by Cedric Nye
As she dressed in the borrowed clothes, she watched him sort through what seemed like an endless array of weaponry in the trunk he had retrieved from the house. She had noticed how smoothly he moved, and now she had to marvel at his obvious strength. She was by no means an expert on firearms and other weapons, but she had a working knowledge of their uses, and she knew how heavy weapons and ammunition could be. The hard-case looked to be three feet long by two feet wide, and about one foot deep. She could see that it was full to the top with bags of food, guns, and ammunition. In addition to that, a large, odd-shaped knife with an extra-long handle was in there. He lifted the case as if it were weightless, and the effortless way in which he had borne the heavy case stunned her.
She watched as he hung the huge blade on the belt of the military-looking harness that he was wearing. He filled pouches with magazines for the two pistols that hung on his lean hips, and then started taking what looked like grenades out of the case. He placed them in a tattered looking backpack, along with four large bags of Jay Lane’s Beef Jerky.
He noticed her staring, and asked, “Are you hungry?” Then, without waiting for an answer, he tossed a sandwich bag full of beef jerky to her.
She did not think she could eat, but when she opened the bag, and the smell of the jerky wafted up into her nose, her stomach gurgled, and her mouth filled with saliva. She chewed hungrily on the jerky while the man finished his preparations.
When she had eaten the entire bag of dried beef, he tossed a bottle of water to her, and said, “Drink it.”
She gulped the water, and then sat still and silent, as if awaiting another order.
“My name is Jango,” he said without looking up.
She had never heard that name before, except… “Like the character in Star Wars?” she asked.
He smiled at her and said, “Yeah, I think that’s where they got my name from.”
“My name is Barbara, by the way. I am pleased to meet you, Jango.” She said with a natural courtesy that he found charming.
He suddenly did an almost comical double-take. “Barbara?” He asked, with the ghost of a grin on his face. He was a fan of movies in general, and horror movies were among his favorites. Not the gore-fest movies without any substance; he loved the movies that could give you chills.
“Remember Night of the Living Dead?” he asked her.
Against her will, she smiled. “They are coming for you, Barbara,” she said in an eerie voice.
His face split into a huge smile that seemed to belong to a different person than the one who had told her, just moments ago, that he would kill her if she lied.
He closed the lid of the case, locked it, and slid over the back-seat of the car into the driver’s seat.
He turned toward her and asked, “What’s the quickest way to your ranch?” Then, as an after-thought, he asked, “How long ago did this happen?”
She had to think about it for a moment. “Four days,” she answered confidently. “And, the quickest way to our ranch is to take the 60 out past Morristown, and then take the Carefree Highway about eight miles in, and our ranch is on the left. It is set way back off the road, but we have a sign out there with the name of our ranch on it. The Carefree Ranch,” she finished in a whisper that underlined the irony of the ranch’s name.
She suddenly looked desperate as she reached over and placed her hand on his knotted forearm. “Promise me you’ll get my children back. Promise me!” She pleaded.
He looked at her, and decided not to lie, “I can’t promise you that, Barbara. There are too many factors outside of my control. Your kids could already be dead, I might get killed, and a dozen other things that can throw a monkey wrench into the deal.”
Her crestfallen face prompted him to give her some glimmer of hope, although it would not be exactly what she wanted to hear, it could be what she needed to hear.
“I will promise you this, though. If your children are alive, I will do everything I can to get them back safe and sound, and, if your children are dead, I will do everything I can to make it right, and to bring justice to those who killed them.”
“What do you mean, ‘justice,’” she asked. “You mean, like, a trial or something? Like the law?” She had seen the writing on his sedan, “Ashfork County Sherriff’s Department” on the side of his car, and now assumed he held to the law.
“Law?” he repeated. “No, I won’t be coming to these people with legal jargon and precedent. The old law was all smoke and mirrors designed to make you think you were getting justice. The law was a heartless bitch that catered to power and wealth. I will bring justice to the ones that took those kids. The law comes with double-talk and paper-work. I come with gun-smoke and fire.”
She gulped as she realized that this man had probably never been a law enforcement officer, and that a law enforcement officer would not be much help in this case, anyway. His grim promises and his harsh view of the law served to give her a measure of peace that she had not felt in four days.
“Thank you,” she whispered to him. “Thank you.”
He started the car, and headed west. “Once more unto the breach,” he thought as he drove.
He chuckled as he considered how Shakespeare seemed to fit so many different occasions.
Twenty minutes into the drive, he noticed her squirming in her seat, trying to get her legs comfortable with his stick, two pump shotguns, and four double-barreled shot-guns leaning barrel-down in the foot well.
He pretended not to notice her discomfort, and shortly, she stopped squirming, and then fell asleep.
Jango breathed a sigh of relief. Interacting with people seemed to sap his energy, and he was glad she had fallen asleep. He had a mission, now, a distraction from his all-consuming quest for revenge on the Apocalypse Road. He had set his feet on a road of revenge, pain, violence, rage, and ruin, and the only place that road ended was in a boneyard.
