by Nye, Cedric
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.
*******
Jango drove away from Anthem, and away from reality. He had an epiphany about himself several days ago that had turned his world inside out.
He had been thinking about Sonja and how powerful his feelings had been for her, when he suddenly realized the truth; Sonja had been an anchor. She had been a rope that tethered Jango to reality.
When he had held her in his arms and made love to her, he had sworn to protect her. With his oath of protection, he had been able to channel his madness into a semblance of normalcy. When she died, his anchor was gone and the world had burned from his untethered insanity.
He had seen the truth, and it saddened him. Jango knew now that he did not mourn Sonja’s death; he mourned his own failure to protect her.
“Am I such a monster?” he wondered aloud as he thought back through his life and realized that he was.
His face began to change and shift into a demon’s visage. He could hear the dog, the albino woman, and the beast as they screamed their pain, rage, and hatred at the walls of his mind.
His foot pressed the accelerator to the floor, and the big car roared forward toward Phoenix, and Jango’s ultimate fate.
For some of the more vicious portions of this book, I listened to music to keep my own beast in lock-down. You might dig the tunes, so here are the artists I listened to.
-Drama, from Warbywire. This song is like a rage-jacked heartbeat. You can find it on YouTube at longshotkdb
-Nocturnal Jackmove, by UnKnownKriminal on YouTube.
Wicked, harsh, and hard, just like a stone.
Read on for a free sample of “To The Death”
Chapter 1.
Northern Uganda, September 8th 2013.
Bullets buzzed through the small village like a swarm of insects, insects that burrowed through chests, skulls, bellies, limbs, leaving ragged bleeding holes, and scores of dead townspeople. Cows, sheep, pigs, and goats, the life's blood of the village, stampeded, fleeing the violence or were gunned down with their owners. Wailing, braying beasts lay in crimson pools of blood. Some crawled along the dirt roads, dragging injured limbs. Men, women, children, the elderly, all fell beneath the onslaught as armed soldiers stormed into the tiny town, killing indiscriminately. Those who weren't killed in the gunfire were rounded up, herded like cattle into the center of the village.
“You! Woman! Come here!” Yelled a soldier no older than sixteen who already had battle scars and the soulless, thousand-yard-stare of those who had seen and committed horrors. His midnight skin glistened with sweat and blood that was not his own. He was a soldier in the Lord's Revolutionary Militia, led by the ruthless and charismatic, self-proclaimed General, Joseph Nwosu. The young soldier held a machete in one hand and a Kalashnikov rifle slung over his shoulder. A sardonic smile scarred his otherwise handsome face.
“Now!” He bellowed, pointing his machete at her and then at the ground by his feet. Her obedience was no more in question than his response should s
he fail to comply. He had killed more people than he'd lived years on this earth. He had tortured, raped, and burned the corpses of dozens of his own people since he'd been kidnapped from a village similar to this one and forced to join the militia. Now, he could no longer remember his parents. The militia was the only family he knew.
The woman was tall and lean, taller than the soldier and twice his age. The same age his mother would have been had she not been murdered in front of him by the same soldiers he now called his brothers. She had comely features and fierce eyes that burned with hatred as she complied with the soldier's command. Behind her, she shielded a young boy, no older than thirteen. There was an obvious resemblance. Her brother? Perhaps even her son.
The teenage soldier took two long strides toward her and grabbed her by the wrist, jerking her forward and off her feet. She fell to the ground with a grunt. The young soldier scowled in contempt and reached for his machete, seeing the fear in her eyes and loving it, reveling in it. Without hesitation, he raised the machete and lopped off her arm at the elbow. Her screams joined the chorus of anguish echoing all around them. Her severed limb fell to the ground, no longer a part of her. The soldier lifted the limb and waved it above his head, spraying blood in a circle around himself. He laughed as he tossed the limb over a nearby fence. The woman with the angry eyes raised the bleeding stump where her forearm and hand had been, still screaming.
