by Cedric Nye
16
The garage was behind the research center, and it was eerily empty of the undead. All of them had been drawn to the front of the enormous building by the screams and howls of those that had pursued him. They had packed the streets in front of the square stone building, and had filled the building itself to bursting. It seemed as though the creatures were aware of who it was that they pursued, and that they would not stop until they had killed he who had killed so many of them.
Jango hobbled away from the area as fast as he could move, and when he had put about half a mile, and several large buildings between himself and the research laboratory, he stopped, turned around, and mashed his thumb down on the button that would send a radio signal, and detonate the huge bomb.
Nothing happened, so he mashed the button again and again. Perhaps it was the distance, or that the current took a moment to ignite the steel wool, but the end result was a slightly delayed explosion.
His first inkling that it had exploded was a feeling of the air being pulled past him back toward the building that he had just left. Then, a hollow “Whumph!” that he felt more than heard.
Some primal instinct made him turn away from the explosion, and hobble into an alley to a concrete staircase that lead down to what used to be a sandwich shop. He made it down the steps, and crashed through the door just before the entire world turned to blood and fire.
The air had been pulling in toward the research center, until, with a grinding roar, the air reversed itself, and spread out from the exploding tanker truck like the ripples from a stone in a pond.
Fire so hot that it burned the very air spewed forth from the floor to ceiling windows of the first floor. The violent winds created by the monstrous explosion hurled the thousands of zombies that were packed into the streets surrounding the building high into the air. As they rose and tumbled in the buffeting blast, the ring of fire was upon them. The city surrounding the research laboratory became a holocaust of torn limbs and charred corpses.
The surrounding buildings were flung away as if by an invisible hand, and thousands upon thousands of the foul, undead creatures were burned to cinders and ash in the raging inferno.
The massive explosion was too large, though, and as Jango had hoped, needed more area in which to vent its fury. The remaining power of the explosion filled the upper floors of the building with first fire, and then force.
All of the jacks that had pursued Jango into the building were crushed to a pulp by the explosion, just before the top three floors of the heavily built building launched into the air like some demented rocket-ship.
Bodies of dead and dying zombies burst through the windows of the building, and flew far out into the surrounding city.
In the almost supernatural calm that followed the titanic blast, the creatures burned. After less than three minutes, all that was left of the more than twenty thousand zombies that had sought to kill Jango were charred remains.
A little over a half of a mile away, Jango and the baby had been spared the worst of the explosion. Aside from the terrible grinding and roaring, they had not been affected by the explosion.
“I need to get you to that damned convention center, kid,” he said as he pawed through a diaper bag that had fortuitously been abandoned in the sandwich shop at some point.
The baby remained silent, staring at him with her preternaturally green eyes, and seeming to not have a care in the world.
“Lookie, lookie,” he chortled at the silent baby. “Formula, bottles, and the most important of all, diaper-change fixings. I don’t know if you can tell, kid, but you stink bad. I heard somewhere that a skunk can’t smell its own scent, so maybe you don’t know it, but you do smell like poop.”
He filled a bottle from a can of formula, and gave it to the baby while he went to work on cleaning her up. After he had cleaned her, and put a fresh diaper on her, he dressed her in a pair of pants and a shirt that had been in the bag. They were too large for her, but still better than her soiled clothing.
Leaning over his backpack, he wrinkled his nose in disgust. “I don’t know if that smell will ever come out!” he exclaimed.
Looking out the windows, he felt his heart sink a little bit. “Damn, kid,” he said as he noted the soft gray of dusk through the shop’s windows. “We need to get to that convention center, now!”
Moving swiftly, his fierce and unnatural vitality asserting itself, he put the baby back in his pack, and closed it up. He shouldered the pack, checked his pistols, his stick, and the pump-action Remington shot-gun on his back, and then lit out for the comparative safety of the large and well-fortified Phoenix Convention Center.
17
“We’re gonna make it, kid,” Jango rasped out as he ran, “I think we’re gonna make it. And kid? If it looks like those hungry bastards are about to get us, I promise you I will not let them get you. I promise you that. Promise.”
He mused over the word “promise” as he ran, and chuckled silently at how silly it seemed to promise anything to anyone given the state of the world.
“I am getting sentimental in my old age, kid.” He told the baby as he rounded a corner, and came within view of the Convention Center.
The enormous structure had once been used to house massive international conventions, and shows of all kinds. With more than nine hundred thousand square feet of space, connecting tunnels to other buildings, and countless out-buildings, the place was large enough to hold thousands of people comfortably.
As he neared the large portal that led to the front entrance, he noticed that there had been a lot of fortifying done to the entry way. A sort of moat had been dug along the front of the building, and a crude draw-bridge had been built. The draw-bridge was raised, and it effectively covered the entire entrance.
“We can’t catch a fuckin’ break, kid!” he exclaimed angrily.
Just then, the gut-wrenching hunting howls of a group of jacks cut through the silence of the night.
Whirling around, he saw that they were less than two hundred feet away, and that there were about twenty of them.
