“Yeesh, you’re a nasty one,” the man said. He was wearing goggles and a yellow bandana decorated with leering white skulls. He watched the zombie for a moment to reassure himself it was paralyzed and no danger, then ambled away.
The room was a shipping and receiving office once. The walls were lined with putty-colored filing cabinets, wipe-off bulletin boards with routing assignments and work schedules scribbled on them in dry erase marker, and a variety of photocopied memos, invoices and yellow sticky notes pinned to cork boards. On top of one of the filing cabinets was a stupendously ugly monkey lamp with a palm leaf shade—a previous employee’s flea market treasure. Pinned to the shade was a handwritten note that declared THIS JOB DRIVES US BANANAS! There were three heavy oak desks that were manufactured sometime in the seventies and a large, only slightly less ancient copier. The gray industrial carpet was soiled with the concentric brown stains of the big man’s previous kills. Richard Rourke had been trolling for zombies from this office for the last three weeks.
Before the world ended, the building had once been the headquarters of the DuChamp Freight Company. DuChamp Freight had operated from this location for ninety years, opening in the roaring twenties and making a steady if modest profit throughout the decades, even during the depression and the numerous assorted recessions and gas shortages which followed. There were still train tracks crisscrossing the loading zone in back, though the company hadn’t shipped by rail in fifty years. After the Zombie Apocalypse, Rourke had made this place his fortress.
He had chosen the freight company because it was familiar. He had been a midlevel department supervisor at DuChamp Freight for nearly a decade, but the job had only been a front for his actual vocation.
In his Pre-Z life, Richard Rourke was a hitman. The underworld family who owned DuChamp Freight and retained him as their pet assassin had dubbed him Da Vinci and relied on him to dispose of informants, pesky law enforcement officers who couldn’t be bought off and the odd business rival or two. When the Armageddon Virus swept through the city of DuChamp, Mr. Rourke was the freight company’s highest paid employee. He drew a salary which made the CEO’s look paltry in comparison. The family paid him lavishly because he was very, very good at his job.
Both of his jobs, to be honest-- his day job and his night job.
He was an effective department supervisor: methodical, pragmatic and something of a perfectionist. His underlings were terrified of him, and rightly so. He had as little patience for slackers as he did for the inept. He was jokingly called the Black Widow around the offices due to the number of employees he had terminated for failing to perform their duties to his standards, but never to his face. Never to his face. His department was the most efficient and productive crew in the company. He was not well-liked, but he was respected, and that pleased him most of all.
He was a good assassin for the very same reasons.
His only nod to individuality as an assassin was the fact that he liked to dispatch his targets with weapons of his own devising. In that, he was more than just a craftsman of death. He was an artist. It was how he’d acquired his nickname: Da Vinci.
The design and fabrication of deadly instruments was his sole passion. In his apartment were sketches for all sorts of killing devices, from the prosaic-- knives, guns, arrows-- to the sublime.
He had painstakingly manufactured innumerable killing devices: mechanical racks that pulled people apart or whittled them down one sliver of flesh at a time. Clockwork killing machines that chewed a person from the feet up, spitting their mangled remains out the back. Strange things. Sexual things. He had a device that could be slid up a subject’s rectum and then triggered, discharging retractible razor sharp hooks. The device was self-lubricating, with a crank on the handle which could be turned to mechanically rotate the penetrating end. He sometimes employed a multi-jointed implement he called the Devil’s Codpiece, which he strapped to his cock so that he could fuck his victims to death.
He had dozens of spiral bound notebooks full of diagrams and blueprints for other equally brutal implements of torture and murder, organized and annotated, but his favorite sketches were affixed to the walls of his workshop. He called it his Altar of Death. It was his one romantic indulgence. Death was his goddess, he sometimes mused. In all her seductive forms.
His handler had seen his sketches the one time he’d visited Rourke’s workshop in person.
