by Rod Redux
Mort made his way across the rooftops to the street corner and then hunkered down to wait for nightfall. Throughout the day, cars sped past on the street below, some chased by mobs of zombies, some roaring by unaccosted. Jets flew back and forth across the sky all afternoon, stitching the clouds with their exhaust. There was constant gunfire, some distant, some just blocks away. It sounded like firecrackers. Made him think of July the Fourth.
As the sun began to roll down the slope of the heavens toward nightfall, Mort heard a distant, echoing explosion. He actually felt the bass concussion of the blast in his flesh and the masonry of the building he was crouched upon. It set off car alarms across several city blocks. A few minutes later, an oily black cloud billowed into the sky. The dark stain of the smoke hung in the air until dark. The gas station, Mort guessed. The place was called the Golden Gallon. He usually filled up his car there on the rare occasions he had to drive. More often, though, it was his belly he filled there—on Krispy Kreme donuts, Starbucks Mocha coffee drinks, bags of chips, and the hot deli food the women who ran the place fried up in the back. They knew him by name there.
More than a dozen times throughout that day, Mort heard screams and saw living people running through the streets. They never survived long. Mort felt terribly guilty but he knew he could not help them. He shut his eyes and stuffed his fingers in his ears while his fellow citizens were murdered and devoured by zombies. Later, he realized he should take the opportunity to observe the carnage. If he wanted to survive this day, he needed to know how these things behaved. What they could and couldn’t do. What stimuli they responded to. What drives motivated them.
Mort possessed a genius level IQ. The last test he’d taken, back in college, he’d scored 198. This was a level labeled “superior intelligence”. He was particularly good at observation, memorization and problem solving. He was also rather adept at collating information and could draw broad, overarching conclusions from many small and disparate facts.
Mort watched the zombies the rest of the evening, and by nightfall, could predict how they would behave in different situations. He had a quick grasp of their physical and mental capabilities, and had also figured out what emotions and desires motivated them.
The zombies were fast and strong, but not supernaturally so. They seemed to have no higher brain functions. They did not reason or remember and displayed only two emotions: rage and hunger. The hunger, of course, was for living human flesh, particularly internal organs and brain tissue. They wandered around like sleepwalkers until something attracted their attention. If it was a loud noise they began to drift toward it, moaning. If it was gunfire, the sound of an engine, human voices or screams—anything that would seem to indicate a living human being nearby—they zeroed in on it with a single-minded and rapacious focus. The zombies had no mercy. If they got their hands on any living creature, they ate it.
Usually they ate it while it was still kicking and screaming.
Sometime late that night, when the streets were empty and the gunfire and screams had died off, Mort snuck to the fire escape and eased down the rungs to the sidewalk. Heart pounding, he crept toward his apartment, staying close to the false fronts of the businesses and apartment buildings that lay between his comic book shop and his home.
The street lights had come on and he felt terribly exposed in the yellow arc sodium lighting, but he couldn’t stay on the rooftops. He’d die of dehydration and exposure. The only alternative he had was to sneak back to his house and lock himself in until the authorities got this plague—this zombie plague—under control.
It didn’t occur to him then that the authorities would never get the pestilence under control. That control, such as it was, had already been lost, and would remain lost indefinitely. It wouldn’t occur to him until days later that his old familiar life might be gone forever. Not until the TV stations went off. Not until the lights went out for good.
He heard an echoing clang! and froze, his heart jumping up into his throat.
A zombie moaned somewhere nearby.
Mort tried to locate the monster in the dark shadows of the doorways and alleys, but couldn’t see it.
But that didn’t mean it couldn’t see him.
He waited for something to come flying out of the dark at him, hungry and howling for his brains. But he was not accosted. After a while, he continued on.
The worst moment came when he got to his apartment and tried to let himself into the foyer. He dug in his pockets for his keys and couldn’t find them. Thinking they must have fallen from his pants at some point—or that he might have left them on the checkout counter of his shop—he almost surrendered to despair. But then he found them, twisted up in his right hip pocket, and he pulled them out with a relief so great his knees threatened to buckle.
