by Cedric Nye
He looked more closely at the extended magazines and scoffed. “I am NOT going to have that stupid shit hanging out of my pistol.”
“What’s up?” Sonja asked him.
“Ahh, well, okay,” he said to her, “You have two magazines that come with your new pistol.” Jango noticed her look of puzzlement, so he pointed out a magazine on the rack as an explanation.
“The cartridges go in there, and then a spring feeds them into your pistol when you are shooting.” He went on, “Your two magazines hold ten rounds in each one.” He pointed to the rack. “Here are more ten-round mags, all the fifteen-round mags are…uh…gone, but over here are some that hold twenty and thirty rounds each.” He finished, pointing at the super high capacity magazines on the rack.
“Well,” Sonja pondered, “What are you using?”
He sighed, “The fifteen-round magazines.”
She cracked up laughing at his discomfort, and then laughed even harder when she saw the look of consternation on his face.
When she finally stopped laughing, she hiccoughed, and asked him, “Why not just use the bigger ones?”
He thought about it for a moment, and then said, “They look like bullshit to me. They would be hanging out of the pistol grip, knocking into shit, and I don’t see how it can feed that well when the spring has to travel so far AND push the little thing that sits under the cartridges.”
She accepted what he had said, and told him, “I will just use the ten-round ones then.”
He pulled all of them off the rack and counted them. There were twelve of the ten-round magazines; one hundred and twenty rounds, not including the two mags that came with her pistol.
Back at the ammunition counter, he showed Sonja how to load the magazines. He was patient and methodical, and never once treated her as anything but an equal.
Sonja was busy furiously trying NOT to like Jango so much. She knew it was just her fear of being alone in a zombie-infested world, but damn, he was being so sweet and patient. And those muscles! She could hardly look away when he did anything with his hands. It was as if the play of the muscles in his forearms mesmerized her. She shook herself out of those kinds of thoughts.
“You should get a backpack and a water container or two,” Jango told her. “The water is still on, but that won’t last.”
He showed her how he had fixed up his own water situation, and she went ahead and did the same. After she had filled her water containers, he showed her the pantry. Sonja loaded up with beef-jerky, but she decided that half of her food - stash should be comprised of the Belgian chocolate bars she found on one of the shelves.
Instead of griping, as many men might do, Jango nodded his support at the wisdom of having chocolate. “That is smart,” he said to her, “Those guys that go to Antarctica or whatever always take chocolate. It gives them good energy, or something.”
She just looked at him, secretly wishing he would do something that would make her NOT like him so much! She wondered to herself whether Jango was feeling the heat between them that she felt.
When they were done loading up on food, Jango turned to her and said, “I have to get out of here. I mean, I know there is food, and we could fill all the containers with water, and probably live here for quite a while.” He looked down at his feet, embarrassed, shy, “But I can’t stand it in here anymore, I feel sick, sad, and trapped.”
“Ughhhhh,” she screamed silently, friggin’ Jango, she thought, like a big puppy. What she said out loud was, “That’s cool, man. I am SO ready to blow this popsicle-stand.”
His face split into a big grin. “Blow this popsicle-stand, eh?” He chuckled. “I haven’t heard anyone besides me use that expression in a long time.”
They stood in companionable silence for a moment, two introverts that finally felt comfortable with each other, and who felt content in their silence.
Finally, Sonja spoke, dealing herself in on whatever he might have in mind. “So,” she asked him, “What’s the plan for getting out of here?”
Chapter 11:
Realizations and Clarifications
“So what’s the plan for getting out of here?” Sonja asked Jango, letting him know that she was in, and ready to go with him when he left G&J Gun House.
Jango was feeling trapped; hemmed in by the walls. And even though he knew there were enough supplies for him and Sonja to live there for a long time, he just couldn’t bear the thought of being trapped any longer. The safe haven had begun to feel like a prison to Jango.
He wasn’t really sure what to make of Sonja. His experiences with women were almost nonexistent, and his understanding of women completely nonexistent, so he hadn’t a clue that she had begun to have a crush on him.
