Mort: Deluxe Illustrated Edition (The Fearlanders)

by Joseph Duncan

  “I don’t think we got enough ammo to hold out that long,” Pete said, peering through the metal racks. The cooler was warm and smelled of spoiled milk. The howling horde beat on the coolers’ glass doors, gnashing their teeth like starved piranha in some kind of weird aquarium. The double pane glass was already cracking. Any moment now, one of those cooler doors was going to shatter, or a zombie would accidentally grab a handle and pull a door open, and they would drag Pete and Vicki out and eat them alive.

  “I ain’t going out like this!” Vicki said fiercely, baring her teeth. Her eyes were bugged out, her nostrils flaring.

  Pete couldn’t give two farts.

  After rejoining the Screw You’s, Pete had fallen into a black depression. For a week or two, he’d even contemplated suicide. He’d sit in the back of one of the trucks after they made camp for the night and imagine putting his pistol in his mouth and pulling the trigger, making all the hurt and guilt go away. Finally one night, he did it. He’d opened his mouth and slid the gun in there, tasting the oily metal, feeling his teeth scrape across the barrel, but before he pulled the trigger, he imagined how horrified Mort would have been. Mort would have been disgusted with him. Mort would have tried his best to talk Pete down, would have urged him to seek counseling, so Pete had taken the gun out of his mouth and went to sleep. After his first tour outcamp, he went to see the psychiatrist at the infirmary.

  The shrink was a pretty little blonde with a cute freckled nose and granny glasses. She told Pete about a psychiatric disorder called “survivor’s guilt” and turned out, she’d known Mort, too. They talked for a couple hours about his friend, and when his session was over, he felt a little better. He didn’t even take the pills she gave him.

  Maybe it was survivor’s guilt making him not care now.

  He heard the tinkle of glass. Vicki yelled and started shooting.

  And then something awesome happened.

  Pete felt that weird tickling sensation inside his head. Through the cooler doors, Pete watched as part of the convenience store’s ceiling ripped clean away, exposing the orange and purple twilight sky. The whole structure shook when the ceiling peeled off, and then angels descended.

  Pete and Vicki watched in awe as the Archons ripped the zombies a new one.

  There were seven of them, dressed in shining breastplates, wings outspread, their robes floating fluidly around them. The deadheads turned and went after them, but the angels were armed with clubs and swords. Some of them even had guns. It was something like fifty versus seven-- so no contest. It was the coolest thing Pete ever saw.

  Zombies were hewn in half. Those halves were hewn into quarters before they even hit the ground. One of the angels, a tall male Archon with short-cropped brown hair, was destroying the deadheads with some kind of invisible force. As Pete watched, the Archon gestured and one of the zombies whipped through the air and punched through a wall, leaving just a splintered hole and a puff of dust in its wake like some crazy cartoon. The Archon gestured again and another zombie burst into juicy pieces.

  Vicki hooted in triumph. “Yes! Oh my God! Whoooooooo!” She jumped up and down in the cooler, clapping like a contestant on The Price Is Right.

  Pete recognized two of the Archons. Metatron and HaMerkavah. They were the angels who had saved Mort and Pete in DuChamp. Metatron was using some kind of invisible force like the brown-headed one. The female was armed with a huge sword and shield, and tore into the zombies like a Cuisinart with tits.

  Inside five minutes, the deadheads had been annihilated. Pete and Vicki scrambled from the cooler to thank their saviors.

  The Archons accepted their gratitude in their typical reserved manner-- not rude, just cool and standoffish-- then walked outside and flapped into the air. The last two to depart was the skinny one named Metatron and the brown-headed angel, whom Pete had never seen before.

  Looking at the brown-headed one made Pete’s eyes water. He suddenly felt dizzy, like the floor was swinging back and forth under his feet. His temples started throbbing, felt like a morning after banger.

  The brown-haired Archon was, of course, glorious to look at. Beautiful, pale, with wry Cupid’s bow lips. But still masculine! There was no mistaking his maleness! He was tall, powerfully built, with a square cleft chin like something out of a superhero comic. His armor was ornate, a kind of burnished bronze, with a lightning bolt inside a raised ring in the center of the breastplate. The symbol looked vaguely familiar to Pete, though he couldn’t exactly place it.

  And those wings...!

  The archon’s wings were white with strokes of tan and black. He’d seen the angels a hundred times now. Hell, he’d worked right beside them once or twice, but he would never get over his sense of wonder, seeing those huge wings!

  Their eyes met and the Archon smiled at him.

  “Be careful, Peter Bolin. I won’t always be around to save you,” the Archon said.

  There was a familiarity in his tone the Archons did not often take with human beings. Not that Pete had ever heard, anyway.

  Metatron grasped the auburn-headed Archon by the upper arm and pulled him toward the door. For a moment, the angel’s image rippled, like a reflection on the surface of a pool of water, and Pete grinned in dawning wonder.

