“What?” Pete asked. “What's so funny?”
“Nothing. Just one of those things. It's either laugh or scream.”
Pete stared at him in silence a moment, then dismissed his companion's little outburst of mirth. Hysterics from Mort never surprised him. Pete didn’t really get how Mort’s mind worked. He only knew Mort was smart, and that made him weird… but handy to have around. Mort was good at thinking his way out of a jam.
“I think the sun's getting' to you, man,” Pete said.
Mort squinted up at the sky. It was strange seeing no contrails up there. The rumbles of passing aircraft was a thing of the past now, as were the pale gray hatchmarks of their passage through the heavens. Funny how the littlest things can leave such gaping holes in the world you used to know.
“Yeah, the sun,” Mort said.
It couldn’t possibly be the end of the world that was bothering him, now could it?
2
The Merry Shanty
In his pre-zombie life, Mort Lesser was owner and operator of an independent comic book specialty shop. He’d named his business POW Comics. A wiseacre once pointed out that POW was an acronym for “prisoner of war”, but Mort didn't think the observation pertinent. Vietnam was like a million years ago. The kids who frequented his shop wouldn’t know a prisoner of war from a Power Puff Girl. They probably couldn’t even find Vietnam on a map. Mort stayed with POW because, when someone got punched in a comic book for being a douche, it was invariably accompanied by a big, primary colored POW! The swift and simple justice of the comic book world had always appealed to Mort Lesser. There was rarely any moral ambiguity in the world of superheroes. Good and evil were always clearly delineated, and villains never profited from their crimes. Reading comics, for Morton Lesser, was an act of Zen meditation. Story and subtext as basic as the colors of the illustrated pages. As simple and direct as that one word: POW.
He’d read comics since childhood. For young Mort Lesser, it was an escape from the degradations of being a morbidly obese child in a world of young, fit, beautiful children, from being uglier, slower, weaker than all the other kids, from being called Mort the Dork and dozens of other marvelously clever grade school nicknames. For grown up Mort, it was just as much an escape. An escape from dismal, boring reality, an escape from loneliness, and an escape from his own growing disappointment with the banal universe into which he had steered his life. When he read comics he transcended the ordinary. The world was bigger, brighter, more fantastic, and he was a hero.
His business turned a profit. Not a great one. Like his dad used to say, sometimes he ate steak and sometimes he ate bologna. As any small business owner will tell you, the only real benefit of owning your own business is that you get to be your own boss. He never woke in the morning wondering if he’d rather go to work or stick his head in the oven. He was never going to get yelled at for doing something wrong, or get blamed for something that he wasn’t responsible for. Best of all, he didn’t have to work for someone who was less intelligent and less qualified than he was. He’d always hated working under some regional supervisor’s nephew or son-in-law. They were invariably dimwitted, and always eager to quash any employees they found even remotely threatening.
POW paid the bills. It covered the rent for his nice, if small, apartment. He made enough money to splurge every now and then on his action figure collection and electronics. He owned a decent car, a big TV, an Xbox, Playstation and Wii, and his refrigerator was always well-stocked.
Life was good.
Well… it was okay. It was at least that.
Sometimes he got lonely. He didn’t date often. Women didn’t really find him interesting. He might have been able to slide by with his plain looks and pudgy body if he was rich or stood to be rich when one of his relatives died, but he was unrelated to any millionaires. Other men got by on charm or persistence, but Mort was standoffish and threw in the towel a little too easily. His bachelor lifestyle was probably a good thing when the Armageddon Virus struck, however. At least he didn’t have to look after anyone but himself.
The first inkling that something was about to go dreadfully wrong with the world was a strange story on the evening news. It was not a big news story, like the consistently withering economy or some senator emailing snapshots of his ding dong to a beleaguered congressional page. It was just one of those weird little news pieces that grab the limelight for a day or two because it makes people say “Ew!”
The tale of The Merry Shanty.
