Jango's Anthem: Zombie Fighter Jango #2 (9 page)

More thumps sounded, and Jango stood up. “Come
on; let’s get this show on the road. If there are any zombies left after I leave, just use your best judgment on how to get out of here. There is a ladder at the back of this rig, and you can also get back down through the skylight. I am counting on you, Vanessa.”

Vanessa’s knees felt like they were made of water, and her stomach felt like it had started to do somersaults.
However, when Jango said that he was counting on her, she felt new strength flow into her mind and body. She stiffened her back, and nodded her head.

“Okay, the moment I go to work on that fan, those goobers are going to raise a ruckus, so I will have to work fast. If you want to help, you can go and kick the wall on the side of the trailer
that is opposite to the door. That might lead some of them away from the door and give me a better chance of making it.” Jango had climbed up on the kitchen counter, braced his feet, and gripped the mounted fan with both of his large hands. A smile split his scarred face as he said, “This should be interesting.”

As soon as the words had left
his mouth, his face contorted in a silent snarl, and he wrenched at the frame that held the fan in place.

Vanessa ran over to the wall opposite the door as the zombies began to wail their terrible hunting song. She kicked at the wall furiously, and
was rewarded for her efforts as the screams moved away from the door, and around to the other side of the trailer.

Jango had already torn the fan from its mounting brackets, and had slammed his fist into the skylight. The Plexiglas cover flew off its hinges from the force of his blow, and spun away into the night.

“Come on, come on!” Jango said urgently.

Vanessa ran to the counter, and Jango grabbed her by her wrist,
then heaved her up onto the counter as if she weighed nothing. He pulled the car keys from his pocket, stuffed them into her hand, and said, “Stay down, lay down, and be quiet, you will be alright up there.”

Vanessa started to speak, to say thank you, but
he had already grabbed her by her waist and pushed her out through the hole in the roof.

She spun her body around, and looked through the hole just in time to see Jango as he grabbed his stick and shotgun. He turned back in her direction, and Vanessa swore that he had become a different person. The normally soft lines of his face had turned into hard lines and sharp angles. His eyes
danced and burned with the feverish, eldritch light of genuine madness. He smiled then, a horrible grimacing smile that turned his face into a demon’s mask. She blinked her eyes in shock, and suddenly, he was gone.

Jango paused at the door, and looked back at the hole in the ceiling
. He saw Vanessa as she looked at him in concern, and he smiled to let her know everything would be okay. He took several deep breaths, and then slammed the door open. In a blur of motion, he had burst through the door, and immediately opened fire with his shotgun at the zombies closest to him.

He fired all eight shots in no more than three seconds, and when the continuous roll of thunder
was done, there were five unmoving zombies on the ground. Jango tossed the shotgun back into the trailer and ran for his life. He saw more than twenty zombies on the other side of the trailer, and they joined the ones who had already been by the door. Jango screamed wordlessly to get their full attention, and then he ran.

His strong legs drove his feet hard against the ground, and he gained speed quickly. His arms pumped faster than the eye could follow, and his stick made a pale blur in the wan light of the moon as he ran.

Jango gloried in his strength, and he whooped with joy as he ran. He had planned his run to lead the zombies away from the road, so that Vanessa would have a clear path out of town. His feet beat against the pavement like a drum-roll, and the zombies mindlessly followed where he led.

After Jango had been gone for several minutes, Vanessa dared to look over the side of the trailer. She looked at the car, and then looked all around the area. She
didn’t see a single zombie, but she heard their howls as they faded into the distance.

She almost sobbed in relief, but
instead, she steeled herself, and climbed down the ladder at the rear of the RV. Her hands shook as though they were palsied as she made her way slowly toward the car. When she reached the car, she quickly unlocked it, opened the door, and climbed in.

Just as she was about to close the car door, she spotted Jango’s shotgun on the floor
just inside the door of the trailer. She wanted to leave, but she knew that he liked the shotgun. She moaned in fear; the last thing she wanted was to climb back out of the car. However, she felt that if she left the shotgun behind, she would let Jango down.

She climbed back out of the car, and raced over to grab the shotgun. Just as her hand touched the empty shotgun, a tuxedo-clad zombie came out of the large restroom of the trailer. Vanessa froze in place as fear turned her bowels to water and her veins to ice.

