by Cedric Nye
Jango immediately recognized the knife as the work of a guy he had seen on YouTube. The knife was called the “Spine Cutter”, and it had been made by a guy named Dell in the UK. Dell owned and operated a small knife making business called Dirty Room Knives. He worked out of his garage, and made top-notch blades for a reasonable price. In Jango’s opinion, one of the things that had set Dell’s work apart from many other custom knife makers had been the utility of many of his designs. The Spine Cutter was a prime example of that; it was a killer, plain and simple. The knife had been made to cut flesh and shed blood, and Jango had wanted one since he had first seen them on YouTube.
“Look out, look out,” he said to Sonja. She was too busy looking at the swords on the wall to notice what Jango was doing as he raised up his trusty ironwood stick, and brought it down in two swift strikes that blew out not only the glass on the top of the case, but the glass in the front as well. Sonja jumped a little, but went right back to her perusal of the swords.
Kicking the glass off of his feet, he reached in to get the knife and the black, Kydex sheath that went with it. Jango shook the glass off the knife and sheath, and then pulled them from the case.
He tested the edge on the pad of his thumb, and it was razor-sharp. With a satisfied smile, Jango snapped the Spine Cutter into its tight fitting Kydex sheath, and clipped it to his belt over his left hip.
Now that he had found a fixed-blade knife, thus fulfilling his needs in that area, he turned to see how Sonja was doing.
Sonja had chosen a katana with a long, gently curving blade, and an oversized grip that had been designed so it could be used with two hands. Sonja stood like a baseball player, and swung the sword at the air in front of her. She made a whooosh noise with her pursed lips every time she swung the sword.
“What are you going to do with that?” Jango asked her. “I thought you were going to get a knife.”
“Why would I take a little tiny knife when I can have a sword?” Sonja asked him incredulously, and then swung the sword again. She made the whoosh sound again.
He just stood there, speechless, unable to process her logic. Jango didn’t understand the way that people thought, and he couldn’t fathom Sonja’s logic. His mind went blank as he tried to figure out why she would choose a sword over a knife. Given their situation, a sword would be a major detriment, while a knife would be useful. Why didn’t she know that? His confusion left him mute, and Sonja seemed to take his silence as encouragement. So she began to explain exactly why a sword was better than a knife.
“You’ve seen The Walking Dead, right?” She asked Jango.
He nodded, as he began to see where she was headed, but he let her finish her explanation.
“Remember Michonne? She was the hardcore girl with the sword just like this one! She kicked major ass.” Sonja smiled at Jango, as if she dared him to deny or defy her logic.
Sonja couldn’t understand why Jango would want her to choose a tiny knife instead of a Michonne style Walking Dead sword! The guy seemed to know a lot about throwing down, but how could he possibly think a knife would beat a sword? The thought was absurd.
Jango sighed, and wondered if he should just let it go, and let her carry the damned sword, when she swung it through the air again.
“Whoosh!” She beheaded another imaginary zombie with her sword.
He couldn’t stand it anymore. “Wait, wait, wait,” Jango said, making a time out T with his hands, his stick held against his body under his left arm.
“Sonja, ahh, shit, how do I say this without sounding like a butthole?” Jango thought about it for a moment, and then said, “That sword will get you killed out there, okay?”
“Here, let me show you, okay?” He looked around, and quickly spotted a wooden handled broom. Perfect! He could definitely use the broom for his anti-sword demonstration.
He walked over and grabbed it from where it was leaned against the wall, and then walked over to the rack that held all the shirts. He randomly chose a shirt from the rack. When he glanced at the writing on the red shirt. He saw that it said, “Gun Control Means Using Both Hands to Aim.” Jango chuckled.
He carefully tied the shirt onto the broom handle just below the bristles. He held the broom with the bristles just about the height of his own head, and told Sonja, “Okay. I am going to pretend to be a zombie. Well, not me, the broom will be the goober, okay?”
