Mort

Deluxe Illustrated

Edition by

Joseph Duncan &

Mike Dubisch

Mort is copyright 2010 by Joseph Duncan

Deluxe Illustrated Edition

Revised text copyright 2012 by Joseph Duncan

Artwork copyright 2012 by Mike Dubisch

and Joseph Duncan

Originally published under the pen name Rod Redux

This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to

Persons living, dead or undead are

Entirely coincidental.

Published by Cobra E-books

Metropolis, IL

Deluxe Illustrated Edition

Version 2.0

Expanded and Revised

ISBN-13: 978-1481271363

ISBN-10: 1481271369

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

1. DEADHEADS

2. THE MERRY SHANTY

3. CHOCOLATE AND DILDOS

4. THE LAST LIVING PIMP

5. DEAD DAYS

6. ASIAN WOMEN CAN DRIVE

7. DA VINCI

8. SHINING PATH AND WINTER PLUM

9. THE LAST LIVING PIMP GETS SAVED

10. GOODBYE, DUCHAMP

11. WHEN MORTON MET PETER

12. DA VINCI GETS OFF

13. THE INFIRMARY

14. SCOUT CREW UNIT TWO

15. DORM LIFE

16. ROMANCING THE APOCALYPSE

17. REUNION

18. ORIENTATION

19. INTERVIEW WITH THE ARCHON

20. THE DEATH OF MORTON LESSER

EPILOGUE

ABOUT THE ARTIST

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Also by Joseph Duncan

The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All

The Oldest Living Vampire on the Prowl

The Oldest Living Vampire In Love

The Oldest Living Vampire Betrayed

Apollonius

Menace of Club Mephistopheles

Mort

Hole: A Ghost Story

Indian Summer

House of Dead Trees

Frankenstonia

For Aaron

Prologue

Esther tried very hard to keep the screams bottled inside as the zombies groaned and scraped their fingers across the windows of the van. Her grandson lay in her lap, sleeping, God knows how, his little hands clamped over his ears. He was a pale, beautiful boy with long dark eyelashes. His father—who had paid for their escape with his life—had always bemoaned his son’s fragility, but Esther didn’t care that Drew was small and gentle and sensitive. Drew was her only grandchild, and she loved him with the fierceness only a grandmother can muster. If that meant she had to bite back her terror and remain quiet so he could steal a few moments of rest, then that is what she would do.

What I wouldn’t give for a tall glass of sweet iced tea right now! Esther thought, trying to summon some spit into her mouth.

It was so hot!

Esther and her grandson had been trapped inside a van about thirty-six hours now. It was her son-in-law’s 2003 Dodge Caravan. Drew’s father had tried to lead the zombies away after those horrible things got inside the house. Only problem was: in their mad scramble to escape the horde of monsters that had battered through their defenses, Jake Werlitz had forgotten that the keys to the van were still in his hip pocket. Esther and Drew had circled around the back yard, climbed inside the van—slamming the doors shut just in the nick of time!—only for Esther to realize she had no way to start the engine. They were trapped! And her son-in-law’s final agonized screams had drawn even more zombies to the area.

Esther stroked her grandson’s fine hair, pushing it back from his brow. Her knuckled old woman’s fingers trembled. The sight of his parched lips, cracked and peeling, filled her with fresh panic every time she looked at him.

We can’t stay here much longer, she thought. We’re dying of dehydration!

If only she could roll the windows down a little. It had been unseasonably warm all month, with temperatures hovering in the high eighties, low nineties all week. That global warming everybody kept talking about, she supposed. It was tolerable cool when they had run from the house to get away from the zombies, but when daylight came, their place of refuge had quickly turned into an oven, and the heat had tormented them all day. Relentless. Oppressive. Wringing every ounce of sweat out of them.

It still lingered, that heat, even though the sun had gone down hours ago. It was like being wrapped head-to-toe in a hot wet towel. If she could roll the window down, the cool night air might refresh them a little, but Esther was afraid those horrible creatures would shove their fingers through the gap and yank the glass right out of the door.

And if they did that...

Perhaps it would be better if her grandson passed away in his sleep. Wouldn’t it be a mercy if little Drew simply didn’t wake up? Didn’t have to look at those horrors scratching at the windows ever again? Didn’t have to spend another day sitting in the van, roasting ever so slowly, tormented by thirst and the maddening howls of those tireless dead things.

No! No-no-no! Esther thought. You mustn’t give up! Never!

Esther did the only thing she could do. She prayed. She prayed to God. She prayed to Jesus and the Virgin Mary. She prayed to any supernatural being who might be listening. She didn’t care who it was-- Allah, Buddha or Holy Ronald McDonald in Cheeseburger Heaven—so long as Somebody heard her.

Please, save us! Oh God in Heaven hallowed be Thy name…

She was not a religious woman. Technically a Lutheran, Esther hadn’t set foot in church for years. She’d become too disenchanted with organized religion. Disgusted by the cliquishness, the gossip and drama of her local church, and the scandals and greed of the larger Christian organizations with their fast-talking televangelists and their constant pleas for donations. It was spiritual blackmail, that’s what it was. Gimme fifty million dollars or God is gonna take me home. Jesus will heal your arthritis if you buy this prayer pillow. She’d gotten so tired of seeing the same three people walk the aisle every Sunday to be saved. Goodness! How many times did a person have to get saved? Didn’t it take last week?

She wished now she’d been a better Christian. Just like the Bible said about the End Times, the dead had arisen. Funny thing though, the Bible never mentioned the resurrected killing and eating everybody! Maybe if she’d been a better Christian, she would have been taken up before the Tribulation and all this nasty brain-eating commenced.

Too late now, she told herself. You thought you were too smart for religion. You thought you could slide by on good deeds and now look where you are! Stuck in a van, surrounded by dead people who want to eat you, just like they ate poor Sissy and Drew’s daddy Jake, and you’ve dragged your grandbaby along for the ride! Oh, you stupid old bitch!

She wished she’d gone to church more often. She wished she’d believed better, harder, for her whole family’s sake. If she had been more devout, and insisted her loved ones march the straight and narrow right along at her side, they might not be dead right now, and she might not be trapped in a van with her grandson in her arms and about three dozen zombies outside, groaning and drooling for their brains.

Drew stirred, whimpering a little in his sleep.

She stroked his hair.

“Hush now, baby. Everything’s fine,” she rasped.

The zombies crowded all around the windows, ogling in at her with their soulless, cataract eyes. They were moaning, pawing at the glass. They left smears and streaks of greasy-looking slime on the windows. Snot and viscous yellow foam dangled from their chins. Every now and then, one would strike the glass harder, and Esther’s whole body stiffened, waiting for the glass to break.

It was nearly impossible for her to bite back her cries. She wanted to scream her fool head off every time one of those monsters lunged at the windows. It was like being stuck on the world’s biggest, scariest funhouse ride, and she wanted off. She wanted to surrender to the horror and hysterics squeezing her heart, give up, bring all of it to an end. If she had been alone, she probably would have thrown open the door and let them have their way with her-- as horrible, as painful as that would be. She knew what they would do to her. She had watched them pull her daughter apart with their bare hands, biting into her flesh, eating her, and Sissy still alive and screaming. They were like wolves. Crazed, starved wolves. But Esther was not alone. She had Drew. And so long as she had Drew, she would persevere.

Please, Lord, send me an angel! Esther prayed.

The dead one she was most worried about had circled around to the passenger side. Esther had been watching him closely. He didn’t seem as dull-minded as the others. There was a glimmer of cleverness in his milky eyes. He’d actually tried the door handle on her side of the van when they first jumped in. She’d locked the doors, of course—just to be safe. And thank God she had, because he’d shuffled up to it and gave it a few clumsy yanks, grinning through the glass at her with his filthy, rotting teeth.

Those teeth--! she thought with a shudder.

Bits of raw meat stuck in between them, and his lips: black, oozing, ragged and infected. He had leered through the window at her, eyes twinkling beneath devilish eyebrows.

There was intelligence there. She could see it. A terrible cunning. He wasn’t just looking at something his diseased mind compelled him to pursue; he was looking at her personally. Her. Esther Rosenbaum.

And he wanted to kill her.

Kill her and make it hurt.

His name was Richard. She knew this because it was embroidered on the breast of his shirt. He was dressed in a stained gray mechanic’s uniform, the logo for Sal’s Quik Change & Lube emblazoned across the back. He had a long bristly beard, pumpkin orange and caked with a brown crust of dried blood, and there were teardrops tattooed to his right cheek.

Esther watched him closely, her litany of prayers trailing off in her head. She didn’t like the way he was looking at her. He just stood there staring at her while all the other zombies shuffled mindlessly around. He was too sly. The other zombies were slow, but he was slow in a different kind of way. A sneaky kind of way. He kept slipping out of sight. He kept circling the van.

“Mammy, I’m firsty,” Drew croaked in her lap, stirring a little.

“Shhh, baby. Go back to sleep. We’ll get you something to drink in the morning, okay?” Esther whispered. She patted his hair, peeking at the rear view mirror to see if Richard the Zombie was behind the van. He’d given her the slip again when little Drew woke up.

“But ‘m firsty now,” Drew said in a terribly soft, weak voice.

It broke Esther’s heart to hear him so. Her poor baby! He sounded so distant and faint. His life, she knew, was playing out into a very thin and very fragile gossamer thread. One that could snap at any moment-- just like that! The image of it was so vivid in her mind, she could actually see it: that single, shining filament.

They must find some way to escape—or be rescued soon—or they would both die. A person could only go a couple days without something to drink, she knew. Their spirits would simply dry up and blow away like little piles of dust if they were not released from this horrible prison soon.

“Can I have a soda pop in the morning, Mammy?” Drew murmured. “With ice cubes and a bendy straw?”

“Of course, baby,” Esther said. “And I’ll have a nice glass of iced tea. But we have to wait until morning.”

“Okay,” he sighed. “Good.”

Despite her dehydration, Esther had apparently retained enough bodily fluids to squirt out a couple tears. Cursing her wastefulness, she wiped her cheeks. She was looking at that moisture on her fingertips, thinking about putting her fingers in her mouth and sucking them, not that it would do her any good, when she noticed something sneaking toward her out of the corner of her eye.

She turned to look.

Richard the Zombie was back, grinning moonily through the driver’s side window.

Go away! she thought. Shoo! I’m tired of looking at your ugly mug tonight!

There was something in his hand.

At first she thought it was a stick. He was holding a stick in his hand like he wanted to play fetch. It reminded her of an old dog she used to have. A golden retriever named Skipper. That was the fetchingest dog she’d ever seen. Lordy! He was always trotting up with a stick or a toy or a shoe in his mouth, wagging his tail in excitement, wanting to play Go-get-it! Her husband Burt, God rest his soul, had loved that dog so much.

CRACK!

Esther jerked back, squawking in surprise, as a white starburst suddenly appeared in the glass next to her cheek.

Richard the Zombie chortled, looking like he wanted to fuck her instead of kill her and eat her.

That was no stick in his slimy gray hand.

It was a tire iron!

Richard raised the iron over his head and brought it down gracelessly.

CRACK!

The webbing of fissures in the driver’s side glass grew just a little bit broader.

“Mammy? What’s that? What’s happening?” Drew asked shrilly, struggling to sit up.

Esther scooped him against her generous bosom and began to sob, surrendering finally to despair.

Crack! Chunk! Crackle!

With each spiritless strike of the tire iron, the passenger window gave. It began to flex inwards. Any moment now, Esther expected to feel a shower of glass, and then cold, greedy fingers digging into her skin. Those terrible creatures were going to drag them from the van and eat them alive!

God, let it be quick! She thought.

She cried out as something heavy crashed onto the roof of the Dodge. Whatever it was, the impact rocked the van on its shocks. Buckled the roof in a little. There was a punching sound. The squeal of tearing metal.

She saw something drop to the hood of the van a second after. Something black and sinuous. She couldn’t make out what it was in the night, despite the fact that the moon was nearly full and her eyes were adjusted to the darkness. But it was fast, a blur of motion.

She felt cool air swirl across her head and the back of her neck and looked upwards.

What she saw did not make sense to her.

Half the roof of the van had been peeled neatly back, like the top of a can of Spam. She could see the silver gibbous moon and ribbons of thin clouds, their edges gleaming. Stars, too. The faint band of the Milky Way. The Little Dipper.

A shadowy thing dropped into the van, landing in a crouch on the passenger seat.

“What is it, Mammy?” Drew piped, turning his face from side to side, trying to see what was going on beyond her censoring breast.