On August 20th the year the world died, fishermen working off the New England coast on a boat named The Merry Shanty hauled several unmarked barrels aboard their ship when pulling in their trawling nets. There were three barrels, rusty and covered in barnacles and seaweed. As the fishermen tried to disentangle the nets, one of the 55-gallon drums fell to the deck and ruptured. Its contents gushed out, exposing the laborers to a highly toxic and unknown slurry of corrosive chemicals and organic goo.
It was not unusual for trawlers to haul in illegally dumped toxic waste, the anchorwoman reported. It had become a real problem in the last few years, apparently. What set this incident apart from all the others was that one of the fishermen died within minutes of being exposed, and three others were admitted to a local hospital for severe chemical burns and seizures after the ship returned to port. Two of those men were reported to be in critical condition. The EPA was investigating the incident, but had yet to issue an official statement.
Mort watched the news report on his widescreen HD television while sitting in his La-Z-Boy recliner, his evening meal on a wooden TV tray in front of him. He was eating a Tony’s pizza and cheesy fries that night. When the story was over, Mort wrinkled his nose and said, “Ew!” But then the anchorwoman went on to report the latest celebrity sex video scandal—Mort made a mental note: Google that later!-- and he forgot all about The Merry Shanty and her unfortunate crewmen.
Until the next day.
The following afternoon, Mort’s part-time employee came in to help cover the Friday after-school rush. The kid’s name was Fred Moore.
They joked about their names sometimes. Mort and Fred. It was almost like their parents had purposely condemned them to lives of nerdery. Mort the Dork and Red Fred. “Why couldn’t our parents name us Max and Fallon?” Mort had said once. “Or how about Mike and Frank?”
“I like Ace and Bronson,” Fred had interjected.
“That doesn’t start with M and F,” Mort said.
“Oh, yeah,” Fred said, chuckling.
Fred was thin to the point of making people squeamish. He was also ginger, and not just your average, run-of-the-mill ginger, but Ginger with a capital G. Hair as orange as a pumpkin. White skin mottled with freckles. He was so ginger, Carrot Top would stop and stare. Conan O’Brien would say, “Goddam, you’re ginger!”
Fred was a big Green Lantern fan. He also collected the Vertigo line of comics from DC. Hellblazer, Sandman, all the macabre stuff. They were talking about his ghoulish taste in comics when Fred brought up the crewmen of The Merry Shanty.
“Did you hear about those fishermen who hauled the toxic waste barrels onto their ship?” Fred asked.
Mort was leaning over the counter, snacking on some sour cream and onion chips. There had been a lull in business so Mort was refueling. “I saw something on the news last night,” he replied.
“Naw. I’m talking about this morning. On the internet.”
Mort frowned. “I haven’t been online today. Been too busy.”
Fred grinned ghoulishly. “I read on a blog that one of the dudes who was in critical condition died about four this morning. Totally flatlined, right? The doctor pronounced him and everything. Then, about fifteen minutes later, he sits up and bites one of the nurses on the arm. Guy went crazy on it. Tried to gnaw it off like he was rabid or something.”
Mort smirked. “Do you really believe everything you read on the internet?”
“No.”
“What site did yo
u read this on?”
“Just some dude’s blog. Guy works as an orderly at the hospital it happened at. He said it was like the guy came back to life. Turned into a zombie, you know, like that movie Night of the Living Dead? He said they had to strap the freak to his bed, then the hospital isolated him and called in the CDC.”
“That’s weird. Send me a link to that webpage when you get home tonight. I want to read it.”
“Sure.”
They got busy then and Mort forgot all about it, but later that night, sitting in front of his computer in his boxer shorts (with a sock and a bottle of Jergins lotion nearby) Fred’s email popped up and Mort delayed his search for that celebrity sex video to follow Fred’s link to the zombie blog.
“That’s strange,” he muttered.
Clicking the link brought up a DNS error message. The blog had been taken offline.
