by Cedric Nye
After that, he had forced the pipe bomb into a one-gallon fuel can that was full of the diesel and fertilizer mixture. He left the end with the wires going into it sticking out of the opening at the top of the can. Then, he had used copious amounts of duct tape to secure it on the frame of the truck beneath the tank.
13
All of the preparations he had made flashed through his mind as he ran through the concrete labyrinth of downtown Phoenix. The cacophony of keening howls and screeching wails that rose up all around him spoke of unbelievable numbers of the living dead. Jango knew that he would not be given any second chances, and that there would be no room for error. If he should become surrounded before he could reach the research center, or if he hit a dead end, the baby's life and his own life would be forfeit. If he could only make it to the research center, he would be able to get free of the horde that now hunted him, and kill a large number of them in one fell swoop.
He rounded a corner at full speed, and found himself face to face with several hundred jacks that appeared to have been waiting for him. His worst fears realized, he made a scrabbling turn that became a desperate run down an alley which lay between two large, nondescript gray stone buildings.
The building on his right was a flat roofed, one-story building with a parapet that encircled the entire roof. The edge of the parapet was about fifteen feet above the ground. The building to his left looked to be about five stories tall, and presented a windowless face to the alley. He noticed the features of the buildings as he raced just ahead of the ever-growing horde of ravening creatures.
He poured on more speed, his legs flashing in a blur as he sought to put distance between himself and his pursuers. About halfway down the alley, all of his hopes of escape disappeared as the far end of the alley filled with Jacks. With zombies behind him, and zombies ahead of him, his mind moved from escape and evade mode to destroy mode in the blink of an eye.
The only option that presented itself was a twenty foot wide loading bay on his right that went back about fifty feet, and then terminated in a six feet deep by six feet wide depression in the wall that went all the way to the roof of the one-story building. He raced toward the heavy steel door that marked the bottom of the declivity, and when he reached the door, he kicked it as hard as he could, with no effect. He knew he was out of time, and that he had nowhere to go, so he turned to face his end.
With his back to the door, he thought about a saying he had once heard about there being no atheists in a foxhole, and he laughed out loud. "God," he said as he watched the first of the jacks come around the corners from the alley, "I've never asked you for anything, and I am loath to do so now. I know you aren't the Christian God, or Krishna, or Buddha, or any of that bullshit. None of those gods would let the shit go down like it has. I know what you are, and I know what you dig. The only god I have is revenge, and I have been your faithful servant, violence. All I ask from you is that I die well, with grace, covered in the blood of these unnatural creatures that have fucked up my fair city. And please give me the courage to kill this baby so these fucking things do not get to eat her."
14
By the time he finished his impromptu prayer, the fast-moving jacks were only twenty-five feet away from him. Jango smiled, leveled the Benelli shotguns at the zombies, and fired as fast as he could pull the triggers.
His aim was true more often than not, and the double ought buckshot tore a swath through the front ranks of the screaming creatures. When the shotguns were empty, he dropped them and drew his pistols. With the fifteen rounds in each pistol, he was able to drop another twelve zombies with head shots. When the slides locked back, he slammed the pistols back into his holsters, reached over his shoulder, and drew his knotted ironwood stick from its scabbard on his back. The heavy stick was almost three feet long, and two inches in diameter at its thickest. The six foot wide entryway would only allow two zombies to come at him at a time. With his back to the wall, Jango braced himself for what he knew would be his last fight.
The zombies that he had killed with the shotguns and pistols slowed the seemingly endless stream of zombies that filled the loading bay and the alley beyond. The zombies stumbled and tripped over the bodies as they rushed forward, which broke the terrible speed of their attack.
Jango stood motionless as the meager layers of gentleness and civility sloughed away and left behind the grim visage of violence and death made flesh. He brought his stick up into its ready position; gripped in both hands, parallel to the ground, and about level with his chin. When the first zombie got within striking range, his stick lashed out faster than a striking snake as his body uncoiled with a vicious left-handed stick punch. Driven by unnatural muscles hardened in the crucible of endless exercise and mortal combat, the heavy stick made a gray ruin of the zombie's head. Everything above the zombie's milky eyes disappeared in a spray of gray blood and white bone, as the stick tore through the creature’s head as if the skull were made of tissue paper. The stick returned to the ready position as quickly as it had struck, and lashed out in a right-handed strike that dropped another zombie to the ground with a burst skull.
After the second stick strike, all art and contrivance disappeared. All that was left behind was the raw form of pure, brutal function, and survival. The sheer amount of violence unleashed by Jango, epic in its proportions would have done the pages of any of Homer's sagas proud. But none would witness his final efforts, save for the screaming, ravening creatures that would feast on his flesh, and turn him into a slavering revenant.
