Mort: Deluxe Illustrated Edition (The Fearlanders)

by Joseph Duncan

  “That’s my sister,” Dao-ming said.

  Dao-ming didn’t slow down until they were perilously close to the entrance of the home. The house grew so quickly that Mort was certain their beautiful driver wouldn’t be able to stop in time, that they were going to crash through the back wall of the garage and burst out the other side before she could get the car stopped. Dao-ming hit the brakes. The sudden deceleration shoved Mort and Pete into the seat ahead of them. The Mercedes-Benz bounced up onto the private drive, missing the girl by less than a foot, and screeched into the open garage.

  Before the men could gather their thoughts, Dao-ming flung herself from the car and ran to help her little sister shut the gate.

  Mort unbuckled his seatbelt with trembling hands and got out of the car. He had to lean against the side of the Mercedes for a second. His legs were all rubbery.

  He tottered forward to help the sisters, but quickly discovered they needed no assistance. As Dao-ming secured the big steel gate, her little sister put the rifle to her shoulder and picked off any zombies attracted by the car’s engine. She was a little sharpshooter, he saw. One shot, one kill. It was kind of intimidating.

  “Good job, Dongmei,” Dao-ming said, ruffling her sister’s hair. The younger girl lowered her rifle and smiled prettily.

  Dao-ming turned and looked at Mort. “Let’s unload the Mercedes and get inside before we attract any more of them.” Mort nodded eagerly. She yelled to Pete: “Hey, cowboy! You wanna get out and lend us a hand?”

  The sisters were holed up in their parents’ million dollar townhouse. The place was huge, Mort discovered. Four bedrooms, three baths, fireplace, pool, the works. An eight foot tall welded steel fence ran the perimeter of the property, the kind with decorative spear tips lining the top. Dao-ming’s father, Zhao Bohai, had owned a chain of Chinese-American restaurants before the zombie apocalypse. Bohai’s Buffet. His success had made him paranoid about security. The more money he had, the more fearful of robbery he’d become. The Zhao home was a fortress, with grated windows and a multitude of security cameras. The women had weathered the plague and all the chaos that ensued with little difficulty. Money might not buy you love, Mort thought, but it could certainly buy you a buttload of security.

  The only problem was: it was a castle sitting on top of a powder keg.

  Mort followed Dao-ming and her little sister as the women loped into the garage. He tried not to stare at the older of the two as he trailed behind them, still catching his breath, but it was hard to resist. Dao-ming was slim and fit, and her one-piece clung like a second skin.

  The ladies walked with cute bouncing strides, their arms swinging broadly. Babes on a mission. Pete got out of the car as they approached, a sullen expression on his face.

  The younger sister, Dongmei, peppered her sibling with questions: “Where did you find these guys? What’s their names? Did they save you or something? I hope you got me some smokes. I’m almost out. Did you see any other live people, or is it still just zombies everywhere?” She looked curiously from Mort to Pete as she babbled.

  “We didn’t save her,” Mort said. “She saved us.”

  Pete turned away to spit. He sniffed and wiped his nose.

  “Is that true? Did you save them?” Dongmei asked her sister. “What happened? I hope they’re nice guys and not, like, rapists or something.”

  “I don’t know if they’re nice guys,” Dao-ming replied. “If they aren’t, well, I guess we’ll just have to shoot ‘em.”

  She looked back at Mort when she said it and smiled.

  Mort put all the pieces together as Dao-ming explained to her younger sister how she’d met Mort and Pete. The beautiful stunt car driver had been on a supply run when she ran across the two fleeing men. That explained why the backseat and trunk of the vehicle was piled with groceries, candles, and ammunition. Just as Mort thought, she had almost mistook them for zombies and run them down, but had realized they were survivors when Pete tried to help Mort to his feet. Zombies didn’t do things like that.

  “It was a close call,” Dao-ming said to her little sister. “In fact, I shut my eyes at the last second. I just knew I was going to run them down.”

  Mort grinned queasily as he helped Dao-ming carry in the provisions. He wondered just how many people had died during the pandemic from accidents, rather than at the hands of the ferocious dead. Probably a lot.

  “So what’s your names?” Dongmei asked.

