Mort: Deluxe Illustrated Edition (The Fearlanders)

by Joseph Duncan

  Jim cursed, losing control of the vehicle as his brother clawed at him and snapped his teeth. Jim had not pulled to a complete stop yet. The truck was still in drive. Trying to hold his brother at bay, Jim accidentally stomped on the gas pedal, and his truck slewed off the road and tipped toward the passenger side. Alan slid back against the passenger side door. For a crazy-long second, the vehicle stood balanced on two wheels while Jim gaped down at his younger brother, his body suspended from his seat belt. Jim grabbed the steering wheel as Alan snagged his dangling foot and jerked his shoe off, and then the truck went rolling side over side into the ravine.

  When Alan’s belly could hold no more of his brother’s flesh and brains, the fisherman crawled out of the truck through the smashed windshield. Alan shuffled around in the weedy ravine for a moment, blinking like a drunkard. Light swept across the top of the ditch, accompanied by a loud purring sound, and his head jerked up. He growled deep in his chest and stumbled forward.

  Drawn by the lights and the rumble of passing traffic, he climbed the crumbly ravine. A station wagon honked at him as he stumbled onto the shoulder of the road, but the vehicle did not stop. It didn’t even slow.

  Belly grotesquely distended, Alan shuffled onto the highway, snarling into a pair of rapidly approaching headlights. A horn blared like the trump of doom and he howled back at it, swinging his arms like Frankenstein’s monster. A moment later, the big silvery grill of a Peterbilt semi collided with him at seventy miles per hour. Alan’s body burst like a watermelon. Chunks of infected zombie meat splattered all four lanes of highway.

  Forty-seven people were exposed to the phage through Alan’s rather messy demise, including the police, the firemen and the paramedics who responded to the gruesome highway fatality and the resulting seven car pileup. Before their shifts were over, the emergency workers had exposed 132 more.

  Not everyone exposed to the virus fell ill. A lucky few carried a faulty gene in their DNA, a rare mutant protein sequence that expressed an altered version of an ordinary human enzyme. The enzyme rendered the rapacious bacteriophage inert, but the genetic mutation was present in only one of ten thousand people.

  Of the travelers who passed through Big Willy’s Truck Stop the night Alan Twitty paid a visit, something like fifty-two of them carried the plague with them when they continued on with their journeys. Three people, an old man and two children-- unrelated-- developed full-blown zombie-ism within twenty-four hours. The kids picked up the virus from the table Mr. Twitty had sat at a couple hours earlier, catching their deaths while they ate fries and colored paper placemats with the little boxes of crayons the truckstop put out for young travelers. The old man got it from the toilet in the mens room, while taking an emergency dump after eating a bad hamburger earlier that day.

  The old man, a retired English professor named Howard McGrath, attacked his son-in-law one day later. He tried to tear the young man’s throat out, but without his dentures in, all he could manage was a very slobbery gumming.

  Howard McGrath’s son-in-law, who survived the attack, was nonetheless traumatized.

  The two kids, brothers named Clint and Colin Reilly, died and reanimated at nearly the same time the next morning. Their mother found them in the laundry room, eating the family cat.

  When she screamed, hand clamped over her mouth in revulsion, the red-faced boys whipped around in tandem and pelted across the room at her. She tripped over a laundry basket as she backpedalled away from them and went sprawling beside the dryer. Her housecoat fell open, a breast flopped out, and young master Clint leapt upon her, sinking his teeth into her teat.

  Mark Lebowski, the final surviving crewman of The Merry Shanty, crashed at his aunt’s home in Ohio. She put him up in the little apartment over the garage, the room where he’d stayed throughout his childhood and the greater part of his teenage years.

  It was nothing special. Just a little room with a low ceiling and a view of the wooded backyard. His uncle had built it for him after Mark’s parents died in a car accident. Mark had fond memories of the little room over the garage. He’d smoked his first doobie there, got his first blowjob-- a neighbor’s daughter, who was two years older than him, and about ten times more experienced. His aunt had done little to change the room since he left. Dusted. Threw out some old Playboys she’d found stashed beneath his bed. His pinups still adorned the walls. His track and baseball trophies still gleamed atop the dresser.

