Tank and The Bomb

by WAZeigler

A new story, a new Tank, and the same old humans. This time instead of the cool tempered and friendly Tank. Tank is now a vicious and violent brute that uses his unlimited strength as he wishes. But all of that changes when he comes across Jockey, who leads him to a nuclear missile silo and has him remove the warhead from one of the missiles. Will he become a gentle giant in time?

The short story you are about to read entitled "Tank and the Bomb" is a continuation of the "Infected Eyes" story but it is not required you read the first story to enjoy this one. It is a new story with a new yet somehow identical in appearance set of characters. Without further ado I present…

Tank and the Bomb

By: WAZeigler

For Tank, the world was just one big excuse to be angry. It just started with outbursts of just shouting angrily at anybody who looked at him funny. Then he started committing random physical violence, at anybody who was nearby. Then finally it got to the point where he never felt any other feelings besides anger and hatred towards everything. As his mind changed so did his body. His skin became rough and thick, his muscles bulged from his tree trunk like arms and his sinuous veins like ropes. His skin became more or less a grey color and his neck was so thick his jaw was stuck open with his tongue dangling out. Wherever he walked, the ground shook, car alarms would sound. This would cause swarms of the common infected to attack the cars just for Tank to get angry at them and smash the common infected and the car to a quivering, jagged, lump of metal and pulverized flesh. Tank saw the common infected the same way the humans did. He saw them as stupid animals with no purpose, a waste of life, weak.

Tank never slept, so he sees the sun rise every morning. He walks down the roads of the small town he lived in as if he owned the place. For all Tank cared, he did own the place. To Tank, he was the king of everything he could see. Then one day, he saw an infected man, and unlike the common ones that just sort of mumble random things, growl, or shout gibberish at each other, this infected man was laughing hysterically. The infected man was laughing not at something funny. It was laughing at Tank, and Tank didn't like it.

Tank growled at the scrawny, hunched over, manically laughing infected man and smashed at the ground. But the infected man only laughed harder. Tank charged up to the infected man and pinned him to the side of a building with one massive fist and roared in its face. Upon closer inspection, the infected man seemed to have torn off its own lips, exposing its rotten teeth and receded gum line giving it a permanent gruesome smile. Tank roared at it, and shook it around like a rag doll. But the infected man kept laughing, and then the infected man jumped on Tank's back and put its hands over Tank's eyes. Tank thrashed about blindly as he tried to shake off the small and insanely laughing assailant. For what felt like hours the "Jockey" as Tank now called the infected man, led him farther and farther away from his home and into the desert. Tank tripped over gates, stepped through barbed wire, over concrete barriers, and smashed through a few barricaded doors, until the Jockey let Tank see where he was led to.

The room was large and circular shaped. On the outer edges of the room there were windows looking into observation rooms and control panels and warning signs littered the walls. Catwalks led to upper levels of the room and when Tank looked up there was no ceiling, only a large hole as big around as the whole room that was letting in sunlight. But the thing in the center of the room was the most interesting. In the center of the room was a massive rocket. A missile, of what variety Tank did not know. But the large Tri-fold suggested it was a nuclear weapon. The Jockey pointed to the top of the missile and looked at Tank. Tank looked more closely at the top of the missile and he saw that it looked like somebody took a hammer to the top and managed to break open the shell of the bomb to reveal the explosive plutonium core within. Something about the faint glow of the core calmed Tank. Maybe it was because he knew if he got angry and started smashing things here he could be instantly vaporized like everything else for 10 miles or maybe the somewhat friendship the Jockey showed him. But Tank thought it was most likely the first thing. Jockey led him up one of the catwalks that bent and buckled under Tank's immense weight to the top of the missile where there was writing on the missile saying "Help Wanted: Strong person with gentle touch". The Jockey smiled as if writing that small sentence was a great achievement. Tank shrugged and decided to reach into the hole in the missile's shell and grab the core with both hands and pull. Metal bent, bolts broke, screws were forcefully ripped from their holes, but no blast, no incineration, no toxic mushroom cloud, just Tank, standing on the catwalk, with the heart of the most powerful weapon on earth in his grasp.

The Jockey smiled and laughed more. The sound of Jockey's laughter annoyed Tank and made him want to beat Jockey with his own property. But considering Jockey's property was a nuclear warhead Tank decided to let Jockey have his laugh. Then Jockey got on Tank's back again and Tank walked out of the building with Jockey and the bomb on his back.

The bomb was not as heavy as Tank expected. Once out of its casing, it only weighed at the most fifty, maybe sixty pounds. It was even warm to sooth Tank's aching back from carrying Jockey and the bomb all day. However the air did seem to have a certain metallic tang around the bomb and he was getting unnaturally tan on his back and probably skin cancer from the radiation. But every day, Tank trudged along empty roads, stopping from time to time at an old gas station to find food and drink. The small chip bags annoyed Tank. They were too small for Tank's giant meaty fingers to open so Jockey had to open them for him. However, the locked freezer rooms at restaurants were easily opened by Tank smashing the door off its hinges.

Day after day they walked, with no definite sense of where they are or where they were going. Until one day they came across an old factory, but for some odd reason the smoke stacks were still billowing dark clouds of smog as if to this day even though the disease infected almost every human in North America, somebody was still in the boiler room, shoveling coal into the burners. Tank and Jockey walked into the factory through one of the loading bays. They looked around to see old steel making equipment, the enormous vats that used to contain molten iron and carbon now cooled and solidified into giant chunks. The vat that was still in the furnace was obviously in there for a long time because the carbon and iron in the vat was boiling white hot and bubbling over the rim and spilling onto the factory floor in waves of molten steel. The melted blood of industry spilled all over the floor.

