“Looks like you’re finally putting on a little weight,” Scott said, arms crossed.
Mort glanced down at himself. His body was pale and bony. Weeks of running from zombies, then his extended stay in the hospital here at New Jerusalem, eating lime Jell-o and chicken broth, had shrunk him from two-fifty to a skeletal one-sixty. It was like some skinny guy had swapped bodies with him when he wasn’t looking. Not that he was complaining. Now that his belly was gone, he could actually see his ding-dong. And it was pretty dang big. Bonus!
He said as much to Scott, and the physical therapist roared. “It’s hard to believe you were ever that big,” Scott said after his laughter had died away. He wiped his eyes.
After drying off, Mort dressed himself in a clean white tee shirt and shorts. He did so well bathing and dressing himself unassisted that Scott clapped him on the shoulder and told him he was doin’ awesome, man. Mort smiled, but only out of politeness. The P. T. session had drained him, and the wounds in his thigh and the side of his head were beginning to throb nastily.
“You should give some thought to which work crew you want to sign up for when you get out of here, too,” Scott said, helping Mort slide his legs onto the bed. “It’s not going to be much longer before they kick you out of here to make room for some other poor schlub.”
Mort nodded tiredly.
“You can worry about that later, though,” Scott said sympathetically. “You look bushed. I’ll head out and let you get some rest.” He paused at the door and looked back. Hooking a thumb, he said, “I’ll tell Nurse Ratchet you’re done with P. T. so she can change your dressings and give you some pain medicine.”
Scott bid Mort good-bye. Fifteen minutes later, a nurse came in to change his bandages. They had begun to peel off because of the shower.
“You all done for the evening?” she asked.
This nurse’s name was Betty Vaughn. If there was ever a real Nurse Ratchet, she was her. Brusque, efficient, not exactly unkind, but certainly unsympathetic. She was the type of nurse that made you want to get better as fast as you could just so she’d quit looking at you like you were some kind of faker.
“Where’s Molly?” Mort asked.
“Helping someone who’s really sick,” Nurse Vaughn replied.
Mort laughed. “I love you, Betty.”
“I know you do.”
A portion of his bandages were still stuck to his thigh. It ripped out a good chunk of hair when she removed it, but she just sniffed at his yelp of pain. She said sorry, but she didn’t sound sorry.
He peeked at the gunshot wound in his thigh as she disposed of the soiled bandaging and prepared to put a new dressing on it. It was bright pink and looked sort of like melted wax.
“Quit picking at it,” Betty said, slapping his hand away.
“It itches,” Mort complained.
“It’s going to. It’s healing.”
The wound in his leg was almost completely healed, they both agreed, though his head injury was still draining, he saw, looking at the yellow-brown stains on the gauze.
“You’re going to have a dent in your head when it’s completely healed,” she opined, poking at his skull with her gloved fingers.
“Great. Like I’m not ugly enough already.”
“Mmm-hmm…You’re not going to have enough hair to comb over it either,” she added, compounding his misery.
Nurse Ratchet taped fresh bandages to both wounds and then cleaned up her mess of used tape, gauze and plastic packaging, tossing the ball of soiled linens into the trash can.
“How is your pain, Mr. Lesser?” Nurse Vaughn asked as she hooked him back up to his IV. He still had to finish the baggy of Rocephin. “Do you need any pain medicine?” The way she said it, Mort felt like she was implying he didn’t need any, but if he wanted to be a big baby, she’d go get him some.
“God, yes!” Mort groaned. He felt like an invisible man was standing over him, stomping his head with cleated boots.
Nurse Vaughn sighed and left the room. She returned a few minutes later with a pill in a paper cup. He swallowed it eagerly and lay back, letting his eyes drift shut.
“Looks like your hair’s starting to grow back a little,” Nurse Ratchet said as she fussed with the dressing on Mort’s head one last time. “Except for the big circle on top that’s bald.”
So she did have a sense of humor after all! Mort smiled as she petted on him. Let her tease. Her voice was floating away like a helium balloon released into an April sky… or a vampire flitting across a burning city.
His body gave a little twitch at that.
That was weird! Why did he think vampire? They were called Archons.
