by Rod Redux
Pete let out a peal of laughter, delighted with the scene spread out in front of him. “Fuck me, Lavender! You are one crazy sonofabitch!”
Lavender chortled. He passed Mort and Pete, platform shoes clopping across the tile floor as he led them to his “bitches”. He waved for them to follow. “Now what do you got to trade for a little playtime with these fine, fine hoes?” he asked. “You can do anything you want to these bitches, gentlemen. Fuck them in the ass. Piss on their faces.” He paused, grinning back at Pete and Mort over his shoulder. “I wouldn’t advise putting your dicks anywhere near their mouths, though,” he added. “They bite!”
Excited, Pete threw his backpack on the floor. He actually began to rummage around in it. Mort ogled him with disbelief. “I got some candy bars. A can opener. I got a half bottle of Jack Daniels…” Pete proffered.
“Do you have any drugs?” Lavender asked. “Coke? Heroin?”
“I got some weed.”
“Really?” Lavender looked very interested in the weed.
Feeling sick to his stomach at even the idea of fucking a corpse, Mort plucked at Pete’s collar. “Come on, man. What are you thinking? This can’t be safe. What if you can catch the virus from them? They’re zombies! They’re dead, Pete. It’s necrophilia.”
Pete jumped to his feet angrily. “That’s five syllables, Mort!” he snapped, and he slugged Mort on the arm twice. Hard.
“Fuck, Pete!” Mort exclaimed, feeling a sudden surge of anger. For a second, he pictured himself hitting Pete back. It would be a brawl, and Pete would probably whip his ass, but for just a moment, Mort almost lost control.
“Yeah, fuck you, too, Mort!”
Mort stumbled back, holding his stinging arm. He swallowed down his anger, saw the crazed look in Pete’s eyes. Pete was grinning like Lavender. That sick, lost soul grin. It frightened Mort horribly. Pete looked like he had lost his mind.
“This ain’t right, Pete,” Mort said numbly.
Pete shrugged. “I got rubbers. It’ll be fine.”
Lavender inspected the bag of weed Pete pulled from his backpack. He sniffed the herb inside, smiled with relish, then rolled the bag back up and stuffed it in his pocket. He noticed Mort backing away and moved smoothly to cut off his retreat.
“What about you, son?” he said silkily. “Don’t you want to spend some time with one of these lovely ladies? You can do anything you want to them. It don’t matter. Nothing matters anymore.”
Mort declined as Lavender steered him toward the bound zombies.
“What about this one?” Lavender asked. The zombie he gestured toward was a heavyset black woman when she was alive. Maybe someone’s wife… somebody’s mother. Maybe the woman who lived in the apartment they’d slept in the previous night. Lady Godiva of the giant brown dildo, Mort thought, feeling a little crazy himself. She had been squeezed into a black silk teddy and duct taped to a cafeteria table, bent over. And she was big. Really big. What insensitive men used to call a BBW. One of her thighs was as thick as Mort’s waist. A plastic bag had been pulled over her head and taped tightly around the neck.
“Don’t you want some of this pussy?” Lavender asked, pulling apart the cheeks of the zombie’s ass to expose the puckered starfish of her anus and the deep, pink folds of her hairy vagina. Thick mucus, probably crawling with the Phage, dribbled out onto the floor. Green-gray mold was growing in the moist pleats of her flesh.
“No! Thanks, but no,” Mort stammered.
Out of the corner of his eye, Mort saw Pete rolling a condom onto his penis. He was fully erect. Before Mort could think of something to say—anything that might make Pete see reason—his buddy sidled up behind one of the zombie women, bent at the knee, and then drove himself into her… Into It!
The zombie he penetrated began to thrash and howl, infuriated, frustrated, mindless in its hunger. Foam sprayed from her snapping teeth. Her milky eyes were wide and soulless and filled with rage.
“Lookit, Mort! I got me a wild one!” Pete laughed, humping the foul thing. He slapped the zombie on the ass as he thrust into it. “Whooee, that makes it mad!” He slapped its ass harder.
Horribly, seeing Pete fuck the zombie doggie-style, Mort felt his own cock stir a little. Ashamed, he wrenched his eyes away. “No!” he said again, more firmly.