What she didn’t know was that he definitely felt the same heat between them as she herself felt. Sonja made him feel warm inside.
“Well,” Jango pondered the question, “I guess we should get some more gear before we go. Beyond that, I don’t have a clue.” He finished up, “I just want to get the hell out of here. The walls are kind of closing in, like some goddamn cage!”
The truth was he had never really had much of a plan for anything in his whole life. He had his morals, a self-written code of behavior designed to keep him from becoming one of the twists, as he called abusers of all kinds. He had built his code to keep innocent people safe, and that was all the structure that he had. He had spent his entire life wrapping chains around his psyche, covering up his pain, caging his rage, and forcing himself to walk a path that had never suited his truth.
The real truth of Jango was violence. Not the violence in a boxing-match or a cage-fight, and not the primetime sugar water gore of everybody’s favorite cop show. His truth was violence so pure and raw that it defied description. The abuse that he had suffered; the horrible beatings from his father, and the rape by his cousin had changed Jango down to his very DNA. He had mutated and become a real-life version of The Incredible Hulk.
Jango wasn’t bulletproof, or able to jump over buildings like The Hulk. There wasn’t anything magical about his mutation at all, only simple science. Way back in the 1800s, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck had already known about forced adaptation and generational mutation. Lamarck, and his modern counterpart, Gabor Mate both knew that “an environment would draw out of an organism what was necessary for that organism to survive the environment.”
That was exactly what had happened to him. His father had beaten him so badly when he was a baby that the malleable tissue of Jango’s mind and body were mutated. His pain centers lost sensitivity, his adrenal glands became larger, and his hormone production skyrocketed to help him survive and heal from the injuries of the abuse. The side effects of the increased hormone production were freakish, unnatural strength, faster reflexes, and a high tolerance to pain. The bad side effects were paranoia, fear of people, and an inability to form relationships and bonds. There were many other problems that he faced because of the abuse he had suffered as a child, but one of the worst was that he had a severe lack of appropriate responses and response levels to the world around him. To him, the whole world was measured by its ability to do him harm, every human, animal, object, and situation was gauged by the threat it posed to him. When Jango felt threatened, he destroyed whatever was threatening him.
Other changes had happened as well, though, in Jango’s mind. His unconscious mind had walled off parts of his personality, ugly, feral parts of his psyche that were unfit for the world. Survival was all Jango would ever be. His religion, his altar, his entire being came down to just one word; SURVIVAL. He knew that violence was the key to survival.
“Hey,” Jango said, noticing that Sonja was looking at him with fear in her eyes. “I’m sorry about that; I just can’t stand being caged up like this.”
He continued talking, trying to soothe Sonja and himself. “I don’t know what to do. To tell you the flat out fucked up truth, I just want to be moving. I feel like it is only a matter of time before some band of shit bags
comes plowing in here to loot the place.”
Sonja looked at him and said, “Well, we have all the guns, so who cares if they come here? We can shoot them into pieces!”
Jango groaned inwardly. This was the kind of shit that television taught people.
“Look,” he said in what he considered his most reasonable voice, “Every fucktard you ever saw thinks that you can just survive a shootout if you have a whole pile of ammo.” He amended what he had said by saying, “Not YOU personally, but like, YOU out there, you know?” He said while gesturing in a sweeping motion to indicate everyone BUT her.
He continued, “But the thing about a shootout is that bullets are coming back at you when you are shooting. Simple fucking logic dictates that if I fire a hundred rounds, then a hundred rounds are coming back at me.”
“So, say one of those Walking Dead ass-bag-a-thons on wheels comes rolling in here. There are like twenty or thirty guys with guns and gasoline?” Jango looked at her to make sure she was getting the point. “Those are LONG odds, Sister, long and messed-up odds.” Then he finished with, “Plus, they can just drive a truck through the wall, throw a can of gasoline in here, set fire to the place, then wait for us to run out, and shoot us into a pile of bloody rags. Or worse.”