Rourke only knew his handler as Mr. Smith, although he’d acted as Rourke’s manager for nearly the entire decade he’d been killing for the family. Smith had come to deliver a message to the killer in person that day at the request of their employer. The man was of medium height, with slate gray hair, thick and combed straight back from his brow. An unremarkable man in every way-- except for his eyes. Da Vinci’s handler had the gray, soulless eyes of a goat.
Smith had perused all the blueprints and half-realized killing fantasies and laughed nervously. “You’re a regular Da Vinci, aren’t you?” he’d asked in his soft, cultivated voice… and the nickname had spread through the underworld like some kind of infectious disease.
Obviously Smith had been impressed enough to mention it to Rourke’s employer. He’s a regular Da Vinci... And his boss had passed the meme on. Rourke had considered finding Smith and killing him for that lapse, but in the end he let it slide. He liked his new nickname. It appealed to his vanity.
Take the arrow he’d used to catch Anne-Marie, for example. He’d designed the arrow himself. The shaft was handmade, composed of Sitka spruce wood, which had an impressive strength to weight ratio and unusual shock absorbing qualities. He’d used a barred turkey feather for the fletching of the arrow, though he preferred peacock when he was feeling whimsical. The arrowhead was his own design, elegant and deadly, and though he’d contracted a local metal fabrication company to produce it, he’d personally sharpened all four of its penetrating edges.
The captive bolt pistol he fetched from one of the big oak desks was his own design as well. Although in function it was no different from any other penetrating bolt cattle gun, its stainless steel barrel and hand grip were deliberately phallic. Resembling an H. R. Giger prop designed for a sci-fi/horror flick, the pistol he carried now toward the paralyzed zombie was as frighteningly erotic as it was lethal.
It was one of his favorites.
Gladius Mortis.
Cock of Death.
He had used it quite often in the last ten years. The weapon fired a sharpened bolt of steel into a victim’s body, propelled by the explosive force of a blank round. The bolt penetrated the victim’s skull, scrambling his or her brains. It killed them instantly. After being discharged, the bolt retracted into the barrel. With no bullet or casing left behind for some forensic examiner to study, it was nearly impossible for law enforcement to glean any evidence from the remains of his hits.
If those bodies were ever found. Most weren’t.
He usually climaxed when using it, too.
It didn’t matter whether his hit was male or female. It wasn’t even the killing that got him off. Not exactly. It was the intimacy of that final moment that drove him over the edge. It was the thing he shared with them right before he sent them-- begging for their lives, usually-- into the endless darkness.
Richard Rourke had a secret.
It was a terrible, dark, dirty secret-- and he shared that secret only with the men and women he’d marked for death.
And in that sharing, they died together.
For DaVinci, la petite mort. The little death.
For his victims… the real deal.
Rourke crouched down beside the zombie, which continued to glare at him with blank rage. It might once have been an attractive woman, but it was just a thing now, a mindless, murderous thing. He pushed a strand of its stiff and colorless hair away from its face with a fingertip and watched its mouth writhe, disgusted by its moldy teeth and frothy black lips. Its cataract eyes twitched back and forth in their sockets like caged animals.
He had cherished that interaction, the power he held over his victims before he killed them. Sometimes he talked to them for hours, and when the time arrived for them to die, he did it as quickly and painlessly as possible—for that was the mark of a true assassin—and as the bolt slid into their brain or the blade sank into their flesh or the garrote cut off their air supply, he leaned in close to them, his lips brushing the delicate, sensual flesh of their ears, and he whispered his deepest darkest secret to them, allowing himself to cum, his hard cock spitting a copious amount of hot, slick semen into his jockey shorts. La petit mort. As he extinguished their life.
But these… things. He felt nothing for them. He had talked to them at first, but quickly came to realize they didn’t understand anything he said to them. They had no intelligence. No soul. Although killing them still made him hard—they still looked somewhat human, he supposed, and his sexual response was stimulated by that—he did not feel any real intimacy with them. He couldn’t share his secret with them… and he never came.
He was starting to get backed up.