“Something special, then?” Lavender pressed. “It’ll cost you extra…”
He gestured toward another zombie, a child with duct tape on her mouth and her knees bound to her shoulders. She couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old. No? Lavender turned Mort to inspect a young male zombie, naked and bent over a railing. His broad brown back was riddled with bullet holes. Half-rotten genitals swung between muscular thighs as he struggled to get free, growling like a pit bull.
“Get the fuck off me!” Mort shouted, pushing Lavender away. “You sick fucking… LUNATIC!”
Pete was grinding into his zombie sex slave, head tossed back, teeth clenched. “Oh, fuck, Mort, I’m gonna pop!”
Lavender’s strange eyes rolled around to Mort and then locked onto him. His grin slowly curled down in a snarl. “What did you call me?” he said, slow and deadly.
As Mort stood frozen in terror, Pete tottered away from his undead partner, penis drooping, the reservoir of his condom jiggling with semen. “Shit. I didn’t mean to cum so quick,” he said, face splotchy and beaded with sweat. He grinned at Mort. “It’s been so long—“ he started, but then, from the front of the building, machine gun fire. A rapid pop-pop-pop!
A moment later, both of Lavender’s guards opened fire.
Brrrapppp!
Pop-pop-pop!
Lavender’s weird eyes rolled toward the door of the lounge. He forgot all about Mort, thank God. “Jesus Christ, what they shootin’ at now?”
Then, over the sound of automatic gunfire, the shrieks and groans of the undead.
An army of them.
5
Dead Days
In the weeks following the incident with The Merry Shanty, as the CDC, the National Guard and the Massachusetts’s State Police scrambled to put a lid on the spreading infection, a series of bogus new stories was broadcast on local television and radio stations. If the authorities had aired the truth—that a bizarre virus was killing people and then reanimating the dead bodies of the infected—they might have been able to contain the disease. Unfortunately, the U.S. government was too accustomed to deceiving the American public. They’d made a habit of it in the 50’s, and just couldn’t kick it. It might as well have been the first line in the government’s employee handbook. Rule #1: They can’t handle the truth. It was nothing but the prejudice of the elite. The arrogant have always been drawn to authority. Unsurprisingly, they never seemed to realize that egotism rarely equates with prudence. If the truth had come out sooner, the public might have been able to aid in the containment of the disease. Instead, the men in charge of dealing with the outbreak issued press releases describing a terrorist anthrax attack, a toxic waste spill, an epidemic of bird flu, even SARS, obfuscating the threat, keeping John Q Public in the dark-- and the whole time, Virus Z spread like wildfire.
At first it seemed that the Armageddon Phage had been successfully limited to Gray Harbor. The small fishing community was cordoned off by the military. No one was allowed in or out except authorized government and military personnel. The American citizens confined to the quarantine zone were examined, coolly euthanized at the first display of infection, deprived of communication with the outside world, and, finally, rounded up from their homes in the middle of the night and herded into hastily erected pens in the town’s baseball and skate park.
Packed together—the healthy and the diseased—like sardines.
But it really didn’t matter. The virus had already moved beyond the quarantine zone. The two fishermen who had gone on the run, Alan Twitty and Mark Lebowski, traveled together as far as Ohio before parting company. Mark dropped off his buddy at a truck stop, giving him a big brotherly bearhug an
d wishing him luck before pulling out and heading toward the interstate. Alan called his brother in Illinois, who picked him up two hours later. Mark, whose parents had died when he was a boy, was headed toward his aunt’s house in rural upstate Ohio.
Both were infected with Virus Z.
Alan was the most ill. He wandered around Big Willy’s Truck Stop for two hours, sweating, shivering, his eyes hollow and bloodshot. His nose was running, his lungs full of phlegm. He coughed into his fist and then sat at a table, smearing the viral organisms that were busy altering the DNA of his cells all over the back of the seat and the tabletop. He went to piss and deposited more pestilence on the toilet handle when he flushed. He was so dizzy and nauseated he didn’t notice the yellow-green discharge coming from his penis, or the furry black mold spreading out from under his foreskin. He shuffled back to the dining area. An elderly couple had taken his table. He flopped down in another seat. When a young employee came to ask if he was okay, he smiled at the chirpy young woman and patted her hand.
“I’m fine, thanks,” he said. “Just a cold. My brother’s coming to pick me up.”
He coughed again as she was standing there. Snot rattled in his lungs like marbles.
