Jango's Anthem: Zombie Fighter Jango #2 (3 page)

The huge basement filled with a chorus of “Hell yeah!” and “Let’s do it!” Jango smiled, and gave the now smiling purple haired girl
’s shoulder a squeeze before he moved back to the guns he had prepared for them.

Jango quickly made sure that each clip
was secured, and then chambered a round before he handed the weapons over. Before he gave them their weapons, he told each girl, “This is the safety, don't take it off of safe until I tell you to, okay?”

The girls looked frightened
. Jango could smell their fear in the air, and he was glad that they were afraid, because their fear would keep them sharp, and make them strong.

When Jango had handed out all
ten of the rifles, he gave the remaining thirteen girls double-barreled shotguns, and several extra rounds to put in their pockets. He showed them where the safety was, just behind the dual triggers, and told them the same thing he had told the other girls. “Don't take it off safety until I tell you to, okay?”

Jango looked over his ragtag army of
twenty-three frightened, blood spattered orphans, and he felt a great surge of pride to be going into battle with them. He looked around and made eye contact with each girl before finally saying, “Let's go kill these twisted mother-fuckers.”

As they walked back up the stairs, Jango asked
several questions, “Where do these guys usually come from? Do they park here by the house? What goes on?”

The brave
brunette, the one who had been the first to climb out of her cage, spoke up. “They come in on the back road and they park all around the Pit. I mean, you know, the corral where they have the fights.”

“
Do they get out of their vehicles right away, or do they come up to the house?” Jango asked.

“
Yeah,” the brave girl said. “They get out of their cars and then they just sit in the bleachers that are back there while they wait for Mr. Banks and The Killer.”

J
ango nodded to himself as they crested the stairs, grinning, as he thought about how long the militia members would have to wait for Banks and The Killer to get there.

Jango led the girls to the fro
nt of the huge house, and up to the vault-like front door.  A few of the girls kicked the unmoving body of Mr. Banks as they filed past it.

Jango
sighed, “I never did find out if his fucking potion works or not, or what he was doing out in the woods with me when I was sick.”

The brunette girl spoke, “No, that stuff was just bull sh
..I mean, poop. He tricked a lot of people into coming here by telling them that he had some herbal cure. He was going to bring you here so you could fight too. Or they might have just killed you and let you fight as a groaner.”
Jango shuddered at the thought of being a zombie. Everything the girl said made perfect sense, though, so he shrugged it off, and focused on the task at hand. He pressed the gray button on the remote device, and opened the heavy steel front door. After he and the girls filed out the door, he closed the door, and then locked it. He pocketed the remote, and headed around the back of the sprawling estate as his army of orphans followed on his heels like a bunch of heavily armed ducklings.

Chapter 5:

Taking it
Back

Jango and the girls made their way across a broad expanse of grass under the darkening sky. They wended their way along a small footpath that led through the woods behind the main house. They emerged from the woods a few minutes later and a smaller, but still substantial house, came into view.

The
brunette, who Jango had mentally dubbed “the brave one,” said, “There's the corral. See? It's right next to the garage. They keep all the zombies and the dogs in the garage.”

He
looked around, took note of the dark, thick woods, and began to mentally finalize his plan for dealing with the militia members.

“
So what time are these guys supposed to show up?” Jango asked.

“
They usually show up right after dark,” said a little Asian girl who had stern eyes and a determined set to her jaw.

“
Then we better hurry,” Jango said. “You said they show up along the driveway over here, right?”

“
Yeah, that's where they come in,” said a little red haired girl. She was very petite, and had a black eye that had turned an ugly shade of yellowish-purple. “They come right up that road and then circle around the corral. They point their headlights kind of inward.”

Jango nodded
to himself; that made perfect sense. That way the men could enjoy the action from a nice, comfortable vantage point. Just sit back on the bleachers and have a nice view of death without ever being in danger. “Fucking twists,” Jango thought.

“All right, listen up!” Jango said in a stern voice. “I want all of you girls in the woods to my right. I want you dead fucking quiet, and I want you out of sight. You will take cover behind trees, and make sure you
aren’t in a position to shoot any of your friends. The men will be sitting with their backs to you, and when I give you the signal, you just cut loose on those dirty sons of bitches.”

“
What's the signal supposed to be?” The question came from a girl who, up until now, hadn’t uttered a single word to Jango. She had blonde hair and she wore a worried expression.

“
Don't worry,” Jango said with a smile. “You'll know my signal when you see it.”