A profound lethargy threatened to overtake him as he saw all of his hopes of getting the baby to safety vanish. With a growl, he shook off the darkness, and looked for a place to make a stand. He was far too exhausted to outrun the pack, so all that was left to him was battle.
Placing his back to the moat, with concrete walls to the left and right of him, he spread his feet wide, drew the shotgun from its scabbard on his back, and cut loose with it. He hammered the rounds out of the pump-action shotgun faster than he could fire with the semi-automatic versions. The sound of the shots rolled like a single peal of thunder, and the buckshot took its toll on the attacking zombies.
Five zombies dropped beneath the hail-storm of lead, never to rise again. He dropped the shotgun, and had his pistols blazing before the last spent shotgun shell had hit the ground.
Exhaustion hampered his aim, and he was only able to kill three more of the terrible creatures before they were upon him.
He dragged his Ironwood stick from its scabbard, and braced himself. He could not see himself surviving this time. There was nowhere to go, and he was almost too tired to move, much less fight.
Nevertheless, fight he did. Burned deeply into his martial being were the movements in the dance of death. Without conscious thought, he lashed out with his stick, and dealt death with every blow.
He laid three zombies low before, with a rending “Crack!” his mighty Ironwood stick broke when he brought it down upon the crown of a large jack’s head. Two thirds of the stick was still in his hand, while the other third was lodged deep within the large zombie’s head.
The long term hard use and endless killing had taken its toll on the large stick. Thousands upon thousands of impacts had slowly weakened it, until it finally gave way.
Jango was stunned for a moment, but only for a moment. With a mournful roar, he dropped the shattered stick, and stooped to pick up his shotgun.
Clubbing the long gun by gripping the barrel, he laid about himself with renewed ferocity. His rage and grief at the loss of the stick was fearsome to behold. He swung the large gun like a baseball bat, and laid waste to the slavering creatures as they crowded up the narrow entryway.
So immersed was he in his killing rage that he did not hear the drawbridge being lowered, or the shouts of people coming to his aid.
His first clue that he was no longer fighting alone was the “crack” of a pistol being fired from behind him. He ducked, and spun, only to see several heavily armored people firing their pistols into the few remaining zombies.
Warily, he stood up, and faced the strangers. He could see nothing of their faces or even gender because of the armor that they wore.
One of the strangers stepped forward. “Jango?” the muffled sound of a woman’s voice came from the helmet. “Jango, Jango, it is you!”
Tearing off her helmet and mask, Vanessa rushed forward and embraced him.
Shotgun clattering to the concrete, he returned her embrace. “I thought you were dead,” he whispered.
18
Vanessa, the pre-operative transsexual whom he had saved from being raped and killed almost a year ago, was the only person in the whole world who mattered to Jango.
“I thought you were dead,” he repeated.
She let go of their embrace, and stood back to look at him. She took in his torn, bloodied clothing, the trembling of his legs, and the gray pallor of exhaustion on his haggard face.
“I had a feeling it was you, Jango. I had a feeling it was you.” She said as tears swam in her almond shaped eyes. “No one can make a ruckus like you, big Brother. I heard those zeds start up this morning, all that screaming and howling. We heard the gunshots. Then, all of a sudden, there weren’t any more gunshots, but the zeds kept howling. You are the only person I know who it could have been. They don’t keep howling when people are dead. They only howl while the fight is on. Then that huge explosion! The whole world shook, Jango!”
He looked at her with the respect one warrior gives to another. “Most people wouldn’t even think that way, Sis. About the howling, I mean. You been getting’ hard while I was away?” He finished with a grin.
A tentative cry came from his backpack, and Jango started, and then cursed, “Fuckin’ shit!” as he quickly shucked his pack and took the baby into his arms.
“It’s all right, kid, it’s all right,” he crooned as he filled her bottle with a can of formula, and gave it to her.
Unnoticed by him, the rest of the armored fighters had taken off their helmets and masks, and were staring in stunned disbelief at the sight of the battered and bloodied man crooning to a baby.
“Holy shit, Jango,” Vanessa exclaimed, “where in the hell did you get a baby?”
He looked up at her, genuinely perplexed by the vehement way in which she had spoken. “A bunch of twists were going to stew her and eat her. I couldn’t just let that happen.”
Vanessa composed herself, and said, “I don’t think you get it, Brother. There haven’t been any babies born, that we have heard of, since the Z-Virus came to town. And here you come with a baby!” Then she asked, “What’s her name?”
He thought for a moment, and then laughed, “Promise.”
The rest of Vanessa’s crew of fighters had crowded forward to see the baby. Two of them were women, and Jango recognized one of them. The woman’s name was Eve, and she had been Vanessa’s girlfriend last time he had seen them.
One man reached down to touch the baby. Jango’s left hand curled into a fist, but before he could strike, Vanessa had pushed the man back while saying, “You wanna get yourself killed, stupid?”
The man looked at her, then at Jango’s battle scarred visage writ large in signs of rage and ruin, and he quailed.
“Listen up,” Vanessa shouted, “this man is under my protection. He and the baby are not to be bothered in any way. Do I make myself crystal?”
All of the fighters, including Eve, straightened up and said in unison, “Ma’am, yes ma’am!”
