Jango's Anthem: Zombie Fighter Jango #2 (12 page)

He pulled
out the IV needle that was stuck in his forearm, and tossed the needle tipped tube to the side. Jango put his hands on the edge of the bed, and heaved himself onto his feet. He stood, unsteadily at first, as his muscles shook from almost a month of disuse. His unsteadiness only lasted a moment or two, though.

Jango stood for several minutes as he slowly flexed
, and then loosened every muscle in his body so that he could gauge his strength. When he had finished, Jango knew that he was not operating at one-hundred percent, but he also knew that he
would
be back to one-hundred percent before long.

He turned to Vanessa and said, “Well, we might as well get started
. Be a doll and get me some clothes. I can’t gank goobers in this hospital gown!”

Chapter 12:

Zombie Killing 101

Jango's animal vitality asserted itself with vigor, and
within a week of having woken up in the hospital, he was as strong as he had ever been. Besides teaching Vanessa and two other women how to hunt and kill zombies, he had set the women to fortifying the housing development.

Numerous
rolls of chain-link fence and several miles of razor wire from the local home improvement stores had turned the entire perimeter of the large housing development into a nearly impassable obstacle to anyone, zombie or human, who might try to gain entrance without permission. Jango showed them how to place vehicles all around the development as obstacles to prevent anyone from using a vehicle to crash through their perimeter.

Besides fortification, Jango also set the women loose to loot every store in town
that carried firearms or ammunition. He helped to give them focus, and purpose as his fractured mind made sense out of a world that most of the women hardly even recognized anymore.

He had them on
the roofs of houses as they installed solar panels, rain gutters, and solar water heaters. Jango felt fierce pride as he watched the women become more and more self-sufficient, and he smiled as he watched them slowly strip the town of anything they might be able to put to use in the future.

Vanessa and the two women, Monika and Jara,
had found Jango's teaching methods to be agonizing at best, and downright frightening at worst. He had spent the last month teaching them the killing ways. He showed them how to cover their scent trail, and how to trap and kill the undead. He also taught them his exercise routine. Vanessa had started to call it the Zombie Fighter Jango workout and the name stuck.

Jango
was pleased by the progress of his Zombinators. He decided that they were ready to be set loose on the world. The thought of the three hard-core women bringing death to whatever might need killing made him smile.

He could
not have asked for a more committed and fierce group of students. He knew that when he left this Amazonian group of women, they would be just fine without him. His confidence was not based solely on their abilities. He knew that no zombies remained in Anthem.

H
e had been shown a grisly find after he had asked about the sentries that he had killed, and then left to become zombies.

“
So, Vanessa, what happened to those sentries that I killed?” Jango asked her the second day after he awakened from his coma.

“
Since you warned us about them, we knew they’d be coming. We just drove around the housing development until we lured them out, and then we shot them down with the double barrels,” Vanessa had answered.

T
hen Vanessa shared another piece of important zombie related information with Jango, information that set his teeth on edge when she told him.

“
Those guys, the ones we killed? Well, apparently the reason that there aren't a whole lot of zombies around here is that they lured them all into another housing development on the other side of town and locked them in.” Vanessa continued, “When Eve told me that, I had her drive me over there so I could see.” She shuddered and had a queasy look on her face. “God, Jango, I've never seen anything like that and I never want to see anything like that again. I don't know how many are in there, but it must be thousands and thousands, like the whole fucking town almost!”

Jango immediately insisted on going to see
the housing development full of zombies for himself. What Jango saw when he arrived there made his flesh crawl with a primal and raw revulsion so strong that he had to suppress an urge to just start shooting at the milling press of zombies behind the heavy steel gates.

He had notic
ed lately that zombies had begun to act differently than they had when the undead had first arrived on the scene. Jango had thought from the start that they must have possessed some kind of crude intelligence, maybe even a hive mind or something.