If Mort had been a conspiracy theorist, he might have been more intrigued. As it was, he just shrugged it off and started searching for that video. It took a little while, but he finally found it. He smiled and picked up his bottle of lotion, squirting some in his left hand. Squirt-squirt! “Hello-ooo, nurse!” he smiled.
The next morning, as he sat in his recliner munching on a bowl of Cookie Crisp, there was an update to The Merry Shanty chronicle on the local news.
“A strange story from Gray Harbor, Massachusetts this morning,” the anchorman with the dead raccoon for a toupee pronounced gravely. “The Center for Disease Control has responded to a mysterious outbreak following the incident with the fishing trawler The Merry Shanty. Health authorities are saying that several of the hospital employees who came into contact with the fishermen are suffering from unusual flu-like symptoms. The Merry Shanty made headlines yesterday following a fatality when several unlucky fishermen netted three 55 gallon drums filled with an unidentified corrosive substance. One man died and three were admitted to a local hospital following their exposure to one of the ruptured canisters. Tragically, two of those men expired overnight, succumbing to an as yet unidentified viral organism. Experts at the CDC think the virus is linked to the toxic waste the men were exposed to the previous day. The CDC has isolated the hospital employees and is in the process of contacting the other crewmen of The Merry Shanty so they can be screened for possible infection.”
Mort scowled at the television, milk dripping from his spoon. Gray Harbor was only ninety miles east. He hoped the CDC put a lid on the mysterious outbreak real quick.
Before going to work, he checked Fred’s link one more time—curious about the tale’s dubious zombie angle. Instead of a blank DNS screen, his internet wasn’t working at all. He unplugged his router, plugged it back in, rebooted his PC, but it did no good. His link to the internet was broken.
It wasn’t the first time he’d had an interruption in his internet service so he didn’t think too much about it. They were probably working on the lines or something. He shrugged it off and went to work.
“Did you read about the zombie?” Fred asked him later that day.
Fred had dropped by the shop, though he wasn’t scheduled to work on Saturday. Like Mort, he didn’t have many friends. He was dressed in a black t-shirt emblazoned with the Green Lantern logo and a tacky pair of green and orange checkered golf pants.
“Naw, my internet is out,” Mort replied.
“Really? Mine went out this morning.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Yeah, that is crazy.”
“So… what’s the poop?” Mort asked, ringing up a few packs of Pokemon trading cards for a snooty little rich kid. “That’s $12.84, bud… Thanks.” The register cha-chinged! and rattled off a receipt.
“Oh. Before my internet went out, I was chatting with a guy who lives in Gray Harbor, and he said military trucks were driving past his house.”
“Any zombies?” Mort asked.
Fred laughed. “No!”
“They’re probably just being careful.”
“Who? The zombies?” Fred asked, frowning.
“No, the CDC. There’s no telling what those people were exposed to.”
“Oh... Yeah, probably,” Fred nodded.
Fred watched the register for a minute so Mort could take a bathroom break. After Mort had dropped the kids off at the pool, Fred bid his employer adieu. He was headed to Best Buy to look at internet routers, he said.
“It’s not your router. They’re probably just upgrading the lines or something.”
“Yeah, I know,” Fred said. “I just want a new one.”
“Gotcha. See ya later, dude.”
“Later!”
Mort finished the day, locked the door, and walked home.
His block was unusually quiet that evening. Traffic was sparse and there was a conspicuous lack of pedestrians on the sidewalks. His nose stuck in the latest issue of The Avengers, Mort didn’t really notice. Even if he had, he wouldn’t have been overly concerned. His shop was located in one of the older sections of DuChamp, and it was usually pretty deserted on Saturday evenings. Everyone went to the mall on Saturdays.
Mort was tired and hungry. Business had been steady all day. No great shakes, not with everyone bootlegging comics on the internet nowadays, but he wasn’t going to starve this week, and that was always a good thing. All he wanted to do was eat some supper, take a nice bath, and then read for a little while before going to bed. He needed to go through his Diamond Distributor catalog and figure out what he was going to order for the shop next month, too.
