by Rod Redux
“Agreed,” Dao-ming said.
“So I guess we find us a nice deserted farm and set up our own little hippy commune,” Pete snorted. “I spent eighteen years tryin’ to get out of Mayberry RFD. Now we’re headed right back in.”
“Do you have a better idea?” Mort asked.
He wasn’t challenging his friend. He was really asking.
Pete shrugged. “Naw. We probably need to get out to the country. Even if the power plant doesn’t melt down, all these dead bodies can’t be good for us living people. There’s going to be more diseases circulating here in DuChamp than just the Z pretty soon. Like, you know, bubonic plague. Or… whatever.”
“So it’s decided then,” Dao-ming said. “I just have one favor to ask you guys.”
“What’s that, uh, sweety?” Mort inquired.
“Since we’re all going to be riding in the Benz together, you two could stand a bath and a fresh change of clothes. No offense, gentlemen, but you’re both pretty ripe.”
Dongmei nodded, eyes wide, her upper lip curled back from her teeth.
“Oh, yeah. Sure.” Mort’s face began to redden. He was suddenly horrified, imagining what he must have smelled like last night.
Dao-ming gathered her father’s grooming supplies and found some shirts and underwear the men might be able fit into. Neither of the two could wear her father’s pants or shoes so they would have to keep on the jeans and footwear they were wearing, unfortunately, but Mort was sure a fresh shirt and clean underwear would do wonders, both for his aroma and his chafed thighs and ass.
“Oh no you don’t!” Dao-ming called to her sister as Dongmei started to follow them outside. “You stay right in here with me. And don’t let me catch you peeking out the window.”
Dongmei hmmpph’ed and stalked to her bedroom.
Both men sloped outside to the Zhao’s kidney-shaped pool. It was still relatively early in the morning, but at least the clouds had broken up and the sun was shining today. Light danced on the surface of the water, bending wavering patterns onto the powder blue tiles underneath. The water in the pool was still clear, Mort noted, despite the fact that there’d been no electricity to run the filters for the last couple days. Though, after they were done with their baths, he thought, it was probably going to be a little less clean.
“So I noticed you weren’t in bed when I got up to pee last night,” Pete casually observed as he pulled his jacket and shirt off beside the pool. He wasn’t looking at Mort when he said it, was squinting off toward the street on the other side of the fence.
“No,” Mort admitted. He tried to keep the goofy grin from his lips but couldn’t. He finally had to drop his head.
“I guess you two knocked boots then,” Pete said. He looked toward Mort then, smiling. “Made the beast with two backs,” he went on. “Did the horizontal boogie. Bumped uglies.”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Pete chided, shucking down his stiff pants. “I wouldn’t be apologizing if she’d picked me over you.” He checked to see if Dongmei was watching from one of the windows of the house, then stripped off his baggy underwear. The underwear he’d been wearing was a grayish brown color—and almost rigid enough to stand on its own. Pete slinked down the tiled steps, cupping his unfairly large penis and testicles in both hands as he descended into the cold water. “In fact, I’d be thanking—Wowzers that’s brisk!—my lucky stars!”
Mort tossed him a washrag and a bar of soap and then disrobed. Protecting the twig and berries, he scooted over the side into the water. Pete lathered up and began to scrub his bulging pecs and flat washboard stomach. Even Pete’s muscles had muscles, Mort saw with dismay, and his stomach was so lean Mort could see veins running up from the curves of his hipbone. Wading in the shallow end of the pool beside the Adonis, Mort felt like nothing but a big, hairy tub of lard.
“The water’s so cold!” Mort complained, teeth chattering, as he splashed water onto his head.
Pete laughed. “So I see!”
Mort grabbed his own soap and washcloth and started scrubbing down his Pillsbury rolls.
“Truth is: I should be the one to apologize to you,” Pete admitted. “I’ve been kind of a jackass over the two of you hitting it off. I was just jealous. Dao-ming is so fucking hot! I don’t know what she sees in you—“
“Gee, thanks.”
“—But I won’t get in the way, neither. You ‘n’ me, we’ve got too close to be trying to stab each other in the back. Bros before hos, right?”
