Mort: Deluxe Illustrated Edition (The Fearlanders)

by Joseph Duncan

  So they toured the facility, approximately sixty giggling, grabassing, know-it-all teenagers, paying little attention to the tour guide’s canned speech and secretly rolling their eyes and cutting jokes at the expense of all the goofy, grinning, uncool adults who ran the power plant and kept their community in lights and ice cubes without turning the city into a big radioactive crater in the middle of Massachusetts.

  When the tour had come to an end, the perky tour guide—a petite brunette with a ponytail—asked the DuChamp junior high schoolers if anyone had any questions. Before he could stop himself, Mort spoke up: “Yeah. So, um... could this place blow up? Like Chernobyl, I mean? My dad says it can. He says the longer the plant is operating, the higher the, uh, probability is that an accident will happen.”

  The entire group fell silent. About half of the seventh and eighth graders looked at Mort. The other half, including the teachers, looked at the tour guide. Mort felt his cheeks heat up at all the stares. The tour guide’s grin grew just slightly brittle before she answered.

  “Like Chernobyl? Um, no. The Chernobyl disaster is something that just isn’t going to happen here in the United States. For one thing, the incident at Chernobyl was triggered by a very unlikely set of circumstances. An unauthorized experiment was being conducted and, unlike nuclear power plants in the United States, the Soviet facility did not have any form of hard containment vessel.”

  “But what would happen if, say, all the people disappeared and there was nobody left to run the plant?” Mort continued. “Would it blow up then?”

  The tour guide laughed, relieved her questioner had veered so quickly into the realm of make-believe. “Well, if everybody in the world just disappeared”—she said, making quotation marks with her fingers—“The emergency diesel generators would kick in and continue to cool the reactor core for about a week. After that, the cooling system would eventually fail, and the plant might melt down, but the energy would still be contained within the power plant’s nuclear containment shielding.”

  “Even in a worst case scenario,” the tour guide continued. “The reactor core would melt down through the floor and continue to burrow through the earth’s mantle until it cooled or struck some type of water table. In any event, the core would be safely shielded, by the plant’s structure, or by the planetary crust.”

  Everyone seemed very impressed and reassured by her answer. Both the teens and adults nodded and smiled at one another, but Mort was not so comforted. He’d overheard his mother and father discussing the Three-Mile Island incident, which had taken place in the US in the late seventies. Mort’s dad, who had grown up in Pennsylvania, sometimes joked when he was in his cups that the radiation he’d been exposed to when he was in high school was the reason he had such a giant schlong. His parents had protested this very plant’s construction when GE decided to build a nuclear plant in DuChamp. Mort was in pre-school when this happened. Failing to halt its construction, his parents had always maintained a simmering paranoia regarding the nuclear power plant that ran their appliances and cooled their home in the summer.

  As they were being escorted out of the plant in his dream, Mort noticed that a pipe was leaking and brought it to the tour leader’s attention. Hot, bubbling water was spraying from the leaky pipe with a rattling raspberry sound.

  “If it’s so safe, ma’am, then why is this pipe leaking?” he’d asked, pointing at it with his index finger.

  The tour guide looked horrified. “Oh no!” she cried. “Everybody run!”

  But it was too late. In his dream, the plant exploded. Hot steam enveloped his classmates, broiling them instantly. Flying debris chopped his teachers and the perky tour guide into bloody chunks. Ms. Hancock, his pre-algebra teacher, was skewered by a flying piece of piping with such force that she was pinned to the wall like a butterfly, blood spraying from her mouth, legs quivering. Then the radiation blossomed out of the shuddering walls, red and hot like the light that comes from an electric heater. Mort stood in the center of the maelstrom like a ghost, untouched, amazed by the destruction. He wondered how he could be standing there unaffected as the plant blew up around him. It was impossible! Then he felt a tingling sensation in his arms and looked down at them. His mouth dropped open in horror as he watched his skin begin to bubble, great blisters welling up and bursting in his flesh. He realized he could see his bones through his skin, like when he was a kid and he would hold his fingers over the lens of a flashlight, but it was not just the flesh of his fingers he could see through. It was his whole body.