His dick a solid lump in the crotch of his pants, Da Vinci put the captive bolt pistol to the zombie’s lips. “You wanna know what my dad used to do to me?” he asked. He stroked the cool metal tip of the weapon against its lips, eased it into its mouth. The zombie grimaced and tried to bite the barrel of the pistol. He squinted into its eyes, looking for the slightest glimmer of intelligence, then angled the weapon toward the roof of its mouth and pulled the trigger in disappointment.
The creature, which had once been a nice lady named Anne-Marie DeAngelo, twitched for a few seconds, her brains scrambled, then died for the second and final time on the floor of the DuChamp Freight Company shipping and receiving office.
Da Vinci pulled his arrow through the back of the zombie’s neck, set it aside, then stood and fetched his meat hook. He chunked it up through the jaw of the carcass like a butcher hooking a slab of beef and dragged the thing from the room.
He hauled the corpse through the hallways, letting it thunk and plonk down the stairs, then heaved it into one of the loading bays. Inside the chamber were piles and piles of zombie bodies, neatly stacked like cords of firewood. The smell of the loading zone was ferocious. There were clouds of flies. Maggots all over the bodies.
Da Vinci deposited the cadaver onto the stack he was working on today, then sauntered back to his office to troll for another.
He was trying to break his daily record. He was up to 14 today. Three more and he would surpass the total he’d killed last Monday. His all-time high score.
It was something to do.
8
Shining Path and Winter Plum
Dao-ming roared through the streets of DuChamp, expertly dodging the pileups and abandoned cars. She dodged the zombies who raced out into the street in pursuit of them, too… for the most part. Every now and then there were just too many obstacles for her to juggle mentally and she couldn’t help but run one down, but she tried to avoid hitting the deadheads as much as possible. Hitting a full grown zombie head on was like hitting a deer, and nobody wants a zombie to crash through a windshield into their lap.
Mort and Pete introduced themselves from the backseat as the Mercedes slalomed through the streets. Pete did most of the talking, however. Mort was a little tongue-tied.
“Hi, there! I’m Peter Bolin. You can call me Pete. Some folks call me Cactus Pete, and that’s all right, too!” Pete hooked a thumb toward his companion. “This little guy is my buddy Mort. He don’t say much, though. He’s kind of shy.”
Pete was doing his best to sound casual, a big aw shucks grin on his face, but Mort could hear the strain in his voice. Both men were squeezing their butt cheeks tight enough to crack walnuts. The speed their rescuer was streaking through the zombie infested streets was worse than nerve-wracking. It was like being strapped into a sadistic and out-of-control theme park ride.
Mort elbowed Pete in the ribs. He was going to say, “I’m not shy.” Before he could get the words out, however, Dao-ming took a corner at what felt like a hundred and seventy miles per hour. Mort slid helplessly across the backseat and smashed into Pete as all four wheels squealed over the pavement. Pete’s face squished against the window. Dao-ming’s hair flew in a raven black swirl as she twirled the steering wheel. She wrenched the gear lever up and down, stomped on the gas and brought the Mercedes out of its drift.
Mort and Pete buckled in frantically after that.
“That’s probably a good idea,” Dao-ming laughed as the two men worked the buckles of their restraints. Mort glanced up and caught the woman studying them in the rear view mirror. The skin around her eyes crinkled as if she were smiling. Then she winked at him, and Mort felt his cheeks flush.
The Asian beauty sent the Mercedes screaming around another corner, wheels smoking. Even buckled up, centrifugal force leaned hard against Mort and Pete each time she made a sharp turn, and the candles, canned foods and ammunition tossed haphazardly in the floorboard of the car went rolling one way and then another. If they hadn’t buckled up, Mort would have gone sprawling again, sliding from side to side like a penny in a Sucrets can.
Dao-ming didn’t look back at him again. Her narrow eyes were intent on the road ahead. She did, however, speak to him haltingly. “So, Mort… are you from DuChamp?” The car jolted up onto the sidewalk to avoid a crashed and burned out school bus, then juddered back onto the street.
