Lavender chortled. He passed Mort and Pete, platform shoes clopping across the tile floor as he led them toward his harem. The sound echoed in the room like a high school gymnasium. “Now what do you got to trade for a little playtime with these fine, fine hoes?” he asked. “You can do anything you want to these bitches, gentlemen. Fuck them in the ass. Piss on their faces.” He paused, grinning back at Pete and Mort over his shoulder. “I wouldn’t advise putting your dicks anywhere near their mouths, though,” he added. “They bite!”
The big one named T-Rex erupted into laughter at that.
Excited, Pete threw his backpack on the floor. Mort ogled him with disbelief as he began to rummage around inside it. “I got some candy bars. A can opener. I got a half bottle of Jack Daniels…”
“You got any drugs?” Lavender asked. “Coke? Heroin?”
“I got some weed.”
“Re-eeeaaally?” Lavender looked very interested in the weed.
Feeling sick to his stomach, Mort plucked at Pete’s collar. He couldn’t really be thinking about doing it with one of those... things, could he? “Come on, man. What are you doing? That can’t be safe. What if you catch the virus from one of them? They’re zombies! Besides, they’re dead, Pete! It’s necrophilia.”
Pete jumped to his feet angrily. “That’s five syllables, Mort!” he snapped, and he slugged Mort on the arm twice.
Hard.
“Hey! That hurt!” Mort exclaimed, surprised, then a sudden surge of anger welled up in him. In that moment, he pictured himself hitting Pete back. It would be a brawl, and Pete would probably mop the floor with him, but for just one second, Mort’s hands tightened into fists, and those fists itched to start flying.
“Yeah, fuck you, too, Mort!” Pete hissed, his cheeks and forehead blotchy with red.
Mort stumbled back, holding his stinging arm. He swallowed down his anger, saw the crazed look in Pete’s eyes. Pete was grinning like Lavender. That sick, lost soul grin. It frightened Mort more than the zombies hissing just a couple feet away. Pete looked like he’d lost his mind.
“This ain’t right, Pete,” Mort said, his voice wavering.
Pete shrugged. “I got rubbers. It’ll be fine.”
Lavender inspected the bag of weed Pete had pulled from his backpack. He sniffed the herb inside, smiled with relish, then rolled the bag back up and stuffed it in his pocket. He noticed Mort backing away and moved smoothly to cut off his retreat.
“What about you, son?” he said silkily. “Don’t you want to spend some time with one of these lovely ladies? You can do anything you want to them. Really. It don’t matter. Nothing matters anymore.”
Mort shook his head as Lavender steered him toward his captive sex zombies. He kept saying no, but Lavender wasn’t listening.
“What about this one?” Lavender suggested. The zombie he’d gestured toward was a heavyset black woman. Maybe someone’s wife when she was alive… somebody’s mother. Maybe even the woman who’d lived in the apartment they slept in last night.
Lady Godiva of the giant brown dildo, Mort thought, feeling a little crazy himself.
She had been squeezed into a black silk teddy and duct taped to a cafeteria table bent over. And she was big. Really big. What guys used to call a BBW on internet sex sites. One of her thighs was as thick as Mort’s waist. A plastic bag had been pulled over her head and taped tightly around the neck.
“Don’t you want to slide yo dick in dis pussy?” Lavender asked, pulling apart the zombie’s ass cheeks to expose the puckered starfish of her anus, the deep pink folds of her vagina. Green-gray mold was growing in the moist pleats of her flesh. Mucus, probably crawling with the Phage, dribbled onto the floor.
“God, no! Thanks, but no,” Mort stammered, trying to pull away. His stomach was doing somersaults. All that chocolate he’d eaten this morning was about to make an encore appearance.
Out of the corner of his eye, Mort saw Pete rolling a condom onto his penis. He was fully erect. Before Mort could think of something to say—anything that might make Pete see reason—his buddy sidled up behind one of the zombie women, bent at the knee, and then drove himself into her… into IT!
The zombie he’d penetrated began to thrash and howl, infuriated, enraged, mindless and hungry. Foam sprayed from her snapping teeth. Her milky eyes were wide and soulless.