No matter. It felt too good to just lay there and drift.
“All right then, Mr. Lesser. You get some rest,” Nurse Ratchet said. “I’ll bring your dinner in later. Looks like the doctor’s finally going to put you on solid food. I hope you like beef stew and lime Jell-o.”
He would have griped about that lime Jell-o—even to grumpy Nurse Ratchet-- if he were still awake.
14
Scout Crew Unit Two
Officially, the work crew Peter Bolin volunteered for shortly after arriving at New Jerusalem was designated Scout Crew Unit Two, but some wiseacre who’d passed through the unit before Pete had nicknamed it “Screw U 2”, and the nickname had stuck. Proud of its reputation, most of its veteran crewmen wore tee-shirts with the slogan emblazoned across the back. It was even spray painted on the side of squad leader’s truck.
It wasn’t the most clever pun in the world, but Pete thought it was pretty cool. It had, in fact, become a point of pride among the scout crew teams to pull at least one tour on Screw U 2. No other crew ranged as far from base as Screw U 2. No other crew boasted as many sanctioned deadheads, as many rescued survivors, or as many casualties as the Screw You’s. They dared claim to be the wildest, deadliest, horniest motherfucking zombie killers in the world. And the truth was, they just might have been.
The makeshift government of New Jerusalem maintained fifteen scouting crews in total. The teams were organized in a quasi-military fashion. Each unit consisted of about ten vehicles—jeeps, buses and flatbed trucks—and a squad of twenty to thirty heavily armed volunteers called scouts. Scouts reported to their squad leader. Squad Leaders reported to squad masters, who coordinated three to five units each from the field. Finally, squad masters reported to the squad major, whose lazy ass never left the outcamp administration building. Every grunt held firm to the belief that Squad Major Dick Neimeyer, who oversaw all fifteen scout units, spent the vast majority of his time alternating between vigorous jerkoff sessions in Outcamp’s mens room and chasing his secretary around his desk. When he wasn’t reading funny books and taking naps, that is.
Scout teams had three primary duties. Ordered by mission priority, they were: one, locate survivors and transport them to New Jerusalem, two, gather supplies for home base’s continually swelling population, and three, sanction all deadheads with extreme prejudice. Though most scouts claimed their job was keeping New Jerusalem stocked with toilet paper and condoms, the scouting crews were vital to the success of the tiny community of survivors.
Only men and women who were immune to Virus Z were allowed to serve on scout crews. If your body did not produce the enzyme that rendered the Phage inert, you were not allowed to volunteer for outcamp duty. Peter Bolin, already a big winner in the looks and physical endowment lotteries (if not the brains sweepstakes), won big on that, too. He wasn’t just immune to the Phage, his blood sample was so heavily saturated with the anti-phage, it bent the virus over and drilled it in the butt.
Once accepted, volunteers had to complete a weeklong course in firearm proficiency and self-defense (called zombie-jitsu). One week wasn’t much preparation. Most of the scouts’ casualties could be directly attributable to a lack of training, but the precarious existence of their burgeoning civilization demanded the reckless pace. More survivors arrived every day, and New Jerusal
em’s stores of food were diminishing with frightening rapidity.
Cactus Pete, who was too lazy for real work, preferred the scout crews to any other work detail. He’d rather risk his hide roaming through the Fearlands (which is what they’d come to call the zombie-infested country outside their fenced safe haven) than break his back slinging hash in the cafeteria, and the brief stint he’d pulled in the administration building, helping register new arrivals and assign them quarters in the dormitories in Yellow and Blue, had put him to sleep his second day of work. Literally. He’d gotten discharged when the bitch who ran registration caught him snoozing in a supply closet.
Well, fuck her, thought Pete Bolin. She’s an ugly old dyke anyway! Pete marched his ass right over to outcamp services and signed up for the scout crews.
Besides, it wasn’t like joining the army. A scout could quit any time he or she wanted. It was hazardous work with no pay, but if you wanted to live in New Jerusalem you had to do something. Their society was, in essence, a big hippy commune. Everyone who could work had to work. That was the rule. If you weren’t disabled, you had to sign up for some kind of duty crew or you didn’t eat. New Jerusalem had a strict “no freeloaders” policy.
