Mort

by Rod Redux

  Mort ogled the sleek sports car with amazement. It had come so close its wind had blown his wet bangs back.

  “Come on, lard ass,” Pete said, pulling him up by the arms.

  Mort got to his feet as the driver’s side door swung up. Up, not out.

  A fantastic-looking Asian woman leaned out from behind the steering wheel of the car. She had long, silky black hair and was dressed in a pale blue one-piece jumpsuit with shin-high black leather boots.

  “Hurry up and get inside, boys! Those jiang shi are right on your asses!” the Asian woman yelled.

  Mort and Pete looked over their shoulders. Never a good thing in horror movies. The zombies were barely twenty yards back, and closing fast. The two men put on a fresh burst of speed and jumped gracelessly into the sports car.

  “Hang onto your hats!” the Asian woman said with a tight smile. She threw the car into reverse and backed up even before the gullwing door had finished closing. The remaining half-dozen zombies shambled onto the street as she drove up the block in reverse.

  “This Mercedes-Benz will go from zero to sixty in three seconds,” she said proudly, eyeing Mort in the back seat.

  A moment later, she hit the brakes, then threw the car into gear. The Benz rocketed forward, wheels squealing. Zombies bounced off the grill and hood like bowling pins. One went under the bumper and the back wheels bounced over its body. The Asian woman laughed as her head flew up and hit the ceiling.

  As the Benz peeled around a corner, the stunning beauty lit a cigarette and said, “My name’s Dao-ming. What’s your names?”

  7

  DaVinci

  Once upon a time, there was a woman named Anne-Marie DeAngelo. She turned thirty-five on her last birthday, was married to a United States postal worker named Sal and had three kids: Robert, who was 12, Amy, 10, and little Ricky Gene, who at 3 was something of a surprise-- but a good one, one that she never regretted. Anne-Marie worked at a florist shop named the Rainbow Inn and painted in her free time. It was strictly a hobby, but she was good. She had even sold a few pieces of her work at a local art store (which was coincidentally just a couple buildings up the street from Mort’s comic book shop). One of her paintings, a landscape of DuChamp’s skyline at sunset, had fetched a shocking eight hundred dollars, and was displayed in the lobby of a large law firm downtown.

  Anne-Marie was born and raised in DuChamp. She was a naturally happy person and loved her husband and her children with a ferocity that surprised even herself. She worked out three times a week to maintain her figure, ate healthy and did her best to insure that her family was healthy, happy and productive people, too. She was also a member of her school district’s PTA and a room mother for Amy’s seventh grade class.

  She was lithe, tan and blond. She had fantastic legs and a tight butt. Her husband Sal couldn’t get enough of her, even after fifteen years of marriage, which she didn’t mind one bit. Sal was still a tiger in the sack, even though he was forty. He was a funny, energetic man. Not to mention, very well hung. And he had the biggest balls she had ever seen. She would never have imagined she’d be so turned on by balls when she was a teenage girl, giggling over the photos in her friend Kathy’s Playgirl magazines, but playing with Sal’s big nuts made her dripping wet every time.

  Sal was a good-looking man, his curly dark hair gone gray at the temples. Women flirted with him all the time. Sometimes right in front of Anne. Sometimes she wondered if he’d ever cheated on her—and she did this with a mix of jealousy and arousal—but he seemed to be devoted to her. An old-fashioned nice guy. They didn’t make ‘em like Sal too often anymore. He made a good living for them. They never did without. Her income bought the groceries, paid for luxuries like video rentals and birthday parties, and gave her enough monetary freedom to feel like she was still an independent woman.

  Sometimes she thought she was the luckiest woman in the world.

  She contracted the Armageddon Virus while picking up the kids from school. One of the other room mothers came to her driver’s side window to gossip before the bell rang and the kids let out for the day and transmitted the virus to her as they chatted about Helen Dorsky, a fellow room mother, who was getting a divorce after her husband caught her in bed with her family’s dentist.