  Exhausted and relieved to be home, Mark stripped out of his filthy clothes, flopped into bed naked and dropped off to sleep almost immediately.

  He never woke up.

  At 4:32 AM, he suffered a grand mal seizure and died. He lay motionless, his body cooling, until 5:15. At sunrise, his corpse began to twitch. A bubbling moan drifted from his cracked and purple lips. He sat up in bed, milky eyes rolling, then rose and circled the dark apartment until his aunt saw the midday news and went to ask him just why in Sam Hill the Center for Disease Control was trying to find him.

  When his aunt pushed through the door into his room, Mark leapt at her with a howl, fingers hooked, cataract eyes narrowed to furious slits.

  His genitals flopped between his legs as he dived upon her. His aunt didn’t even cry out. She was a very modest woman, and she was shocked as much by his nudity as his sudden violent behavior. For one terrible moment, she thought her nephew, whom she had raised since he was a tyke, meant to rape her.

  Mark tackled her to the floor, shoved her chin up to expose her throat, and tore into her with his teeth.

  Mark’s uncle Norman was napping while his wife was being mauled to death. He’d taken his hearing aid out and put it on the coffee table beside the couch. He didn’t hear a thing, nor did he rouse to see his blood-splattered nephew drift dreamily out the garage door into the street. When Norman woke later, he noted his wife’s absence but thought she had gone to bingo. She went to bingo at least two, three times a week. He didn’t find his wife’s body until late that evening, when he finally realized he hadn’t seen his wife or nephew all day and went to check the room above the garage.

  Uncle Norman didn’t even recognize what he had stepped into at first. It was too mangled. Spread too far across the floor. It looked like someone had swallowed a grenade and blew up in his spare room.

  When Mark Lebowski’s uncle finally realized the strewn chunks of mangled meat was his wife, he simultaneously pissed his pants and vomited. His vomit splattered into the jumbled remains of his wife, and realizing what he had just done, he vomited into it again.

  The Armageddon Phage was extremely infectious, and the contagion spread across the continent at an exponential rate. Within days, towns were overrun with violent flesh-starved cadavers. Cities were thrown into chaos. The government was in heavy denial, revealing the truth to the American public only after it was far too late for anyone to do anything about it.

  In less than a week, it was in Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia. The Pope was eaten alive, and two million people watched it happen during a live television broadcast of the papal visit to Spain.

  North Korea nuked Japan for no apparent reason. Russia nuked Afghanistan. Pakistan nuked India, and India nuked Pakistan right back. Israel and Iran felt left out, so they vaporized one another in a near-simultaneous act of mutual annihilation.

  Zombies raged through the streets of the Old World as radioactive ash rained down.

  No one knew where the virus came from or what exactly it was made to do. What did it matter that the virus was man-made, or that its creator-- the R & D department of a well-known breakfast cereal company-- was so horrified with the results of their experimental preservative that they had destroyed all record of it and sought to dispose of their brainchild in vats of toxic chemicals in the middle of the Atlantic? It was the end of the world either way.

  It was a genetically modified bacteriophage, one that had been custom designed to slow the decomposition of prepackaged food products. A nanite with spider-like grasping limbs, a hodgepod
ge of pieced together DNA, and a stinger which it used to inject said DNA into its host cells, forcing its hapless victims to birth billions of its ravenous offspring. It worked brilliantly as a preservative for several months, until it mutated again and targeted its human creators.

  It was a mutant. An infinitesimal Frankenstein’s monster. For lack of a better understanding, the CDC labeled it a virus, and it quickly became known as the Zombie Virus or Virus Z. It was only toward the end, right before the TV stations went off the air, that a scientist more correctly identified it as a bioengineered phage.

  It didn’t really matter what is was called, or whether it was a living virus or an artificial nano machine, the Armageddon Phage had gotten loose, and the pestilence it wrought brought about the end of pretty much everything.

  Although he never knew it, Mort was exposed to the Armageddon Phage twice before he even saw his first zombie.

  Virus Z was in Duchamp within two days of the last news broadcast concerning The Merry Shanty and her unlucky crew.