His evidence for that belief was the fact that they
had always hunted in packs, and that they used their unearthly wails and screams to communicate with the other undead. When the zombie apocalypse first began, the zombies had been fast, but uncoordinated. Now it seemed that the zombies’ coordination had been improving.

All
of those thoughts flashed through Jango's mind as he watched the keening, wailing mass of zombies as they pressed against the steel gates. Their very numbers kept them from being able to apply enough force to the gates to get through. Nevertheless, Jango found himself taken aback as he watched one zombie attempt to climb the heavy bars of the gate. It was attempting to grip the vertical bars and pull itself up, but was impeded by the torn flesh of its hands and their inability to gain purchase on the smooth metal bars. He watched for nearly twenty minutes as the same zombie kept trying to climb the fence. Jango had a sudden premonition, a leap of intuition that caused him to make the destruction of all of the captive zombies his top priority.

The vision the Jango had, the premonition, was that the zombie was going to figure out that all
it had to do was climb up one of its fellow goobers and it would be able to reach the top of the fence. His premonition extrapolated and unfolded in his mind, and he knew, he just knew that the other zombies would follow suit when it finally did figure out how to get over the fence.

Jango immediately
tried to figure out how he could destroy such a multitude of zombies without breaking the gate and setting loose a flood of the living dead. He mentally reviewed everything that he'd seen in Anthem, and he came up with a plan.

Anthem had many rural homes and large ranches that lay far on the outskirts of town.
A lot of rich people with deep pockets had resided in Anthem, and those people that lived on the edge of town would have insisted on having fire department services despite the lack of fire hydrants.

Jango hunted around until he found a fire department that had a pumper truck. The truck had a large water tank and a powerful
pump, which would have allowed the truck to fight a fire even though there was no water source near the scene of the fire.

Once Jango had the truck, he drove it to one of the filling stations that
were scattered all over the town.

The pumper truck came equipped with an inlet hose so that
its tank could be filled from any large water source, and he used the water inlet hose on the pump to fill the trucks tank with hundreds of gallons of diesel fuel. When he had finished filling the tank, Jango drove back to the zombie-infested housing development.

When
he got there, Jango wanted to make sure that every zombie in the walled-in enclosure was in his kill zone. To accomplish that, he walked close to the gate, pulled out his spine cutter, and made a long cut on the back of his left forearm. He gave the blade a quick wipe on his pants leg and sheathed it back on his hip. Jango dipped his fingers in the blood from the wound and flicked it at the zombies that were pressed against the gate.

The zombies responded instantly to the scent of his blood, and a horrendous wail rose from the ravening horde. Their horrible hunting screams spread like fire on a puddle of gasoline. In less than a
minute, their combined screams had become so loud that Jango's head felt like it could explode at any moment.

He
could not even guess at how many zombies there were, and he really did not care. He just wanted them all dead, all the way dead; forever.

He walked back to the truck and
unspooled the thick hose with its heavy brass nozzle at the end. When the hose was unspooled, and he had made sure that it was laid out flat with no kinks, he hit a large red button that was labeled “pump”.

The hose immediately snapped tight as it filled with the diesel fuel
. Jango climbed on top of the truck with the hose, and sprayed the thousands upon thousands of zombies that were screaming for his flesh. He waved the hose from side to side, and the arc of fuel followed his movements.

Soon,
the entire horde was soaked in the flammable liquid. Hundreds of gallons of diesel fuel sprayed over the screaming bodies of the undead army. Jango ran the hose until the tank was empty. When the fuel ran out, he climbed off the truck, and pulled a road flare from his back pocket.

Jango pulled the striker
off the road flare, and struck it against the end of the flare. The tip of the road flare burst into flame, and he watched it burn for a few moments before he turned, and then flung the road flare as far as he could out amongst the writhing mass of zombies.