Exhaustion began to take him, and Jango said to Vanessa, “Take the baby, Sis. I think I’m going to fall out.”
She had barely taken the baby from his gore-encrusted arms, when he fell forward to the ground, and was still.
She stared in wonder at the calm and silent baby in her arms, and then at the still form of Jango. She found herself wondering for the hundredth time who this man was, and what he had been before the dead started rising and the whole world went to hell. So many people seemed to be out to get as much as they could from the world, yet this man, this obviously crazy and unstable man, consistently went out of his way to help complete strangers. She knew of several hundred people who currently resided within the bowels of the Convention Center who owed their lives to the man who lay on the ground before her, and, even though she felt that she knew him at an almost cellular level, she still could not reconcile the man’s many contradictions. She knew that he could kill, maim, and torture without ever changing expression, but that he had also risked his life so that she could live. “Who are you, Jango?” She whispered.
She shook herself from her reverie, and shouted, “Stan, Jerry, Dan, grab all of his gear that you can find. Ian and Mike, you carry him inside, and get him to the infirmary.”She quickly added, “Tell them that they are to take NO blood samples from him. It is against his religion.” Eve had told her about Jango’s secret, and Vanessa would not let that secret get out.
“Jesus Christ,” Dan exclaimed as he held up the longer piece of Jango’s shattered stick. “How hard do you have to swing a stick like this to break it?”
“About this hard, I reckon,” the man named Jerry drawled as he toed the body of the zombie in whose head the other third of the stick was embedded.
Several of the team-members whistled or exclaimed over the amount of force needed to split a zombie’s head almost in two with a single swipe of a stick.
“Eve,” Vanessa called, “you go with him to the infirmary. Make sure no one messes with him, okay?”
Eve nodded to let Vanessa know that she understood the deeper meaning to the order, and hustled off after Ian and Mike, who were struggling along slowly under the unnatural weight of Jango’s body.
Taking one last, long look around, Vanessa ordered everyone inside. Once in, she hit a large button that operated a winch which raised and lowered the drawbridge. When the drawbridge was raised, and locked in place, she turned and headed toward her quarters deep within the labyrinthine depths of the massive structure.
19
Jango awoke to the sound of Vanessa’s voice, and he smiled when he heard her giving orders and demanding reports.
“How does it look out there?” She demanded.
“Ma’am, it is dead out there.” A man responded. “There is not a single zed to be seen. I have never seen the city so still. Half of downtown is smashed to nothing, and there are body parts everywhere.” The man continued with his report. “We came across a huge mess down that alley near 3rd street, you know the one with that short building? Anyway, ma’am, there was a mess down that alley! The loading bay was packed with dead zeds. There had to be more than two hundred corpses stacked eight deep in some places. We went down there to check it out, right? A bunch of them had been burned alive, but most of the dead ones had their heads caved in! Who in the hell can kill like that? He had to have been there all day!”
Vanessa pinned him with her gaze, a trick she had learned from watching Jango, and the man stuttered into silence.
“Most of the day, anyway,” Jango said as he rose unsteadily to his feet. His body felt like a clenched fist, all made of bruised bones and knotted muscles. He cracked his neck by rotating his head, and felt a little looser.
Most of the people in the room looked away from him, and Jango, perplexed, looked down to find that he was completely naked. He grinned ruefully, and said, “Oops.”
At five feet, nine inches tall, he
was of average height, but his body was a maze of scar-tissue which puckered and stretched atop the cable-like muscles that rippled every time he moved. He noticed two women on the far side of the room staring at him with smiles on their faces as they whispered to each other.
Feeling embarrassed, he dragged a sheet off the bed that he had recently occupied, and wrapped it around his waist.
“Grab him some clothes, and get his gear,” Vanessa ordered the man who had so exuberantly given her his report about the mess that Jango had made of downtown.
The man snapped to attention, and then hustled off. He returned quickly with a stack of heavy-duty clothing, Jango’s backpack, pistols, broken stick, and battered shotgun.
Handing the stack to Jango, the man said, “I cleaned and oiled your pistols, sir, but the shotgun is a goner.”
Jango just stared at the stack of clothing and gear for several moments, sorrow permeating every aspect of his demeanor as he looked forlornly at his broken stick. The stick had been uniquely his. He had taken it from a twelve hundred year-old Ironwood tree that had been bull-dozed for the sake of building a cookie-cutter housing community. He had painstakingly and lovingly cured, peeled, and whittled the stick until it was perfect. He had trained with it every day, and, when the Z-Virus had hit, he had relentlessly killed humans and zombies alike with the heavy and seemingly indestructible stick.
He felt tears pressing against the backs of his eyes, and, with an effort of will, he drove them back.
“Thanks, man,” he told the young soldier as he took the stack, and began to get dressed. Once he had dressed, he stripped, checked, loaded his pistols, and then strapped on his harness and pistols.
He turned to Vanessa. “Where’s the baby?” He asked with his normal lack of tact.
Used to Jango’s personality quirks, she smiled and said, “She’s with Eve, Bro. Safe and sound in our quarters. We haven’t let anyone else near her.”