  Mort was exposed to the Phage the first time when he went to a local grocery store to stock up on snacks. The Armageddon Virus was crawling all over the cantaloupe he examined, then put back in the vegetable and fruit bin in favor of a package of Sparkly Star Cakes (coincidentally manufactured by the same company which had developed the “Super Preservative” which would shortly destroy the world). Luckily, Mort washed his hands when he got home and his immune system took care of the rest.

  A day later, he was standing in line at Taco Fiesta and noticed that one of the cooks was sick. Mort was trying to decide between the Mega Mexi-Meal or the Super Size Fiesta Platter—diarrhea be damned-- while the cook, pale and sweaty, eyes rimmed red, kept turning away from the prep table to cough. Mort took one look at the guy, who was waxy-skinned and kept wiping his runny nose, and decided on McDonalds.

  Mort left without ordering anything—which probably saved his life. All the people eating there that day came down with the brain munchies within a week.

  Sadly, as smart as he was, Mort didn’t really notice the zombie apocalypse until it was in full swing. He spent his day off in a Big Mac and French fry coma, sleeping through the sirens and the rushing of emergency vehicles in the street below his apartment.

  Things had quietened down when he finally woke. There were a couple gunshots and a few yells as he wandered bored around his apartment, scratching his ass, but gunfire and screams were not totally out of the norm for his neighborhood. He finally decided to watch a DVD boxset of the 1980’s television series The Flash, and spent the rest of the evening in his La-Z-Boy, the lights out, his apartment dark but for the shifting hues of the flatscreen TV.

  He watched movies. Munched on Funyuns. Fred called to give him a sales total for the day and asked if Mort knew what all the excitement was about.

  “What do you mean?” Mort asked, keeping an eye on the TV.

  “I saw some ambulances earlier. Then a bunch of cops roared past with their red and blues on.”

  “Hmm. Dunno,” Mort replied. “Be careful going home, though.”

  “Sure thing, big guy. Bye.”

  “Nightie-night.”

  Mort fell asleep halfway through the season. As he snored in his recliner, the remote in his lap, the first zombies on his block went shuffling out into the street. It was his neighbors, the Feinsteins, a Jewish couple who lived two apartment buildings down from him. They’d contracted Virus Z the day before, at the 17 screen multiplex out by the mall, while watching the latest Jason Statham action flick. Mr. Feinstein was dressed in smiley face boxer shorts. Mrs. Feinstein was in her fuzzy pink housecoat, her feral zombie rictus disguised by a thick layer of face mud. They’d wandered around inside their apartment until another resident reported loud moans and thumping, and the maintenance man was sent up to check on them.

  A pedestrian noticed the blood splattered on their bodies and went to see if they needed help. He thought they’d been robbed. He lived about three minutes longer than their maintenance man.

  Mort slept through the pedestrian’s screams. One of his plump legs jerked as the unlucky fellow’s cries echoed up and down the street. A few minutes later, Mort raised up on one hip and farted.

  He woke the next morning with a start and jumped out of the recliner, worried that he’d overslept. Flicking the DVD player and TV off, he ran into the kitchen to check the time. It was 8:30 AM. Plenty of time to get ready, thank goodness.

  Relieved, Mort shit, showered, shaved and got dressed. He chose a pair of khaki shorts and his red t-shirt with the Flash insignia emblazoned across the front. The shirt, he discovered, was a little tough wriggling into. Must have shrunk in the dryer, Mort thought. He sat in the kitchen and ate some powdered donuts for breakfast, chased that with a mochaccino, then left for work. As usual, he hoofed it. His apartment was only a few blocks from the shop.

  It was a fine, clear morning, the sun bright but not too hot. A beautiful, breezy autumn day. There were just a couple cottony puffs of cloud sailing across the sky. The birds were chirping merrily. Mort felt like chirping, too. He’d slept most of the day yesterday so there was a little extra skip in his step.

  Funny, Mort thought, there’s not many people out walking this fine, fine Monday morning. There were usually a handful of people on the sidewalks at all hours of the day. Business men rushing on errands. Joggers and power walkers in tight spandex shorts, chasing their next fix of endorphins. Bicyclists. Moms with kids. But for some reason, the streets were deserted. DuChamp had turned into a ghost town overnight.