He rifled through them—their click and chatter horribly loud to his ears—then unlocked the door and slipped into his apartment building.
Climbing the stairs and creeping down the hallway to his apartment, he tried to hear his neighbors behind closed doors. Someone in 2B was crying. From 3A, a shuffling sound, accompanied by a guttural moaning that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. The old woman in the apartment next to his—Ms. Finnegan the cat lady—was praying in a loud, rapt voice.
“Oh God in heaven I beg your forgiveness Please God don’t leave me here to suffer through the Tribulation Lord Jesus don’t forsaken me haven’t I been a good Christian woman Oh Lord God please forgive me—“
She sounded like she was about one hosanna from sacrificing a kitty.
Mort let himself into his apartment and locked the door.
He slid to the floor with relief. His breath came out in a gust and he lay there shuddering for several minutes.
After a time, he rose and tiptoed to his kitchen. He’d had nothing to eat or drink all day. After chugging a couple Cokes, he ravaged some left overs he found in the fridge. Two pieces of cold fried chicken from KFC. A wedge of pizza. Baked beans and a couple ears of corn on the cob. Feeling better, he walked to the livingroom and turned on the television. He kept the volume low. He didn’t want to attract any attention. He even pulled the shades and closed the curtains.
He expected to find the news channels rife with breathless tales of zombie horror, but there was nothing. He flicked through the channels in disbelief. FOX, CNN, the local stations… there was not a peep about the violence and horror in DuChamp. Not one story. The anchors reported on the economy, the Middle East, even some human interest pieces… but not a whisper about zombie plagues, brain-eating or otherwise. Feeling like he was in a bad dream, Mort turned off the television and sat in his silent, dark apartment.
If the authorities were keeping this under wraps, he decided, then it must be bad.
Really bad.
Feeling more frightened than ever, Mort crept from room to room, closing shades, filling basins with fresh drinking water, trying to put together an emergency kit in case he needed to flee. He had no weapons, but he did have knives in the kitchen. A couple were pretty big.
He sat in the floor by a window, holding the big butcher knife in his hands, and watched the street below for hours, peeking through a gap in the blinds. Every now and then, a zombie would drift by on the street, moving with eerie slowness through the glow of the street lamps. About three am, a red compact car pulled up in front of his apartment buildings. His neighbors, the Halls, clambered out, smiling and chatting with one another as they unloaded luggage. They’d been on vacation, Mort remembered. Gone to Maine to enjoy the changing colors. They had no idea anything was the matter.
Mort started to raise his window and yell a warning to them, but it was too late.
A trio of zombies darted out of some dark alley and fell on them.
Jack and Kathy’s screams drew even more deadheads to the scene.
After a while, there seemed to be more than two dozen zombies massing around the returned vacationers, whose screams had quickly fallen silent. Mort turned fr
om the shade, letting it fall closed, and sat in the darkness.
It was his first dead day.
6
Asian Women Can Drive
Lavender’s zombie ho’s went crazy when they heard the rapid reports of the machine guns, the tatatat and echoing fart of gunpowder and lead. They howled and fought against their bindings with renewed furor as Lavender’s armed guards fired their Uzis out front of the recreation center. Loud as they were, the cries of the sex slave zombies were lost beneath the chorus of shrieks and snarls coming from the head of the building. It sounded like an army of deadheads had descended on the community building, a swarm of angry, diseased wasps, howling in a chorus of hunger and mindless rage.
Mort and Cactus Pete stood in shocked paralysis as the sounds of combat grew louder and more frenzied out front.
There came the cough and tinkle of breaking glass, a loud thud, and then the machine guns fell silent. One of Lavender’s bodyguards yelled in despair. The yell started out low-pitched but wound its way quickly to soprano. Was it the big one named Landslide? Or the even bigger one named T-Rex? Mort couldn’t tell who it was, only that is sounded like he was being pulled apart. A moment later, T-Rex stumbled through the door from the foyer and threw his back against it. Sweat beaded his brown, jowly face. His eyes were so wide they looked like they were about to pop out of their sockets.
“How bad is it, dawg?” Lavender demanded. “How many’s out there?”