He knew his road would end in death, but he did not care. His only care was that he deliver his rage and ruin upon as many of his enemies as possible before he died. Now, he had some new enemies. Old enemies, actually. They just wore new faces. Human predators. They fueled the fires of his violence like nothing else but zombies could.
He drove the rest of the way to the ranch in silent contemplation of the evil that man commits against man, and how it always came to pass that the children, animals, and women paid the price for man’s atrocities. It seemed to him that men rarely paid the wages of their actions.
The rain was hammering the world by the time he pulled down the long and winding gravel road that led to Carefree Ranch, and the sun had gone down. He brought the car to a stop in front of a sprawling ranch-house that shone like a new penny even in the dark. A beautifully crafted and well-kept house that was home only to pain and sorrow, now.
He felt despair as he watched the rain gouge and cut the earth into a thousand pieces. He had been depending on his tracking abilities to be able to find the stolen children and their abductors. The rain had robbed him of their trail.
He looked at the sleeping woman, and decided not to wake her. He settled into his seat, loosened his pistols in their holsters, and closed his eyes. The sound of the rain pounding against the car lulled him off to sleep, and when he opened his eyes again, it was almost sunrise.
He stared at the brilliant purple-blue of the pre-dawn sky, and marveled at the beauty. He shook himself out of the trance that the sky offered him, and turned to shake Barbara awake.
3
She awakened slowly, groggy and disoriented. Then, after a moment, she looked around, and almost began to cry again. With a courage born of necessity, she bit back her tears, and got out of the car.
“I am going to check out the house, then check the perimeter. That fuckin’ rain dog-dicked up any trail we might have had to follow, but those wagons might have cut a deep enough path in places that some track might have survived.” He told her as he strode up to the house, drew his right-hand pistol, and entered the ho
use.
He emerged several minutes later to tell her that the house was empty, and that she should go in and get cleaned up.
After she had gone inside, Jango immediately set himself to quartering the area in search of any signs that would point to which direction the Amish had taken. From her description, the Amish had come from the West, so he started there. He scanned the ground as he moved across the broken ground at a loping run. He moved with an unconscious and wild grace that was more like a wolf than a man. He covered an amazing amount of ground, and, after less than an hour of searching, he had found a partial trail, and their direction of travel. In the lee of a large outcropping of rock, the ground had been almost untouched by the raging storm. He found furrows cut into the ground from the wagon wheels, and he saw where a wagon had bumped the outcropping, and knocked loose a rock. The direction the rock had fallen, and the placement of the scratch told him that they had been leaving the ranch when it had happened.
He felt a savage surge of joy, and the thrill of the hunt as he loped back to the ranch house with his news.
When he entered the house, he found Barbara loading a pump-action shotgun. She had a large revolver in a leather cowboy style gun belt slung around her waist, and a grim cast to her features.
“No, no, no, no,” He immediately protested, knowing exactly what she meant to do. He worked alone, and she would only slow him down. He had to walk the killing path, and it would take him through the looking glass and out on the abattoir floor. This high-bred woman seemed as tough as anyone, but even she could not keep pace with him on the Apocalypse Road.
“I am going, and you can’t stop me,” she said defiantly.
Jango’s face went hard, and he said, “Yeah, lady, I can stop you. And if you make me stop you, it’ll hurt.”
She looked shocked as his words slammed against her sensibilities.
He softened his face and told her, “I will have to travel overland. This is a hard land that you have only sampled from the safety of your ranch. Out there, it is Jungle Rules, and I will be moving fast and hard to make up time. It isn’t because you are a woman, it is because very few people could hold the pace I will set for myself, and survive. You need to be here if I bring those kids back. You will die if you go with me. Then who will they have?” He let the weight of his words settle in before he spoke again.
“Anything that can be done, I will do. You have my word.” He placed a scarred and callused finger beneath her chin, and gently lifted her face so that he could see her eyes. “I will bring hell and fire to these men, and when I am done, nothing taller than a child will be left standing. Now, go and get me a picture of your kids so I will know who I am looking for.”
She quietly left the room, and when she returned, she had a large family portrait that showed four smiling people who no longer existed.
“This is the last picture we had taken. It was done just before the zombie outbreak,” she whispered sadly.
He scanned the faces of the two rosy-cheeked children, and knew that they would be easy to spot. They both had the same golden hair as their mother, and the fine bone structure that graced both the mother and their deceased father.
He handed the picture back to her.
She just looked at it in his hand. “Won’t you need it?” She asked.
“No,” he replied as he set the picture on the table. He turned on his heel, and strode from the house.
She hustled to catch up with him, and found him at his car. He had opened up the large case of weaponry and food, and was putting most of his shotguns in the case. He kept out one pump-action shotgun, and one double-barreled shotgun. He stuffed some extra shells for the long guns into his pack, and then slid the guns into scabbards that were attached to the harness that he wore. She noticed another scabbard on his back, and wondered what went in there. Her unspoken question was answered when she saw him lift the heavy, scarred stick that she had seen earlier, and slide it into the third scabbard in a reverent way that reminded her of a Samurai sheathing his sword.
Then, almost as an afterthought, he reached in to his case, and brought out an old, weathered-looking rifle with a scarred wooden stock. The steel had the dark gleam of a brand-new file, or a storm-cloud. It had no frills, was blocky, and looked as dangerous as the man who held it.
