Mort

by Rod Redux

  He usually climaxed when using it, too.

  It didn’t matter whether his hit was male or female. It wasn’t even the killing. It was the intimacy of that final moment that drove him over the edge. The sharing. Richard Rourke had a secret-- a terrible, glorious, 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 hunkered down over the zombie, which was staring at him with blank rage. It might once have been a nice looking woman, but it was just a thing now. He watched its mouth writhe, disgusted by its moldy green teeth and slimy black lips.

  In the good old days, before the zombie phage wiped out the entire living world, DaVinci often incapacitated his victims before killing them. It was the only time he could reveal his true nature to other human beings. He had cherished that interaction, the intimacy he shared with his targets before he dispatched them. Sometimes he talked to them for hours. When the time arrived for them to die, he would do it as quickly and painlessly as possible—for that was the mark of a true master—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 their naked flesh, 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.

  But these… things. He felt nothing for them. He had talked to them at first, but he quickly came to realize that they did not understand anything he said to them. They had no awareness. No soul. Although killing them still made him hard—they still looked somewhat human, he supposed—he did not feel that intimacy with them. He couldn’t share his secret with them… and he never came.

  It was a real letdown.

  He only killed them now because he was bored.

  His dick a solid lump in the crotch of his pants, DaVinci put the captive bolt pistol to the zombie’s forehead. “You wanna know what my dad used to do to me?” he asked. The zombie grimaced and tried to bite his hand. He squinted into its eyes, looking for the slightest glimmer of intelligence, then 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.

  Davinci 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 docks. 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.

  Davinci 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. Today he was up to 14. 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, dodging the pile-ups and abandoned cars with expert skill. She dodged the zombies who raced out into the street after them, too… for the most part. Every now and then, there were just too many obstacles for her to juggle, 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 at the speed she was driving would have been like hitting a deer. None of them wanted a zombie to crash through the windshield into their laps.

  Mort and Pete introduced themselves to her from the backseat. Their introductions were terse. Terse because both men were squeezing their butt cheeks tight enough to crack walnuts. The speed at which Dao-ming streaked through the congested, zombie infested streets was worse than nerve-wracking. It was like being strapped into a sadistic and out-of-control theme park ride.

  Mort and Pete had buckled in frantically after the Asian woman sent the Benz screaming around the first corner, wheels smoking. Even buckled up, centrifugal force leaned hard against them each time she made a sharp turn, and the candles, canned foods and ammunition tossed haphazardly in the backseat went rolling one way and then another. If they hadn’t buckled up, Mort and Pete would have gone sprawling, sliding from side to side like two peanuts in a Sucrets can.

  Dao-ming didn’t look back at them as she drove. Her narrow eyes were intent on the path ahead. She did, however, speak to them haltingly. “So, Mort… are you… from DuChamp?” she asked. 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 Benz pealed around another corner, he continued. “I own a comic book store here in town. Or I used to. Before… you know. All the zombies.” He tried to keep the boxes of ammo from jarring, 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. I was here in DuChamp to do a show when the shit hit the fan.”

  “You looked familiar. You did those Calvin Klein underwear ads in Cosmo earlier this year, right?” 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, howling clusters of zombies. “You stuff your crotch in that photoshoot?”

  Pete opened his mouth to deny it, his face turning red. Truth was: he had stuffed. The director had insisted. Instead of lying, 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 babe behind the wheel had shut him down. And none too gently.

  “What about you?” Mort asked the Asian woman.

  They all ducked as the Benz clipped a zombie and sent it spinning away like a raggedy anne doll. The impact cracked the passenger side window and left a broad black fan of splattered goo across the side of the car.

  “You need to slow down, babe!” Pete yelped, turning his head to watch the zombie smash through a plate glass window.

  “If I slow down, the jiang shi might be able to follow us, dummy,” Dao-ming snapped. “Don’t worry. I won’t crash us. I’ve been a stunt driver for three years. I was here in DuChamp to celebrate my parents’ thirtieth anniversary when Virus Z 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 Benz. They were running pretty fast, but the rate of speed the Benz was traveling made them shrink pretty quickly.

  Mort held up three fingers. Added another finger as a fourth deadhead dashed out a Sal
vation 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. The closely spaced structures of uptown DuChamp gave way to affluent homes with sprawling wooded lawns. Mort watched as a young girl dashed from the front door of a large, fenced private residence at the far end of the street. The dark haired girl ran to the high black metal gate that secured the street entrance and began to tug it open. The girl, Mort saw, had a rather hefty rifle slung over one shoulder.