Mort’s mouth worked silently for a moment before he managed to find his voice. He finally stammered, “Y-yeah.” After the Mercedes pealed around another corner, he continued. “I own a comic book shop here in town. Or rather, I used to own a comic book shop here. Before… you know... all the zombies.” He tried to keep the boxes of ammo from jarring against one another with his feet, afraid a round might go off and injure someone.
“I’m from Kentucky originally,” Pete interjected. “I’ve been living in New York the last few years. Workin’ as a male model. Maybe you seen me. I was here in DuChamp to do a show when the shit hit the fan.”
“You did those Calvin Klein ads in Cosmo earlier this year, right? The underwear ads?” Dao-ming asked.
“Yeah, that was me.”
“I thought I recognized you when you jumped in the car.”
“That right?” Pete asked with a lopsided grin. He winked at Mort. “I used ta get recognized a lot before the zombie apocalypse.”
“Let me ask you something,” Dao-ming said as she steered in and out of two converging hordes of howling zombies. “You stuff your crotch in that photoshoot?”
Pete opened his mouth to deny it, his face turning red.
“My little sister says no, but I heard all you male models stuff,” Dao-ming continued.
Truth was: he had stuffed. Sort of. Underwear models didn’t use socks to pad their shorts, as was the common myth. They used a band with a velcro fastener. It kept their junk semi-erect and pushed everything up and out. He didn’t like doing it, didn’t think he needed it, but it was something nearly everyone in the business did. He wasn’t explaining all that to this chick, though. He didn’t like her attitude. Instead, he shut his mouth and leaned back in his seat, crossing his arms.
Mort looked from Pete to the back of Dao-ming’s head, confused. Pete had turned on the charm, grinning his best country boy grin, and the woman behind the wheel had shut him down. And not too gently.
“What about you?” Mort asked the Asian woman.
They all ducked as the Mercedes clipped a zombie and sent it spinning away like a scarecrow in a twister. The impact cracked the passen
ger side window and left a broad black fan of splattered goo across the side of the car.
“You need to slow down, babe!” Pete yelled, turning his head to watch the zombie smash through the plate glass window of a music store.
“If I slow down, those jiang shi will follow us, dummy,” Dao-ming snapped. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to crash. I’ve been a stunt driver for three years. I was here in DuChamp to celebrate my parents’ thirtieth anniversary when the Phage hit town… And don’t call me babe.”
After that, Dao-ming leaned to her right and lifted a walkie-talkie from the passenger seat. She had to push aside a couple of very nasty and very large automatic weapons to get to it. Driving one-handed, she depressed the talk button and said, “Dongmei, I’m about five minutes away. Are you ready? Over.”
The walkie-talkie crackled, and then a young female voice replied, “I’m ready. You got any jiang shi chasing you? Over.”
Dao-ming glanced in the rearview mirror. Mort turned in his seat to help her look. Pete sat with his arms crossed and a sour look on his face. In the street behind them, three zombies were shambling after the vehicle. They were running pretty fast, but the rate of speed the Mercedes was traveling made them shrink into the distance pretty quickly.
Mort held up three fingers. He added another finger as a fourth deadhead dashed from a Salvation Army thrift store and gave chase.
“Four. Maybe more. Be ready,” Dao-ming said into the walkie-talkie.
“Roger. Over and out.”
Dao-ming tossed the walkie-talkie aside and executed a tight, high-speed S curve, zigging from one street onto another. The closely spaced structures of uptown DuChamp gave way to affluent homes with sprawling wooded lawns. Mort watched a young girl dash from the front door of a large, fenced in private residence at the far end of the street. The dark haired girl ran to the high black gate which secured the street entrance of the property and began to tug it open. The girl, Mort noted, had a rather hefty rifle slung over her shoulder.
Mort: Deluxe Illustrated Edition (The Fearlanders) Page 11