The shadowy thing on the passenger seat cocked its head at her, birdlike, then smiled. Esther recoiled from that smile instinctively, for the thing she saw was not human. It had large round black eyes and white skin and teeth like the teeth of a shark. White picket fence teeth. Rows of them, encircled by bright scarlet lips.

Then her thoughts swam and she put her hand to her brow, blinking dizzily.

No, not human… but beautiful.

An angel!

“Don’t be afraid, Esther Rosenbaum,” the thing—the angel—said to her. His voice was smooth and honey sweet. His eyes were blue like the sky on a fine summer afternoon, the kind of day you’d sit out on the porch swing and watch the traffic roll by, the smell of mown grass on the breeze and a glass of iced tea sweating in one hand.

His skin was alabaster white and flawless. So white and pure it seemed to glow with its own inner light. And he had wings. Beautiful, shining black wings, each feather gleaming like oil, not a pinion out of place.

“You… you came,” Esther stammered. Her lips were slack with wonder. Her eyes shone with awe and gratitude.

“Of course we came,” the angel said. “We heard your prayers and came as fast as we could.”

Esther rubbed her eyes. She could almost see the angel’s halo, a faint gold nimbus about his head. So wondrous!

He held his hands out to her. His fingers, she noted, were long and thin and white.

“Give me the child,” he said.

She looked at the angel, suddenly hesitant. Though she did not know why, she was reluctant to pass her grandson to the wondrous being. He smiled at her, patient and understanding. His face was so beautiful, long and thin and pale, with high cheekbones and a narrow aristocratic nose. His hair was long and black and straight. It sloped down from his widow’s peak, gleaming and clean, all the way to the middle of his chest. He was dressed in armor and flowing red robes.

“It’s okay. I understand,” he said. His teeth seemed very white and broad when he smiled at her, but… but… now why couldn’t she think straight all of a sudden?

Esther looked past the windshield and saw something dark and strangely serpentine twisting and whipping within a ring of howling zombies. A quicksilver gleam sketched abstract patterns around the whirling black dervish. There were moist, meaty sounds coming from the dancing form. Thwack! Chunk! Shwip!

Something thunked onto the hood of the van, coming to rest in the well of the wiper blades.

It was the head of Richard the Zombie. It had been sliced neatly off its neck.

As Esther gawped at it, Richard the Zombie’s evil little eyes rolled toward her and narrowed to slits. His lips split into a cruel grin. It almost looked like he was laughing at her!

The spinning dervish came to a sudden stop, and Esther realized it was another angel. It stood crouched on the pavement, one arm extended behind its back, a sword in its grip dripping dark syrupy zombie blood. The angel—a “her”, Esther saw, not an “it”—had made quick work of the zombies surrounding the van. They were lying in chunks of varying sizes around the angel’s black knee-high boots.

The female angel turned her head and smirked at Esther, and the old woman gasped in wonder as the angel’s wings suddenly unfurled in the moonlight, tan with intricate black patterns. Impossibly large, unbelievably beautiful. The wings spread out until they swallowed half the sky, shivering slightly in the breeze, then they folded suddenly and diminished to a more believable dimension. Closed against her back, the wings became invisible.

“Her name is HaMerkavah. I am Metatron,” the angel in her passenger seat said mildly. “We should hurry before more of the infected ones come.”

“But where are you taking us?” Esther asked.

“We’ve come to take you to New Jerusalem, where you will be safe,” the angel—Metatron—answered her. Again, he held his hands out. “I can only carry one of you. Put the child in my arms, or place him in HaMerkavah’s care and come to me. We must be away quickly.”

Esther took Drew from her bosom and pressed the boy into Metatron’s arms. At first, her grandson fought against it, looking horrified, but then the angel stroked his head and he slumped into a blissful sleep.

“Please be careful with him,” Esther said, ashamed she should worry. Her grandbaby lay in the arms of one of God’s divine messengers. Why should she be frightened?

“Of his safety, have no fear. He is the most precious thing to us in all the world.” The angel smiled down at the child as he spoke, and Esther believed him. Her apprehension faded away.

The other angel, the female named HaMerkavah, strolled to Esther’s door, hips sweeping jauntily back and forth. She was grinning, pleased with herself. She sheathed her sword as she drew near and stood waiting outside the van.

The male angel rose through the hole in the roof and spread his wings. Eyes gleaming beneficently, he declared, “I promise you this, Esther Rosenbaum: on this child’s bloodline, God shall restore the world.”

The great wings beat down and the angel lifted into the air, her grandson in his arms.

Esther heard the howls of distant zombies. A whole pack of the horrid things, and they were coming this way! She opened the van door and clambered down onto the sidewalk.

“Ow! Oh, dear!” she groaned, her knees and back crackling. She’d been trapped inside the Dodge, in a seated position, for more than a day.

The angel, HaMerkavah, slammed her door shut impatiently, knocking little chunks of glass loose, then swept Esther into her arms. “We have to hurry, old woman. More of those foul things are coming!”

This angel was not so kind, but Esther dismissed her rudeness. The divine creature was obviously one of God’s warrior angels, and made for battle, not gentleness.

The arm encircling her was armored with a heavy and ornate gauntlet, its fingers jointed and brutal-looking. The sword at her hip was massive. HaMerkavah peered down the street, eyes narrowing. The howls were growing louder.

Esther held tight to the angel in black leather, squeezing her eyes shut as the first of the zombies came shambling around the end of the block, running toward them and screaming for hot, fresh brains.

Goodness, she was cold to the touch! Esther thought. The angel’s flesh was icier than the metal armor which adorned her body.

“Don’t let go,” the angel commanded.

Don’t worry, I won’t! Esther thought.

Letting go was definitely that last thing she intended to do!

She stepped onto the angel’s toes like a little girl getting ready to dance with her daddy.

The zombie horde poured into the street. There were dozens, maybe hundreds, of the mindless, howling creatures. And the worst part was: she knew them. There was Sam Blackwell, who lived on the corner in the white crackerbox house. That was one of the boys who bagged groceries at the local Food Mart. She saw the deputy and the postman, and her neighbor’s ten year old son. They pelted down the street, clothes ragged and stiff with gore, fingers curled, ready to tear her and her savior to pieces.

The angel craned her face towards the heavens. She unfurled her wings and took flight.

The van and the street, the trees and houses and zombies, diminished suddenly beneath them. The cool night wind roared in Esther’s ears. Esther clung to the angel, shivering, as first the street, then the neighborhood, then the whole darn town shrank rapidly below them. It was like riding the world’s biggest Ferris wheel, only there was no safety bar, and if the angel dropped her...

HaMerkavah made a choking sound. Esther was holding on too tight.

“I’m sorry, dear!” she yelled above the howling of the wind.“I’ve never flown before!”

1

Deadheads

The really sad thing, Mort thought as he watched the deadheads trudge lifelessly along the street below, was that the city didn't look all that different than it had before the outbreak. If you didn't know the zombie apocalypse went down a few weeks ago, sweeping away all the old familiar civilizations in an orgy of gore and violence, you would be hard pressed to discern much of a change in the scene twelve stories down.

The sidewalks still crawled with humanity, an ant-like parade. Men in business suits, marching off to work. Mothers and their children, dressed in spring pastels, tramping hand-in-hand as if they were going down to the local park to swing or ride on the teeter-totters. Even teenagers, all anti-establishment in their rock-and-roll t-shirts and torn jeans, loitering outside their favorite headshop. Though the Armageddon Phage had turned 99.9 percent of the human population into brain-eating zombies, its rotting victims retained a faint sad echo of each person's previous personality. Their habits and mannerisms. Sometimes even their cunning.

Of course, upon closer examination, it was obvious the world had changed. Fundamentally so. There were no moving vehicles. Zombies couldn't drive, thank God. The smell of car exhaust had been replaced with the gassy odor of putrefying flesh. The bass and brass of afternoon traffic had been supplanted by the eerie sound of the wind blowing through the concrete canyons of the city and the low moans and guttural gargling of the ambulatory dead. The clothes of the people in the street were filthy and ragged, stiff with dried blood and various other unmentionable fluids. And all of them shuffled along in a dream-like stupor. Slow, swaying movements, like they were flotsam in a stagnant sea. Bloated detritus, drifting upon a languid and polluted tide of death. Zombies didn't get in a hurry unless they smelled fresh, living flesh to eat.

Then they ran.

They ran like greased lightning.

“Lord, those things fuckin' STINK!” Cactus Pete declared, his lip curling back from even white incisors. “Matter of fact, this whole motherfuckin’ city stinks! It's like living in a goddam sewer!”

“It's the decomposition,” Mort supplied.

Mort was just trying to be helpful. It was his natural disposition. He’d always had a habit of contributing little nuggets of wisdom from his encyclopedic brain, even when no one asked for them. He also absentmindedly corrected other people’s English. It never occurred to him that most people found it annoying. One of the few women he’d dated   since he started wearing big boy pants had broken up with him because of this tendency to edit the speech of his companions. He had been shocked when she told him that that was the reason she didn’t want to see him anymore.

“I was just trying to help. If you noticed I was saying something wrong, wouldn’t you correct me?” he had asked her, confused and hurt by her anger. “I’d be grateful. Not mad. Who wants to sound like an idiot--?”

He had winced the instant he said it. He wasn’t that oblivious.

“Oh, so I’m an idiot now?” she’d cut him off, all the little muscles in her neck standing out and twitching.

Her name was Dee Brinkley. He’d met her at a collectible toy trade show. Mort collected action figures, Dee Beanie Babies. She was a skinny brunette with a two-pack-a-day habit and thin lips that were prematurely seamed by a tendency to scowl. She had asked Mort out for coffee after chatting with him on the showroom floor, then invited him back to her house after they finished their coffee, warning him that she had a six-year-old son, but--

But that doesn’t matter, he thought. Not anymore.

She was probably zombie chow by now. Anyone who thought the phrase “blessing in disguise” was actually “blessing in the skies” most likely didn't have the mental capacity to avoid becoming a zombie entrée. She’d probably died arguing with the pack of flesh-eating mutants who were devouring her.

“Oh, so I’m a smorgasbord now?” he could hear her say. “Do you know how much time I spend in the gym to have a body like this? And now you’re ruining it! I am SO pissed! Ow! Owwwwwww!”

Cactus Pete, who’d been traveling with Mort the past week or so, didn't like it when his companion used big words. Pete considered it a snub against his vocabulary... or lack thereof.

“That's five syllables, hombre,” Cactus Pete glared. “You know the rule.”

“Aw, come on!” Mort objected. “I’ve got bruises on both arms!”

The cardinal rule when traveling with Cactus Pete was: “No big words”. Each syllable per word over the three syllable limit earned Mort a goose egg.

Pete made a fist, the knuckle of his ring finger protruding, and slugged Mort in the arm twice.

“Ouch! Oomph!” Mort cried, submitting to the abuse with good-natured chagrin. It didn't really hurt. It was funny, actually. Well... sort of. And even if it wasn’t, Mort was used to bullies. He’d dealt with them all his life. That’s not saying he always played the role of victim in that particular social dynamic. He usually found himself cast in the role of sidekick. There was something about his demeanor-- his stocky physique, his lack of style, or his perpetual hangdog expressions-- that triggered the buddy gland of the typical American alpha male, that made them slap him on the back and declare, “You’re all right, dude! What say you and me be pals?” It kind of boiled down to him being the male equivalent of the ugly girlfriend, he supposed, but he could live with it. If he was a girl, he’d definitely be a career ugly girlfriend. He had no delusions about his place in society.

With all the goose eggs and oneupmanship, the recklessness and vulgar behavior, traveling with Pete was like being in high school again. Most of the time, Mort couldn’t help but laugh at Pete’s immature antics, despite the fact that Mort was pushing thirty. It helped take his mind off things.

Like all the dang zombies.

Not to mention the end of the world.

Besides, the post-traumatic high school flashbacks Peter Bolin generously doled out weren't all that bad, not in comparison to the grim reality of recent weeks… what with all the reanimated cannibals and the entire collapse of human civilization. All the wedgies and goose eggs he’d gotten during his four year stint at Joseph Biden High were fond memories compared to being chased down back alleys by rotting cougars in ripped designer clothes and broken stilettos.

And Pete wasn’t a bully. Not really. Mostly Pete was just dumb. He had more testosterone than brains, and he derived a great deal of enjoyment from what Mort’s father used to call “grabassing”. Somewhere around the time Peter Bolin turned thirteen, his emotional transmission had thrown a gear, and no one had bothered to pull the engine and fix him.