  “That’s my sister,” Dao-ming said.

  Dao-ming didn’t slow until they were frighteningly close to the entrance of the home. Mort and Pete were shoved to the back of the front seat by her sudden deceleration. The Benz bounced up onto the private drive and screeched into an open parking garage. Before the men could gather their thoughts, Dao-ming was out the car and running to help her sister shut the gate.

  Mort unbuckled his seatbelt and got out of the car, his legs wobbly.

  He tottered to help the sisters, but quickly found they needed no assistance. As Dao-ming secured the black steel gate, her little sister put the rifle to her shoulder and picked off any zombies who had been attracted by the sound of the car’s engine. She was a little sharpshooter. One shot, one kill.

  “Good job, Dongmei,” Dao-ming said. She turned and smiled at Mort. “Let’s unload the Benz and get inside before we attract more of them.” To Pete, she yelled: “Hey! Cowboy! You mind pulling the garage door closed?”

  The sisters were holed up in their parents’ million dollar townhouse. The place was huge, Mort found later. Four bedrooms, three baths, fireplace, pool, the works. A six foot tall welded steel fence ran the entire perimeter of the property, the kind with decorative spear tips lining the top. Dao-ming’s father, Zhao Bohai, had owned a chain of Chinese-American restaurants before the zombie apocalypse. Bohai’s Buffet. His success had made him paranoid about security. The more money he had, the more fearful of robbery he’d become. The Zhao home was a fortress, with grated windows and a multitude of security cameras. The girls had been safely hiding out in the family estate since the plague swept through the city.

  Mort followed Dao-ming and her little sister as the women loped to the garage. The ladies walked with cute bouncing strides, their arms swinging broadly. Babes on a mission. The younger Dongmei peppered her sister with questions about the newcomers, looking curiously from Mort to Pete.

  “I don’t know if they’re nice guys,” Dao-ming replied. “If they aren’t, I guess we’ll just have to shoot ‘em!”

  But she looked back at Mort when she said it and winked.

  Dao-ming had been on a supply run when their two groups crossed paths. The backseat and trunk of the vehicle was full of groceries, candles, ammunition. Mort helped Dao-ming carry in the provisions while Pete and Dongmei sorted and put them away.

  The décor of the Zhao home was understated but refined. When Mort commented on the splendor of the home, Dao-ming smiled sadly. “My mother’s good taste,” she said. After that, the four of them walked the fence perimeter to make sure no other zombies had been attracted by the engine sounds or gunshots.

  The enclosed back lawn abutted a neighbor’s yard, so it was relatively safe. Only the south side and the front of the property bordered the street. Luckily, aside from the zombies Dongmei had shot down, the area seemed clear of deadheads.

  Dao-ming walked with Mort while Dongmei skipped along beside Pete, babbling and preening in front of the older man, trying to get his attention. Pete kept eyeing the girl’s older sister, but Dao-ming was studiously ignoring him.

  Dongmei was trying to talk Pete into getting in the pool with her. “Come on! You can borrow my dad’s shorts. I’m sure the water’s still warm!” she cajoled him. “Besides, you look really dirty. You can at least wash up. You smell like old tennis shoes and BO.”

  “Naw, I don’t swim too good,” Pete said curtly. “Besides, it’s kinda rainy. I bet that water’s freezin’.”

  “Your sister’s a good shot,” Mort said to Dao-ming as they headed back into the house. They were walking past the inground pool. Little ripples speckled its surface as the overcast sky continued to drip and drizzle drops of cold rain.

  “We both had to learn how to shoot pretty quick when the zombies got really bad,” Dao-ming replied, tracing a finger along the slick black barrel of her gun. “For a couple days, we were shooting them in shifts. I thought the bodies would pile up high enough for them to climb over each other and get inside.”

  Mort looked at the black fence. There weren’t any zombie bodies lying along it anywhere.

  “I dragged the dead ones away when they finally started thinning out,” Dao-ming said. She smiled at him, waving a hand in front of her nose. “Whoo, they stank so bad!”

  “What happened to your mom and dad?” Mort asked. “You don’t have to talk about it if… you know, it’s still painful.”

