Mort: Deluxe Illustrated Edition (The Fearlanders)

by Joseph Duncan

  He had strange dreams. People running. People screaming and dying. Mort dreamed about Da Vinci. Da Vinci whispering in his ear. Telling him dirty, forbidden secrets. Putting the cattle gun to his head.

  Mort woke with a start.

  He felt like he’d just drifted asleep, but several hours must have passed because the dormitory was all but silent. He lay in bed, listening. He heard a TV droning softly, the murmur of a CD player, a low conversation coming from somewhere down the landing, all of it echoing in the cavernous hall, but most of the residents of Dorm Eight had settled in for the night, it seemed.

  He pushed his blankets off and swung his feet to the floor.

  Cold!

  Making a mental note to buy some slippers at the commissary in the morning, Mort rose and walked to the window. It was pitch dark outside, still snowing, but the precipitation had lightened. There were just a few sparse flakes wheeling slowly earthward now. The yard was white. Looked like at least three inches of accumulation, he judged.

  He sat in the niche which housed the window and watched the snow fall.

  He thought about Dao-ming and Pete. He wondered where they were right then. Were they alone like him, or were they cuddled up with new lovers? Maybe they were sitting awake right that moment, just like him, thinking about their ol’ pal Mort. He didn’t think it likely either of them were wasting much time worrying about him. If they were, they would have come to see him in the infirmary. Mort tried not to be self-indulgent, but he felt abandoned.

  He told himself he should lay back down, try to get some more sleep, he had a lot to do in the morning, but he was wide awake. He wished he had something to do. Something to read. Something to keep his mind occupied so it would stop turning to Dao-ming and Pete, or the psycho who had crippled his brain.

  After half an hour, Mort felt a weird tickle inside his skull. He rubbed his temple, dizzy.

  Out in the yard, three Archons drifted out of the black sky. They swooped in like dark kites, landing lightly on the icy grounds. The sight of them descending from the snowy heavens like characters from a J.M. Barrie novel jolted him with surprise and a feeling which was very close to horror. Being a superhero aficionado, you’d think he wouldn’t find flying people so disconcerting, but there was something hideous and unnatural about creatures who seemed so disconnected from the laws of physics. It might be wondrous in the movies to watch Superman or Jean Grey lift into the air in defiance of gravity, but in reality, the sight was terrifying.

  Mort leaned close to the cold glass and squinted down at the figures, his heart galloping.

  They were holding people in their arms. Rescued survivors. As Mort watched, the Archons—dressed like leather fetishists— touched down lightly and released their wards. The humans fell to their hands and knees or took off running away from them in fear, making ugly black gashes in the pristine snow. The Archons didn’t help them up or give chase, just stood there, wasted humanoid figures in strange leather garments, their buckles and snaps glinting in the garish overhead lights.

  Mort could not see their faces, only the bald white knobs of their heads.

  “No wings,” he whispered under his breath. Everyone said they were like angels with great shining wings. Everyone claimed they were stately, beautiful creatures, but when Mort looked at them, he saw no wings, and they were certainly not stately or beautiful.

  More like mummies with shark teeth.

  Several human beings hurried out into the snowy yard. They intercepted the fleeing survivors as the Archons stood there watching. The Archons must have signaled ahead somehow. Radio, maybe. Or telepathy. Everyone seemed to think the Archons could read minds, too.

  The human agents scurried after the survivors with flashlights and blankets. For a moment the yard was chaotic, beams of light swinging around wildly, everyone running in different directions. A heavyset man in bib overalls tussled with a rescuer before they both sprawled in the snow. A little girl fought like a wildcat as they swept a blanket around her. The Archons watched for a moment longer, then turned their bony heads skyward and, one by one, came untethered from the earth.

  Without their human cargo, the strange creatures shot straight into the air like bottle rockets.

  Mort watched them go, heart in his throat.

  What’s wrong with me? Mort wondered as the creatures vanished into the dark. When everyone else called them angels, why did he behold monsters?

