Zombie Fighter Jango #1 The Road to Hell Is Paved With Zombies (3 page)

Chapter
5:

In the Grip of Fever

Jango wandered in the darkening woods for hours in a haze of sickness and fever
. His entire body was shaking with spasms and convulsions and his clothing was drenched in a foul smelling and greasy sick-sweat. The acrid, stinging sweat ran into his eyes and mouth as he struggled for breath. He fell to his knees, a dark tide of sickness racing through his veins. His panting grew louder in his own ears, and began to gain a rhythm, a roaring cadence like the ocean, or brain death. He fell onto his face in the thick carpet of pine needles, his breathing became shallower as his vision went black, and then he knew no more.

Fever-bright images flash
ed quickly across his field of vision like a Bigfoot sighting, images of death and destruction, life and rebirth. The madness of mankind could never be made more clear or apparent than in the images that flashed through Jango’s feverish mind as his body convulsed and bucked on the forest floor. Forests burning, women and children screaming for help, polluted waters, and the crop that was reaped from the seeds that man had sown; the ultimate horror of the risen dead.

He
saw his father, who had the hard, unrelenting fists of an unapologetic abuser. He saw his mother as she prostituted herself while Jango played in the living rooms of strange men. He saw his strength built of fear and rage, a strength that only deserted him when life was at its best. His mind filled with visions of himself fighting against a sea of screaming, gibbering zombies, millions of them wailing for his flesh. He stood against the rising tide of zombies that filled his fevered mind, and he was all alone.

Jango continued to flash through insane nightmare visions of his childhood that alternated with strange visions of himself fighting the ravening hordes of the living dead.

All around
him, the forest was silent as his body and mind fought a terrible battle with the virus that threatened to turn him into one of the undead. It was as if the forest waited for him; for it was a respectful and solemn silence, a watchful and hopeful silence that highlighted the horrible convulsions and gut wrenching screams that came from the unconscious man. Then, as the fever rose within his agony-wracked body, steam began rising from his skin, and the fever swept him away on a burning tide of madness.

Until Now:

When we last saw Jango, his vacation in Prescott, AZ had been interrupted by nothing less than the Zombie Apocalypse! Jango successfully battled his way through a couple
of dozen living-dead, only to be chewed up and tossed around by a giant dog. To add insult to injury, a strange, naked, Albino woman appeared from out of thin-air, pulled some serious Kung-Fu moves on him, and kicked him in the balls…twice!!

He
wandered through the woods in a delirium of fever, until he fell unconscious on the forest floor. That is where we left Jango, moaning and screaming in a fever-dream with visions of madness dancing through his damaged brain. Now we continue the saga of Zombie Fighter Jango. Thank you all for making this journey with me.-Sincerely, Cedric Nye

Chapter 6:

A Lamentable Predicament

Jango regained consciousness all at once, like a
light bulb being turned on. He jerked into a sitting position on the carpet of pine needles and looked around him. He made a swift mental inventory of himself to see if anything felt broken, or wrong; nothing felt wrong at all. In fact, he felt pretty good.

“Damn!”
he exclaimed, “I feel GOOD!”

Jango stood up, and brushed the
pine needles and dirt off of his pants. It was then that he noticed all his gear was gone. His stick, his pistol, his shirt, and his spare magazines were all gone.

“Oh, shit,”
he said in a whisper, suddenly feeling….well, naked.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,”
he kept repeating to himself as he contemplated a weaponless life in a world full of zombies.

Then Jango’s eyes fell on the most beautiful sight he could imagine
!

“Oh yeah, baby,”
he crooned as he spotted his Desert Ironwood stick lying on the ground a few feet away. He walked over and picked it up with the same reverence a devout Christian might show when handling a splinter from the True Cross.

Jango’s stick was uniquely
his. He had cut the limb himself from a tree that was bulldozed to make way for a housing tract of half a million dollar homes that were made of chicken wire and stucco slapped on top of half-dried foundations; all in the name of progress.

The tree was over 300 years old, and the limb he took was nearly 80 years old. The rings of growth were so fine that he needed a magnifying glass to count them.

Jango had painstakingly dried the ironwood limb for nearly 6 months in the desert air, and then peeled it by hand. He had spent hours sanding and oiling, sanding and oiling, until he had fashioned a weapon that suited him like a part of his own body.

“Guns run out of ammunition, knives
get dull with use, but you only stop working when I stop working,” he softly crooned to his stick.

A sudden thought made Jango check the right front pocket of his jeans.
“Better and better,” he said with a smile as he found out that his Spyderco knife was still clipped inside his pocket.

The Spyderco was the Mannix 2 XL model.
He had won it in a YouTube contest, and it was the nicest folding knife he had ever seen, let alone owned. It held an edge like crazy. Made from CPM S30V stainless steel, the Spyderco was tailor made for someone like him.

Jango clipped the knife
back in his pocket, and took a hard look at the woods around him.

“Where AM I?”
he mused aloud as he continued to scan his surroundings in hopes of finding his way back to Prescott, and his hotel room.

As Jango surveyed the woods, he noticed what looked like drag marks heading off to his left. On closer examination,
he noticed that the marks looked like they had been made by a person dragging their feet. He also noticed that the marks ended at the exact spot where he had regained consciousness.

“I guess I don’t have to be Sherlock to figure this one out,”
he muttered to himself as he adjusted his grip on the stick so that it was perfectly balanced in his hand, and headed back the way he had come.

Chapter
7:

Zombie Fighter Jango

Clad only in his jeans and boots,
Jango followed his erratic fever-path for several hours. As he walked, he looked side to side, hoping to spot his pistol, but he never did.

Finally,
he came to the edge of the woods within sight of the hotel where he had been staying when the Zombie Apocalypse first began.

