by Rod Redux
“Look what I found!” Mort proclaimed, wobbling the dildo back and forth as he returned to the kitchen.
“Dude! Nasty!”
“Yeah, but look in here.”
“All right! I call Snickers.”
They sat at the kitchen table and munched on chocolate candy, grinning at one another contentedly. Chocolate never seemed to go bad. It must have an expiration date of “eternity”.
The pink dildo lay at Mort’s elbow next to the lifelike penis. When his belly was full—and starting to feel a little queasy— he picked up the vibrator and contemplated it.
“See if the batteries are still good,” Pete suggested, then cackled when the massager began to hum.
“Momma always said, ‘Life is like a box of cocks’,” Mort gumped.
Pete grabbed the big brown dildo. “I see my Schwartz is more powerful than yours!” he said in a low voice. “Join me, Luke, and together we shall rule the universe as father and son!”
“No! It’s not true! That’s impossible!” Mort cried, and they used the vibrator and the dildo to play lightsabers, both of them making sound effects with their lips.
It was funny for a few minutes, but then for some reason, the sex toys began to make Mort feel kind of depressed. They became, in a vulgar way, a relic of bygone days. An era when women had the time to light candles, put some Barry White on the stereo, and vibrate themselves to a minute or two of carefree nirvana.
“You ever have a girl use one of those on you?” Pete asked.
“No,” Mort answered, taking the batteries out of the pink one. He set them aside. They might come in handy. “Why? Have you?” he asked. He tossed the gaudy pink plastic into their piss can. Sploosh!
“I had a girlfriend this one time named Anette. Now I’m here to tell you, she was one kinky little filly…”
Mort listened with half an ear as Pete went on to describe yet another of his sexual escapades—this one, Mort judged, bearing a probability factor of eighty percent—in which he, Pete, was the recipient of a wild blowjob while having his prostrate stimulated with a vibrator. Mort didn’t really want to hear the story. Picturing a vibrator being stuffed in his buddy’s hairy poop chute was disturbing, to say the least, but Pete was the type that had to lay it all out. The tackier the better. Pete had once told Mort how a girlfriend ate donuts off his dick, which Mort endowed a probability factor of 10%. He had never seen donuts with holes in them bigger than his index finger, and unless Pete had an extremely narrow penis (and Mort knew for a fact he didn’t; Pete was a terrible sleep huncher) he just couldn’t imagine that particular fetish working in the real world. You always had to take Pete’s sex stories with a grain of salt.
When Pete was finished, he leaned over the table and asked, “You ever had a blowjob, Mort?”
“Yeah,” Mort answered, a little offended. He wasn’t that pathetic!
“What was the craziest blowjob you ever had?”
Mort smiled, blushing a little. “Well… this one time, a girlfriend gave me a blowjob in the backroom of my comic book shop.”
“And…?”
“And… that was it. That’s the story. She gave me a BJ in the backroom of my shop.”
“Oh.”
Mort shrugged. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay.” Pete thought about it a moment, then asked. “Did you cum in her mouth?”
“No!”
“Give her a pearl necklace or something?”
“No. She didn’t like that kind of stuff.”
“Oh.” Pete got up and walked to the bedroom to get dressed. “You’re a real buzz kill, man.”
It was always tempting to stay somewhere safe and comfortable, but they knew they could not linger at Magnolia Village. The two men washed in the kitchen sink, turning the water in the basin dark gray, then they wriggled back into their stiff, filthy clothes and made a circuit of the apartment, stuffing anything that looked useful into their tattered backpacks. They grabbed food, a couple knives and a can opener, batteries, a roll of toilet paper. Mort found a half bottle of antibiotics in the medicine cabinet and snatched them. There was also a bottle of prescription pain killers. That was a good find. Aspirin, vitamins, and a little brown bottle of iodine also went in his backpack. He filled his canteens with clean water in the stinking bathroom, holding his breath.
He tried to not look at the toilet brimming with feces. The smell was awful enough. I’ve finally discovered something that smells worse than zombies! he thought.
