Mort: Deluxe Illustrated Edition (The Fearlanders)

by Joseph Duncan

  Though he was ninety miles from Gray Harbor, Mort felt a little worm of fear wiggling in his belly. He flashed back to the military vehicles passing his apartment building in the night, his terrible nightmare. A woozy wave of unreality washed through him suddenly. He felt like a character in a George Romero film.

  Stop being so paranoid, Mort chided himself. It’s probably just swine flu or something.

  Less than a week later, Mort saw his first real-life zombie.

  3

  Chocolate and Dildos

  The morning Mort and Cactus Pete crossed paths with the last living pimp, the previous day’s cheery sunshine had been supplanted with overcast and intermittent drizzles. The unusually balmy October weather had reverted to type. The blue skies and warm breezes they’d enjoyed the day before had transformed into an old wet blanket, lumpy and colorless. Tiny beads of rain, silvery and glum, speckled the windows.

  Mort woke to a peal of thunder. It rumbled distantly, sounding like a big cushy sofa tumbling down a long flight of stairs. He lay in a stranger’s bed in a small and dimly lit bedroom. It was a woman’s bedroom, paintings of unicorns and flowery glens on the walls, the vanity by the window piled with makeup and lotions and various hair care products. The comforter and pillows were zebra striped. There were dolls and stuffed animals sitting on the antique trunk where the apartment’s last tenant had stored her bedding. He listened to the thunder die slowly away, reluctant to abandon the fragile warmth that had collected under the pile of blankets and comforters he had huddled beneath the night before.

  Behind him, Pete snored softly.

  They had snuck into an apartment on the second floor of an abandoned housing complex yesterday evening, after quitting their last hideout. The housing project was named Magnolia Village, but it was no picturesque village, and there were no magnolias, just a cluster of gray concrete buildings, each about six stories high. Its parking lot was full of late model cars, some with the windows duct taped over, others with flat tires or big patches of rust.

  Magnolia Village… It sounded genteel and southern, but the place looked like it had been transplanted from some violence-ridden Russian ghetto. In the waning daylight, it was worse than depressing. Soulless was a better description. More like a prison than low income family housing.

  They’d managed to move several blocks the previous day without being detected by any of the Phage’s ravenous victims. Their goal-- escaping Duchamp before the nuclear power plant went critical-- was looking just a tiny bit more plausible. Not likely. In all likelihood, one of them was going to slip up and get them both eaten. Or the plant was going to redline before they were clear of the city. But it was plausible they might escape to the countryside and survive a little while longer. Mort didn’t dare to hope, but it was there in the back of his mind: the possibility, a subconscious glimmering of very, very faint optimism.

  Magnolia Village looked as if it had been the stage of a violent battle. There were hundreds of bullet holes in the walls of the buildings, punctuation marks dramatizing a fierce struggle, and broad black scorch marks on the sidewalks-- small explosives maybe. Brown spray patterns, like grim abstract paintings, swathed the vertical surfaces of the entire housing project, where weapons fire had blown open countless human bodies.

  “I have a bad feeling about this place,” Mort had said. He crept close behind Pete, his eyes wide, his head swiveling anxiously to and fro.

  You have a bad feeling about every place we go,” Pete whispered.

  “I’m usually right, too,” Mort hissed.

  Pete didn’t respond to that. Mort was usually right. “Well, I can’t help it. It’s getting dark,” Pete said instead. “We gotta find someplace safe to hole up. Unless you want to spend the night in a dumpster again.”

  “No,” Mort said quickly. “No dumpsters.” His clothes still smelled like coffee grounds and rotten bananas.

  The sidewalks in between the monolithic apartment buildings were littered with the withered remains of the housing complex’s boarders. Men, women, children. Most of them were African-American. All of them had been mutilated, their clothes shredded, their bodies devoured. Their skulls had been cracked open and emptied of brains, hollow gourds but for the insects and their squirming larvae. Mort and Pete had seen so many corpses in the last few weeks, however, the bodies didn’t even register on their consciousnesses.

