Mort

by Rod Redux

  Ms. Beecher set her clipboard and flash cards on the bedside table and poured him a cup of water.

  “Thank you,” Mort said, drinking from a bendy straw. The water soothed his raw, dry throat. He sighed, smiled in gratitude, passed the empty cup back to the woman.

  “So how are you feeling?” the woman asked, placing the cup on the bedside table. She sat primly in the chair beside the bed, sweeping her skirt beneath her with one hand—a feminine gesture Mort had always found attractive. She crossed her legs at the knee, placed her clipboard in her lap, clicked an ink pen. She had very nice legs. Tan and smooth in nude hose. Mort tried not to stare at her legs as he replied.

  “Better. I still have a lot of pain. Especially when it rains. But I’m doing better,” Mort answered.

  “Have you had any seizures since our last session?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Hallucinations? Phantom smells?”

  “No.”

  Ms. Beecher moved on down her checklist, ticking off an assortment of ills and complaints, most of which Mort answered a negative to. He said yes to headaches, yes to memory loss, yes to weakness of the extremities, yes to feelings of depression.

  “I was wondering if I could get a message to my friends. Peter Bolin and Zhao Dao-ming?” Mort said, growing impatient with her note-taking. “Pete came to see me when we first arrived. After those… things… saved us.”

  “The Archons,” Ms. Beecher interjected, frowning a little.

  “Yeah, the Archons,” Mort conceded. The people around here always seemed to get upset when Mort called them things or monsters, but for some reason, he had a hard time remembering the name the creatures insisted everyone call them. Archons. It was probably the brain damage. He did get shot in the head with a cattle gun, after all. “Sorry. I can’t always remember that word.”

  “It’s all right, Mort. That’s not surprising, considering the severity of your injury.” His apology mollified her. The frown disappeared and her usual kind smile took its place, like sun peeking from behind a dark cloud. “You should try to call them something besides ‘things’ or ‘monsters’, though. The other survivors would probably consider it offensive. The Archons are trying to save our species. If it wasn’t for them, neither of us would be sitting here right now.”

  Mort nodded. “Yeah… sorry.”

  Marilyn laughed softly, patting his hand. “Quit apologizing, Mort! I’m not trying to upbraid you. I’m only telling you so that you don’t have any problems with the other survivors when you’re reintegrated with the general population. Which, considering the speed of your recovery, may be sooner than you think.”

  Mort smiled. “Good. I’m tired of hospital food. Lime Jell-o and chicken broth every day.” He pulled a face and shuddered, which made Ms. Beecher laugh softly again.

  He realized then that the pretty blonde had derailed him. He supposed the small and overworked staff here in New Jerusalem’s infirmary was tired of him asking about Pete and Dao-ming, but he couldn’t help himself. He was lonely and wanted to see them. He hadn’t seen either of them since the night the… the… Archons delivered them to the Appalachian complex. He’d seen them briefly, Pete and Dao-ming. His friends had hugged and kissed him and told him to hold on and be strong, and then the emergency staff had whisked him away to surgery. One of the nurses, he couldn’t remember her name, told him later that a little bit of his brain was hanging out when the… the Archons! delivered him into their care.

  The medical staff had refused to let Pete and Dao-ming see him after surgery. It was too dangerous for Mort, they’d explained. Mort was not one of the lucky few who were naturally immune to Virus Z. Both Pete and Dao-ming were. But they might accidentally expose him to the virus, which, in his weakened state, was sure to infect him.

  It annoyed him how smoothly Ms. Beecher had changed the subject, but before Mort could press her about his friends again, the therapist picked up her flash cards.

  “Okay, now, Mort. You know how this works. We’re going to do some exercises that will help with your disability. You’ve suffered some damage to the part of your brain which allows you to process visual information. I want you to look at these pictures and tell me the word or name that is associated with the image that you see.”

  She held up one of the eight by eight cards, smiled encouragingly.

  Mort squinted at the image. It was red, round, but not perfectly round. Kind of lumpy, fatter at the top than the bottom. “Uh… ball?” he said.

