Jango's Anthem: Zombie Fighter Jango #2 (14 page)

“Fuck yeah! Die motherfuckers!” They whooped and cheered as they cleared the two or three remaining creatures from their path. They were so engaged in the act of slaughter, they
didn't hear the things creeping out of the houses, yards, alleys, and barns all around them. The shadows crawled with shambling, jerky, off-kilter motions. Something sprinted into the clearing, heading straight for them.

Agent Stern was the first to notice the army of putrefying humanity that had surrounded them. In every direction, human beings that had been dead and decomposing for days lunged forward, loose skin rotting and sloughing off their muscles in sheets. That queer, black and purple mold covered large patches of the remaining skin like fur, seeming to feed off the rot and decay leaking out of the things.  Their black skin
was mottled with grays, blues, and purples, from both the mold growth and the normal decay, accelerated by the extreme African heat. Angry reds and pinks created a livid contrast where the skin was missing entirely and raw muscle showed through. Even these areas, naked of skin, crawled with purple fungus. Dirt from whatever grave they'd crawled out of was matted in their hair and caked their ragged clothing. Their skin rippled and undulated with movement as legions of carrion-eating insects and vermin burrowed through their flesh. Rodents, birds, lizards, snakes and other opportunistic scavengers, crawled through the gaping holes in their limbs and torsos, feeding off the rotting muscles and organs as the dead stumbled forward.

Like the cows, goats, and pigs, this decaying horde showed the ghastly injuries that had ended their previous lives and countless scavengers seethed in the machete wounds and bullet holes that decorated their carcasses. Some had limbs missing. Others had chest wounds, neck wounds, stomach, and even head injuries, all ecstatic with movement. Some
had been eviscerated, disemboweled by sharp blades. They trampled their own organs and intestines as they marched inexorably forward. One great tide of rotting death as if every grave for miles had suddenly regurgitated its contents back onto the earth. 

“We've got company!”

The rangers formed a circle, hitting the dirt, linking legs, and unloading their M-4 rifles on the creatures in all directions as they moved in closer. They wasted few bullets. Each shot annihilated a skull, obliterated brain matter, shutting the creatures down like turning off a light switch. As soon as one lifeless thing fell, another scrambled over it, getting ever closer to the rangers. Sergeant Holder fired the SAW in a wide semi-circle, cutting a swath through the undead creatures, tearing them to crimson confetti. Where one creature disintegrated, another staggered in to fill the void. Some did more then stagger, some came at them at a full sprint. A few, even carried weapons, machetes, picks, shovels, swinging them with deadly intent.

They had allowed the creatures to get too close, allowed themselves to be surrounded while they were busy gunning down the undead farm animals. Now, all avenues of escape
were clogged with corpses, corpses that were still alive. There was no choice but to stand and fight.

A young ranger, Sergeant Turner Holmes, twenty-two years old, emptied his M-4 into the nearest creatures, splattering the earth all around with fragments of bone, chunks of flesh, and a strawberry pulp of brains and blood. The hammer fell on an empty chamber and the young ranger reached for another clip as the rancid horde surged forward. Turner jammed the clip into his weapon as two of his fellow rangers picked off a few of the creatures closest to him. They were so close now he only had time to get off a single, close-range
shot, that spattered him with flecks of blood and gray matter. Then the horde of decaying dead fell upon him. He fought with all his skill and training, driving punches, elbows, and hammer-fists into the creature's putrescent flesh. He snapped the neck of the first fetid pile of rot to grab hold of him. The thing tore a huge avulsion in Turner's forearm even as the young ranger twisted its neck, cracking several cervical vertebrae and leaving the thing's head lolling from its broken neck like a tetherball. The other soldiers turned to help, firing into the advancing horde.

More of the dead things grabbed hold of Turner. He lost all reason, forgot all bravery, discipline and training and screamed for his life, begging the mindless things for mercy.

“No! No! Dooooon't! Please! Noooo!!!”

Teeth and nails bit and clawed at his skin, tearing his flesh, wrenching hunks of muscle and fat from the bone, boring into the soft tissue of his belly and pulling his organs out in handfuls, stuffing them into their greedy mouths. Turner's screams were terrible. His cries rose to a pealing shriek that shivered up the spines of the remaining soldiers. They ended abruptly when one of the dead villagers pushed his head inside Turner's chest cavity and ate its way to his heart.

Bodies were torn apart by both gunfire and the voracious mouths of the undead as they overwhelmed the small squad. Soon, two more of his squad joined poor Turner. One was hacked to ribbons by a dead villager wielding an axe. The rest of the squad formed a tight circle and began moving back the way they came, alternating between firing and reloading to maintain a continuous volley of gunfire as they fought their way through the living corpses.

“Head for the extraction point!”

“It's the other way, Lieutenant! It's on the other side of the village!” Agent Stern yelled as he fired two shots into the skull of an ancient crone with a missing arm and bullet holes in her chest and stomach that crawled with pale, squiggling larva. She fell to the charred earth in a cloud of dirt and ash and lay still.

Just beyond the village, was the hill upon which the Blackhawk that brought the Ranger squad to this dark corner of hell had
landed. The Blackhawk could only carry eleven soldiers. The CIA agents had been in Uganda for weeks. It was their intelligence that had brought the rangers in. Now, with three soldiers dead, there would be room for them all in the helicopter, if they could get to it.