  Bohai and his Japanese wife Satori, Dao-ming explained, had died during the riot at the quarantine zone. Their parents were shot down by Army gunmen while trying to charge through the barricades that had been set up at the outskirts of the city. Dao-ming had survived the fracas and retreated home with her little sister, shell-shocked and horrified.

  “My mother… she was just shot in the shoulder. I don’t think it would have killed her. But then the crowd turned, and she fell. They trampled her, all those people. I couldn’t do anything to help her. All I could do was grab Dongmei and run too.” Dao-ming shuddered, her eyes far away.

  “Why were they barricading the roads?” Mort asked. “That seems like kind of a lost cause. Virus Z was pretty much everywhere when the riot happened. I heard about it on the radio before they went off the air. Or got shut down. I’m not sure what really happened to the local radio stations. The just went off the air, one after another, that first week.”

  Dao-ming shrugged. “I guess they were just scared, like everyone else.”

  In the house, Dongmei tore open a pack of Marlboros and angrily stuck a cigarette in her mouth. She was frustrated with Pete’s lack of cooperation, and didn’t like thinking about her parents’ cruel fate. “You got a light, cowboy?” she asked Pete. She was dressed in Daisy Dukes and a pink spaghetti strap t-shirt, a smallish teenager girl with short cropped black hair and a round face with large, epicanthic eyes, heavily made up.

  “Are you kiddin’?” Pete asked. “You look like you’re about twelve. You shouldn’t be smoking.”

  Dongmei snorted. “I’m fifteen, dumbass. I may not live to see sixteen. In case you haven’t noticed, the whole planet’s been taken over by zombies. So… you got a light or not?”

  Eyes wide, Pete dug a lighter from his pocket and handed it over.

  Dao-ming laughed and shrugged as her little sister blew out a smoke ring and slouched in a chair, relishing the nicotine. Dao-ming held Mort’s gaze a moment too long and looked away self-consciously.

  Mort shifted on his feet, suddenly uncomfortable. He could feel his cheeks heating up. Pete was staring at the two of them with a confused, slightly disgusted expression.

  Dao-ming was a beautiful woman. Tall, thin, athletic, with dark almond-shaped eyes and long, silky black hair. She also seemed attracted to Mort, though he could not fathom why. He was fat, his hair was thinning, and… well, he thought, to be honest he wasn’t really that fat anymore. Looking down at his belly, he realized it had shrunk tremendously over the last four weeks.

  Dongmei filled the awkward silence by addressing Pete: “You look really familiar, dude. Where have I seen you before?”

  Pete frowned. “You’re pretty straightforward for a runt.”

  Dongmei smiled around the butt of her smoke. She looked much like her older sister, just a bit shorter and plumper. Her face had not yet lost its baby roundness. “My mother and father trained me to be outspoken. They said it was the
American way to speak your mind.”

  Dao-ming nodded. “That’s true.”

  Pete shrugged. “Before the zombie virus, I did a little TV. Soap operas. Sitcoms. A few commercials. I mostly modeled.”

  “You were a fashion model?” Dongmei asked.

  “A male model.”

  “An underwear model,” Dao-ming elaborated.

  Dongmei looked from her sister to Pete, snorting with delight. “Awesome! I can see that. You are one smoking hot piece of dick.”

  “Dongmei!” Dao-ming gasped.

  The three of them laughed while Pete blushed furiously and muttered, “You’re just a kid. You shouldn’t be talkin’ like that!”

  After that, Dao-ming asked what Mort and Pete had been doing when the three of them met, or more precisely, when she had nearly ran them over. Mort explained that they were trying to get out of the city. He expounded on their plan to abandon the city, informing her of the danger posed to all the city’s inhabitants by the DuChamp nuclear power facility.

  “By all accounts, it should have blown already. The power went out in the city a week or so ago. There must be someone there trying to maintain it, but they’re only going to be able to keep it from melting down so long,” Mort explained.

  “And then it will go up like an A-bomb?” Dao-ming asked.

  “No. That’s not likely. There are a lot of safety measures built into nuclear power plants. We went there on a field trip when I was in grade school. It’s why I thought about it. It won’t go up like a nuclear bomb, but it could blow up, start fires, and then there’s the radiation and fallout. If any fires start with the city abandoned, you know, no emergency services… well, I just don’t think it will do any good to try to find a fallout shelter to hide in, especially if the building it’s in burns down and falls on top of it. I think our best bet is to get out of the city and try to find someplace to stay in the countryside. There will be fewer zombies to contend with. Less fallout the further away we get.”