The girl, whose name was Heather Anderson, had a couple small wounds on her fingertips. She was a nervous cuticle biter. The virus invaded her body through the tiny areas of broken skin around her nails. Almost immediately, the virions latched onto the cells of her body and began to inject their DNA into them. Later that night, she died in her bed next to her sleeping husband (they’d married young because he got her knocked up on prom night). A few hours after she died, her corpse sat bolt upright, eyes filmy gray marbles, cheeks and eye sockets sunken, and she fell upon her nineteen year old husband with a snarl, biting into his neck and ripping open his jugular.
On the way to his home in Illinois, Alan Twitty’s sibling James noticed that his little brother didn’t seem to be breathing in the passenger seat beside him. Alan was slumped against the passenger window, ashy and still, his body lolling limply with the bumps and turns of the highway. Alan had been gasping and sputtering for miles, sounding terrible phlegmatic, but he had suddenly fallen very quiet. Jim poked him on the shoulder, frightened. “Alan? Alan, are you okay?”
Alan’s body began to twitch.
Alarmed, Jim hit the brakes and steered his truck toward the shoulder of the road. Before he could come to a full stop, Alan’s eyelids flipped open and the fisherman lunged at his older brother with a snarl. Jim screamed, lost control of the vehicle. They went off the road, rolling end over end into a ravine.
When Alan’s belly could hold no more of his brother’s flesh and brains, the zombie crawled out of the truck through the smashed windshield and clambered up the steep, crumbling ravine, drawn toward the sounds of passing traffic.
A few minutes later, he was hit by a semi. He burst like a watermelon. Chunks of infected zombie meat splattered all four lanes of highway. 87 people were exposed to the phage through Alan’s rather messy demise, including the police, firemen and paramedics who responded to the fatality. Before their shifts were over, they’d exposed 432 more.
Not everyone exposed to the virus fell ill. A lucky few carried a faulty gene in their DNA, a rare mutant protein sequence that expressed an altered version of an ordinary human enzyme. The enzyme neutralized the rapacious bacteriophage, but the genetic mutation was present in only 1 in 10,000 people.
Of the travelers who passed through Big Willy’s Truck Stop the night Alan Twitty was present, something like fifty-two of them carried the plague when they continued with their journeys. Three people, an old man and two children-- unrelated-- developed full-blown zombie-ism within twenty-four hours. The kids picked up the virus from the table Mr. Twitty sat at a couple hours earlier, as they ate their fries and colored their paper placemats. The old man got it from the toilet in the mens room, while taking an emergency dump from eating a bad burger earlier that day.
The old man, a retired English professor named Howard McGrath, attacked his son-in-law one day later. He tried to tear the young man’s throat out, but without his dentures in, all he could manage was a very slobbery gumming.
Howard McGrath’s son-in-law was nonetheless traumatized.
The two kids, brothers named Clint and Colin Reilly, died and reanimated at nearly the same time the next morning. Their mother found them in the laundry room, eating the family cat. When she screamed in horror and revulsion, the red-faced boys turned in tandem and leapt upon her. Their mother tripped over a laundry basket and sprawled beside the dryer. Her housecoat fell open, a breast flopped out, and Clint sank his teeth into her teat with a savage snarl.
Mark Lebowski, the last crewman of The Merry Shanty left alive, crashed at his aunt’s home in Ohio. She put him up in the little apartment over the garage where he’d lived throughout his teenage years. He had fond memories of his room over the garage. He’d smoked his first doobie there, got his first blowjob in that room. His pinups and posters were still on the walls. Exhausted and glad to be home, Mark stripped out of his filthy clothes, flopped into bed naked and dropped off to sleep almost immediately.
He never woke up.
At 4:32 am, he suffered a grand mal seizure and died. He lay motionless, his body cooling, until 5:15. At sunrise, his cadaver began to twitch. A bubbling moan drifted from his blue, chapped lips. He sat up in bed, milky eyes rolling, then rose and circled the dark apartment until his aunt began to worry and went to look in on him.
When his aunt went to check on him, Mark leapt at her with a howl, his fingers hooked into claws. His cataract eyes were narrowed to furious slits. His penis and balls flopped between his legs. His aunt didn’t even have time to cry out. He tackled her to the floor, shoved her chin up to expose her throat, and tore into her with his teeth.
