by Cedric Nye
As soon as the razor-sharp S30V steel bit into the creature’s skin, it had convulsed into a sitting position that had consequently caused the knife to be driven deep behind its jawbone. The knife was torn from his grasp, and before he could retrieve it or kill the creature, the zombie had cut loose with the horrible keening wail so common to its kind. He found himself engaged in hand-to-hand combat against the powerful creature. At the back of his mind, he knew that the creature’s scream had guaranteed that more of the zombies were headed his way. He had not had to fight barehanded against one of the undead since the beginning of the zombie outbreak. The monsters had been much less coordinated back then, and not nearly as strong.
He was stronger now as well, though, and as the slavering humanoid monster grabbed hold of him with terrible strength and sought to draw him toward its snapping jaws, Jango learned just how much his strength had grown. He braced his left hand beneath the thrashing, screaming creature's lower jaw, and gripped the creature's hard neck in his callused hand. As it strove to draw him closer, he exerted force with his left arm and was amazed when he was able to halt the zombie's progress.
Taking heart, he tightened his grip on the monster's steely neck until the tips of his fingers had all but disappeared in the tough hide. He slowly forced the creature’s head toward its right shoulder. When he started exerting pressure, the creature began to flail its arms at him with deadly strength, but with grim stoicism, he ignored the punishment of the heavy blows that pulped his lips and bruised his flesh. When he had turned the revenant’s head until its chin nearly touched the ground above its shoulder, he brought his right fist up beside his ear, and then drove it into the side of the writhing creature’s head. His fist struck like a trip hammer, and the zombie's heavy, bony skull burst under the force of the blow. Its movement ceased instantly, and Jango fell back from his dead enemy with his hands shaking and his breath coming in rasping wheezes. He had known then that there were benefits to the effects that the Z-Virus had wrought upon him.
Jango munched contentedly on the dried beef for a few moments, as he thought about how strong he had become, and about how he could use that strength on his path: The Apocalypse Road.
When he had eaten a little more than half of the bag, he rolled it up and stowed it in his backpack. He looked around with an almost embarrassed or guilty look on his face, reached back into the alcove, and withdrew a touch-screen computer tablet in a sealed plastic bag.
He removed the tablet from its bag and powered it up. The glow of the screen washed his face with a gentle, blue light that made him look like a different person altogether. He looked peaceful and calm in the soft light.
Once he had typed in his password, he immediately opened up a picture file and went through them one by one. The pictures featured a small group of people that he had come across while ghosting his way through the city. They were a small group of survivors who did not seem to fit in with the world around them. They were always happy and smiling. They had a garden, and chickens, and they had a baby as well.
The group consisted of two men and three women. Two of the women seemed to be paired up with the men, and the baby appeared to belong to the third woman. It was she who featured in most of Jango's pictures, along with her baby. He imagined himself a part of their group, and he sighed.
"Maybe we should go meet them tomorrow," he said out loud.
"Sure we will, just like the last time you said we would," answered a voice that sounded like a chainsaw cutting bone in the bottom of a grave.
"Hey, Diogenes," Jango said to the giant dog who had appeared beside him. "Maybe we should really go this time," he mumbled, half to himself.
"Yes, yes we should, sugar," the albino woman crooned in his ear. Her voice sounded like whiskey, sin, and arsenic, with a trace of blood dripping on an abattoir floor. Her voice seemed heavily laden with suppressed violence and rough sex.
"We are a lot better when we're around people, Jango," the dog grated in what, for him, was a soft whisper.
Jango's lips tightened as he felt the beast shaking the bars of his cage, and screaming his rage at the walls of their mind.
"You really should let him out, Jango. He's just a baby," the albino woman said with a sad look on her alabaster face.
That made him look up. "What do you mean, Alby?" he asked her.
"Think about it, honey. He is made of the pain that started when you were just a little boy. He is still mostly just a little boy. Nothing more than a baby locked in a cage." Her voice had the soft drawl of the Deep South, and her sadness made the accent even more apparent.
