Zombie Fighter Jango #1 The Road to Hell Is Paved With Zombies (2 page)

Chapter Two:

Jango Shows His Nuts
.

Jango spent a few minutes just looking around, making sure there were no more zombies in sight. When he was finally satisfied that he was alone for the time being, he turned his car off, and got out. His shoes made squishy sounds as he stood up. Jango looked down, saw the inch-thick layer of zombie-slurry that he was standing in and he vomited on his shoes. Heave after gut-wrenching heave, his stomach emptied its contents like a reverse chronology of his most recent meals. When there was nothing left in his stomach, he was reduced to dry heaves and hiccoughs as he tried to resume control of himself.

    When his heaves finally passed,
he pressed his forefinger against first one nostril, and then the other while blowing out through his nose to clear the vomit from his sinuses. He called this a “Swedish Handkerchief” because the term made him laugh. And he did laugh as he flicked mucus and half-digested McBurger Barn take-out from his finger. “Good old Swedish hanky,” Jango said to his finger, “Doesn’t cost a dime, and the chicks really dig it.”

He began laughing
hysterically. He laughed so hard he could barely stay standing as he slipped, sloshed, and slid through the zombie gore on his way to the hotel office. He wanted to check on the old lady to make sure she was all right.

He was still laughing when he reached the office and rapped “
shave and a hair-cut, two bits,” on the door. His hackles rose on his neck, and he dodged to the side. “BLAMMM!” A dinner-plate size chunk of the door was suddenly gone as a shotgun blast tore through it where Jango had just been, barely missing him as he dove to his right. He rolled, and popped up in a gun-fighter’s crouch with a hard, cold look on his face that said everything that had seemed nice about him might have been a lie.

He
could take a lot of crap without losing his temper, but when he was threatened, he became monkey-strong and bughouse crazy. He lost his ability to feel pain along with any semblance of human emotion. His battle madness would take over, and the episode could last anywhere from a minute to several months. Jango called this “showing his nuts,” or “the destroy mode,” and tried to avoid situations which provoked him. The shotgun blast that almost killed him put Jango over the edge. His eyes went as flat and hard as stones. His facial features hardened and seemed to become more angular, his eyes changed color to a weird grey-green-blue, and his body even seemed to swell as the legacy that abuse had left him took over. He hardly looked like the same person anymore as he pulled his pistol from the waistband of his pants, and peeked around the edge of the hole in the door.

“You ass-hole
, you shouldn’t have done that,” he said in a conversational tone as he watched the old woman struggle to eject the spent casing from her shotgun.

Jango took aim with his pistol
,
and shot at the old woman.
His bullet went through the hand she was using to work the slide on her shotgun and struck one of the shells in the magazine tube.

The
round blew up in the tube, which in turn set off the next shell, and the next. The exploding shells turned her shotgun into a pipe bomb. The small explosion turned her hands, arms, chest, neck, and face into a ragged burger. She fell to the ground, moaning and screaming for help. Her pleas fell on uncaring ears as Jango watched her with his head cocked slightly to the right; eyes empty, but bright as a hungry bird’s when it sees a worm. In his mind, the old lady had betrayed him by trying to kill him. That made her the enemy.

Jango finally looked away from the dying woman, and went over to the small table inside the office where some musty donuts and stale coffee were arrayed in what the hotel called a “continental breakfast”
. He began loading a plate with stale pastries, and then fixed himself two cups of coffee.

When he was done fixing his plate and coffee,
he kicked a chair closer to the old woman, and sat down to eat.

The old woman’s gurgling cries for help got weaker and weaker, until she finally died. In the sudden silence, there were three beeps as Jango set his watch to the
stopwatch setting, and started the timer.

Jango wanted to see if she would turn into a zombie, and, if she did,
he wanted to know how long it took to happen. He knew he would need knowledge to survive what appeared to be a true Zombie Apocalypse. 

   
While watching the woman’s corpse, he finished his donuts and coffee. Then suddenly, without warning, he stood, walked outside, and grabbed the old woman’s aluminum baseball bat from where she had dropped it, went back inside, and began smashing her legs with it. It had occurred to him that if she did turn into a zombie, she was going to be just as fast and strong as the others had been, and by smashing her legs, he was giving himself a better chance at survival. For Jango, survival was everything.

    Blow after powerful blow came down on her skinny, dead legs as Jango systematically broke every inch of
the tibias and femurs in both of her legs.

When he was done, he headed out the door
with the bat in his hand, and veered toward his car. He began whistling The Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” to himself as he neared his car.

As
he exited the office, the seven or eight broken zombies that were still “alive” started wailing at him while they flopped and writhed to get at him. Jango stared interestedly at them for a moment, then walked to the nearest moving zombie, and allowed it to reach his steel-toed boot with its hand before he brought the baseball bat down sharply on the top of the wailing creature’s skull.