Jango hustled the girls in
to the woods, and told them, “Go ahead and take your weapons off safe, but don’t mess around! Don’t you put your fingers on those triggers until it is go-time. You understand? Don’t touch those triggers until it is the killing hour. I don't need you killing your friends or messing up the plan. You need to know that if these guys get a chance, or get any kind of warning, they will kill us. You do understand that they will do worse to any of you that they take alive, right? I need you all on the same page with me.”

The girls’ ashen faces told Jango that his hard sell had gotten the message across to them, and that they would wait.
All the girls nodded their heads vigorously in agreement and he led them into the woods, and showed them where he wanted them to hide. He positioned every girl behind trees to give them cover. He also made sure that they had a clear line of fire to the bleachers. They would be able to shoot the men in their backs from less than thirty feet away. The trees would give them protection in case any of the men were able to return fire.

“
So how many of these crap-sacks do you think there are?” Jango asked. “Just a rough estimate?”

The brave girl spoke up
again. “There are nineteen of them in all.” Then she hurriedly added, “But that doesn't count the slimy bastard or Mr. Banks.” Jango almost laughed out loud at the guilty look on the girl’s face when she realized what she had said.

“Nineteen
guys?” Jango thought. That was a lot of men. A lot of
armed
men. But he looked at the determined faces of the twenty-three brave and desperate warriors who were depending on his guidance, and he felt as if his heart had been given wings.

“
I want you to stay here,” Jango said. “But I don't want you to worry because I'll be close by. Just be ready for my signal.”

The girls looked frightened, and Jango could tell that they
didn't want him to go. But the simple truth was that he did his best work alone. He was at his most dangerous when he had some room to maneuver, and no innocents to worry about.

The girls watched
in nervous silence as Jango melted into the shadows of the woods without a sound. They had no frame of reference for what lay before them, and their stomachs churned as their one ray of hope disappeared into the inky darkness of the forbidding forest.

“Do you think he’ll come back?” The small girl named Sarah asked in a terrified whisper.

Melissa, who felt fierce pride in the fact that she had heard of their potential savior first, whispered scornfully, “Of course he will! Are you crazy?” Then she added in a softer tone, “He is so bad-ass, I’m going to be just like him one day so no one will ever hurt me again.”

The muscular girl stepped closer to Melissa, and gave her a one-armed hug. “I am with you, Mel.
We’ll make ourselves so hard and tough that we can’t be hurt. We’ll have to protect ourselves, you know? He’s leaving when this is done, I can just tell.”

Melissa turned to her and said, “He won’t just leave us, Connie
. He’ll make sure we’re safe. He’s a knight, but not like the stories. He’s a real life version. He’ll make sure, you’ll see.” She gave the strong girl a hug, and gently pushed her back toward where Jango had positioned her.

Melissa said, “Now just stay still. This is our only job, and you heard him. You already know what those bastard-asses will do if we don’t do this right.”

The girls all murmured their assent into the darkness. The stiffening of their resolve and their sense of purpose became an almost palpable force that pulsed through their hearts and minds in a wave of healing energy.

Unaware of the
raw emotions that the group of girls felt, Jango silently made his way down the inside of the tree line. He followed the long and winding driveway that would bring the men into his make-shift kill zone.

He
made his way through the woods for a couple of hundred feet, and then hunkered down to wait for the militiamen.

As Jango waited, he thought about the evil that men do, and wondered how humans could be capable of the things that they do.
He knew full well that every human had the potential for miraculous acts of decency, as well as a depth of depravity that would boggle the mind. He knew that inside every human there was an angel and a demon, darkness and light, good and evil. He also knew that each human had the ability to choose which path they would follow.

“What you
choose to do,
that’s
the truth,” he said out loud.

He
didn't have long to wait. Less than half an hour after he had hunkered down, he saw vehicles coming up the driveway. He melted back further into the woods, and with the patience of death, he waited. He carefully watched, and counted each person in the vehicles that went past.

After
he had counted nineteen people, Jango waited for several more minutes. When he saw that no one else would be arriving, he swiftly made his way back to where he wanted to position himself for the coming ambush.

By the
time he had made his way back along the tree line, the militia members had all gathered on the aluminum bleachers that occupied one side of the corral. Careful to make sure that he wouldn't end up in the girls’ line of fire, he crept up to the very edge of the woods, until he was less than fifteen feet away from his targets.

Jango slowly slid his pistol from the shoulder holster, quietly released the magazine, and replaced it with a full one from his pocket.
He placed the magazine that was missing one round in the pocket of his pants.

