Zombie Fighter Jango #1 The Road to Hell Is Paved With Zombies (7 page)

Chapter
12:

Swords? We Don’t Need No Stinking Swords!

Jango had been thinking about the survival gear that would come in handy, and he had a pretty good list made up in his mind.

“What we need are knives, oh, a compass, a fire-starter, you know, like maybe a ferro-rod or a magnifying glass, or even both.” He was feeling better now that he knew he’d be getting out of there soon.

“And I
’d like to have some first-aid stuff, at least some anti-biotic ointment, a needle, and some thread.” He added, “But, seeing as how this place had so much survival rations and what-not, maybe we can score some top-notch black market first aid goodies.”

Sonja started getting into the idea
. “Yeah!! I think I saw knives and stuff up front!”

He
blinked at her. It hadn’t even occurred to him to check for knives when they were up there, and the fact that she had spotted them gave him a great respect for her powers of observation.

He smiled at Sonja and said, “Then let’s gets crackin’! Lay on, MacDuff!”

She shook her head, but a smile was on her face as she said, “You got it, Shakespeare.” Then she headed to the front of the store for what she hoped was the last time.

“See?” Sonja exclaimed excitedly as she pointed at a case, and a section of the wall behind the case.

She had definitely found something. The three-shelf deep glass case was full of knives of all kinds, and the wall was covered in large knives and swords.

“Whew,” Jango whistled as he saw
hundreds of knives in the case: all high-end knives, excellent quality, and expensive! Not that price mattered anymore, but he still felt compelled to check out the price tags through the glass.

“Ooohh, ooh,
ooh,” he said suddenly, sounding like a chimpanzee as he pointed through the glass at a particularly villainous looking knife that had a steep angle to the tip that made it look almost like a chisel. Except for the sheer heft and width to the four-inch blade, it was similar to a tanto-style blade. The knife had sulfurous looking yellow micarta grip scales that were ground down so that they looked like the skin of something prehistoric. Where the grip scales had been ground down, a black under layer showed that gave the grips a predatory look that perfectly matched the evil looking blade.

Jango immediately recognized the
knife as the work of a guy he had seen on YouTube. The knife was called the “Spine Cutter”, and it had been made by a guy named Dell in the UK. Dell owned and operated a small knife making business called Dirty Room Knives. He worked out of his garage, and made top-notch blades for a reasonable price. In Jango’s opinion, one of the things that had set Dell’s work apart from many other custom knife makers had been the utility of many of his designs. The Spine Cutter was a prime example of that; it was a killer, plain and simple. The knife had been made to cut flesh and shed blood, and Jango had wanted one since he had first seen them on YouTube.

“Look out, look out,”
he said to Sonja. She was too busy looking at the swords on the wall to notice what Jango was doing as he raised up his trusty ironwood stick, and brought it down in two swift strikes that blew out not only the glass on the top of the case, but the glass in the front as well. Sonja jumped a little, but went right back to her perusal of the swords.

Kicking
the glass off of his feet, he reached in to get the knife and the black, Kydex sheath that went with it. Jango shook the glass off the knife and sheath, and then pulled them from the case.

He
tested the edge on the pad of his thumb, and it was razor-sharp. With a satisfied smile, Jango snapped the Spine Cutter into its tight fitting Kydex sheath, and clipped it to his belt over his left hip.

Now that
he had found a fixed-blade knife, thus fulfilling his needs in that area, he turned to see how Sonja was doing.

Sonja had chosen a katana
with a long, gently curving blade, and an oversized grip that had been designed so it could be used with two hands. Sonja stood like a baseball player, and swung the sword at the air in front of her. She made a whooosh noise with her pursed lips every time she swung the sword.

“What are you going to do with that?” Jango asked her
. “I thought you were going to get a knife.”

“Why would I take a little tiny knife when I can have a sword?” Sonja asked
him incredulously, and then swung the sword again. She made the whoosh sound again.

He
just stood there, speechless, unable to process her logic. Jango didn’t understand the way that people thought, and he couldn’t fathom Sonja’s logic. His mind went blank as he tried to figure out why she would choose a sword over a knife. Given their situation, a sword would be a major detriment, while a knife would be useful. Why didn’t she know that? His confusion left him mute, and Sonja seemed to take his silence as encouragement. So she began to explain exactly why a sword was better than a knife.

“You’ve seen
The Walking Dead
, right?” She asked Jango.

He
nodded, as he began to see where she was headed, but he let her finish her explanation.

“Remember Michonne? She was the hardcore girl with the sword just like this one!
She kicked major ass.” Sonja smiled at Jango, as if she dared him to deny or defy her logic.

Sonja couldn’t understand why Jango would want her to choose a tiny knife instead of a Michonne style
Walking Dead
sword! The guy seemed to know a lot about throwing down, but how could he possibly think a knife would beat a sword? The thought was absurd.

Jango sighed, and wonder
ed if he should just let it go, and let her carry the damned sword, when she swung it through the air again.

“Whoosh!”
She beheaded another imaginary zombie with her sword.

He
couldn’t stand it anymore. “Wait, wait, wait,” Jango said, making a time out T with his hands, his stick held against his body under his left arm.

“Sonja, ahh, shit, how do I say this without sounding like a butthole
?” Jango thought about it for a moment, and then said, “That sword will get you killed out there, okay?”

“Here, let me show you, okay?”
He looked around, and quickly spotted a wooden handled broom. Perfect! He could definitely use the broom for his anti-sword demonstration.

