Mort: Deluxe Illustrated Edition (The Fearlanders)

by Joseph Duncan

  The female angel turned her head and smirked at Esther, and the old woman gasped in wonder as the angel’s wings suddenly unfurled in the moonlight, tan with intricate black patterns. Impossibly large, unbelievably beautiful. The wings spread out until they swallowed half the sky, shivering slightly in the breeze, then they folded suddenly and diminished to a more believable dimension. Closed against her back, the wings became invisible.

  “Her name is HaMerkavah. I am Metatron,” the angel in her passenger seat said mildly. “We should hurry before more of the infected ones come.”

  “But where are you taking us?” Esther asked.

  “We’ve come to take you to New Jerusalem, where you will be safe,” the angel—Metatron—answered her. Again, he held his hands out. “I can only carry one of you. Put the child in my arms, or place him in HaMerkavah’s care and come to me. We must be away quickly.”

  Esther took Drew from her bosom and pressed the boy into Metatron’s arms. At first, her grandson fought against it, looking horrified, but then the angel stroked his head and he slumped into a blissful sleep.

  “Please be careful with him,” Esther said, ashamed she should worry. Her grandbaby lay in the arms of one of God’s divine messengers. Why should she be frightened?

  “Of his safety, have no fear. He is the most precious thing to us in all the world.” The angel smiled down at the child as he spoke, and Esther believed him. Her apprehension faded away.

  The other angel, the female named HaMerkavah, strolled to Esther’s door, hips sweeping jauntily back and forth. She was grinning, pleased with herself. She sheathed her sword as she drew near and stood waiting outside the van.

  The male angel rose through the hole in the roof and spread his wings. Eyes gleaming beneficently, he declared, “I promise you this, Esther Rosenbaum: on this child’s bloodline, God shall restore the world.”

  The great wings beat down and the angel lifted into the air, her grandson in his arms.

  Esther heard the howls of distant zombies. A whole pack of the horrid things, and they were coming this way! She opened the van door and clambered down onto the sidewalk.

  “Ow! Oh, dear!” she groaned, her knees and back crackling. She’d been trapped inside the Dodge, in a seated position, for more than a day.

  The angel, HaMerkavah, slammed her door shut impatiently, knocking little chunks of glass loose, then swept Esther into her arms. “We have to hurry, old woman. More of those foul things are coming!”

  This angel was not so kind, but Esther dismissed her rudeness. The divine creature was obviously one of God’s warrior angels, and made for battle, not gentleness.

  The arm encircling her was armored with a heavy and ornate gauntlet, its fingers jointed and brutal-looking. The sword at her hip was massive. HaMerkavah peered down the street, eyes narrowing. The howls were growing louder.

  Esther held tight to the angel in black leather, squeezing her eyes shut as the first of the zombies came shambling around the end of the block, running toward them and screaming for hot, fresh brains.

  Goodness, she was cold to the touch! Esther thought. The angel’s flesh was icier than the metal armor which adorned her body.

  “Don’t let go,” the angel commanded.

  Don’t worry, I won’t! Esther thought.

  Letting go was definitely that last thing she intended to do!

  She stepped onto the angel’s toes like a little girl getting ready to dance with her daddy.

  The zombie horde poured into the street. There were dozens, maybe hundreds, of the mindless, howling creatures. And the worst part was: she knew them. There was Sam Blackwell, who lived on the corner in the white crackerbox house. That was one of the boys who bagged groceries at the local Food Mart. She saw the deputy and the postman, and her neighbor’s ten year old son. They pelted down the street, clothes ragged and stiff with gore, fingers curled, ready to tear her and her savior to pieces.

  The angel craned her face towards the heavens. She unfurled her wings and took flight.

  The van and the street, the trees and houses and zombies, diminished suddenly beneath them. The cool night wind roared in Esther’s ears. Esther clung to the angel, shivering, as first the street, then the neighborhood, then the whole darn town shrank rapidly below them. It was like riding the world’s biggest Ferris wheel, only there was no safety bar, and if the angel dropped her...

  HaMerkavah made a choking sound. Esther was holding on too tight.

