Mort ogled the sleek sports car with amazement. The vehicle had passed so close its wind had blown his wet bangs back.
“Come on, lard ass,” Pete said, trying to pull him up.
Mort got to his feet as the driver’s side door swung up.
Up, not out.
Cool, Mort thought.
A fantastic-looking Asian woman leaned out from behind the steering wheel. She had long silky black hair and wore a pale blue one-piece jumpsuit with shin-high black leather boots.
“Hurry up and get inside, boys!” the Asian woman yelled. “Those jiang shi are right on your asses!”
Mort and Pete looked over their shoulders-- never a good thing to do in the horror movies. Turns out, it wasn’t a bright idea in real life either. The zombies were barely twenty yards back, and closing fast.
The two men put on a fresh burst of speed and jumped gracelessly into the sports car.
“Hang onto your dicks!” the Asian woman shouted.
She threw the car into reverse and backed up even before the gullwing door had finished closing. The remaining half-dozen zombies shambled onto the street as she drove up the block in reverse.
“This Mercedes-Benz will go from zero to sixty in three seconds,” she boasted, eyeing Mort in the rear view mirror.
A moment later, she hit the brakes, then threw the car into gear and stomped on the gas pedal, bright red lips splitting back from her teeth.
The Benz rocketed forward, wheels squealing. Zombies caromed off the hood like bowling pins. One went under the bumper and the back wheels bounced over its body. The Asian woman laughed as her head flew up and hit the ceiling.
As the Benz peeled around the corner, the stunning beauty lit a cigarette and said,“The name’s Dao-ming. Who the hell are you?”
7
Da Vinci
Once upon a time, there was a woman named Anne-Marie DeAngelo. She turned thirty-five on her last birthday, was married to a United States postal worker named Sal and had three kids: Robert, who was 12, Amy, 10, and little Ricky Gene, who at 3 had come as something of a surprise-- but a good one. One that she never regretted.
Anne-Marie worked at a florist shop named the Rainbow Inn and painted in her free time. The painting was strictly a hobby, or so she had always said to herself, but she was good. She had even sold a few pieces of her work through a local art store (which was coincidentally just a couple buildings up the street from Mort’s comic book shop). One of her paintings, a landscape of DuChamp’s skyline at sunset, had fetched a shocking eight hundred dollars when it sold, and was displayed in the lobby of a large law firm downtown.
She was a naturally happy person and loved her husband and her children with a ferocity that surprised even herself. Though she worked and had many hobbies, her family took precedence over all else. Her family was her life.
She went to the gym three times a week to maintain her figure, ate healthy and did her best to insure her family was healthy, happy and productive people, too. She was even a member of her school district’s PTA and room mother for her daughter Amy’s seventh grade class.
She was lithe, tan and blonde. She had fantastic legs, respectable c-cup breasts and a tight butt, not a hint of cellulite anywhere. Her husband, Sal, couldn’t get enough of her body, even after fifteen years of marriage, but that was an interest she encouraged.
Her husband was no slouch, either. Sal was still a tiger in the sack, even though he was forty. Aggressive, energetic, masculine. Not to mention very well hung. In fact, he had the biggest balls she’d ever seen. She would never have imagined she could get so turned on by balls. When she was a teenager, she and her friend Kathy Nader had shoplifted a Playgirl magazine from a convenience store, giggling over all the dirty photos later at Kathy’s house. They had both agreed that day: balls were ugly, wrinkly things. Like big pink raisins covered in kinky hair. But nuzzling up to Sal’s big coconuts made her plumbing spring a leak every time. It was shameful!
Sal was a good looking man, with curly dark hair gone gray at the temples. Women flirted with him all the time. Sometimes right in front of Anne. Every now and then she wondered if Sal had ever cheated on her—and she did this with a mixture of jealousy and arousal—but he seemed devoted to her, and she’d never once caught him flirting back.
A good old-fashioned Nice Guy, that was her Sal.