Jango listened to the rude jests and raucous laughter of the men as they bragged about what they would do
to the girls later that night, and he felt the feral fragments of his shattered psyche surge forward to the front of his mind. Then, he felt something else stir inside of his mind, something hideous, powerful, and so full of rage that he felt himself mentally recoil from the mind-cage that held it. Jango’s reintegration with the two fragments of his mind, who he called the dog and the albino woman, had given him a greater knowledge of self, and he instinctively knew what it was that had stirred within his mind; it was the beast. The beast was a part of him that even the dog and albino woman had shied away from. It was the final fragment of his fractured mind. Jango was the part of their mind that took all of the pain, but the beast
was
the pain.

The
beast felt like scorched earth, broken bones, weeping widows, razor blades, and torn flesh in Jango’s mind. Even though it was caged and chained deep within the confines of his mind, the beast was still strong enough to influence Jango, the dog, and the albino woman. Jango forged the iron of his will into stronger chains and bars to hold the evil that dwelt within him, and the beast fell silent.

Jango shook himself out of his own mind, and focused on the men once more. They continued to joke and laugh, oblivious to the
fact that a deadly predator stood so close to them.

Jango decided
that the time to attack had come. He let loose a terrifyingly bloodcurdling and perfectly executed zombie hunting cry, “RheeeeeeeAaaaaeeeeeee-Eeeeeee!”

Stricken with horror by the closeness of the zombie
’s scream, the militiamen all stood in fear and confusion as they tried to fumble the weapons out of their holsters and look everywhere at once.

Jango started shooting
at the men, and a split second after he had fired his first shot, he heard the sharp “snap, snap” of 22 caliber rounds being fired, punctuated by the heavy boom of the double-barreled shotguns being fired. The militia members fell like wheat before a scythe.

The
men danced, shuddered, and jerked under the relentless fusillade of lead that came from their former victims.

As t
he gunfire from the woods tapered off, it reminded Jango of making pop-corn. He chuckled, removed the partial magazine from his pistol, and replaced it with a full one.He placed the partially spent magazine in the same pocket as the other, and reminded himself to reload them as soon as possible.

Jango stepped out from behind his tree, and cautiously approached the bodies that
were strewn across the aluminum bleachers. As Jango approached the men, he turned his head to his right and nodded toward the woods to let the girls know it was okay to come out.

When Jango finally stood over the bodies, he saw that they
had been riddled by the girls’ gunfire. He didn't bother looking to see who'd been hit by his own fire, because as far as he was concerned, the girls had killed every last one of them. This was theirs, and he knew that they needed it. Some of the men were moaning, and Jango swiftly dispatched them with a single bullet to each of their brains. He holstered his weapon, and then went from man to man, and broke their necks. To make sure they didn’t come back, he twisted their heads until their necks gave way, and then jerked their heads around to make sure the spinal cords were fully severed. A couple of the girls vomited, and a couple of them cheered.

In the silence that followed,
Jango heard a rustling in the woods, and with animal like speed, he rushed unerringly toward the sound. As soon as he hit the tree line, he threw himself to his right, rolled and then rushed back at an angle toward the spot the sound had come from. He saw a human form pressed up against a tree, and he rushed at it.

Before the
person could react, Jango had his pistol screwed into their ear, and his left hand had gripped the person’s larynx. He could smell a man’s smell as well as the sour smell of fear on the person.

“
What do you want, Mr. Man,” Jango asked in the poison sugar voice of the albino woman. His mind would never be normal, and even though he had reintegrated the albino woman and the dog, the two fragments of his psyche would always have their own partitions in his tortured mind.

“
I just came for my granddaughter, Mister, I don't want any trouble, but I know she's here and I won’t leave without her,” said the man.

Jango's eyesight had readjusted to the darkness and
he saw that the man carried what appeared to be a pump shotgun hanging at his side in his right hand and a blocky semiautomatic pistol in a holster on his hip. The man wore large glasses, and a woodsman's clothes.

“
Let's just step out into the light, and see if any of the girls recognize you. If they do, cool, then we'll go from there. But if they don't, you will be as dead as those piles of zombie-meat on the bleachers over there,” Jango said in his normal voice. He took his hand off of the man's larynx, and gripped the man’s left shoulder instead. Before stepping out of the woods, Jango told the man, “Don't even think about trying anything with me, because I will burn you down and leave you where you lay.”

As Jango and the man stepped out into the light
cast by the circle of automobiles, the girl that he knew only as the brave one let out a squeal of joy. “Grandpa Don, Grandpa Don,” the girl squealed happily, as she dropped her rifle and ran to hug the man.