  16

  Romancing the Apocalypse

  Mort had never been one of those people who made friends quickly. He was much too introverted for that. So he was a little disconcerted when Bob Hawthorne decided, right off the bat, that the two of them were going to be buddies. After years of schoolyard bullying, Mort was conditioned to suspect anyone acting unusually friendly towards him. What unerringly followed, in his experience, was some kind of prank. His pants yanked to his ankles. Nair poured down his jockey shorts. An atomic wedgie. Rationally, he knew that Bob would do no such thing. Grownups didn’t behave like that, but he was suspicious anyway. He couldn’t help wondering why this stranger was being so nice to him.

  Maybe he saw in Mort a kindred spirit, someone whose life had been nearly as charmless as his own. Bob certainly looked like he had suffered a few atomic wedgies himself over the years. Maybe it was just pity. Mort wasn’t sure what the guy’s motives were, but he tried to put aside his suspicions and accept the man’s overtures of friendship at face value.

  The day after Mort took up residence in Dorm Eight, Bob escorted him to the commissary in Orange Yard.

  He awakened Mort with a rap on the door and a hearty: “Kemosabe! Throw some britches on, and I’ll take you to the commissary and getcha some extra clothes and supplies.”

  Mort hadn’t slept well the night before, but he swung his feet to the floor anyway. “All right. I appreciate it,” he said fuzzily.

  Later, downstairs, in the small quarters the caretakers shared, Tina fed them a couple hotcakes drizzled with syrup (good ones, too!) and then Mort and Bob headed across the compound to get Mort some provisions.

  As they crossed the grounds, their shoes crunching in the snow, Bob threw his arm around Mort’s shoulders.

  “So what’s your story, bub?” he asked.

  “Story?”

  “Everybody’s got a story,” Bob said, sweeping his arm to indicate the entire complex. “I wanna know where you used to live, what you used to do, what happened when God decided to drop a big steaming clinker on Planet Mort. You know, the whole nine yards.”

  “It’s not really that interesting,” Mort replied, trying not to slip on the icy sidewalk. “Why don’t you tell me your story instead?”

  Bob’s thick lips split into a grin. “I know what you’re really wondering,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re wondering how a dude as ugly as me hooked up with such a stone cold fox.”

  Mort laughed. “No.”

  “Admit it!”

  “No!”

  “Suit yourself. I’m going to tell you anyway.”

  “Okay,” Mort chuckled.

  “I was a masseuse working at a swanky spa in Beverly Hills...”

  “What?”

  “No, wait! That was a fantasy. Oh, yeah, I remember now. I was the superintendent of an apartment building in Indiana, a place called Rosemont Heights...”

  He went on to tell Mort how he had survived the first chaotic days of the pandemic. Like most survivors, he had simply kept his head down, holing up in his apartment while the world went crazy around him. He was amazed how many people didn’t have the common sense to just hunker down and stay put. He had watched in stunned disbelief as the street in front of his apartment building jammed up with refugees fleeing the epidemic. Shortly after, those living refugees were replaced by a slow parade of the undead, most of whom were probably said refugees. He didn’t meet Tina until a week or so after the Phage had burned through his hometown. By then, the Rosemont was all but deserte
d, her tenants fled to whatever strange roads, and fate, lay in wait for them.

  Their paths crossed one afternoon while he was out looting. He was returning to his apartment from a local Piggly Wiggly, slinking through a narrow alley, a paper sack bulging with canned food in his arms, when he heard squealing tires, then the crunch and tinkle of a car meeting its own personal Armageddon. He ducked down in a mound of refuse, feeling no compulsion to investigate whatsoever-- not Myrtle Hawthorne’s boy, Bob, who was a firm believer in that old saw about curious cats. A minute or two later, a dude in basketball shorts, a white tee-shirt and sandals went clip-clopping past the mouth of the alley, running for everything he was worth.

  “Fuckin’ flip-flops!” Bob snorted. “You believe that happy crap? Zombie apocalypse and the guy is wearing flip-flops!” He laughed, shaking his head.