Jango gathered steam and forged ahead, just wanting to get her on the same page as him. “Vertebrae are bone and bone is hard. You can’t just cut through it that easily.” He continued talking when he saw that she had started to listen to him now.
“Vertebrae, I think, are going to be harder to cut than this broom handle. If you want to behead something, you have to be, like, I don’t know, a fucking master of swords, or whatever they call themselves. There are too many things that can get in the way of you taking off a head, like if your blade doesn’t hit at the perfect angle, or your blade gets stuck in bone. Zombies don’t feel any pain, they don’t flinch, and if your sword gets stuck, you will be well and truly fucked,” Jango finished.
He watched her face as Sonja’s common sense warred with what television had taught her would work in a Zombie Apocalypse. Then he pulled out his final card.
“I will come at you like a zombie, and if you can cut off the head of this broom-goober, then I will believe that you can gank zombies with it, okay?”
Jango crossed his heart and said, “I promise I won’t give you any grief at all about it after this.”
She looked at him for a long moment, and finally said, “Fine. Let’s do it!”
Without warning, he screamed at the top of his lungs, “Derrrr-EEEE-aaaaaaaHeeeee!” and ran straight at Sonja while he held the broom up in front of his face. The shirt flapped wildly on the broom handle as Jango charged.
Sonja, startled, jumped a little bit, and then quickly brought the sword back over her right shoulder as if it was a baseball bat. But she had been too slow.
Jango had reached her, and he had pushed the broom against the top of her head while he made a creepy keening sound that was unnervingly similar to the sounds that the zombies made when feeding. Then he pressed the bristles against her left shoulder and made chewing noises, “Nom, nom, nom, mmmm, nom, nom.” Then he screamed, “Rheeee-Eeeeee!”
By that time, Sonja had started laughing so hard she could barely breathe. The sword lay on the ground as she leaned over, hands braced on her knees. Tears streamed from her eyes, as she laughed so hard that didn’t even make any noise.
After a few minutes, she was finally able to draw a breath, “Heeeeeeeeeee,” she wheezed, as she took in a long breath, still giggling a little bit as she stood up straight and wiped the tears from her face.
“You are one seriously deranged individual, Jango!” Sonja chuckled, and almost burst into another fit of laughing when she looked at him and saw that he was still waving the broom at her while he made zombie faces.
“So what should I do?” She asked him. “If the sword is crap, what will a little knife do to help me?”
Jango suddenly realized that he hadn’t really explained why he took the Spine Cutter; he realized that he had only told her why NOT to get a sword. That was another aspect of his messed-up mental processes. He unconsciously believed in thought-projection, or a kind of universal knowledge. He unconsciously assumed that if he knew something, everyone else must know it as well.
He took a breath, dropped the broom, and took his stick out from under his arm.“Okay,” Jango began, “I took the knife for other reasons. This knife is just as worthless for ganking goobers as the sword is.”
“The thing about a good knife, though, is that you can make weapons with it. Like my stick, for example. It’s excellent for putting zombies down permanently. You use your stick right, a hard strike to their skull will cause instant destruction of their brains. Then it’s lights out for the nasty bastards. You can also make traps, and cut rope, and do all kinds of other st
uff with a knife, too.”
Sonja leaned to look into the case full of knives. After a moment or two, she reached in and grabbed a small, elegant looking knife that had a sweeping curve to the handle just behind the blade. The grip scales were a soft orange shade of tan, and it had a black Kydex sheath.
The knife seemed familiar to Jango, and he leaned in for a closer look. “Ha!” He said out loud.
“What, what?” Sonja asked him.
“Oh, no big deal. I just recognized that knife, well, the style, anyway.” Jango had seen that same knife on another YouTube channel. He figured the G&J Gun House must have had a manager who was a fan of the YouTube knife making community, and had stocked some of their work.