Mort and Pete looked at one another solemnly.
“Thanks. Really,” Mort said.
Pete grinned and flexed a bicep. “I mean, I don’t know why she’d wanna pass this shit up! But hey, chicks are crazy!”
Mort laughed. “What are you smoking? Check this shit!”
“Ha! Not too bad, Mort-for-Short. You’re starting to slim down some! I might have to get me a piece of that ass, you keep buffin’ up like you’re doin’!”
“Dream on, cowboy!”
They lathered, rinsed, then climbed out to dry and get dressed. Both of them were several shades lighter—and the pool a shade or two darker—when they were done bathing. Pete appeared to be smuggling a rather large grapefruit in the clean underwear Dao-ming had lent him. He floated, though, in Father Zhao’s shirt, looking like a kid dressed up in his daddy’s clothes. Mort found his shirt, a blousy Hawaiian top, a little snug, and had to stretch the underwear out until its seams threatened to tear. Even tight as they were, the largest piece of produce he could claim to be smuggling was a pickle. Just why exactly had she picked him over Pete anyway? Mort wondered. As they sat to pull on their socks and shoes, Mort decided to quit worrying why Dao-ming liked him and asked his friend instead what he intended to do about Dongmei.
Pete shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I’ll fuck her. She’s practically begging for it. Dao-ming acts like she wants me to hook up with her little sister, but it’s kind of weird for me. Dongmei probably still has peach fuzz down there, but, you know, it’s the fuckin’ end of the world, right? What if we all die today? I wouldn’t want to check out without tapping some ass at least once.”
Mort nodded. “That’s a tough call. She’s cute and all, but…”
“Yeah.”
Dao-ming slid open the patio door. “You guys going to sit and chat all morning, or are we going blow this shitty town?”
Mort and Pete jumped to their feet.
“We’re ready,” Mort said.
It took them an hour to pack the Benz. They filled the trunk and half the back seat with supplies, which was a perfect opportunity for Dongmei. It gave her an excuse to sit in Pete’s lap finally. They packed plenty of guns and ammo, too, and enough food to last for weeks. Mort sat in the front seat with Dao-ming, his knees hiked to his chest because the floorboard was occupied by two cases of bottled water. Pete slid into the back and Dongmei climbed into his lap. Pete tried to be nice for a little while, but Dongmei kept wriggling in his lap, probably on purpose, and Pete finally complained she was crushing his balls and needed to sit her bony ass still.
Dao-ming backed the car to the gate, checked the street for deadheads, then unlatched gate and jumped back in the Mercedes. The Benz peeled onto the road. Arrowed forward, headed south.
Mort was so anxious he was nauseous. He prayed silently he wasn’t leading them all to their doom. What if he was wrong about the nuclear power plant? What if they would be safer at Dao-ming’s house?
Within a block, the Benz was being chased by a pack of zombie dogs. Big, mangy animals with filmy eyes and black lolling tongues. Dongmei threw her arms around Pete with a squeal when she saw them, hiding her face in his shoulder.
Mort was buckled in, a shotgun and a rifle in his arms. He kept the barrels poking out the cracked window an inch or two for safety. Another gun, a pistol, sat in his lap. He was holding it between his thighs.
Dao-ming narrowed her eyes and fixed the totality of her concentration on the roa
d ahead. Until they cleared the city, she would need all of her driving skills to navigate the crash-littered and zombie-infested streets of DuChamp.
It was another roller coaster ride through zombie hell. Mort was horrified by the city’s dissolution. Buildings had burned. Bodies lay in the gutter. Zombies exploded from every doorway and alley, running at the car like feral animals. Dongmei screamed and clutched at Pete like a girl on her first horror movie date. Despite Dao-ming’s driving skills, they clipped several howling revenants. One flew up and hit the windshield, starring the glass, before rolling across the roof and sprawling in the street behind them. Mort tried to hang on to the weapons and his breakfast.