  They were only here, walking out in the open, because there didn’t seem to be any deadheads in the vicinity. They had watched from the roof of the building across the street for nearly an hour before deciding to check out the apartment complex. Only the prospects of food and warmth could tempt them into exposing themselves like this. They normally tried to travel by rooftop or through narrow alleys and fenced off back lots.

  “I don’t know where all the zombies went, but I ain’t complainin’,” Pete said in a low voice.

  The complex was so forbidding, they’d probably fled it, Mort thought. Even in death, he couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to linger here long.

  But the sun was going down and they needed a place to sleep for the night. It wasn’t safe to travel at night. Deadheads hunted by sound and smell just as much, if not more so, than sight.

  They moved stealthily from wall to wall, peeking around the corners to check for zombies. It wasn’t like in the movies, where you could just bash in a zombie’s head if it spotted you. In the real world, when zombies caught wind of you, they began to howl, and the sound alerted all the other deadheads in the area. Before you knew it, you were surrounded. And they ran. They ran like lawyers after ambulances.

  “The coast is clear,” Pete whispered.

  The two men shuffled around the corner and headed toward the most remote building. It sat at the edge of the compound, near a low-lying wooded area. Not exactly a park, this copse of trees. More like the local rape-grounds. But to get there, they had to cross a broad open courtyard.

  There were a lot of desiccated bodies missing their flesh and brains in this central area—really just crusty skeletons. Still, no zombies.

  “Quiet! Quiet!” Pete hissed, gesturing with the baseball bat he carried for defense. The bat was solid oak and had long sharpened nails driven through the business end of it, making it into a pretty effective wooden mace. They’d learned real quick not to use guns, except as a last defense. Zombies were attracted to any loud noise. The sound of a gas engine or gunfire drew them en masse. Loud voices. Screams. Music, too.

  Pete froze in a crouch and cocked his head. “I thought I heard something,” he whispered

  Mort nearly collided into him. “You probably did,” he whispered fiercely. His face shone with oily fear sweat. “Let’s get inside. It’s too open here. We’re going to get spotted.”

  Pete nodded and they slinked through the common area between the highrises. Flies erupted in a thrumming cloud as the men crept past the human buffet in the center of the housing complex. The corpses looked like bones with bits of beef jerky stuck to them.

  Mort waved his hands at the shiny green and black flies, his skin crawling at the hive-like rumble they made. There were so many of them! Fat autumn flies, too. The kind that tried to crawl in your mouth and up your nose.

  They selected the first second floor apartment they found unlocked. Mort carried a crowbar for a weapon-- and for prying into things that needed prying into-- but it was smarter to take a little extra time and look for an unlocked door than to make a bunch of noise trying to break into someplace.

  “Ready?” Pete whispered.

  Mort shook his head no.

  Pete threw the door open and swept his bat into the air, ready to bash in some ugly’s head.

  There was often a zombie or two lurking behind closed doors. Mort and Pete had seen it time and again. Survivors got attacked by zombies while they were out scavenging for supplies. If they somehow managed to escape, they invariably retreated to some place of refuge to nurse their injuries. Shortly after, they succumbed to the Armageddon
Virus, died and reanimated, but zombies were too stupid to find their way back outside again. The undead couldn’t remember how to work doorknobs. It was a mixed blessing. You could escape them by simply shutting a door in their face, but it also meant they popped out of closed rooms like maggoty jack-in-the-boxes when you were looking for some place to sleep for the night.

  But the living room was empty.

  They went in and locked the door, checked the other rooms. The apartment was clean, furnished, showed every sign of recent occupancy… but there were no people. No zombies either.

  “Jackpot,” Pete grinned, and Mort had collapsed onto the sofa with a groan.

  Now it was morning. A rainy gray morning in a soulless gray housing complex. Mort lay in the stranger’s bed, warm as a bug in a rug, enjoying the security of their second floor shelter.

  Second floors were golden, they’d come to find out. They were too high for zombies to climb through the windows (or, memorably for Mort one time, to accidentally fall through them right in your lap) but not too high for Mort and Pete to jump to the ground below if they had to beat a hasty retreat.

  Pete snorted behind him. Rolled over and threw an arm across Mort. Mort nudged his partner away with an elbow and Pete woke.

  “Huzzah?” Pete gasped, sitting up quickly. “Whadizit?”

