Mort: Deluxe Illustrated Edition (The Fearlanders)

by Joseph Duncan

  No, he thought. This is real.

  Someone was trying to rescue him!

  As the zombies began to drift toward the gunman, Mort’s rescuer backed away, pumping another round into the sky. It was like a gunshot signaling a race. The zombies began to howl all at once. They gave chase like a single terrible organism, feet rumbling on the pavement. The blonde man fired one last shot, this one aimed dead center at the approaching mob. It must have been some kind of buckshot, because the round took down several stumbling deadheads, knocked them right off their feet. An instant later, they were trampled.

  “Go! Go!” Mort cried, rooting for his savior.

  With a whoop of excitement, Mort’s rescuer jumped in the air, doing a strange sort of kung fu kick, then he turned tail and ran.

  Fast as the zombies could be in their desperate hunger, Mort’s hero was faster. A veritable Mercury, the lanky fellow shagged ass to the end of the block, then turned and waited for the deadheads to come closer. Mort watched in stunned disbelief as nearly all the revenants who had surrounded the delivery truck abandoned their trapped quarry. Even the Rottweiler took off after the blonde gunman, trotting away from the van with a ragged, limping gate.

  The guy in the cowboy boots sprinted around the corner of the building, vanishing from sight.

  Mort reached for the door handle, knowing he had to take this opportunity to escape, but he hesitated. Not all of the zombies had taken off after his rescuer. There were still three of them swiping at the windows of the Frito-Lay truck. It’s now or never, you big chicken, he said to himself. He grabbed the crowbar and gripped it in a tight, sweaty fist. If you don’t run now, they’re going to come back, and then you’re going to die!

  But he was scared.

  Tears of shame and frustration stung his eyes. His body began to tremble all over as he battled with his fear. Big, greasy blobs of sweat oozed from his cheeks and forehead, and then he opened his mouth and let off a growl that would have made Conan the Barbarian proud.

  Just as Mort lunged for the door handle, the lanky blonde came around the far corner of the building and pelted toward the delivery truck.

  One of the zombies that stayed behind finally took notice of Mort’s rescuer. It was a humped and desiccated woman with a great mane of permed black hair. The deadhead took three tottering steps toward the blonde in the aviator sunglasses, arms outstretched, but before she came close, Mort’s deliverer leveled the shotgun at her and blew her out of her Crocs. Scalp and big chunks of gray brain matter splattered the driver’s side window.

  “Come on out of there, honey!” Mort’s rescuer called. “We need ta git while the gittin’s good!”

  Mort fumbled the door open and spilled out onto the street.

  “What the fuck?” the blonde gawped, recoiling in surprise. He looked past Mort into the cab of the delivery truck. “Where’s the chick?” he asked, his upper lip curled.

  “Dead,” Mort said.

  “Dead?”

  “Dead.”

  “Shit! It’s just you in there?”

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “Shit!”

  The blonde in the cowboy boots swung a kick at the sidewalk, looking disgusted. Up close, his handsomeness was astounding. He had high cheekbones, squinty blue-gray eyes and full, sensuous lips. Mort wasn’t attracted to other men, but he was momentarily stunned by his rescuer’s good looks. The guy was a fucking movie star. The kind teenage girls swooned over. The kind their mom’s fantasized about while their dads sweated and bounced on top of them. Mort felt like the fattest, ugliest man in the world.

  Another zombie shuffled toward them from the far side of the delivery truck. A geriatric in a hospital gown. Mort turned and clubbed him down with his crowbar. The old man fell, growling and foaming at the mouth. Mort clubbed him again and again until he fell still.

  His rescuer was walking in a circle with his hands on his hips, disgusted and angry that Mort was Mort and not the buxom blonde he’d expected. He cursed some more, kicked the front wheel of the truck. Finally, he forced himself to calm down.

  “Okay. Take a deep breath and let it out,” the guy muttered. His chest rose, then he pursed his lips and blew.

  The mob of zombies that had chased Mort’s rescuer around the block were beginning to clear the far side of the building. Zombies weren’t very bright though. About half of them seemed to have forgotten what they were chasing and went loping away in random directions, still howling and waving their arms. The rest stampeded toward the Frito-Lay truck.