  Mort jerked awake with a snort. He found himself bolt upright in his bed.

  He recalled that long ago tour guide answering his hypothetical long ago question: “Well, if everybody in the world just disappeared, the emergency diesel generators would kick in and continue to cool the reactor core for about a week.”

  For about a week…!

  Mort packed a bag and departed the next day.

  He figured it would take three or four days to get out of the city on foot. Maybe as little as a day if he could find a ride with the keys in the ignition and some gas in the tank. He couldn’t take his little jalopy. Some lady in a Porsche had crashed into it on the third day of the outbreak, shoving it up onto the sidewalk and wedging it against a light pole.

  He just hoped the backup generators at the power plant held out three or four more days. He was optimistic. The city’s power was still on in some areas. He could see the lights at night, glowing on the horizon. Surely that must mean someone was still manning the power plant… but how long could they hold out?

  He didn’t want to stick around and find out.

  The thought of leaving the safety of his apartment was terrifying. Putting himself in the reach of those awful creatures...! He knew what they would do if they got ahold of him! The cowardly part of his mind tried to talk him out of it all morning, insisting he was jumping the gun, that order would soon be restored and the zombies dealt with, that the power plant’s safety features had multiple redundancies. Heck, they probably even had protocols for just such an emergency. He was going to get himself killed, and for what? A bad dream?

  But Mort was a firm believer in Murphy’s Law. His father had always said, “Shit happens... and shit stinks.” Mort suspected that things in DuChamp—things all over the world—were just going to keep sliding deeper and deeper into the tar pit. All the lights in DuChamp would go out, and a week after that, give or take a few days, the plant would melt down. The backup generators would fail, the coolant would stop circulating, the reactor core would begin to heat up, and then... kaboom!

  So he watched the street from his window, and when a couple hours had passed with no sign of deadheads, he unblocked his door and crept through his dark and silent apartment building to the sidewalk down below.

  He leaned out the door, peering up and down the street. The only sound was the mournful hooting of the wind. That, and the thudding of his heart. He stuck out a foot, almost balked, then forced himself to step completely out in the open.

  “You can do this,” he whispered to himself.

  He stood there beneath the open sky, the sun on his face, the wind blowing through his hair, waiting for a pack of starved zombies to come bolting from an alley or some recessed doorway, but nothing happened. The world was silent, the street deserted.

  Mort started down the avenue, headed south. He slipped from doorway to alley, peeking around each corner, hunkering down behind every wrecked car he came to, trying to stay out of sight. He checked the abandoned vehicles but most were locked tight or too damaged to drive. He made it to the end of the street and turned right, heading west. A couple blocks from his apartment, he found a crowbar in the open trunk of a gray Ford Taurus that had crashed into the brick wall of a Dollar General store. The driver of the car had been flung partially through the windshield. He’d also been eaten from the waist up.

  There were a few fat autumn flies crawling over the man’s gnawed bones. They rubbed their hairy little
forelegs together and skittered around, taking to the air and landing restlessly, wings buzzing. The man didn’t look real. He could have been a prop in a horror movie. He smelled pretty real, though. Mort had to cover his nose and mouth to get close.

  Mort hefted the crowbar. He liked the weight of it in his hands. He took a few practice swings and continued on.

  A few blocks past that, he chanced upon a Frito-Lay truck. The delivery truck was parked neatly at the curb. The driver, a woman with curly bottle-blonde hair, sat slumped in her seat. Mort approached cautiously. He wasn’t completely sure she was dead-dead, but the vehicle appeared unscathed. Maybe he could drive it out of town.

  He eased open the door, grimacing at the smell that blossomed from the interior.

  He poked the woman experimentally with his crowbar.

  He waited to see if her eyes would flash open, expected the corpse to come to life and lunge at him, but she didn’t so much as twitch. She was as stiff and lifeless as a store mannikin.

  Dead-dead, he thought.

