by Rod Redux
So Pete had rolled Mort to Dorm Eight. It was bitter cold. The moon was a gleaming ivory disc in the heavens, ancient goddess, mottled gray and bright. There was a ring around the moon that night. Mort couldn’t remember whether it was a lover’s moon or a liar’s moon. He remembered his mother telling him about that when he was a teenager. One meant lover, the other liar, but which was which? Pete had swerved Mort back and forth on the icy sidewalks, almost spilling him a couple times. Pete was giddy with relief. He’d expected the worst when Mort was called to speak with the Archons. As they drew near the dorm, Pete relaxed and asked in a serious voice what the Archon had wanted to talk to Mort about. Mort was quiet a moment, then lied, “He just wanted to apologize for frying my brain with his psychobolts at the orientation. Their telepathy kind of fritzed out my brain-damaged head.”
Pete had laughed. “Is that all?”
“Yep.”
“Poor old brain-damaged Mort.”
“Yeah. But look on the bright sight. Now we’re on an equal playing field, mentally speaking.”
“I think that was an insult.”
“It was.”
Laughing together, they’d pushed through the front door. The dorm was dark, silent. It was late and everyone was asleep.
“Here’s your cane, buddy,” Pete had stage whispered, sliding the walking stick from the pouch on the back of the wheelchair’s seat. Mort hobbled upright and Pete folded the chair and pushed it next to the wall by the door.
“Thanks.” The bandage across his broken nose made it sound like “thangst”.
Pete headed toward the galley as Mort limped toward his room, leaning heavily on the cane. The cold had really done a number on his bad leg. His nose and cheeks were throbbing, too. Lortab here I come, he had thought.
“You want something to drink?” Pete had called over his shoulder.
Mort’s mouth was dry. His interview with the Archon had been nerve-wracking. Instead of walking to his room, he angled toward the galley. “Yeah. See if there’s some pop left in the cooler,” he called. And maybe something sweet, he thought to himself. He didn’t want to get fat again. He didn’t think his leg could take that kind of strain, but one little sweet couldn’t hurt. He deserved it. He’d just made a deal with the devil. Sort of.
There was a clatter and a cry from Bob and Tina’s lodging. The couple shared the room right next to the dorm’s kitchen. It was originally intended as a sort of guardroom, but Bob and Tina had converted it into a rather spacious apartment. Spacious in comparison to the rest of the dorm’s living quarters. Nobody seemed to mind, though. The couple was about to have a baby. The first baby, in fact, to be born in New Jerusalem.
“You want red or purple?” Pete asked, sauntering from the galley with his hands full.
The door of Bob and Tina’s apartment slammed open. Bob stumbled out, cradling a baby in his arms. The lanky man was splashed with blood. His eyes were wide, his neck a ragged mess. He opened his mouth to speak but could only make a gargling noise.
Pete dropped the soft drinks. They hit the floor and one of the plastic bottles began to spray and spin in bubbly circles.
“What the hell--?” Pete gawped.
Bob tottered toward Pete, put the baby in Mort’s friend’s arms, then collapsed to his knees.
Pete looked down at the wet, squirming baby in his arms, then blinked at Mort in shock.
Bob wheezed once, then toppled onto his side.
Mort heard a phlegmatic growl, looked toward the doorway Bob had just stumbled through. Tina was standing there, glazed eyes staring from sunken black sockets, hair in bloody tangles. She was naked, her belly hanging open, coils of guts protruding from the dripping cavity. Mort’s mind connected the dots rather quickly in the second or two between the moment he saw her and the moment she launched herself at Pete and the baby. Tina, looking a little under the weather a couple days ago. Bob, asking Mort to tell the nurses at the infirmary that she was ill and would be in for her screening sometime later in the week. The baby. The crudely performed caesarean. Mort opened his mouth to cry a warning at Pete, who was still gaping at the naked little boy in his arms, but before Mort could utter a sound, Tina ran toward Pete, fingers hooked into claws, lips peeled back from her teeth in a snarl of hunger and rage.
Mort stepped forward and swung the cane.
It connected with Tina’s forehead and she went down on one knee.
“Get the baby out of here!” Mort yelled.
Tina’s snarls roused the dormitory. Lights came on in a few of the rooms, then the big overhead lights which illuminated the commons brightened with a thundding sound. Mort heard cries of horror and dismay, but there was no time for anyone to intercede. The baby began to wail and Tina leapt once more at Pete. Mort whacked her with the cane again and, furious, she turned her rage on him.
She struck, faster than he could retreat. Grabbed his wrist—the arm he was holding the cane with—and sank her teeth into his hand. The cane dropped from his spasming fingers, clattering on the floor. As Mort yelled, Tina wrenched her head back and forth and tore a plug loose. She chewed his flesh with a triumphant smile and swallowed it.