  “Damn it all,” Mort’s rescuer cursed. He turned and swung his shotgun, nodding his head to one side. “Well, come on, fatso. If you want to live, follow me. And try to keep up. I ain’t waiting on you.”

  With that, the blonde in the cowboy boots and aviator sunglasses took off in a sprint.

  Mort grabbed his backpack and followed.

  Mort tried to keep up with his handsome rescuer, but the longer they ran the further Mort fell behind. He clenched his teeth and gave it everything he had, but he could feel his gut and man-tits bouncing up and down with each stride. His lungs burned. Sweat poured down his face and neck and torso. He could hear the howls of the pursuing mob growing louder and louder behind him, tried to run faster, but he was giving it all he had.

  Despite his threat to leave Mort behind, the blonde had paused at the mouth of an alley. He waited impatiently for Mort to catch up, waving him on.

  “Come on, lardbutt! Move!” he yelled.

  Mort called him every foul name he could think of… in his head. Aloud, he gusted, “I’m trying!”

  The blonde leaned out, tried to decide if the fat guy was going to make it or not. “They’re right behind you, tubbo!” he yelled.

  Mort finally caught up with Cowboy Boots. “This way!” Mort’s rescuer said, and bolted down the alley. Mort wheezed after him. Midway down the alley, a flight of concrete steps descended to a sub ground-level steel door. The blonde pelted down the steps and whisked through the entrance. Mort panted right behind him. As soon as Mort plodded through the entrance, the blonde slammed the door and barred it with a two-by-four. He crouched down and waited.

  Wheezing and huffing, Mort stood with his hands on his knees. He began to cough.

  “Quiet!” the blonde hissed.

  Mort tried to slow his breathing but he was too winded. He’d never been—by even the most creative stretch of the imagination—a fit person, and he’d spent the last week hiding in his apartment, getting zero exercise and living off his stocks of potato chips, Little Debbie cakes and canned meats. Mort’s face was red and splotchy, and his clothes were soaked through with sweat. He backed away from the door, hoping the deadheads wouldn’t hear him, mouth working like a fish out of water. He propped his butt against a bare cinderblock wall, chest heaving, and concentrated on not passing out. His heart was beating so hard it felt like someone was slapping him on the back.

  When he was sure they’d eluded the zombies, Movie Star wheeled on Mort angrily. “That was a goddamn dirty trick,” he said accusingly.

  “What do you... mean?” Mort gasped.

  “Pretending to be a chick.”

  “I… wasn’t pretending… to be anything.”

  “I saw a blonde inside that truck. She was moving around and screaming.” He looked Mort up and down, nose curled with disgust. “What were you doing? Eating her?”

  Mort laughed breathlessly. “That was… me screaming… You saw her moving… when I tried to pull her… out of her seat. She was already dead.”

  “How?”

  “She… cut her own throat… with a box cutter. I was about… to do the same.”

  The guy in the cowboy boots grinned. “Well, huh… I guess I rescued me a fatty.”

  Mort was finally beginning to catch his breath. He wiped the sweat from his face with the back of his hand. “Yeah. Yeah, you did. Thanks. If there’s anything I can do to repay you, just let me know.”

  “I can think of one thing.” />
  “What’s that?”

  “You can give me a blowjob.”

  Mort’s head jerked up. “What?”

  “You said if there was anything you could do to pay me back… so give me a blowjob. You owe me one, at least. I did just save yer life. Hey, and don’t forget to slob on muh balls while yer at it. That always gets me off real good.”

  Mort drew away from the cowboy, opening his mouth to protest.

  Movie Star cracked up. He laughed and slapped his knee. “Oh, shit, son! You should see yer face! Oh, Jesus, that was funny! Take it easy. I’m just pulling yer leg.” Mort’s rescuer wiped his streaming eyes and chuckled. “I’m Peter Bolin, by the way. My friends call me Cactus Pete. What’s yer handle?”

  “Morton. Morton Lesser. Mort, for short,” Mort answered, relaxing a bit.

  Cactus Pete thrust a hand out. Mort took it, surprised how calloused it was. He hadn’t expected such a rough, firm shake from a man who was so… well, admit it, guy-pretty. And Pete was strong, too. Mort’s bones crackled in his grip.