Mort didn't mind Pete’s roughhousing. He felt safe with Cactus Pete around. Pete was everything Mort was not: strong, stubborn, fast, handsome. Pete kicked ass when ass needed kicking. Pete had a highly refined sense of self preservation and an instinct for mayhem. Pete shot straight and never flinched. Pete had saved him a dozen times from the endless hordes of brain munching deadheads. If this were some cheesy horror flick, Pete’s role would be the swaggering hero. He’d find the cure to the Armageddon Phage, save the girl and ride off into the sunset on his bitchin’ Harley.

Mort probably would have bought it about halfway through the flick, after getting stuck trying to climb through a window or something humiliating like that.

Mort turned back to the scene twelve stories below, rubbing his shoulder with a smirk. As he watched the deadheads shuffle listlessly through the street, Mort chided himself for being so self-critical.

Another bad habit.

He wasn’t really that much of a loser. Mort was a stocky fellow of average height with curly brown hair... not unattractive, to be honest, but no great human specimen either. He had nice eyes-- big, soulful brown eyes. He had good cheekbones, a strong jawline and a manly chin, complete with a sexy Magnum P.I. cleft running right down the center of it. He even had dimples in his cheeks. But there was little else about him that could be described as remarkable, aside from his genius level IQ. His hair was thinning at the crown and even weeks of running for his life had failed to trim the squishy layer of fat from his midsection.

He had survived the zombie apocalypse by grace of his cleverness and a natural inclination toward paranoid cautiousness, but it was still a comfort to have a shit-kicking redneck along to fortify his spine.

The two men watched the zombies shuffle along the sidewalk below for several minutes, the wind blowing through their hair. They tried to ignore the terrible, lonely sound of the wind hooting in all the broken windows of the surrounding highrises and apartment complexes. It was like a chorus of lost souls, that sound. It put weird thoughts in your head, made your belly flutter.

“I know what 'decomposition' means, by the way,” Pete muttered after a few minutes. He glanced toward Mort very seriously, his big blue eyes wounded. “It means ‘rotting’.”

“I didn’t mean to imply you didn’t know what decomposition was. I was just talking,” Mort replied.

Pete shrugged. “No biggie.” But he looked mollified.

“What I don't understand is how they keep rotting,” Mort said, changing the subject, “and how they keep walking around. A person shouldn’t be able to keep walking around after the tissues have degraded like that. It’s not physically possible. Not unless the Phage is somehow regenerating their cells at the same time that it’s breaking them down. Maybe that’s why they need living flesh. It must fuel some aspect of the disease’s life cycle.”

“You mean like recycling?”

Mort shrugged. “I guess you could call it that. Sometimes you see them attack each other. They don't do it often, but every now and then a bunch of the really burned-out ones will gang up on a fresh one and strip its bones clean. If they don’t get enough flesh, the virus seems to devour them from the inside out.”

“Yeah, I've seen that.”

Both of them shuddered at the memory. It was bad enough being scared of the zombies. Worse being hunted by them. But listening to one of them screaming as a horde of its fellow ghouls chewed the flesh from its bones like a bunch of starved piranha was a special kind of awful. They sounded so... pitiful!

“When they don’t get enough to eat, it’s like they have some kind of metabolic crisis.”

Pete counted the syllables of “metabolic” on his fingers and the two men shared a chuckle.

“It doesn't really matter, though,” Mort said. “If we don't get out of this city soon, we're going to be as dead as those deadheads down there. Dead and glowing in the dark. The power plant should have melted down already. The only thing I can think of to explain why it hasn’t happened already is that someone must still be alive in there, keeping everything running.”

“But how long will that last?” Pete said.

“Exactly.”

Mort squeezed his eyes shut and sighed as the breeze ruffled his bangs again. He might have enjoyed it if it didn’t carry with it the sickly sweet stink of decay, the smell of fire and human waste, the high ripe odor of death and destruction on a scale that his little human brain had trouble even comprehending. The death of his species. The death of an entire world.

In every other way, zombies excluded, it was a fine mid-October afternoon. The city was quiet but for the moans of the undead. The sky was clear and sunny, an inverted bowl of blue with a few white wisps of clouds drifting from west to east. Birds flitted from roof to roof, chirping and squawking contentedly. They were happy. They were immune to the Phage... and their bellies were full.

Then, from somewhere down the street, a dog barked twice. It yelped in pain and fell silent. Their moment of peace was soured.

“Poor fella,” Pete sighed.

Canines had suffered their own zombie apocalypse. Man's best friend was just as vulnerable to the Armageddon Phage as man himself was. They had suffered the same degrading physical and mental effects. The flu-like symptoms, which came with the initial stages of the infection. Fever, nausea, pain. Coma followed quickly after, then death, reanimation and a terrible afterlife of unthinking, mechanical wandering, the mind reduced to base instinct with an insatiable appetite for living flesh. The body slowly burning out, withering as the virus attacked the cells and devoured them, or converted them into factories to mass produce even more of the mutated bacteriophages. A slimy and foul-smelling biofilm coated the skin. The mucus membranes and salivary glands poured forth a thick, snot-like fluid, teaming with billions of infectious phages. One bite, one scratch, and you were dead. And often you didn’t even have to get bitten or scratched. You just caught it, like the flu.

Twice, Mort had nearly perished when he stumbled across a pack of rotting doggy zombies. Later, after meeting up with Pete, a lone poodle with three legs and dripping green flesh caught him by surprise and almost bit his ankle. If Pete had not kicked the poodle over the side of a balcony, Mort himself might have been shuffling around on the street below, eyes rolled back in their sockets, sniffing for some tasty brain chowder.

Pete was a dog lover. It broke his heart to kill Phaged pooches. Mort really had no feelings for dogs, pro or con. He was more of a cat person himself.

Mort pictured a zombified Paris Hilton, stumbling down an alley with a zombified Chihuahua in her doggy purse, snapping and growling viciously, and couldn't hold back a giggle. Would you still call a doggy purse a “durse” if your dog was undead, or a “zurse”?

“What?” Pete asked. “What's so funny?”

“Nothing. Just one of those things. It's either laugh or scream.”

Pete stared at him in silence a moment, then dismissed his companion's little outburst of mirth. Hysterics from Mort never surprised him. Pete didn’t really get how Mort’s mind worked. He only knew Mort was smart, and that made him weird… but handy to have around. Mort was good at thinking his way out of a jam.

“I think the sun's getting' to you, man,” Pete said.

Mort squinted up at the sky. It was strange seeing no contrails up there. The rumbles of passing aircraft was a thing of the past now, as were the pale gray hatchmarks of their passage through the heavens. Funny how the littlest things can leave such gaping holes in the world you used to know.

“Yeah, the sun,” Mort said.

It couldn’t possibly be the end of the world that was bothering him, now could it?

2

The Merry Shanty

In his pre-zombie life, Mort Lesser was owner and operator of an independent comic book specialty shop. He’d named his business POW Comics. A wiseacre once pointed out that POW was an acronym for “prisoner of war”, but Mort didn't think the observation pertinent. Vietnam was like a million years ago. The kids who frequented his shop wouldn’t know a prisoner of war from a Power Puff Girl. They probably couldn’t even find Vietnam on a map. Mort stayed with POW because, when someone got punched in a comic book for being a douche, it was invariably accompanied by a big, primary colored POW! The swift and simple justice of the comic book world had always appealed to Mort Lesser. There was rarely any moral ambiguity in the world of superheroes. Good and evil were always clearly delineated, and villains never profited from their crimes. Reading comics, for Morton Lesser, was an act of Zen meditation. Story and subtext as basic as the colors of the illustrated pages. As simple and direct as that one word: POW.

He’d read comics since childhood. For young Mort Lesser, it was an escape from the degradations of being a morbidly obese child in a world of young, fit, beautiful children, from being uglier, slower, weaker than all the other kids, from being called Mort the Dork and dozens of other marvelously clever grade school nicknames. For grown up Mort, it was just as much an escape. An escape from dismal, boring reality, an escape from loneliness, and an escape from his own growing disappointment with the banal universe into which he had steered his life. When he read comics he transcended the ordinary. The world was bigger, brighter, more fantastic, and he was a hero.

His business turned a profit. Not a great one. Like his dad used to say, sometimes he ate steak and sometimes he ate bologna. As any small business owner will tell you, the only real benefit of owning your own business is that you get to be your own boss. He never woke in the morning wondering if he’d rather go to work or stick his head in the oven. He was never going to get yelled at for doing something wrong, or get blamed for something that he wasn’t responsible for. Best of all, he didn’t have to work for someone who was less intelligent and less qualified than he was. He’d always hated working under some regional supervisor’s nephew or son-in-law. They were invariably dimwitted, and always eager to quash any employees they found even remotely threatening.

POW paid the bills. It covered the rent for his nice, if small, apartment. He made enough money to splurge every now and then on his action figure collection and electronics. He owned a decent car, a big TV, an Xbox, Playstation and Wii, and his refrigerator was always well-stocked.

Life was good.

Well… it was okay. It was at least that.

Sometimes he got lonely. He didn’t date often. Women didn’t really find him interesting. He might have been able to slide by with his plain looks and pudgy body if he was rich or stood to be rich when one of his relatives died, but he was unrelated to any millionaires. Other men got by on charm or persistence, but Mort was standoffish and threw in the towel a little too easily. His bachelor lifestyle was probably a good thing when the Armageddon Virus struck, however. At least he didn’t have to look after anyone but himself.

The first inkling that something was about to go dreadfully wrong with the world was a strange story on the evening news. It was not a big news story, like the consistently withering economy or some senator emailing snapshots of his ding dong to a beleaguered congressional page. It was just one of those weird little news pieces that grab the limelight for a day or two because it makes people say “Ew!”

The tale of The Merry Shanty.

On August 20th the year the world died, fishermen working off the New England coast on a boat named The Merry Shanty hauled several unmarked barrels aboard their ship when pulling in their trawling nets. There were three barrels, rusty and covered in barnacles and seaweed. As the fishermen tried to disentangle the nets, one of the 55-gallon drums fell to the deck and ruptured. Its contents gushed out, exposing the laborers to a highly toxic and unknown slurry of corrosive chemicals and organic goo.

It was not unusual for trawlers to haul in illegally dumped toxic waste, the anchorwoman reported. It had become a real problem in the last few years, apparently. What set this incident apart from all the others was that one of the fishermen died within minutes of being exposed, and three others were admitted to a local hospital for severe chemical burns and seizures after the ship returned to port. Two of those men were reported to be in critical condition. The EPA was investigating the incident, but had yet to issue an official statement.

Mort watched the news report on his widescreen HD television while sitting in his La-Z-Boy recliner, his evening meal on a wooden TV tray in front of him. He was eating a Tony’s pizza and cheesy fries that night. When the story was over, Mort wrinkled his nose and said, “Ew!” But then the anchorwoman went on to report the latest celebrity sex video scandal—Mort made a mental note: Google that later!-- and he forgot all about The Merry Shanty and her unfortunate crewmen.

Until the next day.

The following afternoon, Mort’s part-time employee came in to help cover the Friday after-school rush. The kid’s name was Fred Moore.

They joked about their names sometimes. Mort and Fred. It was almost like their parents had purposely condemned them to lives of nerdery. Mort the Dork and Red Fred. “Why couldn’t our parents name us Max and Fallon?” Mort had said once. “Or how about Mike and Frank?”

“I like Ace and Bronson,” Fred had interjected.

“That doesn’t start with M and F,” Mort said.

“Oh, yeah,” Fred said, chuckling.

Fred was thin to the point of making people squeamish. He was also ginger, and not just your average, run-of-the-mill ginger, but Ginger with a capital G. Hair as orange as a pumpkin. White skin mottled with freckles. He was so ginger, Carrot Top would stop and stare. Conan O’Brien would say, “Goddam, you’re ginger!”

Fred was a big Green Lantern fan. He also collected the Vertigo line of comics from DC. Hellblazer, Sandman, all the macabre stuff. They were talking about his ghoulish taste in comics when Fred brought up the crewmen of The Merry Shanty.

“Did you hear about those fishermen who hauled the toxic waste barrels onto their ship?” Fred asked.

Mort was leaning over the counter, snacking on some sour cream and onion chips. There had been a lull in business so Mort was refueling. “I saw something on the news last night,” he replied.

“Naw. I’m talking about this morning. On the internet.”

Mort frowned. “I haven’t been online today. Been too busy.”

Fred grinned ghoulishly. “I read on a blog that one of the dudes who was in critical condition died about four this morning. Totally flatlined, right? The doctor pronounced him and everything. Then, about fifteen minutes later, he sits up and bites one of the nurses on the arm. Guy went crazy on it. Tried to gnaw it off like he was rabid or something.”

Mort smirked. “Do you really believe everything you read on the internet?”

“No.”