“Lookit, Mort! I got me a wild one!” Pete laughed, humping the foul thing. He slapped the zombie on the ass as he thrust into it. “Whooee, does that ever make it mad!” he said, then he slapped its ass harder.
Horribly, watching Pete doggy-style the zombie, Mort felt his own cock stir a little. How long had it been since he’d had sex with a woman? Over a year, at least. He might be fat and ugly, but he had the same needs any other man had. He suddenly pictured himself doing the same thing Pete was doing to one of the other zombie women. One that wasn’t too rotten, maybe. Like Lavender had said, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore...
NO!
Ashamed, he wrenched his eyes away from Pete.
“No!” he said again, more firmly, to Lavender.
“Something special, then?” Lavender pressed. “It’ll cost you extra…”
He gestured toward another zombie, a child with duct tape on her mouth, her knees bound to her shoulders. She couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old.
“No?” he said as Mort gaped at him, eyes watering.
Lavender circled around behind him. He turned Mort by the shoulders to inspect a young male zombie, naked and bent over a railing.
“Maybe this is more your speed?” Lavender purred, his lips right next to Mort’s left ear. “Get you some down-low? I’m cool wit dat.”
The naked male zombie growled and tugged against his bonds. His broad brown back was riddled with bullet holes. Half-rotten genitals swung between his muscular thighs as he struggled to get free, snarling like a pit bull.
“Get the fuck off me!” Mort shouted, pushing Lavender away with his elbow. “You sick fucking… LUNATIC!”
Pete was grinding into his zombie sex slave, head tossed back, teeth clenched. “Oh, fuck, Mort, I’m gonna blow!”
Lavender’s strange eyes rolled around to Mort and then locked onto him. His grin slowly curled down into a snarl. “What did you call me?” he said, slow and deadly.
As Mort stood frozen in terror, Pete tottered away from his undead partner, penis drooping, the reservoir of his condom jiggling with semen. “Shit. I didn’t mean to cum so quick,” he said, face bright red and beaded with sweat. He grinned at Mort. “It’s been so long!”
Then, from the front of the building, machine gun fire. A drumroll of rapid popping sounds.
T-Rex was standing with his back against the entrance, arms crossed. He looked at Lavender, alarmed, then turned and hustled through the door. A moment later, both of Lavender’s guards opened fire.
Brrrapppp!
Pop-pop-pop!
Lavender’s weird eyes were fixed on the door. He’d forgotten all about Mort, thank God.
Mort and Pete exchanged frightened glances. They both knew how gunfire attracted deadheads. Those Uzis could probably be heard for miles. Pete cursed and started wrestling up his trousers, a panicked look on his face. Mort trotted across the rec room floor toward him.
Lavender headed tentatively toward the door, murmuring, “I guess... I better go check on them.”
Then, over the sound of automatic gunfire, the shrieks of the undead.
An army of them.
5
Dead Days
In the days following The Merry Shanty incident, as the CDC, the National Guard and the Massachusetts’s State Police scrambled to put a lid on the rapidly spreading infection, local television and radio stations broadcast a series of bogus new stories.
If the authorities had aired the truth—that a bizarre viral organism was killing people and then reanimating the bodies of the dead—they might have been able to contain the disease. Unfortunately, the U.
S. government was too accustomed to deceiving the American public. They’d made a habit of it in the 50’s, and they just couldn’t kick it. It might as well have been written in their employee handbook.
Rule #1: They can’t handle the truth.
It was nothing but the prejudice of the elite. The arrogant have always been drawn to positions of authority, and sadly, arrogant men and women never seem to realize that ego rarely equals wisdom. The government’s reaction to the crisis was the worst possible strategy they could have adopted.
If the truth had come out sooner, the public might have been able to aid in the containment of the disease. Instead, the men in charge of dealing with the outbreak issued press releases describing a terrorist anthrax attack, a toxic waste spill, an epidemic of bird flu, even SARS, obfuscating the threat, keeping John Q Public in the dark-- and the whole time, Virus Z spread across the continent like wildfire.