  Bob heard deadheads moaning in the distance and realized he was talking out loud to himself. He clamped his mouth shut with a snap. In the old days, talking to yourself might give people the idea that you had a screw loose. Now, it could get a guy killed. He crouched down behind a dumpster, hoping no rotting cannibals had overheard him.

  The moans and groans were getting louder. Mr. Flip-flops had gotten the weirdos stirred up, and it was a sure bet the block would be crawling with them before too long. They were like ants that way. You see one, you can pretty much bet a whole gaggle of them were soon to follow. There was no time to try to make a break for it. Bob leapt into the garbage and started scooping it up over his body.

  That’s when the pregnant woman limped around the corner.

  Tina Laramie shuffled into the alley, cradling her stomach in one hand and clutching an injured leg with the other. Her hair was disheveled, and little blobs of red, like poppies, were blooming down her pants leg.

  Bob froze in his pile of refuse, stunned by the woman’s beauty.

  “You know that old saying, ‘she took his breath away’,” Bob said to Mort. “I know it’s cheesy, but that was how I felt. I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to call out to her, help her, but for a second or two, my jaw just wagged up and down. I couldn’t get anything out. Even banged up and preggers, she looked like a frickin’ movie star!”

  Tina Laramie was a teller at a local credit union. She and her boyfriend, a personal trainer named Calvin Voyles, had survived the initial bloodbath of the pandemic and were attempting to escape from the city in Calvin’s Jaguar. About three miles from their house, Calvin had ripped around a corner doing about seventy and was startled by a mob of zombies. They were just milling around in the street like crackheads, their usual behavior when they weren’t pursuing a victim. Calvin tried to weave through them, but there were too many. He plowed over about a half dozen, almost made it through the horde, but then he rolled over a really fat one and the wheels came up off the pavement. They careened into a light pole at about forty miles per hour, all the luggage he’d strapped to the top of the car tearing loose and skidding down the street, flinging their belongings in a wide fan of garments and foodstuffs and Calvin’s high school sports trophies. The airbags had deployed, sparing them both from severe injury, but the impact had dizzied Tina, and by the time she shook off the little stars spinning around her head, she realized her sweety had abandoned her to her fate. Calvin had bailed on her, leaving the driver’s side door open. Tina glanced in the rear view mirror as she fumbled with her seatbelt and saw about five dozen zombies stumbling in her direction.

  “You goddam coward!” she hissed through gritted teeth, and then she flung herself from the steaming Jag and ran for her life.

  She limped into the alley, breasts heaving, bloody, bruised and suffering from adrenaline burnout. Fear and maternal instinct had given her the burst of strength she needed to outrace the mob of zombies chasing after her, but she was wiped out. She had to hide or climb or... or something. She couldn’t run much further.

  “Over here!” Bob hissed at her.

  Startled, Tina let loose a little squeal of terror.

  “Quiet!” Bob whispered. “Are you trying to attract them?”

  “Who are you?” Tina asked, scanning the littered alleyway with wide, frightened eyes.

  “Santa Clause, who do you think?” Bob quipped, and the statuesque blonde stood upright and planted one fist on her hip.

  “Ha ha,” she said humorlessly.

  With a frustrated sigh, Bob raised up out of the garbage and waved his arms at her. “The name’s Bob. If you want to live, follow me.” And then he dived back under the refuse, vanishing once more from sight.

  Tina Laramie wrinkled her nose. “Gross,” she said, but the cries of the pursuing zombie horde were getting louder and louder, closer and closer, and she was out of steam. She limped further into the alley and Bob helped camouflage her beneath a redolent heap of old newspapers and tin cans, rotten banana peels and coffee grounds.

  They clung desperately to one another, bodies trembling, as the zombie horde thundered past the alley. A couple snarling weirdos broke away from the mob and slunk into the alley to have a sniff, clothes hanging in tatters from their desiccated limbs, milky eyes rolling around in sunken sockets. One of them came within a couple feet of the two strangers, raw feet scraping the ground as he turned in circles, sniffing and making low inquisitives in his chest. Tina’s fingernails dug into Bob’s shoulder. He was certain she was going to lose it, that she’d start screaming and break from cover any second, give them both away, and that would be it for Myrtle Hawthorne’s baby boy, Bob.