“What site did you read this on?”

“Just some dude’s blog. Guy works as an orderly at the hospital it happened at. He said it was like the guy came back to life. Turned into a zombie, you know, like that movie Night of the Living Dead? He said they had to strap the freak to his bed, then the hospital isolated him and called in the CDC.”

“That’s weird. Send me a link to that webpage when you get home tonight. I want to read it.”

“Sure.”

They got busy then and Mort forgot all about it, but later that night, sitting in front of his computer in his boxer shorts (with a sock and a bottle of Jergins lotion nearby) Fred’s email popped up and Mort delayed his search for that celebrity sex video to follow Fred’s link to the zombie blog.

“That’s strange,” he muttered.

Clicking the link brought up a DNS error message. The blog had been taken offline.

If Mort had been a conspiracy theorist, he might have been more intrigued. As it was, he just shrugged it off and started searching for that video. It took a little while, but he finally found it. He smiled and picked up his bottle of lotion, squirting some in his left hand. Squirt-squirt! “Hello-ooo, nurse!” he smiled.

The next morning, as he sat in his recliner munching on a bowl of Cookie Crisp, there was an update to The Merry Shanty chronicle on the local news.

“A strange story from Gray Harbor, Massachusetts this morning,” the anchorman with the dead raccoon for a toupee pronounced gravely. “The Center for Disease Control has responded to a mysterious outbreak following the incident with the fishing trawler The Merry Shanty. Health authorities are saying that several of the hospital employees who came into contact with the fishermen are suffering from unusual flu-like symptoms. The Merry Shanty made headlines yesterday following a fatality when several unlucky fishermen netted three 55 gallon drums filled with an unidentified corrosive substance. One man died and three were admitted to a local hospital following their exposure to one of the ruptured canisters. Tragically, two of those men expired overnight, succumbing to an as yet unidentified viral organism.  Experts at the CDC think the virus is linked to the toxic waste the men were exposed to the previous day. The CDC has isolated the hospital employees and is in the process of contacting the other crewmen of The Merry Shanty so they can be screened for possible infection.”

Mort scowled at the television, milk dripping from his spoon. Gray Harbor was only ninety miles east. He hoped the CDC put a lid on the mysterious outbreak real quick.

Before going to work, he checked Fred’s link one more time—curious about the tale’s dubious zombie angle. Instead of a blank DNS screen, his internet wasn’t working at all. He unplugged his router, plugged it back in, rebooted his PC, but it did no good. His link to the internet was broken.

It wasn’t the first time he’d had an interruption in his internet service so he didn’t think too much about it. They were probably working on the lines or something. He shrugged it off and went to work.

“Did you read about the zombie?” Fred asked him later that day.

Fred had dropped by the shop, though he wasn’t scheduled to work on Saturday. Like Mort, he didn’t have many friends. He was dressed in a black t-shirt emblazoned with the Green Lantern logo and a tacky pair of green and orange checkered golf pants.

“Naw, my internet is out,” Mort replied.

“Really? Mine went out this morning.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Yeah, that is crazy.”

“So… what’s the poop?” Mort asked, ringing up a few packs of Pokemon trading cards for a snooty little rich kid. “That’s $12.84, bud… Thanks.” The register cha-chinged! and rattled off a receipt.

“Oh. Before my internet went out, I was chatting with a guy who lives in Gray Harbor, and he said military trucks were driving past his house.”

“Any zombies?” Mort asked.

Fred laughed. “No!”

“They’re probably just being careful.”

“Who? The zombies?” Fred asked, frowning.

“No, the CDC. There’s no telling what those people were exposed to.”

“Oh... Yeah, probably,” Fred nodded.

Fred watched the register for a minute so Mort could take a bathroom break. After Mort had dropped the kids off at the pool, Fred bid his employer adieu. He was headed to Best Buy to look at internet routers, he said.

“It’s not your router. They’re probably just upgrading the lines or something.”

“Yeah, I know,” Fred said. “I just want a new one.”

“Gotcha. See ya later, dude.”

“Later!”

Mort finished the day, locked the door, and walked home.

His block was unusually quiet that evening. Traffic was sparse and there was a conspicuous lack of pedestrians on the sidewalks. His nose stuck in the latest issue of The Avengers, Mort didn’t really notice. Even if he had, he wouldn’t have been overly concerned. His shop was located in one of the older sections of DuChamp, and it was usually pretty deserted on Saturday evenings. Everyone went to the mall on Saturdays.

Mort was tired and hungry. Business had been steady all day. No great shakes, not with everyone bootlegging comics on the internet nowadays, but he wasn’t going to starve this week, and that was always a good thing. All he wanted to do was eat some supper, take a nice bath, and then read for a little while before going to bed. He needed to go through his Diamond Distributor catalog and figure out what he was going to order for the shop next month, too.

He tried his internet before retiring and saw that it was still offline. There were also no new stories about The Merry Shanty and its crewmen on the news that night either.

Mort went to sleep and dreamed zombies were chasing him through his old high school.

In his dream, he’d taken refuge beneath his English teacher’s desk while a mob of undead classmates roamed the hallways, trying to sniff him out. He could hear them outside the English room door, groaning and shuffling. He’d huddled as far under Mr. Pommier’s desk as he could squeeze his fat ass, waiting for them to figure out where he was and come crashing into the room, fingers curled into claws, their low bubbling moans turned into piercing shrieks of hunger. Even in his dream, he was aware that his plumber’s crack was showing, but pressed as tightly as he was under the desk, there was nothing he could do about it. So much for dying with dignity!

He was grateful when he awoke.

His eyelids snapped open in the dark and there was the old familiar ceiling of his old familiar bedroom. Mort smiled in relief.

His body was clammy with sweat. He hated zombie nightmares, but something besides the bad dream had awakened him. What was it?

Engines thrummed in the darkness. His bed was shaking a little. The water glass on his nightstand chattered against his lamp.

He thought it was an earthquake at first, then realized it was the reverberation of heavy vehicles. The bass rumbling was coming from the street below.

He swung his feet out of bed, walked to the window and peeked out.

Big military vehicles were passing on the street beneath his apartment. A caravan of them. The trucks rumbling past looked like armored troop carriers. Green Army camouflage. Tarp covered beds. He watched a whole fleet of them lumber by, followed by zipping jeeps and other smaller vehicles. He couldn’t make out the men inside the trucks. They were too far away, and it was too dark. The whole parade was headed east.

Mort watched the ominous motorcade from his bedroom window, dressed in only his boxers. His face, in the sallow glow of the street lights, was doughy and pale with worry. It might be a common sight in places like China or Russia, but in America you didn’t see military vehicles on maneuvers like that. Not in the middle of the city. Not on his street anyway!

Restless, he turned on his lamp and went to his computer.

The internet was still on the fritz.

Annoyed, he grabbed his cell phone and called his internet service provider. At least his cell phone worked, but all he learned from the automated customer service line was that his ISP was “currently experiencing technical difficulties”. They were also “working to resolve the problem as quickly as possible”. The robot voice then apologized for any inconvenience he might experience due to the service outage and hung up on him.

Mort couldn’t sleep for a long time, but it was Sunday morning and Fred ran the shop on Sundays, giving Mort a day to do laundry and get some rest. It wouldn’t matter if he slept in later, after the sun had risen.

Instead of forcing himself to go back to sleep, Mort walked into the living room, grabbed a can of soda from the refrigerator and sat down in his recliner to watch some TV.

There was a final news story about The Merry Shanty after that. Mort watched it on the Sunday evening news as he sat folding towels.

The CDC was seeking two of The Merry Shanty’s crewmen, the anchor of WMBS’s News at Nine reported. The men had gone on the run after they’d received a tip-off they were being sought by authorities. All of their crew mates had apparently died, and the CDC wanted the unfortunate fellows quarantined until they could figure out what kind of disease they’d been exposed to.

“Local law enforcement and officials from the Center for Disease Control are seeking Alan Twitty, age twenty-eight,  and Mark Lebowski, age twenty-nine, both from Yarmouth Port in Massachusetts,” Brock Bronson, the bronzed blond anchorman said. “If anyone has any information concerning the whereabouts of these men, they are asked to please call the CDC hotline immediately. It is urgent these men be located and screened for possible infection as soon as possible.”

“If you have come into contact with either of these men, please call the CDC for treatment,” the anchorman intoned grimly before moving on to the weather. An 800 number blinked at the bottom of the screen in big red numbers.

Though he was ninety miles from Gray Harbor, Mort felt a little worm of fear wiggling in his belly. He flashed back to the military vehicles passing his apartment building in the night, his terrible nightmare. A woozy wave of unreality washed through him suddenly. He felt like a character in a George Romero film.

Stop being so paranoid, Mort chided himself. It’s probably just swine flu or something.

Less than a week later, Mort saw his first real-life zombie.

3

Chocolate and Dildos

The morning Mort and Cactus Pete crossed paths with the last living pimp, the previous day’s cheery sunshine had been supplanted with overcast and intermittent drizzles. The unusually balmy October weather had reverted to type. The blue skies and warm breezes they’d enjoyed the day before had transformed into an old wet blanket, lumpy and colorless. Tiny beads of rain, silvery and glum, speckled the windows.

Mort woke to a peal of thunder. It rumbled distantly, sounding like a big cushy sofa tumbling down a long flight of stairs. He lay in a stranger’s bed in a small and dimly lit bedroom. It was a woman’s bedroom, paintings of unicorns  and flowery glens on the walls, the vanity by the window piled with makeup and lotions and various hair care products. The comforter and pillows were zebra striped. There were dolls and stuffed animals sitting on the antique trunk where the apartment’s last tenant had stored her bedding. He listened to the thunder die slowly away, reluctant to abandon the fragile warmth that had collected under the pile of blankets and comforters he had huddled beneath the night before.

Behind him, Pete snored softly.

They had snuck into an apartment on the second floor of an abandoned housing complex yesterday evening, after quitting their last hideout. The housing project was named Magnolia Village, but it was no picturesque village, and there were no magnolias, just a cluster of gray concrete buildings, each about six stories high. Its parking lot was full of late model cars, some with the windows duct taped over, others with flat tires or big patches of rust.

Magnolia Village… It sounded genteel and southern, but the place looked like it had been transplanted from some violence-ridden Russian ghetto. In the waning daylight, it was worse than depressing. Soulless was a better description. More like a prison than low income family housing.

They’d managed to move several blocks the previous day without being detected by any of the Phage’s ravenous victims. Their goal-- escaping Duchamp before the nuclear power plant went critical-- was looking just a tiny bit more plausible. Not likely. In all likelihood, one of them was going to slip up and get them both eaten. Or the plant was going to redline before they were clear of the city. But it was plausible they might escape to the countryside and survive a little while longer. Mort didn’t dare to hope, but it was there in the back of his mind: the possibility, a subconscious glimmering of very, very faint optimism.

Magnolia Village looked as if it had been the stage of a violent battle. There were hundreds of bullet holes in the walls of the buildings, punctuation marks dramatizing a fierce struggle, and broad black scorch marks on the sidewalks-- small explosives maybe. Brown spray patterns, like grim abstract paintings, swathed the vertical surfaces of the entire housing project, where weapons fire had blown open countless human bodies.

“I have a bad feeling about this place,” Mort had said. He crept close behind Pete, his eyes wide, his head swiveling anxiously to and fro.

You have a bad feeling about every place we go,” Pete whispered.

“I’m usually right, too,” Mort hissed.

Pete didn’t respond to that. Mort was usually right. “Well, I can’t help it. It’s getting dark,” Pete said instead. “We gotta find someplace safe to hole up. Unless you want to spend the night in a dumpster again.”

“No,” Mort said quickly. “No dumpsters.” His clothes still smelled like coffee grounds and rotten bananas.

The sidewalks in between the monolithic apartment buildings were littered with the withered remains of the housing complex’s boarders. Men, women, children. Most of them were African-American. All of them had been mutilated, their clothes shredded, their bodies devoured. Their skulls had been cracked open and emptied of brains, hollow gourds but for the insects and their squirming larvae. Mort and Pete had seen so many corpses in the last few weeks, however, the bodies didn’t even register on their consciousnesses.

They were only here, walking out in the open, because there didn’t seem to be any deadheads in the vicinity. They had watched from the roof of the building across the street for nearly an hour before deciding to check out the apartment complex. Only the prospects of food and warmth could tempt them into exposing themselves like this. They normally tried to travel by rooftop or through narrow alleys and fenced off back lots.

“I don’t know where all the zombies went, but I ain’t complainin’,” Pete said in a low voice.

The complex was so forbidding, they’d probably fled it, Mort thought. Even in death, he couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to linger here long.