The bat left a
deep depression in the creature’s skull, and ended the thing’s life for a second time.

He
then proceeded to dispatch the remaining zombies. One, who had managed to rip its squashed parts loose from the asphalt did a sort of disgusting handstand and ran on its hands toward Jango’s back.

He
spun as he heard the slap of its hands on the pavement and swiped the zombie’s arms from beneath it with a swing of his bat, and then brought the bat down on its larynx when it fell. The zombie’s writhing went from spastic to fever pitch, as it struck the ground with its hands hard enough to spring six feet into the air. Jango rolled forward, and the keening monster landed where he had just stood.

One hard hit to the head and the thing was done. “So it has to be the head,” Jango said to himself. “At least Hollywood got one thing right.”

There was one zombie left, and it had ceased wailing. It had started making a crooning sound, like a baby that had just learned to vocalize. The sound was even more unsettling to Jango because it was almost pretty.

He
circled the zombie until he was behind it and swung the bat to the back of its neck. The muffled “Crunch!” of irreversibly damaged vertebrae was followed by the zombie’s death. “Not just the head, eh, Dr. Watson?” Jango mused aloud. He dropped the bat and headed to his car.

When
he reached his car, he opened the hatchback, and flipped back the blanket that was spread out in the tiny cargo area. Underneath the blanket was a heavy ironwood stick, about thirty-two inches long, and almost two inches in diameter. The stick was stained with the sweat of countless hours of exercise, and had an almost palpable aura of violence around it.  

He
picked up the stick gently, almost lovingly, the way a person might treat a precious heirloom. For Jango, his fighting stick
was
precious, more precious to him than anything else in the world, and he immediately felt as if everything would be all right when he had it in his hand.   

Chapter 3:

Jango Makes A Friend.

Jango locked up his car, looked around a final time, and went back into the office, checking his running stopwatch as he walked. Forty-five minutes had passed since the old woman had died.

Upon entering
the hotel office, he could feel that something had changed. He instinctively looked toward the old, dead woman. She wasn’t there anymore. Instead, a grey and black trail of blood and other fluids led toward the back door of the office.

He
stopped his watch timer, and checked the time. Forty-six minutes had passed since the old lady had died. “So, it takes less than forty-six minutes for the dead to come back,” he thought as he carefully scanned the room.

He
had a pleased look on his face as he began following the snail-trail of blood that he assumed would lead him to the newly risen zombie.

When
he reached the back of the office, he saw that the trail continued through a back door. He took a couple of deep breaths, opened the door all of the way, and quickly ran into the back
yard.

The sight that greeted him was not a comforting one. The old lady was propelling herself with her arms around a fenced yard. Her broken legs trailed behind her like two wrinkled slim-jims, not even touching the ground due to her abnormal strength and speed. The sight of the old woman zombie doing a solo wheelbarrow race was unsettling enough, but there was also an enormous dog in the yard!

The dog easily stood over five feet tall at the shoulder and was built to scale. It appeared to be a Rottweiler, but Jango had never heard of a Rottweiler even half the size of that one.
Preoccupied with the sight of such an enormous dog being in such close proximity to himself, he had forgotten about the zombie in the yard with him.

“RheeeeeAAAAAA-eeeeeeeeeeeee!” The zombie wailed as she launched herself into the air,
flying straight at Jango. He quickly sidestepped to the right, raised his stick, then whipped his shoulders counterclockwise and brought the heavy stick crashing down on the back of the creature’s neck. There was a muffled crunch, a thud as the body hit the ground, and then there was silence. He looked back up at the dog.  

The dog was sitting down
now, but was so large that his head was about even with Jango’s own head. He noticed how calmly the dog was looking at him, so he patted his leg and said, “Come here, doggy.”

The dog stood up, walked over to
him, and leaned against him, just a little bit, as if for comfort. Jango put his hand on the dog’s neck, surprised by the surge of emotion he suddenly felt for the dog, and said, “It’ll be okay, boy, you’re okay.”

As he scratched the big dog’s neck,
his features and posture softened, his eyes lost their feral gleam, and went back to being hazel. His body seemed to shrink slightly, as if some air were being let out of a balloon.

He
sighed heavily and looked around the yard. “Well, boy,” he said to the dog, “I guess you can come with me, if you want to.” The dog’s tail thumped on the ground, and he got up and followed as Jango went through the office and out the front door.

Chapter
4:

Jango Gets
Sick.

As Jango stepped out the front door of the hotel office, he spoke over his shoulder to the dog, “We should probably get out of town. There are bound to be some places where there aren’t any zombies”. Then, with more enthusiasm he said, “Yeah! We can, camp out, go hiking, and awwwkkkk!! What the…?”