  “I’m sorry, dear!” she yelled above the howling of the wind.“I’ve never flown before!”

  1

  Deadheads

  The really sad thing, Mort thought as he watched the deadheads trudge lifelessly along the street below, was that the city didn't look all that different than it had before the outbreak. If you didn't know the zombie apocalypse went down a few weeks ago, sweeping away all the old familiar civilizations in an orgy of gore and violence, you would be hard pressed to discern much of a change in the scene twelve stories down.

  The sidewalks still crawled with humanity, an ant-like parade. Men in business suits, marching off to work. Mothers and their children, dressed in spring pastels, tramping hand-in-hand as if they were going down to the local park to swing or ride on the teeter-totters. Even teenagers, all anti-establishment in their rock-and-roll t-shirts and torn jeans, loitering outside their favorite headshop. Though the Armageddon Phage had turned 99.9 percent of the human population into brain-eating zombies, its rotting victims retained a faint sad echo of each person's previous personality. Their habits and mannerisms. Sometimes even their cunning.

  Of course, upon closer examination, it was obvious the world had changed. Fundamentally so. There were no moving vehicles. Zombies couldn't drive, thank God. The smell of car exhaust had been replaced with the gassy odor of putrefying flesh. The bass and brass of afternoon traffic had been supplanted by the eerie sound of the wind blowing through the concrete canyons of the city and the low moans and guttural gargling of the ambulatory dead. The clothes of the people in the street were filthy and ragged, stiff with dried blood and various other unmentionable fluids. And all of them shuffled along in a dream-like stupor. Slow, swaying movements, like they were flotsam in a stagnant sea. Bloated detritus, drifting upon a languid and polluted tide of death. Zombies didn't get in a hurry unless they smelled fresh, living flesh to eat.

  Then they ran.

  They ran like greased lightning.

  “Lord, those things fuckin' STINK!” Cactus Pete declared, his lip curling back from even white incisors. “Matter of fact, this whole motherfuckin’ city stinks! It's like living in a goddam sewer!”

  “It's the decomposition,” Mort supplied.

  Mort was just trying to be helpful. It was his natural disposition. He’d always had a habit of contributing little nuggets of wisdom from his encyclopedic brain, even when no one asked for them. He also absentmindedly corrected other people’s English. It never occurred to him that most people found it annoying. One of the few women he’d dated since he started wearing big boy pants had broken up with him because of this tendency to edit the speech of his companions. He had been shocked when she told him that that was the reason she didn’t want to see him anymore.

  “I was just trying to help. If you noticed I was saying something wrong, wouldn’t you correct me?” he had asked her, confused and hurt by her anger. “I’d be grateful. Not mad. Who wants to sound like an idiot--?”

  He had winced the instant he said it. He wasn’t that oblivious.

  “Oh, so I’m an idiot now?” she’d cut him off, all the little muscles in her neck standing out and twitching.

  Her name was Dee Brinkley. He’d met her at a collectible toy trade show. Mort collected action figures, Dee Beanie Babies. She was a skinny brunette with a two-pack-a-day habit and thin lips that were prematurely seamed by a tendency to scowl. She had asked Mort out for coffee after chatting with him on the showroom floor, then invited him back to her house after they finished
their coffee, warning him that she had a six-year-old son, but--

  But that doesn’t matter, he thought. Not anymore.

  She was probably zombie chow by now. Anyone who thought the phrase “blessing in disguise” was actually “blessing in the skies” most likely didn't have the mental capacity to avoid becoming a zombie entrée. She’d probably died arguing with the pack of flesh-eating mutants who were devouring her.

  “Oh, so I’m a smorgasbord now?” he could hear her say. “Do you know how much time I spend in the gym to have a body like this? And now you’re ruining it! I am SO pissed! Ow! Owwwwwww!”

  Cactus Pete, who’d been traveling with Mort the past week or so, didn't like it when his companion used big words. Pete considered it a snub against his vocabulary... or lack thereof.

  “That's five syllables, hombre,” Cactus Pete glared. “You know the rule.”

  “Aw, come on!” Mort objected. “I’ve got bruises on both arms!”

