Jango's Anthem: Zombie Fighter Jango #2 (13 page)

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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 she 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.