  “Mort for short,” Pete echoed. “Hey, that rhymes!” And he laughed again.

  Pete placed his shotgun in a wood crate near the door. The crate, Mort saw, bristled with weapons: rifles, a shotgun, a couple axes, a baseball bat with nails driven through the business end. Mort’s new friend was armed for bear.

  Beside the crate was a heavy wooden table with a vice clamp attached to it. The table was littered with various wood crafting tools. Hammers, chisels, drills, a couple wood planers and sanding pads. There were screwdrivers and coffee cans full of odds and ends: bolts, screws, drill bits, nails. On the wall was a girlie calendar, some brunette in Daisy Dukes soaping up the hood of a sports car. They’d taken refuge in someone’s neglected workshop, Mort surmised. Faint yellow light filtered through dusty windows set high up in the wall. The windows were barred, thank goodness.

  “Come on, Mort-For-Short. Let’s kick back for a little while,” Pete said, waving for Mort to follow him.

  With a clank, Mort set his crowbar on top of the woodshop table and followed Pete into the next room.

  Pete had made a fort for himself in the adjoining room. His hideout was smaller than the woodshop, a storage area with only two small windows for light. A mattress lay on the floor, a tangle of pillows and blankets piled on top of it. There was a battery powered radio and a small black-and-white TV. A Coleman lantern sat on a scarred coffee table amid a collection of empty beer cans, overflowing ashtrays and crumpled food wrappers. Pete’s hideout looked, Mort thought to himself, like a very messy kid’s private club house.

  “Make yerself at home,” Pete invited, indicating the lumpy mattress.

  Mort eyed the pornographic magazines stacked beside the mattress. It was pretty hardcore stuff. No tame standards like Playboy or Penthouse in those piles! Pete’s collection included titles like Gangbang Café, Juicy Cherry Holes and Squirting Sluts. One peek at the cover illustrations made Mort leery of reclining on Pete’s mattress. He was afraid the sheets might stick to him.

  Pete cracked open a beer. “You want something to drink?” he asked. “They’re warm, but it’ll take the edge off.”

  Mort started to decline, then thought, Why the hell not?

  “Yeah, hand me one,” he said with an exhausted smile.

  Pete grinned and tossed Mort a warm brew.

  Steeling himself for an unpleasant surprise, Mort eased down on the mattress. He popped the can open and drank. Though he wasn’t much of a drinker, Mort’s mouth and throat were parched from his flight from the zombies. He chugged half the brew in one gulp, then let out a massive belch. “Excuse me,” he gurgled.

  Pete guffawed. “Goddamn, son! I felt the wind off that all the way over here!”

  Mort perused the small room. Pete had plenty of food stocked up. Junk food mostly, piled haphazardly on a handmade shelf that took up most of the back wall. Cases of beer were stacked in front of the shelf. There was bottled water and pop, too, but most of Pete’s drinking supplies was beer. The mattress he was sitting on was pushed up against a second door. The second door didn’t quite shut, hung crooked in its frame, but Pete had secured it with a large screwdriver shoved down through a hinged lockplate.

  Pete sauntered to the windows. He stepped up on a wooden box so he could look out at the street. He pushed a threadbare curtain aside. Slurping his beer, he muttered, “Zombies are still wandering around out there. Probably wondering where we disappeared to.” He snorted. “Dumb fuckers.”

  “That was a close call,” Mort said. “I thought I was a goner for sure.”

  Pete nodded, hopped down from the box. “So what’s yer story, hoss?” he asked.

  They spent the rest of the evening talking.

  Pete, it turned out, was a surprisingly worldly man. Born in Kentucky, he’d wandered all over the Midwest, settling finally in Memphis, Tennessee, where he’d met a girl named Hannah. They started dating, moved in together. Pete even considered proposing. Hannah thought Pete was good looking enough to be a TV star. She sent pictures of Pete to various agencies in New York. When a modeling agency in the Big Apple showed some interest, Pete and Hannah moved east and Pete started working as a model. He’d even landed a gig on a daytime soap.

