by Cedric Nye
“You don’t look like much, zombie fucker.” He said with a smile. He turned back to his cronies and their thugs, playing the part of the big man. Without warning, he turned back quickly, and punched Jango in his up-turned face.
His punch did not have the desired effect on the prisoner. It did, however, have an effect on Elam. A sobbing wail escaped from his lips as he cradled his obviously broken hand.
Jango smiled, and spat blood on Elam’s shoes as he felt the last of the cords around his wrists part. He looked around, and saw that the people of Bartertown had spread out, and effectively surrounded the Black Coats without them even noticing.
“What are you smiling about, zombie fucker!” Elam screamed, spittle flecking his lips. “I am going to do you like I did that bitch, and that freak tranny cunt! Give me the knife, Nick! Gimme it!” He screamed at the fat doctor.
Nicholas Copeland smiled, and handed a large scalpel to Elam. Elam took the scalpel in his good hand, and walked back toward Jango with it raised back over his shoulder, ready to slash and cut the bound man.
49
Instead of a defenseless and bound man, though, Elam found himself facing the Zombie Fighter, in all of his blood-stained glory as he rose, bonds falling from his freed wrists, and inhuman savagery twisting his bloody face.
Jango’s rising was the signal, and in the next instant, all hell broke loose.
Rushing forward, Jango slammed his shoulder into Elam, knocked him flat, and then he slammed into Copeland in the next instant.
In the center of the mass of Black Coats, he wrought carnage upon them. He drew the sin-black rope-covered steel bar from the scabbard on his back, and laid about him with bloodthirsty abandon, lost in the joy and revelry of the slaughter.
Their own numbers hampered them in their efforts to fight him. He danced amongst them like a deadly dervish, whirling and striking with the heavy stick. Never in the same place for more than a heartbeat, Jango narrowly avoided death a dozen times in the midst of the battle. His stick flashed out as he leapt and whirled amongst the men, and he left a trail of corpses in his wake.
Meanwhile, Shawn and Mark had fired their weapons with discipline, and to gruesome effect. More than fifteen bodies lay in their field of fire as the two laughed and dealt death.
The people of Bartertown had held up their end of the bargain, and were gunning the Black Coats down from the outside of the crowd.
In less than two minutes, all of the Black Coats were dead, and only Elam and Copeland remained alive. The two men lay cowering on the corpse-strewn ground, as they whimpered for the mercy that they had never given to others.
Jango walked toward the two groveling men, rage and ruin writ upon his features. Suddenly, the doors to Builder’s Square slammed open, and a large group of Black Coats began swarming through. They were all armed, and they had the drop on the people from Bartertown.
50
As they raised their rifles to fire, a terrible, mechanical screaming filled the air, and the Black Coats began to fall like wheat before an invisible scythe. The air around the soldiers turned to red mist, and in seconds, all of them were either dead or mortally wounded, and the war was over.
Looking around, Jango spotted the source of their deliverance. The large man, Dan, had cut loose with a minigun, and mowed down the Black Coat reinforcements. He nodded to the big man, who nodded back, and then walked slowly back toward The Weapon Shop.
Back on track, Jango ignored the sounds of revelry that rose up around him from the victorious crowd. For him, the victory was hollow because he had lost Vanessa.
He stopped when he stood over the two men who were responsible for the torture of the woman who he had called sister.
Using his left hand to grip Elam’s hair, he lifted the man off the ground. With his right hand, he drew his new knife. With one slashing motion, he removed a long strip of the man’s scalp. He screamed as he fell to the ground, and lay writhing and screeching as blood poured down his narrow face.
Elam screamed wordlessly for a long, long moment, and then passed out from the pain of his terrible wound.
Turning to the Copeland, Jango leaned down, and slapped the man’s face with Elam’s scalp. “Your turn, knife-man.” He said, and, straddling the doctor’s chest, Jango took the toll for torturing Vanessa from the fat man’s flesh.
He fell into a rage that was hellish even for him. In a superhuman display of strength, he tore and rent the man asunder with nothing more than his hands. Where his hands fell, bones crushed and flesh tore, and long after the man was dead, he continued to savage the body.
51
When the red haze of violence and revenge finally lifted from his eyes, he had torn apart not only Copeland, but Elam as well. A large, irregular circle of blood, bone, and viscera was a mute testimony to his love for the dead Vanessa.
Clambering to his feet, Jango began the grisly task of finishing off the corpses so that they would not reanimate and become zombies. “Be neck-deep in starving jacks if you don’t take care of business,” he muttered as he began to systematically work his way through the bodies, and break the necks of the corpses.
Shawn and Mark began working their way through the bodies from the other end with Mark breaking their necks, and Shawn kicking the bodies prone, and then swinging the blade of his heavy khukri through the backs of their necks to sever the spinal cord. The rhythmic “swish-click” of his blade parting flesh then bone, and the muffled “crack” of Mark and Jango breaking the corpses’ necks caused many people in the crowd to get violently ill.
At the sounds of retching and heaving, Mark smiled, and Shawn just shook his head.
“Why are you doing that? You, you, you barbarians!” One man wheezed in between heaves.