  “Nothing,” Mort said.

  “Oh... ‘S morning.” Pete scratched his head, blinking around the room, then announced, “I gotta whiz.”

  Pete got out of bed and trotted to the kitchen to pee.

  They were peeing in the kitchen trashcan because the apartment’s former resident had filled the toilet to the brim with feces and toilet paper before abandoning the hideout. The bathroom stank so bad Mort had rolled up a towel and pushed it into the crack under the door. They couldn’t use the tub or sinks either because there was water in them. The apartment’s former tenants were smart enough to fill the basins with drinking water when the crisis began, a major score for them.

  Mort rolled into his companion’s warm spot and tried to go back to sleep, but Pete was an early riser and didn’t like to be up by himself. He returned to the bedroom and poked Mort on the head.

  “Get up, sleeping beauty,” he sang.

  “No.”

  “Come on, Mort. Get up. Let’s have some breakfast.”

  Mort and Pete always slept together now. It was safer that way. When you slept together you didn’t have to wonder who or what was shuffling around in the next room. It was also, though neither would admit it, more comforting to have a friend nearby. Simple human closeness. Mort was perfectly happy putting up with Pete’s sleep hunching in exchange for that comfort, slim as it might be.

  Mort sat up in bed, smacking his lips. Had someone shit in his mouth while he was sleeping? “Breakfast sounds good,” he said. “What did you fix me?”

  Pete laughed. “Dream on, homo! You’re going to fix me something to eat!”

  Pete was still in his underwear. At first, when they began bunking together, both men slept fully clothed out of an exaggerated sense of male propriety, scared their wieners might brush against each other in the middle of the night. After traveling together a few days, however, they had grown comfortable enough with each other to strip to their skivvies to sleep…when it was practical. It was something of a luxury. Like eating. Drinking. Being warm and dry. Not being eaten alive by slimy cannibals. Plus, they could share body heat. No electricity meant no heat and air.

  It was funny, the first night they’d doffed their outer clothes to bunk down together: Pete in his underwear, jamming his finger in Mort’s face. “You better not get any cute ideas, buddy,” he’d warned. “Grab my junk while I’m sleeping or try and stick anything in my butt, and I will use my baseball bat on you.”

  No worries there. Mort had no interest in same sex sex. And he’d awoken the next morning to find Pete’s arm across his shoulder and Pete’s morning wood lodged firmly in the crack of his butt. Pete had apologized, face red as a fire truck, when Mort pushed him off. “Sorry, man, I did that in my sleep! I swear that was not on purpose!” Pete was so horrified and humiliated, Mort felt bad for him and laughed it off. Neither of them worried about Pete’s sleep hunching anymore. Mort just elbowed him away. In his defense, Pete claimed Mort farted like a Clydesdale and scratched his balls half the night. Tit-for-tat.

  Mort rubbed his crusty eyes. Scratched his balls. His thinning hair was standing straight up, his face puffy and creased with pillow marks.

  “Are you getting up?” Pete pestered him.

  “I will in just a second. Turn around. I gotta pee really bad.”

  “Why? You got a pee boner?” Pete laughed.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, go pee. You ain’t got anything I don’t have. Yours is just a little smaller. And then you can make me something to eat.”

  Irritated, Mort stood up and walked to the kitchen to pee in the trashcan. He didn’t bother to hide the tent in the front of his boxers. “I don’t know why you think I’m the bitch in this relationship,” he grumbled.

  “Whoo-eee! Now that’s what I call a blue veiner!” Pete cried.

  “Why do you always have to be so uncouth?” Mort drawled, then he lifted his right leg and farted in Pete’s general direction.

  “Ha! That sounded like a duck with pneumonia,” Pete snorted.

  Mort farted again.

  “That one sounded like a firecracker!”

  Mort strained for one more, grinning.

  “Ew… that sounded… kinda wet, dude. Maybe you should go wipe.”