Trembling with pain and soul-searing rage, she let go of the boy's hand and charged the young soldier, swinging at him with her remaining fist. It was not the reaction the soldier was expecting and it took him off guard for a moment. He took a punch to the chest before responding by smacking the woman to the ground. The soldier raised the machete and brought it down on the woman's thigh. The blade cut deep into the thick muscle with a sound like chopping wood as it struck bone. He jerked the machete free and a geyser of arterial blood shot into the air in a fine spray, spattering the soldier's face in a gruesome Rorschach of dripping red. His smoldering black eyes burned from that mask of gore like lit coals. Grinning maniacally, he brought the heavy blade down again and again, chopping at her leg until he'd hacked through the thick femur and amputated the limb mid-thigh. The woman's screams were terrible as the young soldier continued hacking her to pieces.
Identical scenes of mayhem unfolded all around them as the survivors of the initial onslaught were rounded up, raped, tortured, mutilated, and executed. Screams filled the air like a choir, a piercing symphony of woe. The little boy who'd been standing with the woman was now standing beside the blood-spattered soldier as he went berserk with the machete. The soldier never even noticed when the boy slipped the Russian-made handgun out of his holster and pointed it at his back. He never felt a thing when the little boy pulled the trigger. Never even heard the gunshot.
Chapter 2.
Northern Uganda, September 9th, 2013.
Smoke billowed from dozens of shattered, incinerated structures. The houses had been little more than huts made of mud and bricks with roofs composed of corrugated metal, but they had been homes filled with love and children's laughter. Now, they were blackened skeletons crumbling in the breeze. Once verdant farmland smoldered. Crops had been turned to ash, the earth singed barren. Pens that once held pigs and sheep were now broken and empty. Dead animals lay strewn about the streets amid the rubble of bomb-blasted and bullet-riddled hovels. Not a single living human being was in sight. The immolated remains of one villager lay sprawled in the doorway of his decimated home. The smell of burning flesh wafted through the village like a rancid cloud.
A few yards outside of town, a large pit had been dug with a tractor. Like a putrescent pie filling, hundreds of corpses were piled into the pit and buried, to be forgotten as if they'd never existed. Jeeps and trucks rolled over the pit, compacting the dirt until it was indistinguishable from the earth that surrounded it. Then, the soldiers moved on, leaving the charred necropolis behind.
Women and girls as young as nine, once members of the village, were carried off to be used as prostitutes in the “pleasure tents” for the soldier's amusement. Boys as young as six or eight stumbled along behind the caravan at gunpoint. They would learn to be soldiers or else they would be killed and join their fathers, brothers, uncles, and grandparents in the pit or worse, join their mothers and sisters in the pleasure tents.
The harsh sun baked their skin as they marched in a somber line toward the horizon. Most would never return. They said silent prayers for their families, many of whom were buried beneath the earth. For their loved ones who'd been lucky enough to escape, they prayed that they would keep running and find peace somewhere far away. Those who wept were warned once and if they persisted, were shot, their bodies left to rot by the side of the road as the rest marched on. The others learned quickly to suck their pain down deep and hide it and all other signs of weakness. Each step away from their village hardened them.
Chapter 3
Northern Uganda, September 29, 2013
A bluish green fungus streaked with veins of black and purple, covered the ground around what had once been a prosperous village. It covered the charred husks of burnt-out buildings, the rusted, twisted metal of similarly incinerated bikes and automobiles, and the dead pigs, sheep, goats, and cows shambling toward them as the platoon of special forces operatives stood aghast, cradling their firearms apprehensively. Standing at the end of the village's main and only paved road, awaiting the order to retreat or engage.
“What the fuck is wrong with them? Are they sick or something?” Asked one of the younger soldiers. They were all Americans, a squad of nine army rangers, sent on a clandestine mission to assess a possible threat to national security and eliminate it if necessary. As long as the conflict remained a local civil war, they were not concerned, but there had been rumors of biological weaponry being deployed with possible global implications. If those rumors were confirmed, that would significantly increase the level of American and international involvement. In addition to the squad of soldiers, were two CIA operatives there strictly to observe. One of them, Agent Emmanuel Stern, raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes.