  “I’m Mort,” Mort said. “This is my buddy Pete.”

  Pete tipped an imaginary hat.

  Dongmei eyed Pete up and down. “He’s cute,” she said.

  Pete grinned, then looked uncomfortable as the pigtailed little girl continued to stare at him. She was young, maybe thirteen, but had the stare of a man-hungry divorcee.

  Mort and Dao-ming finished unloading the Mercedes while Pete and Dongmei sorted the supplies and put them away. The décor of the Zhao home was understated but refined. When Mort commented on the beauty of her home, Dao-ming smiled sadly. “Mother had good taste,” she said.

  “Did she die during the outbreak?” Mort asked.

  Dao-ming nodded. “Mother and Father both. I’ll tell you about it later. We should walk the fence before we relax. Just in case any more zombies followed us back.” After that, the four of them walked the perimeter of the property to make sure no other zombies had been attracted to the vicinity by the sound of the Mercedes’ engine or Dongmei’s gunshots.

  The exterior of the home was just as splendid as the interior, with decorative trees and bushes, flower gardens and fountains and a large Koi pond. Mort walked alongside Dao-ming, feeling as if he’d stumbled into yet another alternate universe, a fantasy world with no monsters, no Phage, just blossoms and beautiful women, warm sunshine and tranquility. The only thing that spoiled the illusion were the guns. Both women were carrying large caliber firearms, and Pete his Saturday Night Special.

  If this is a dream, I don’t want to wake up, Mort thought, listening as Dao-ming talked about her old life, when she was a stuntwoman and not just a survivor. He told her about his life, too, before the plague turned the world upside down, and was gratified when she seemed genuinely interested in him. He had expected her eyes to glaze over, like most people’s eyes glazed over when he talked about himself. Turned out she was a big sci-fi buff. She was into anime and science fiction films. Even had a good working knowledge of comics. From the movies, mostly, but it gave them something to talk about.

  “What was the last movie you saw at the theater before the zombie outbreak?” Mort asked.

  “The new Batman,” Dao-ming confessed, ducking her head with embarrassment.

  “Me, too!” Mort cried, and they laughed together.

  “Nerds,” Pete muttered behind them, rolling his eyes.

  The back lawn abutted a neighbor’s yard, so it was relatively secure. Only the south side and the front of the property bordered the street. Luckily, apart from the zombies Dongmei had shot down, the area was clear of deadheads.

  Dongmei skipped along beside Pete, babbling and preening in front of the older man, trying to get his attention. Pete kept eyeing the girl’s older sister, but Dao-ming was studiously ignoring him.

  Dongmei tried to talk Pete into getting in the pool with her. “You can borrow my dad’s shorts,” she cajoled him, when he told her he had nothing to go swimming in. “You could even swim in your underwear if you want. They’re no different than Speedos. You can at least wash up. You’re really dirty. You smell like old tennis shoes and BO.”

  “Naw, I don’t feel like swimmin’,” Pete said. “Besides, it’s kinda rainy. I bet that water’s freezin’.”

  “It’s not cold. Come on! I’ll show you.”

  “Nah, maybe later.”

  “Your sister’s a good shot,” Mort said to Dao-ming as they headed back to the house. They were walking past the inground pool again. Ripples spiraled on its surface as the overcast sky continued to drip.

  “W
e both had to learn to shoot quick when the zombies started getting really bad,” Dao-ming replied, tracing a finger along the slick black barrel of her gun. “For a couple days, we were shooting them in shifts. I thought the bodies would pile up high enough for them to climb over each other and get inside.”

  Mort glanced at the base of the fence. “There aren’t any zombies there now.”

  “I dragged the dead ones away after they finally stopped coming,” Dao-ming said. She smiled at him, waving a hand in front of her nose. “Put them in our neighbor’s yard. They stank so bad! Whoo!”

  “What happened to your mom and dad?” Mort asked. “You don’t have to talk about it if… you know, it’s still painful.”