Returning to the kitchen, eyes watering from the smell of the bathroom, Mort caught Pete sliding the lifelike dildo in his bag.
Pete shrugged, unembarrassed. “We might need it.”
Mort let it go with a sigh. Pete had a new toy. Mort could expect some dildo-related pranks in the days ahead.
“How much time do you think we have left before the plant goes up?” Pete asked, standing near the front door now. He asked that a lot.
Mort shrugged. “Who knows?”
The truth was: Mort did know. They were on borrowed time already. It had been weeks since the zombie phage spread across the globe. Weeks of horror, bloodshed, pandemonium. There had been nuclear weapons strikes in attempts to “cauterize” infected populations. On the west coast. In Europe. Mort had listened to that particular gem of a news story on a portable radio before the last of the local broadcasting stations fell silent.
By all accounts, the DuChamp Nuclear Power Plant should have gone into meltdown already. The emergency diesel generators which circulated cooling water to the nuclear reactor core should have run out of fuel inside a week. Mort had no idea why their city was not already a big smoking crater in the middle of Massachusetts, but he was not complaining.
Mort had discussed all of this with Pete shortly after they met. After Pete saved him from a mob of deadheads. Pete was battened down and prepared to wait out the disaster. Mort had convinced him that the two of them had to get out of the city before the power plant went nuclear. Pete, who had a very keen instinct for self-preservation, had grasped the situation instantly and agreed to accompany Mort through the zombie-infested city. It was dangerous, but they might survive long enough to escape into the open country. It was that, or stay and fry. And neither of the men were fond of being cooked alive.
Hearing no zombies shuffling on the landing outside, Pete cracked the door and peeked out.
“The coast is clear, dude,” he said.
Mort gripped his crowbar and they snuck out onto the second floor landing.
4
The Last Living Pimp
His name was Lavender Baasim, and he was the world’s last living pimp.
Lavender and his goons, the Pussy Posse, had been keeping their eyes peeled since the day before, when they heard low voices echoing through the alleys of the abandoned housing project. He’d sent his homies to investigate, but it was close to dark by then—whoever they’d heard sneaking around their digs, they’d holed up for the night. Lavender’s boys had come back empty handed. “Don’t sweat it,” Lavender had said. “Just stay on your toes. If they’s somebody on our turf, we’ll catch ‘em.” And he was right. The next morning, his boy T-Rex spied Mort and Pete as the two men snuck through the drizzle toward the outskirts of the complex.
Mort and Pete were getting ready to make a run for the convenience store across the street when the pimp called out to them from behind.
The convenience store was called the Pack-N-Tuck, whatever that meant. It looked deserted, its black windows riddled with bullet holes, the entrance dangling from one hinge. Mort and Pete were studying the open street that stood between them and the Pack-N-Tuck, crouched down in the rain. Gas stations were good places to pilfer. There was always a lot of packaged food inside: bottled water, flashlights, cigarette lighters. All kinds of survival supplies, really. There didn’t seem to be any zombies, but sometimes you didn’t see them. Sometimes they were around the corner, or hiding behind a bush. You’d think the coast was clear and then, th
ree or four steps out in the open, you heard their chilling groans. And then more of them in the distance, responding to the first. That’s when you knew your goose was cooked.
The two men were so intent on lurking zombies, they didn’t hear Lavender and his bodyguards creep up behind.
“Don’t move, biatches!”
Pete and Mort spun toward the high-pitched voice, adrenaline surging. Mort was so startled he slipped on the wet sidewalk and fell. Pete yelped and brought his baseball up to take a swing. The voice, they saw, belonged to a rail thin black man in a lime green leisure suit and platform shoes. The thin man was accompanied by two massive bodyguards, each with an automatic weapon.
Lavender grinned, waggling his fingers. He was dressed like every black stereotype known to man. There were big jeweled rings on every finger. Three-fourths of his teeth were gold caps, the other quarter rotten. He was wearing wide round shades, the lenses beaded with rain, and two braided pigtails angled out from beneath his knit Kufi skull cap.