They only saw one other band of survivors during their escape from the city. A group of college-age kids in a van. The van had crashed into a light pole and sat immobile, its radiator steaming. Dao-ming didn’t slow. The van, Mort saw, was surrounded by zombies. Deadheads were beating at the windows, clawing at the seams of the vehicle, trying to tear their way in. The college kids stared out the windows in doomed horror. They knew their fate was sealed.
Maybe it was his imagination, but Mort thought he caught the eye of one of the college kids as they roared past—just for a nanosecond. The terror in the kid’s pale face made him feel like weeping.
“There’s nothing we can do for them,” Dao-ming said grimly. She didn’t turn her eyes from the street. Not for a moment.
Mort nodded. It looked like there were at least fifty zombies-- maybe even more-- surrounding the van.
Finally, the city began to thin. The high rise buildings gave way to a low suburban sprawl. The roads were less cluttered with debris and crashed cars, and there were fewer zombies to dodge. Dao-ming sighed and dropped their speed to something just shy of suicidal.
“Are we safe? Are we out of the city?” Dongmei asked, her eyes red and swollen.
“Almost,” Dao-ming answered.
They turned onto a deserted street, headed west. To the north, on Mort’s side, were factories, broad fenced lots, criss-crossing railways. A large sign said DuChamp Industrial Parkway. There were a few cars in the factory parking lots, but not many. A lot of their employees probably called in dead the last couple weeks, Mort thought to himself. He only saw two zombies: a rotten scarecrow shuffling in the middle of a parking lot, wandering in circles between the abandoned cars, and a second one limping along the ditch, dragging a partially devoured leg behind it by the ankle.
Parkway Road travelled west toward a large gray building with a sign that said DuChamp Freight Company. Another road angled north and south there.
“Parkway connects to some back roads, and then we’ll be out of DuChamp,” Dao-ming said. “We need to head south again at this stop sign up ahead.”
“Good,” Mort replied.
“You hear that, baby,” Pete said to Dongmei, petting her hair. “We’re home free, girl!”
Dongmei smiled, scrubbing her wet cheeks with the back of her hand. “Yay!”
Things happened fast after that.
Dao-ming and Mort jerked back as bits of glass suddenly coughed from the center of the windshield into their faces. Mort squeezed his eyes shut as his cheeks and forehead were peppered by the hail of glass shards. There was no sound other than the blast of rupturing glass. The Benz swerved, almost went into a ditch before Dao-ming got it back under control. They heard no gunshot. One minute everything was fine, the next, a four inch hole magically appeared in the front window of the Mercedes-Benz.
“What the fuck--!” Dao-ming cried, her cheek and ear bleeding.
Then from the backseat, Pete’s wails: “Oh God no! No, girl!”
Dao-ming shrieked.
Dongmei lay slumped in Pete’s arms, her head rolling loosely on her shoulders, her eyes open and staring lifelessly at the roof of the car. There was a ragged red hole in her forehead, close to her right temple. Blood all over Pete’s face. Blood all over his shoulder and chest. Blood sprayed across the inside of the back window and all over the back seat. Pete’s eyes were wide and stunned. He tried to stench the flow of blood from her head with his right hand but it was a futile act. The girl was already dead.
“Dongmeeeiii!” Dao-ming screamed.
The car jerked as one of the front wheels ruptured.
The Benz swerved, jounced into a ditch, then struck a fence post and came to a sudden halt. The hood popped up, crumpled. Steam rolled from the radiator.
Screaming, Dao-ming tried to claw her way into the back seat, but she was still buckled and couldn’t get to her sister.
Pete was in shock. He couldn’t seem to wrap his brain around the sight of the bloodied teenager in his arms. “Hey, I think someone shot her…”
Mort had struck his forehead pretty hard on the dash when the Benz ran into the fence post. He shook his head to clear his rattled thoughts, then checked the area around the Benz for zombies. No zombies were coming yet, thank God. He saw a flicker of reflected light in one of the ground floor windows of the DuChamp Freight Company building. The shooter. But who…? And more importantly, why…?
Dao-ming had finally realized she was strapped down. She unbuckled her seatbelt to climb into the back. She sprawled over the seat and brushed Dongmei’s hair from her still, pale face, sobbing no, no over and over.