To anyone watching, it would have appeared as though Jango was having a conversation with himself in three different voices. The dog and the albino woman were simply splinters of a mind fractured by the horrors of abuse, yet, they were no less real for all of that.
At her words, he felt his heart soften as he imagined himself locked away for so long. He then wondered why he thought that he had the right to lock any of his mind-fragments away.
"Just a baby," he whispered softly.
In the back of his mind, he heard the beast whimper piteously, and he knew he had been wrong to cage such a soft part of himself.
"Come on out, baby boy, come out and be free," he said out loud. Then he added, "But remember, I run the show, always and forever."
He relaxed the chains forged of his will, and the beast surged forward. When he appeared, he found himself shocked by the beast's appearance. He was a great, hulking brute with muscles like boulders and river-rock stacked one on top of another. He had the face of a child; open, and smiling with the simple joy of freedom. His body was covered in scars, and there were some fresh wounds that were raw and red. His large teeth were filed to points, and his eyes were the unadulterated green of a tropical lagoon.
To Jango; he was beautiful.
"Welcome home, baby-boy, welcome home," he whispered to the giant.
Then, his features hardened, and his entire being emanated menace as he spoke to the three inhabitants of his mangled mind, “Don’t for one instant take my kindness as weakness. You plot on me, try to take my shit, I will make your lives into a scene from ‘Hellraiser.’”
“Fuck with me, push me, see what happens,” he growled, and then turned back to the computer tablet.
The beast lumbered over to Jango, and spoke in a child’s voice, “S’okay, B okay, happy out here. You boss.” After he had finished speaking, he smiled a huge, genuine smile, and tilted his head way back so he could stare at the stars.
“Okay, B, okay,” Jango said.
After flipping through the pictures for a few more moments, he turned the tablet off and rewrapped it in the plastic bag. He stashed it in the alcove, and then lay on his back on the sleeping bag with his fingers laced behind his head as he stared at the stars and thought about the people that they would go to see tomorrow. They had showed up within the bounds of what Jango considered his turf about two and a half or three weeks earlier. Their appearance was a welcome break in the monotony of the endless slaughter that had become Jango's existence. His days were filled with the hunt and the kill, with room for little else. With the appearance of the small group, he had found a little bit of peace outside of himself as he spied on the people. He was not sure where they had come from, but he found himself hoping that they would stay where they were living at the moment.
Upon their arrival, he had immediately taken it upon himself to extend to them his protection. The small group seemed to have zero survival skills, and he could not fathom how they had made it this far. They never cleaned up after themselves, never covered their back trail, and did not seem to have the ability to keep their voices down. So he had become proactive in their protection by vigorously clearing an area approximately half a mile in diameter around the house in which the small group had chosen to live. He had taken to spending some time every other day or so in the branches of a large tree nearby the people. It was from this tree that he'd taken the
pictures that had become a sort of guilty pleasure for him.
"Yeah, we're going to go see them tomorrow," he whispered to the alter egos who were the only family that he had ever had.
4
Before the sun had risen, Jango had stowed his camping gear, and fully stocked up on ammunition for his Remington shotgun and two Ruger pistols from the cache of weapons and ammunition that he kept in a large watertight trunk at the back of the natural cubbyhole. Above all things, he believed in being prepared, and he had a good idea that his notions about the people who he was going to see would prove to be wrong. Unlike many mentally ill people, he was fully aware that his perceptions were usually biased by his desires or fantasies. He figured that there was a good chance that the people would turn out to be something different than he hoped they would be.
"Well, no time like the present," he said to the world in general as he strode off down the sandy bottom of the wash. After about thirty minutes of walking, and several changes of direction, he came to the place that he was looking for. It was a tunnel similar to the one that he had used to enter the safety of the overgrown ravine. He repeated his moments of the day before, and swiftly wormed his way through the long circuitous tunnel with his backpack resting on his forearms. When he reached the end of the tunnel, he pushed a heavy log with thorny branches attached to it out of his way, and climbed out into the paradise that the wreckage of the concrete jungle had become. He replaced the subterfuge that covered his tunnel, replaced his backpack over the scabbards on his back, and resolutely headed toward the house where the five strangers lived with the baby.
