Mort: Deluxe Illustrated Edition (The Fearlanders)

by Joseph Duncan

  “Go! Go! Go!” Dongmei squealed.

  Dao-ming yanked the gear lever and stomped the gas pedal to the mat.

  The Mercedes-Benz pealed down the street, tires smoking.

  The shady residential streets slid past, moving quicker and quicker as the Mercedes accelerated. Mort had to swallow down his breakfast. A little of it had come back up, hot as acid, in his mouth.

  Mort Lesser was not a religious man. He believed there was a God. Not so much in all the other mumbo-jumbo organized religion would have people buy into. Nevertheless, as he led his friends into the wilderness that morning, Mort prayed. He prayed he was doing the right thing, that he was right about this, that he wasn’t leading them all to their doom. Somehow he had assumed responsibility for this group. They were letting him call the shots, but what if he was wrong? What if the nuclear power plant didn’t blow up? What if they would have been safer hiding out at Dao-ming’s house until the Phage ran its course? The deadheads weren’t immortal. They could be killed. He’d killed them himself. Eventually the Armageddon Virus would simply burn itself out. Maybe they should have just stayed where they were and crossed their fingers. He was going to get them all killed!

  He didn’t believe it though. In his head, there was a graph, and it charted two variables. One was the odds of the DuChamp nuclear power facility melting down. The other was the odds of being killed and eaten by zombies. Right now, both those variables were climbing into the red zone, but if their luck held out, if they could get out of town before one or the other hit one hundred percent, the chances of dying from either plummeted close to zero. They’d be safe, and he would be the hero for a change!

  But he couldn’t stop thinking what if. It was, he realized, the price of trying to be a hero.

  Within a block, the Mercedes was being chased by a pack of zombie dogs. Big, mangy animals with filmy eyes and black lolling tongues. Dongmei threw her arms around Pete with a squeal when she saw them, hiding her face in his shoulder.

  They pelted after the car, snarling and slavering, little bits and pieces of them falling off into the street, but the Mercedes was already going fifty miles per hour, and the animals shrank quickly into the distance.

  Mort leaned hard against his seatbelt as Dao-ming took a sharp turn at full speed. He ground his teeth together and tried his best to hold onto the rifle and shotgun in his arms. He kept the barrels poking out the cracked window an inch or two for safety. Another gun, a pistol, sat in his lap. He squeezed it between his thighs as canned food and flashlights and ammo rattled in the backseat.

  Just around the corner, a deadhead was stumbling in the middle of the street. It was a female, skin blue and mottled with mold, dressed in a ragged hospital gown. The Mercedes squealed around the corner, missing her by inches. Her hospital gown whipping in the air, the deadhead turned and tottered after the vehicle, groaning, but the Mercedes was a block away before the creature had shambled three steps in pursuit of it.

  Dao-ming narrowed her eyes and fixed the totality of her concentration on the road ahead. Until they cleared the city, she needed all of her skills to navigate the crash-littered and zombie-infested streets of DuChamp. She weaved through a wagon train of burned out military transports. Went up onto the sidewalk to sidestep a big pileup at an intersection. All along the street, the dead lifted their heads as the Mercedes roared past. They gave chase, their faces twisted in hunger and rage.

  It was another roller coaster ride through zombie hell. Mort was horrified by the city’s dissolution. Homes and businesses had burned to their foundations. In some place, entire city blocks had burned, looked like photos of World War II destruction. Bodies lay piled in the gutters, flyblown and bloated. Zombies exploded from every doorway and alley, running at the car like feral animals. Dongmei screamed and clutched at Pete like a girl on her first horror movie double date. Pete stroked the back of her head and told her it was going to be all right, forgetting his annoyance with her for the time being. Despite Dao-ming’s driving skills, they clipped several howling revenants. One flew up and hit the windshield, starring the glass, before rolling across the roof and sprawling in the street behind them. Mort tried to hang onto the weapons and his breakfast.

  They saw one other band of survivors during their escape from the city. A group of college-age kids in an old green van. The van had crashed into a light pole and sat immobile, hood buckled up, radiator steaming.

  Dao-ming didn’t slow.