“We thought we heard some white boys sneaking around here yesterday,” Lavender said. “Didn’t we, T?” He took his shades off and slipped them in his suit pocket.
“Yeah, we did, boss,” one of Lavender’s guards grunted, his voice deep and resounding. This one stood about seven feet tall and was so fat his features looked like they had been molded into the center of one massive lump of brown Play-Doh.
The three black men were standing in the middle of the commons, their bright clothes conspicuous in all that grayness: the misty rain, the sidewalk, the grim apartment complex surrounding them. Lavender’s vintage suit was bright enough to sear the eye. His bodyguards were dressed in burgundy track suits.
“We looked for you fellas for a little while yesterday, but I guess you broke into one of our apartments. We figured we’d wait and keep an eye out instead of searching for you room by room.” Lavender laughed, his eyes rolling in their sockets. “We’ve cleaned out most of the zombies here in Magnolia Village, but you never know what’s going to jump out at you when you go poking around after dark, right? That’s never a good thing. Lord, no. So… my question to you honkies is: whatchu crackers doing on our turf?”
“We were just looking for a safe place to sleep. That’s all,” Mort stammered.
“What ya gonna to do?” Pete asked, eyeing the weapons. “You thinkin’ about robbing us? We ain’t got much o’ nothing.”
“Heavens, no!” Lavender exclaimed, looking shocked. He placed his hand to his heart, like someone’s prissy auntie. “No-no-no! That’s so racist! You believe that, T? That is so racist! You think, just ‘cause we’re men of color, we gon’ rob you? Pshaw! Perish the thought! Naw, we just thought we’d invite you boys to the crib. You know. Shoot the shit. Maybe do a little bidness.”
“Well if you ain’t gonna rob us, you mind not waving those Uzis in our faces? Machine guns make me nervous.”
Pete had balls. Mort had to give him that.
Lavender pressed the barrels of his bodyguards’ weapons toward the ground. “Of course. Of course. A pimp’s got to be careful this day and age, you know what I’m saying? How do we know you ain’t packin’, too? You might try to rob us.”
Lowering his bat, Pete said, “Well, technically, we are armed… but, fair enough.”
“That thing?” Lavender said, gesturing toward the bat. He sniffed. “What good is that?”
“We got guns, too,” Pete retorted. “We just try not to use them. Gunshots bring those deadheads running like flies to shit.”
Lavender tittered.
“I’m Mort,” Mort said, putting his hand out. He’d climbed back to his feet as the other men conversed.
Lavender looked at his hand but didn’t shake. He crossed his arms instead, tucking his jeweled fingers under his armpits. “Lavender. Lavender Basiim,” he said, grinning despite his rudeness. His sallow eyes rolled toward Mort, looked off into the distance over Mort’s shoulder, then rolled away. “Now that the end of the world is come, I guess I’m the last living pimp. This here’s my posse. I call ‘em the Pussy Posse. T-Rex. Landslide.” The big men nodded. “Let me ask you honkies something before we head back to my crib.”
“Shoot,” Pete said.
“Not literally!” Mort added jokingly.
No one laughed.
Lavender flared his nostrils at Mort, eyebrows arched, then smiled again at Pete and asked, “What would you boys say to getting some pussy today?”
It was such an unexpected question Pete and Mort didn’t answer for a long time. They stood in the drizzle, staring at Lavender as thunder rolled in the distance. Lavender grinned back, eyes rolling from Pete to Mort and then to Pete again. Water dripped from the muzzles of his guards’ Uzis. Finally, Cactus Pete grinned and declared, “I say ‘hell yeah!’ Where’s the ladies at?”
Lavender bowed, sweeping his arm toward one of the buildings behind him. “This way, gentlemen!”