The undead creature spotted her at the exact same time as
had she spotted it. The monster opened its mouth to howl as it charged at her with incredible speed.

Vanessa, without conscious thought, mimicked the movement she had seen Jango
make with his stick. She brought the bulky shotgun up into a two handed grip, and lashed the heavy butt-stock forward in a clumsy stick punch.

The velocity of her strike, the speed of the charging zombie, and the upward nature of her strike all combined into enough force to snap the zombie’s neck
before the first sound of its hunting cry could escape its foul throat.

Vanessa stared at the shotgun, and then stared at the zombie. Slowly, like the sun rising over a forest, a huge smile spread across her beautiful face.

“What’s up now, goober?” she said as she started to laugh. Then her mouth slammed shut as she remembered that there might be more zombies about. Her smile disappeared in a flash. She raced back to the car, threw the shotgun on the passenger’s seat, and pulled her door shut. She locked the door, got the car started, and put it into gear.

She
drove slowly out of the fenced lot, turned right on the frontage road, and headed back the way that they had come.

Vanessa had almost made it to the freeway before she remembered that she had forgotten her suitcase at the trailer. She moaned in despair as she thought about all of her belongings. She had her small emergency stash of hormones that she had refrained from taking just in case she got sick from missed doses. She thought about turning back so she could get her luggage.
But then, she thought of Jango, all alone in the darkness as he led the ravening horde of creatures away so that she would be safe, and she suddenly realized that she would rather die than let him down.

Since she had only known him for a little while, the
realization surprised her. She found Jango to be confusing, amusing, and terrifying all at the same time, and she wondered why she felt such a fierce loyalty toward the obviously crazy man.

She looked around at the dark and inhospitable desert as she turned onto the freeway, and wondered where
he might be.

At the exact
moment that Vanessa had wondered where he might be, Jango had gotten himself hemmed in by a small pack of zombies.

He
had been running hard, and had drawn well ahead of his pursuers, when all of a sudden he had come to a dead end. The rock walls on the sides of the road had gotten gradually higher, and then the road simply ended at a natural stone wall. It looked as if a road crew had blasted the mountain to make a road, but then stopped before the job was done.

When
he had turned to go back the way he had come, he saw that six zombies blocked his way. They saw him at the same time, and with a keening wail, they charged.

Jango felt his body swell with strength as the dog and the albino woman meshed seamlessly into the matrix of their fighting mind.
He slid forward as if his feet didn’t even need to touch the ground. As he moved, it almost looked as if he had become a wisp of smoke as he glided like a ghost along the asphalt road.

When
he and the pack of zombies collided, Jango cut through their loose ranks like a sharp knife through gossamer. He had raised his stick up into his two-handed grip, and slammed it into the underside of the lead zombie’s chin. The zombie’s neck snapped like a rotten twig as foul ichor sprayed from its ruined mouth and covered Jango’s chest and neck in a layer of slime.

Without slowing, Jango angled his stick to the left, and rammed the
limp zombie into the nearest goober. Then, almost as if it were a sentient thing, his stick snapped back around in a movement that he called the “side spear.” The tip of his stick slammed into a zombie’s forehead, and it dropped like a stone.

Coming back from the side spear, Jango snapped his stick out in two mongoose-fast stick punches, and then spun
smoothly away from the three remaining zombies’ grasping hands as the two that he had struck fell to the ground.

Jango moved like death made flesh as he danced and struck, and e
very time his stick lashed out whip-crack fast, another zombie fell, never to move again. He used his own martial movements; the stick punch, the crown, the side sweep, and the side spear. In less than ten seconds, he had dispatched all six of the zombies, and started to run back toward the freeway.

Vanessa had driven exactly two miles from New River before she pulled off the road, parked, and shut the car off. She sat as silent and as still as a statue. She twisted her fingers together in worry, and waited. She had a feeling that Jango
had been killed. No one could outrun those monsters! She sat, and fingered the knife that she had pulled from the belt of one of the would-be rapists so that she could slash at one who had been about to shoot Jango.

The knife had a gentle curve to the blade, like something from
1001 Arabian Nights.
She had liked the knife so much that she just couldn’t bear to get rid of it. There was a stamp on the blade that said “KB Bryon” with a stylized paw print around the “KB.” She didn’t know or care what it meant; she just liked the knife.

