Zombie Fighter Jango #1 The Road to Hell Is Paved With Zombies (4 page)

Chapter
8:

Shotguns, Pistols, and Rifles…Oh My!

“Glergle-gurg-sploop,” Jango’s stomach protested its emptiness out-loud
again.Jango muttered to his stomach, “Yeah. Yeah, just hold your horses.”

As he walked away from the
courthouse, Jango tried to remember where he had seen a grocery store. He couldn’t remember exactly, but he thought it might have been a Fried’s Food Store, and that it might be west. He was honest enough with himself to know he was really only guessing as to the direction of the store, but he was also mentally ill enough to just not care. He would make a choice based on what he
thought
was right at any given moment, and with the stone-crazy resolve that only fanatics and lunatics usually possess, he would stay that course until
he
decided otherwise, or until he died.

As he walked back out on
to Montezuma Street, Jango looked around at the crowded structures and abandoned vehicles. His heart lightened a little bit as he realized that it wasn’t just good and decent people who had died, and become shambling corpses. No, the Zompoc disease had taken the twists, the abusers, the rapists and freaks as well!

“Whooo-hoooo,”
he shouted at the empty sky. Even though he believed the whole world was out to get him, he tried to stay positive and find the good in any bad situation. 

Jango immediately shut-up and looked all around to make sure his outburst hadn’t drawn any unwanted attention. In
his mind, any attention was unwanted, so he clammed up, and kept walking.

He suddenly
stopped in mid-stride as he spotted a welcome sight … G&J Gun House! A huge warehouse style building that was renowned for having the largest inventory of firearms in the entire state of Arizona, and in Arizona, that was a bold statement! Jango broke into a trot, and then a run, joy pumping through his veins at his discovery.

In his exuberance,
he didn’t notice the crowd of zombies on his left that were milling around aimlessly in the loading bay of the local feed store. There were at least fifty zombies, meandering around in ragged circles and bumping into each other.

Almost as one, the hungry undead horde turned their milky eyes toward Jango, and sniffed at the air as he ran past them. Then, almost as one, the
zombies let loose their soul freezing hunting-cry, “Ghhhreeeeeeee-Daaaaaahhhheeeee-Aaaaaaaeeeee,” and charged toward him.

Jango didn’t even look in the direction the cry came from
. He simply poured on the speed, legs churning like the pistons on a steam engine, body leaned forward to balance his weight, stick blurring as his arms pumped madly, headed for the entrance of G&J.

He
leapt over the four steps that lead up to the entrance of the gun store, and crashed through the partially opened steel door, then slammed it shut with his back. He drove his body hard against the door in anticipation of the moaning goobers that had been hot on his heels. Jango held the door shut with the weight of his body, and shot the deadbolt, effectively turning the building into a vault.

He
leaned against the heavy steel door, panting and trembling from fatigue, hunger, and fear when the zombies suddenly slammed into the door. The thumps, though, were muted, as were their moans and screams. The sounds and impacts seemed like they were far away, or under water.

Jango slid slowly to the
thinly carpeted floor, utterly exhausted, hungry, and depressed. He felt wetness on his face, and realized he was crying. He swiped his hands at the tears as if they were his enemies, and stood back up. He squared his shoulders, and picked up his stick from where it had fallen on the floor.

He
looked around the vast room, lit only by an emergency lighting system that gave the place an almost romantic feel. Almost. The place didn’t look looted, pillaged, or even mildly disarrayed. It looked like the employees had just gone out for a moment and would be right back.

C
autiously, he approached the gun case that lined three sides of the room. He took his time, and watched for any signs of movement. He crept closer to the guns and the security that they promised him. That was one of the important truths of Jango; all he really wanted was safety, solace, and peace. He didn’t know it, but that was what all of his efforts really boiled down to, a desire to feel safe.

He
had spent most of his life avoiding people, so the new world he found himself plunged into did not really change his outlook or affect his life in any big way. Jango had ALWAYS believed that every human was out to get him, and that it was up to him to protect himself. The Zombie Apocalypse just turned his paranoid delusions into facts.

There were hundreds of long-guns, rifles and shotguns, adorning the walls behind the hand-gun-filled glass cases.
He glanced at them as he approached. Making his way right up to the case, he looked inside at the bounty that fate had provided for him.

“Wheewwwww,”
he whistled appreciatively. Luck, or maybe the fickle-finger of fate had drawn him to the case reserved for Ruger handguns, which just happened to be Jango’s personal favorites. He based his regard for Ruger handguns solely on the KP 89 he had owned. Solid, heavy, reliable, and made from stainless steel and aircraft aluminum; they were made to last!

