by Cedric Nye
THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH ZOMBIES
ZOMBIE FIGHTER JANGO
BOOK 1
By Cedric Nye
May 2013
This Book is dedicated to the Children of Abuse.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Zombies Need no Introductions
Chapter 2: Jango Shows His Nuts
Chapter 3: Jango makes a Friend
Chapter 4: Jango gets Sick
Chapter 5: In the Grip of Fever
Chapter 6: A Lamentable Predicament
Chapter 7: Zombie Fighter Jango
Chapter 8: Shotguns, Pistols, and Rifles… Oh My!
Chapter 9: Lawless
Chapter 10: Gotta Get Away
Chapter 11: Realizations and Clarifications
Chapter 12: Swords? We Don’t Need no Stinking Swords!
Chapter 13: Zompoc Sex
Chapter 14: Getting Ready to Go
Chapter 15: Things Go Sideways
Chapter 16: Fire Kills Everything
Chapter 17: On the Road
Chapter 18: A Change in Philosophy
Chapter 19: Fuck Shakespeare
Chapter 20: Choices
Chapter1:
Zombies Need No Introductions.
Jango peeked out the door of his room at the Prescott Sierra Inn in Prescott, Arizona, and then quickly closed it again. “Those sure look like zombies,” he mumbled to himself, as he lifted a corner of the curtain to look out the window. “But then again,” he thought, “this IS Prescott. It could just be a bunch of Liberal Arts students dicking around and doing some kind of fucked up performance art.” Jango coughed into the crook of his arm, and hoped he wasn’t coming down sick with the flu or something.
He continued watching through the window as what appeared to be three blood-covered people, two men and a woman, played tug-of-war with a dead looking fourth person. There was something wrong with the way the three people moved; he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Their limbs moved with a stiff, marionette-like quality that he found funny, creepy and off-putting all at the same time.
Jango hadn’t left the hotel room in several days, and since there was no television in the ratty little room, he had no idea that a real Zombie Apocalypse had started two days before.
Everything he knew about zombies came from movies and books, so the information he had on hand was Hollywood sketchy, “But damn,” he thought, “They sure look like zombies to me!” Their hair looked matted with clotted blood, twigs, and dirt. Their clothing had probably been expensive at one time, but was now torn to shreds. One male, he noticed, seemed to be missing his right cheek and ear, and the other male seemed to be chewing on the un-moving person. The female was gripping one of the maybe-dead-body’s arms in her teeth and hands, while savagely jerking her head side to side, like a wolf does when it wants a piece of meat to go. “Probably definitely zombies,” he thought to himself with the kind of simple acceptance usually only found in children and the seriously mentally ill.
Jango noticed movement from the direction of the hotel office. The foul-mouthed older lady who worked at the front desk had run out of the office in a pink bathrobe and pink, fluffy slippers. She waved an aluminum baseball bat above her head and shouted, “You get away from my guest, you nasty hippy assholes!” She ran toward the three zombie/liberal arts students with the wobbly, hunch-backed, shuffling gait so common with older people.
The zombies heard her shout, noticed her slow-motion advance, and raised their heads. They sniffed at the air, and then rose like marionettes being pulled up by invisible strings. The creatures started hissing and moaning. Saliva ran from their slack lips as they all began making a high-pitched keening sound, “Rhheeeeeeeeee-EEeeeeeee-aaaahhhh-eeeeee.” Then, in a blur of motion, the zombies charged at the old lady.
The zombies’ upper bodies didn’t coordinate well with the speed of their churning legs, so the high speed movement was almost comical as their torsos swayed around atop their legs, and their arms trailed behind them like the tassels on a kid’s bicycle handle - bars.
The old woman suddenly seemed to realize that the creatures were not a bunch of hippies. She dropped the baseball bat, screamed in terror, and turned to run back inside. The zombies, though, were less than fifty feet away from her, and it was obvious that they would catch her before she could shuffle halfway to the office door.