Tank and Jockey decided to look in the boiler room. If steel was the blood of industry, then the boiler room of the factory must be the stomach and the burners its mouths. Greedy mouths that never stop eating from the second the first spark is lit until the last few embers die out, always consuming more and more until there is none left. Seemingly ancient and long since unused machinery and rusty pipes littered the walls, and chains hung from the ceiling like wind chimes. The two kept looking around until they saw in the light of the roaring flames in the burners, an infected man. "Smoker" as Tank called this one, was about average human height with scars and bumps on its skin. A large squishy growth on its neck that was made of pure muscle, allowing Smoker's mouth and neck to be like the barrel of a gun, shooting his long rope like tongue great distances to wrap around things and drag them closer. Smoker's skin seemed to emit a thick black smoke and he was coughing from either the smoke from his skin or the smoke from the burners Tank could not tell. The Smoker was hard at work shoveling coal into the burners and coughing horribly, completely oblivious to Tank and Jockey who were behind him. Then Smoker threw his shovel aside and sat on the ground. That is when Jockey decided to gently tap Smoker on the shoulder and wave hello.

As soon as Smoker saw Tank and Jockey he let out a long raspy shriek and his tongue shot out and grabbed the shovel and pulled it into Smoker's waiting hands. Then as soon as Smoker raised the shovel to strike Jockey, Tank grabbed Smoker's arm and growled at him warningly. Then Smoker put down the shovel and sat down again and relaxed. Then Tank remembered he took the bomb into the factory with him and he showed it to Smoker. Smoker merely nodded his head and looked at Tank and Jockey in a way that meant to ask if he could come along with them and Tank and Jockey nodded in agreement. Smoker grabbed his coal shovel and jumped on Tank's back next to Jockey and wrapped his tongue around the bomb, allowing it to drag on the ground behind them. They saw a city in the distance. They decided to head there.

By the time they arrived in the city, Tank, Jockey, and Smoker were all hungry again. They went to a nearby gas station on the edge of town and had lunch of stale chips and cold pizza. Then they went into the city, Tank taking point and carrying he bomb. But about five blocks down the street, they saw humans. Dozens of humans all wearing gas masks and carrying rifles, extra thick Kevlar uniforms to protect from bites from the infected. All around the group, there were dead infected. Most of them were bodies of common infected; their grey skin and dim glow of their eyes and blood splattered bodies littering the ground. Amongst the bodies of the common infected were special infected, their bodies warped and deformed, long necks and pools of acidic goo, fat and covered in pus filled warts and boils, skinny and malnourished with scythe blade like fingers. All of them dead, and that is what made Tank mad. Not that they were slaughtering the common infected in droves, but that the humans had the nerve to kill ones like him when they are clearly superior to man.

Tank growled and looked at Jockey and Smoker and pointed at the humans and with his other giant hand he shook his fist in the air. Letting out a loud roar, Tank and Jockey and Smoker ran at the humans, roaring, coughing, and laughing manically, the humans turned and raised their rifles the sunlight glinting off the glass lenses of the gas masks, their breath heard through the thick filters of the mask. The leader of the group shouted through the mask, "Ready… Aim… Open fire on all targets!" and on command, the group opened fire on Tank and is friends. Jockey began leaping around, dodging bullets while jumping from mailboxes and benches and trash cans. Smoker running at the soldiers swinging his coal shovel, beating several humans to death, but when a human managed to shoot the shovel out of his hands he climbed on top of a lamp post and began using his tongue to strangle the humans one by one.

Tank with his unbridled rage charged into the fray throwing cars, and dumpsters, and even the dead humans. He would just run at the humans, the beestings that were their bullets impacting on Tank's flesh would only fuel his rage and he continued tearing the soldiers limb from limb, leaving the bomb in an alley where the humans wouldn't see it. But things seemed to all go south when Jockey leaped at one of the soldiers and got on its back, but only a mere few seconds passed before Jockey was shot in the head several times and he collapsed in a lifeless heap on the pavement. Smoker and Tank gasped, or at least coughed and roared. Smoker was next to fall, several bullets puncturing his lungs causing them to explode inside of him releasing a thick cloud of smoke and a loud popping noise where he died. Tank roared again, running towards the alley where he hid the bomb and pulling it out and raising it above his head for all the soldiers to see. The soldiers stared at Tank in awe of the power Tank held in his clutches. One of them screamed, "Holy shit! Commander! You aren't going to believe this but the target has a nuclear warhead!" and ran for his life. Tank stood there, breathing heavily and growling at the bewildered soldiers as they slowly lowered their guns and slowly backed away.

In a final act of unimaginable anger, Tank smashed the warhead on the ground. There was a blinding light, a deafening boom, and in mere seconds the humans, Tank, and the city they were in were destroyed in a nuclear blast. Common infected looked up from whatever they were doing to see as the fiery wave of destruction, the final symbol of Tank's rage, consumed the city, and the mushroom cloud signified that the war has begun. It was going to be either the infected, or all of humanity.

The end

If you liked this story, remember to leave a review and leave a suggestion as to what the next story in the "Infected Eyes" series should be. Just remember, it has to still be from the point of view of Tank, but has to have a different way of dealing with the infection.