  The van, Mort saw, was surrounded by zombies. Deadheads were beating at the windows, clawing at the seams of the vehicle, trying to chew their way through the crunchy outside to get to the gooey center. The college kids-- two boys and two girls-- stared out the windows in doomed horror. They knew their fate was sealed.

  Maybe it was his imagination, but Mort thought he caught the eye of one of the college kids as they roared past. Just for a nanosecond. The boy was clutching a barking dog to his chest, waiting for the two of them to be eaten alive.

  “There’s nothing we can do for them,” Dao-ming said grimly. She didn’t turn her eyes from the street. Not for a moment.

  Mort squeezed his eyes shut, fighting off the tears. He nodded.

  Nothing they could do.

  Mort opened his eyes.

  He grabbed the dash with his free hand and howled, “No! No! No!”

  The street up ahead was completely blocked, packed from one side of the road to the other with deadheads. Half the city seemed to be gathered there, for what he could not see, but the street was impassable.

  Dao-ming saw it as soon as he did, however. She stomped the brakes, brought the Mercedes to a squealing halt.

  “Back! Back! Back!” Mort said, twisting around in his seat. “We have to take an alternate route!”

  “I know!” Dao-ming said tersely.

  As the great mob of deadheads gave chase, Dao-ming wheeled the car around. The Mercedes took off like a rocket.

  Watching the deadheads shrink into the distance, Mort blew out his cheeks. He settled back into his seat. “That was close!” he breathed.

  “Naw, she’s got it under control,” Pete said from the backseat.

  Dao-ming glanced back at him in the rear view mirror and gave him a faint, but genuine, smile.

  Finally, the city began to thin. The high rise buildings gave way to a low suburban sprawl. There was less debris in the streets, fewer smashed cars. There were fewer zombies to dodge, too. Dao-ming sighed and dropped their speed to something just shy of suicidal.

  “Are we safe? Are we out of the city?” Dongmei asked, her eyes red and swollen.

  “Almost,” Dao-ming answered.

  They turned onto a deserted street, headed west. To the north, on Mort’s side, were factories, broad fenced lots, criss-crossing railways. A large sign said DuChamp Industrial Parkway. There were a few cars in the lots, but not many. Most employees had probably called in dead the last couple weeks, Mort thought. He only saw two zombies: a rotten scarecrow shuffling in the middle of a parking lot, wandering between abandoned cars, and a second one limping along the ditch, dragging a partially devoured human leg behind it by the ankle.

  Parkway Road travelled west toward a large gray building with a sign out front that said DuChamp Freight Company. Another street ran perpendicular there, heading north and south.

  “Parkway connects to some backroads,” Dao-ming said. “There’s some wooded lots and warehouses, the city dump, and then we’ll be out of DuChamp.”

  “Good,” Mort replied.

  “You hear that, baby,” Pete said to Dongmei, petting her hair. “We’re home free, girl!”

  Dongmei smiled, scrubbing her wet cheeks with the back of her hand. “Yay!”

  Things happened fast after that.

  Dao-ming and Mort jerked back as bits of glass coughed from the center of the windshield. Mort squeezed his eyes shut as a hail of glass shards peppered his forehead and cheeks. There was no sound other than the blast of rupturing glass. One minute everything
was fine, the next a four inch hole had magically appeared in the front windshield of the Mercedes-Benz.

  “What was that?” Dao-ming cried, her nose and ear bleeding. The Mercedes slewed into the ditch as she tried to blink the glittering debris from her cheeks and eyelashes, but she recovered and steered the car back onto the street.

  Then from the backseat, Pete moaned: “Oh, God! Oh, Jesus!”

  Dongmei lay slumped in Pete’s arms, her head rolling loosely on her shoulders, her eyes open and staring lifelessly at the roof of the car. There was a ragged red hole in her forehead, close to her right temple.

  Pete’s face was covered in blood. There was blood all over his shoulder and chest. Blood sprayed across the inside of the back window. Blood all over the back seat. He tried to stench the flow from the teenager’s head with his right hand but it was futile. The girl was mortally wounded.

  “Dongmeeeiii!” Dao-ming screamed.

  The car jerked as one of the front wheels ruptured.