“They're coming right at us. Whatever this purple fungus is that's all over everything, seems to have infected them as well. Don't let them touch you. We don't know what this is we're dealing with.”
Agent Stern was a tall, brown-skinned, thickly muscled man of mixed Middle-Eastern and African American descent. He had a baldhead and no facial hair at all except for a few thin wisps of prickly black hair above his eyes. He wore black fatigues that contrasted dramatically with the combat green of the ranger squad. He stared closer at the animals. There was evidence of severe trauma. Most had bullet wounds that looked infected, suppurating with pus and crawling with maggots and that unidentified dark fungus. Some of the wounds were clearly fatal. A sheep limped forward with a hole in its side the size of a cantaloupe with half its intestines spilling from the wound and trailing behind it. A hog with a large portion of its head missing, brains flopping around its shattered skull, covered in mold, lumbered along as well. A cow covered in mold and apparently rotting alive, its belly bloated with putrescent gases, exploded. Its belly ruptured, spraying internal organs everywhere, yet it continued to stagger forward.
“Kill those things!” Shouted one of the rangers, Lieutenant Ronald Bushard, a grizzled soldier in his early forties who'd been deployed in every military operation in the last twenty years, starting with “Operation Iraqi Freedom” before it acquired its more popular moniker “Desert Storm.” This was his mission and these were his men. They obeyed without question, and in seconds, the undead cattle disappeared in a hail of precisely targeted gunfire. A short, stocky, soldier with a shaved head, Sergeant Craig Holder, opened up with an M249 SAW, a belt-fed, gas-operated machine gun capable of firing 725 rounds per minute. It tore the undead creatures apart, but they kept coming.
“What the fuck?”
These rangers were some of the best soldiers in the world.
What they shot at usually died. Yet their first volley of bullets killed seven animals out of a herd of nearly two dozen, who were now so close the fetid stench of them was stupefying. It choked the air from their lungs and churned the bile in their stomachs.
“Oh, God! That smell!”
“Fire again! Aim for their heads!”
This time, they had much better success. Skulls ruptured and brains erupted as the highly trained team of soldiers took headshots at the slow-moving dead things, finally quieting their restless corpses. The remaining animals suddenly sped up, charging at a full gallop, no longer looking quite as weak and sick. The SAW roared again, this time decapitating the herd of undead farm animals in mass, shredding them like stalks of wheat in a threshing machine. One of the rangers pumped the M203 grenade launcher mounted beneath the barrel of his M-4, firing a grenade into the herd. The explosion sent a cloud of gore raining rotting meat and tepid blood down on the ranger squad.
“Fuck yeah! Die motherfuckers!” They whooped and cheered as they cleared the two or three remaining creatures from their path. They were so engaged in the act of slaughter, they didn't hear the things creeping out of the houses, yards, alleys, and barns all around them. The shadows crawled with shambling, jerky, off-kilter motions. Something sprinted into the clearing, heading straight for them.
Agent Stern was the first to notice the army of putrefying humanity that had surrounded them. In every direction, human beings that had been dead and decomposing for days lunged forward, loose skin rotting and sloughing off their muscles in sheets. That queer, black and purple mold covered large patches of the remaining skin like fur, seeming to feed off the rot and decay leaking out of the things. Their black skin was mottled with grays, blues, and purples, from both the mold growth and the normal decay, accelerated by the extreme African heat. Angry reds and pinks created a livid contrast where the skin was missing entirely and raw muscle showed through. Even these areas, naked of skin, crawled with purple fungus. Dirt from whatever grave they'd crawled out of was matted in their hair and caked their ragged clothing. Their skin rippled and undulated with movement as legions of carrion-eating insects and vermin burrowed through their flesh. Rodents, birds, lizards, snakes and other opportunistic scavengers, crawled through the gaping holes in their limbs and torsos, feeding off the rotting muscles and organs as the dead stumbled forward.