  Bohai and his Japanese wife Satori had died during a riot at a military blockade, Dao-ming explained. The military had quarantined the city shortly after the outbreak started. The Zhao family had tried to flee from the city and found themselves caught up in the riot at the edge of town. Army gunmen had shot her parents along with several dozen others when the crowd tried to charge through the barricades. Mort had heard about the shooting on the radio. He was still hunkered down in his apartment at the time. The guy on the radio had babbled hysterically about it for an hour before playing “The Star-Spangled Banner”. After the national anthem, he had raged about the fascist government and the Biblical endtimes for another hour. Dao-ming and Dongmei had gone with their parents when they tried to escape the city, of course, but they had gotten separated from them in the chaos. Dao-ming saw her parents go down and retreated home with her little sister, shell-shocked and horrified.

  “My mother… she was just shot in the shoulder. I saw when the bullet hit her. I don’t think it would have killed her. But then the crowd turned, and she fell. They trampled her, all those people... trying to run away. I couldn’t do anything to help her. All I could do was grab Dongmei and run, too.”

  Dao-ming shuddered, her eyes far away.

  “Why were they barricading the roads?” Mort asked. “That seems like kind of a lost cause. Virus Z was pretty much everywhere when the riot happened. I heard about it on the radio before they went off the air. Or got shut down. I’m not sure what really happened to the local radio stations. They just went off the air, one after another, that first week.”

  Dao-ming shrugged. “I guess they were just confused, like everyone else. They probably still thought they could contain it.”

  In the house, Dongmei tore open a pack of Marlboros and angrily stuck a cigarette in her mouth. She was frustrated with Pete’s lack of cooperation, and didn’t like thinking about her parents’ cruel fate. “You got a light, cowboy?” she asked Pete. She was dressed in Daisy Dukes and a pink spaghetti strap t-shirt, a smallish teenage girl with short cropped black hair and a round face with large, epicanthic eyes, heavily made up. Two ponytails stuck up jauntily from both sides of her head, like Mickey Mouse ears.

  “Are you kiddin’?” Pete asked. “You look like you’re about twelve. You shouldn’t be smoking.”

  Dongmei snorted. “I’m fifteen, you hillbilly. I may not live to see sixteen. In case you haven’t noticed, the whole planet’s been taken over by zombies. So… you got a light or not?”

  Pete looked at Dao-ming, who shrugged.

  Eyes wide, Pete dug a lighter from his pocket and handed it over.

  Dao-ming laughed as her little sister blew out a smoke ring. She glanced at Mort to gauge his reaction, held her gaze just a moment too long and looked away self-consciously, flipping her raven black hair back over her shoulder.

  Mort shifted on his feet, suddenly uncomfortable. He could feel his cheeks heating up. Pete was staring at the two of them with a confused, slightly disgusted expression.

  Mort was just as confused. Did this beautiful, exotic woman really like him? Was that possible?

  Dao-ming was probably the most gorgeous creature he had ever seen. Tall, slim, athletic, with dark almond-shaped eyes and long silky black hair. She had full hips and breasts and a waist so narrow he could probably encompass it in his hands. She liked the same things he did, but even more amazing, she seemed as attracted to him as he was to her, though he could not fathom why. He was fat, his hair was thinning--

  Well, he thought, to be honest he wasn’t really that fat anymore. Looking down at his belly, he realized it had shrunk tremendously over the last four weeks. It was like a part of him was missing. He was still shocked when he looked down and could see his crotch rather than a big mound of belly jelly.

  Dongmei filled their awkward silence by addressing Pete: “You look really familiar, dude. Where have I seen you before?”

  Pete frowned. “You’re pretty forward for a runt.”

  Dongmei smiled around the butt of her smoke. She looked a lot like her older sister, just a tad shorter and plumper. Her face had yet to lose its baby roundness. “My mother and father raised me to be outspoken. They said it was the American way to speak whatever’s on your mind.”

  Dao-ming nodded. “She’s telling the truth.”

  Pete shrugged. “Before the zombie virus, I did a little TV. Soap operas. Sitcoms. A few commercials. I mostly modeled.”

  “You were a fashion model?” Dongmei asked.

  “An underwear model,” Dao-ming elaborated, as if it were a silly thing to do.

  Dongmei looked from her sister to Pete, snorting with delight. “Awesome! I can see that. You are one smoking hot piece of dick.”

  “Dongmei!” Dao-ming gasped.

  The three of them laughed while Pete blushed furiously and muttered, “You’re just a kid. You shouldn’t be talkin’ like that!”