But the sun was going down and they needed a place to sleep for the night. It wasn’t safe to travel at night. Deadheads hunted by sound and smell just as much, if not more so, than sight.

They moved stealthily from wall to wall, peeking around the corners to check for zombies. It wasn’t like in the movies, where you could just bash in a zombie’s head if it spotted you. In the real world, when zombies caught wind of you, they began to howl, and the sound alerted all the other deadheads in the area. Before you knew it, you were surrounded. And they ran. They ran like lawyers after  ambulances.

“The coast is clear,” Pete whispered.

The two men shuffled around the corner and headed toward the most remote building. It sat at the edge of the compound, near a low-lying wooded area. Not exactly a park, this copse of trees. More like the local rape-grounds. But to get there, they had to cross a broad open courtyard.

There were a lot of desiccated bodies missing their flesh and brains in this central area—really just crusty skeletons. Still, no zombies.

“Quiet! Quiet!” Pete hissed, gesturing with the baseball bat he carried for defense. The bat was solid oak and had long sharpened nails driven through the business end of it, making it into a pretty effective wooden mace. They’d learned real quick not to use guns, except as a last defense. Zombies were attracted to any loud noise. The sound of a gas engine or gunfire drew them en masse. Loud voices. Screams. Music, too.

Pete froze in a crouch and cocked his head. “I thought I heard something,” he whispered

Mort nearly collided into him. “You probably did,” he whispered fiercely. His face shone with oily fear sweat. “Let’s get inside. It’s too open here. We’re going to get spotted.”

Pete nodded and they slinked through the common area between the highrises. Flies erupted in a thrumming cloud as the men crept past the human buffet in the center of the housing complex. The corpses looked like bones with bits of beef jerky stuck to them.

Mort waved his hands at the shiny green and black flies, his skin crawling at the hive-like rumble they made. There were so many of them! Fat autumn flies, too. The kind that tried to crawl in your mouth and up your nose.

They selected the first second floor apartment they found unlocked. Mort carried a crowbar for a weapon-- and for prying into things that needed prying into-- but it was smarter to take a little extra time and look for an unlocked door than to make a bunch of noise trying to break into someplace.

“Ready?” Pete whispered.

Mort shook his head no.

Pete threw the door open and swept his bat into the air, ready to bash in some ugly’s head.

There was often a zombie or two lurking behind closed doors. Mort and Pete had seen it time and again. Survivors got attacked by zombies while they were out scavenging for supplies. If they somehow managed to escape, they invariably retreated to some place of refuge to nurse their injuries. Shortly after, they succumbed to the Armageddon Virus, died and reanimated, but zombies were too stupid to find their way back outside again. The undead couldn’t remember how to work doorknobs. It was a mixed blessing. You could escape them by simply shutting a door in their face, but it also meant they popped out of closed rooms like maggoty jack-in-the-boxes when you were looking for some place to sleep for the night.

But the living room was empty.

They went in and locked the door, checked the other rooms. The apartment was clean, furnished, showed every sign of recent occupancy… but there were no people. No zombies either.

“Jackpot,” Pete grinned, and Mort had collapsed onto the sofa with a groan.

Now it was morning. A rainy gray morning in a soulless gray housing complex. Mort lay in the stranger’s bed, warm as a bug in a rug, enjoying the security of their second floor shelter.

Second floors were golden, they’d come to find out. They were too high for zombies to climb through the windows (or, memorably for Mort one time, to accidentally fall through them right in your lap) but not too high for Mort and Pete to jump to the ground below if they had to beat a hasty retreat.

Pete snorted behind him. Rolled over and threw an arm across Mort. Mort nudged his partner away with an elbow and Pete woke.

“Huzzah?” Pete gasped, sitting up quickly. “Whadizit?”

“Nothing,” Mort said.

“Oh... ‘S morning.” Pete scratched his head, blinking around the room, then announced, “I gotta whiz.”

Pete got out of bed and trotted to the kitchen to pee.

They were peeing in the kitchen trashcan because the apartment’s former resident had filled the toilet to the brim with feces and toilet paper before abandoning the hideout. The bathroom stank so bad Mort had rolled up a towel and pushed it into the crack under the door. They couldn’t use the tub or sinks either because there was water in them. The apartment’s former tenants were smart enough to fill the basins with drinking water when the crisis began, a major score for them.

Mort rolled into his companion’s warm spot and tried to go back to sleep, but Pete was an early riser and didn’t like to be up by himself. He returned to the bedroom and poked Mort on the head.

“Get up, sleeping beauty,” he sang.

“No.”

“Come on, Mort. Get up. Let’s have some breakfast.”

Mort and Pete always slept together now. It was safer that way. When you slept together you didn’t have to wonder who or what was shuffling around in the next room. It was also, though neither would admit it, more comforting to have a friend nearby. Simple human closeness. Mort was perfectly happy putting up with Pete’s sleep hunching in exchange for that comfort, slim as it might be.

Mort sat up in bed, smacking his lips. Had someone shit in his mouth while he was sleeping? “Breakfast sounds good,” he said. “What did you fix me?”

Pete laughed. “Dream on, homo! You’re going to fix me something to eat!”

Pete was still in his underwear. At first, when they began bunking together, both men slept fully clothed out of an exaggerated sense of male propriety, scared their wieners might brush against each other in the middle of the night. After traveling together a few days, however, they had grown comfortable enough with each other to strip to their skivvies to sleep…when it was practical. It was something of a luxury. Like eating. Drinking. Being warm and dry. Not being eaten alive by slimy cannibals. Plus, they could share body heat. No electricity meant no heat and air.

It was funny, the first night they’d doffed their outer clothes to bunk down together: Pete in his underwear, jamming his finger in Mort’s face. “You better not get any cute ideas, buddy,” he’d warned. “Grab my junk while I’m sleeping or try and stick anything in my butt, and I will use my baseball bat on you.”

No worries there. Mort had no interest in same sex sex. And he’d awoken the next morning to find Pete’s arm across his shoulder and Pete’s morning wood lodged firmly in the crack of his butt. Pete had apologized, face red as a fire truck, when Mort pushed him off. “Sorry, man, I did that in my sleep! I swear that was not on purpose!” Pete was so horrified and humiliated, Mort felt bad for him and laughed it off. Neither of them worried about Pete’s sleep hunching anymore. Mort just elbowed him away. In his defense, Pete claimed Mort farted like a Clydesdale and scratched his balls half the night. Tit-for-tat.

Mort rubbed his crusty eyes. Scratched his balls. His thinning hair was standing straight up, his face puffy and creased with pillow marks.

“Are you getting up?” Pete pestered him.

“I will in just a second. Turn around. I gotta pee really bad.”

“Why? You got a pee boner?” Pete laughed.

“Yeah.”

“Well, go pee. You ain’t got anything I don’t have. Yours is just a little smaller. And then you can make me something to eat.”

Irritated, Mort stood up and walked to the kitchen to pee in the trashcan. He didn’t bother to hide the tent in the front of his boxers. “I don’t know why you think I’m the bitch in this relationship,” he grumbled.

“Whoo-eee! Now that’s what I call a blue veiner!” Pete cried.

“Why do you always have to be so uncouth?” Mort drawled, then he lifted his right leg and farted in Pete’s general direction.

“Ha! That sounded like a duck with pneumonia,” Pete snorted.

Mort farted again.

“That one sounded like a firecracker!”

Mort strained for one more, grinning.

“Ew… that sounded… kinda wet, dude. Maybe you should go wipe.”

The kitchen was stocked with a lot of lonely fat chick food. Lean Cuisine single serve dinners growing mold in the freezer compartment. Low carb snacks. Rice cakes, which were supposed to be edible, good for you even… yet always tasted to Mort like mummy turds. The one time he tried rice cakes, Pete spit his out. “Jumpin’ Jesus! That’s not food,” he’d exclaimed. “It’s like eatin’ those packing peanuts they ship stuff in! Fuckin’ hell!” He’d picked the rice bits off his tongue and shuddered. Mort looked through the cabinets. There was plenty of canned food that was probably perfectly edible, but he wanted chocolate.

Mort left the kitchen to poke around the apartment. There had to be a stash here somewhere. Being a lonely fat chick himself—one with a penis, admittedly—he knew there was going to be a secret stash of chocolaty goodness hidden somewhere in the apartment.

He found it in a shoebox under the bed. Snickers, Godiva chocolates, M&M’s… and a pink vibrator.

He sniffed it to make sure it was clean (Like any guy would do). Yep, clean, he thought.

There was also a much larger brown dildo under the bed next to the shoebox. It was one of those lifelike replicas, molded from an actual porn star’s tool. Feels Like Real Skin! the packaging proclaimed. Mort estimated it was about ten inches long and seven inches around. Made his dinky look like a baby dick.

“Look what I found!” Mort proclaimed, wobbling the dildo back and forth as he returned to the kitchen.

“Dude! Nasty!”

“Yeah, but look in here.”

“All right! I call Snickers.”

They sat at the kitchen table and munched on candy, grinning at one another contentedly. Chocolate never seemed to go bad. It might as well have an expiration date of “infinity”.

The pink dildo was sitting at Mort’s elbow next to the lifelike penis. When his belly was full—actually, when it was starting to slosh around queasily— he picked up the vibrator and contemplated it.

“See if the batteries are still good,” Pete suggested, then cackled when the massager began to hum.

“Momma always said, ‘Life is like a box of cocks’,” Mort Gumped.

Pete grabbed the big brown dildo. “I see my schwartz is more powerful than yours!” he said, pitching his voice deep. “Join me, Lone Starr, and together we shall rule the universe as father and son!”

So Pete was familiar with the movie Spaceballs! Mort was impressed. He decided to play along. “No! It’s not true! That’s impossible!” Mort cried, and then they used the vibrator and the dildo to play lightsabers, both of them making sound effects with their lips.

It was funny for a few minutes, but afterwards Mort felt kind of depressed. In some strange and vulgar way, their new toys had become relics of a bygone era. The old world, where a woman could light some candles, put some Barry White in the CD player and vibrate herself to a minute or two of carefree nirvana, had passed away. Never to return, perhaps. If humanity somehow managed to survive, women would find themselves in a bad place again. Weaker than their male counterparts, their gender would have to rely on men to defend them, keep them safe, and not just from the deadheads. They’d have to watch out for the psychos, the rapists and the men who’d want to imprison them, breed them like cattle. In one fell swoop, the Armageddon Phage had erased their long, hard struggle for emancipation, for equality. They would have to start all over from scratch.

Mort was glad he wasn’t a woman.

“You ever have a girl use one of those on you?” Pete asked.

“No,” Mort answered, taking the batteries out of the pink one. He set them aside. They might come in handy later. “Why? Have you?” he asked. He tossed the gaudy pink plastic into their piss can. Sploosh!

“I had a girlfriend this one time named Anette. Now I’m here to tell you, she was one twisted little kitty…!”

Mort listened with half an ear as Pete went on to describe yet another of his sexual escapades—this one, Mort judged, bearing a probability factor of eighty percent—in which he, Pete, was the recipient of a wild blowjob while having his prostate stimulated with a vibrator.

Mort didn’t really want to hear the story. Picturing a vibrator being stuffed in his buddy’s hairy brown eye was disturbing, to say the least, but Pete was the type of guy who had to lay it all out. The tackier the better. Pete had once told Mort how a girlfriend ate donuts off his dick, to which Mort had ascribed a probability factor of 10%. He had never seen donuts with holes in them bigger than his index finger, and unless Pete had an extremely narrow penis (and Mort knew for a fact he didn’t; Pete was a terrible sleep huncher) he just couldn’t imagine that particular fetish working in the real world. You always had to take Pete’s sex stories with a grain of salt.

When Pete was finished, he leaned over the table and asked, “You ever had a blowjob, Mort? Be honest!”

“Yeah,” Mort answered, a little offended. He wasn’t that pathetic!

“Tell me. What was the craziest blowjob you ever had?”

Mort smiled, blushing a little. “Well… this one time, a girlfriend gave me a blowjob in the backroom of my comic book shop.”

“And…?”

“And… that was it. That’s the story. She gave me a BJ in the backroom of my shop.”

“Oh.”

Mort shrugged. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay.” Pete thought about it a moment, then asked. “Did you cum in her mouth?”

“No!”

“Give her a pearl necklace or something?”

“No. She didn’t like that kind of stuff.”

“Oh.” Pete got up and walked to the bedroom to get dressed. “You’re a real buzz kill, man.”