He was breathing hard, looking around with wild, rolling eyes at the thought of burning to death.
“Plus, to top it all off, there is some giant fucking dog that bit me, and that talks and he has a bitch…a mean albino bitch that just appears out of nowhere and kicks a mother-fucker in the nuts….TWICE!” He was ramping up, riding the crazy-train, and about to fall off the rails when Sonja spoke.
“A giant dog?” She asked him, genuinely curious despite the fact that Jango’s lips were flecked with spit, his face was an ugly purple color, and large veins were writhing on his neck and forehead.
“So how big is giant?” Sonja asked, “Like, as big as a Great Dane?” She was desperately trying to get Jango to calm down. She knew he was messed-up. She just didn’t have any idea just HOW messed up he was until he started flipping out. She thought to herself, “I should have known he was too good to be true!”
Sonja also knew that he looked like a badass, and that her chances of survival would be better if she could stick with him for a while, so she was willing to try anything to calm him down.
“Or was he, like, I don’t know, the size of a donkey?” She asked.
Jango looked confused, as the ugly purple color began to leave his face, and the bulging veins returned to normal.
“N-n-n-no,” he stammered, readjusting back to his usual state of semi-normalcy. “He, the dog I mean, he was as big as a horse. He looked like a Rottweiler. He said that some nasty shit was coming, and I had to be ready. He kept telling me I freed him. He bit the hell out of me, I mean; he shook me like crazy and tossed me against the building like I was a rat or something. I managed to get up, and then I shot him a WHOLE bunch of times, full mag, and they just slid right off his fur. The dog and the albino kept flickering, too, like a bad movie or something.”
He started thinking about that, about the actual possibility of there being something in this world that could actually withstand gunfire with its bare skin.
“Huh!” Jango grunted in epiphany. He had it figured out!
“Okay, Sonja, check this out, and let me know what you think,” he said, talking fast so he wouldn’t forget what he was thinking.
“This weird zombie thing, like, the “Z-Virus” or whatever. It infects everybody, okay?” Jango pushed on with his theory, “Some people kick right away, and turn into goobers, but some people don’t. Like the old lady at the hotel, and me, and you, too”
He began pacing, thinking feverishly about the possibilities. He continued talking. “But even though we didn’t croak right away, we still have the Z-Virus pumping through our veins. The proof is in the pudding, or in that old lady, anyway. I killed her, and then about 45 minutes after I gacked her, she was a zombie!”
He kept going with his theory on the dog and the albino. “So if we all got sick, right? Some of us went full-on goober right away, and some of us have some immunity or something. But we still would have gotten sick, right?” He finished up, “Maybe I was sick and I imagined, or I hallucinated the giant dog and his high kicking bitch. Doesn’t that make more sense than a giant bulletproof dog? Nothing made out of meat is bulletproof, ipso-facto; the fucking dog was bullshit!!” Jango was smiling and happy, or at least as close to happy as he could get without an enemy in front of him.
“Did you get sick at all, Sonja?” he asked her in calm, soothing tones.
Sonja thought about it for a moment. She did get sick, a pretty bad fever, around the time the Zombies started showing up, but she was more focused on what Jango had just said, and not the part about them all being infected. He had just admitted to killing an old woman! “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” she thought to herself.
“Soooone-YA,” Jango sang, “Did YOU get sick?”
“Yeah, I mean, yes…Yes I did,” she stuttered, trying not to picture him killing her in all kinds of horrible ways.
“Are you okay,” he asked her as he sniffed at the air, “Because you look like shit right now, kind of pasty-yellow, and you stink like fear.”
Jango suddenly jumped back, away from her. “Are you sick now?” He asked her. “Did you get bit somewhere?”
“What?” Sonja shouted, “Am I sick?” She repeated it again in an even louder and more high-pitched tone, “Am I sick?”