As she sat in the deafening silence, she
convinced herself that Jango had died. She started to get mad; first at him, and then at the zombies for taking the closest thing to a friend that she had.

“
Damned zombies, I hate all of you!” She muttered vehemently.

Vanessa looked
around at the road behind her, and hoped she would spot Jango; but all she saw was the dark emptiness of the desert. When she turned back to face the front of the car, she was greeted by a wildly smiling face.

Vanessa screamed, and
had started to turn the ignition until she saw that it was Jango.

She opened her door, jumped out of the car, and embraced him. She started firing questions at him almost immediately. “How did you get away?
Where the hell have you been? What’s that on your shirt? It smells like ass.”

  Jango just stood and weathered the storm of questions for a moment, and then stopped her by saying, “Shhh, what was that noise? Did you hear that?” He pretended to look around
for danger.

He chuckled to himself as Vanessa immediately stopped talking, and
then clambered into the passenger seat. “If it works, use it!” he thought to himself. He climbed into the driver’s seat, and started to load his shotgun. “Go ahead and get some sleep, kid, tomorrow will be a long day. We’ll hit Anthem for your pills. That town is, well,
was,
full of the rich and shameless. I know they’ll have your pills there. Anthem has piles of pharmacies and medical centers. I need you sharp, though, so get some sleep.” He settled back in his seat, and listened to Vanessa’s breathing deepen as she drifted off to sleep.

Chapter 10:

Jango’s Anthem

Jango knew that
Anthem wasn’t more than twenty minutes away, and he also knew that they had plenty of medical facilities there. He figured they would be able to find the hormones and androgen blockers that helped Vanessa to be who she really was. He didn't know why this little quest had become so important to him; he just knew that it had. He had decided to help her, and once Jango had decided on a course of action, the only way to stop him would be to kill him.

He
kept driving, and they soon came to the off ramp for Anthem, with its huge outlet malls and boutiques that had once catered to every level of the social strata. Jango knew for a certainty that the pills Vanessa needed could be found in Anthem.

Jango's knowledge base was fairly specialized, and mostly pertained to all the different aspects of combat, but his mind was also home to thousands upon thousands of odd factoids. And what
he knew about hormone replacement therapy and androgen blockers was that rich elderly women used the products liberally in a vain attempt to stave off the effects of old age. They hoped to cheat the reaper out of a few extra years. He also knew that you had to have a lot of money to live there, which meant that the pharmacies and doctor’s offices would have carried a surplus of the hormonal supplements that Vanessa needed.

Jango slowed
the car as he took the ramp that led to the town of Anthem. He drove slowly along the curving ramp, and then made a right-hand turn that would take him to the outlet malls that the place had been famous for. His eyes constantly roved as he searched the landscape for any signs of movement, or signs of ambush. He wasn't foolish enough to think that there would be no survivors in the town of Anthem, and he also knew that the odds were that any survivors would not be friendly to him or Vanessa.

They motored along silently as Jango
steered the car into the stadium-sized parking lot of the mall. He piloted the car all the way to the far north end of the Anthem Outlet Mall, and hung a left at the end of the mall. He drove off to the side of the lot where the car would be unnoticed among all the other cars that had been abandoned there when all hell broke loose, and the world went to the zombies. He parked the car, shut the vehicle off, and then removed the key from the ignition.

After a moment,
he turned to look at Vanessa and said, “Look, it can get ugly out there, okay? I need to know that you will do what I say, and if the shit goes down, I need to know that you will do it fast. I can't fight at one hundred percent if I have to worry about where you are and what you’re doing, okay?” Jango was deadly serious.

“
I promise, I promise I'll do whatever you say, okay? I mean, I don't know anything about any of this zombie stuff. I had to fight a lot when I was growing up because of who I am, but it was never anything like this. I promise I will do whatever you say.” Vanessa raised her right hand toward Jango, made her hand into a loose fist and extended her pinky finger.

Jango felt the
pain-beast begin to rampage against the bars of his will as Sonja's fate was made fresh in his tortured mind. His face tightened and drew back into a rictus as an involuntary snarl ripped from his throat. Then, with a massive effort of will, he beat back the monster that dwelled within him. He took long, calming breaths until his mind was once again his.