  The cardinal rule when traveling with Cactus Pete was: “No big words”. Each syllable per word over the three syllable limit earned Mort a goose egg.

  Pete made a fist, the knuckle of his ring finger protruding, and slugged Mort in the arm twice.

  “Ouch! Oomph!” Mort cried, submitting to the abuse with good-natured chagrin. It didn't really hurt. It was funny, actually. Well... sort of. And even if it wasn’t, Mort was used to bullies. He’d dealt with them all his life. That’s not saying he always played the role of victim in that particular social dynamic. He usually found himself cast in the role of sidekick. There was something about his demeanor-- his stocky physique, his lack of style, or his perpetual hangdog expressions-- that triggered the buddy gland of the typical American alpha male, that made them slap him on the back and declare, “You’re all right, dude! What say you and me be pals?” It kind of boiled down to him being the male equivalent of the ugly girlfriend, he supposed, but he could live with it. If he was a girl, he’d definitely be a career ugly girlfriend. He had no delusions about his place in society.

  With all the goose eggs and oneupmanship, the recklessness and vulgar behavior, traveling with Pete was like being in high school again. Most of the time, Mort couldn’t help but laugh at Pete’s immature antics, despite the fact that Mort was pushing thirty. It helped take his mind off things.

  Like all the dang zombies.

  Not to mention the end of the world.

  Besides, the post-traumatic high school flashbacks Peter Bolin generously doled out weren't all that bad, not in comparison to the grim reality of recent weeks… what with all the reanimated cannibals and the entire collapse of human civilization. All the wedgies and goose eggs he’d gotten during his four year stint at Joseph Biden High were fond memories compared to being chased down back alleys by rotting cougars in ripped designer clothes and broken stilettos.

  And Pete wasn’t a bully. Not really. Mostly Pete was just dumb. He had more testosterone than brains, and he derived a great deal of enjoyment from what Mort’s father used to call “grabassing”. Somewhere around the time Peter Bolin turned thirteen, his emotional transmission had thrown a gear, and no one had bothered to pull the engine and fix him.

  Mort didn't mind Pete’s roughhousing. He felt safe with Cactus Pete around. Pete was everything Mort was not: strong, stubborn, fast, handsome. Pete kicked ass when ass needed kicking. Pete had a highly refined sense of self preservation and an instinct for mayhem. Pete shot straight and never flinched. Pete had saved him a dozen times from the endless hordes of brain munching deadheads. If this were some cheesy horror flick, Pete’s role would be the swaggering hero. He’d find the cure to the Armageddon Phage, save the girl and ride off into the sunset on his bitchin’ Harley.

  Mort probably would have bought it about halfway through the flick, after getting stuck trying to climb through a window or something humiliating like that.

  Mort turned back to the scene twelve stories below, rubbing his shoulder with a smirk. As he watched the deadheads shuffle listlessly through the street, Mort chided himself for being so self-critical.

  Another bad habit.

  He wasn’t really that much of a loser. Mort was a stocky fellow of average height with curly brown hair... not unattractive, to be honest, but no great human specimen either. He had nice eyes-- big, soulful brown eyes. He had good cheekbones, a strong jawline and a manly chin, complete with a sexy Magnum P.I. cleft running right down the center of it. He even had dimples in his cheeks. But there was little else about him that could be described as remarkable, aside from his genius level IQ. His hair was thinning at the crown and even weeks of running for his life had failed to trim the squishy layer of fat from his midsection.

  He had survived the zombie apocalypse by grace of his cleverness and a natural inclination toward paranoid cautiousness, but it was still a comfort to have a shit-kicking redneck along to fortify his spine.

  The two men watched the zombies shuffle along the sidewalk below for several minutes, the wind blowing through their hair. They tried to ignore the terrible, lonely sound of the wind hooting in all the broken windows of the surrounding highrises and apartment complexes. It was like a chorus of lost souls, that sound. It put weird thoughts in your head, made your belly flutter.

  “I know what 'decomposition' means, by the way,” Pete muttered after a few minutes. He glanced toward Mort very seriously, his big blue eyes wounded. “It means ‘rotting’.”