He
walked over and grabbed it from where it was leaned against the wall, and then walked over to the rack that held all the shirts. He randomly chose a shirt from the rack. When he glanced at the writing on the red shirt. He saw that it said, “Gun Control Means Using Both Hands to Aim.” Jango chuckled.

He
carefully tied the shirt onto the broom handle just below the bristles. He held the broom with the bristles just about the height of his own head, and told Sonja, “Okay. I am going to pretend to be a zombie. Well, not
me
, the broom will be the goober, okay?”

Jango gathered steam and forged ahead, just wanting to get
her on the same page as him. “Vertebrae are bone and bone is hard. You can’t just cut through it that easily.” He continued talking when he saw that she had started to listen to him now.

“Vertebrae, I think, are going to be harder to cut than this broom handle. If you want to behead something, you have to be, like, I don’t know,
a fucking master of swords, or whatever they call themselves. There are too many things that can get in the way of you taking off a head, like if your blade doesn’t hit at the perfect angle, or your blade gets stuck in bone. Zombies don’t feel any pain, they don’t flinch, and if your sword gets stuck, you will be well and truly fucked,” Jango finished.

He
watched her face as Sonja’s common sense warred with what television had taught her would work in a Zombie Apocalypse. Then he pulled out his final card.

“I will come at you like a
zombie, and if you can cut off the head of this broom-goober, then I will believe that you can gank zombies with it, okay?”

Jango crossed his heart and said, “I promise I won’t give you any grief at all about it after this.”

She looked at him for a long moment, and finally said, “Fine. Let’s do it!”

Without warning,
he screamed at the top of his lungs, “Derrrr-EEEE-aaaaaaaHeeeee!” and ran straight at Sonja while he held the broom up in front of his face. The shirt flapped wildly on the broom handle as Jango charged.

Sonja
, startled, jumped a little bit, and then quickly brought the sword back over her right shoulder as if it was a baseball bat. But she had been too slow.

Jango
had reached her, and he had pushed the broom against the top of her head while he made a creepy keening sound that was unnervingly similar to the sounds that the zombies made when feeding. Then he pressed the bristles against her left shoulder and made chewing noises, “Nom, nom, nom, mmmm, nom, nom.” Then he screamed, “Rheeee-Eeeeee!”

By th
at time, Sonja had started laughing so hard she could barely breathe. The sword lay on the ground as she leaned over, hands braced on her knees. Tears streamed from her eyes, as she laughed so hard that didn’t even make any noise.

After a few minutes,
she was finally able to draw a breath, “Heeeeeeeeeee,” she wheezed, as she took in a long breath, still giggling a little bit as she stood up straight and wiped the tears from her face.

“You are one
seriously
deranged individual, Jango!” Sonja chuckled, and almost burst into another fit of laughing when she looked at him and saw that he was still waving the broom at her while he made zombie faces.

“So what should I do?”
She asked him. “If the sword is crap, what will a little knife do to help me?”

Jango suddenly realized that he hadn’t really explained why he took the Spine Cutter
; he realized that he had only told her why NOT to get a sword. That was another aspect of his messed-up mental processes. He unconsciously believed in thought-projection, or a kind of universal knowledge. He unconsciously assumed that if he knew something, everyone else must know it as well.

He
took a breath, dropped the broom, and took his stick out from under his arm.“Okay,” Jango began, “I took the knife for other reasons. This knife is just as worthless for ganking goobers as the sword is.”

“The thing about a good knife, though, is that you can
make
weapons with it. Like my stick, for example. It’s excellent for putting zombies down permanently. You use your stick right, a hard strike to their skull will cause instant destruction of their brains. Then it’s lights out for the nasty bastards. You can also make traps, and cut rope, and do all kinds of other stuff with a knife, too.”

Sonja leaned to look into the case full of knives. After a moment or two, she reached in and grabbed a small, elegant looking knife that had a sweeping curve to the handle just behind the blade. The grip scales were a soft orange shade of tan, and it had a black Kydex sheath.

The knife seemed familiar to Jango, and he leaned in for a closer look. “Ha!” He said out loud.

“What, what?” Sonja asked him.

“Oh, no big deal. I just recognized that knife, well, the style, anyway.” Jango had seen that same knife on another YouTube channel. He figured the G&J Gun House must have had a manager who was a fan of the YouTube knife making community, and had stocked some of their work.

He
explained to Sonja where he had seen the knife. “Yeah, look at the little symbol on the blade, right there.” He pointed to the blade. There was a small symbol, a stylized “LMK” etched into the blade near the grip.

“That “LMK” stands for LMarshall Knives. He had a little knife making business, and this knife is one of his AEB-L stainless steel knives.” Jango finished his story with, “Those little knives are gnarly and tough. NICE choice!”

Sonja blushed as she clipped the knife and sheath to her belt.

“So what were you saying about sticks?”
She asked him after a few moments of silence. “You said that if someone uses a stick right, then it is bad ass. Well, what is the right way to use a stick?”

Jango pointed to the wall just to the left of the swords
she had been looking at earlier. “You see those?” He asked her, pointing at several things that looked like canes, or lumpy sticks. The difference was that they appeared to be made out of some kind of plastic.

“Those are Cold Steel Shillelaghs,”
he told her. He had recognized them when he spotted them earlier. He had been impressed with the videos he had seen on YouTube of their performance.

“
I saw some demonstrations on YouTube.” Jango looked embarrassed for a moment. Even though he avoided people like the plague because of the threat he believed all people posed to him, he still craved the human connection. YouTube had been the only way he could connect in any way with other human beings. He had always been embarrassed about his inability to function well in social situations. He shook himself out of his thoughts, and finished his pitch to Sonja.