Another five minutes of walking brought him to the street that led to the house. He straightened up, and used his hands to brush away any dirt, dust, or grass from the mottled tan-colored homemade Kevlar clothing that he had taken to wearing. Then, holding his head high, he continued down the street and up to the front door of the house.
He rapped "shave and a haircut, two bits" on the door, and then slid over until he was standing just to the side of the door. The door opened quickly, and he glimpsed a round, pale face in the opening. It was one of the men who had answered the door, and Jango immediately noticed that he had four parallel scratches down the left side of his face.
Placing his hand gently, but firmly against the door, Jango dropped his right hand to the pistol that hung low on his right hip as he surveyed the area of the home that was visible from where he stood. He saw that the other man who lived there and the two women that were paired up with the men were all seated at a table with a large breakfast laid out. With the lack of preamble and tact of which only children are usually capable, he asked, "Where is she? Where's the lady and her baby?"
The round faced man, who stood about six and a half feet tall, but had the soft, rounded frame of a lifelong office worker, struggled to push the door closed while Jango held the door open with very little effort.
Jango's voice took on the pedantic quality, which usually preceded one of his ultraviolent episodes, as he asked, "Where. Is. The. Woman. And. Her. Baby. I will not ask you again." The overly patient, and almost singsong way in which he had spoken clearly rattled the man at the door, as well as the other three occupants of the home.
The man stopped trying to push the door closed, took a deep breath, and answered him. "We sold her, man. She just wanted to keep living here, and didn't want to put out."
Jango did not move, but his facial features began to subtly shift, and the color of his eyes changed from their usual soft hazel to the hard, cold gray of gunmetal.
The man seemed encouraged by the stranger's apparent lack of response and expression, so he continued. "Yeah, man. I told her she had better start putting out to pay her way around here, and she didn't like that. Bitch scratched up my face and everything, so we sold her and that noisy ass baby to some people we met a while back. Got four cartons of cigarettes and twenty OxyContin's out of the deal."
By this time, Jango's metamorphosis into what he called his destroy mode had completed. He almost looked like a different person. His face seemed made out of sharp angles and harsh planes, and his body even seemed to swell and become larger. Feral and lunatic light pinwheeled through the depths of his eyes as he pinned the larger man in place with a mad man's gaze.
"Where, exactly, can I find these people that you sold the woman and her baby to?" he asked in a voice that sounded like metal tearing.
The man gulped as he finally seemed to recognize the full extent of the threat he found himself facing. "They, they, they move around, but right now they are at the public park north of Union Hills on 19th Ave. They have a pile of supplies. There's like thirty or forty of them, and they'll trade with anybody." The man had started babbling, but suddenly stopped when he saw that Jango had drawn his pistol and was staring at him with the bright and empty look of a hungry bird.
"I can't believe that I actually protected you pieces of shit," Jango rasped.
"Protected us from what?" The man asked. "Shit, there aren't even any zombies around here to protect us from." He finished.
In response, Jango pressed the muzzle of his pistol against the man's crotch and fired a round into his genitals. The effect was stunning. The high velocity hollow-point round slammed into the soft tissue of the man's genitals, reduced the meat to the consistency of chunky soup, and then blew the resulting mess out through the man's rectum.
The groin-shot man dropped to the floor as an eerie high-pitched scream tore its way loose from his throat. While he writhed in pain on the floor, Jango leaned over him and in a conversational tone said, "There aren't any zombies around here because I killed every last mother fucking one of them, you sorry meat-whistle."
He looked up in time to see the other man fumbling for a pistol in the waistband of his pants with nerveless, fear-deadened fingers. He slapped the door shut behind him, and took several long strides across the room until he stood in front of the man. With his eyes burning fever bright, Jango cocked his head to the side and smiled as he spoke to the man. "I am pretty sure I know what they want with the woman, but what on earth can they want with the baby?"