  After that, Dao-ming asked what Mort and Pete had been doing when the three of them met, or more precisely, when she had nearly ran them over.

  Mort explained they were trying to get out of the city, and then he told her why. He felt like a heel ruining the good thing these two women had here, in their million dollar fortress, but they needed to know about the danger they were in, the danger posed to all the city’s survivors by the DuChamp nuclear power facility.

  “By all accounts, it should have blown already,” Mort explained. “There must be someone there maintaining it, but they’re only going to be able to keep it from melting down so long.”

  “And then it will go up like an A-bomb?” Dao-ming asked. She glanced at her sister with a horrified expression.

  “That’s not likely. There are a lot of safety systems built into nuclear power plants. We went there on a field trip when I was in grade school. It’s why I thought about it. It won’t go up like a nuclear bomb, but it could blow up, start fires, and then there’s the radiation and fallout. If any fires start, well, you know, there’s no emergency services to put them out anymore. You could try to hide in a fallout shelter, but you’d probably run out of supplies before it was safe to come out. I think our best bet is to get out of the city and try to find someplace to stay in the countryside. There will be fewer zombies to contend with. Less fallout the further away we get.”

  Dao-ming looked to Dongmei. “I never thought about the power plant! We just thought we’d stay here until the zombies all died. They can’t keep running around forever. Most of the ones I’ve seen the last few days are starting to look a little… well, rotten.”

  Mort spread his hands. “I’m not trying to tell you what to do, Dao-ming. I’m just telling you what Pete and I have decided to do.”

  Dao-ming nodded. “Yes… Yes, I understand. I’ll have to think about it.”

  Mort nodded.

  “But do you think it’s really likely? A meltdown?” Dao-ming asked.

  “It’s going to happen. The only question is how much damage it’s going to cause, and how much radiation it’s going to release into the environment.”

  Dao-ming scrubbed her face with her hands. She looked at her little sister then and said, “Give me one of those cigarettes.”

  They talked until night fell, then shifted their palaver to the den, which was an inner ro
om with no windows. They could safely use candles there without the light attracting hordes of zombies. Dao-ming and Mort went into the kitchen and prepared dinner before it got too dark to see: spam sandwiches, potato chips, canned fruit and vegetables, and for dessert… Hoho’s.

  “My favorites!” Mort cried.

  Dao-ming smiled up at him, candlelight dancing in her eyes.

  Mort was hyper aware of Dao-ming’s movements. He felt a mild tingle of electricity every time her body moved anywhere close to his, and wondered if it was real or just a figment of his imagination. He jumped when her hand brushed his. He felt drunk on the smell of her. He imagined kissing her and got lightheaded.

  The two of them talked about their parents as they worked together in the kitchen. Dao-ming was still in mourning for hers. She couldn’t even really believe they were dead. Mort’s father had died during a triple bypass almost a decade earlier, he told her. His mother had retired to Miami the previous year. He hadn’t been able to contact her since the outbreak.

  Mort was unaccustomed to attention from such a beautiful woman and had difficulty speaking coherently. His dick was a hair’s breadth away from a full on hard the whole time, even though he tried to think of the most disgusting things he could to keep from embarrassing himself: geriatrics in soiled Depends tongue-kissing, the chest bursting scene from the movie Aliens, Burt Reynold’s face… post-facelift.

  Dao-ming was well aware of the effect she was having on him, but didn’t act put-off at all. In fact, she seemed flattered by his discomfort. She patted his butt when she walked around him to the other side. She pushed him out of the way with her hip as he fumbled with the dressing. “What’s the matter, Mort?” she asked teasingly. “You’re all sweaty and clumsy.”

  “Ah…um… ahem! I guess my… uh, sugar’s low. I haven’t eaten since this morning.”

  Smooth operator.

  They returned to the den and ate by candlelight. The quartet talked some more, even joked around a little. Everyone was relaxed and happy. Everyone except Pete. Pete was unusually jumpy, mostly due to Dongmei. Dao-ming’s little sister was all over Mort’s buddy. She tried to sit in his lap. She walked behind the sofa he was in and played with his hair. She kept making suggestive comments to him-- and some that were just downright nasty.