  “Things were going good. I was making decent money, starting to get known. Then I come home early from a fashion show in Boston. They had to cancel because the designer got busted for solicitation. I didn’t call her, wanted it to be a surprise. I took a taxi home from the airport, let myself into the apartment and what do you know? I catch her banging my agent on the livingroom couch!” He shook his head, scowling. “It would have been fine if she told me she wanted to swing. Heck, I might have jumped right in! But she did it behind my back. How could I trust her after that? I got my own place. Went back to work. I even got a job modeling Calvin Klein underdrawers. I was really startin’ to make a name for myself when all this zombie shit went down.” He crushed his can and tossed it into the corner, looking angrily toward the windows. “Fuckin’ zombies,” he snarled.

  Pete told Mort how he’d gotten his nickname—his grandfather had nicknamed him Cactus Pete after a local kids show host when he went to live with his grandparents in Southern Illinois. Mort described his comic book shop, talked about his friend Fred and how Fred had gotten killed and eaten by zombies. Pete asked him about his family-- “My dad died several years ago,” Mort said. “Mom moved to Florida with her new boyfriend. No brothers or sisters.”-- and told Mort about his. “Mom and dad live in Kentucky,” Pete said. “I got three older brothers, one in prison, one in Alabama, and one in the military. Last I heard, Billy, the one in the military, was fighting over in Afghanistan. I wonder if they got zombies over there, too.” When Pete asked Mort how he’d come to be trapped in the Frito-Lay delivery truck, Mort informed him of his plan to escape DuChamp before the power plant melted down.

  “What do you mean the power plant’s going to melt down?” Pete asked.

  After Mort explained, Pete volunteered immediately to accompany him. “I sure don’t want to be sitting here when Nagasaki blows up!” Pete declared, but he also wanted to go because he was bored. He was tired of hiding in a basement, tired of spending his days drinking beer and stroking off to porno magazines. Most of all, he was tired of being alone. Peter Bolin was a gregarious person, and he was going crazy with nobody to talk to but himself.

  Plus, he liked Mort.

  They were total opposites. Mort was thoughtful, intelligent, reserved. Pete was brash, immature and outgoing. But somehow they clicked. Their personalities were like two adjoining puzzle pieces. They fit, and in a city with so many zombies and so few survivors, that fit was something both men were reluctant to let slip through their fingers.

  They set out the next morning.

  12

  Da Vinci Gets Off

  I was right, Mort thought as the pavement thrummed beneath his body. He watched a column of superheated steam billow into the sky. It was alrea
dy taking on that nightmarish mushroom shape.

  The reactor really did blow up!

  There was a part of Mort that was surprised, but the larger part of his intellect was not. Nope. Not surprised one bit. He knew nuclear power plants were built with numerous fail safes. Their reactors were housed inside layered shells of concrete and steel—all designed to keep the core from breaching and spilling its radioactive guts into the surrounding area. The DuChamp nuclear power facility’s containment building was supposed to be strong enough to endure a missile strike, but Mort was also a firm adherent to Murphy’s Law.

  If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong.

  Murphy’s Law was why the nuclear power plant on the north side of town was belching radioactive clouds of steam and ash into the atmosphere like some deadly man-made volcano. It was also why he was lying on the pavement with a gunshot wound in his leg, bleeding out in some industrial park he’d never heard of, even though he’d lived his whole life in DuChamp.

  And they’d been so close to escaping!

  Murphy’s Law.

  He’d survived gaggles of zombies, forged unlikely bonds of friendship with a small but resilient group of fellow survivors. He’d even met a smart, sexy woman who found him attractive, who’d picked him over his much more handsome companion. Actually laid him! No muss. No fuss. And now he was dying like a dog in the road because his group had stumbled across some psycho with a sniper rifle.

  Well, screw Murphy! Murphy sucked ass!

  Dao-ming was still wailing for her sister. Poor Dongmei. The sniper’s bullet had taken out the right side of the teenager’s head. Most of her brains had splattered across Pete’s face and chest. All she wanted to do was have an adventure, maybe seduce Mort’s buddy Pete if she could wear him down or get him drunk enough to forget she was fifteen. Now she was dead, and Mort’s gal, her older sister, was shrieking in rage and loss and disbelief in the backseat of the Mercedes-Benz.