by Cedric Nye
Vanessa could tell that Jango struggled 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 his 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.
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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 closed 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.
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.”
Even 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.
Cautiously, 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 th
e 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.