Jango looked up, covered in blood and gore, his face a barren wasteland of pain and horror as he spoke, “This is not uptown, mister. There are no second chances, and the goobers and jacks can’t be bargained with. If you don’t harden up, you will die. You will all die.” He looked around at the white, shocked faces of the people staring at him, and he shrugged as he stood up. “Nothing good is free, and nothing free is good. You want the world to change, you have to force that change behind gun smoke and lead. Blood is the price, always and ever, if you want to buy freedom.” He finished softly.
EPILOGUE
Turning toward the entryway to the Convention Center, Jango returned the waves of Shawn, Mark, Dan, Jarvis, Ian, and the many people who thronged the entry to see him off. He spotted Vanessa and Sonja in the crowd, blinked in disbelief, and then they were gone. He shook his head roughly.
He could not stay with these people in the place where he had lost so much, so he put his feet back on the Apocalypse Road; back on the killer’s path. He knew that the zombies were changing, getting smarter, more organized, and he had to be ready for whatever came. He would get soft living with these people who only wanted to be happy and safe.
“Happiness and security are for people who don’t know any better,” he grated to himself as he turned his back on them, settled his pack, adjusted his rope-covered steel rod and shotgun, and then walked away without looking back.
As he walked away from the Phoenix Convention Center, he felt a deep melancholy descend upon him. So strong was the feeling that the air itself seemed to darken. He looked down at the ground, and watched the ashes from the carnage he had wrought puff up around his feet at every step. He felt heat behind his eyes, yet no tears would fall.
“I don’t have anything,” he whispered to himself. “I don’t have anyone.” He sniffed, forced the sorrow away, and looked up just in time to see a woman step out from behind a building about fifty feet away. He stopped dead in his tracks.
Stunned at the sight, shaken to his very core, all he could do was stammer, “So-So-Sonja?”
He blinked, and she was suddenly closer by ten feet. He blinked again, and she was right in front of him. She looked exactly as he remembered her. Narrow elfin face, violet eyes, li
ght brown hair, and that slight kink in the bridge of her nose.
Sonja smiled at him, and lunatic lights that mirrored Jango’s own madness began to glimmer and shine in the depths of her eyes as she purred, “Miss me, lover-boy?”
BONUS
ZOMBIE FIGHTER JANGO SHORT STORY
ALL THE LITTLE CHILDREN
By Cedric Nye
All Rights Reserved for all Friggin’ Eternity
http://www.zombiefighterjangolaboratory.com/
2014
-This story takes place before the events in Rage and Ruin.-
1
Beneath a lowering sky, Jango girded himself with violence. It had been almost two days since he had begun tracking the group of kidnappers. Plenty of time to fan the coals of his hatred into flames, and now they were in sight.
He had found out about the gang of kidnappers from a sobbing, broken woman he had picked up on the side of the Carefree Highway on his way back from Wickenburg. He liked the feel of the road, so he had made a point of going out of his way to take the route.
He had been humming the Gordon Lightfoot song, Carefree Highway, when he spotted the woman…
2 Days Ago
She was staggering along the side of the road, naked, but for one sock on her left foot. Her hair was tangled, and her breasts were covered in dried blood. He could hear her howling moans, even from a great distance.
“I will not abide a fuckin’ zombie on the Carefree Highway,” Jango muttered through gritted teeth as he put the tan Crown Victoria in park, grabbed his ironwood stick, opened his door, and uncoiled from the vehicle.
Before he braced the zombie, he turned a weather eye to his surroundings. His practiced gaze took in every dip and rise of the earth as he looked for movement, or anything out of the ordinary. When he was satisfied that there were no imminent threats, aside from the zombie, he turned his deadly focus back toward the zombie.
He flowed toward the undead woman like a man-shaped cloud of smoke. Not a rattle of pebbles or the scuff of a boot marked his passing as he became his killing aspect. When he was ten feet away from the creature, his stick came up, as of its own accord.
In the ready position, his stick was parallel to the ground, three inches in front of his face, and level with his mouth. His hands gripped the massive stick, effectively dividing it into thirds.
He had just begun a stick punch that would cave in the skull of the zombie, and end its unnatural existence when he noticed something odd; the woman’s eyes were blue.
He nearly tripped over his own feet as he went from killer to caregiver, stripping off his jacket, and wrapping it around the woman. He gently, but firmly, guided her toward his car, and pushed her into the back seat. He looked around once more before climbing in, and continuing on toward Phoenix.
2
It had begun to rain before Jango made it back to his lair in North Phoenix. Well, one of his lairs. When he had first arrived in Phoenix, he had begun a tireless campaign to stash food, weapons, ammunition, and other survival goods in places all over the Valley of the Sun. He made a point of never sleeping in the same place two nights in a row, so, like a post-apocalyptic nomad, he was ever on the move.
He backed his car into the driveway of a modest one-story home on Sweetwater Avenue, about a mile from the I-17. He looked around, saw nothing that raised any alarms, put the car in park, and turned it off. He sat in silence for a moment, listening to the “tick” of the engine as it began to cool.
After bracing himself for what he knew would be a story of heartbreak and woe, and turned around to look at the now-silent woman whom he had found.
