Mort

by Rod Redux

  When he was sure they had eluded the zombies, Mr. Movie Star turned on Mort angrily. “That was a damn dirty trick,” he said accusingly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Pretending to be a chick.”

  “I… I wasn’t pretending… to be a girl.”

  “I saw those zombies all gathered around that truck and a blonde-headed chick inside, moving around and screaming…”

  Mort laughed breathlessly. “That was probably… me screaming… and she probably moved… when I tried to pull the… boxcutter out of her hand.”

  “Boxcutter?”

  Mort nodded. “She… cut her own throat… and I was about… to do the same.”

  The guy in the cowboy boots grinned. “Well, huh… I guess I saved your life then.”

  Mort was finally beginning to catch his breath. He wiped the sweat from his face with the back of his hand. “Yeah. Yeah, you did. Thanks. If there’s anything I can do to repay you, just let me know.”

  “I can think of one thing already.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You can give me a blowjob.”

  Mort’s head jerked up. “What?”

  “You said if there was anything you could do to pay me back… so give me a blowjob. You owe me one, at least. I did just save yer life. Hey, and don’t forget to slob on muh balls while yer at it. That always gets me off.”

  Mort drew away from the cowboy, opening his mouth to protest.

  Cowboy Boots cracked up. He laughed and slapped his knee. “Oh, shit, son! Oh… you should see yer face! Oh, Jesus, that was funny! Take it easy. I’m just pulling yer leg.” Mort’s rescuer wiped his streaming eyes and chuckled. “I’m Peter Bolin, by the way. My friends call me Cactus Pete. What’s yer handle?”

  “Morton. Morton Lesser. Mort, for short,” Mort answered, relaxing a bit.

  Cactus Pete had thrust a hand out to shake. Mort took his hand and was surprised how calloused it was. He hadn’t expected such a rough, firm shake from a man who was so… well, admit it, guy pretty. And Pete was strong, too. Mort’s bones crackled in his grip.

  “Mort for short,” Pete echoed. “Hey, that rhymes!” And he laughed again.

  Pete placed his shotgun in a wood crate near the door. The crate, Mort saw, was bristling with weapons. Rifles, shotguns, a couple axes, a baseball bat with nails driven through the business end. Pete was armed for bear, as Mort’s father might have said. Beside the crate was a heavy wooden table with a vice clamp attached to it. The table was littered with various wood crafting tools. Hammers, chisels, drills, a couple wood planers and sanding pads. There were screwdrivers and coffee cans full of odds and ends: bolts, screws, drill bits, nails. They had taken refuge in someone’s neglected workshop. There was light—faint, yellow illumination filtering through the dusty window slits set high up the walls—but the small windows were barred, thank goodness.

  “Come on, Mort-For-Short. Let’s kick back for a while,” Pete said, waving Mort to follow him.

  With a clank, Mort set his crowbar atop the woodshop table and followed Pete into the next room.

  Pete had made a fort for himself in the adjoining basement space. The room was smaller than the woodshop, a storage area with only two small windows for light. A mattress lay on the floor, a tangle of pillows and blankets piled on top of it. There was a battery powered radio and a small black-and-white TV. A Coleman lantern sat on a short coffee table amid a collection of empty beer cans, overflowing ash trays and crumped food wrappers. Pete’s hideout looked, Mort thought to himself, like a very messy kid’s private club house.

  “Make yerself at home,” Pete invited, indicating the lumpy and unmade mattress.

  Mort eyed the stacks of pornographic magazines beside the mattress. It was pretty hardcore stuff. No tame standards like Playboy or Penthouse in those piles. Pete’s collection included titles like Hard Cock Café, Juicy Cherry Holes and Spunk Eating Sluts. One peek at the cover illustrations made Mort leery of reclining on Pete’s mattress. He was afraid something might stick to him.

  Pete cracked open a beer. “You want something to drink?” he asked. “They’re warm, but it’ll take the edge off.”

  Mort started to decline, then thought, Why the hell not?

  “Yeah, hand me one,” he said, smiling.

  Pete grinned and passed Mort a warm brew.