Mort kicked her. His leg buckled and he fell. She scrambled toward him hungrily, but then Pete was there. He kicked her in the head with the sharp toe of his cowboy boot, still holding the sobbing newborn. Tina sprawled on her side, stunned. Then one of the other dormitory residents kicked her. Someone grabbed Mort’s cane from the floor and began to pummel the zombie with it.
Mort slid away from the violent scene on his butt, cradling his bleeding hand.
“Mort! You okay?” Pete asked, holding the squalling baby. He saw Mort’s wound then and wailed, “Aw, fuck!”
Mort had looked up at his friend, holding his injured hand to his breast. “I guess this is it for me,” he said with a sick smile.
And it was. After Pete raced him to the infirmary, the hospital staff had pumped him full of antiviral drugs and antibiotics, but the bacteriophage had entered his bloodstream. It replicated quickly, subverting his cells, turning him into one big virus production machine. Dr. Whalen even tried an experimental treatment, transfusing blood from immune donors into Mort’s body in the hope that it would somehow slow or halt the spread of the infection. Mort was surprised how hard everyone worked to save him, but he knew it was all in vain. He was doomed from the moment he entered the office of the Archon Yaldabaoth. He’d made his bed, and now he had to lie in it.
Doctor Whalen would be returning soon. Mort waved Pete closer. Pete grabbed his friend’s hand.
“Listen, you stupid redneck,” Mort said. “I want you to understand that none of this is your fault. There’s nothing you could have done that would have changed anything.”
Pete’s lower lip quivered. His bloodshot eyes probed into Mort’s, which were starting to get hazy and sunken. “But I—“
“Stop being such a big crybaby,” Mort interrupted. “We all die. It’s inevitable.”
Pete laughed and sobbed at the same time. “That’s four syllables! You know the rule.”
“Actually, it’s five syllables, you dumb hillbilly.”
“I don’t even know what ‘inevitable’ means.”
“I know. It’s okay.”
The door whisked open. Doctor Whalen and good ol’ Nurse Ratchet walked in.
“No!” Pete wailed. “Just a few more minutes!”
The doctor looked at Mort and Mort nodded. Mort pushed Dao-ming into Pete’s arms after kissing her silky black hair. She couldn’t stand. Pete held her on her feet as Mort said goodbye, then the doctor and nurse wheeled him from the room.
He watched the fluorescent lights scroll past.
“How are you feeling?” Nurse Ratchet asked brusquely.
“Like shit,” Mort murmured. “One of my eyes isn’t working anymore.”
They rolled down a hallway, turned the corner, rolled down another hallway.
“Will it hurt much?” Mort asked.
&
nbsp; “You won’t feel a thing,” Dr. Whalen answered, his voice tight with emotion. “It will be like falling asleep.”
“Good. I’m glad. I’m pretty scared.”
They bumped through the doors into the surgical room. There were several more hospital workers waiting. They all wore matching gowns, gloves and goggles too. They gathered around the hospital bed. Someone stroked his face. Someone else strapped his good arm and both legs to the bedrails-- in case he fought them, Mort supposed.
“It’ll all be over in a moment,” Dr. Whalen said gently. He’d put on his goggles and mask. Mort saw the man’s eyes narrow, and then the doctor touched his forehead.
Mort felt a familiar prickling sensation in his brain, right in the center of his forehead. He turned his head and looked toward the entrance of the surgical room. He still had one good eye, but everything was getting blurry.
Yaldabaoth, accompanied by two other Archons, strode silently into the room.
“We’ll take it from here, Dr. Whalen,” the creature said gravely.
Epilogue
Pete Gets Saved
Funny, he’d never noticed how pretty her eyes were before: green like antique copper, with little flecks of gold in them. If he was going to die with someone, he could do a lot worse. Pete smiled at Vicki. “Looks like we’ve bought the farm, babe,” he said.
It was the same old crooked smile, just slightly tinged with regret. That almost movie star smile, the one that made women drop their panties and lesser men green with envy.
Yeah, he’d made a good run of it, considering. If he had any regrets at all, it was only that he wished Mort was here with him. He missed his buddy more than he ever thought he would. But Mort was dead. If there was a heaven, Mort beat him to it. He just hoped Mort was there to sneak Pete in the side door—cause he didn’t think they’d let him in the front gates.
After Mort died and his body was cremated, Pete had returned to Scout Crew Unit Two. There was a lot of anger in him and he wanted to exorcise that anger by killing zombies. There were still plenty of them shambling around the towns and villages surrounding New Jerusalem. You could think of it as putting them out of their misery, only really he just wanted to get that hurt and hatred out of him. It was eating at his guts like an ulcer. Unfortunately, his team had stumbled across a town that was right smack in the middle of a massive zombie outbreak—Pete supposed the isolated burg had simply gotten infected much later than the surrounding region—and now they were trapped, he and Vicky. They’d gotten used to the burned out ones, weren’t being careful, and walked right into a nest of them. They were surrounded, and they were probably going to die.