The man continued to paw at the pistol in his waistband until he finally pulled it loose from his pants. His face frozen in a madman's smile, Jango grabbed the man's wrist and broke it with one savage twist. Then, as though to press the point home, he shook the man's arm and ground the broken bones together in his vice-like grip.
"I don't think you understand the full gravity of your position," he said after releasing the man's broken arm. "Let me school you. I ask a question, and you answer. If you do not adapt yourself to that very simple dynamic, I will take you apart at the seams."
"So," he continued, "why do they want the baby?"
His face gray with pain, the man stammered, "They, they are going to eat it."
"Eat the baby?" Jango said in a questioning tone, his face still frozen in the lunatic grin.
"Yeah, man, yeah. Food isn't easy to come by, and it's hard to feed so many people. You can't just go out and hunt, because the zombies will find you. Anybody dies, they chop the head off and then stew them up." The man finished.
“Hmmmm”, Jango mused, “so let me get this straight. You sold a woman to be raped and a child to be eaten. Does that about sum it up?”
Once again, fate seemed to conspire with the foul nature of the worst of humanity to turn Jango's attention from the Apocalypse Road to a more specific, and personal vendetta.
With that thought, he accepted the fact that he had already unknowingly committed himself to protect the woman and the baby. He asked the man, “When, exactly, did you sell the woman and the baby?”
“Just yesterday, man,” the injured man moaned.
With lightning rapidity, his mind was creating a plan of attack. He knew the basic layout of the park that the man said the group of cannibals had taken over. He took stock of all the assets at his disposal, and cemented his plan of attack.
Turning away from the man and his
shattered wrist, Jango walked back to the groin shot man and shot him through the heart. He then calmly walked back to the other man as he de-cocked and holstered his pistol. Using his left hand, he grabbed the man by his hair and lifted him bodily from the floor. The toes of the man’s shoes scrabbled on the tile floor, as he struggled to reduce the agony in his scalp by using his unbroken hand to lift some of his weight off.
“Take your dick skinner off my wrist,” Jango said in the poisoned honey voice of a deadly southern belle, “or I will take your dick skinner off at the wrist.”
The man, eyes wet with fear, released his grip on Jango's wrist as if it was a hot stone.
“Now, I just know that I can't trust you three, so I am gonna need you all to sit still for a while so I can work out what I'm going to do,” Jango purred. “Can you all do that for me?”
“Yes,” the man and the two women said almost in unison.
“Well, let me just make sure of that,” he said as he released the man's hair. With a gesture of his head, Jango herded all three into a corner where he swiftly zip-tied them to each other, wrist and ankle.
“Yeah, I think this will keep you all out of trouble for the time being,” he said in his normal tone of voice.
He started to turn away from the people, but then stopped and turned back. “You wouldn't happen to have an ax or machete, would you?”
In response to his question, all three people let out soft whimpers, as a large dark spot appeared on the front of the man's khaki pants, and the hot, acrid stench of urine filled the corner of the room.
“No?” Jango sighed. “Well, that's okay. There's more than one way to skin a cat.”
He turned away from the people, and walked back over to the man who he had shot in the crotch, and then again in the chest. As he looked down at the corpse, he drew his heavy, knotted ironwood stick from its scabbard on his back. With his face empty and flat, he raised the stick up beside his ear and brought it down in a lightning fast strike that landed on the corpse’s upper thigh, just below the bloody ruin that had been its groin. The blow struck with such force that the muscles of the thigh were torn and liquefied, and the bone shattered as though it had been struck by a high-velocity bullet, or a sledgehammer. He repeated his action on the corpse’s other leg and then its arms. He then slid the stick back into its scabbard, pulled the knife from his pocket, and removed the dead man's appendages. The keen edge of his blade sliced through flesh like a razor blade through taffeta. The bones had been shattered into slivers and dust where his stick had fallen, and that was where he cut. In less than five minutes, he had completely dismembered the body.