  The Mercedes swerved, jounced into the ditch, then struck a fence post and came to a wrenching halt. The hood popped up. Steam began to billow from the radiator.

  Screaming, Dao-ming tried to claw her way into the back seat, but she was still buckled in and couldn’t get to her sister.

  Pete was in shock. He couldn’t seem to wrap his brain around the sight of the bloodied teenager in his arms. “I think someone shot her…”

  Mort had struck his forehead pretty hard on the dash when the Mercedes ran into the fence post. He shook his head to clear his rattled thoughts, then checked the area around the vehicle for zombies. No zombies were coming yet, thank God. He saw a flicker of reflected light in one of the ground floor windows of the DuChamp Freight Company building. The shooter! But who…? And more importantly, why…?

  Dao-ming finally realized she was still buckled in. She unbuckled her seatbelt to climb into the back. She sprawled over the seat and brushed Dongmei’s hair from her still, pale face, sobbing no, no over and over.

  Pete was crying too. He looked at Mort. His mouth worked but nothing came out.

  Mort took the rifle and shotgun in his arms and kicked open the door. He clambered out onto the grassy shoulder of the road and headed toward the Freight Company building, toward the window where he’d glimpsed that deadly glint of light.

  He heard a zombie howl and turned in its direction. The shambling deadhead they’d passed earlier, the one dragging the leg behind it, was stumping toward him, mouth agape. It was rotted so bad its gender was indecipherable. It dropped the leg and tottered toward him, clawing at the air with leathery hands.

  Mort blew its head off with the rifle, taking savage satisfaction in the killing.

  He turned back to the Freight Company building. Sighted the open window through the rifle’s scope. A shadow moved inside. There you are, he thought. His mind was surprisingly clear, the thought surprisingly lethal. He sighted on the shadow figure in the window, his finger twitching on the trigger. A moment later, he felt a blast of heat in his thigh and found himself dropping to the pavement.

  He shot me!

  He observed his fall with a dreamy sort of detachment, as if he were floating outside his own body. Pete yelled his name, but his friend’s voice seemed to come from a million miles away.

  It was strange how time switched to slow motion when you were injured.

  Mort marveled at how much he could see and think and feel in the single blink of an eye. The gritty surface of the pavement drifted up to meet his body. There was a beer can in the ditch. It was a Pabst Blue Ribbon, half-crushed and caked with dirt. Dao-ming shouted her sister’s name in the wrecked car behind him, her voice low and slow. The pavement was warm, he noticed, when his cheek finally settled upon it, light as a feather. It was actually kind of nice, that warmth.

  He looked down at his jeans. Scowled. There was a hole in his thigh. Blood was pouring out of him. Quite a lot of blood. This whole plot is full of holes, he thought irrationally.

  Then he noticed something else. The ground was vibrating beneath him. He felt it more than he heard it, a deep bass hum. The quake swelled in intensity, then began to ebb. The ground thrummed once again, more intensely, and he heard the distant warble of car alarms. Some of the Freight Company’s windows burst.

  Mort looked to the north and saw, hazy with distance, a gray pillar of smoke rising into the sky.

  Oh crap, he thought.

  11

  When Morton Met Peter

  Morton Lesser met Peter Bolin the day Mort lit out for the territories. Mort’s plan was straightforward. Travel light, and get the heck out of Dodge before the nuclear power plant redlined. He didn’t take a lot with him, just food and water and some basic survival gear stuffed in his old backpack from high school. He knew trying to carry too many supplies would only slow him down, and lord knows, he was slow enough as it was. Besides, he reasoned, he could probably scavenge anything he needed along the way.

  When he decided it was now or never, he grabbed his backpack, laced his tennis shoes good and tight, threw up in the kitchen trashcan and made his way cautiously to the deserted street below. Within a few hours of abandoning his apartment, Mort was pinned down in a Frito-Lay delivery truck, surrounded by the hungry dead.

  Peter Bolin rescued him, but only because he thought Mort was a chick.