It was always tempting to stay somewhere safe and comfortable, but they knew they couldn’t linger at Magnolia Village. Maybe later, when they were far away from the city, someplace remote, someplace safe, they could think about settling in. Find a little farmhouse in the country. Fence it up. Make it into their own little Mad Max fortress, and try to figure out how to live off the land. Raise their own food like the pioneers did, survive without the luxury of supermarkets and internet shopping, cable TV and electric appliances. Farmer Pete and Farmer Mort. It would be like Green Acres, but without the Gabor.

The two men washed in the kitchen sink, turning the water in the basin dark gray, then wriggled back into their stiff, filthy clothes and made a circuit of the apartment, stuffing anything that looked useful into their tattered backpacks. They grabbed food, a couple knives and a can opener, batteries, a roll of toilet paper. Mort found a half bottle of antibiotics in the medicine cabinet and snatched them. There was also a bottle of prescription pain killers. That was a good find. Aspirin, vitamins, and a little brown bottle of iodine also went in his backpack. He filled his canteens with clean water in the stinking bathroom, holding his breath. He tried not to look at the toilet brimming with feces. The smell was awful enough. I’ve finally discovered something that smells worse than zombies! he thought.

Returning to the kitchen, eyes watering from the stench in the bathroom, Mort caught Pete sliding the lifelike dildo into his bag.

Pete shrugged, unembarrassed. “We might need it.”

Mort let it go with a sigh. Pete had a new toy. Mort could expect some dildo-related pranks in the days ahead.

“How much time do you think we have left before the plant goes up?” Pete asked, standing near the front door now. He asked that a lot.

Mort shrugged. “Who knows?”

The truth was: Mort did know. They were on borrowed time already. It had been something like six or seven weeks since the Phage spread across the globe. Almost two whole months of horror, bloodshed, and pandemonium. There had been nuclear weapons strikes in attempts to “cauterize” infected populations. On the West Coast. The South. Several more had fallen in Europe. Mort had listened to that particular gem of a news story on a portable radio before the last of the local broadcasting stations fell silent, feeling his guts drop out his ass, thinking, That’s it. It’s all over now. We’ve destroyed the world!

By all accounts, the DuChamp nuclear power plant should have gone critical already. The emergency diesel generators, which circulated cooling water to the nuclear reactor core, should have run out of fuel inside a week. Mort had no idea why their city was not already a big smoking crater in the middle of Massachusetts, but he was not one to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Mort had discussed all of this with Pete shortly after they met. After Pete saved him from a mob of deadheads. Pete had battened down in the basement of a big brownstone and was prepared to wait out the disaster, but Mort had convinced him that the two of them needed to get out of the city before the power plant went nuclear. Pete, who had a very keen instinct for self-preservation, had grasped the situation quickly enough and agreed to accompany Mort through the zombie-infested city.

It was dangerous, and their progress was marked in city blocks per day, at best, but they had to escape into the countryside. It was that, or stay and fry. And neither of the men were fond of being cooked alive.

“I was thinking we should cross that little park out back. I believe there’s some empty lots on the other side. We can probably get two or three blocks without exposing ourselves,” Mort said.

Mort was their navigator. He’d lived in and around the city of DuChamp most of his life. Pete was from out of town and didn’t know DuChamp from Dublin. That was part of the reason he’d hunkered down when the shit hit the fan.

Pete nodded, then put his ear to the door. Hearing no zombies shuffling around on the landing outside, he cracked the door open and peeked outside.

“The coast is clear, dude,” he said.

Mort gripped his crowbar and they snuck out onto stairwell.

4

The Last Living Pimp

His name was Lavender Baasim, and he was the world’s last living pimp.

Lavender and his goons, the Pussy Posse, had been keeping their eyes peeled since the previous evening, when they heard low voices echoing through Magnolia Village’s grim gray alleys and courtyards. He’d sent his homies to investigate, but it was close to dark. Whoever they’d heard sneaking around their digs, the M.F.s had holed up for the night, and searching for intruders apartment by apartment wasn’t just impractical, it was dangerous. Lavender’s boys had come back empty-handed.

“Don’t sweat it,” Lavender had said. “Just stay on your toes. If they’s somebody on our turf, we’ll catch ‘em.” And he was right. The next morning, his boy T-Rex spied Mort and Pete as the two men snuck through the drizzle toward the outskirts of the complex.

Mort and Pete had originally planned to cut through the weedy park behind the apartment complex, but they had spotted some of the high grass rustling down there, heard the low moans of a wandering deadhead, and decided to try a different route. They were getting ready to make a run for the convenience store across the street when the pimp called out to them from behind.

The convenience store was called the Pack-N-Tuck, whatever that meant. It looked deserted, its dark windows starred with bullet holes, the front door dangling from one hinge. There didn’t seem to be any deadheads shuffling around inside, but there was about fifty feet of open street standing between them and the convenience store.

Gas stations were golden. Their stocks, intended for travelers, made good survivor supplies: jerky, candy, bottled water, flashlights, batteries, cigarette lighters. The only downside was they were also the first places to get looted, but there was usually something the two could use inside. They were rarely stripped bare.

But the street... that had them nervous.

There didn’t seem to be any zombies in the street, but sometimes you didn’t see them. Sometimes they were just around the corner, or hiding behind a bush. You’d think the coast was clear and then, three or four steps out in the open, you heard those chilling groans. And then more of them in the distance, responding to the first. That’s when you knew your goose was cooked.

The two men were so intent on checking the street for zombies, they didn’t hear Lavender and his bodyguards creep up behind them.

“Don’t move, biatches!”

Pete and Mort spun toward the high-pitched voice, adrenaline surging. Mort was so startled he slipped on the wet sidewalk and fell. Pete cursed and cocked back his baseball bat, ready to swing for the fences.

The voice, they saw, belonged to a rail thin black man in a lime green leisure suit and platform shoes. The lanky man was accompanied by two massive bodyguards, each with an automatic weapon.

Lavender grinned, waggling his fingers at the two startled men. He was dressed like every black stereotype known to man. There were big jeweled rings on every finger. Three-fourths of his teeth were gold caps, the other quarter rotten. He was wearing wide round shades, the lenses beaded with rain, and two braided pigtails angled out from beneath his knit Kufi skull cap.

“We thought we heard some white boys sneaking around here yesterday,” Lavender said. “Didn’t we, T?” He took his shades off and slipped them in his suit pocket.

“Sho did, boss,” one of Lavender’s guards glowered, his voice deep and resounding. The man named T stood about seven feet tall and was so fat his features looked like they’d been molded into the center of one massive lump of brown Play-Doh.

The three black men were standing in the middle of the commons, their bright clothes conspicuous in all that grayness: the misty rain, the sidewalk, the grim apartment complex. Lavender’s vintage suit was bright enough to sear the eye, and his bodyguards were dressed in burgundy track suits.

Despite his shock, Mort was outraged by their attire. You could see them from a mile away! he thought.

“We looked for you fellas for a little while yesterday, but I guess you broke into one of our apartments. We figured we’d wait and keep an eye out instead of searching for you room by room.” Lavender laughed, his eyes rolling in their sockets. “We cleaned out most of the zombies here in the Village, but you never know what’s going to jump out at you when you go poking around after dark, am I right, T?”

“Yeah, boss,” T said dutifully.

Lavender laughed. “That’s never a good thing! Lord, no! So… my question to you honkies is this: whatchu crackers doing on our turf?”

“We were just looking for a safe place to sleep. That’s all,” Mort stammered.

“What ya gonna do?” Pete asked, eyeing the weapons. “You thinkin’ about robbing us? We ain’t got much o’ nothing.”

“Heavens, no!” Lavender exclaimed, looking horrified. He placed his hand to his heart, like someone’s prissy auntie. “No-no-no! That’s so racist! You believe that, T? That is so racist! You think, just ‘cause we’re men of color, we gon’ rob you? Pshaw! We just thought we’d invite you boys to the crib. You know. Shoot the shit. Maybe do a little bidness.”

“Well if you ain’t gonna rob us, you mind not waving those Uzis in our faces? Machine guns make me nervous.”

Pete had balls. Mort had to give him that.

Lavender pressed the barrels of his bodyguards’ weapons toward the ground. “Of course. Of course. A pimp’s got to be careful this day and age, you know what I’m saying? How do we know you ain’t packin’, too? You might try to rob us.”

Lowering his bat, Pete said, “Well, technically, we are armed… but, fair enough.”

“That thing?” Lavender said, gesturing toward the bat. He sniffed. “What good is that?”

“We got guns, too,” Pete retorted. “We just try not to use them. Gunshots bring those deadheads running like flies to shit.”

Lavender arched an eyebrow.

“I’m Mort,” Mort said, putting his hand out. He’d climbed back to his feet as the other men conversed.

Lavender looked at his hand but didn’t shake it. He crossed his arms instead, tucking his jeweled fingers under his armpits. “Lavender Baasim,” he said, scowling at Mort. His sallow eyes rolled toward Mort, looked off into the distance over Mort’s shoulder, then rolled away. “Now that ever’body’s gone to dat Big Bar-B-Q in the Sky, I guess I’m the last living pimp. Dis here’s my homies. I call ‘em the Pussy Posse. Dis fella’s T-Rex. And dis my boy Landslide.” The big men nodded. “Let me ask you honkies something before we head back to my crib.”

“Shoot,” Pete said.

“Not literally!” Mort added jokingly.

Lavender flared his nostrils at Mort, unamused, then smiled again at Pete. He leaned in and asked, “Whatchu boys say to getting some pussy today?”

It was such an unexpected question Pete and Mort didn’t answer for several seconds. They stood in the drizzle, staring at Lavender as thunder rumbled in the distance. Lavender grinned back, eyes rolling from Pete to Mort and then to Pete again. Water dripped from the muzzles of his guards’ Uzis. Finally, Cactus Pete grinned and declared, “I say ‘hell yeah!’ Where’s the women?”

Lavender bowed, sweeping his arm toward one of the buildings behind him. “Dis way, gentlemen! Dis way!”

As he followed the others through the courtyard, feet splashing in the puddles, Mort was overcome with a sense of impending doom. Lavender and his Pussy Posse couldn’t possibly be on the level. They were either crazy, fucked up on drugs or they were up to something nasty. Mort felt like he was walking to the gallows. He was certain the three men were leading him and his redneck companion into a trap.

Lavender seemed friendly enough, but there was something about him that set Mort on edge. Maybe it was his constant dreamy grin, or the way his eyes rolled loosely in their sockets, never really focusing, never lingering on any one thing for more than a moment, like they had somehow become disconnected from his brain. Or maybe it was just the way he spoke. His jive-talk was so thick and exaggerated it couldn’t possibly be authentic.

But how could he warn Pete without alerting Lavender and his bodyguards?

Pete was going on about how long it had been since he’d had a piece. Lavender sympathized, chatting in some kind of ghetto slang Mort had trouble following. Lavender’s big guards said nothing. They watched their rainy surroundings with narrow suspicious eyes as Pete and Lavender talked in loud animated voices, rain beaded on their smooth shaved heads.

Lavender led them to a single story rec center. It was a long rectangular building with graffiti covering every inch of its gray stone flanks. That graffiti seemed to be the only bright colors in the vast, grim housing project, aside from the fading brown stains of all the human carnage. The plaque beside the door said MAGNOLIA VILLAGE COMMUNITY CENTER. The big glass windows in front were boarded over.

T-Rex-- the bodyguard who looked like he’d gotten his head stuck in an inner tube—opened the door for them.

“Right this way…” Lavender said.

Pete trotted in without hesitation, all but hopping up and down in his excitement. If Mort had been solo, he would have run for his life, but he was with Pete, and Pete went in, so he went in, too. He didn’t want to, but he did.

He thought of a saying his mother was fond of back before the world died and took all good things with it: “If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump off a bridge, too?”

I guess I would, Ma, Mort thought sheepishly, looking around the sparsely furnished lounge he’d entered.

There were a few cheap plastic chairs against one wall. A couple cheap plastic plants beside them. The posters hanging on the bulletin board looked like they were from the seventies. Crack Is Whack! one of the yellow posters declared. Take Pride In Your Community! another exclaimed. The concession window was boarded over in the same slipshod manner the front of the building had been secured: pieces of furniture, cabinet doors, and other odds and ends, nailed crookedly into place.

“Would you stay out front and guard the door, Landslide?” Lavender asked.

“Yeah, boss.”

Lavender whisked past and opened a second, inner door. “This way to paradise, boys,” he cooed.

Pete went through the door first. Mort heard him cry, “Holy shit!”

Mort slid past Lavender uneasily. He didn’t want to come too close to the “pimp”, just in case the man’s madness was infectious.

And now the trap is sprung... Mort thought, his heart racing.