  But she didn’t. Tina squeezed her eyes shut and bit her lower lip and managed to stay quiet long enough for the zombies to lose interest. The two deadheads that had stopped to investigate the alley moved on-- rejoining their pack, you might say-- grotesque appetites mercifully unsatisfied.

  “Well, that was fun,” Bob said, rising cautiously from the garbage.

  Tina followed a moment later. She brushed eggshell from her hair, plucked a half-eaten McBurger from her ample cleavage. Then she saw it, and her body spasmed with surprise and horror. “Oh, no!” she moaned, gaping down at her groin.

  The crotch of her lavender maternity pants was soaked with bright red blood.

  Bob escorted her back to his apartment, the two of them sneaking through the alleys, moving in fits and starts. They crossed paths with a couple weirdos and had to backtrack or wait around the corner until the creatures had wandered away, but the zombies they encountered were none too bright, thank God, and they were able to slip past the infected without too much trouble.

  Tina stumbled along, holding her distended belly, blood seeping down her thighs. She tried to be stoic, but she faltered a couple times as cramps bolted through her abdomen, her face tightening. She grabbed his hand and squeezed it.

  “Are you all right?” Bob asked, which was probably the stupidest thing he’d ever said, but he didn’t know what else to say.

  “I’m going to lose my baby if I don’t find some place to rest,” Tina gasped, beads of sweat rolling down her face.

  “My place is just around the block,” Bob replied. He tried to pull his hand from hers. She was squeezing it so hard he wouldn’t have been surprised if the bones inside it started crunching.

  “Is it safe?” Tina asked.

  “Safe as anywhere else, I guess. You want a guarantee or something?”

  It might have sounded cruel, but he smiled when he said it, the epitome of gallows humor, inviting her to laugh with him in the face of all the death and destruction they had lived through thus far, and to her credit, Tina Laramie had looked at him, one eye narrowed down to a slit, and she had laughed. Her face was waxy and slick with sweat. Pain and fear was etched into her features, but she had laughed, and Bob Hawthorne had fallen just a little bit in love with her.

  He got her back to his apartment safe, if not sound, and she had collapsed onto his bed with a gust of relief. She didn’t know him from Adam. For all she knew, he could have been Hannibal Lecter, but there was something in his face, something in
his big froggy eyes, that spoke to her instincts. This is a good man, her intuition said, and she thanked God for him, because she was in no condition to take care of herself right now. Lord knows Cal had resigned from that post readily enough.

  “What can I do to help?” he had asked, standing at the side of the bed with an anxious expression on his face.

  “There’s nothing you can do,” Tina replied, staring up at the ceiling and trying to halt the spontaneous abortion of her child by sheer force of will. “If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen.”

  “I could maybe boil some water, or...”

  Tina had laughed softly. “I’m not in labor, Bob. I’m losing my baby.” Tears had welled up in her eyes.

  “But she didn’t lose it,” Bob said to Mort as they got in line at the commissary. It was a long line, despite the cold. It extended from the front door of the building some thirty yards out into the snowy yard. “I don’t know how. I think it was pure stubbornness. After a while, she just stopped bleeding. She spotted the next two or three days, and that was that. I know she talks like a Southern Belle, but that dame is tough as nails.”

  “What about the boyfriend?” Mort asked.

  “Oh, he turned back up,” Bob said with a moue of distaste. He and Mort shuffled forward as the line advanced. “About a week later. I was getting ready to sneak outside. We needed more food. And toilet paper. I never knew women used so much toilet paper. I can make a roll last two weeks, but not Tina. I think she wraps herself up in it, you know, puts on a little fashion show in the bathroom mirror. Anyway, Tina was watching the street. We were waiting for the weirdos to thin out so I could slip out unnoticed, and that’s when I hear her give a little squeak.