Generation Dead Book 2: What You Fear (29 page)

Jango
got set, raised his gun, and fired all in one fluid motion; the bullet hit the monster in the center of its forehead and it collapsed instantly. As he stared at the creatures he had just killed, the full weight of his situation suddenly struck him.

He leaned against the side of his dented, smashed, and otherwise thoroughly abused Geo Metro and sobbed. “What BULL-shit,” he whispered to himself. He leaned against his car, head hung, gasping for air. He was in excellent physical shape, but everyone has limits to their endurance; and the zombies had stretched his ability to endure almost to the breaking point.

Unnoticed by him, several zombies had made their way up the road. The creatures had followed the sound of his gunshots and the wailing of the now dead-again zombies. Jango just leaned against his car, panting, and thinking. He was shell-shocked, unaware and unmoving.

He was thirty-six years old, had no children, a bad case of P.T.S.D., and a built in paranoia that made a meth-head seem stable by comparison. He was average height, brown hair,
soft hazel eyes, with big, callused, violent looking hands that looked as if someone who liked to kill had designed them for a strangler. His build was deceptive, average looking, until you looked closely and saw that he appeared to be made of cables and ropes, all hard, dense muscle made for use. All of his spare time was spent making himself into a killing machine, exercising, running, pounding a heavy bag, and practicing with every kind of weapon he could make or buy. He believed that the world was out to get him, and it was up to him to protect himself.

As a child, he had suffered terrible abuse, and that suffering had left a permanent mark on his mind, body, and spirit. The pain and horror of abuse had wrought a change in him, all the way down to a cellular level.

He had spent his entire life preparing for the worst to happen, and now that it had, he found himself shocked into a lethargic numbness.

“
Deeeeeee-aaahhhhhh-eeeeeeeeeeee!” a zombie screamed as it rushed at him from no more than fifteen feet away.

Jango
jumped like a scared cat, straight up in the air, legs already churning in a full-speed run before he hit the ground again. He ran around his car, and got into the driver’s seat, slammed the door, started his car, and began gnashing his teeth while growling at the zombies through his cracked windshield. Foam flecked his lips and a strange, feral light started glowing deep within his eyes as he continued growling and grinding his teeth.

Jango
saw more than two-dozen zombies rushing his way in a loose, swaying formation that made him think of a group of children running while wearing straightjackets. He felt a dam break loose in his mind from the strain of it all.

Snarling and gnashing his teeth, he put his little car in gear, and started driving over his undead antagonists. Driving into them was probably more accurate since the tiny Geo Metro had the approximate ground clearance of a lawn mower, and about the same amount of horsepower as well.

“Thump, thunk, crunch,” as he drove in circles and figure-eights, knocking over, and then running over the zombies until none were left standing. His knuckles were ghost-white from his death grip on the steering wheel as he slalomed around the parking lot on a slimy slick of zombie juice and innards. Twenty minutes later, when Jango finally noticed that there was nothing left standing in the parking lot, he brought his car to a skidding stop, and put it in park. Looking around the parking lot, he was stunned at the level of carnage he had wrought. Mangled, wailing zombies littered the area; some with flattened body-parts stuck to the asphalt like snakes that had been ran over on the highway, but were still alive, doing that messed up, twisting crawl that went nowhere. And the blood…everywhere he looked was blood and guts. The zombie blood was thick, slimy, and an unhealthy shade of reddish-black interspersed with blotchy gray that looked like beef liver that had gone bad and begun to rot.

Jango
suppressed the urge to vomit, but just barely. He sat there for a moment, bile in the back of his mouth and in shock. Then suddenly his face split into a huge and genuine smile. “I knew it!!” he shouted out loud, “I just fucking knew it!” He pumped his arms up and down in the air, fists hitting the ceiling of his car.

It had suddenly occurred to him that his psychologist had been wrong when he told
Jango that it was pure fantasy to believe the world would just suddenly go to hell overnight, leaving only the strong to survive. All around him was proof that the wheels had come off of some very important shit, and that the meek were not going to get very much in Prescott right now.

The Road To Hell Is Paved With Zombies is available from
www.severedpress.com
and
Amazon