  Steeling himself for something unpleasant, Mort eased down on the mattress. Mort popped the can open and drank. For some reason, he’d always enjoyed warm beer more than cold. Though he wasn’t much of a drinker, Mort’s mouth and throat were parched from their flight from the zombies. He chugged half the brew in one gulp, let out a massive belch. “Excuse me,” he gasped.

  Pete guffawed. “Nice one.”

  Mort perused the small room. There was plenty of food stocked up—junk food mostly—piled haphazardly on the handmade shelf unit that took up most of the wall to his right. Cases of beer were stacked beside the shelf. Bottled water and pop, too, but mostly beer. On the wall the mattress sat against was another door. This door was hung crooked, didn’t quite shut, but Pete had secured it with a large screwdriver shimmied down through the hinged lock plate.

  Pete sauntered to the windows and stepped up on a wooden box to look casually out at the street. Slurping his beer, he muttered, “Some of those zombies are still wandering around. They’re probably wondering where we disappeared to.” He snorted. “Dumb fuckers.”

  “That was a close call. I thought I was dead for sure.”

  Pete hopped down from the box. “So what’s yer story, hoss?” he asked.

  They spent the next few hours talking. Pete, it turned out, was a surprisingly interesting guy. Born in Kentucky, he’d moved around the Midwest most of his life, settling finally in Memphis, Tennessee, where he’d met a girl name Hannah. They’d started dating exclusively. Pete even thought about proposing. It was Hannah who insisted Pete was good looking enough to be a TV star or a model. She sent pictures of Pete to various agencies in New York. When a modeling agency in the Big Apple showed interest, Pete and Hannah had moved east and Pete started working as a model. He’d even landed a gig on a daytime soap.

  “We broke up when I came home early from a fashion show in Boston and caught her in bed with my agent,” Pete said. He still looked pretty sore about that. It must have been a real blow to his ego. “I got my own place. Did some commercials. I even got some work modeling Calvin Klein underdrawers. I was startin’ to make a name for myself when all this zombie shit went down.” He crushed his can and tossed it into the corner, looking angrily toward the windows. “Fuckin’ zombies,” he snarled.

  They spent the better part of the day getting to know one another. Pete told Mort how he’d gotten his nickname—his grandfather had nicknamed him Cactus Pete after a local kids show host when he went to stay with his grandparents in Southern Illinois. Mort described his comic book shop, talked about his friend Fred and how Fred had gotten killed and eaten by zombies. When Pete asked Mort how he’d come to be trapped in the Frito-Lay delivery truck, Mort informed him of his plan to escape DuChamp before the power plant melted down.

  Pete volunteered almost immediately to accompany him. “I sure don’t want to be sitting here when Nagasaki blows up!” Pete declared, but he also wanted to go because he was bored. He was tired of hiding in a basement. Tired of spending his days looking at porno magazines and beating off. Tired of being alone. Plus, he liked Mort. They had clicked. They were total opposites. Mort was thoughtful, intelligent, reserved. Pete was brash, immature and crude. But their personalities were like puzzle pieces. They fit, and in a city with so many zombies and so few survivors, that fit was something both of them were reluctant to let slip through their fingers.

  They set out the next morning.

  12

  DaVinci Gets Off

  I was right, Mort thought as the pavement thrummed beneath him and a column of radioactive ash billowed into the sky to the north. That fucker really did blow up!<
br />
  There was a part of Mort that was surprised, but there was a larger part of him that wasn’t. Nope, not surprised one little bit. He knew that nuclear power plants in the United States were built with numerous fail safes and that they were housed inside a shell of layered shielding materials—all designed to keep the dangerous reactor core from breaching and spilling its radioactive guts into the surrounding area —but Mort was also a firm adherent to Murphy’s Law. If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong.

  Murphy’s Law is why the nuclear power plant to the north of town was belching radioactive clouds of smoke like some kind of deadly, man-made volcano. It was also why he was laying on the pavement with a gunshot wound in his leg, bleeding out on the blacktop within hours of escape from the city.

  Murphy’s Law.

  He’d survived gaggles of zombies, forged unlikely bonds of friendship with a small but resilient group of fellow survivors. He’d even met a smart, sexy woman who found him attractive, who’d picked him over his much more handsome companion. Actually laid him! No muss. No fuss. And now he was laying here dying like a dog in the road because his group had stumbled across some psycho sniper.