For a day or two, it seemed as if the Armageddon Phage had been successfully quarantined in Gray Harbor. The small fishing community was cordoned off by the military. No one was allowed in or out except authorized government and military personnel. The American citizens confined to the isolation zone were denied communication with the outside world. They were placed under house arrest, examined one by one, and coolly euthanized at the first sign of infection. Whole families were sanctioned, decapitated, and loaded onto the back of dump trucks to be disposed of in mass graves. Finally, when authorities realized nearly everyone in Gray Harbor had been exposed to the Phage, the surviving citizens were rounded up from their homes in the middle of the night and herded into hastily erected pens in the middle of the town’s baseball and skate park.
Packed together like sardines, the healthy and diseased, they shook the chain link fences and howled about their civil rights. At dawn, the morning of August 25, just four days after The Merry Shanty pulled into port, the order was given. Soldiers encircled the pen, dressed in white hazmat suits, shouldered their automatic weapons and opened fire. Those soldiers, nearly crazy with horror and self-loathing, spent the rest of the day picking off the reanimated when they rose snarling from the great bloody mounds of dead American citizens.
But it really didn’t matter, this incident of inhumanity. The virus had already spread well beyond the quarantine zone.
The two fishermen who had gone on the run, the two most directly responsible for the spread of the contagion, Alan Twitty and Mark Lebowski, traveled together as far as Ohio before parting company.
Alan and Mark had been buddies for a long time. Since grade school, in fact. Back then, they went to classes together, played on the same baseball team, took turns sleeping at one another’s homes during summer vacation. Now they shared a small bachelor’s apartment in Yarmouth Port when they weren’t working on the Shanty. They ate together, partied together, even screwed the same girl together on one memorable and drunken occasion. “Brothers from another mother,” Mark sometimes joked.
On August 21, the captain of The Merry Shanty, Big Mike Wallace, was taken into custody. He was the first member of the crew to be rounded up. He was at a bar drinking, rattled by the deaths of his crewmen, not three sheets to the wind yet but getting there, when three very sober men in tailored black suits walked through the entrance and headed straight toward him. He didn’t like the looks of the men in black, who had come, they said, to escort him back to the hospital. Thinking fast, he told the agents sure, yeah-yeah, he’d let ‘em check him out in they thought he’d caught some kind of disease, but he had to piss first. “‘S all right if I have a piss?” he asked, acting more drunk than he really was. They let him stumble into the mens room alone, and Big Mike dug his cell phone from his pants pocket, hands trembling. Big Mike called Alan, his second cousin, and told the kid to get the hell out of Dodge. He said it in a low, urgent voice, but they must have been listening at the door because the men in black barged in within moments of him placing the call, just kicked the door right in, swarmed around him, and snatched his cell phone right out of his hands. That, more than anything, made a believer of Alan-- listening to his captain struggling with the men in black. Alan hung up and immediately started packing a bag.
They dragged the captain kicking and screaming from the bar he had been drinking at. “They ain’t cops! They ain’t got a warrant!” he howled, but no one lifted a finger to help him. Big Mike died around 3:30 that morning of the Phage, and was the first deadhead to be studied in earnest by the epidemiologists the CDC had flown in.
Alan told Mark what was going on when he got back from his beer run, and together, the two men drove to Mark’s girlfriend’s house in Yarmouth, which was thirty miles from the hotel they were staying at in Gray Harbor. They persuaded her to swap vehicles with them and immediately headed west, where both men had family who would hide them out until whatever it was that was going on had blown over.
Mark dropped off his buddy at a truck stop in Southern Ohio, the same one they always stopped at when visiting their families out west.
“Take it easy, bro,” Mark said. “Call me when you get to your brother’s house.”
“I will,” Alan agreed.
Mark gave his buddy a big bearhug, wishing him good luck before pulling out of the lot and heading toward the interstate. Mark, whose parents had died when he was a boy, headed toward his aunt’s house upstate.