“Then head for that ridge! We need some high ground! We can hold them off there!” Lieutenant Bouchard yelled. Something in his voice gave Stern the impression the man was having the time of his life. Stern knew the type. The Lieutenant had spent so much time at war, that even this nightmare felt more familiar to him than regular civilian life. The military had made him as much of a monster as the dead things tearing apart their team. Stern wondered what his years in the CIA had done to him, even as he fired a single shot into the forehead of a young boy who'd been no older than ten or eleven when he'd been murdered and then reborn as one of these horrible things. He was already aiming at the next target when the boy's corpse hit the dirt, a pregnant teenage girl with a fetus eating its way out of her womb. He
didn't feel a thing as he put a bullet in the woman and her rapacious offspring or the next target or the next. Even though he'd never contemplate the notion himself, he'd have felt no more remorse if they'd been alive. To him, there'd always been a difference between a human being and an enemy and that's where he and Lieutenant Bouchard were alike. 

Chapter 4.

Northern Uganda, September 30, 2013

General Joseph Nwosu stared at the rotting things stumbling around in the dog cages.

“What are they?” He asked his first Lieutenant, Andrew Karutunda.

Karutunda was the exact opposite of General Nwosu. Nwosu was a large, dark-skinned man with as much muscle as fat on his mammoth 6'4” 280-pound frame. His blue and gold military uniform was festooned with medals. A raised scar split his bald scalp like a lightning bolt. In contrast, Karutunda was slight of frame with big, open, curious eyes and long lashes. The general had an overwhelming, threatening presence that filled the room with an oppressive pall of menace. The lieutenant was nearly invisible in comparison, but there was something sinister in his soft, almost feminine features. A dark intellect lurked beyond his placid eyes. A smile slithered across his face like a serpent swimming through a murky swamp. He was clearly impressed by the rotting carcasses snarling behind the chain-link fence. There was a feral gleam in his eye. The lieutenant licked his lips and smiled wider as the general recoiled from the stench of fetid meat. The general had never trusted the man. He was certain the lieutenant was crazy. But his kind of crazy was useful in war.

“Zombies, sir.
We buried them in a mass grave in Makombo and they crawled back out the next day covered in this- this mold.”

General Nwosu nodded.
He'd heard the tales before. Walking dead covered in purple fungus, attacking and eating the living. His mind began working overtime, calculating risks versus rewards, considering all his options. If he could weaponize these- these things, he could take Uganda with ease, end the war, maybe even take all of Africa. Fear was a powerful weapon and these things were terrifying. They were walking nightmares straight from hell. The general imagined an army of the dead marauding across the plains of Africa, laying waste to entire cities and multiplying, growing larger with each town they consumed.

What force could stand against them? He wondered.

“You say it is the mold that makes them walk? That makes them come back to life?”

The soldier nodded.

“That's what the doctor says, sir.”

“Which doctor? Bring this doctor to me. I want to talk to him.”

Lieutenant Karutunda dialed a number on his cell phone.

“Doctor?
You are needed in the general's office, immediately. Okay. We'll be waiting. He will be here in an hour, General.”

“Good.”

“There's something else. Some Americans came to the village. Soldiers. They came two days after our soldiers left. The dead had risen. The Americans fought the dead ones. They killed hundreds of them, but they lost a few of their soldiers. The soldiers that were bitten came back too. “

“The bites changed them?”

Karutunda nodded.

“Yes, general. The mold spores seem to be transferred through saliva and once in the bloodstream, they spread rapidly, taking over the entire system in a matter of hours, turning the victim into...” he gestured toward the American soldier with half his face and most of his right arm missing.
“These things.”

General Nwosu nodded, rubbing the whiskers on his chin and smiling.

“I want to know how it works. I want to make more.”

“It took five hundred of these things to stop a handful of well-armed American soldiers. I don't know if they will be quite the scourge you think they will be.”

The general shook his head.

“You're wrong. These things are the answer. How smart are they? Can they carry weapons?”

“I-I don't know. They don't seem to have any higher brain functions. They just seem to eat. They don't even protect themselves. Watch.”

He pulled his revolver, aimed it at the undead soldier, and pulled the trigger. The thing took three shots in the chest and continued to stagger forward, heedless of the damage done to it. Lieutenant Karutunda gestured toward the soldier who now had a grouping of three small holes in his chest and a fist-sized exit wound in his back.

“You see?”

The general's smile widened.

“I see that he is still standing, and he'd rip you apart right now if you were in that cage with him. I want you to find a way to weaponize these creatures. They must be teachable. Everything can be taught. Everything can be controlled.”

“Some of them were carrying weapons when we found them, sir.”

“Weapons?”

“Knives, axes, machetes.
That sort of thing.”

General
Nwosu's smiled widened further.

“If they can carry knives, they can carry guns.”

The general placed both elbows on the desk with his fingertips tented in front of him. The look in his eyes was that of a house-cat staring into a fishbowl.

Lieutenant Karutunda nodded.

“You'll get your army of zombies, general. I'll see to it.”

They both turned to look at the redheaded man in the shiny, sweat-stained suit, sauntering into the room
like he owned the place. He was flanked by six of the general's guards, nervously aiming their guns at the intruder's head.

“Who the
fuck are you? Who let this man in here?”

Five of the guards turned to look at the guard closest to the man with the red hair.

“He said he was a friend of yours. He insisted,” the guard answered.

The general rose from his seat, pointed his gun at the chest of the guard and pulled the trigger three times, hollowing out the center of the man's chest. The guard fell over and died instantly.

Next, the general pointed the gun at the intruder who only smiled and held up his hands.

“I embellished a bit. We're not friends yet, General, but we will be.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“My name is Bill Vlad. I am a business man and I am interested in the product you have discovered, the purple fungus.” He pointed to the cages of walking corpses. “I am willing to pay
you handsomely for it, enough to buy your own tanks, and I can also show you how to use the mold to strengthen your army and conquer this entire continent. Interested?”