No, sir, they didn’t make ‘em like Sal anymore! He made a good living for them. He took pride in the thought that his family never had to go without. Her income bought the groceries, paid for luxuries like video rentals and birthday parties, and gave her enough monetary freedom to feel like she was an independent woman, but Sal was the real breadwinner. Even better, he never held it over her head, as her father used to do to her mother.
Sometimes she thought she was the luckiest woman in the world.
Anne-Marie DeAngelo contracted the Armageddon Virus on August 31, while picking up her two older kids from school. It was the same day Mort Lesser saw his first zombie, and not long after Fred Moore was murdered in the alley behind POW! Comics, his brains prized from his shattered skull and devoured by a young woman in a Hello Kitty T-shirt.
It was a Monday, a little after 3:00 PM. One of her fellow room mothers had come to the window of her car to gossip before the bell rang and let the kids out.
The other room mother, a redhead named Sharon Yates, transmitted the virus to Anne as they chatted about Helen Dorsky, a fellow room mom who was getting a divorce after her husband caught her in bed with their dentist.
Sharon was a real character, the type of gal some people might describe as “quirky”. As she laughed about Helen Dorsky’s marital problems-- “getting drilled by her dentist,” was how Sharon put it-- millions of mutated bacteriophages billowed from her mouth and nose, riding upon the microscopic droplets of her respiration. Several hundred thousand of these blew directly into Anne Marie’s face as she sat smiling and nodding behind the steering wheel of her SUV. The phages coursed into her lungs as she inhaled to chuckle with her friend. Ricky Gene, in the backseat, inhaled a couple thousand, too, as he sat sucking cherry Kool-Aid placidly from his sippy cup, cherubic lips stained pink.
Finally the bell rang, interrupting Sharon’s deadly monologue. “Oops! There’s the bell. I better get back to the car. Talk to you later, girlfriend,” Sharon chirped. She walked away, hips swinging, the rose and tribal tattoo on her lower back peeking out over the waistband of her blue jeans. In the backseat, Ricky Gene squealed, “‘Obert! ‘Obert coming, Mom!” The kids piled in. Robert first, then Amy, a butterfly sticker on her cheek.
“I want a sticker!” Ricky Gene hollered.
“This one’s mine, Ricky. I got it for good behavior,” Amy replied haughtily. “When you’re big enough to go to school, maybe you’ll get one, too.”
“Mo-ooom!” Ricky squalled.
By bedtime, all three children were infected.
Her husband, Sal, was one of the very rare people who carried the faulty gene which rendered him immune to the mutant phage, but as with so many of the immune, who would die by violence or accident in the weeks that followed the pandemic, his luck, genetically speaking, would do him little good.
Though all of the DeAngelo clan were fit, their immune systems could only fight the infection so long. All three children were feverish the next morning. Anne-Marie tried to call the school to let them know the kids weren’t coming in today, but her cell wasn’t working. It buzzed for a moment, then a recorded message stated that her service was temporarily disrupted. Technicians were working to restore it, sorry for any inconvenience. “Screw it,” Anne-Marie sniffed, and she returned to bed. “Move over, buster,” she said to Ricky Gene, who was sprawled in her bed in his PJ bottoms, face pale and sweaty.
By 10 AM, Anne-Marie was too sick to get out of bed.
She drifted in and out of strange dreams. Her muscles alternated between violent tremors and excruciating cramps. Her bloodshot eyes swam in pools of sticky tears as she co
ughed hoarsely, spitting up wads of yellow, infectious mucus. She woke and rolled over to check on her youngest child. When she couldn’t rouse Ricky Gene, she tried to call Sal at the post office. Her cell still wasn’t working. She tried to get up, get Ricky Gene to the hospital somehow, and collapsed onto the floor beside the bed.
She died at 12:32 PM.
Her dying thoughts were of her kids.
Sal came home early that day in a panic. There were military and police everywhere. People were rioting in the streets. He’d heard rumors of a terrorist attack, disease, but no concrete information. One of their drivers had gotten attacked, returned to the post office with several bites and scratches on her arms, hands and face. Sal left shortly after the Postmaster locked the doors, slipping out one of the rear exits because there was a crazy man at the front, screaming and banging on the glass.