Jango raised his scarred and knotted killer
’s hand, and hooked his pinky finger into the slim, delicate pinky finger of Vanessa's hand. “Then that's a deal,” he rasped. His voice sounded like a combination of his normal voice, and a rockslide on a mountain slope in hell.

Vanessa could tell that Jango struggl
ed with something painful, and she didn't know if there was anything that she could do to help him. Her ability to judge moods and body language were almost as accurate and astute as Jango's own abilities. She had learned many of the same lessons from abuse as he had learned. Vanessa recognized that what she saw him struggling with was a terrifying level of barely repressed violence and animal rage that must have stemmed from some horrible trauma he had experienced. She could tell that the pain was fresh, and she felt her heart break for this man that she hardly knew.

Jango shook hi
s head to clear it, climbed out of the car, and opened the rear door. After asking Vanessa to pop the trunk for him, he loaded all of his spare weaponry into the trunk. He only kept out his stick, the pistol under his arm, and the spine cutter on his hip. He took the LMK knife from his belt, and placed it in the trunk. Jango quietly closed the trunk, then walked up to the driver’s side door and gestured for her to climb out.

When
she climbed out of the vehicle, he pressed the button that would lock all the doors. Then, before he closed his own door, Jango told Vanessa, “If something happens to me, the keys will be on top of the front driver’s side wheel. Do you understand?”

What Jango
had meant when he said, "do you understand?" Was that if something happened to him, he expected Vanessa to take the car and leave without him.

Vanessa understood exactly what
he had meant. She nodded her assent, and her understanding. Jango closed his door and placed the keys on the front tire.

Jango moved
quickly as he led Vanessa through the labyrinth of cars that surrounded the deserted shopping mall. He kept his senses on full alert as they moved swiftly and steadily through the maze of automobiles toward a nearby Wall-Baum’s pharmacy. They soon came to the edge of the huge paved parking lot with only a vacant stretch of hard, gray desert earth between themselves, and the pharmacy. Jango waited for a moment, and then waved Vanessa forward.

Jango had taken four steps across the vacant lot, when he felt a crashing blow against his head
and heard a far-off boom; then his whole world went black.

Vanessa was
numb with shock. She stood, frozen in place as she stared down at the lifeless corpse that had, just moments before, been a source of safety and solace to her. “Jango,” she moaned.

She looked at Jango’s body, and it looked like part of his head had been blown away. A ragged flap of his scalp hung from his unmoving head, and dangled in the alkali dirt in which he lay. She could see the white bone of his skull, and she felt a deep sadness surge through her as she saw what had been such a strong and vital person laid low in such a way.

When
she finally remembered that she needed to get back to the car and get out of there, it was too late. Vanessa heard someone shout. When she saw that three men had almost closed in on her, she knew that it was too late to run.

She
leaned down and tried to pull the pistol from Jango's underarm holster, but his arm had twisted beneath him, and her best efforts could not dislodge the firearm.

Vanessa felt rough hands grab her, and she fought tooth and nail, just as she had
fought all her life. She fought like a wildcat until a hard fist crashed brutally against her cheekbone. Flashbulbs exploded behind her eyes, and then she knew no more.

Jango was welcomed back to consciousness by
mind numbing pain in his head and neck. He did not move or make a sound, though. He slowly forced his right eye open against the coating of coagulated blood that had glued it shut. Jango finally managed to open his eye to make sure that he was alone. Patiently, he waited, listening and watching as the terrible pain fed the fire on the altar of his god.

After several minutes of waiting in silence,
he began to move. He slowly pressed himself up onto his hands and knees, and then to just his knees. Jango fought the wave of nausea that threatened to drag him back down into the darkness of unconsciousness.

After a moment
of rest, Jango got one of his feet beneath his body, and slowly stood upright. He stood and swayed as he fought the nausea and embraced the pain. Pain had been his friend for as long as he could remember. Pain had always been the one thing that he could count on in life. For many people, pain was a debilitating disease to be feared, and to be avoided. However, for Jango, the pain gave him the strength to worship his one true God; revenge. As Jango let go of the iron control that he had so long imposed upon himself, he felt the chains that held the beast shudder, and then burst asunder.

