickly. When he was done preparing their meal, he waved the dogs in, inviting them to fill their stomachs.
Tentative at first, the dogs approached the bodies of the men who had caged, tortured, and starved them. It seemed as though they would not have the courage to feed. Then one large, gray beast that looked like he was the offspring of an Irish Wolfhound, a Great Dane, and a bulldozer finally stepped forward and drove his strong, sharp, teeth into the flesh of one of the men’s stomachs. The huge dog savaged the body. He lifted the dead man up and violently whipped his massive head back and forth.As if that action was a sign, or a cue, the other nine dogs pressed forward and began to feast ravenously on the meat of their former persecutors.
&nb
sp; Jango nodded happily at what he considered to be the very definition of justice. “We might not have law and order, but we can still have justice,” he said to himself as he watched the dogs tear large pieces of flesh loose, and then swallow the chunks down whole. After watching the feast for a moment, he turned and hurried back to the garage.
As Jango neared the garage, he noticed that the group of girls and the two grandparents had nauseated looks on their faces. “Don't look at it if that shit bothers you. Jesus, what's wrong with you people?” He said as he pushed through the queasy looking crowd.
Jango looked at the zombies in their cages for a short moment, then calmly and methodically walked down the row of cages and shot each of the creatures in the head. When he finished with his grisly task, he turned to look at the group of people. His code demanded that he continue to protect these strangers, just as it had forced him to walk the Apocalypse Road when Sonja had died.
“All right, people, we have to move right now. That big house up front, that damn thing is built like a fortress, and I think that might be the best place for you to ride out the storm.”
“What storm? What are you going to do?” Grandpa Don asked Jango. “Because I can help you with whatever you need to do.”
Jango felt respect for the man, but he preferred to kill zombies on his own. He also knew that he was never coming back here, and that the man needed to stay to protect the children.
“No disrespect, no offense, but I'll do this myself. I'm just glad you two showed up, because I didn't know how I was going to find someone to take care of these girls. Now I've got you two to watch over them, and believe me, that is plenty.”
“You’re the zombie fighter, aren't you?” Grandpa Don suddenly asked.
Jango just looked at the man and wondered how so many people had heard about his work as he headed south on Highway 89.
“Yeah,” the old woman said. “We heard about you as soon as we hit the 89 going south. There are some people trying to rebuild in Ash Fork, and they said the only reason that they could do anything was because a crazy man had come through and blown up most of the town, and took out all the zombies. They hadn’t been able to go outside their homes for days, and they said it was just a matter of time before the zombies got them.”