Jango raised his stick up
over his shoulder, and then brought it down on the glass in a sharp, chopping motion, using mostly his wrist. The glass exploded as if it had been hit by a wrecking ball, and he smiled.

“One KP 89, in sweet, sweet nine,”
he sang as he reached into the broken, glass-littered case for his prize.

All business,
now, he stripped the semiautomatic pistol and inspected each part in the dim light. After a few minutes of inspection, he walked over to the wall that held miscellaneous gun cleaning supplies, and pulled a cleaning kit from the rack.

He
whistled softly while he slowly cleaned and oiled the weapon, first removing the factory grease, then putting a light coating of oil on every moving part of his new gun.

Jango then began to search for more magazines. The pistol
had come from the factory with two ten-round magazines in the case, but he felt the need for more.

“There!” he exclaimed jubilantly as he spotted
a wall rack loaded with magazines and clips to fit just about any firearm on the planet. He swiftly looked through the rack, finally finding the fifteen-round magazines he wanted. He took all eight of them
,
and went behind the counter to find ammunition.

He found the ammunition he wanted, Golden Sabre hollow point rounds with a very high muzzle velocity. He first unpackaged, and then methodically loaded all eight of the high capacity magazines as well as the two ten round magazines that had come with the pistol. When he finished, Jango gently, almost lovingly, seated a high-capacity magazine in the hollow grip of the pistol, and pulled back the slide to chamber a round.

“Gerglooooop-glerploop,”
his stomach complained again. “All right, all right,” he muttered to his complaining stomach as he grabbed a shoulder holster for his prize and a backpack for the other gear he would need, and went toward the rear of the store in search of food.

Chapter
9:

Lawless

Jango glanced up at the wall full of long
guns again as he went behind the counter, and through the door marked “Employees Only.” He found himself in a large, labyrinthine area full of moveable partitions, cardboard boxes, steel cages full of firearms, and offices.

H
unger sent him in search of anything resembling an employee’s lounge, or a break room. His luck held as he swiftly found a grey door marked with a red and white peeling plastic placard that proclaimed the room to be “The Employee Lounge and Cafeteria.” “Bingo,” he said as he slowly pushed the door open.

The cafeteria was more brightly lit than the rest of the facility had been, and
he could see that the place was empty of any life…OR un-life.

The cafeteria was about thirty feet by thirty feet, with a long, steel counter-top that had a
cash register at one end of it, and various clear plastic boxes, bubbles, and screens to house the food that used to be on display. Opposite the counter was a long row of various vending machines that offered a wide range of barely edible foods and drinks.

He
dismissed the vending machines and turned to check behind the food counter for whatever might still be good to eat. He stepped around the cash register, and went through a door marked “Kitchen”.

Jango quickly found his way to a pantry that was fully stocked with enough
dry goods and survival food to feed the whole town of Prescott! “YES!” he cried at the top of his lungs as he started doing “the robot” while making off-key techno-beat noises with his smiling mouth.

“Bwahht, bomp-bomp, wheet, whaant, boom-boom,”
he sang as he robot-walked into the pantry, sat down on a large drum of soy protein isolate, then started gorging on beef-jerky and drinking apple-juice from a one-gallon can. After several minutes of non-stop gorging, he belched, and sighed contentedly. He then began methodically packing jerked beef into his large digi-cam patterned backpack.

Jango amused himself for a few
minutes by pretending that he couldn’t find his backpack due to its pixelated green and tan “camouflage” coloring. “Where the hell is my ruck-sack,” he yelled in a parody of an old man’s voice, alternating between waving one fist over his head and giggling maniacally.

After a
while, Jango stopped giggling, and hiccoughed. The hiccough seemed to knock something loose. He suddenly stood up, and decided that he needed to find a toilet right away! Just thinking about using a toilet made him think about one of his favorite movies, “Zombieland,” and the dangers of using a toilet during a zombie out-break. He flat out refused to die on a toilet.

He
strapped his backpack on, shifted his stick to his left hand, and, just to be safe, drew the pistol from its holster under his left arm before cautiously going to look for the toilet.

The lavatory was easy to
find, given the fact that it was placed in close proximity to the cafeteria. He considered that to be sound reasoning, “Cause eating and shitting is what humans do best!” he said in the voice of a weird cartoon tiger he had recently seen in a commercial on TV.