Alan watched his buddy drive away, then picked up his duffel bag and trudged inside the truck stop. He called his brother in Illinois from a pay phone. The two had thrown their cell phones out the windows of the borrowed truck shortly after leaving Yarmouth, fearful the authorities could track them by their phones even if they didn’t use them. By 4 AM the morning of August 22, the two fishermen had already infected thirty people.
Of the two men, Alan Twitty’s infection had progressed the furthest. He’d never had much of an immune system. He always caught every cold and fever that was making the rounds, even when he was a kid. He wandered around Big Willy’s Truck Stop for two hours, sweating, shivering, his eyes hollow and bloodshot. His nose was running like a sieve, his lungs full of phlegm. He coughed into his fist and then sat at a table, smearing the Phage all over the back of the seat and the tabletop. He went to the mens room to piss and deposited the seething pestilence on the door handle, the lock of the handicap stall and the toilet lever when he flushed. He was so nauseated and exhausted he didn’t notice the yellow-green discharge coming from his penis, or the furry black mold spreading from beneath his foreskin. He shuffled back to the dining area to find that an elderly couple had taken his table. He flopped down in another seat, teeth chattering, and wiped his nose with the back of his forearm. When a young female employee came over to ask if he was okay, he smiled at the chirpy young woman and patted her hand.
“I’m fine, thanks,” he said mushily. “Just a cold. My brother’s coming to pick me up.”
He coughed again as she was standing there, snot rattling in his lungs like marbles. “Really,” he wheezed as she stood there uncertainly. He smiled at her, a death’s head grin, and she smiled back sympathetically and returned to her duties.
The girl, whose name was Heather Anderson, had a couple small wounds on her fingertips. She was a nervous cuticle biter. The bacteriophage invaded her body through the tiny areas of broken skin around her nails. Almost immediately, the virions, which looked sort of like teenie tiny little versions of the spaceships from H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, latched onto her cells with their spindly little legs and began to inject their DNA into them.
An hour before she clocked out for the night, Heather was puking up her guts in the ladies bathroom, praying she wasn’t pregnant again and cursing her husband just in case she was. Little Jake was only nine months old! They couldn’t afford any more kids!
She was sick for a little less than 24 hours before she succumbed to the Phage. In that time, she spread the virus to over three hundred people. She died in bed next to her sleeping husband at 2:17 AM the morning of August 23.
A few hours after she died, her corpse sat bolt upright, eyes filmy gray marbles, cheeks sunken, and she fell upon her nineteen year old husband with a snarl, ripping into his carotid and jugular veins with her teeth. Her husband, who had married her just two months after knocking her up at their high school prom, died without knowing what was happening or who it was that was hurting him. He struggled briefly, yelling at the pain, his wife’s face an unrecognizable, monstrous blur in the moonlight, all bloody snapping teeth and swirling hair, and then he died, thinking he was only having a bad dream and was going to wake up any second.
Any second...
In the next room, the baby began to cry.
On the way to his home in Southern Illinois, Alan Twitty’s sibling James noticed that his little brother had stopped breathing. Alan was slumped against the passenger window, his face ashy and still, his head bobbing limply with each bump in the highway. James had listened to his brother snoring phlegmatically for miles. Sounded like he had a terrible cold. But Alan went quiet very suddenly, just as the sign announcing their exit (AHEAD 2 MILES) glided past in the headlights. Jim prodded Alan on the shoulder, frightened by his little brother’s sudden silence. “Alan? Alan, are you okay?”
Alan began to twitch.
Alarmed, Jim hit the brakes and steered his truck toward the shoulder of the road. When he was in college, he’d shared a dorm room with a young man who was epileptic. His brother’s spastic jerking looked just like his roommate’s seizures. Before Jim could come to a full stop, however, Alan’s eyelids snapped open. He looked around for a moment like he wasn’t sure where he was.
“Bubby?” Jim said tentatively.
Alan’s head snapped toward him, cocked strangely to one side. Some dark fluid, bile maybe, dribbled from the corner of his mouth. Jim Twitty called his brother’s name one more time, and then Alan launched across the seat, howling like a maniac.
Mort: Deluxe Illustrated Edition (The Fearlanders) Page 6