He tried his internet before retiring and saw that it was still offline. There were also no new stories about The Merry Shanty and its crewmen on the news that night either.
Mort went to sleep and dreamed zombies were chasing him through his old high school.
In his dream, he’d taken refuge beneath his English teacher’s desk while a mob of undead classmates roamed the hallways, trying to sniff him out. He could hear them outside the English room door, groaning and shuffling. He’d huddled as far under Mr. Pommier’s desk as he could squeeze his fat ass, waiting for them to figure out where he was and come crashing into the room, fingers curled into claws, their low bubbling moans turned into piercing shrieks of hunger. Even in his dream, he was aware that his plumber’s crack was showing, but pressed as tightly as he was under the desk, there was nothing he could do about it. So much for dying with dignity!
He was grateful when he awoke.
His eyelids snapped open in the dark and there was the old familiar ceiling of his old familiar bedroom. Mort smiled in relief.
His body was clammy with sweat. He hated zombie nightmares, but something besides the bad dream had awakened him. What was it?
Engines thrummed in the darkness. His bed was shaking a little. The water glass on his nightstand chattered against his lamp.
He thought it was an earthquake at first, then realized it was the reverberation of heavy vehicles. The bass rumbling was coming from the street below.
He swung his feet out of bed, walked to the window and peeked out.
Big military vehicles were passing on the street beneath his apartment. A caravan of them. The trucks rumbling past looked like armored troop carriers. Green Army camouflage. Tarp covered beds. He watched a whole fleet of them lumber by, followed by zipping jeeps and other smaller vehicles. He couldn’t make out the men inside the trucks. They were too far away, and it was too dark. The whole parade was headed east.
Mort watched the ominous motorcade from his bedroom window, dressed in only his boxers. His face, in the sallow glow of the street lights, was doughy and pale with worry. It might be a common sight in places like China or Russia, but in America you didn’t see military vehicles on maneuvers like that. Not in the middle of the city. Not on his street anyway!
Restless, he turned on his lamp and went to his computer.
The internet was still on the fritz.
Annoyed, he grabbed his cell phone and called his internet service provider. At least his cell phone worked
, but all he learned from the automated customer service line was that his ISP was “currently experiencing technical difficulties”. They were also “working to resolve the problem as quickly as possible”. The robot voice then apologized for any inconvenience he might experience due to the service outage and hung up on him.
Mort couldn’t sleep for a long time, but it was Sunday morning and Fred ran the shop on Sundays, giving Mort a day to do laundry and get some rest. It wouldn’t matter if he slept in later, after the sun had risen.
Instead of forcing himself to go back to sleep, Mort walked into the living room, grabbed a can of soda from the refrigerator and sat down in his recliner to watch some TV.
There was a final news story about The Merry Shanty after that. Mort watched it on the Sunday evening news as he sat folding towels.
The CDC was seeking two of The Merry Shanty’s crewmen, the anchor of WMBS’s News at Nine reported. The men had gone on the run after they’d received a tip-off they were being sought by authorities. All of their crew mates had apparently died, and the CDC wanted the unfortunate fellows quarantined until they could figure out what kind of disease they’d been exposed to.
“Local law enforcement and officials from the Center for Disease Control are seeking Alan Twitty, age twenty-eight, and Mark Lebowski, age twenty-nine, both from Yarmouth Port in Massachusetts,” Brock Bronson, the bronzed blond anchorman said. “If anyone has any information concerning the whereabouts of these men, they are asked to please call the CDC hotline immediately. It is urgent these men be located and screened for possible infection as soon as possible.”
“If you have come into contact with either of these men, please call the CDC for treatment,” the anchorman intoned grimly before moving on to the weather. An 800 number blinked at the bottom of the screen in big red numbers.
Mort: Deluxe Illustrated Edition (The Fearlanders) Page 3