Then Sonja showed her own nuts and let Jango have it both barrels, “You miserable, crazy, fuck, asking me if I’m sick, and saying I stink?” Her voice was rising, becoming even more piercing. “You shit-ass, you killed some old lady! Big man, huh? Tough guy, killing old ladies and telling girls they stink. Well, let me tell you something. You are nuttier than elephant-shit, with your giant dogs and albino women and killing old ladies.” She was panting by the time she finished.
“Tell me I stink,” she muttered softly. “You aren’t exactly a pile of rose-petals, buddy.”
Jango was taken aback. He had thought everything was going pretty smoothly between them. He was also stunned that she was upset about him killing the old lady who had tried to give him a buckshot enema.
“Uh, Sonja?” Jango asked, “I didn’t mean that you stink. I just say things the way they are in my head, and I didn’t mean anything by it.” He continued to talk to her softly, “I just wondered why you smelled afraid all of a sudden, and why you looked so freaked-out.” He finished up in a sad tone, “I guess I know, now.”
“I didn’t just kill that old lady out of the blue,” he suddenly said. “She tried to shoot me through the door, and it set me off. I put her ass down, and I will never, ever, ever feel bad about it, either.”
“I leave people alone, as long as they do me the same courtesy.” He sighed as he realized he actually cared what Sonja thought about him.
“Huh?!” Jango grunted at the new epiphany. He actually cared what someone thought about him beyond whether they were plotting on him or not. That was new and unexpected. He decided he shouldn’t mention his experiment, and how he had busted the old woman’s dead legs so she couldn’t run after him if she turned into a zombie. He felt Sonja might not understand why he had bashed that old woman’s legs, or why it didn’t bother him to do it.
“So you aren’t some serial killer?” Sonja broke into his reverie.
“No! No way,” he replied vehemently. Jango had a very low opinion of serial killers. He ranked them with baby-rapers, animal abusers, and basically all abusers in general. The only people he had ever killed were bad people who deserved it, but he decided not to share that with Sonja either.
Sonja found herself believing his explanation, and was comforted by the fact that he seemed to genuinely care what she thought about him.
“Okay, okay, “she said slowly, “So what do we do about this gear you were talking about?”
Chapte
r 12:
Swords? We Don’t Need No Stinking Swords!
Jango had been thinking about the survival gear that would come in handy, and he had a pretty good list made up in his mind.
“What we need are knives, oh, a compass, a fire-starter, you know, like maybe a ferro-rod or a magnifying glass, or even both.” He was feeling better now that he knew he’d be getting out of there soon.
“And I’d like to have some first-aid stuff, at least some anti-biotic ointment, a needle, and some thread.” He added, “But, seeing as how this place had so much survival rations and what-not, maybe we can score some top-notch black market first aid goodies.”
Sonja started getting into the idea. “Yeah!! I think I saw knives and stuff up front!”
He blinked at her. It hadn’t even occurred to him to check for knives when they were up there, and the fact that she had spotted them gave him a great respect for her powers of observation.
He smiled at Sonja and said, “Then let’s gets crackin’! Lay on, MacDuff!”
She shook her head, but a smile was on her face as she said, “You got it, Shakespeare.” Then she headed to the front of the store for what she hoped was the last time.
“See?” Sonja exclaimed excitedly as she pointed at a case, and a section of the wall behind the case.
She had definitely found something. The three-shelf deep glass case was full of knives of all kinds, and the wall was covered in large knives and swords.
“Whew,” Jango whistled as he saw hundreds of knives in the case: all high-end knives, excellent quality, and expensive! Not that price mattered anymore, but he still felt compelled to check out the price tags through the glass.
“Ooohh, ooh, ooh,” he said suddenly, sounding like a chimpanzee as he pointed through the glass at a particularly villainous looking knife that had a steep angle to the tip that made it look almost like a chisel. Except for the sheer heft and width to the four-inch blade, it was similar to a tanto-style blade. The knife had sulfurous looking yellow micarta grip scales that were ground down so that they looked like the skin of something prehistoric. Where the grip scales had been ground down, a black under layer showed that gave the grips a predatory look that perfectly matched the evil looking blade.