Jango, thinking about the Zombie Apocalypse and all the ramifications of said Apocalypse, also remembered the giant
dog and the albino bitch. “Shit!” he exclaimed suddenly as he remembered being bitten by first the dog, then the albino bitch. He quickly transferred his fighting stick to his left hand, and reached up with his right hand to check the place the dog had bitten him. His left shoulder was completely healed!

“How long was I out?”
he questioned aloud, not really expecting an answer.

He
skirted around the hotel, staying just inside the tree line, eyes roving, searching, and trying to spot any threats. As far as he could see, there were no threats. There was no movement at all.

“It sure is quiet,”
he said to himself, smiling like a loon, “Almost
too
quiet,” he added as he suppressed a giggle.

Jango was a staunch realist, and he was honest enough with himself to know that his mental processes were not in the “normal” range. He had built a system of stops
and chains around his psyche to protect himself and the world around him. He knew exactly what he was capable of when he flipped out.

He
had decided a long time ago, when he was a child being beaten by his father, that he would NEVER be an abuser or a bully. His childhood had taught him who he did NOT want to be, and books had taught him who he wanted to be.

He
had fashioned a crude code of behavior for himself, based on fictional characters from books, such as,
Tarzan, The Phantom, King Arthur, Robin Hood, Conan
, and many more. His almost pathological need to defend any animal or person who was being hurt had put a lot of bad people into hospitals. Jango, though, had never regretted a single assault. In his mind, he could justify almost anything where abusers of
any
kind were concerned. He pulled away from his thoughts, and finished eyeing the area for any signs of danger.

With the area apparently clear
of threats, he slowly made his way to the hotel parking lot, silently wishing that he still had his pistol.

As he edged around the corner of the hotel,
he realized that the place looked even worse than when he had left it!

The end of the building that housed the hotel office
had burned to the ground, and all the zombies that he had killed were even more rotten and foul than before. He surveyed the still-gooey mess coating the parking lot, and suddenly smiled with the memory of his rampage. “Good times,” he sighed, “Good times.”

Jango
spotted his car, and was stunned to see that it was completely torn to pieces and strewn all over the lot like so much garbage.

“Whew,”
he whistled, trying to picture how his car could have been destroyed so completely.

Jango shook himself out of his reverie. “Gurgle, gurgle, gooshloop!”
his stomach growled and gurgled to let him know that he needed to eat. “Yeah, food, water, weapons. Yeah, yeah,” he mumbled aloud as he walked away from the hotel, and headed toward downtown Prescott.

As Highway 89 became S. Montezuma Street,
he noticed that there were no signs of any living creatures, human or otherwise, in or around any of the buildings and houses. “What the
fuck
?” Jango asked. The town looked like a scene from “The Omega Man.”

He
kept walking until he got to the Yavapai County Courthouse, a big, blocky structure made entirely of grey stone blocks. The lovely landscaping around the Courthouse looked the same as it had when he had seen it three weeks ago on his way in to town. Giant trees, and lush, green grass, but not a bird in sight. The ever-present bird-song had completely vanished.

Jango got a sudden chill, his hackles raised, and with the reflexes of an abuse survivor,
he threw himself to the right, took ukemi, and came up in a fighting stance. Nothing. He looked around, shrugged his shoulders, and headed toward the grocery store on Gurley Street.

“SchheeeHawwwww-EEEEEEEEE
!” A zombie wearing a black and white uniform, with a white chef’s hat perched on its head rushed at Jango with unearthly speed.

“I fucking
knew
it was too quiet,” he whispered to himself as he snapped his stick up into a two-handed grip; stick parallel to the ground, about level with his chin. He set his feet in something between a boxer’s stance, and a knife-fighter’s stance, left foot leading, knees slightly bent.

When the
zombie was about six or seven feet away, Jango’s entire body moved blur-fast as he unfolded into a stick-punch. He stepped forward a little bit with his right foot, his right hip twisted forward; his powerful abdominal muscles drove his thick right shoulder toward the zombie, and his steel-muscled right arm shot forward like a piston as he snapped the heavy stick out in a one-handed strike. The end of his stick connected with the zombie’s right temple with a loud “CRAACKK!” The results were impressive. The zombie’s head gave way like a cardboard box under a moving car; its skull crumpled as the zombie’s upper-half stopped like it had hit a brick-wall. The creature’s feet flew up in the air as its momentum was spent.

Jango looked dispassionately at the
zombie, and mentally catalogued the damage he had done. The zombie’s skull was crushed in. His stick had sunken into the thing’s head nearly all the way to its nose. He grunted in satisfaction, and started doing a lunatic’s version of an Irish River-Dance around the newly re-killed creature. Finally, for the first time in his life, he felt good about himself.

Then, as swiftly as he had begun his insane jig,
he stopped moving, and looked at the zombie’s still, lifeless form. Jango sighed, a deep and melancholy sound, and fell to his knees beside the unmoving corpse.

He
was many things: violent, paranoid, untrusting of people, and capable of horrific violence with no conscience or regret. However, he was much more than just a madman.

He
compulsively supported the under-dogs of the world, was fiercely protective of animals, women, and children. He was also something that most people would never be able to guess. He was a lover of all the things in the world worth loving.

He
looked at the zombie, and realized that this was once a man. Someone’s friend, son, brother, he had been a part of the world, and he had probably been loved. His eyes were wet as he methodically began checking the corpse for identification.

Jango muttered to the un-hearing body. “I am sorry this happened to you, dude, but if it’s between you eating me, and me living another day, it’s no choice at all.”

He finally found a wallet, and removed the man’s driver’s license from the clear plastic holder within. “John Davies, huh, I won’t forget you, man, not ever.”