“What’s that?” she asked.
He looked at her, and replied, “An M1 Garand. It is, in my opinion, the finest rifle that has ever existed.”
He turned back to the case, and took out two olive drab pouches, which were filled to capacity. He fastened the pouches to his harness, and then closed and locked the case. He locked his car, and pocketed the keys.
He turned to face her, and she shrunk back from the look on his face. She could hardly recognize him. His eyes danced with that strange, lunatic light, and his face was the face of death made flesh. She felt her bladder begin to loosen as she realized exactly what she had unleashed on her small part of the world. This man really was the Zombie Fighter.
The legend that had sprung up around the half-mythical stories of a man who walked the land without fear, and who razed flat the ground upon which he walked was real, and here it was. This man, who, if the stories she had heard on the shortwave were true, had burned Ashfork to the ground, had destroyed an entire detachment of Army National Guardsmen who had turned to rape and torture, and had set fire to the very ground as he systematically cleansed the world of the risen dead, was about to set out after the men who had taken her children.
“You really are him,” she murmured in awe. “Death on a pale horse, the Zombie Fighter.”
Jango laughed, and then spoke in a woman’s voice that sounded like honey and blood, sex and death, with a touch of the Deep South, “If I ain’t, sugar, then it’s a damn fine joke!”
She could not say why, but she found herself comforted by the thought of such a creature on the trail of her children and their captors.
“I’m ghost,” he said in his normal voice as he turned away, and began running off to the East at a deceptively fast pace.
Long after he had disappeared from view, Barbara stared at the spot where she had last seen him. She mouthed a silent prayer to a God in whom she hardly believed anymore. She prayed for three things: The safe return of her children, the safe return of Jango, and the utter decimation of the men who had killed her man and taken her children.
4
On the hunt, his senses spread out like the tentacles of a jellyfish, Jango moved like a living shadow. He slid across the rough desert at a mile-eating pace, following the faint spoor of the Amish kidnappers; all the while remaining aware of his surroundings.
The presence of death always seemed to enliven him, and he reveled in it as he ran. He felt every surge of his muscles as he raced tirelessly across the hostile terrain. He had always felt like a part of the desert, and never more so than when he was hunting.
He had covered over twenty miles when he came across a solid-looking log-house that was pocked with bullet-holes, and blackened on one corner. The wagons had passed this way, and the damage looked recent, so he had to assume that this was the work of his quarry.
It did not look like the door to the house had been breached, so he shouted, “Hello the house!”
After a long, tense moment, he heard the rattle of a heavy steel shutter, and heard a man’s voice say, “What do you want, mister? If it’s trouble, I’ll gladly give it to you.”
Jango placed his rifle barrel-up on his shoulder, with the butt-stock in his scarred hand, and replied, “No trouble, amigo. I’m just looking for some fucked-up Yoders that passed through here a day or two ago. I know they passed here, and any information you can give me would be appreciated.” Then, intuitively, he added, “They took my friend’s kids, and I’m set on getting them back.”
He could hear a woman’s voice saying something, and the man trying to respond to her. After several minutes of what seemed to be a one-sided argument, a woman’s voice came from the house.
“They sure did come through here,” she said. “They wanted our kids, but we shot the shit out of their bearded asses, and sent them packin’.”
She continued, “Sons-a-bitches even tried to burn us out, but John soaked these logs with... wait. What’s that stuff called again?”
He heard the man answer, unintelligible from that distance, then, a second later the woman shouted, “Shingle Kote! Yeah. That stuff is awesome. Those Amish dick-heads were trying to get the house burning, but no go!” She chortled, and added, “Plus, I’m guessing the bullets didn’t help their concentration!”
He had to laugh at that. “All right.” He said. Then he thought to ask, “How many were there? How many did you manage to clip? And, what kind of weapons did they have?” He fired the questions at them quickly, feeling the passage of time like a slow knife-cut burning its way into his patience.
Some more chatter back and forth between the man and woman, and then, “Maybe thirty men total. I think we killed four, but I won’t swear to it. I know for a fact we wounded three more. They picked up their dead and wounded before high-tailing it out of here. Goddamned primitive assholes.” A throaty sob crossed the distance as she said, “They had so many kids in those cages. So many kids. What are they going to do with those kids?” She asked him.
“Bad things, lady. Nothing but bad things,” he replied. “How about weapons?”
“Oh,” she exclaimed, “just rifles and revolvers. Not a semi-auto or a scatter gun in the lot.”
Finally, some good news. “All right, thanks.” He said as he turned back to the trail, and started moving again.
“Wait! It’s almost dark. You can’t be out there in the dark.” She shouted.
Jango turned to the house, his face broken by a death-rictus smile, and replied, “It’s always dark where I am.”
He turned away and ran off without another word.
The woman, shaken by the man’s smile, and by his words, unconsciously crossed herself as the hair rose on her neck and her stomach clenched. She turned to her husband, a bespectacled man in his thirties with a messy shock of brown hair, and said, “John, that was death who just came calling. I swear to you that it was.”