  But before that, in the week following Fred’s death, during the most violent phase of the zombie epidemic, Mort holed up in his apartment. During that first chaotic week, Mort had no intention whatsoever of stepping foot outside his apartment until the government or army or somebody got the zombie outbreak under control. He didn’t care what authority stepped up to the plate, just so long as they put the world back in order. If it was Nazis from the moon, he’d heil with the best of them. If it was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he’d happily bike around town the rest of his life, dressed in a peppy suit and tie and spreading the good word about Jesus Christ, as translated by his modern day prophet Joseph Smith Jr.. Heck, he’d grok alien intervention. They could probe him all they wanted! Unfortunately, the government was a no-show. The army spent a day or two shooting healthy but frightened American citizens at the edge of town before hauling stakes, and Jesus and the Nazi Party were previously engaged. When the TV and radio stations went off the air-- and shortly after that, the lights-- Mort realized the cavalry wasn’t coming.

  This isn’t so bad, he thought, sitting in his dark apartment. His apartment ran warm without air conditioning, but he could live with it. Emphasis on the word “live”. Sweating through his undies and going to sleep at sundown were minor inconveniences compared to being ripped apart and devoured by his fellow Massachusetts. He’d just keep his head down until the zombie infection ran its course. Things might never be the same again, but at least he’d be alive.

  He found an old Walkman in one of his dresser drawers and popped some batteries in it. Tuning to 107.3, Mort spent his days listening to some guy ranting on what used to be the local rock ‘n’ roll station, DCFM, home of “Stinkie and the Fonz”. He didn’t know who the guy was. He certainly wasn’t Stinkie or the Fonz, but he sure had some wild ideas, and every now and then he would actually report some halfway credible news. He even played some music here and there. Mort finally dubbed the guy Ravin’ Ronnie, because of his tendency to get hysterical and babble, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying, and sometimes a little of both. One day Ravin’ Ronnie claimed the zombie outbreak was a supervirus that had escaped from some government lab. The next day, he claimed the virus had come from outer space. Day three, it was mutated AIDS, and God was punishing the world for all the immorality and dirty fucking going on. Whatever its genesis, Mort knew such a destructive virus would—must!—burn itself out quickly. He’d even seen zombies attacking and eating one another. Yes, he decided, sometimes the best course of action was simply taking no action at all.

  He estimated he could survive for at least three weeks without the need to leave
his apartment. He’d spent the first forty-eight hours following Fred’s death prepping. He’d barricaded the door, filled every container, jug, coffee mug, drinking glass and basin in his apartment with drinking water. He began to ration his food immediately, eating only when he could ignore his hunger pains no longer, although he did gorge himself on his entire Little Debbie stores one evening in a fit of boredom and despair. He’d slept the next twelve hours in a sugar coma.

  Hell, he might be able to push it further than three weeks. It depended on just how long the taps continued to work. Potable water was the crux. He’d installed a filtration system in his kitchen sink a couple years ago, hoping to strain some of the rust and little black bits from the city’s unpalatable drinking water, so quality was not a big deal, just so long as water came out when he turned the valve. A human being could go weeks without food as long as they had a continuous supply of drinking water. He just hoped it wasn’t the water supply that was spreading the infection. His filters could remove chlorine and lead. It couldn’t remove viruses or bacteria. He didn’t think so, anyway.

  Then one night, about a week after he hunkered down to wait out the zombie plague, he dreamed the DuChamp nuclear power facility blew up.

  To be more precise, he dreamed he was visiting the plant when it blew up.

  In his dream, he was a teenager again. This was a grade school version of Mort Lesser: fat, unpopular, face like a pepperoni pizza, with C-cup titties and a belly that hung over the waist band of his blue jeans like a small awning. Mort the Dork, a living, breathing KICK ME sign. He was in junior high and his school had taken all the seventh and eighth graders by bus to the nuclear power plant on the north side of town as part of Ronald Reagan’s “Nuclear Power is Your Friend” public service program, the nuclear power industry’s pithy attempt to reach out to the U.S.’s nuclear power communities and allay their fears following the Chernobyl disaster in Russia.

  His dad, who was still fifteen years away from dying during a triple bypass operation, had scrawled his name on the permission form. Mort remembered because his dad was monging on a banana when he did it and got banana goo on the paper, which upset Mort tremendously. He didn’t want his teacher, who was young and slim and pretty, to see the banana goo and think Mort had gotten the permission slip all gooey.