But there was no trap. He’d entered what appeared to be a large and dimly lit rec room. A quartet of cafeteria tables stood folded against one wall. There were a couple soda machines. A water fountain. A ratty green sofa and a ping pong table. Basketball goals jutted from the walls at the far end of the chamber. The clock on the wall to Mort’s right was frozen at 11:26.

Also on Mort’s right were two dark hallways leading away from the main room. One had a male ideogram on a plaque above the doorway, the other a female ideogram. Locker rooms, most likely. The rec center’s only illumination was the gray glow slanting through a row of narrow windows set high up on the walls on the left hand side of the room.

Mort saw nothing at first that might explain Pete’s sudden exclamation.

Until he heard the moans.

Mort froze, his guts dropping out of him, the hair on his arms standing on end.

Zombies!

He almost turned and bolted from the room, but then Pete laughed and said, “I don’t believe it! Hey, come look at this shit, Mort!”

Forcing himself to breathe, Mort leaned cautiously to the side and peered around his companion. His temples were thumping. His fear reaction had been so extreme, he felt a rush of faintness. Adrenaline made his knees wobble.

At the far end of the room, several women had been duct taped in various lascivious poses to furniture, support posts, even a rolling audio-video cart. And not just any women. Zombie women. A couple of the zombies were fresh-- not too rotten or bloated. Others were in less attractive states of decomposition. One looked like she’d had most of her face chewed off. Another was missing a couple limbs. They were all dressed in lacy undergarments. Stockings, garters, push-up bras. A couple were in high heels. The smell in the room was ungodly. Mort felt his breakfast come up into his mouth, hot and acidic, and swallowed it back down.

The undead creatures were moaning, hissing and writhing like a nest of vipers, struggling against their bonds. They smelled fresh meat, and they were hungry.

Pete let out a peal of laughter, delighted with the horrific 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 toward his harem. The sound echoed in the room like a high school gymnasium. “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!”

The big one named T-Rex erupted into laughter at that.

Excited, Pete threw his backpack on the floor. Mort ogled him with disbelief as he began to rummage around inside it. “I got some candy bars. A can opener. I got a half bottle of Jack Daniels…”

“You got any drugs?” Lavender asked. “Coke? Heroin?”

“I got some weed.”

“Re-eeeaaally?” Lavender looked very interested in the weed.

Feeling sick to his stomach, Mort plucked at Pete’s collar. He couldn’t really be thinking about doing it with one of those... things, could he? “Come on, man. What are you doing? That can’t be safe. What if you catch the virus from one of them? They’re zombies! Besides, 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.

“Hey! That hurt!” Mort exclaimed, surprised, then a sudden surge of anger welled up in him. In that moment, he pictured himself hitting Pete back. It would be a brawl, and Pete would probably mop the floor with him, but for just one second, Mort’s hands tightened into fists, and those fists itched to start flying.

“Yeah, fuck you, too, Mort!” Pete hissed, his cheeks and forehead blotchy with red.

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 more than the zombies hissing just a couple feet away. Pete looked like he’d lost his mind.

“This ain’t right, Pete,” Mort said, his voice wavering.

Pete shrugged. “I got rubbers. It’ll be fine.”

Lavender inspected the bag of weed Pete had 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. Really. It don’t matter. Nothing matters anymore.”

Mort shook his head as Lavender steered him toward his captive sex zombies. He kept saying no, but Lavender wasn’t listening.

“What about this one?” Lavender suggested. The zombie he’d gestured toward was a heavyset black woman. Maybe someone’s wife when she was alive… somebody’s mother. Maybe even the woman who’d lived in the apartment they slept in last 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 guys used to call a BBW on internet sex sites. 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 to slide yo dick in dis pussy?” Lavender asked, pulling apart the zombie’s ass cheeks to expose the puckered starfish of her anus, the deep pink folds of her vagina. Green-gray mold was growing in the moist pleats of her flesh. Mucus, probably crawling with the Phage, dribbled onto the floor.

“God, no! Thanks, but no,” Mort stammered, trying to pull away. His stomach was doing somersaults. All that chocolate he’d eaten this morning was about to make an encore appearance.

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’d penetrated began to thrash and howl, infuriated, enraged, mindless and hungry. Foam sprayed from her snapping teeth. Her milky eyes were wide and soulless.

“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, does that ever make it mad!” he said, then he slapped its ass harder.

Horribly, watching Pete doggy-style the zombie, Mort felt his own cock stir a little. How long had it been since he’d had sex with a woman? Over a year, at least. He might be fat and ugly, but he had the same needs any other man had. He suddenly pictured himself doing the same thing Pete was doing to one of the other zombie women. One that wasn’t too rotten, maybe. Like Lavender had said, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore...

NO!

Ashamed, he wrenched his eyes away from Pete.

“No!” he said again, more firmly, to Lavender.

“Something special, then?” Lavender pressed. “It’ll cost you extra…”

He gestured toward another zombie, a child with duct tape on her mouth, her knees bound to her shoulders. She couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old.

“No?” he said as Mort gaped at him, eyes watering.

Lavender circled around behind him. He turned Mort by the shoulders to inspect a young male zombie, naked and bent over a railing.

“Maybe this is more your speed?” Lavender purred, his lips right next to Mort’s left ear. “Get you some down-low? I’m cool wit dat.”

The naked male zombie growled and tugged against his bonds. His broad brown back was riddled with bullet holes. Half-rotten genitals swung between his muscular thighs as he struggled to get free, snarling like a pit bull.

“Get the fuck off me!” Mort shouted, pushing Lavender away with his elbow. “You sick fucking… LUNATIC!”

Pete was grinding into his zombie sex slave, head tossed back, teeth clenched. “Oh, fuck, Mort, I’m gonna blow!”

Lavender’s strange eyes rolled around to Mort and then locked onto him. His grin slowly curled down into 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 bright red and beaded with sweat. He grinned at Mort. “It’s been so long!”

Then, from the front of the building, machine gun fire. A drumroll of rapid popping sounds.

T-Rex was standing with his back against the entrance, arms crossed. He looked at Lavender, alarmed, then turned and hustled through the door. A moment later, both of Lavender’s guards opened fire.

Brrrapppp!

Pop-pop-pop!

Lavender’s weird eyes were fixed on the door. He’d forgotten all about Mort, thank God.

Mort and Pete exchanged frightened glances. They both knew how gunfire attracted deadheads. Those Uzis could probably be heard for miles. Pete cursed and started wrestling up his trousers, a panicked look on his face. Mort trotted across the rec room floor toward him.

Lavender headed tentatively toward the door, murmuring, “I guess... I better go check on them.”

Then, over the sound of automatic gunfire, the shrieks  of the undead.

An army of them.

5

Dead Days

In the days following The Merry Shanty incident, as the CDC, the National Guard and the Massachusetts’s State Police scrambled to put a lid on the rapidly spreading infection, local television and radio stations broadcast a series of bogus new stories.

If the authorities had aired the truth—that a bizarre viral organism was killing people and then reanimating the bodies of the dead—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 they just couldn’t kick it. It might as well have been written in their 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 positions of authority, and sadly, arrogant men and women never seem to realize that ego rarely equals wisdom. The government’s reaction to the crisis was the worst possible strategy they could have adopted.

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 across the continent like wildfire.

For a day or two, it seemed as if the Armageddon Phage had been successfully quarantined in 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 isolation zone were denied communication with the outside world. They were placed under house arrest, examined one by one, and coolly euthanized at the first sign of infection. Whole families were sanctioned, decapitated, and loaded onto the back of dump trucks to be disposed of in mass graves. Finally, when authorities realized nearly everyone in Gray Harbor had been exposed to the Phage, the surviving citizens were rounded up from their homes in the middle of the night and herded into hastily erected pens in the middle of the town’s baseball and skate park.

Packed together like sardines, the healthy and diseased, they shook the chain link fences and howled about their civil rights. At dawn, the morning of August 25, just four days after The Merry Shanty pulled into port, the order was given. Soldiers encircled the pen, dressed in white hazmat suits, shouldered their automatic weapons and opened fire. Those soldiers, nearly crazy with horror and self-loathing, spent the rest of the day picking off the reanimated when they rose snarling from the great bloody mounds of dead American citizens.

But it really didn’t matter, this incident of inhumanity. The virus had already spread well beyond the quarantine zone.

The two fishermen who had gone on the run, the two most directly responsible for the spread of the contagion, Alan Twitty and Mark Lebowski, traveled together as far as Ohio before parting company.

Alan and Mark had been buddies for a long time. Since grade school, in fact. Back then, they went to classes together, played on the same baseball team, took turns sleeping at one another’s homes during summer vacation. Now they shared a small bachelor’s apartment in Yarmouth Port when they weren’t working on the Shanty. They ate together, partied together, even screwed the same girl together on one memorable and drunken occasion. “Brothers from another mother,” Mark sometimes joked.

On August 21, the captain of The Merry Shanty, Big Mike Wallace, was taken into custody. He was the first member of the crew to be rounded up. He was at a bar drinking, rattled by the deaths of his crewmen, not three sheets to the wind yet but getting there, when three very sober men in tailored black suits walked through the entrance and headed straight toward him. He didn’t like the looks of the men in black, who had come, they said, to escort him back to the hospital. Thinking fast, he told the agents sure, yeah-yeah, he’d let ‘em check him out in they thought he’d caught some kind of disease, but he had to piss first. “‘S all right if I have a piss?” he asked, acting more drunk than he really was. They let him stumble into the mens room alone, and Big Mike dug his cell phone from his pants pocket, hands trembling. Big Mike called Alan, his second cousin, and told the kid to get the hell out of Dodge. He said it in a low, urgent voice, but they must have been listening at the door because the men in black barged in within moments of him placing the call, just kicked the door right in, swarmed around him, and snatched his cell phone right out of his hands. That, more than anything, made a believer of Alan-- listening to his captain struggling with the men in black. Alan hung up and immediately started packing a bag.

They dragged the captain kicking and screaming from the bar he had been drinking at. “They ain’t cops! They ain’t got a warrant!” he howled, but no one lifted a finger to help him. Big Mike died around 3:30 that morning of the Phage, and was the first deadhead to be studied in earnest by the epidemiologists the CDC had flown in.

Alan told Mark what was going on when he got back from his beer run, and together, the two men drove to Mark’s girlfriend’s house in Yarmouth, which was thirty miles from the hotel they were staying at in Gray Harbor. They persuaded her to swap vehicles with them and immediately headed west, where both men had family who would hide them out until whatever it was that was going on had blown over.

Mark dropped off his buddy at a truck stop in Southern Ohio, the same one they always stopped at when visiting their families out west.

“Take it easy, bro,” Mark said. “Call me when you get to your brother’s house.”

“I will,” Alan agreed.

Mark gave his buddy a big bearhug, wishing him good luck before pulling out of the lot and heading toward the interstate. Mark, whose parents had died when he was a boy, headed toward his aunt’s house upstate.

Alan watched his buddy drive away, then picked up his duffel bag and trudged inside the truck stop. He called his brother in Illinois from a pay phone. The two had thrown their cell phones out the windows of the borrowed truck shortly after leaving Yarmouth, fearful the authorities could track them by their phones even if they didn’t use them. By 4 AM the morning of August 22, the two fishermen had already infected thirty people.

Of the two men, Alan Twitty’s infection had progressed the furthest. He’d never had much of an immune system. He always caught every cold and fever that was making the rounds, even when he was a kid. He wandered around Big Willy’s Truck Stop for two hours, sweating, shivering, his eyes hollow and bloodshot. His nose was running like a sieve, his lungs full of phlegm. He coughed into his fist and then sat at a table, smearing the Phage all over the back of the seat and the tabletop. He went to the mens room to piss and deposited the seething pestilence on the door handle, the lock of the handicap stall and the toilet lever when he flushed. He was so nauseated and exhausted he didn’t notice the yellow-green discharge coming from his penis, or the furry black mold spreading from beneath his foreskin. He shuffled back to the dining area to find that an elderly couple had taken his table. He flopped down in another seat, teeth chattering, and wiped his nose with the back of his forearm. When a young female employee came over to ask if he was okay, he smiled at the chirpy young woman and patted her hand.

“I’m fine, thanks,” he said mushily. “Just a cold. My brother’s coming to pick me up.”

He coughed again as she was standing there, snot rattling in his lungs like marbles. “Really,” he wheezed as she stood there uncertainly. He smiled at her, a death’s head grin, and she smiled back sympathetically and returned to her duties.

The girl, whose name was Heather Anderson, had a couple small wounds on her fingertips. She was a nervous cuticle biter. The bacteriophage invaded her body through the tiny areas of broken skin around her nails. Almost immediately, the virions, which looked sort of like teenie tiny little versions of the spaceships from H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, latched onto her cells with their spindly little legs and began to inject their DNA into them.