Sal planned to load the family up and get them out of the city. His parents owned a cabin up north. It was remote, with stores of food and water. They would be safe there until whatever this madness was had passed and things were back to normal.
Anne-Marie was standing motionless in the middle of the parlor when he opened the front door.
Her eyes had filmed over. Her skin was pallid and waxy. She stood with her head hanging down and her hair in her face, her breasts rising and falling with a sound like wet gravel in a bellows.
“Baby, we have to get out of town!” Sal said breathlessly. He had not yet shut the door.
She slowly raised her head and looked at him.
“There’s something really bad going down. I’m not sure what it is, but there are cops everywhere. People are rioting in the streets--”
He finally noticed the pallor of her skin. The foam dripping from her chin.
“Baby--?”
Before he could ask her what was wrong, she ran at him.
Her fingers were curled into claws. Her sweet prettiness had transformed into an awful Halloween mask of rage and hunger. She collided into him with enough force to bowl him off his feet. They fell onto the antique table they always threw their keys on when they came home from work, splintering the hundred-year-old cherry wood.
Sal tried to push her away and she bit his index and ring fingers off. He screamed once, and then she ripped out his larynx with her fingernails.
When little Ricky Gene came stumbling down the stairs in his PJ bottoms twenty minutes later, his jaw hanging open, his cowlick sticking straight up, Anne-Marie crouched over her kill and snarled at him.
Ricky Gene sidled cautiously around his mother and wandered out into the front lawn, groaning softly.
Anne-Marie watched the little boy totter across the lawn and down the street, her lips peeled back from her teeth, then leaned in between her husband’s thighs. She sank her teeth into his scrotum, then twisted her head back and to the side with a snarl, the flesh tearing, blood running down her chin. Great flutters of pleasure, like silky butterfly wings, flickered through her body as she swallowed the warm wet meat.
She wandered down those same streets now, her flesh shriveled tight around her bones, a shambling scarecrow with a matted blond mop of hair atop her skull. Despite the preservative properties of the organism which had killed and then reanimated her body, her organs and skin had begun to decompose. Her blue-black face was pitted. Maggots boiled in her ears and in the open sores on her bare legs, once so long and smooth and tan.
She was still dressed in the shorts, sleeveless T-shirt and housecoat she’d died in, though the fabric had faded and begun to fray. Her cute bedtime ensemble was little more than rags now.
She moved stiffly, groaning in pain with each step. It had been days since she last ate (a teenage boy she’s snagged off his bike as he pedaled frantically past her, too concerned with the pack of zombie dogs behind him to notice her until it was too late). Without fresh meat to fuel its life processes, the ravenous phage was eating her from the inside out. If she didn’t make a kill soon, she would continue to rot, continue to stiffen, until she became inert, a moveless thing of bone and sinew and inflexible, desiccated tissue.
She had no memory of her happy living past, but that was a blessing. She had no sense of self, no higher mental processes, no understanding of the past or the future, cause or effect. Nothing. She simply Was. And that Was was only two things: pain and hunger.
She was wandering down Parkway Road today. Across town, Mort Lesser and Peter Bolin were leaping into the back of a black Mercedes-Benz. The thing which had once been Anne-Marie DeAngelo was limping down the sidewalk, every cell of her body burning, shrieking for sustenance, a horrid, empty, withered thing.
She could feel the rain drumming down on her. It was cold and wet, but those things meant nothing to her. It was only physical sensation. Once a rainy afternoon would have filled her with a sweet melancholy, would have compelled her to paint or screw, but the gray sky made her neither happy nor sad now. She didn’t even hope to find something hot and wet to eat. Hope was as far beyond her mental capacity as reason or memory. She only shuffled along, groaning as her bare feet settled on the moist pavement. Each step was like walking on chunks of jagged glass.
She heard a sound and came to attention, her moan trailing off. She cocked her head, listening, filmy eyes rolling in their pitted sockets.