Jango, who was a compulsive supporter of the underdog, would not stand by and watch a little old lady get eaten by zombies. Without thinking, he tore open the door to his room and shouted at the zombies, “Hey, you, over here!” The zombies all looked his way at once, and then, as one, they veered toward him like a group of top-heavy ostriches, and their keening wail became louder as they rushed toward him.
Suddenly, he realized that he didn’t really have a plan for dealing with the un-dead, so, in a panic, he started running toward his car. His panic ended up saving his life.
As a resident of Arizona, a modern version of the Wild West, Jango owned a gun. This being Arizona, he was not going to leave his gun in his hotel room for the maid to steal, so he had stashed his 9mm pistol in the welded lockbox under the driver’s seat of his 1990 Geo Metro hatchback.
He reached his car well ahead of the zombies, got the keys out of his pocket, and opened the car door. He climbed in quickly, slammed the door shut, and locked it. By that time, the old lady had made it back to the hotel office and slammed the door shut behind her.
Jango reached between his feet for his gun box, just as one of the zombies smashed into the side of his Metro. The small car lurched and rocked as the zombie tried to get to him. He fumbled his key into the key hole on the box, twisted the key, and the box popped open. Inside were a Ruger KP 89 pistol, four fully loaded fifteen-round magazines, and four spare fifty-round boxes of ammunition. Swiftly and smoothly, he fitted a magazine into the grip of his pistol, seated it, and worked the slide to chamber a round. He stuck the three remaining mags into his front pockets, and steadied himself.
All three zombies were mindlessly bashing against his little car, arms swinging wildly, flailing with such force that the car’s frame was bending. The doors were buckling in, and the side windows were spider webbed with cracks. Even though it seemed they could not think clearly enough to just break a window and haul him out through the hole, it wouldn’t be long before they opened the tiny automobile like a piñata full of Jango treats.
Jango began breathing faster, hyper-oxygenating his blood as he put his hand on the door handle, and then with a violent surge, he slammed the driver’s side door open and into one of the male zombies. The door rebounded, and closed behind him as he jumped out of the car. The zombie tumbled backward in a disjointed pile, but immediately got back up. He noticed the guy wearing a pinkie ring on his right hand. “Guys shouldn’t wear pinkie rings,” he quipped, half to himself, as he shot the zombie in its head.
The zombie fell and started twitching, just as the other two came around the back of the car. Jango startle-jumped, let out a little scream, and ran around his car away from the zombies.
He suddenly found himself in a high-speed Chinese fire-drill around his beat up car, with two wailing, undead creatures that were intent on eating him. Jango saw no way out of his predicament. He managed to keep perfectly even with the two zombies as they chased him pell-mell around the smashed up hatchback. His only desire was to keep the bulk of his vehicle between himself and the two slavering zombies.
He fired two wild shots at them across the roof of his car while running, and missed both shots. “Shit,” he panted in frustration as he continued running. He had always thought it was bogus how people in movies made runnin
g head - shots on moving zombies, and there was his proof.
Jango wracked his brains to find a way out of his predicament, and suddenly he had an idea. He poured on more speed, and started closing in on the still wailing undead from behind. He was getting winded, from fear as much as exertion, but he slowly drew closer to the zombies, and lap by lap, he closed the gap between himself and his pursuers. He came around the front of his car on the passenger side just as the screeching creatures passed the passenger side door. He stopped, steadied his hands on the pistol in a two handed grip, and started shooting at the female zombie’s head.
With his first shot, he hit the female in the head, but his next three shots were wild. The remaining zombie finally noticed that its meal was much closer if it turned around. With an ear-splitting shriek, the thing turned toward Jango and charged. Its mouth gaped open and its tongue flailed around like an impaled earthworm, as it reached toward him.
Jango got set, raised his gun, and fired all in one fluid motion; the bullet hit the monster in the center of its forehead and it collapsed instantly. As he stared at the creatures he had just killed, the full weight of his situation suddenly struck him.