He explained to Sonja where he had seen the knife. “Yeah, look at the little symbol on the blade, right there.” He pointed to the blade. There was a small symbol, a stylized “LMK” etched into the blade near the grip.
“That “LMK” stands for LMarshall Knives. He had a little knife making business, and this knife is one of his AEB-L stainless steel knives.” Jango finished his story with, “Those little knives are gnarly and tough. NICE choice!”
Sonja blushed as she clipped the knife and sheath to her belt.
“So what were you saying about sticks?” She asked him after a few moments of silence. “You said that if someone uses a stick right, then it is bad ass. Well, what is the right way to use a stick?”
Jango pointed to the wall just to the left of the swords she had been looking at earlier. “You see those?” He asked her, pointing at several things that looked like canes, or lumpy sticks. The difference was that they appeared to be made out of some kind of plastic.
“Those are Cold Steel Shillelaghs,” he told her. He had recognized them when he spotted them earlier. He had been impressed with the videos he had seen on YouTube of their performance.
“I saw some demonstrations on YouTube.” Jango looked embarrassed for a moment. Even though he avoided people like the plague because of the threat he believed all people posed to him, he still craved the human connection. YouTube had been the only way he could connect in any way with other human beings. He had always been embarrassed about his inability to function well in social situations. He shook himself out of his thoughts, and finished his pitch to Sonja.
“A stick, see, that’s something you can use that won’t get stuck in bone. AND, since zombies don’t seem to be all that interested in defending themselves, they just keep coming at you, so you can use your whacking stick to keep one off of you.”
He demonstrated for Sonja using a two-handed grip on his stick. He held the stick parallel to the ground at shoulder level. His hands divided the stick into thirds, with about 10 inches extending out from each fist, and about 10 inches between his hands.
He then made a shoving motion that utilized his entire body, his legs, and his arms. The movement was a sinuous whipping motion that resembled the movement that a snake would make when it struck. He quickly brought the stick back, and threw two stick punches in rapid succession. Getting into it now, he told her, “This next one is the kayak attack; it’s a seriously gnarly attack that gets your whole body into the strikes.”
Jango then demonstrated the movements with his stick. The kayak attack was a brutal looking two-handed attack that resembled a series of left and right hooks, except that the ends of the stick were what he would hit something with instead of his fists. His hips pivoted into each strike as his shoulders whirled quickly to add impetus to the blows.
Sonja watched closely, and her martial-arts background served her well as she easily picked up the body mechanics of his movements. She immediately realized the practical brutality of the stick strikes. She also saw why he called the movements the kayak attack. Jango’s violent movements very closely resembled someone madly paddling a kayak.
He suddenly stopped his demonstration and jogged over to the water containers, where he grabbed a plastic jug, and without a word, jogged through the door to the back.
Sonja had begun to get use to his odd behavior, so she just waited patiently to see what he was up to this time.
Jango had filled the large container with water, and when he got back, he promptly set the jug on a counter that was still intact.
He told Sonja, “Go grab one of those Cold Steel poly-whatever shillelaghs. Just grab whichever one feels right.”
She grabbed a shillelagh off the wall at random, and walked over to stand with him.
Jango squared up in his basic starting stance for stick-fighting, left foot very slightly leading the right, left shoulder turned slightly forward, elbows against his ribs, and the stick in the two-handed grip in front of his face.
“Okay, this is a stick punch. It’s a VERY easy move, but it hits super-hard,” he told her. “Just act like you’re throwing a punch, let your weight move forward, drive off your right foot, swivel your hips, and torque your shoulder forward, then let the punch go.”
He demonstrated the move slowly as he talked.
“Then, just before full extension, snap your wrist so the just shoots forward!” He demonstrated the stick punch at full speed time. The heavy ironwood stick was a blur as it shot forward. There was a meaty thunk as the part of the stick closest to him hit the back of his forearm at full extension. He drew it back just as quickly.