  Anne-Marie carried the virus home and transmitted it to all three of her kids by bedtime.

  Her husband Sal was one of the very rare people who carried the faulty gene which rendered him immune to the mutated bacteriophage, but he wouldn’t survive the week. Though the DeAngelos were fit, their immune systems could only fight off the infection so long. Within twenty-four hours, all three kids were feverish, and Anne-Marie couldn’t get out of bed to care for them. She hurt all over. The muscles in her body alternated between long periods of violent tremors punctuated by brief flashes of violent cramps. Her bloodshot eyes swam in pools of sticky tears as she coughed hoarsely and spat up wads of yellow, infectious mucus.

  She died at 3:32 pm the next day.

  Her dying thought was of her kids.

  When Sal got home from work, she was standing motionless in the middle of the parlor. Her eyes had filmed over. Her skin was pallid and waxy. She stood with her head hanging down and her hair in her face, her breasts rising and falling with a sound like wet gravel in a bellows.

  “How you feeling, baby?” Sal asked. He’d not yet shut the door.

  She slowly raised her head and looked at him.

  “Oh, God…” Sal started to say, then she ran at him screaming. Her fingers were curled into claws. Her sweet prettiness had transformed into an awful Halloween mask of rage and hunger. She collided into him with enough force to bowl him off his feet. They fell onto the antique stand they threw their keys on when they came home, splintering the old cherry wood. Sal tried to push her away and she bit his index and ring fingers off. He screamed once, and then she ripped out his larynx.

  When little Ricky Gene came stumbling down the stairs in his pajamas, jaw hanging open, eyes milky, Anne-Marie crouched over her kill and snarled. Ricky Gene sidled cautiously around her and wandered out into the evening, groaning softly. Anne-Marie watched the little boy drift down the street, her lips peeled back from her teeth, then leaned in between her husband’s thighs and continued to devour his testes.

  She wandered down those same streets now, her flesh shriveled tight around her bones, a shambling scarecrow with a matted blond mop of hair atop her skull. Despite the preservative properties of the organism which had killed and then re-animated her body, her organs and skin had begun to decompose. Her blue-black face was pitted. Maggots boiled in her ears and in the open sores on her withered bare legs, once so long and smooth and tan.

  She was still dressed in the shorts, sleeveless t-shirt and housecoat she had died in, though the fabric had faded and begun to fray. Her cute bedtime ensemble was little more than rags now.

  She moved stiffly, groaning in pain with each step. It had been days since she last ate (a teenage boy she’s snagged off his bike as he pedaled past). Without fresh meat to utilize for its life processes, the ravenous phage was eating her up from the inside out. If she didn’t make a kill soon, she would continue to rot, continue to stiffen, until she became inert, a moveless thing of bone and sinew and stiff, desiccated tissue.

  She had no memory of her happy living past, but perhaps that was a blessing. She had no sense of self, no higher mental processes, no understanding of history or future, cause or effect. She simply Was. And that Was was only two things: pain and hunger.

  She was wandering down Parkway Road today. She could feel the rain drumming down on her. It was cold and wet, but that meant nothing to her. It was only sensation. Once a rainy afternoon would have filled her with a sweet melancholy, would have made her want to paint, or screw, but the gray sky made her neither happy nor sad now. She didn’t even hope to find something hot and wet to eat. Hope was as far beyond her mental capacity as reason or memory. She only shuffled along, groaning as her bare feet settled o
n the moist pavement. Each step was like walking on chunks of jagged glass.

  She heard a sound and came to attention, her moan choked off in her sudden attentiveness. She cocked her head, listening.

  It was a Food sound!

  She didn’t have a word for the sound. All such things were beyond her. A living human being would have thought: Oh! Music! She no longer thought. All that remained to her was sensation and instinct. The sensation: pain. The instinct: kill-eat.

  The food-sound was a soft and rhythmic keening, but it drilled into her ears, into her skull, like red hot knitting needles. Lips like fattened leeches peeled back from her teeth, which were chipped and moldy. Green, slick and sharp. She’d broken most of them gnawing on bones, trying to get to the juicy marrow inside.