The diesel fuel did
not combust as explosively as gasoline. That was one of the reasons why Jango had chosen to use diesel fuel. He felt that in this circumstance, with the press of zombies so close, he would need the long steady burn of the diesel fuel to reach the high temperatures necessary to kill the virus that had infected them.

He
watched with a psychopath’s fascination for fire as the flames spread swiftly and steadily through the ranks of the ravenous creatures. He idly wondered to himself what he would do when the gasoline finally ran. In only minutes, the fire had spread over the entire army of living dead. Jango stayed and watched through the gate, as the terrible heat of the fire destroyed the unnatural virus that animated the dead tissue.

Jango shook himself out of
the remembrance, and looked at the three Zombinators. He looked long and hard at Vanessa, and he could tell that she knew he needed to leave.

“
I know I've been pretty rough on y'all but there's a reason for that. This world has never been a kind place, and the zombie apocalypse has only made it worse. You three? You have to be the hardest motherfuckers that anybody's ever heard of. If a group of people comes, and they want to move in, you three are going to have to convince the others to do the right thing, which is going to be the same as the hard thing. You have to err on the side of caution; otherwise, they will fuck your shit up the first chance they get. Everybody is the enemy; just treat everybody like a zombie. You see some kind of convoy coming, you start shooting at them when they are still a mile away. No weakness, no mercy, and be hard, otherwise you won't survive the Apocalypse Road.” Jango looked at them, and then said, “I have something for each of you.”

Jango opened the trunk of his car and pulled out three Ironwood fighting sticks. He had burned Monika and Jara's names into the heavier end of their sticks. He handed the two women their sticks first
, and then he turned to Vanessa, and turned her stick so that she could see what he had burned into the haft of her stick.

Tears sprang to her eyes
as she read the words that he had inscribed on her heavy Ironwood stick. “Blood of my Blood. Heart of my Heart. My Sister.”

Vanessa embraced Jango for several moments as she cried without shame against his chest. He was not only her brother, but he
had been the first person in the world who had ever seen her as she truly was. “Do you have to go?” Vanessa asked.

“
Yeah, little sister, I have to go. I'm not made to be around people for very long, not even people that I love.” Jango looked straight at her as he spoke. “I know you're going be all right, hell, you are definitely going be a lot better off than I am. I'm walking the Apocalypse Road, and I won't stop until I find out where the Z-Virus really came from. I will burn Mosnato to the ground, and find the truth. And even if I find out where it came from, I won't stop as long as one zombie is still screaming and drooling out there. Hell, I'm pretty fucked up, but even I'm not crazy enough to think that I can kill them all. I know I'm gonna die, little sister, and the fact is, I just don't care. I did the Tyburn Jig when I was fifteen. I hung myself from the bars of a state run facility. Don't get me wrong; I don't want to die, and I will fight tooth and nail, knuckle and skull to stay alive for one more second. But when it's my time, and the reaper calls my name, there will be no stink of fear on me, and my only wish will be to die with grace, covered in the blood of my enemies.”

Vanessa looked into the
feral insanity of his eyes. She looked into his eyes and saw, for the first time, the deepest truth of Jango. He had mentioned the reaper, but Vanessa saw the truth that he could never see; he himself had become death incarnate.

She watched as
the dancing lights of madness swirled and flickered in his eyes like the fires of hell, and she knew that nothing could ever quench those fires but death. Vanessa knew that Jango had become his own Grim Reaper.

Jango broke loose from their embrace, and brushed Vanessa's hair back gently from her forehead with the scarred hand that was capable of grinding bones to powder with a single squeeze. He looked into her eyes, and nodded his goodbye.
As he turned away, she felt him press something into her hand.

She
watched the road for a long time after Jango had gone. Tears coursed down her face as she thought of the sorrow that she had seen in his eyes as he had nodded his goodbye to her.

Vanessa
clutched her hands tightly to her chest, one hand holding the Ironwood stick, and the other hand holding tightly to the object that Jango had pressed into her hand when he had ended their embrace. It was the LMK knife.