He leaned against the side of his dented, smashed, and otherwise thoroughly abused Geo Metro and sobbed. “What BULL-shit,” he whispered to himself. He leaned against his car, head hung, gasping for air. He was in excellent physical shape, but everyone has limits to their endurance; and the zombies had stretched his ability to endure almost to the breaking point.
Unnoticed by him, several zombies had made their way up the road. The creatures had followed the sound of his gunshots and the wailing of the now dead-again zombies. Jango just leaned against his car, panting, and thinking. He was shell-shocked, unaware and unmoving.
He was thirty-six years old, had no children, a bad case of P.T.S.D., and a built in paranoia that made a meth-head seem stable by comparison. He was average height, brown hair, soft hazel eyes, with big, callused, violent looking hands that looked as if someone who liked to kill had designed them for a strangler. His build was deceptive, average looking, until you looked closely and saw that he appeared to be made of cables and ropes, all hard, dense muscle made for use. All of his spare time was spent making himself into a killing machine, exercising, running, pounding a heavy bag, and practicing with every kind of weapon he could make or buy. He believed that the world was out to get him, and it was up to him to protect himself.
As a child, he had suffered terrible abuse, and that suffering had left a permanent mark on his mind, body, and spirit. The pain and horror of abuse had wrought a change in him, all the way down to a cellular level.
He had spent his entire life preparing for the worst to happen, and now that it had, he found himself shocked into a lethargic numbness.
“Deeeeeee-aaahhhhhh-eeeeeeeeeeee!” a zombie screamed as it rushed at him from no more than fifteen feet away.
Jango jumped like a scared cat, straight up in the air, legs already churning in a full-speed run before he hit the ground again. He ran around his car, and got into the driver’s seat, slammed the door, started his car, and began gnashing his teeth while growling at the zombies through his cracked windshield. Foam flecked his lips and a strange, feral light started glowing deep within his eyes as he continued growling and grinding his teeth.
Jango saw more than two-dozen zombies rushing his way in a loose, swaying formation that made him think of a group of children running while wearing straightjackets. He felt a dam break loose in his mind from the strain of it all.
Snarling and gnashing his teeth, he put his little car in gear, and started driving over his undead antagonists. Driving into them was probably more accurate since the tiny Geo Metro had the approximate ground clearance of a lawn mower, and about the same amount of horsepower as well.
“Thump, thunk, crunch,” as he drove in circles and figure-eights, knocking over, and then running over the zombies until none were left standing. His knuckles were ghost-white from his death grip on the steering wheel as he slalomed around the parking lot on a slimy slick of zombie juice and innards. Twenty minutes later, when Jango finally noticed that there was nothing left standing in the parking lot, he brought his car to a skidding stop, and put it in park. Looking around the parking lot, he was stunned at the level of carnage he had wrought. Mangled, wailing zombies littered the area; some with flattened body-parts stuck to the asphalt like snakes that had been ran over on the highway, but were still alive, doing that messed up, twisting crawl that went nowhere. And the blood…everywhere he looked was blood and guts. The zombie blood was thick, slimy, and an unhealthy shade of reddish-black interspersed with blotchy gray that looked like beef liver that had gone bad and begun to rot.
Jango suppressed the urge to vomit, but just barely. He sat there for a moment, bile in the back of his mouth and in shock. Then suddenly his face split into a huge and genuine smile. “I knew it!!” he shouted out loud, “I just fucking knew it!” He pumped his arms up and down in the air, fists hitting the ceiling of his car.
It had suddenly occurred to him that his psychologist had been wrong when he told Jango that it was pure fantasy to believe the world would just suddenly go to hell overnight, leaving only the strong to survive. All around him was proof that the wheels had come off of some very important shit, and that the meek were not going to get very much in Prescott right now.
Chapter Two:
Jango Shows His Nuts.