Pete was crying too. He looked at Mort. His mouth worked but nothing came out.
Mort took the rifle and shotgun in his arms and kicked open the door. He clambered out onto the grassy shoulder of the road and headed toward the Freight Company building, toward the window where he had glimpsed that glint of light.
He heard a zombie howl and turned in its direction. The shambling deadhead they’d passed earlier, the one dragging the leg behind it, was stumping toward them. It was rotted so bad its gender was indecipherable, but it had dropped the leg and was tottering toward them, its black mouth agape.
Mort blew its head off with the rifle, taking savage satisfaction in the killing.
He turned back to the Freight Company building. Sighted the open window through the rifle’s scope. A shadow moved inside. A moment later, he felt heat in his thigh and found himself dropping to the pavement.
He shot me!
He observed his fall with a queer sort of detachment, as if he were floating outside his own body. Pete yelled out his name, but his friend’s voice seemed to come from a million miles away.
It was strange how time switched to slow motion when you were injured. Mort marveled at how much he could see and think and feel in the single blink of an eye. The gritty surface of the pavement, swinging up to meet his body. The beer can in the ditch. Pabst Blue Ribbon, half-crushed and caked with dirt. Dao-ming crying her sister’s name in the wrecked car behind him. He noted how warm the pavement felt when his body slumped upon it. It was actually kind of nice, that warmth.
There was a hole in his jeans, and blood was pouring out of him. Quite a lot of blood, actually.
Then he noticed something else. The ground was vibrating beneath him. The quake swelled in intensity, then began to ebb. The ground thrummed again, more intensely. He heard the distant warble of car alarms. Some of the Freight Company’s windows burst.
Mort looked to the north and saw, hazy with distance, a gray pillar of smoke rising in the sky.
Oh crap, he thought.
11
When Morton Met Peter
Morton Lesser met Peter Bolin the day Mort lit out for the territories. Within a few hours of abandoning his home, Mort was trapped in a Frito-Lay delivery truck by a rabid pack of zombies. Pete rescued him, but only because he thought Mort was a chick.
But before that, in the week following Fred’s death, Mort had holed up in his apartment. Mort actually had no intention whatsoever of stepping foot outside his apartment until the government or army or whoever got the zombie outbreak under control. He didn’t care what authority stepped in to assert control, just so long as the world was put back in order. If it had been the Nazi party, he would have heile
d with the best of them. If it was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he would have happily rode a bike around town for the rest of his life, dressed in a peppy suit and tie and spreading the good word about Jesus Christ, as translated by his modern day prophet Joseph Smith jr.. Unfortunately, the government was a no-show. The army spent a day or two shooting down healthy but frightened American citizens at the “quarantine zones” before hauling stake and getting the hell out of Dodge. And Jesus and the Nazi Party were previously engaged. When the cable and the radio stations went off the air, Mort knew that no cavalry was going to come galloping into town to save the day.
Oh, well, he thought. He’d just hide out until the zombie infection ran its course.
Mort had heard on the radio that week that the zombies were being created by some type of bizarre and rapacious supervirus. Some said it was from outer space. Others claimed it had escaped from a secret government lab. Whatever its genesis, Mort knew such a destructive virus would—must—burn itself out quickly. He’d even seen zombies attacking and eating one another. Yes, he decided, the best course of action sometimes was simply making the choice to take no action at all.
He could survive for at least two or three weeks without the need to leave his apartment, he estimated. He’d spent the first twenty-four hours following Fred’s death filling up every container, jug, coffee mug, plastic tumbler and basin he could find with drinking water, and he began to ration his food immediately, eating only when he could ignore his hunger pains no longer.
Hell, he might be able to push it further than two or three weeks. It depended on how long the taps worked. Potable water was the crux. He’d installed a water filtration system in his kitchen sink years ago, due to the city’s unpalatable drinking water, so quality was not such a big deal, just as long as water came out when he turned the valve. A human being could go weeks without food so long as there was a continual supply of drinking water.
Then one night, about a week after he hunkered down to wait out the zombie plague, he dreamed that the DuChamp nuclear power facility blew up.