  Well, screw Murphy. Murphy sucked ass.

  Dao-ming was still wailing for her sister. Poor Dongmei. A sniper’s bullet had taken out the right side of the teenager’s head. Most of it had splattered across Pete’s face and chest. Now she was dead, and Mort’s gal, her older sister, was shrieking in rage and loss and disbelief in the backseat of the Mercedes-Benz.

  That bullet could have hit any of them. Mort doubted the shooter was aiming for the child purposely. Most likely, he (or she) was simply shooting at the Mercedes-Benz, trying to take out a wheel or the radiator, and Dongmei was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Mort’s current predicament was a little more explicable. After Dongmei was shot and the Benz went into the ditch, Mort had jumped out with a rifle, anger overriding his natural cautiousness. Taking advantage of his stupidity, the sniper had shot him through the leg.

  Judging by the amount of blood that was pulsing out the hole in his pants, the bullet had severed an artery, too.

  Mort tried to poke his finger in the hole. He knew he needed to stem the flow of blood somehow. It was not one of his best ideas. The pain felt like someone sticking a red hot poker in his leg. He jerked his finger away, gritting his teeth. Black spots danced in his vision.

  “Hang on, Mort!” Pete yelled from the backseat. Mort’s friend was trying to extricate himself from Dao-ming and Dongmei. He looked almost comical, the whites of his eyes standing out round and white in the middle of his gore-splattered face. Pete looked like Sissy Spacek in that old Stephen King movie Carrie, right after her high school tormentors splashed a bucket of pig blood on her at the prom.

  The world was going dim and distant. Mort smiled and tried to say, “Don’t worry about me. Just get yourself out of here.” He opened his mouth to speak, but his lips and tongue were too sluggish to do their job. Instead, he just kind of grunted.

  Pete spilled out of the backseat finally, landing on his knees. Dao-ming continued to cry, cradling her dead sister in her arms.

  “Hold on, buddy! Don’t give up on me!” Pete babbled, scrambling to Mort on his hands and knees. He had something in his hands.

  Mort shook his head. He tried to speak again, concentrating hard. Finally got his mouth parts to work. “’S too late, Pete,” he said weakly.

  “No! You shut that shit up, lardass! You’ll be fine. Just hold on.”

  The thing in his hands was a strap from Pete’s battered old backpack. Pete wrapped it around Mort’s thigh, setting the tourniquet up high above the bullet wound. Mort cried out as Pete cinched it tight and fumbled a knot in the stiff material.

  Mort shook his head. He grabbed Pete’s shirt with a bloody fist and pointed to the north.

  “It blew up,” Mort hissed.

  Pete’s eyes grew even wider. “Oh shit.”

  Sitting in the Benz, Pete hadn’t felt the tremor that wormed through the ground when the plant exploded. The vehicle’s shocks had absorbed the vibration. With Dao-ming screaming and crying in his ear, he hadn’t heard the resounding drumroll of the reactor breach either. As far as they were from the actual plant, it had only sounded like a distant peal of thunder.

  “Radiation,” Mort gasped. “You and Dao-ming need to go… now!”

  “No-no-no-no,” Pete murmured, looking at the thickening plumes to the north. Mort could tell by his blank expression that Pete had no idea what to do next. There were too many variables, too many problems, for his nimble but single track mind to process. Radiation cloud. Mort shot. Car wrecked. Girl dead. Zombies. Gunman. Mort could almost see the tilt signs flashing in his buddy’s eyes.

  “Get away, Pete. Take Dao-ming. Hide. Head south. Fast as you can,” Mort ordered.

  “No,” Pete said, looking down at Mort finally. “I’m not leaving you here.”

  “Don’t move!” a powerful voice called out behind them.

  The gunman!

  The sniper, or one of the snipers, stepped out from the corner of the parking lot’s security shed. He was a big man, broad and solid, with a shiny bald head and a gray-stubbled chin. His body was barrel-shaped, massive with muscle. His arms, Mort thought, looked as big around as Mort’s thighs, and that was saying something! He had a large and powerful rifle set to his shoulder and was staring down the sights of it at Pete, his upper lip peeled back from his teeth.