  He quickly realized how she’d died. It was pretty obvious up close. She’d slit her own throat with a box cutter. A large, crusty grin was carved into her neck from ear to ear, her uniform black and stiff with blood, the box cutter in her lap. How hopeless and frightened must she have been to do such a thing, Mort wondered. He didn’t think he could do it. She must have gotten trapped, surrounded by zombies--

  You don’t have time for this, a voice spoke up in his head.

  He leaned in to check the ignition and couldn’t help but grin.

  Keys!

  Mort was getting ready to haul her out of her seat when he heard soft, bubbly exhalations behind him.

  Hair standing up on the back of his neck, Mort turned to see where the phlegmatic breathing was coming from.

  “Oh, crap,” Mort whispered.

  A few yards away, a very large and very zombified Rottweiler was creeping toward him.

  Head lowered, lips peeled back from its teeth, the beast stalked forward. Its eyes were filmy gray marbles. Its black and tan fur had fallen out in clumps.

  “Uh... good doggy,” Mort squeaked, easing backwards. He stepped onto the running board of the delivery truck.

  Foam drooled from the Rottweiler’s twitching muzzle as it padded toward him. It began to growl deep in its chest. If it hadn’t been in such an advanced state of putrefaction, Mort realized, the creature probably would have been able to take Mort down before he’d noticed it coming up behind him, but the beast appeared to have died days before, and death had ravaged its tissues, making it slow and stiff and clumsy.

  Mort slid up onto the delivery driver’s lap. He jumped a little as the driver wheezed. The weight of his body had forced a whoosh of gas from the dead driver’s guts. He gagged. The smell was awful beyond description.

  “That’s a good boy,” Mort gulped, trying to keep his voice steady. “Sta-aaay...”

  The Rottweiler leapt.

  The animal’s jaws snapped shut just inches from one of his ankles. Mort swung the crowbar down with panicky strength, striking the huge dog in the head. The impact rattled up his entire arm, almost jerked the crowbar from his grip, but he did not feel it. He would not feel it until later that night, when he was safe in Pete’s basement hideout. By nightfall, his arm would be so sore he could raise it no higher than his chest, but there was so much adrenaline pumping through his veins right then he could have ripped the whole blamed arm off and not felt it.

  The big dog fell to the ground on its side, rotten flesh and maggots peppering the pavement around it. It writhed around for a moment, its skull dented in like a rotten melon, then it struggled to its feet.

  Gasping, Mort pulled his legs into the delivery truck and slammed the door shut.

  The Rottweiler drove its head against the side of the truck hard enough to make the vehicle rock on its wheels. The beast did it again, making Mort cry out, and then it must have decided that mushing its head against the door of the delivery truck was a bad idea, because it began to bark: hoarse and loud. Its baying was answered a second later by the howl of a human zombie.

  Mort sat in the dead blonde’s lap, his entire body trembling. He couldn’t believe how close he’d come to getting bit, maybe even killed. Down the street, a zombie lurched around the corner, headed in his direction.

  Gotta get out of here, he thought. Get this crate moving before you’re surrounded!

  He scooted to the open compartment beside the driver’s seat and tried to pull her out of the chair. The blonde’s head and shoulders tilted a little, but he couldn’t dislodge her from her seat. He yanked again, grunting. For a second, he thought she was adhered to the seat with the dried glaze of her own blood, then he realized she was still buckled in.

  Mort yelped as a zombie slapped its palms against the driver’s side window. It was a male, still fresh and strong, with coppery curls and a big hunk of skin missing from its cheek: a bite wound, ragged and oozing. It had heard the Rottweiler howling and come a-running. The curly-headed zombie slapped its hands against the glass twice more, gnashing its teeth and hissing.

  Gasping, dizzy with fear, Mort slid back onto the blonde’s lap, the steering wheel gouging him in the belly. He keyed the ignition, praying under his breath. Please oh please oh please, God, I don’t ask for much! The engine caught right off, the whole cab shaking, then died an instant later. He tried again... with similar results. He finally thought to check the instrument panel and saw with horror that the fuel indicator was pointing at E.