Pete breezed through firearms and self-defense training. He was a natural born athlete, in prime physical condition, and had handled firearms since he was a kid. Even better, he drew Screw U 2 his first rotation, and found the motley crew of hellraisers and asskickers to be a perfect fit. At the end of his first tour of duty, the unit’s regulars had invited him to join the squad permanently, or at least until some zombie ate his ass or he lost his nerve and decided mopping floors would be a better way to spend his days. “Hell, yeah!” said Pete, and they all proceeded to get drunk before heading home the next morning.
Despite the danger, Pete was happy in the scouts. Most of the time there really wasn’t much to do but ride around and enjoy the scenery. Every now and then they’d have a hairy shootout with a bunch of hungry deadheads, but the Phage seemed to be running its course. Zombies, it turned out, were only a little hardier than ordinary living creatures. They were subject to the laws of physics just like everything else. As they ran out of fresh human flesh to eat, the virus began to devour them from the inside out. Once the population of the living had zeroed out, they preyed on what few wild animals they could catch... or one another. In fact, most of the deadheads Pete had seen in recent days were little more than shambling bones wrapped in beef jerky. Most everyone agreed, the dead were dying again.
“By this time next year,” one of his crewmates had said, “there won’t be any deadheads left. The world’ll be ours again!”
Not that the creepazoids couldn’t get you. They were still dangerous in large groups. Even the really burned out ones. There were still towns crawling with the onerous creatures like maggots on roadkill. And you never knew when a fresh one was gonna come busting out a barn door, howling its crazy head off and running straight at you.
The scouts had developed a pretty good system in the brief time they’d been operating. Whenever they moved on to a new community, the caravan would roll through the streets at about fifteen miles per hour. A loudspeaker attached to the top of the lead vehicle played country music. For some reason, country-western music drew the zombies out better than any other genre of music. Especially Conway Twitty. Conway Twitty drew them in groves. His deep-pitched wailing really seemed to piss them off. When the zombies started shagging ass toward the trucks, the scouts opened fire. They continued to shoot, cruising just fast enough to stay out of any deadhead’s reach, until all the zombies were dead, and then they looted the town for supplies and rounded up any survivors.
The Screw You’s had gotten so efficient at killing zombies they’d made a game of it. Every clean headshot scored you one point, but you had to claim it right then, and your H. S. partner had to verify. Killing two zombies with one shot was worth ten H. S.’s, but it had to be verified by at least three other scouts. Three or more zombies with one shot scored a whopping fifty H. S.’s, but as yet no one had dared claim that accomplishment.
H. S.’s were traded in at the end of the day for goods and services. Ten H. S.’s got you a carton of smokes. Twenty-five got you a dip from the goody bag-- the squad leader kept a duffel bag chock full of girly mags, illicit drugs and various sundries the goody-two-shoes back home might find objectionable. Fifty H. S.’s got you a blowjob from Vicki Rungold, the only female scout currently in the squad.
Vicki herself had offered that particular prize. Vicki Rungold was as wild as any of her male crewmates. She was a fine looking piece of ass, could drink any Screw You under the table, and liked nothing better than going down on a nice hard dick after a long day of shooting deadheads. She said it helped her relax. Even better, she wasn’t too dainty to swallow.
Wild as they were, the Screw You’s took their job seriously, and their most important task was rounding up survivors. While Conway played on the lead truck’s loudspeaker, a second loudspeaker broadcast a looped message from the rear: “If there are any survivors in the area, do not run toward these vehicles. You will be shot. Find a high safe place and flag us with a brightly colored object. We will find and rescue you. If you shoot at these vehicles, we will return fire. Repeat: If there are any survivors…”
There were never many survivors. In a town of five thousand, like the one they just departed, they’d rescued one. A little boy, half-starved, who had hidden out in his tree house. He had heard the looped recording and started waving a ragged red tee-shirt from the doorway of his hideout. In the overgrown lawn below, his zombified family circled like hungry sharks. After the Screw You’s put fresh blowholes in every member of his family’s skulls, the boy told them he’d been stuck in the treehouse for days, living off the candy and soda pops he’d squirreled away before the zombie apocalypse came to town like some corrupt and lethal county fair.