  The kitchen was stocked with a lot of lonely fat chick food. Lean Cuisine single serve dinners growing mold in the freezer compartment. Low carb snacks. Rice cakes, which were supposed to be edible, good for you even… yet always tasted to Mort like mummy turds. The one time he tried rice cakes, Pete spit his out. “Jumpin’ Jesus! That’s not food,” he’d exclaimed. “It’s like eatin’ those packing peanuts they ship stuff in! Fuckin’ hell!” He’d picked the rice bits off his tongue and shuddered. Mort looked through the cabinets. There was plenty of canned food that was probably perfectly edible, but he wanted chocolate.

  Mort left the kitchen to poke around the apartment. There had to be a stash here somewhere. Being a lonely fat chick himself—one with a penis, admittedly—he knew there was going to be a secret stash of chocolaty goodness hidden somewhere in the apartment.

  He found it in a shoebox under the bed. Snickers, Godiva chocolates, M&M’s… and a pink vibrator.

  He sniffed it to make sure it was clean (Like any guy would do). Yep, clean, he thought.

  There was also a much larger brown dildo under the bed next to the shoebox. It was one of those lifelike replicas, molded from an actual porn star’s tool. Feels Like Real Skin! the packaging proclaimed. Mort estimated it was about ten inches long and seven inches around. Made his dinky look like a baby dick.

  “Look what I found!” Mort proclaimed, wobbling the dildo back and forth as he returned to the kitchen.

  “Dude! Nasty!”

  “Yeah, but look in here.”

  “All right! I call Snickers.”

  They sat at the kitchen table and munched on candy, grinning at one another contentedly. Chocolate never seemed to go bad. It might as well have an expiration date of “infinity”.

  The pink dildo was sitting at Mort’s elbow next to the lifelike penis. When his belly was full—actually, when it was starting to slosh around queasily— he picked up the vibrator and contemplated it.

  “See if the batteries are still good,” Pete suggested, then cackled when the massager began to hum.

  “Momma always said, ‘Life is like a box of cocks’,” Mort Gumped.

  Pete grabbed the big brown dildo. “I see my schwartz is more powerful than yours!” he said, pitching his voice deep. “Join me, Lone Starr, and together we shall rule the universe as father and son!”

  So Pete was familiar with the movie Spaceballs! Mort was impressed. He de
cided to play along. “No! It’s not true! That’s impossible!” Mort cried, and then they used the vibrator and the dildo to play lightsabers, both of them making sound effects with their lips.

  It was funny for a few minutes, but afterwards Mort felt kind of depressed. In some strange and vulgar way, their new toys had become relics of a bygone era. The old world, where a woman could light some candles, put some Barry White in the CD player and vibrate herself to a minute or two of carefree nirvana, had passed away. Never to return, perhaps. If humanity somehow managed to survive, women would find themselves in a bad place again. Weaker than their male counterparts, their gender would have to rely on men to defend them, keep them safe, and not just from the deadheads. They’d have to watch out for the psychos, the rapists and the men who’d want to imprison them, breed them like cattle. In one fell swoop, the Armageddon Phage had erased their long, hard struggle for emancipation, for equality. They would have to start all over from scratch.

  Mort was glad he wasn’t a woman.

  “You ever have a girl use one of those on you?” Pete asked.

  “No,” Mort answered, taking the batteries out of the pink one. He set them aside. They might come in handy later. “Why? Have you?” he asked. He tossed the gaudy pink plastic into their piss can. Sploosh!

  “I had a girlfriend this one time named Anette. Now I’m here to tell you, she was one twisted little kitty…!”

  Mort listened with half an ear as Pete went on to describe yet another of his sexual escapades—this one, Mort judged, bearing a probability factor of eighty percent—in which he, Pete, was the recipient of a wild blowjob while having his prostate stimulated with a vibrator.

  Mort didn’t really want to hear the story. Picturing a vibrator being stuffed in his buddy’s hairy brown eye was disturbing, to say the least, but Pete was the type of guy who had to lay it all out. The tackier the better. Pete had once told Mort how a girlfriend ate donuts off his dick, to which Mort had ascribed a probability factor of 10%. He had never seen donuts with holes in them bigger than his index finger, and unless Pete had an extremely narrow penis (and Mort knew for a fact he didn’t; Pete was a terrible sleep huncher) he just couldn’t imagine that particular fetish working in the real world. You always had to take Pete’s sex stories with a grain of salt.