Round. Red. Food.
“It’s an apple,” Mort’s psychologist said, putting the card aside.
As soon as she said it, the word appeared in Mort’s brain. But it was too late. Mort felt a hot flash of shame and frustration.
“Let’s try another,” Ms. Beecher said.
Mort stared at the flash card. He tried to do as she had instructed, tried to think sideways around the vacant spots in his head. His mind was once a well-stocked and organized pantry, everything in easy reach, but no longer. Everything was a jumbled mess in there now, and there was so many empty shelves. It frightened and depressed him every time he peeked inside.
“Fish?”
“Very good! How about this one?”
“Dog,” Mort answered quickly.
“Wonderful!”
This went on for a good half hour. Mort was able to name half of the images Ms. Beecher showed to him. When they had finished, Mort’s head was throbbing, but he was proud of himself.
“I’m very pleased with your progress, Mort,” Ms. Beecher said, putting away her clipboard and flash cards. “Considering the extent of your injuries, and the fact that you received only the most basic medical care immediately following the trauma to your brain, the speed at which you’re recovering is a little hard to believe.”
They had discussed it before. Prompt medical treatment was extremely important following severe neurological trauma. So much so, it was called the “golden hour”. Mort had received very little medical care following his injury. It had taken almost three hours for the... Archons to transport Mort and his companions to New Jerusalem. It was a miracle he’d survived at all.
They discussed his aphasia and talked about some of the other psychological issues he might have to deal with due to his brain injury: emotional difficulties, loss of consciousness, confusion.
“The most important thing to remember,” Ms. Beecher said, “is that your recovery, whether it’s eighty percent or one hundred percent, is entirely dependent upon you. Your will. Your determination to recover. It’s all right to get frustrated, and it’s all right to be angry or mourn for the parts of your mind that you’ve lost, but you must never, ever give up. If you do, that terrible man who hurt you will have won just the tiniest victory over you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Mort nodded.
They were still chatting when Mort’s physical therapist leaned through the doorway.
“You ready for P. T., Mort?” the man asked. He laughed at Mort’s immediate groan.
Ms. Beecher rose and patted Mort’s forearm. “I’ll see you in a few days, hon. I wish I could come see you every day, but I’m the only therapist here, and there are a lot of survivors who need my assistance.”
“I can imagine,” Mort said.
“Just do those exercises we talked about.”
“Okay.”
She didn’t say goodbye. She smiled at Mort, nodded to the physical therapist, and departed. Mort’s physical therapist studied the psychiatrist’s behind as she receded down the hallway, heels clicking on the tiled floor. He cut his eyes toward Mort and winked.
Mort smirked. “Nice,” Mort said.
“Nice,” the physical therapist agreed. “Now,” he said, turning his attention to Mort and rubbing his hands together, “tell me what my name is.”
“Scott the Physical Therapy Guy.”
“Awesome!”
“When this session is over, I’ll probably be calling you ‘Scott the A-hole’.”
Scott laughed and said, “That’s awesome, too. I’ll probably deserve it.”
Scott the physical therapist was one of those people who could never stand still. A fidgeter, Mort’s mother would have said. Even when he was idle, Scott was constantly in motion: tapping his feet, cracking his neck, swinging his arms, whistling. “If someone put a gun to your head and said don’t move, you’d last about two seconds,” Mort told him yesterday, after watching the man twitch and hop and lick his lips nervously for ten minutes. Scott had ducked his head and confessed, “You’re probably right. I have Attention Deficit. Let me know if I’m driving you crazy, and I’ll try to throttle it back a bit.”
He was dressed in a white tee-shirt and blue sweatpants today. It was the only outfit Mort had seen him wear, though sometimes he added a matching blue sweat jacket to the ensemble. Mort imagined a closet full of neatly hung white tee-shirts and blue tracksuits.
Scott had thick, curly hair that was graying prematurely (he called it his “jewfro”) and a broad, almost manic smile. He was short and fit, with handsome earnest features. He was also a talker. What little information Mort had gleaned of the... the... androids? No. It started with A... Ar. All. Ah, screw it!—the monsters... he’d learned from Scott the Physical Therapy Guy.