T-Rex ogled his boss for a moment, staring at him like he’d never seen the man before. His mammoth man-tits flopped up and down beneath his burgundy track suit as he tried to catch his wind. Finally, thick lips quivering, he managed to gasp: “About a fuckin’ thousand of them motherfuckin’ zombies! They got Landslide! They… they pulled him in two like a fuckin’ wishbone!”
“Oh dear!” Lavender said mildly.
There was a violent thump behind T-Rex. His great body shook with the impact. Mort could see savage, bloody faces squeezed up to the wire-reinforced window in the door. Gnashing teeth with bit of flesh stuck between them. Moldy finger scrambling for purchase. T-Rex turned and threw the lock, and not a moment too soon. Zombie fists thundered on the door.
“Where’s your chopper?” Lavender asked.
T-Rex looked in his fat palms like his machine gun would magically appear in his hands. He gawped at his boss, then cursed. “Fuck! I think I dropped it.”
“Da-amn!” Lavender swore. He stalked off toward the dark Coke machines, a lanky man in a venomously bright lime green leisure suit. The gangly man should have looked comical with his braided pigtails, Kufi skullcap and retro apparel, but Mort wasn’t laughing. His entire life had become one long marathon of dream-like bizarreness. One skinny lunatic in bell-bottoms could not make his new existence any more ridiculous.
Mort watched Lavender retrieve a Mac-10 submachine gun from atop a rolling metal cart and check the clip. Grinning over his shoulder at Mort and Pete, the world’s last living pimp said, “If you boys are packing, you best lock an’ load! That door ain’t gonna hold for long!”
Mort glanced at Pete.
Pete looked back at him.
Pete didn’t move. He didn’t say a word. He was waiting, maybe, to see what Mort decided to do. Stay and fight with Lavender? Make a run for it? He wasn’t indecisive often, he was a shoot first and ask questions later kind of guy, but when he was, he looked like a boy, his long blonde bangs hanging in his eyes.
“Forget that loon. Let’s go this way,” Mort said calmly, and headed toward the dark hallway leading to the mens locker room.
Pete fell behind him, rooting in his backpack for his gun.
“Where you crackers goin’?” Lavender demanded. “Da-amn!”
Mort wondered if Lavender would open fire on them. He thought the man might do just that. The “last living pimp” was not a rational person. Mort didn’t think he ever had been. Mort had smelled the madness coming off him the moment they crossed paths.
But Lavender didn’t shoot them. Mort and Pete passed into the dark hallway that led off the main chamber of the rec center.
“There has to be a back door here somewhere. It’s in the fire code for public buildings. Maybe we can sneak out and give them the slip. Those zombies sound like they’re concentrated in front of the rec center,” Mort reasoned aloud as they moved in the dark.
“You’re the genius. Get us out of here,” Pete said, deferring to Mort for the time being.
Behind them came the crack and splinter of the reception area door. The howls of the zombies increased in volume. The crazed creatures had managed to batter the door down and gain entrance to the main recreation room. T-Rex screamed, his voice attaining an oddly girlish octave. A second later, Lavender began to spray the advancing horde with 9 mm bullets.
“Shit!” Pete swore. “Shit-shit-shit! Our gooses are cooked, Mort!”
“Just stay calm,” Mort snapped.
“It was nice hanging with you, bro.”
“Here! Be quiet. Let’s see if the coast is clear!”
They had zagged through the locker room, then zigged down another hallway and found an emergency fire exit. The handles of the double doors were chained together, but Mort had not forgotten his handy crowbar in the chaos. He hooked it in the clasp of the lock and the two of them yanked and puffed until they snapped the latch. The chain slithered down on the floor.
Lavender had stopped shooting. Whether the zombies had got to him and T-Rex, Mort couldn’t tell, but the deadheads were still howling and—judging by the cacophony of destruction in the main recreation area—the angry dead were busy tearing the place apart.
“You got your gun?” Mort asked.
“Yep,” Pete answered.