  “Well, I’ll be damned!” Pete exclaimed.

  The angel looked over his shoulder at Cactus Pete-- only he wasn’t an angel anymore. For just a second, he was something-- someone!-- else.

  “Not if you behave,” the Archon winked.

  The brown-headed Archon walked out into the parking lot. He turned and spread his wings and, with a great gust of wind, swept them down and shot like an arrow into the sky.

  “Up, up and away,” Pete murmured, grinning and shaking his head.

  About the Artist

  It has been said that artist Mike Dubisch can see into other dimensions. Fans praise his alien brain, declaring, "Imagination lives!" Japanese horror writer Ken Asamatsu cries, "KAMIWAZA!!! He has the God Hand!" Illustration luminary Rick Berry proclaims, "The whole EC golden age of comics has a true son in you, Mike Dubisch!"

  Dubisch's art and subject matter is pulled from pulp science-fiction, EC comics, Heavy Metal, fantasy art and horror fiction. He counts among his greatest influences comics illustrators Frank Frazetta, Richard Corben, Bernie Wrightson, Moebius, Barry Windsor Smith, Wally Wood, Greg Irons, Alex Niño and Jack Kirby.

  Virtually all of those artists were discovered by Dubisch at a young age, as an interest in Marvel Comics’ Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, the Fantastic Four and Devil Dinosaur led to questioning his father, "Who is your favorite super-hero?" In an act of questionable judgement, sealing the artist’s fate, his father exposed him to the extraordinarily graphic Wonder Wart-Hog appearance in "The Best of Rip-Off Press." A pile of Heavy Metal magazines and Wally Wood's Witzend were also in his parent's bookshelves, as well as Richard Corben's epic weird fantasy Den. His mother’s paperback reprints of EC comics seeded a deep affection for Weird Science, Tales from the Crypt and EC's Ray Bradbury editions, which he read by flashlight beneath his covers late into the night.

  While in high school, Dubisch began showing his work around local comic book conventions in Albany, New York. By his sophomore year, Dubisch was working professionally as a comic-book colorist at Tom Vincent's Bi-Frost studio. Additionally, Albany comic book store and underground publisher FantaCo's small press publication GoreShriek featured short horror comics and masterful black and white illustrations from the young artist.

  Dubisch honed his skills at art school where he met his future wife and collaborator Carolyn Watson, and continued to create comics for small publishers. After graduation, Dubisch pursued illustration work and began appearing in science fiction and fantasy magazines before starting a long career in role playing games, creating illustrations and toy designs for Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons, and RIFTS books.

  In recent years Dubisch has become a well-known figure in the world of Cthulhu Mythos fandom, p
ublishing his Cthulhu Mythos space fantasy Weirdling, a graphic novel collecting his independent comic book, and releasing the limited edition collectible art-book The Black Velvet Necronomicon: Black Velvet Cthulhu.

  Mike will be releasing several graphic stories in the immediate future. "The Wet Nurse", from publisher Strange Aeons, will be featured in an extra large format in time for the H.P. Lovecraft Film festival in Portland, Oregon. The second issue of the anthology, Bela Lugosi's Tales From The Grave, will feature another tale, "Take Out/ Order In Chaos," a Cthulhu Mythos tale set in a Chinese fast food delivery.

  About the Author

  Author Joseph Duncan was born and raised in Southern Illinois. He spent his idyllic childhood running wild through the wooded highlands of the beautiful Illinois Ozarks, a veritable “lost boy”... a hillbilly heathen, if you will. Despite his rural upbringing, Joe’s home environment was very creative and liberal. His mother was an avid reader and his father was a talented amateur artist. From an early age, he was exposed to a vast world of science fiction and fantasy literature, art, comic books and movies. He was particularly influenced by the classic underground comic book scene of the sixties and seventies, titles like the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and the works of Robert Crumb and Richard Corben, as well as European graphic albums by artists like Moebius, Enki Bilal and Milo Manara.

  By age 9, he was reading Tolkien and Stephen King. He wrote his first novella at age 10, a story called “Scratch”, which featured a telekinetic cat trying to protect its mistress from a bloodthirsty serial killer.

  In his salad days, Joe tried his hand at art, and landed a few gigs penciling underground horror comics, but his comic book career never really took off, and he was artistically sidetracked by opening a business and starting a family. Fast forward through the everyday ups and downs of family life and business and...

  In 2009, the first e-readers began to appear on the market, and Joe realized he could bypass the gatekeepers of traditional publishing and get his creative efforts out to the public. He immediately began writing his first novel, The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All. The indie novel was a surprising success, allowing Joe to close down his business and devote himself full time to writing. He followed Oldest Living Vampire with an occult detective novel and a zombie/vampire mashup, and the rest, as they say, is history.

  If you'd like to contact Mr. Duncan, you may do so at cobraebooks@gmail.com. You can also “friend” him on Facebook, or visit his (sporadically updated) blog Red Ramblings.

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