Scott called in a nurse to remove Mort’s IV. They were still giving him antibiotics every day. Something called Rocephin. “Call me when you’re finished with him,” the nurse said to Scott. “He needs to finish the bag.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Scott saluted. He lowered the bedrail and helped Mort out of bed. “You okay?” he asked, as Mort steadied himself. Mort sometimes got dizzy when he rose. He’d thrown up a couple times, too.
“I’m okay,” Mort said after a moment.
“You’re not going to puke on me again, are you?”
“I don’t think so,” Mort chuckled.
“Awesome!”
Holding his elbow, Scott the Physical Therapy Guy walked Mort down the hall to the P. T. room. They stopped for a moment at the nurse’s station to say hi to the evening shift nurses. Mort had become their pet since moving to the unskilled ward.
“You’re looking so much better,” one of the nurses chirped. “I bet the doctor’s going to discharge you before long.”
Another, a pretty redhead named Molly, said, “Don’t think you’re getting away that easy. When you get out of here, you’re taking me out to dinner!”
They all laughed.
“I think she meant that,” Scott said in a low voice as they continued on.
“Yeah, right,” Mort snorted.
“Don’t say that,” Scott replied. “You’re still a good looking guy. Not that I swing that way, mind you. I’m just saying.”
“I look like Frankenstein’s monster,” Mort said.
“No way, man! I mean, you did at first, but you’re healing up really well. Besides, a lot of women think scars are sexy.”
“Really?” Mort asked.
“Sure.”
Mort’s eyes stung, and he tried not to weep. Everyone had been so supportive of him here at the infirmary. He wondered if the entire population of New Jerusalem would treat him so kindly. He thought maybe they would. This strange new solidarity was a result of the terrible chaos they had all survived. The Phage. The plague of the hungry dead. Perhaps they had learnt, at long last, how precious human life was. They were, after all, the last living human beings on the planet. Once an all-consuming wildfire, the race of man had been reduced to a few guttering sparks, with no guarantee that those dim embers would not soon be extinguished as well. Extinction was a powerful motivator to get along.
“How you doing?” Scott asked as they turned to enter the P. T. room.
“Good,” Mort said.
And he did feel good. He felt strong. In the last couple weeks, Mort had progressed from walker to cane. Now he was walking completely on his own, though the staff continued to accompany him whenever he ventured outside his room, just in case he fell. His leg still went out on him every now and then.
“Awesome,” Scott said. “What say we start with some stretches...”
As Mort sweated in the P. T. room under Scott’s watchful eye, they talked about the Archons and the city of New Jerusalem.
The refuge the Archons had brought Mort and his companions to was a large government complex. They called it New Jerusalem like it was a city, but it wasn’t. It was more of an internment camp. It was originally constructed during the Bush
administration as a site to house domestic “enemy combatants” during the war on terrorism. The official name for the complex was DOD Camp 15-C. It was one of 25 fenced military campuses designed to function as internment camps following the 911 attacks, spread out across the 48 continental states. Essentially a concentration camp, its existence—as well as the existence of the other 24 DOD camps-- had been kept relatively secret from the public. But after the world was ravaged by Virus Z, the… Archons were employing them to house the survivors of the plague.
What few survivors there were.
DOD Camp 15-C was a prison-like complex situated near the Unicoi Mountains of Eastern Tennessee. Sited around the sprawling complex were multiple dormitories, administration buildings, even a fully stocked hospital. There were garages, fuel and food depots, storehouses and various smaller outcamp buildings. The complex was divided into yards. Green Yard, Yellow Yard, Blue Yard, etc. Green Yard was mostly administration and the medical and human services buildings. Yellow and Blue were the housing blocks. Each had twenty dormitories that could lodge as many as 125 internees each. Nicknamed New Jerusalem by the survivors of the zombie plague, DOD Camp 15-C was originally designed by the Department of Defense to confine a population of 5,000, not including staff. Sadly, due to the horrific death toll and resulting chaos of the Armageddon Virus, the Archons had so far only successfully rescued about half that many.