  She did not remember the name of the man singing. She’d once enjoyed listening to Johnny Cash, but the woman who’d once collected vinyl record albums with her husband Sal, listening to them late at night in his office after the kids were in bed, no longer existed as a sentient being.

  She tottered forward after the sound, growling at the pain it drove into her ears.

  Kill-eat-kill-eat!

  She found it with her eyes then. A small black box with a gray cord tied around its handle. The gray cord was a clothesline, but she did not know that. The small black box was a battery powered tape player. The play button was taped down, and the player itself was swaddled in cloth to pad it from impacts. She only saw vague shapes through the blurry lenses of her cataracts, movements.

  She stumbled toward it, snarling and reaching for it with her hands.

  Kill! Kill it! It hurt so bad!

  She wanted to grab it, rip its gut out, bite it, bash it on the ground, make it dead, make it silent.

  The cord twitched, then the tape deck skittered away from her three or four feet.

  Anne-Marie, or rather, the soulless thing Anne-Marie had become, fumbled after it.

  It jittered, jumped up over the curb, slid across the sidewalk.

  She followed.

  The cord snaked across the pavement toward a gray-walled building, then angled up into the air and disappeared into an open ground floor window. Anne-Marie caught movement out of the corner of her eye, turned her attention from the hateful sounds coming from the little black box to the shadow shifting around beyond the window. She hissed. Even the act of turning her head was agony, and she wanted to kill the shadow-thing which had caused her to move her head in such a manner.

  She saw something sketch the air from the open window, a streak of red, heard a thwipping sound.

  An arrow punched through her throat. The impact caused her to stumble back. Protruding from the back of her neck was three inches of shaft and a large and vicious-looking four bladed broadhead projectile point. She tried to reach up and pull the object from her flesh, but her arms no longer worked. She sank to her knees, fell over limply on her right side.

  A living person would have died within moments. The broadhead arrow tip was wicked sharp and had done massive damage during its brief passage through her body, slicing through arteries and muscle. But Anne-Marie DeAngelo was already technically dead. Though her spinal cord had been neatly severed, she bled very little and remained aware of her surroundings.

  She watched as the tape deck slid quickly up the wall and into the window. A moment later, the music fell silent.

  A metal ring was inserted in the shaft of the arrow between the nock and the fletching. Attached to the metal ring was a high-test, braided fishing line. The line went tight. The arrow pulled out her throat until the broadhead caught against the back of her neck. Her entire body jerked forward then, sliding across the wet pavement toward the window.

  When she was alive, Anne-Marie had weighed one-twenty. Her weight had varied very little from that all her adult life, except when she was pregnant. The thing that Anne-Marie had become, however, weighted only sixty-five pounds. Well below the test limit of the fishing line.

  She was dragged across the sidewalk and up the cold gray wall of the building, flopped limply through the open window when she was finally hitched inside.

  She came to rest staring up at a heavyset man in white jeans, a stained white shirt and apron. He was wearing bright yellow Playtex gloves. She could still move her face so she snarled at him, baring her sharp green teeth. She wanted to kill him, eat him.

  “Yeesh, you’re a nasty one,” the man said. He was wearing goggles and a yellow bandana hat that was decorated with leering white skulls. He watched the zombie for a moment to reassure himself that it was paralyzed and no danger to him, then he ambled away.

  The room had been a shipping and receiving office once. The walls were lined with putty-colored filing cabinets, wipe-off bulletin boards with routing assignments and work schedules scribbled on them in dry erase marker, and a variety of photocopied memos, invoices and yellow sticky notes. Atop one of the filing cabinets was a stupendously ugly monkey lamp with a palm leaf shade—a previous employee’s flea market treasure. Pinned to the shade was a handwritten note that declared THIS JOB DRIVES US BANANAS! There were three heavy oak desks that were manufactured sometime in the sixties and a large, almost equally ancient, copier. The gray industrial carpet was soiled with the concentric brown stains of the big man’s many previous kills.