He estimated her age to be about twenty eight years old. She had the long limbs and delicate bone structure that comes from several generations of wealth and privilege. Her broken demeanor was at odds with her sharp cheek-bones and too-perfect nose, though, and his heart went out to her.
“So, what’s the deal?” he asked with his normal lack of tact.
As if only now becoming aware of her surroundings, the woman looked up, and made eye-contact with him. When she saw Jango, a sort of recognition dawned in her eyes, and a little light seemed to spark in the cerulean depths.
She took in the man who sat in the front seat of the car, and almost instantly knew who he was. Who he had to be. The shorn scalp, the scars, and those eyes. His hazel eyes seemed to pixelate and change like the view through a kaleidoscope as fires of insanity sparked and leapt within them.
“You are the Zombie Fighter.” She whispered. “You will save my babies.” Her voice broke on the last word, but she stopped the grief with an effort of will.
He had no idea how people had come to know about him, much less how they came to name him, but he had grown used to being recognized by people who he had never met before.
His mangled mind suddenly latched onto two of the words that she had spoken, “save”, and “babies”.
His face began to harden, and became more angular. His eyes seemed to almost glow as they turned a weird gray/blue/green color. The veins in his neck and head writhed beneath his skin like grave-worms, and his knuckles cracked explosively when he clenched his hands into fists.
The woman pressed backward against the seat, an atavistic fear forcing her to put as much distance between herself and the man as possible. And then he spoke.
“What do you mean, ‘Save my babies’?” He asked her in a voice that sounded like rusted ball-bearings being thrown into a coffin. “Where are your ‘babies’?” He finished.
It was a mark of her courage that she was able to swallow her fear, and lean toward him. “They took them,” she whispered. “They took my babies.”
“Lady, you better have more than ‘they’ as a god-damned clue, or I might lose my patience with you,” he said in that voice that seemed unfit for human vocal-cords.
Her eyes widened, and then narrowed as she saw that she had only one chance with this madman, one chance to get her children back. She tried to clear her mind so she could tell her story.
“My husband and I moved out to a nice ranch near Picacho Wash. We have… I mean had everything a self-sustaining ranch could need. We both come from wealthy families, and we also had our own money.”
She continued with her story. “The ranch started out as a hobby, a project, but it became so much more when we began to fall in love with the Southwest. We brought our 2 children, Maddie and Rupert, out to the ranch, and just ended up staying.”
“When the whole world went crazy, and people started turning into, well, zombies, we were glad that we had made the ranch our home. We had solar panels, a well with cool, sweet water, and everything wired to run off of our battery storage system. We were far enough away from the cities and towns that we rarely saw anyone, dead or alive.”
“Everything was fine. We had plenty of food from our chickens, cows, and our gardens. Then they came.”
She was silent for a long moment, and then, with a shake of her head, she continued with her tale. “They came across the desert in horse and mule-drawn carriages. They were Amish, and my husband was excited when he first spotted them coming. Then, when they got closer, we saw that they had dozens of children in pens on the back of some of the carriages. I had always been frightened by Amish men because of how they look at women as nothing more than brood-mares, and their children as nothing more than slaves. My husband, God bless him, he did not even think twice before he started giving them hell about the caged children. A big Amish man in the lead wagon climbed down from his seat, and then shot my husband in the head!”
Her voice broke again, and tears squeezed out between her tightly clenched eye-lids as she struggled for control of herself.
Jango had become as still as a statue as she told her story, and his rage was an almost palpable thing. His rage came off of him in waves of heat, and an acrid odor rose off of him as his unnatural body chemistry pumped his thews full of blood and adrenaline in response to his rage.
She started speaking a
gain, “I ran out there. I ran out to my husband. I didn’t even think of the kids. That big man, he struck me in the face, and the whole world went black. When I woke up, the men had left, the carriages were gone, and so were my babies.”
She fell into an almost catatonic silence, as if by telling him what had happened, she had come to the full realization of all that she had lost.
He gave her a moment to feel her grief, and then he said, "Give me directions to your ranch. I have to make one stop, and then we will go see what we can see."
The woman looked up at him, blinking through the tears that flowed, unbidden, from her red and swollen eyes. "You, you mean you will help me?"
"No", Jango said, "I'm going to try to help your children, and all the other children that you said are in those carriages. And I swear, on the blood in my veins, that if you are lying to me, I will kill you."
The woman looked shocked for a moment. Shocked by the nonchalant way in which this obviously crazy man could talk about killing her. "I am not lying," she said vehemently.
"Let's get moving," he told her as he put the car into gear and headed out of the driveway, and toward one of his stash-houses.
Less than twenty minutes later, he pulled up in front of a house that had been burned almost to the ground. He put the car in park, shut it off, and with a look at the woman, took the keys from the ignition, and pocketed them.
He strode through the rain, and into the fire-blackened house. A few minutes later, he emerged with a large hard-shell suitcase. He motioned her out of the car, handed her some sweat-pants, socks, crude leather moccasins, and a shirt. “Put these on, and sit up front,” he said brusquely.
He slid the case into the backseat, and then climbed in. He opened the case, and began pawing through it.