  Marilyn smiled sympathetically. “Close.”

  “Something that you eat…” Mort ruminated, thinking hard.

  Ms. Beecher waited for a little while, giving Mort plenty of time to work it out for himself, then said, “Remember what we talked about. Do your word associations, Mort. You have to train your brain to think around the sections of it that are damaged. You have to relearn how to recognize the things your eyes are seeing.”

  Round. Red. Food.

  “It’s an apple,” Mort’s psychologist said, putting the card aside.

  As soon as she said it, the word clicked in Mort’s brain. But it was too late. Mort felt a hot flash of shame and frustration.

  “Let’s try another,” Ms. Beecher said.

  Mort stared at the flash card. He tried to do as she instructed, tried to think sideways around the empty place in his head.

  “Fish?”

  “Very good! How about this one?”

  “Dog,” Mort answered quickly.

  “Wonderful!”

  This went on for a good half hour. Mort was able to name half of the images Ms. Beecher showed to him. When they had finished, Mort’s head was throbbing, but he felt proud of himself. He was optimistic he might be himself again someday soon, with no gaping hole in the middle of his mind.

  When they had finished with the flash cards, Mort and Ms. Beecher sat and talked a little while. Marilyn told Mort how pleased she was with his recovery. Mort had received very little medical care immediately following his injury, which was called the “golden hour”, she said, because of how important it was to get prompt medical treatment after such a severe neurological trauma. It was a miracle he had survived at all. The speed with which he was recovering was even more miraculous.

  They discussed his aphasia and talked about some of the other psychological issues he might have due to his brain injury: emotional difficulties, loss of consciousness and confusion.

  “The most important thing to remember,” she said, “Is that the extent of your recovery, whether it’s eighty percent or one hundred percent, is entirely dependent on you. Your willpower. Your stubbornness. It’s all right to get frustrated, and it’s all right to be angry or mourn for the parts of your mind that you’ve lost, but you must never, ever give up. If you do, that terrible man who hurt you will have won just a tiny little victory over you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  They were still talking when Mort’s physical therapist leaned through the doorway.

  “You ready to do a little PT, Mort?” the man asked.

  He laughed at Mort’s groan.

  Ms. Beecher rose and patted Mort’s arm. “I’ll see you in a few days, hon.”

  Mort’s physical therapist eyed Ms. Beecher’s behind as she walked past him out of the room . He cut his eyes toward Mort and winked.

  Mort smirked. “Nice,” he said.

  “Nice,” the physical therapist agreed. “Now,” he said, rubbing his hands together, “tell me what my name is.”

  “Scott the Physical Therapy Guy.”

  “Awesome!”

  “When this session is over, I’ll probably be calling you ‘Scott the A-hole’.”

  Scott laughed and said, “That’s awesome, too. I’ll probably deserve it.”

  Scott the physical therapist was a bundle of nervous energy. He was constantly moving, even when he was standing still. Tapping his feet. Cracking his neck. Swinging his arms. Whistling. Today he was dressed in a white tee-shirt and blue s
weatpants. He had thick, curly hair that was going gray (he called it his “jewfro”) and a broad manic smile. He was also a talker. What little information Mort had gleaned about the-- androids? No. It started with A. Ar… All…Ah, screw it!—the monsters, he’d learned from Scott the physical therapist.

  Scott helped Mort out of bed and walked him down the hall to the physical therapy room, holding his elbow just in case Mort stumbled. In the last couple weeks, Mort had progressed from walker to cane, though Mort’s leg was still going out on him every now and then. As Mort sweated in the PT room under Scott’s watchful eye, they talked about the Archons and the city of New Jerusalem.

  The place Mort and his friends had been brought to was a large government complex, not really a city. It was originally constructed during the Bush administration as a site to house domestic “enemy combatants” during its war on terrorism or as an internment camp for foreign nationals should war break out. The official name for the complex was DOD Camp 15-C. It was one of 25 fenced military campuses designed to function as internment camps following the 9-11 attacks, spread out across the 48 continental states. Essentially a concentration camp, its existence—as well as the existence of the other 24 DOD Camps-- had been kept relatively secret from the American public, but after the world was ravaged by Virus Z, the… Archons had employed some of them as safe havens to house the survivors of the plague.