Mark’s uncle Norman was taking a nap when his wife was mauled to death and didn’t see his naked, blood-splattered nephew drift dreamily out the garage door into the street. When Norman woke later, he noted his wife’s absence but thought she had gone to bingo. She went to bingo at least two, three times a week. He didn’t find his wife’s body until that night, when he finally got worried and thought to check the room above the garage.
Uncle Norman didn’t even recognize what he was seeing at first. It was too mangled. Spread too far across the floor. It looked like someone had swallowed a grenade and blew up in his spare room. When Mark Lebowski’s uncle finally realized the strewn chunks of mangled meat was his wife, he simultaneously pissed his pants and vomited. His vomit spattered into the jumbled remains of his wife, and realizing what he had just done, he vomited into it again.
The Armageddon Phage was extremely infectious, and the contagion spread across the continent exponentially. Within days, towns were overrun with violent, flesh-starved cadavers. Cities were in chaos. The government was in denial, revealing the truth to the American public only after it was far too late for anyone to do anything about it. In less than a week, it was in Europe, Asia, Australia. The Pope was eaten alive, and two million people watched it during the live television broadcast of the papal visit to Spain. North Korea nuked Japan for no apparent reason. Russia nuked Afghanistan. Pakistan nuked India and India nuked Pakistan. Zombies raged through the streets of the Old World as radioactive clouds of ash rained down. What did it matter that the virus was man-made, and that its creator-- the R & D department of a well-known breakfast cereal company-- was so horrified with the results of their experimental preservative that they expunged all record of it and sought to neutralize their brainchild in vats of biologically toxic chemicals in the middle of the ocean? It wasn’t even a virus really. It was a genetically modified bacteriophage which was designed to slow the decomposition of prepackaged food products. A nanite with spider-like grasping limbs, a hodgepodge of pieced together DNA, and a stinger that it used to inject its DNA into host cells, forcing its hapless victims to give birth to billions of its ravenous offspring. It was a mutant.
An infinitesimal Frankenstein’s monster come to horrible life. For lack of a better understanding, the CDC simply labeled it a virus, and it quickly became known as the Zombie Virus or Virus Z. It was only toward the end, right before the TV stations went off the air, that a scientist more correctly identified it as a bioengineered phage.
It didn’t really matter what is was called, whether it was a living virus or an artificial nano machine, the Armageddon Phage had gotten loose, and the pestilence it wrought brought about the end of pretty much everything.
Although he never knew it, Mort was exposed to the Armageddon Phage twice before he even saw his first zombie.
Virus Z was in Duchamp within two days of the last news broadcast concerning The Merry Shanty and her unlucky crew. Mort was exposed to the phage the first time when he went to a local grocery store to stock up on snacks. The Armageddon Virus was crawling all over a cantaloupe he examined, then put back in the vegetable and fruit bin in favor of a package of Sparkly Star Cakes (coincidentally manufactured by the same company that had developed the “Super Preservative” that would shortly destroy the world). Luckily, Mort washed his hands when he got home and his immune system took care of the rest.
A day later, he was standing in line at Taco Bell and noticed one of the cooks was sick. Mort was trying to decide between the Mega Mexi-Meal or the Super Size Siesta Platter—diarrhea be damned. The cook, pale and sweaty, eyes rimmed red, kept turning away from the prep table to cough. Mort took one look at the guy, who was waxy-skinned and kept wiping his runny nose, and decided on McDonalds. Mort left without ordering anything—which probably saved his life. All the people eating there that day came down with the brain munchies within a week.
Sadly, as smart as he was, Mort didn’t really notice the zombie apocalypse until it was in full swing. He spent his day off in a Big Mac and French fry coma, sleeping through the sirens and the rush of emergency vehicles in the street below his apartment. Things had quietened down when he finally woke. There were a couple gunshots and a few yells as he wandered bored around his apartment, scratching his ass, but gunfire and screams were not totally out of the norm for his neighborhood. He finally decided to watch a DVD boxset of the 1980’s television series The Flash, and spent the rest of the evening in his La-Z-Boy, the lights out, his apartment dark but for the shifting hues of the flatscreen. He watched TV. Munched on Funyuns. Fred called to give him a sales total for the day and asked if Mort knew what all the excitement was about.