Jango spent a few minutes just looking around, making sure there were no more zombies in sight. When he was finally satisfied that he was alone for the time being, he turned his car off, and got out. His shoes made squishy sounds as he stood up. Jango looked down, saw the inch-thick layer of zombie-slurry that he was standing in and he vomited on his shoes. Heave after gut-wrenching heave, his stomach emptied its contents like a reverse chronology of his most recent meals. When there was nothing left in his stomach, he was reduced to dry heaves and hiccoughs as he tried to resume control of himself.
When his heaves finally passed, he pressed his forefinger against first one nostril, and then the other while blowing out through his nose to clear the vomit from his sinuses. He called this a “Swedish Handkerchief” because the term made him laugh. And he did laugh as he flicked mucus and half-digested McBurger Barn take-out from his finger. “Good old Swedish hanky,” Jango said to his finger, “Doesn’t cost a dime, and the chicks really dig it.”
He began laughing hysterically. He laughed so hard he could barely stay standing as he slipped, sloshed, and slid through the zombie gore on his way to the hotel office. He wanted to check on the old lady to make sure she was all right.
He was still laughing when he reached the office and rapped “shave and a hair-cut, two bits,” on the door. His hackles rose on his neck, and he dodged to the side. “BLAMMM!” A dinner-plate size chunk of the door was suddenly gone as a shotgun blast tore through it where Jango had just been, barely missing him as he dove to his right. He rolled, and popped up in a gun-fighter’s crouch with a hard, cold look on his face that said everything that had seemed nice about him might have been a lie.
He could take a lot of crap without losing his temper, but when he was threatened, he became monkey-strong and bughouse crazy. He lost his ability to feel pain along with any semblance of human emotion. His battle madness would take over, and the episode could last anywhere from a minute to several months. Jango called this “showing his nuts,” or “the destroy mode,” and tried to avoid situations which provoked him. The shotgun blast that almost killed him put Jango over the edge. His eyes went as flat and hard as stones. His facial features hardened and seemed to become more angular, his eyes changed color to a weird grey-green-blue, and his body even seemed to swell as the legacy that abuse had left him took over. He hardly looked like the same person anymore as he pulled his pistol from the waistband of his pants, and peeked around the edge of the hole in the door.
“You ass-hole, you shouldn’t have done that,�
�� he said in a conversational tone as he watched the old woman struggle to eject the spent casing from her shotgun.
Jango took aim with his pistol , and shot at the old woman. His bullet went through the hand she was using to work the slide on her shotgun and struck one of the shells in the magazine tube.
The round blew up in the tube, which in turn set off the next shell, and the next. The exploding shells turned her shotgun into a pipe bomb. The small explosion turned her hands, arms, chest, neck, and face into a ragged burger. She fell to the ground, moaning and screaming for help. Her pleas fell on uncaring ears as Jango watched her with his head cocked slightly to the right; eyes empty, but bright as a hungry bird’s when it sees a worm. In his mind, the old lady had betrayed him by trying to kill him. That made her the enemy.
Jango finally looked away from the dying woman, and went over to the small table inside the office where some musty donuts and stale coffee were arrayed in what the hotel called a “continental breakfast”. He began loading a plate with stale pastries, and then fixed himself two cups of coffee.
When he was done fixing his plate and coffee, he kicked a chair closer to the old woman, and sat down to eat.
The old woman’s gurgling cries for help got weaker and weaker, until she finally died. In the sudden silence, there were three beeps as Jango set his watch to the stopwatch setting, and started the timer.
Jango wanted to see if she would turn into a zombie, and, if she did, he wanted to know how long it took to happen. He knew he would need knowledge to survive what appeared to be a true Zombie Apocalypse.
While watching the woman’s corpse, he finished his donuts and coffee. Then suddenly, without warning, he stood, walked outside, and grabbed the old woman’s aluminum baseball bat from where she had dropped it, went back inside, and began smashing her legs with it. It had occurred to him that if she did turn into a zombie, she was going to be just as fast and strong as the others had been, and by smashing her legs, he was giving himself a better chance at survival. For Jango, survival was everything.