  What few survivors there were.

  DOD Camp 15-C was a prison-like complex situated near the Unicoi mountains of Eastern Tennessee. Sited around the sprawling complex were multiple dormitories, administrative buildings, even a fully stocked hospital and various smaller outcamp buildings. The complex was divided into yards. Green Yard, Yellow Yard, Blue Yard, etc. Green Yard was mostly administration and the medical and human services buildings. Yellow and Blue were the housing blocks. Each had twenty dormitories that could lodge as many as 125 internees each. Nicknamed New Jerusalem by the survivors of the zombie plague, DOD Camp 15-C was originally designed by the Department of Defense to confine as many as 5,000 inmates. Sadly, due to the horrific death toll and resulting chaos of the Armageddon Virus, the Archons had so far only successfully rescued about half that many people.

  Though they scoured the surrounding states tirelessly, looking for survivors to rescue, their numbers were small. The strange beings claimed there were only a couple hundred of their kind. And not all of them were trying to save humanity. Some of them didn’t care if humanity survived or perished.

  “So what are they exactly?” Mort had asked Scott during his first PT session, when the therapist mentioned the enigmatic creatures.

  Scott had shrugged, “They don’t say exactly. They hint around about it a little. Maybe they don’t know the correct way to explain it to us in English. They talk about coming from outer space, but not, you know, outer space space, like in Star Trek. I think they mean extra-dimensional. But they say they evolved here on Earth at the same time we did, they just kept to themselves. Like a secret race or something.”

  They discussed the creatures’ powers: flight, mind-reading, psychokinesis. Scott said it was like they knew how to use the Force, similar to the Jedis in the Star Wars movies.

  “Pretty wild, huh?” he’d enthused. He said it with an embarrassed laugh. Apparently, he was ashamed of his inner nerd. Scott the PT guy was a big fan of the Archons.

  Of course, he should be a fan. He, like almost everyone else here in New Jerusalem, had been saved by the furtive creatures.

  Scott was rescued by the flying things from the roof of his home in Southern Indiana, after his house was surrounded and overrun by zombies. He’d described to Mort in breathless wonder how he’d been brought to New Jerusalem, carried through the clouds in the arms of a magnificent being that called itself Uriel.

  A licensed physical therapist, he’d been pressed into service at the infirmary shortly following his orientation. New Jerusalem’s need for medically trained personnel was dire.

  “But don’t you think they look kind of scary?” Mort had asked.

  “What do you mean? I think they’re beautiful. They look like angels, you know, with their wings and all.”

  “Angels?” Mort had frowned. The creature that rescued him had looked like a bug-eyed, white-skinned, shark-toothed freak. And he had seen no wings, shiny black or otherwise. “Maybe they look like different things to different people,” Mort suggested, and Scott had agreed.

  “I guess that’s possible,” the PT guy had said, frowning that little frown that everyone frowned at Mort when he was critical of humanity’s saviors.

  They had an efficient little system going on here, Scott said. The survivors were screened for Virus Z on arrival. Once they were cleared to join the general population, all new arrivals gathered in the Green Yard Auditorium where the city’s administrators gave a presentation, explaining the rules and regulations of New Jerusalem. Then, after that, one of the Archons would step out and address the assemblage. It was usually the unofficial “leader” of the 15-C Archons, an imposing creature who called himself Yaldabaoth.

  Mort, of course, had been too badly injured to attend orientation.

  All residents of New Jerusalem who weren’t immune were screened weekly. Blood tests had been developed which showed if someone was about to come down with the brain munchies. If anyone exhibited symptoms of infection, they were given a choice: euthanasia, or they could be put in isolation to let the sickness run its course. Most opted for euthanasia.

  “You’re doing really good, Mort, ” Scott said today, looking impressed as Mort did leg extensions on a workout bench in the physical therapy room. “I think you’ll be able to get around on your own pretty soon. Get out of this lousy place.”