  Mr. Tockstein, he noted, had not opened his newsstand. Mort usually bought a paper there on his way to work, but the stand was closed today, the doors padlocked, and no note to explain why.

  He checked the newspaper dispensers further down the street, but they were empty. No Times. No USA Today. He put his hands on his hips, frowning. They couldn’t have sold out already. It was way too early.

  Was the flu making the rounds again? Mort wondered. He remembered hearing something about the flu on the evening news a day or two ago.

  As he stood beside the newspaper dispensers, a big truck roared past on the street, weaving dangerously. It was one of those redneck monster trucks, the kind you had to climb a ladder to get inside. It had a faded Bush/Cheney bumper sticker on its tailgate and deer hunter decals on the back window.

  The warm wash of its passage blew litter around Mort’s ankles. Empty paper cups and scraps of newspaper. Crushed cigarette butts and leaves. Mort turned to watch the vehicle squeal around the corner, outraged by the driver’s recklessness. Dude was going to kill someone!

  Then again, where was all the other traffic?

  He walked the rest of the way down the block, feeling a little uneasy.

  He noticed the frame and art print shop on the corner was closed.

  The Gym-Borie was also dark.

  Mort finally arrived at his shop. He fumbled his keys from his front pocket and let himself in. Five seconds after he entered POW Comics, a UPS man bolted from the alley two buildings up, running for his life. A pack of zombie canines—seven big ones, with a hobbling three-legged Chihuahua bringing up the rear— ran close behind him, nipping at his heels. The dogs were making weird huffing noises instead of barking, tongues lolling, foam dripping from their muzzles.

  Mort didn’t see the UPS man running for his life, or the zombie dogs. He readied his shop: turning on lights, organizing shelves, alphabetizing back issues, which he kept in long white cardboard boxes in the central aisle. A few pedestrians shuffled past the window as he swept, but no one entered.

  By 11:00 a.m., he was starting to worry.

  It looked like it was going to be a dead day.

  He munched on some chips, drank a pop, read a few issues of Wolverine and Fantastic Four. At 11:30 AM, he noticed someone yelling in the street. He peered out the window as the cry grew louder. A moment later, Fred rocketed by the window, yelling at the top of his lungs. Mort laughed. What was tha
t nut up to today?

  Fred doubled back, dived in the front door, and slammed it shut, gasping for air.

  “Hey, man! What’s the big deal?” Mort asked, still chuckling.

  Fred leaned his back against the door, his chest jerking rapidly up and down. He ogled Mort with disbelief, his frizzy red hair and unusual pallor making him look positively clownish.

  “Zom—!“ Fred gasped.

  “Take a deep breath,” Mort said, making a “calm down” gesture with his hands.

  “Zom—!“ Fred gasped again.

  “What is it?”

  Fred sucked in another breath, shook his head, then blasted: “ZOMBIES! IT’S FUCKING ZOMBIES!”

  Smiling dubiously, Mort turned to look out the window… and fell back against the counter in shock.

  There were five very dead-looking people standing in the display window, swiping half-heartedly at the dusty glass. One was his neighbor, Mrs. Feinstein, looking ghastly in her cracked and peeling mud mask. The front of her fuzzy pink robe was stained black with blood. Mort gaped at them stupidly, and they gaped back, their eyes like white marbles, red-rimmed and weepy. Viscous yellow-green foam hung suspended from their jaws, jiggling and dripping when they moved.

  “It’s fucking zombies!” Fred gasped. “Real fucking ass zombies!”

  Fred locked the door and retreated, shaking all over.

  “What do you…? Are you pulling my…?” Mort stepped around the counter to put some distance between himself and the very realistically made-up practical jokers groaning and scraping at the show window.

  “I’m not shitting you, man!” Fred cried. “They’re zombies! I saw them eating some meter maid up the street. They were fucking chowing down on her. For real. Then they saw me and started chasing after me.”

  The zombies were staring at Fred hungrily, faded eyes narrowed to ravenous slits, teeth bared. As Mort and Fred stood gawping at them, the putrescent group was joined by a couple more ambulatory dead folk.

  “This can’t be real,” Mort said softly.

  “It’s real, man! It’s fucking real!” Fred shrieked.