Though their saviors scoured the surrounding states tirelessly for survivors, and seemed to possess incredible-- almost magical-- superhuman abilities, their numbers were small. The strange beings claimed there were only a couple hundred of their kind in the States. And not all of them were trying to save humanity, the Archons had confessed. Some of their brethren didn’t care if humanity survived or perished.
“So what are they exactly?” Mort had asked Scott during his first P. T. session, when the therapist mentioned the enigmatic creatures.
Scott had shrugged, “They don’t say exactly. They hint around about it a little. Maybe they don’t know the correct way to explain it to us in English. They talk about coming from outer space, but not, you know, outer space, like in Star Trek. I think they mean extra-dimensional space. But they say they evolved here on Earth at the same time we did, they just kept to themselves. Like a secret race or something.”
They discussed the creatures’ powers: flight, telepathy, psychokinesis. Scott said it was like they knew how to use the Force, similar to the Jedis in the Star Wars movies.
“Pretty wild, huh?” he’d enthused. He said it with an embarrassed laugh. Apparently, he was ashamed of his inner nerd. Scott the Physical Therapy Guy was a big fan of the Archons.
Of course, he should be a fan. He, like almost everyone else here in New Jerusalem, had been saved by the mysterious creatures.
Scott was rescued by the flying things from the roof of his home in Southern Indiana, after his hometown was overrun by zombies. He’d escaped from the ravenous deadheads by climbing out a window after the creatures battered their way through his barricades. Completely surrounded, he could do nothing but sit on his roof and try to wait the creatures out. When the Archons found him, he had been there for two days straight with no food or water. He described to Mort in breathless wonder how he’d been brought to New Jerusalem, carried through the clouds in the arms of a magnificent being that called itself Uriel.
A licensed physical therapist, he’d volunteered to work at the infirmary shortly after they treated him for dehydration and exposure. New Jerusalem’s need for medical personnel was dire.
“But don’t you think they look kind of scary?” Mort had asked.
“What do you mean? I think they’re beautiful. They look like angels, you know, with their wings and everything.”
“Angels?” Mort had frowned. The creature that rescued him had looked like a bug-eyed, white-skinned, shark-toothed freak. And he’d seen no wings. “Maybe they look like different things to different people,” Mort suggested, and Scott had agreed.
“I guess that’s possible,” the physical therapist had said, frowning that little frown that everyone frowned when Mort was even mildly critical of humanity’s saviors.
They had an efficient little system going on here, Scott had said. The Archons brought in survivors. Once the survivors’ injuries were treated, their blood was tested for the Phage. There was no treatment for Virus Z. Not yet, Scott had said. But they could test for it now. Once the survivors were cleared to join the general population, all new arrivals were assigned housing and job duties.
“What if you have it?” Mort had asked. “The virus, I mean? What happens to you if you start... turning?”
“There’s nothing anyone can do,” Scott said. “Most people ask to be euthanized. We take them into a room downstairs and the doc gives them pentobarbitol. It’s painless, and for some reason the pentobarbitol keeps them from... you know... coming back. If they refuse that, we have to put them out. They have to leave the camp. I know it sounds cruel, but we don’t have a choice. About half the people here are immune to the Phage, but the other half aren’t, and we have to protect them from being exposed.”
Immunity was determined by blood test as well. Apparently there was some kind of enzyme, but they didn’t know how it neutralized the Phage, or why some people produced it and other people did not. Mort, of course, was not immune. They told him shortly after he awoke from surgery. A nurse had counseled him how to protect himself from the virus. This involved washing his hands several times a day, cleaning and disinfecting any open wounds, no matter how minor, and abstaining from unprotected sexual contact. Not that he had to worry about that, with his shaved and stitched up head! That’s why they were giving him all the antibiotics, the nurse had said. They wanted to make sure he did not contract the Phage because his immune system was low.