  Empty!

  “No!” Mort cried. “No! No! No! Oh, you stupid fat idiot!”

  The howls of the curly-headed zombie had attracted more deadheads to the stalled truck. Mort watched with steadily rising terror as two, three, four came pelting around the street corner. The Rottweiler continued to bark. The zombies howled and snarled and shrieked. They ran to the Frito-Lay truck and began to scratch at the sides. They pawed the windows, smearing them with goo and gore. Mort locked the door just in case one of them accidentally hooked the door handle with their flailing fingers, then slid from the dead driver’s lap into the floorboard and put his face in his hands.

  “You’re dead, Mort,” he said to himself, voice pitched high in disbelief. “You just killed yourself!”

  One mistake. He’d made one mistake…!

  But in Zombie World, one mistake is all you got.

  Mort blinked up at the driver as he sat in the floorboard. She’d once been a lovely, middle-aged woman. Mid-forties, thin, her face a little too wrinkled from tanning, with a narrow nose and a sharp prow of a chin. She looked like one of those bittersweet blondes life always seemed to cure into female beef jerky. The kind of woman who drank too much, smoked too much and couldn’t help but fall for the bad boys, no matter how many times they burned her. Her final grimace was stamped forever now onto her lipsticked lips, just three or four inches above the joker smile she’d carved into her own throat.

  She had nice fingernails, Mort noted. French manicure, like his mother always got. The stiff fingers of her right hand were still curled around the box cutter.

  He thought about taking that box cutter from her bony fingers and doing himself a like favor. They could sit here in the Frito-Lay truck together, grinning side by side, for all eternity.

  She’d probably made just the one mistake, too. Forgot to fill up the delivery truck, or maybe she had checked the gauge that morning and thought, I’ll just get it at lunch, no big whoop... He wondered how long she’d sat in the truck, trapped by the hungry dead, before she decided to off herself.

  It couldn’t have been too long ago, because she wasn’t all rotten and maggoty.

  Mort jumped as more zombies drummed the side of the truck.

  “Shut up!” he screeched at the howling revenants.

  Within an hour, there was something like fifty zombies surrounding the van, playing bongos on the side panels and scraping at the windows with their ragged, bony fingers. The vehicle sh
uddered and rocked. If they were smart enough to coordinate their efforts, go for the windows at once, the zombies could have gotten at him in an instant, but they were mindless things. They attacked one another as often as they did the van. Mort rose, duckwalked into the back. He opened a cardboard box and grabbed several bags of chips. He returned to the front and opened them, eating the salty snacks glumly. He stared out at the zombies as he munched, face pale, brow furrowed.

  When he was full, he took the box cutter from the blonde’s stiff fingers and put the blade to his neck. He squeezed his eyes shut and screamed.

  1-2-3-NOW!

  Okay... 1-2-3-NOW!

  He screamed until he was out of breath, but he just couldn’t do it!

  He threw the box cutter down, tears beading his eyelashes.

  Coward!

  A second later: two gunshots.

  Mort jerked as the gunshots echoed in the air. Before the sound had even died away, the zombies quit howling and pummeling the delivery truck. In the sudden dead silence, Mort raised up. He scrambled across the truck driver’s lap. Peeking through the smeary window, Mort spotted the gunman. The guy stood on the sidewalk across the street from the van, legs spread, a shotgun in his hands. He was a lanky fellow with shoulder-length feathered blonde hair and broad shoulders. Dressed in tight straight-leg jeans, a blue Chambray shirt and cowboy boots, Mort’s rescuer flashed a big grin and fired another shot in the air. He looked every inch the hero, shotgun belching smoke, the sun flashing off expensive aviator sunglasses.

  “Come get some, you undead assholes!” the man yelled.

  Mort heard the words clearly. The zombies were just standing there ogling the man. Perhaps, in their own dim way, the deadheads were just as impressed as Mort was at the man’s reckless bravery. Mort didn’t quite believe what he was seeing, didn’t dare to hope. Was he imagining it? Was this some last desperate fantasy?