He
did an inventory of his possessions, and found that nothing was missing. His stick lay on the ground, and his pistol was still in its holster. His Spyderco was in his pocket, and the spine cutter was on his hip. Jango's eyes searched his surroundings, as he looked for any sign of Vanessa, or the people who had injured him so grievously.

All he saw were
boot tracks, and what looked like two drag marks that led off toward a residential neighborhood in the distance.

His
vision was impeded by something, and he reached up to find out what it was. His hand brushed the large flap of his scalp that hung over part of his right eye, and then looped around to cover his right ear. He carefully ripped his shirt off, and used the inside of one of the pieces to scrub roughly at the inside of the flap of skin. The pain was terrible, but Jango knew that he had a better chance of the scalp reattaching if it had no scab and no coagulated blood to impede the healing.

When
he was done scrubbing the flap of scalp, and his skull, he pushed the flap of scalp back into place, and then tied strips of his shirt around his head to hold the avulsed tissue in place. When he finished, Jango picked up his stick and went to see if the car was still there.

As
he walked, he wished and hoped that the car was gone, and that Vanessa was safe. A wave of nausea washed over him as he walked, but the wave broke against the indomitable force of his iron will, and then it was gone. As his iron constitution and his deep well of endurance asserted themselves, his steps quickened, and he made his way swiftly back to the area where he parked his car.

When Jango rounded the corner and saw that the vehicle was still there, he felt his heart crash down into his stomach.
He felt a pressure at the back of his throat, and when he opened his mouth, a long, mournful howl of rage and anguish rose from his mouth like a wolf’s song of death to come.

Jango retrieved the keys from where
he had stashed them, and went around to the trunk. Opening the trunk, he began filling his front pockets with buckshot rounds. When his pockets were filled with buckshot, he loosened his heavy, homemade leather belt two notches, and then re-buckled it. He then slid two of the loaded double-barreled shotguns through his belt so that the butt stocks were pressed against the heavy muscles at the small of his back. He then pulled out his Remington 870 pump action shotgun, and made sure that it was fully loaded.

When he had all of his firearms squared away, Jango took one last item from the trunk of the car. He reached in
, grabbed Sonja's knife, and clipped it to his belt. Then, he pulled the rags from his head, uncapped a bottle of water that he had taken from the trunk, and poured the entire bottle on his wound. He pulled another water bottle out, and drank it down.

Jango
stuffed a handful of beef jerky in his mouth, and chewed it, while he patted his head dry with a pair of socks, and then used duct tape to keep his scalp in place.

When he
had finished, Jango closed the trunk of the car, and put the keys back on top of the tire. He knew that it was a false hope, but just in case Vanessa did make it there, he wanted the keys to be where she could find them. He had no illusions about the mission before him. He had to assume that Vanessa was dead, and that he would soon be dead as well. However, Jango had been born to the vendetta and he had learned to live by the feud, so he was content with the idea of killing as many of them as he could before they killed him. Jango knew more about how to walk the killing ways than most people could even dream. He had hunted men through the streets, alleys, and slums of his own city, Phoenix, and he knew that he would extract a horrible price from whoever had shot him and taken Vanessa.

Jango ghosted through the parking lot at the front of the mall
like a puff of smoke in the wind, careful to keep low and to move smoothly.

As
he made his way through the labyrinth of cars, he noticed an enormous AP Bowling Center that was separate from the main mall, but built right beside it. He also noticed two big rig tractor trailers parked at the rear of the bowling center. He altered his course so that he could take a look. When he got to the trucks, he noticed that both of the rear doors were unlocked, but unopened.

Jango glanced around quickly
, and then opened one of the trailers. Jango started to smile when he saw the contents of the truck, and a plan began to formulate in the roiling cauldron of his damaged mind. What he saw inside of the truck was a shipment of several thousand bowling balls.

He slowly and quietly close
d the roll down door on the back of the trailer, and continued toward the neighborhood where the drag-marks led. Jango operated under a simple kind of logic, and he knew that the only thing that could have made those drag marks were Vanessa's feet. His mind instantly extrapolated that information, and he knew that she had fought. He also knew that she had been rendered unconscious; hence, the drag marks. Jango found himself starting to nurse a small glimmer of hope that she could still be alive. With the possibility of her being alive came the realization that his favorite equalizer, fire, would not be a viable option. Fire was too hard to control, and he did not want to risk killing the person that he was trying to protect.