Once a week, Scott had said, a meeting took place at the Green Yard Auditorium. There, the city’s administrators gave a presentation explaining the rules and regulations of New Jerusalem. During orientation, one of the Archons would step out and address the assemblage. It was usually the unofficial leader of the 15-C Archons, an imposing creature who called himself Yaldabaoth.
Mort, of course, had been too badly injured to attend orientation.
All residents of New Jerusalem who weren’t immune were screened weekly. If anyone exhibited symptoms of infection, they were immediately isolated. After that, they were given a few hours to get their affairs in order, say their goodbyes, and then they had to decide: exile, or euthanasia.
“You’re doing really good, Mort,” Scott said, looking impressed as Mort did leg extensions. “I think you’ll be getting around on your own pretty soon. Maybe they’ll let you out of this lousy place.”
“I hope so,” Mort grunted, sweaty and red-faced. “I’d like to see what my friends have been up to.”
But would he? Why hadn’t they come to see him? It had been weeks since he came out of surgery.
“You should attend an orientation after you’re discharged,” Scott said, counting off Mort’s reps with his fingers. “That way you can have another look at the Archons. I think, maybe, when you were rescued, your brain injury made you hallucinate and see them as monsters. They’re not monsters. They’re actually very beautiful.”
Mort consulted his memory: the storage room in the DuChamp Freight Company building. The psychotic Da Vinci. He remembered the door blowing off the hinges like someone had stuck a blob of C4 to it, then those terrible things striding inside. Horrible, wizened creatures, with great black eyes and skin like bleached sinew wrapped around bone. How could anyone think they were beautiful with all those shark-like teeth?
Revisiting the memory made Mort think of a Bible passage, the one where Jesus called the Pharisees whited sepulchers, full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean. But was that right? Was it fair? Were the Archons whited sepulchers? Were his memories of them real?
The creature that brought Mort to this safe haven had been only gen
tle and sympathetic towards him. It had rescued him from that psycho and asked for nothing in return. But suppose he was right and everyone else was wrong? Did good things always have to be beautiful? Could they not sometimes be kind-hearted and hideous to look at? It was a fatuous human bias that beauty must be good and ugliness evil.
He remembered the Archon Metatron carrying him to the roof of the Freight Company building. They’d stood there with the hot wind blowing in their faces while they waited for the others to join them. As he held Mort in his arms, looking off across the burning city, clouds of radioactive steam and ash billowing into the sky from the nuclear power plant, the spreading flames, the white and desiccated creature had cradled Mort’s injured head and murmured, “See your city burn, Morton Lesser.” How he knew Mort’s name, Mort did not know. Telepathy maybe. “If I had a heart, I think it would have broken a thousand times today.”
His words had roused Mort from his torpor, and Mort had watched two tears spill down the thing’s taut white cheeks: tears which looked scarlet in the glow of the approaching inferno.
Then the others had joined them and the creature named Metatron came loose from the tug of gravity like a helium balloon, spiraling high into the stars before turning swiftly westward.
“Yeah, I think I will attend an orientation when I get out of here,” Mort said.
When his physical therapy session was over, Scott returned Mort to his room. He helped Mort undress and watched while Mort bathed himself. The warm water felt blessed, though he was mindful not to slip in the sudsy runoff. He didn’t care that Scott lingered to watch. Any extended stay in a medical facility robbed a person of modesty pretty quickly. You could only pee in a jug being held by a teenaged nurse’s aid so many times before you weren’t self-conscious of your dinky any more.
Scott continued to speculate about the Archons as Mort showered, leaning in the doorway of Mort’s private bathroom. He wondered aloud if Archon females could mate with human men. “I wonder if they even have sex with each other, like human beings do,” he said, tapping a foot nervously.
Mort visualized the creature that had rescued him and shuddered. Who’d want to shag something like that? But he kept his opinion to himself. He didn’t want to get The Frown again.
Mort: Deluxe Illustrated Edition (The Fearlanders) Page 20