The hallway was dark but for the seam of light glowing between the doors. Mort could only see the outline of Pete’s body crouched behind him. Steeling himself for battle, Mort tightened his grip on the crowbar, his palms sweaty with anxiety. He nudged the fire exit open. Outside, rainy gray light and wet sidewalk. A waft of misty air
A moment later, a female zombie lunged in at Mort.
Pete stepped forward, shoving his gun in the creature’s mouth. He pulled the trigger.
The gun did not fire.
Mort blinked in disbelief. “No way, dude,” he moaned.
The female zombie stumbled back, trying to dislodge the object Pete had shoved in her throat. It was the big brown dildo. In the dark hallway, in his nervousness, Pete had taken the dildo from his backpack instead of his weapon.
As it turned out, it was a lucky mistake. The giant dildo served to gag the female zombie’s howls, which might have attracted the attention of the horde in the front of the building. The afro-headed zombie whipped her upper torso back and forth, biting the rubbery shaft as she tugged at the replica balls.
Mort didn’t wait for her to clear her gullet. He stepped toward her and raised the crowbar over his head. With a grunt, he leveraged his impressive mass behind the descending blow. The bar of iron came down on top of her skull so hard she bit the dong in half. The crowbar put a sizeable dent in her head, driving her to her knees. Gritting his teeth, Mort kicked her over and stabbed the crowbar into her right eye, skewering her brain.
The zombie flopped and pissed and then fell still.
Mort looked grimly over his shoulder at Pete.
“I told you it would might come in handy,” Pete said with a grin.
There were no other zombies visible on this side of Magnolia Village. Mort and Pete took off running, staying low. They dashed around one last monolithic housing structure and set off across the street.
They scurried down the sidewalk, dreadfully exposed. It wasn’t too long before they heard the howl of a nearby zombie, who spotted them as it shuffled around an empty lot, gnawing on a dead cat.
“Shit!” Mort cursed under his breath.
“Hurry! Hurry!” Pete urged him, taking off in a sprint.
When they first met, Mort would have had trouble
keeping up with Pete at a full run, but weeks of survival had begun to hone his body into a more efficient machine. Mort was surprised to find himself falling only a little behind his partner, though he was still gasping and wheezing.
They rounded a corner, pursued by the howling zombie, only to find the street ahead of them occupied by more of the undead. Three zombies were shuffling around in the drizzle, two large males and one slim girl-child in a ragged going-to-church dress. Their heads jerked around at the howling of the pursuing zombie, then they joined the chase, scrambling toward Mort and Pete as they added their cries to the deadly choir.
Pete skidded to a stop and headed off at a perpendicular angle.
Mort followed.
The two men pelted across an empty lot, leaping over the remnant of a brick wall, and zig-zagging through piles of lumber and building supplies. The four zombies—joined now by two more of the running dead—were in hot pursuit, screaming their heads off.
Pete turned and fired a couple shots. He’d finally managed to dig his gun from his duffel bag.
They were wild shots—wild enough to make Mort throw his arms in front of his face, in fear of being hit-- but one was lucky enough to find a target. The little girl in the going-to-church outfit was struck in the forehead and flew out of her patent leather shoes, her head exploding like a jar of strawberry jam between her bouncing pigtails.
“Fuck you, bitch!” Pete crowed.
Mort ran past, sliding a little in the muck. Pete fired off a couple more shots before putting the pedal to the metal and catching up.
They sprinted across the empty lot and turned onto another street. It was beginning to rain more earnestly now and Mort slipped on the wet pavement and went down on his ass. A block away, a car was bearing down on them at high speed. Both men saw it simultaneously. They realized—also simultaneously-- that they were right in its path, and that it was too close and moving at much too high a speed to avoid running them down. Pete threw up his hands and waved frantically. The car accelerated at first—the driver obviously mistaking them for zombies and intending to run them down—but as Mort tried to scramble to his feet, and Pete gave off waving his arms to hook his hands under Mort’s armpits to help lift him, the driver engaged the brakes. The oncoming vehicle, some kind of black sports car, slewed slightly sideways, wheels squealing on the blacktop. The driver steered into the slide expertly, regained traction, and then executed an impossible-looking drift, curving the trajectory of the vehicle just enough to clear the two men. It came to a stop a few yards away.