Jango's Anthem: Zombie Fighter Jango #2 (10 page)

Slowly, he
made his way to the housing development in a roundabout fashion, careful to remain unseen. It was nearly nightfall before he had made it to the neighborhood. He arrived at a nine-foot tall brick wall that surrounded the entire housing development, and with the brash decisiveness of a madman on a mission, he transferred his stick to his left hand so that he gripped the shotgun and the stick in one hand. He angled the stick and the shotgun so that they were parallel to his leg, crouched, and then leapt into the air. The fingertips on his right hand had caught the top of the wall; they had caught, and held. Jango gripped with his fingertips, and slowly walked his feet up the wall, while he pulled himself up with his right arm. When he had gotten high enough that he could reach the shotgun and the stick to the top of the wall, he did so.

With
the use of his left hand, Jango easily chinned himself, and then pressed his body to the top of the wall in one fluid motion. Looking around quickly, he saw that there was no one in sight, so he took his weapons and dropped down inside of the walled community.

He was inside the housing development, and full dark had finally fallen. It was time for Jango to take the fight to the enemy. He made his way through the crispy, brown, dead grass that he assumed had once been lush when the water had still been on.

He opened the gate that led to the front of the house, and ghosted down the walkway to the narrow road that meandered through the neighborhood of million-dollar homes. Jango had seen some activity in the northernmost part of the housing development, and so he headed that way.

The pain in Jango's head pulsed in time with the beat of his heart. Every time his feet hit the ground, it felt like an ice pick was being driven into his brain. He soaked up the pain. He embraced the pain, and then he called on his only real friends in the whole world.

Jango felt the splintered fragments of his damaged psyche move forward, tentatively, as though they were afraid of the pain that coursed through Jango's ruined scalp and gouged skull.
“I am the pain taker,” Jango said. “I am the pain taker, and now I need to be the rainmaker. Twists got Sis, and the beast is roaming free, so let's do something…..ugly.”

E
ven though Jango’s mind had reintegrated with the dog and the albino woman in the halls of their wounded mind, he still felt a pulse of strength and wellness as they all consciously combined their abilities.

The dog
was the part of Jango's mind that filled his thews with power, and turned his hands into hammers. The albino woman was the poison in his fangs, and she gave him an almost omniscient awareness of all things combat. There was Jango. He was the part of their shared mind that bore the pain of all the abuse as a child. Then there was the beast; a nightmare inside a nightmare. The beast had been birthed by the pain of abuse. The beast was a horror, and he embraced him.

Together, the
four of them were much more than the sum of their parts. Jango's facial features hardened, and became angular. His muscles swelled and his veins stood out like writhing snakes beneath his skin. His eyes slowly turned the same cold color of gunmetal and ice water. His muscles and bones crackled audibly as Jango’s fully integrated mind supercharged his abuse-mutated body.

He
made his inexorable way toward the end of the housing development where he had seen activity. Slowing as he neared the area where he believed he had seen activity, he took a good look around.

His
eyes, attuned to the near pitch darkness of the desert night, quickly zeroed in on the sentries that had been posted on the outskirts of the populated area. Jango waited, as patiently as cancer, and simply watched.

After about
forty-five minutes, Jango realized that the sentries were lazy, and did not take their duties seriously. “Works for me,” he whispered to himself.

Jango
slithered along the ground toward the nearest guard. As he wormed his way closer, he saw a sudden flare of light that made him freeze in place until he realized that the sentry had just lit a cigarette.

Jango chuckled inwardly
.  The guard had just given up his night vision temporarily, and he would be easy meat. Jango moved more swiftly, and when he had gotten within ten feet of the sentry, he placed his shotgun and stick on the ground. Silently, he stood up, and pulled the spine cutter from his belt. In a flash of movement, he was upon the sentry. His left hand gripped the man's windpipe, as his right hand slammed the point of the spine cutter upward beneath the man's sternum. Jango ripped downward with the sharp blade, and sliced the man's heart in two. The blade cut all the way to the guard’s belt, and spilled his stinking bowels on the ground.

Jango quickly dragged the man's body
to the side of the house the man had been stationed in front of. The man's bowels trailed in the dirt behind his body as Jango dragged him. He contemplated popping his skull, or breaking his neck, but then decided that if all else failed, then this zombie-to-be would be currency in the bank of revenge.

With that thought in mind, Jango cut the man's bowels loose so that when he did turn into a
zombie, he would be able to move freely and quickly amongst his prey without tripping on his own guts. He cleaned his blade on a part of the man's shirt that wasn't covered in gore, and sheathed the knife on his hip.

Then
he danced the dance that had come to define his deepest truth. Jango moved through the darkness silently, and slew the sentries one by one. Jango danced, and the tune that he danced to was Death. With his madness, and the beast of his fury set free, Jango was death made flesh. He killed all six of the sentries in utter silence, and then, just as silently, he hid their bodies.

Satisfied
with his work, Jango began hunting for the place where Vanessa might be kept. As he hunted among the cookie-cutter homes, he suddenly became aware of the sound of several voices that whispered nearby.

C
autiously, he made his way toward the sound of the voices. He rounded a corner, and stopped short. It was the first time in Jango's life that he had been stunned speechless. The sight that greeted him felt better than the warm rays of the sun on a cold day.

In front of
him stood Vanessa, and what he estimated to be somewhere around forty or fifty women and girls. They all seemed to see Jango at once. Most of them froze in fear at the sight of him, but two determined looking women who were dressed like nurses pointed rifles in his direction. Vanessa's tawny skin turned pale, and then she gasped and ran toward him.