It was a Food sound!
She didn’t actually have a word for food anymore, nor the sounds that meant that food was near. All such things were beyond her. A living human being would have thought: Music! But she no longer thought. All that remained was sensation and instinct. Stimuli and hunger.
The food-sound was a soft and rhythmic keening, but it drilled into her ears, into her skull, like red hot knitting needles. Lips like rotten leeches peeled back from her teeth, which were chipped and moldy, slick and sharp. She’d broken most of them gnawing on bones, trying to get to the marrow inside, the first one on her husband’s thighbone.
She did not remember the name of the man who was singing. She’d once enjoyed listening to Johnny Cash, but the woman who used to collect vinyl record albums with her husband, buying them at junk shops and used music stores, listening to them late at night in his office after the kids were in bed, no longer existed as a sentient being.
She tottered forward, homing in on the sound, growling at the pain it drove into her head.
Kill-eat-kill-eat!
She found it with her eyes then. A small black box with a gray cord tied around the handle.
The gray cord was a clothesline, but she didn’t know that. The small black box was a battery powered tape player. She didn’t know that either. The play button was taped down with a piece of black electric tape, and the player itself was swaddled in cloth to pad it from impacts.
She only saw vague shapes through the blurry lenses of her cataract eyes, light and shadow, motion. She relied more on scent and sound to zero in on her prey.
She stumbled toward it, snarling and reaching for it with knuckled hands.
Kill! Kill it! It hurt so bad!
She wanted to rip its guts out, bite it, bash it on the ground, make it dead, make it silent, and eat it.
The cord twitched. The tape deck skittered away from her.
Anne-Marie-- or rather, the soulless thing Anne-Marie had become-- fumbled after it.
It jittered down the sidewalk. Crossed the street. Jumped up over the curb.
She followed.
The twitching cord snaked across the pavement toward a gray-walled building, then angled up and disappeared into an open ground floor window.
Anne-Marie caught movement out of the corner of her eye. She turned her attention from the hateful sounds coming from the little black box to the shadow shifting around beyond the window. She hissed. Even the act of turning her head was agony, and she wanted to kill the shadow-thing which had caused her to move her head in such a manner.
She saw something sketch the air from the open window then, a streak of red, heard a thwipping sound.
An arro
w punched through her throat. The impact caused her to stumble. Protruding from the back of her neck was three inches of shaft and a large and vicious-looking four bladed broadhead. She tried to reach up and pull the object from her flesh, but her arms no longer worked. She sank to her knees, wobbled for a moment, then fell limply onto her right side.
A living person would have died within moments from shock or massive blood loss. The broadhead arrow tip was wicked sharp and had done massive damage during its brief passage through her body, slicing through flesh and esophagus, muscle and nerve. But Anne-Marie DeAngelo was already technically dead. Though her spinal cord had been neatly severed, she bled very little from the grievous injury and remained aware of her surroundings.
She watched as the tape deck slid quickly up the wall and into the window. A moment later, the music fell silent.
A metal ring was inserted in the shaft of the arrow between the nock and the fletching. Attached to the metal ring was a high-test, braided fishing line. The line went taut. The shaft pulled out her throat until the broadhead caught against the back of her neck. Her entire body jerked forward then, sliding across the wet pavement toward the window.
When she was alive, Anne-Marie weighed one-twenty. Her weight had varied very little from that all her adult life, except when she was pregnant. The thing Anne-Marie had become, however, weighed only sixty-five pounds-- well below the test limit of the fishing line.
She was dragged across the sidewalk and up the cold gray wall of the building. Up, up, in two foot increments. Her body flopped through the open window, boneless as a Raggedy Anne doll.
She came to rest staring at a heavyset man in white jeans, a stained white shirt and apron. He was wearing bright yellow Playtex gloves. She could still move her face so she snarled at him, baring her sharp green teeth. Even now she wanted to kill him, eat him.
Mort: Deluxe Illustrated Edition (The Fearlanders) Page 10