  Richard Rourke had been trolling for zombies from this office for the last three weeks.

  Before the world ended, the building had once been the headquarters of the DuChamp Freight Company. DuChamp Freight had operated from this very location for ninety years, opening in the roaring twenties and making a steady if modest profit throughout the decades, even during the depression and the assorted recessions and gas shortages that followed. There were still train tracks criss-crossing the loading zone in back, though the company hadn’t shipped by rail in fifty years. After the Zombie Apocalypse, Rourke had made this place his fortress.

  He chose the freight company because it was familiar. Publicly, he had been a mid-level department supervisor here at the DuChamp Freight Company for the last decade, but the job was actually a front for his real vocation.

  In his Pre-Z life, Richard Rourke was a hitman. The underworld family who owned DuChamp Freight and retained him as their pet assassin had dubbed him DaVinci, and relied on him to dispose of informants, pesky law enforcement officers who couldn’t be bought off and business rivals. When the Armageddon Virus swept through the city of DuChamp, Mr. Rourke was the freight company’s highest paid employee. He drew a salary that made the CEO’s look paltry in comparison. The family paid him lavishly because he was very good at his job.

  Both of his jobs, actually. His day job and his night job.

  He was a good office manager. He was methodical, unemotional and something of a perfectionist. His underlings were terrified of him, and rightly so. His department had been the most efficient and productive crew in the company.

  He was also a good assassin, and for the very same reasons.

  His only nod to individuality as an assassin was the fact that he liked to kill with weapons of his own devising. In that, he was more than just a craftsman of death. He was an artist. It was how he’d acquired his nickname: DaVinci.

  He loved designing weapons. In his apartment were sketches for all sorts of killing devices, from the practical to the inexplicable. Knives, guns, arrows, but also large and fanciful killing boxes, things that pulled people apart mechanically, or whittled them down one sliver of flesh at a time. Clockwork killing machines that chewed a person from the feet up and spat their mangled remains out the back. Strange things. Sexual things. Things you could stick up a man’s ass and then trigger, cutting him to pieces on the inside. Strange multi-jointed implements which Rourke could strap to his cock so he could fuck his victims to death. He had spiral bound notebooks full of diagrams, organized and annotated. His favorite drawings were taped to the walls of his workspace, an altar to Death and all the forms she took.

  His boss had seen these sketche
s the one time he visited Rourke’s workshop. He’d eyed all the blueprints and half-realized killing fantasies and had laughed nervously. “You’re a regular DaVinci, ain’t you?” he’d asked… and the name had stuck.

  Take the arrow that he’d used to catch Anne-Marie DeAngelo for example. He’d designed the arrow himself. The shaft was handmade, composed of Sitka spruce wood, which had an impressive strength to weight ratio and unusual shock absorbing qualities. He used a barred turkey feather for the fletching of the arrow, though he liked peacock as well. The arrowhead was his own design, elegant and deadly, and though he had contracted a local metal fabrication company to produce it, he had personally sharpened all four of its penetrating edges.

  The captive bolt pistol he fetched from one of the big oak desks was his own design as well. Although in function it was no different than any other penetrating bolt cattle gun, its stainless steel barrel and hand grip were purposefully phallic and grim. Looking like a set piece designed for a sci-fi/horror flick by H.R. Giger, the pistol he carried now toward the paralyzed zombie was just as sensually beautiful as it was deadly.

  It was one of his favorite weapons.

  He had used it quite often over the last ten years. The weapon fired a sharpened bolt of steel into a victim’s body, propelled by the explosive force of a blank round. He normally fired it into a victim’s skull, scrambling the brains. After firing, the bolt retracted into the barrel. With no bullet or casing for forensic examination, it was nearly impossible for law enforcement to glean any evidence from the bodies of his targets. If those bodies were ever found. Most weren’t.