  “Put your hands up,” the gunman barked at Pete. “On your head!”

  He was dressed in black. Black tee, black jeans. He wore military-style lace up boots.

  “You!” he said, the barrel of his gun sliding from Pete to the Mercedes-Benz. “Get out of the car, bitch! Right the fuck now!”

  Dao-ming cursed the gunman in Chinese or Japanese. Mort didn’t know what it was. Maybe a mix of both.

  “Get out or I’m going to blow the head off one of your boyfriends,” the big man snapped.

  Dao-ming obeyed, wobbling out on unsteady legs. She was covered in her sister’s blood. Her face was swollen, her eyes red and raw. She cursed the shooter again and spit in his direction.

  “Save it, sister,” the gunman said with a sneer. He cocked his head. Listened for a moment. As Dao-ming dropped to her knees beside Mort, putting her hands on him lightly, the sniper smiled and said breezily, “Sounds like all this racket is attracting some attention.”

  His three captives listened. Yes, they could hear the mindless howls of zombies on the hunt. The cries rose from different locations in the sprawling expanse of the city’s industrial park. But they were getting louder and closer by the second.

  “Get on your feet. We need to get inside before they find us.” He smiled grimly. “It’s me or the zombies, kids. Take your pick.”

  Dao-ming and Pete rose. They hooked their hands under Mort’s arms and helped him stand up.

  Mort yelled. The pain was a dark whirlpool with his thoughts caught inside. He shook his head and tried to come fully awake, but it was so hard to think. Blood pattered the pavement beneath him. His pantleg was soaked. There was so much blood running down his leg, his shoe squished when he took a step. Dao-ming and Pete were struggling to hold him, so he tried to bear a little more of his own weight. The pain freshened him right up. Seething and spitting through his gritted teeth, Mort hobbled forward with the help of his two companions.

  “Shit, you’re heavy,” Pete grunted.

  Mort snorted a ragged laugh.

  Dao-ming said nothing. Though she helped Mort walk, she had retreated into her own pain. She sniffed, eyes downcast, still crying for her sister as they moved.

  Impatiently, the gunman gestured them past. He directed them toward the big building at the end of the street: the DuChamp Freight Company. “Pick it up,” he barked as he followed behind them. He listened to the pursuing zombies. The cries were getting closer. “There. Through those doors,” he gestured with the rifle. “
Hurry. If those zombies see us, we’ll have a mob of them to contend with.”

  Each shuffling step was agony for Mort. He could feel his consciousness waxing and waning. The three of them entered the freight company building through a large set of double glass doors. Ahead of them stretched a long, tiled hallway with offices on both sides. Their captor forced them at gunpoint down the hall, around the corner, down another hallway and then up a staircase. The stairs, finally, were what defeated Mort’s effort to stay conscious. Halfway up the flight of steps, he passed out.

  This is probably it for me, Mort thought as the world went very still and slow, as the blackness encroached past the edges of his awareness and claimed him. I hope they can make it without me.

  The thought came without fear or welcome. It was just a matter-of-fact observation.

  Then it went dark.

  Time passed. How much time, Mort wasn’t sure. There was a sense of its passage as his awareness stirred and he began to swim up out of the thick tar of unconsciousness. A half-awareness of the number of times his heart had beat when he was comatose. The progression of bodily processes. His belly gurgled, demanding nourishment. His bladder strained with the need to urinate. He opened his eyes with a groan and blinked out at the room he was sitting in.

  He’d had his gall bladder removed a few years before. Coming awake now felt kind of like coming out of the anesthesia they’d given him when he’d had surgery. He was suddenly aware again, but the world seemed dislocated and somewhat unreal, like a dream.

  He couldn’t quite remember where he was. Who he was. And how he’d come to be where he suddenly found himself.

  “Mort! Hey, buddy! You’re awake!”

  It was a familiar voice. Pete. Somewhere off to his right.

  Mort turned his head and there was Pete. His buddy. His “bro”. Pete smiled and his teeth seemed too bright and white. His face was still covered in blood. Dried and brown now, some of it flaking and falling off.