After the first few heartbeats, he was forced to abandon the full-length stick punches in favor of the more brutal and close range strikes that he called the kayak attack. The strikes were short and brutal; like the vicious hooks thrown by a professional boxer. However, instead of using his fists to hit his targets, he used the protruding eight inches of stick on the outside of his hands. The name "kayak attack" was apt, as the wind-milling strikes did resemble a person madly paddling a kayak.
The blurring stick filled the narrow entrance of his small refuge, and the zombies fell like wheat before the scythe as they fearlessly rushed his position.
He had no illusions about surviving the battle, or any real conscious thought about the battle at all. Logic and rational thought had been shed like a killer's false smile, and all that remained was death.
The bodies of the souped-up jacks began to pile up before the tiny alcove, which made it difficult for him to combat the relentless horde. The mound of bodies in front of his position gave the attacking zombies an elevated position, which made it difficult for him to place his strikes where they needed to be; on the zombies' heads.
With a guttural roar, he surged forward and up the pile of bodies, and laid about with his seven pound Ironwood stick like a demon. His frenzied attack drove back the unnatural creatures for a moment, and he used that moment to strengthen his position. He reached down with one hand, and began flinging corpses behind him into the entryway. As the jacks pressed forward once more, screaming and slobbering, he drove them back yet again with another attack. He flung and kicked corpses behind him into the alcove, and then retreated once more when he had given himself the elevated position.
If there had been only fifty, or even one hundred zombies, he may have been able to hold out, or even triumph and survive. Instead, he faced what seemed an endless stream of the undead, more than he had ever seen or imagined in one place. From the volume of the howls and screams, and the keening wails which rose from all around, there could have been more than twenty thousand zombies crowding the downtown Phoenix area, and surrounding his position.
The alcove became his entire world. His hearing dulled until all he could hear was the pounding of his heart, and the rasp of his breath. He fought simply for the sake of dying with grace. He did not fight to win, rather, he fought so that he could do as much damage to his enemies as possible before they laid him low. His muscles burned as though they were filled with acid, and his legs trembled
atop the uncertain footing of the corpses. He knew that his strength would not hold out forever, and his heart sank with the thought of having to give the baby final mercy before the zombies took them both. In an attempt to delay that terrible choice, he blanked his mind, and just fought harder.
As the bodies piled up before him, he would repeat his earlier efforts by driving forward in a bull-ape frenzy, kicking and tossing corpses into his refuge until his footing was level with, or higher than that of his attackers.
He fought on, and the hours passed. The pile of corpses beneath his feet, and spread out before him, was a gory testimony to his strength of will, and the burning depth of his rage. His muscles trembled with fatigue, his shoulders knotted with the tension of abused muscles, and his legs felt like two pieces of wood. His hands were swollen from the long hours of gripping his stick.
After what seemed an interminable length of time, as his breath rasped and sobbed through his throat like handfuls of broken glass, he chanced to glance up. What he saw astounded him. As he had raised the floor-level of his alcove with the bodies of the slain, he had unwittingly brought himself closer to the edge of the roof above.
15
A fierce smile spread across his scarred and bloody visage as he felt his spirits become invigorated in the fires of hope. His lizard brain slowly relinquished authority, and the wheels of reason once more began to turn. His mental state went from scorched-earth and dying with grace, back into survival mode. Like an organic supercomputer, his mind began to calculate distances, times, and his relative position in downtown Phoenix. When he felt that all of the factors were in place, he drove forward against his relentless foes once more. This time when he drove forward, he did so with a gleeful, laughing roar. He cut a wide swath through the massed undead with mighty blows from his stick. A lone zombie rose in the cleared spot, and Jango drove his right foot forward like a wrecking-ball, striking the zombie in its chest as he shouted, "This is Sparta!" The zombie flew backward into its brethren, spasming wildly with a caved-in chest.
In the blink of an eye, he spun around, took two fast steps, and leapt with all of the strength that remained in his powerful legs. The corpses shifted beneath him a little bit as he leapt, and he feared that he would not be able to reach the edge of the roof. His fears, however, were unfounded as he gained a grip with his left hand on the raised edge of the roof, tossed his stick onto the roof, and then muscled himself up and over to the top of the building.
He knelt, and stayed still for a long moment. One soul-deep sigh escaped from his broken lips before he shook himself, and stood. With renewed vigor, he swiftly unslung his pack, and opened it up. The baby looked up at him with her unnaturally green eyes, and smiled at him. A small sob of relief escaped his lips when he saw that she was okay.