  “That’s good,” Mort grunted, sweaty and red-faced.

  “You should attend an orientation after you get released, like everyone else does. That way you’ll get to see one of the Archons again. I think maybe, when you were rescued, your brain injury made you hallucinate and see them as monsters. They’re not monsters. They’re actually very beautiful.”

  Mort consulted his memory: the storage room in the DuChamp Freight Company building. The psychotic DaVinci. He remembered the door blowing off the hinges, then those terrible things striding in. Horrible, wizened creatures, with great black eyes and skin like bleached sinew wrapped around bone. How could anyone think they were beautiful with all those shark-like teeth?

  Revisiting the memory made Mort think of Jesus calling the Pharisees whited sepulchers.

  But was that right? Was it fair? Were the Archons whited sepulchers? Were his memories of them real?

  The creature that had born Mort to this safe haven had been only kind and gentle towards him. And suppose he was right and everyone else was wrong? Did good things always have to be beautiful? Could they not sometimes be kind-hearted and hideous to look at?

  It was a fatuous human bias that beauty must be good and ugliness evil.

  He remembered the Archon Metatron carrying him to the roof of the Freight Company building. They had stood there with the wind blowing in their faces while they waited for the others to join them. As he held Mort in his arms, looking off across the burning city, clouds of radioactive steam and ash billowing into the sky from the nuclear power plant, the white and desiccated creature had cradled Mort’s injured head and murmured, “See your city burn, Morton Lesser.” How he knew Mort’s name, Mort did not know. Telepathy maybe. “If I had a heart, I think it would have broken a thousand times already this tragic season.”

  His words had roused Mort from his torpor, and Mort had watched two tears spill down the thing’s wizened cheeks: tears that looked scarlet in the glow of the approaching inferno.

  Then the others had joined them and the creature named Metatron came loose from the tug of gravity like a weightless bubble, spiraling high into the stars before turning swiftly westward.

  “Yeah, I think I will attend an orientation when I get out of here,” Mort said.r />
  When his PT session was over, Scott returned Mort to his room. He helped Mort undress and watched while Mort bathed himself. The warm water felt blessed, though he was overly mindful not to slip in the sudsy runoff. He didn’t care that Scott was keeping an eye on him. Any extended stay in a medical facility robbed a person of modesty pretty quickly. You could only pee in a jug a nurse’s assistant was holding so many times before you weren’t self-conscious of your dinky any more.

  Scott continued to speculate about the Archons as Mort showered, leaning in the doorway of Mort’s private bath with his muscular arms crossed, tapping one foot anxiously. He wondered aloud if the Archon females could mate with human men. If Archons even had sex with each other, like humans did.

  Mort visualized the creature that had rescued him and shuddered. Who’d want to shag something like that? He wondered, but he kept his opinion to himself.

  After drying off, Mort dressed himself in a clean white tee shirt and shorts. He did so well bathing and dressing himself unassisted that Scott clapped him on the shoulder and told him he was doin’ awesome, man. Mort smiled, but only out of politeness. The PT session had drained him, and the wounds in his thigh and the side of his head were throbbing nastily.

  “You should give some thought to which work crew you want to be on when you get out of here, too,” Scott said, helping Mort slide his legs onto the bed. “It’s not going to be much longer before they kick you out of here to make room for some other poor schlub.”

  Mort nodded tiredly.

  “You can worry about that later, though,” Scott said sympathetically. “You look bushed. I’ll head out and let you get some rest.” He paused at the door and looked back. Hooking a thumb out the door, he said, “I’ll tell Nurse Ratchet out here at the nurse’s station that you’re done with PT so she can change your dressings and give you some pain medicine.”

  Scott bid Mort good-bye. Fifteen minutes later, the dayshift nurse came in to change his bandages. They were halfway off already because of the shower, and he was peeking at the gunshot wound in his thigh—mostly healed now and shiny pink. The dayshift nurse slapped his hands away and removed the bandage, telling him to quit picking at it. The portion of the tape that was still sticky pulled out some hair, but she just sniffed at his yelp of pain. She said sorry, but she didn’t sound sorry.