It just about broke Pete’s heart, seeing the little tyke with his sunk-in belly and hollow, haunted eyes. The kid’s name was Billy, just like Pete’s brother in Afghanistan.
“I look at him, and I think, fuck, there can’t be no God. How could He allow something like that to happen if there was,” Pete said to Vicki later that night, sitting out back of the caravan, drinking a beer. “I know there has to be a God, ‘cause of the angels and all, but damn, why’s He got to be such a prick?”
Vicki had taken Pete’s cock out of her mouth and asked, “Are you going to cum anytime soon? My jaw’s starting to get sore.”
“Oh, yeah... sorry,” Pete had mumbled.
One little boy, and they’d shot how many deadheads that day? Five hundred? Six hundred? Pete had personally sanctioned dozens of mombies and dabbies that afternoon. Grambies and kibbies, too. He didn’t feel anything for them. They were dead and gone. But seeing the little boy crying over his mom and pop had turned the monsters back into human beings. It made them regular people again, not deadheads, not villains. Sick, yes, deranged and deadly, yes, yes...but still people. And seeing them lying twisted and motionless in the streets of their once idyllic hometown, their bodies emaciated and dressed in rags, Pete was reminded of the concentration camp photos from his Grampa’s old World War II magazines, and it took all the fun out of the killing.
But he had a job to do. They all did. Pete had become an expert marksman in the last couple weeks, maybe second best in the unit, right behind Vicki. He could blow out their brains without even half trying. Blam! There goes Granny in a mumu dress! Blam! There goes Reverend Tully running starkers through the church yard! Blam! There goes Aunt Petunia in her blood-splattered sundress.
A few of the Phage’s victims had already burnt out. They lay motionless where they dropped, their feet wore down to nubs, their bodies just piles of dry bones, twice devoured--first by the mutant virus that had decimated the world, then again by nature’s clean up crew: the buzzards and bugs, and possums and crows and coyotes.
Later that night, wrapped up in a blanket in
the back of his truck, Pete turned his face into the crook of his arm and wept silently.
He missed Mort.
He didn’t want to admit it, but there it was. He missed Ol’ Lardbutt worse than he ever would have believed it was possible. He’d always fancied himself a tough guy, but Mort had a way of listening that made a person lower his guard. A feller could tell Mort anything without worrying about being judged, not like the guys (and gal) of Screw U 2, who were always trying to outdo one another, always jockeying for status, trying to be the alpha dog. If he told one of his crewmates he was sad and lonely and homesick, if they caught him crying like he was crying right now, they’d laugh and call him something cute like Crybaby Pete or Bawlin’ Bolin. They wouldn’t let him live it down. Mort would look at a guy with those big somber eyes and say, “Yeah, man, I understand. I’m homesick, too.” And then he’d try to make you feel better.
Fuckin’ Mort! Pete thought, laughing softly against his sleeve.
He decided to go see the slob as soon as this tour was up. His unit was returning to New Jerusalem soon. They were due a week off for some R and R. He’d try to sneak past the nurses at the infirmary, or look him up in the housing registry if they’d finally discharged him. He’d have to wait a couple days. All returning scouts had to go through a twenty-four hour quarantine before they were clear to mingle with the other survivors, but after that, Cactus Pete and his ol’ buddy Mort were going to drink some beers and shoot the shit. He just hoped Mort wasn’t mad at him.
He’d tried to get in to see Ol’ Blubberbutt two or three times after the angels brought them to New Jerusalem. The last time Pete had thrown a real fit, but the hospital staff just wouldn’t let him in. They explained that Mort was not immune. They told Pete he was just as dangerous to Mort as Mort’s injuries were. With his immune system compromised and all the medication he was on, it was very possible Mort could get infected with the zombie virus without even being bit. His body just wouldn’t be able to fight it. They’d have to put him down like a rabid dog. Pete didn’t think he could stand to see Mort go zombie, so he’d stayed away, but surely the fat butt was better by now! They couldn’t keep him in the infirmary forever.
Mort: Deluxe Illustrated Edition (The Fearlanders) Page 21