“No time for a hippie love-in, kid, we need to get the hell out of here.” Before closing the bag again, he removed a cloth-wrapped glass jar with a lumpy duct-taped protrusion on its side. He put his backpack back on, cinched the waist strap tight, and unwrapped the jar. The one-quart jar was filled with gasoline, and had a white phosphorus grenade duct-taped to the side with only the spring-handle and pin left outside of the duct tape. He had discovered, several months before, that whatever physiological changes the Z-Virus had wrought in the terrible creatures that humanity had become, had caused the zombies to be highly flammable when exposed directly to open flames.
He had no way to know why they were so flammable, but he guessed that it had to do with some kind of hyper oxygenation of the tissues in their unnatural bodies. Whatever the reason, the end result was that a tightly packed group of zombies, such as those below, was very vulnerable to fire.
He wrenched the pin from the grenade and smiled as the handle "pinged" off to the side. As he tossed the homemade fuel bomb out toward the middle of the seething mass, he shouted, "Say hi to Willy Pete, mother-fuckers!"
The duct-tape wrapped incendiary landed atop the tightly packed creatures about one second before it ignited explosively. He had mixed styrene into the gasoline, and the result was a kind of "poor man's" napalm. The jellied gasoline burst outward in a twenty-yard radius when the white phosphorus grenade exploded, and the zombies began burning with blue-white flames as the fiery carnage spread swiftly amongst their ranks. He stared at the flames for a moment, jaw hanging slack, before slowly turning away. He picked up his stick and made for the far end of the quarter-mile long row of inter-connected buildings at a dead run.
Before he reached the far end, he shoved his stick into the scabbard on his back, and one at a time placed a fully loaded magazine into each of his pistols as he ran. When he reached the end, he took a hopping step to the top of the parapet, and then jumped off the edge and spun so that he could grip the parapet. He then undulated his body slightly and let go his grip. The undulation served to push him out from the wall so that when he struck the ground almost twenty feet below, he was about eight feet from the side of the building. He landed on the balls of his feet, and tried to minimize the impact on the baby by bending his knees deeply. The moment his feet hit the ground, he was off and running toward the Urban Research Laboratory, and the massive booby-trap he had set up months before.
He had just started running when the first zombie spotted him, and let loose with the soul-searing scream that would notify the rest of the zombies that their prey was escaping. He reached deep into the reserves of his iron endurance, and his feet pounded the pavement in a staccato rhythm as he ran as fast as he was capable of running. After several minutes of running pell-mell at full speed through the labyrinth of gray stone buildings, he spied the research center. He would have laughed out loud if he had had the breath to spare. Instead, he just smiled, gritted his teeth, and ran faster.
As he entered the double doors of the large stone building, he smiled at all the slavering, wailing zombies that poured down the streets in pursuit.
Immediately upon entering the building, he ran to the tanker truck and flipped a toggle switch. The switch was an "on" switch that allowed power from the battery to go to the amplified receiver on the garage door opener that would ignite the massive tanker-truck pipe bomb.
That done, he raced for the stairwell that lead to the roof of the five-story building. He bit down hard on his tongue as he ran, and ground down until his mouth filled with the taste of blood. As he reached the door and flung it open, he spat a mouthful of blood into the stairwell. He kicked the rubber stopper that he had left there months ago under the door to prop it open, and began running up the stairs.
When he reached the second floor, he spat another mouthful of blood through the already-open door that led out into the second floor. Grinding his teeth into his tongue, he continued racing up the steps, stopping on every floor to repeat his actions. He had almost reached the fourth floor when he heard the first zombies make their screaming way into the stairwell. After repeating his blood decoy on the last two floors, he finally reached the door that led to the roof.
The door opened easily and silently on the hinges that he had meticulously oiled. He quietly closed the door behind himself, and placed a heavy bar across the door, and into the L-shaped brackets he had bolted to either side of the door. Moving more calmly, he went to what appeared to be a pile of rubble draped with dried condoms and other garbage. He kicked at the pile until he had unearthed a large strongbox similar to the one that he had stashed at Walmart. This one had a combination lock on it. He put in the combination, and opened the case. Inside of the four foot long case was a Benelli semi-auto shotgun, ammunition, and the amplified radio detonator that would hopefully turn the entire building and all the zombies in it into a giant pile of blood-soaked stone. He grabbed several loaded magazines for the Benelli, and stuffed the pockets of his jacket with loaded magazines for his twin Ruger pistols.
“Okay, kid. Shit is about to get dicey, but I will try to keep you safe. So just stay calm, if you can.” As he spoke, he ran to the edge of the roof, and vaulted over the edge. His l
eap carried him across to the roof of the parking structure beside the research center.
His legs buckled beneath him when he landed on the roof of the parking garage, and he had to break his fall with his forearms. He struggled to his feet, exhausted beyond the limits of even his iron endurance. He shook his head viciously, and muttered, “I ain’t done yet,” before making his way at a shuffling run down the stairwell to the ground floor of the garage.