Vicki called frantically for backup on her radio, but the whole damn town was crawling with the undead, and their squad leader told them they had to hold out. Help was coming, but their squad was going to have to shoot its way through hundreds of infected townspeople to get to them.
Vicki threw the radio down and cursed.
“I don’t think we got the ammo to hold on that long,” Pete said, peering through metal racks piled with soft drinks and jugs of spoiled milk. The howling horde had pursued them into the convenience store and was beating on the cooler’s glass doors. It looked like there were three, maybe four dozen of them. At least. And probably more coming.
The double pane glass was already cracking. Any moment, one of the cooler doors would shatter, or a zombie would accidentally grab a handle and pull a door open, and they would drag Pete and Vicki out and eat them alive.
“I ain’t going out like this!” Vicki said fiercely, baring her teeth.
Pete, for some reason, couldn’t give two farts.
After Mort died, Pete had felt a terrible sense of guilt. For a day or two, he’d actually contemplated suicide. It would be such a relief. He imagined putting his pistol in his mouth and pulling the trigger, making all the hurt and guilt go away. He’d actually put his gun in his mouth, tasting the oily metal, feeling his teeth scrape across the barrel, but before he pulled the trigger, he imagined how horrified Mort would have been. Mort would have been disgusted with him. Mort would have tried his best to talk Pete down, would have urged him to seek counseling, so Pete had taken his gun out of his mouth and went to see the psychiatrist at the infirmary.
The shrink was a pretty little blonde with a cute freckled nose and granny glasses. She told Pete about a psychiatric disorder called “survivor’s guilt” and, turned out, she’d known Mort, too. They talked for a couple hours about his friend, and when his session was done, he actually felt a little better. He didn’t even take the pills she gave him.
Maybe it was survivor’s guilt making him not care right now.
He heard the tinkle of glass. Vicki yelled and started shooting.
And then something awesome happened.
Pete felt a weird tickling sensation inside his head. Through the cooler doors, Pete watched as part of the convenience store’s ceiling just ripped clean away, exposing twilight sky, glowing orange and purple clouds and the roofs of the buildings across the street. The whole structure shook when the ceiling peeled off, and then angels descended from the heavens above.
Pete and Vicki watched in awe as the Archons ripped the zombies a new one.
There were seven of them, dressed in shining breastplates, their wings outspread, their robes floating fluidly around them. The deadheads turned and went after them, but the angels were armed with clubs and swords. Some of them even had guns. It was something like fifty versus seven: so no contest. It was the coolest thing Pete had ever seen.
Zombies were hewn in half. Those halves were hewn in quarters. One of the angels, a tall male Archon with short-cropped brown hair, was destroying the deadheads with some kind of invisible force. As Pete watched, the Archon gestured and one of the zombies whipped through the air and punched through a wall, leaving just a splintered hole and a puff of dust in its wake, like some crazy cartoon. He gestured again and another zombie burst into big juicy pieces.
Vicki was screaming in triumph. “Yes! Oh my God! Whoo!” She was jumping up and down, clapping like a little girl at a magic show.
Pete recognized two of the Archons. Metatron and HaMerkavah. They were the angels who had saved Mort and Pete in DuChamp. Metatron was using some kind of invisible force like the brown headed one. The female was armed with a sword and tore into zombies like a Cuisinart.
Inside five minutes, the deadheads had been annihilated. Pete and Vicki scrambled from the cooler to thank their saviors.
The Archons accepted their gratitude in a cool and reserved manner, then turned away and flapped into the air. The last two to depart were the dark-haired one named Metatron and the brown headed one, whom Pete had never seen before.
Looking at the brown headed one made Pete’s eyes water. For some reason, he was dizzy and his head hurt.
The brown-haired Archon was, of course, glorious to look at. Beautiful, pale, but still masculine, with wry pink Cupid’s bow lips and a squarish, cleft chin. He was tall, muscular. His armor was ornate, a kind of burnished bronze, with a lightning bolt inside an upraised ring in the center of the breastplate. The symbol was familiar to Pete, though he could not place it. The Archon’s wings were white with strokes of tan and black. Their eyes met and the Archon smiled at him.
“Be careful, Peter Bolin. I won’t always be around to save you,” the Archon said.
There was a familiarity in his tone that Pete had never heard the Archons take with human beings before.
Metatron grasped the auburn-headed Archon by the upper arm and pulled him away.
For a moment, the angel’s image rippled, like a reflection in a pool of water, and Pete grinned in dawning wonder.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Pete murmured.
The angel smiled. “Not if you behave,” he replied.
Then he turned and spread his wings and, with a great gust of wind, swept them down and shot like an arrow in the sky.
END
About the Author
Rod Redux lives in Southern Illinois with his wife and children. Mort is his third novel. He is currently hard at work on his next novel.
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If you’d like to contact Rod, please email him care of [email protected].