Vanessa slammed into Jango, and gripped him in a
rib-cracking embrace as she gasped into his chest. “I thought you were dead, I thought you were dead.”

The two women who
had pointed their rifles at him slowly lowered the rifles until they were pointed at the ground. Vanessa had told them about Jango, and they were as surprised to see him alive as Vanessa was.

“
You were shot in the head, Jango, what the hell?” Vanessa babbled.

He
hushed her, and looked around to see if anyone was near. “I wasn't shot
in
the head; I was shot across the side of my head. It just gouged my skull and ripped a big chunk of my scalp off. A little bit of duct tape and I was as good as new.” Then he remembered a saying he had heard. “You know what they say, right? If you can't duct it, fuck it.”

Vanessa
could not help but smile at his morbid sense of humor. She snorted as she shook her head, and said, “I am just so glad to see you.”

One of the women
who was dressed in a nurse's uniform said, “I hate to break up this reunion, but we need to figure out how to get past the guards. They’ll kill us if they catch us, or worse.”

Jango turned to look at the woman, and
said, “Ma'am, you don't have to worry about any sentries, they're all on break right now. But they'll be back in about forty minutes.” He chuckled as he thought about all the havoc those zombies would wreak on the inhabitants of the development.

“
How the hell did you all get out of there?” Jango asked as he turned back to Vanessa.

“
Well, these guys only left one person to guard all the women, and they kept us all in the place that used to be the clubhouse for this development. So I flirted with him a little bit, and acted like I was going to give him a blow job. And when he wasn't expecting it, I kneed him in his balls, and when he bent over, I kneed him in his chin. And then I twisted as hard as I could on his head until his neck broke,” Vanessa told him.

Jango felt a huge swell of pride for the strength of his little sister.
He slowly extended a fist toward her and said. “Knuckle bump, come on, knuckle bump.”

Vanessa
smiled, and bumped her small, delicate fist against the knotted bone-hammer of his fist.

Vanessa continued her story, “Then, we took his guns, and snuck out. All the other men are having some kind of
freak-meeting or something. These fuckers are fucked-up, Jango; they aren’t right. They were keeping all the females to be divided up among the higher ranked guys. And the girls too! And the older women were going to be used like whores by the lower ranked men. What the fuck is that messed up shit, huh?!” Vanessa seemed like she was about to explode with anger.

As Vanessa finished speaking, Jango saw the massive knot on her delicate cheek
-bone and an ugly, low pitched and grinding snarl began rumbling up from deep in his chest.

The same nurse
who'd spoken just moments before stepped forward, and put an arm protectively around Vanessa’s shoulders. Jango noticed the gesture, but he didn't understand what it meant until later.

When Vanessa noticed where
his eyes had been, she lowered her chin so that her hair fell across the knot. “It's no big deal, Jango, I'm fine. But we need to get out of here because they could notice us missing at any minute.”

He
wholeheartedly agreed with her logic, and he also knew that the dead sentries would be rising from the dead soon, and the six zombies would definitely present some problems for his ragtag crew of refugees.

“
Okay,” Jango said. “I don’t think we can risk trying to get out through the main entrance to this place, so I'm gonna take you to where I climbed the wall to get in. I can boost you up the wall one at a time, and then we'll go from there.”

W
ithout waiting to see if they would follow his lead, Jango headed back in the direction from which he had come. The group of fifty or so women and girls hustled to keep up with him as he flitted like a ghost along the deserted street.

Just as they reached the house
where he had gained entrance to the development, they heard some kind of uproar from the other end of the housing complex. There were the muted sounds of shouts, and of engines being started. He knew that their time had run out.

Jango quickly herded his charges into the backyard of the stucco home. When the last person
came through the gate, he closed it and pushed his way through the frightened women. He was worried that he would not be able to get them all over the fence before they were found.

Jango
knew it was only a matter of time before they would have vehicles patrolling the outside of the wall to look for the women. He knew that he needed to move swiftly.

He
thought about just boosting Vanessa up. Then he could jump up, pull himself over, and leave with the woman that he had decided to call sister. However, as he looked around at the desperate faces turned toward him with the faint glimmer of hope in their eyes, Jango knew that he would rather die than leave a single one of them behind.

His
body began to thrum with the bone-deep power of his wrath. The almost palpable aura of violence that spilled from him pressed the women and girls back, almost as if a hand had come and pushed them away.

Jango looked around the yard, and saw
a massive concrete planter that held a dead palm tree. The planter was two feet across at the top, and it was shaped like an inverted bell. It probably weighed more than three-hundred pounds, but as he strode toward it, the frightening power of his killing aspect made the massive planter seem to shrink, and become insignificant.

When Jango reached the planter
, he grasped the rim of the heavy object and in a bone cracking display of raw power; he hefted the dead weight up to his chest. Then, in a heavy, awkward run, he moved toward the brick wall.

When
he was about seven feet from the wall, he twisted his torso to the right, and then whipped forward faster than a snake could strike. He released the enormous concrete planter, and it slammed into the brick wall about chest height. It hit the wall like a wrecking ball. The bottom of the giant planter slammed into the bricks, and the bricks gave way like wet paper.

Jango kicked the loose bricks
away to make the hole larger, and then quickly ushered the stunned group through the hole that he had made.

“
Vanessa,” he whispered urgently. “Get them all far away from here. You head out to the parking lot, okay? Just run straight ahead, and don't look back. The keys are where I left them, and there are plenty of guns in the trunk. Hit the car rental place. You can't miss it. It’s right next to the Jive Juice Hut. You can get enough vehicles to get all these people out of here. Just be safe, little sister.” Jango did not realize that he had called her “little sister” out loud.