As he followed the others through the courtyard, feet splashing in the puddles that had formed on the concrete, Mort was overcome with a dream-like sense of unreality. Lavender and his Pussy Posse couldn’t possibly be on the level. They were either crazy, fucked up on drugs or they were up to something nasty. Mort felt like he was walking to the gallows. He was certain the three men were leading him and his redneck companion into a trap. Lavender seemed friendly enough, but there was something about him that set Mort on edge. Maybe it was his constant dreamy grin, or the way his eyes rolled loosely in their sockets, never really focusing, never lingering on any one thing for more than a moment, like they had someone become disconnected from his brain. Maybe it was the way he spoke. His jive-talk was so thick and exaggerated it couldn’t possibly be authentic.
Lavender-- Mort suspected-- was crazy as a shithouse rat.
Pete was going on about how long it had been since he had a piece. Lavender sympathized, chatting in some kind of ghetto slang Mort had trouble even following. Mort and Lavender’s guards said nothing. They watched their rainy surroundings with narrow, suspicious eyes as Pete and Lavender talked in loud, animated voices.
Lavender led them to a single story rec center. It was a long, rectangular building with graffiti covering every inch of its flanks. The graffiti was the only color in the vast gray housing project, aside from the brown stains of recent violence. The plaque beside the door said MAGNOLIA VILLAGE COMMUNITY CENTER. The big glass windows in front were boarded over. T-Rex-- the bodyguard who looked like he’d gotten his head stuck in an inner tube—opened the door for them.
“Right this way…” Lavender said.
Pete trotted right in, bouncing with excitement. If Mort had been solo, he would have run for his life, but he was with Pete, and Pete went in, so he went inside, too. He thought of a saying his mother was fond of: “If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump off a bridge, too?”
I guess I would, Ma, Mort thought sheepishly, looking around the sparsely furnished lounge he’d entered. There were a few cheap plastic chairs against one wall. A couple cheap plastic plants beside them. The posters hanging on the bulletin board looked like they were from the seventies. Crack Is Whack! One of the yellow posters declared. Take Pride In Your Community! Another demanded. A concession window was boarded over in the same slipshod manner the front of the building had been secured: pieces of furniture, cabinet doors, and other odds and ends, nailed crookedly into place.
“Would you stay out front and guard the door, Landslide?” Lavender asked.
“Yeah, boss.”
Lavender whisked past and opened a second, inner door. “This way to paradise, boys,” he invited.
Pete went through the door first.
Mort heard him say, “Holy shit!”
Mort slid past Lavender uneasily. He didn’t want to come too close to the “pimp”, as if his madness was infectious. Mort entered what appeared to be a large, dimly lit rec room. A quartet of cafeteria tables had been folded up against one wall. There were a couple soda machines.
A water fountain. A ratty green sofa and a ping pong table. The clock on the wall to Mort’s right had frozen at 11:26. There were a couple dark hallways leading off from the large central chamber. One had a male ideogram on a plaque above the doorway, the other a female ideogram. Locker rooms, maybe. The center’s only illumination was the gray glow slanting in through a row of narrow windows set high up the walls on the left hand side of the room. Mort saw nothing at first that might explain Pete’s sudden exclamation.
Until he heard the moans.
Mort froze, his gut dropping out of him, the hair on his arms standing on end.
Zombies!
He almost turned and bolted from the room, but then Pete laughed and said, “Look at this shit, Mort!”
Forcing himself to breath, Mort leaned cautiously to the side and peered around his companion. His temples were thumping. His fear reaction was so extreme he felt a rush of faintness. Adrenaline made his knees wobble. His hands trembled.
At the far end of the room, several women had been duct taped in various lascivious poses to furniture, support posts, even a rolling audio video cart. And not just any women. Zombie women. A couple of the zombies were fresh-- not too rotten or bloated. Others were in less attractive states of decomposition. One looked like she’d had most of her face chewed off. Another was missing a few limbs. They were all dressed in lacy undergarments. Stockings, garters, push-up bras. A couple were in high heels. The smell in the room was ungodly. Mort felt his breakfast come up into his mouth, hot and acidic, and swallowed it back down.
The undead creatures were moaning, hissing and writhing like a nest of vipers, struggling against their bonds. They smelled fresh meat, and they were hungry.