He threw several more stick punches, and Sonja noticed that he didn’t need to make any sound effects with his mouth. In his hands, the stick cut through the air with a whistling noise as it wove a blurred web of death in front of him.
She emulated his movements, slowly at first, then with increasing speed as she became comfortable with the movement.
“Now remember,” he warned, “Don’t extend your arms out all the way on any strikes, okay? That can hyper-extend your elbows and leave you up shit-creek without a fighting stick OR a paddle.”
Sonja adjusted her strikes so that her arms didn’t fully extend. She practiced moving and striking, getting her footwork in sync with the unfamiliar style of fighting.
Jango nodded his approval. “You really picked that up fast!” He exclaimed. “What martial art do you practice?” He asked her.
She stopped snapping the stick out, and asked him, “How did you know that?”
“I just noticed your build, how you move, and the first two knuckles on each of your hands. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out you can kick ass. Oh, plus you told me how you chest-jacked that Zombie that tried to get your chitterlings, remember?”
She looked at her knuckles, then at her arms, and shrugged her shoulders. “I studied a whole bunch of different systems of fighting,” she answered, “But mostly just Krav Maga now.” Sonja was proud of her accomplishments in the various martial arts she had studied over the years, and it secretly pleased her that he had been able to figure it out.
Jango nodded. The Israeli martial art of Krav Maga was a good system of practical ass kicking that he respected.
“So, what’s the water jug for?” She asked.
He smiled, happy that she had finally asked about the jug. He told her, “So you can see the kind of damage you can do with your stick. Go ahead and hit the jug with a stick punch.” Jango encouraged her with a smile.
Sonja stepped forward, brought her shillelagh up, and moved forward, her whole body moving into the strike. The stick impacted the water jug with a sound like a small-caliber gun being fired, and the jug literally exploded under the impact.
Her face broke out in a huge grin. “That. Was. AWESOME!” She shouted happily.
Jango had a smile on his face almost as big as Sonja did, mostly happy because he finally had someone who shared his joy of destroying things.
He held up his left hand for a high-five, and told her, “That was awesome. You really picked that up FAST!”
Sonja gave him a high-five. She was still grinning, and she was flushed from her exertions. She held on to Jango’s hand when the high-five was over, a warm, lingering touch that shook
him to his very core.
His breath caught in his throat, as he felt a warm feeling spread from his stomach to his chest, neck, and then to his face. He felt like his body was bursting at the seams, and he didn’t know how to react.
Jango’s mouth went dry, and he couldn’t think straight, much less speak. He had never had anyone touch him gently before, not like that. He could feel Sonja’s pulse in her hand, and, as he looked into her eyes, he wanted to kiss her so badly he felt like he would die if he didn’t. But he couldn’t move.
Sonja saved him from his paralysis by dropping her shillelagh, grabbing the front of his jeans, and jerking him close to her. She grabbed the back of Jango’s head, and pulled him even closer as she kissed him on his mouth. Her tongue darted out, and pressed against Jango’s lips, softly, but insistently.
His lips parted as if they had a will of their own and he put his arms around Sonja as he melted into her passionate kiss. She pulled away from him just long enough to take the stick out of his hand, and then she pulled him back into their heated embrace. Her lips were as soft as silk against Jango’s lips. Her tongue caressed his lips, then plunged into his mouth quickly only to draw back out. He kissed her neck, and tasted the salty tang of her sweat.
He felt his erection straining against the material of his jeans, like a starved beast that had been caged for too long, and had finally smelled food. He felt as if his whole body could explode at any moment, but he also felt…..good.
When he was a child, sex was a terrible thing. Sex was to be avoided at all costs, and in the state-run gladiator academies that the social workers called boy’s homes, group homes, and foster homes, Jango had fought to NOT have sex.
Later on, when he was a teen and then an adult, Jango had a few passing flings that mostly consisted of quickies in alleys behind bars, or in abandoned houses, standing, pressed against graffiti-marred walls and surrounded by garbage from other squatters.