Jango walked past the door marked “women’s
room”, looked at the men’s room door for a moment, and then nudged the door open with the striking end of his stick. He kept his pistol at waist level, pointed forward, and close to his body. He had always cringed when he watched movies and television shows where the cops ran around with their pistols held out in front of them. It had always grated on his nerves when the actors would let their handguns lead around a blind corner. Like the fucking pistol could spot danger. He firmly believed in keeping control of any weapon in his hands, and he just as firmly believed in keeping his weapon in his own hands.

He
had to suppress the urge to call out hello as he pushed all the way into the large and well-appointed restroom. He glanced around in the dim emergency lighting

There were three sinks, a long mirror on his right, and four toilet-stalls on his left. Jango dropped to his knees and peeked under the stall
doors to see if there were any surprises waiting for him in there. He immediately spotted a pair of butter colored leather loafers that had legs attached to them. The pants were bunched around a pair of fat ankles as though someone were in there having a bowel movement. He felt his heart start beating its tune of madness to come. His chest constricted as he felt himself start to nut-up, but he pushed it back. He took several deep breaths, letting his belly expand with each breath, calming, calming.

He
couldn’t decide what to do, until a gurgling exhalation of flatulence and a gut cramp made his decision for him.

Jango stood up, and rapped on the bank of stalls with his stick. “Hey, you,”
he said loudly, “You almost done in there?” He mentally cursed himself for the stupid question even as he waited hopefully for some kind of answer.

Nothing, nada, zip, zilch. No sounds came from the occupied stall, so
he carefully opened the stall nearest to the entrance, and closed it behind him. He shot the puny little bolt that comes standard with all toilet stalls. It was barely even an illusion of safety. The twelve-inch gap at the bottom of the stall, and a three-foot gap at the top of the stall ruined any illusions of safety he might have had without even considering the half-assed latch.

He
took off his backpack, and hung it from the coat hook on the back of the stall door while mentally reminding himself to find a shirt. Then, he meticulously built a cushion of toilet paper on the toilet-seat so his butt would not make any contact with what he considered to be a “petri-dish” of human waste. As he worked, he had to keep grinding his knees and thighs together to keep the inevitable from happening before he could finish his safety cushion.

At last!
His need to empty his bowels and bladder had caused him to break out in a sweat, and he started getting the shakes from holding it in. He unbuckled his homemade leather belt, fingers frantically fumbling with the buckle, and his hands shaking from holding his bowels. He dropped his pants and underwear, and his rear end hit the toilet just as he lost all control over his sphincter. After he was finished, he wiped and flushed, then put his pack back on.

Jango unlocked the stall, and
someone or something with unbelievable strength suddenly and viciously drove the door into his face and body!

The mystery of who his attacker might be was swiftly solved as an obese
businessman in butter colored leather loafers with his pants around his ankles fell at Jango’s feet, half in the stall, screaming while he clawed at Jango’s feet and legs.

He
kicked the zombie in its head, and then slammed his stick down in a vicious strike that popped the zombie’s head like a ripe melon.

“Fucking goobers, man, slimy, moaning, screaming, drooling, GOOBERS!!”
he yelled at the unmoving body. “GOOBERS!” He yelled again.

He
had to walk atop the corpulent corpse to get out of the stall, and he nearly fell when one of the man’s mountainous buttocks shifted beneath his foot. He caught himself on the stall, stepped off of the rotund corpse, and left the restroom.

As soon as he exited the restroom,
the realization dawned that he had forgotten to wash his hands. “Shit!” he exclaimed as he held his hands out in front of his body as far away as he could stretch his arms, as if that extra distance would keep whatever germs he imagined he had touched from entering his system.

Jango pushed the restroom door back open, then said, “No way, man!” when he saw the
fat man’s ankles shackled together by his trousers, and the massive, pale humps that were his buttocks. He let the door close on its spring, and looked at the women’s restroom longingly.

Suddenly,
he realized that he could use the women’s room if he wanted to. Who was there to complain? His face lit up in a smile as he kicked the door open and sauntered into the lady’s room shouting, “I’m LAWLESS, do you hear me, LAWLESS!”

He
strode into the restroom, and began kicking the stalls open one at a time, looking for any signs of anything, dead, alive, whatever. The restroom proved to be completely empty, so he locked the restroom door, and washed his hands in the sink.

“I wonder why the water is still working.”
he asked his reflection in the mirror. No answer came, so he dried his hands, thought about it for a moment, and emptied out the paper towel dispenser and added the thick stack of paper to his backpack.

He
unlocked the door, jerked it open quickly, and came out fast, just in case there was something there; there wasn’t. He relaxed, and decided to make a plan of action for his future.