He
had been caught off guard when the dog clamped down on his left shoulder and sank its teeth to the gums in his flesh. Jango was savagely shaken back and forth. The giant dog was so big and strong that he found himself flung about in the air like a rag doll. He felt the big dog’s teeth grinding against his bones as they savaged his flesh, and his stick went flying out of his hand as he was flung around.

Jango went berserk, “You ingrate
!” he shouted, “I’ll kill your ass!”

He
pulled his gun, and aimed back under his left arm at the beast as it continued to shake him. He pulled the trigger five times, as fast as he could. The dog tossed Jango against the wall of the hotel hard enough to drive the air from his lungs.

Jango stood on shaky legs,
as a sudden fit of coughing almost bent him double. He straightened, and he aimed his pistol at the seemingly unstoppable animal. The dog just gazed at him calmly with human looking eyes.

“You set me free, Jango, you finally set me
free,” the dog said in a deep, gravelly voice that sounded like it came from the bottom of a grave.

Jango twitched in surprise.

“Yeah, I can talk,” the dog continued in the same deep voice.

He
emptied his pistol at the dog.

“Blam, blam, blam, blam, blam, blam, blam, blam, blam, blam!”
Jango fired the pistol so quickly it sounded like one long roll of thunder, and every shot struck the dog in its chest.

   As the slide locked back on an empty magazine,
he watched in shock as the bullets slid from the fur on the animal’s chest.

“You freed me,
Jango,” the dog repeated.

Jango’s mind was screaming, “How does it know my name? Why did it attack me? And why is it fucking bullet-proof?” He noticed that the dog flickered sometimes, like a cheap drive-in movie
. He coughed hard, and felt dizzy.

The dog kept talking
. “There is big-time nasty shit coming, and you need to be eyes wide open if you are going to survive it, Jango. You will get very sick, I mean, so sick that you are going to think you are dying, but you won’t die, Jango, you
will
wake up.”

The whole time
the dog was talking, Jango just stood in a kind of trance-like shock of pain, and dumb-founded surprise as he watched the oddly flickering dog. He noticed the dog look toward the woods and saw its eyes widen.

He
turned to see what he was looking at, and was slammed to the ground by a fast moving and powerful form. Jango hit the ground hard, but rolled so that his new attacker ended up beneath him. He drew back his fist for a killing blow, but paused in bafflement when he saw that his attacker was a nude woman! She was a very attractive nude woman, who also appeared to be somewhat of an albino, or semi-albino. She was wild looking, feral, with a lithe, athletic body that felt hard and soft at the same time.

Wh
en he paused in confusion, the wild-woman grabbed him by his shoulders, and head-butted him with concussive force, then threw him into the air with more than human strength.

Jango twisted in mid-air like a cat, and landed on his toes and hands with a springy motion. His shock was gone
. No more surprise from a talking dog or an albino wild-bitch. He focused all of his being into his center. He willed away his pain and fear, and became a stone.

He
moved toward the albino, and she growled, a deep, ugly growl, as Jango slowly advanced. Then, faster than his eyes could follow, she lunged forward, ducked, and spun into a bone-cracking kick that put him against the hotel wall again.

As Jango slowly rose, shaking his head to clear his vision, she attacked him again. The wild-woman kicked Jango in the testicles twice in the blink of an eye, and then punched him in the jaw with a trip-hammer hard left/right combo that put
him on the ground with a nasty ringing in his ears and blurred vision. The wild woman then straddled him in an almost sensuous way, slapped him on each cheek, spit in his left eye, punched him in the nose, then leaned down and bit him on the same shoulder that the dog had already savaged.

“Tha
nk you for setting me free,” the wild woman purred as she rose from Jango’s barely functional body.

He
got a good look at her crotch as she straddled him with her hands in her hair, back arched, her nearly white nipples pointing at the sky. She flickered just like the dog had, and Jango thought he knew what that meant, but couldn’t quite catch hold of the thought.

He
found himself strangely aroused as he watched her stretch languorously above him. The woman stepped over him, and turned toward the giant canine as she said, “It was too long in the cage, way too long.”

Then, with
a flash of pale limbs, the wild woman ran and jumped onto the enormous dog’s back as if he was a horse.

The dog
walked over to Jango with the woman on his back, both of them flickering in and out of existence, “You need to get out of here now, Jango, there are a whole lot more of those zombies out there. If you get sick here, they will kill you. You need to be gone. Get into the woods, now. Please just trust me; you will not die if you go out there now.” The big dog looked earnest as he spoke, “Leave your vehicle and walk into the woods, come back when the fever has passed, and your car will still be here.” With that, the dog sprinted into the woods while the wild woman laughed with joy on his back. They were swallowed by the woods, and Jango realized that he missed them.

He
pulled himself to his feet, and picked up his pistol. He took out the empty mag and inserted a full one, stuck his pistol in his waistband, and picked up his ironwood stick. Then with a fatalistic shrug, he walked, coughing raggedly, into the woods behind the hotel.