  “I didn’t mean to imply you didn’t know what decomposition was. I was just talking,” Mort replied.

  Pete shrugged. “No biggie.” But he looked mollified.

  “What I don't understand is how they keep rotting,” Mort said, changing the subject, “and how they keep walking around. A person shouldn’t be able to keep walking around after the tissues have degraded like that. It’s not physically possible. Not unless the Phage is somehow regenerating their cells at the same time that it’s breaking them down. Maybe that’s why they need living flesh. It must fuel some aspect of the disease’s life cycle.”

  “You mean like recycling?”

  Mort shrugged. “I guess you could call it that. Sometimes you see them attack each other. They don't do it often, but every now and then a bunch of the really burned-out ones will gang up on a fresh one and strip its bones clean. If they don’t get enough flesh, the virus seems to devour them from the inside out.”

  “Yeah, I've seen that.”

  Both of them shuddered at the memory. It was bad enough being scared of the zombies. Worse being hunted by them. But listening to one of them screaming as a horde of its fellow ghouls chewed the flesh from its bones like a bunch of starved piranha was a special kind of awful. They sounded so... pitiful!

  “When they don’t get enough to eat, it’s like they have some kind of metabolic crisis.”

  Pete counted the syllables of “metabolic” on his fingers and the two men shared a chuckle.

  “It doesn't really matter, though,” Mort said. “If we don't get out of this city soon, we're going to be as dead as those deadheads down there. Dead and glowing in the dark. The power plant should have melted down already. The only thing I can think of to explain why it hasn’t happened already is that someone must still be alive in there, keeping everything running.”

  “But how long will that last?” Pete said.

  “Exactly.”

  Mort squeezed his eyes shut and sighed as the breeze ruffled his bangs again. He might have enjoyed it if it didn’t carry with it the sickly sweet stink of decay, the smell of fire and human waste, the high ripe odor of death and destruction on a scale that his little human brain had trouble even comprehending. The death of his species. The death of an entire world.

  In every other way, zombies excluded, it was a fine mid-October afternoon. The city was quiet but for the moans of the undead. The sky was clear and sunny, an inverted bowl of blue with a few white wisps of clouds drifting from west to east. Birds flitted from roof to roof, chirping and squawking contentedly. T
hey were happy. They were immune to the Phage... and their bellies were full.

  Then, from somewhere down the street, a dog barked twice. It yelped in pain and fell silent. Their moment of peace was soured.

  “Poor fella,” Pete sighed.

  Canines had suffered their own zombie apocalypse. Man's best friend was just as vulnerable to the Armageddon Phage as man himself was. They had suffered the same degrading physical and mental effects. The flu-like symptoms, which came with the initial stages of the infection. Fever, nausea, pain. Coma followed quickly after, then death, reanimation and a terrible afterlife of unthinking, mechanical wandering, the mind reduced to base instinct with an insatiable appetite for living flesh. The body slowly burning out, withering as the virus attacked the cells and devoured them, or converted them into factories to mass produce even more of the mutated bacteriophages. A slimy and foul-smelling biofilm coated the skin. The mucus membranes and salivary glands poured forth a thick, snot-like fluid, teaming with billions of infectious phages. One bite, one scratch, and you were dead. And often you didn’t even have to get bitten or scratched. You just caught it, like the flu.

  Twice, Mort had nearly perished when he stumbled across a pack of rotting doggy zombies. Later, after meeting up with Pete, a lone poodle with three legs and dripping green flesh caught him by surprise and almost bit his ankle. If Pete had not kicked the poodle over the side of a balcony, Mort himself might have been shuffling around on the street below, eyes rolled back in their sockets, sniffing for some tasty brain chowder.

  Pete was a dog lover. It broke his heart to kill Phaged pooches. Mort really had no feelings for dogs, pro or con. He was more of a cat person himself.

  Mort pictured a zombified Paris Hilton, stumbling down an alley with a zombified Chihuahua in her doggy purse, snapping and growling viciously, and couldn't hold back a giggle. Would you still call a doggy purse a “durse” if your dog was undead, or a “zurse”?