An hour before she clocked out for the night, Heather was puking up her guts in the ladies bathroom, praying she wasn’t pregnant again and cursing her husband just in case she was. Little Jake was only nine months old! They couldn’t afford any more kids!

She was sick for a little less than 24 hours before she succumbed to the Phage. In that time, she spread the virus to over three hundred people. She died in bed next to her sleeping husband at 2:17 AM the morning of August 23.

A few hours after she died, her corpse sat bolt upright, eyes filmy gray marbles, cheeks sunken, and she fell upon her nineteen year old husband with a snarl, ripping into his carotid and jugular veins with her teeth. Her husband, who had married her just two months after knocking her up at their high school prom, died without knowing what was happening or who it was that was hurting him. He struggled briefly, yelling at the pain, his wife’s face an unrecognizable, monstrous blur in the moonlight, all bloody snapping teeth and swirling hair, and then he died, thinking he was only having a bad dream and was going to wake up any second.

Any second...

In the next room, the baby began to cry.

On the way to his home in Southern Illinois, Alan Twitty’s sibling James noticed that his little brother had stopped breathing. Alan was slumped against the passenger window, his face ashy and still, his head bobbing limply with each bump in the highway. James had listened to his brother snoring phlegmatically for miles. Sounded like he had a terrible cold. But Alan went quiet very suddenly, just as the sign announcing their exit (AHEAD 2 MILES) glided past in the headlights. Jim prodded Alan on the shoulder, frightened by his little brother’s sudden silence. “Alan? Alan, are you okay?”

Alan began to twitch.

Alarmed, Jim hit the brakes and steered his truck toward the shoulder of the road. When he was in college, he’d shared a dorm room with a young man who was epileptic. His brother’s spastic jerking looked just like his roommate’s seizures. Before Jim could come to a full stop, however, Alan’s eyelids snapped open. He looked around for a moment  like he wasn’t sure where he was.

“Bubby?” Jim said tentatively.

Alan’s head snapped toward him, cocked strangely to one side. Some dark fluid, bile maybe, dribbled from the corner of his mouth. Jim Twitty called his brother’s name one more time, and then Alan launched across the seat, howling like a maniac.

Jim cursed, losing control of the vehicle as his brother clawed at him and snapped his teeth. Jim had not pulled to a complete stop yet. The truck was still in drive. Trying to hold his brother at bay, Jim accidentally stomped on the gas pedal, and his truck slewed off the road and tipped toward the passenger side. Alan slid back against the passenger side door. For a crazy-long second, the vehicle stood balanced on two wheels while Jim gaped down at his younger brother, his body suspended from his seat belt. Jim grabbed the steering wheel as Alan snagged his dangling foot and jerked his shoe off, and then the truck went rolling side over side into the ravine.

When Alan’s belly could hold no more of his brother’s flesh and brains, the fisherman crawled out of the truck through the smashed windshield. Alan shuffled around in the weedy ravine for a moment, blinking like a drunkard. Light swept across the top of the ditch, accompanied by a loud purring sound, and his head jerked up. He growled deep in his chest and stumbled forward.

Drawn by the lights and the rumble of passing traffic, he climbed the crumbly ravine. A station wagon honked at him as he stumbled onto the shoulder of the road, but the vehicle did not stop. It didn’t even slow.

Belly grotesquely distended, Alan shuffled onto the highway, snarling into a pair of rapidly approaching headlights. A horn blared like the trump of doom and he howled back at it, swinging his arms like Frankenstein’s monster. A moment later, the big silvery grill of a Peterbilt semi collided with him at seventy miles per hour. Alan’s body burst like a watermelon. Chunks of infected zombie meat splattered all four lanes of highway.

Forty-seven people were exposed to the phage through Alan’s rather messy demise, including the police, the firemen and the paramedics who responded to the gruesome highway fatality and the resulting seven car pileup. Before their shifts were over, the emergency workers had exposed 132 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 rendered the rapacious bacteriophage inert, but the genetic mutation was present in only one of ten thousand people.

Of the travelers who passed through Big Willy’s Truck Stop the night Alan Twitty paid a visit, something like fifty-two of them carried the plague with them when they continued on 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 had sat at a couple hours earlier, catching their deaths while they ate fries and colored paper placemats with the little boxes of crayons the truckstop put out for young travelers. The old man got it from the toilet in the mens room, while taking an emergency dump after eating a bad hamburger 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, who survived the attack, 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, hand clamped over her mouth in revulsion, the red-faced boys whipped around in tandem and pelted across the room at her. She tripped over a laundry basket as she backpedalled away from them and went sprawling beside the dryer. Her housecoat fell open, a breast flopped out, and young master Clint leapt upon her, sinking his teeth into her teat.

Mark Lebowski, the final surviving crewman of The Merry Shanty, crashed at his aunt’s home in Ohio. She put him up in the little apartment over the garage, the room where he’d stayed throughout his childhood and the greater part of his teenage years.

It was nothing special. Just a little room with a low ceiling and a view of the wooded backyard. His uncle had built it for him after Mark’s parents died in a car accident. Mark had fond memories of the little room over the garage. He’d smoked his first doobie there, got his first blowjob-- a neighbor’s daughter, who was two years older than him, and about ten times more experienced. His aunt had done little to change the room since he left. Dusted. Threw out some old Playboys she’d found stashed beneath his bed. His pinups still adorned the walls. His track and baseball trophies still gleamed atop the dresser.

Exhausted and relieved 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 corpse began to twitch. A bubbling moan drifted from his cracked and purple lips. He sat up in bed, milky eyes rolling, then rose and circled the dark apartment until his aunt saw the midday news and went to ask him just why in Sam Hill the Center for Disease Control was trying to find him.

When his aunt pushed through the door into his room, Mark leapt at her with a howl, fingers hooked, cataract eyes narrowed to furious slits.

His genitals flopped between his legs as he dived upon her. His aunt didn’t even cry out. She was a very modest woman, and she was shocked as much by his nudity as his sudden violent behavior. For one terrible moment, she thought her nephew, whom she had raised since he was a tyke, meant to rape her.

Mark 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 napping while his wife was being mauled to death. He’d taken his hearing aid out and put it on the coffee table beside the couch. He didn’t hear a thing, nor did he rouse to see his 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 late that evening, when he finally realized he hadn’t seen his wife or nephew all day and went to check the room above the garage.

Uncle Norman didn’t even recognize what he had stepped into 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 splattered 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 at an exponential rate. Within days, towns were overrun with violent flesh-starved cadavers. Cities were thrown into chaos. The government was in heavy 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, Africa and Australia. The Pope was eaten alive, and two million people watched it happen during a 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 right back. Israel and Iran felt left out, so they vaporized one another in a near-simultaneous act of mutual annihilation.

Zombies raged through the streets of the Old World as radioactive ash rained down.

No one knew where the virus came from or what exactly it was made to do. What did it matter that the virus was man-made, or 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 had destroyed all record of it and sought to dispose of their brainchild in vats of toxic chemicals in the middle of the Atlantic? It was the end of the world either way.

It was a genetically modified bacteriophage, one that had been custom 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 which it used to inject said DNA into its host cells, forcing its hapless victims to birth billions of its ravenous offspring. It worked brilliantly as a preservative for several months, until it mutated again and targeted its human creators.

It was a mutant. An infinitesimal Frankenstein’s monster. For lack of a better understanding, the CDC 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, or 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 the 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 which had developed the “Super Preservative” which 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 Fiesta and noticed that one of the cooks was sick. Mort was trying to decide between the Mega Mexi-Meal or the Super Size Fiesta Platter—diarrhea be damned-- while 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 rushing 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 TV.

He watched movies. 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.

“What do you mean?” Mort asked, keeping an eye on the TV.

“I saw some ambulances earlier. Then a bunch of cops roared past with their red and blues on.”

“Hmm. Dunno,” Mort replied. “Be careful going home, though.”

“Sure thing, big guy. Bye.”

“Nightie-night.”

Mort fell asleep halfway through the season. As he snored in his recliner, the remote in his lap, the first zombies on his block went shuffling out into the street. It was his neighbors, the Feinsteins, a Jewish couple who lived two apartment buildings down from him. They’d contracted Virus Z the day before, at the 17 screen multiplex out by the mall, while watching the latest Jason Statham action flick. Mr. Feinstein was dressed in smiley face boxer shorts. Mrs. Feinstein was in her fuzzy pink housecoat, her feral zombie rictus disguised by a thick layer of face mud. They’d wandered around inside their apartment until another resident reported loud moans and thumping, and the maintenance man was sent up to check on them.

A pedestrian noticed the blood splattered on their bodies and went to see if they needed help. He thought they’d been robbed. He lived about three minutes longer than their maintenance man.

Mort slept through the pedestrian’s screams. One of his plump legs jerked as the unlucky fellow’s cries echoed up and down the street. A few minutes later, Mort raised up on one  hip and farted.

He woke the next morning with a start and jumped out of the recliner, worried that he’d overslept. Flicking the DVD player and TV off, he ran into the kitchen to check the time. It was 8:30 AM. Plenty of time to get ready, thank goodness.

Relieved, Mort shit, showered, shaved and got dressed. He chose a pair of khaki shorts and his red t-shirt with the Flash insignia emblazoned across the front. The shirt, he discovered, was a little tough wriggling into. Must have shrunk in the dryer, Mort thought. He sat in the kitchen and ate some powdered donuts for breakfast, chased that with a mochaccino, then left for work. As usual, he hoofed it. His apartment was only a few blocks from the shop.

It was a fine, clear morning, the sun bright but not too hot. A beautiful, breezy autumn day. There were just a couple cottony puffs of cloud sailing across the sky. The birds were chirping merrily. Mort felt like chirping, too. He’d slept most of the day yesterday so there was a little extra skip in his step.

Funny, Mort thought, there’s not many people out walking this fine, fine Monday morning. There were usually a handful of people on the sidewalks at all hours of the day. Business men rushing on errands. Joggers and power walkers in tight spandex shorts, chasing their next fix of endorphins. Bicyclists. Moms with kids. But for some reason, the streets were deserted. DuChamp had turned into a ghost town overnight.

Mr. Tockstein, he noted, had not opened his newsstand. Mort usually bought a paper there on his way to work, but the stand was closed today, the doors padlocked, and no note to explain why.

He checked the newspaper dispensers further down the street, but they were empty. No Times. No USA Today. He put his hands on his hips, frowning. They couldn’t have sold out already. It was way too early.

Was the flu making the rounds again? Mort wondered. He remembered hearing something about the flu on the evening news a day or two ago.

As he stood beside the newspaper dispensers, a big truck roared past on the street, weaving dangerously. It was one of those redneck monster trucks, the kind you had to climb a ladder to get inside. It had a faded Bush/Cheney bumper sticker on its tailgate and deer hunter decals on the back window.

The warm wash of its passage blew litter around Mort’s ankles. Empty paper cups and scraps of newspaper.  Crushed cigarette butts and leaves. Mort turned to watch the vehicle squeal around the corner, outraged by the driver’s recklessness. Dude was going to kill someone!

Then again, where was all the other traffic?

He walked the rest of the way down the block, feeling a little uneasy.

He noticed the frame and art print shop on the corner was closed.

The Gym-Borie was also dark.

Mort finally arrived at his shop. He fumbled his keys from his front pocket and let himself in. Five seconds after he entered POW Comics, a UPS man bolted from the alley two buildings up, running for his life. A pack of zombie canines—seven big ones, with a hobbling three-legged Chihuahua bringing up the rear— ran close behind him, nipping at his heels. The dogs were making weird huffing noises instead of barking, tongues lolling, foam dripping from their muzzles.

Mort didn’t see the UPS man running for his life, or the zombie dogs. He readied his shop: turning on lights, organizing shelves, alphabetizing back issues, which he kept in long white cardboard boxes in the central aisle. A few pedestrians shuffled past the window as he swept, but no one entered.

By 11:00 a.m., he was starting to worry.

It looked like it was going to be a dead day.

He munched on some chips, drank a pop, read a few issues of Wolverine and Fantastic Four. At 11:30 AM, he noticed someone yelling in the street. He peered out the window as the cry grew louder. A moment later, Fred rocketed by the window, yelling at the top of his lungs. Mort laughed. What was that nut up to today?

Fred doubled back, dived in the front door, and slammed it shut, gasping for air.

“Hey, man! What’s the big deal?” Mort asked, still chuckling.

Fred leaned his back against the door, his chest jerking rapidly up and down. He ogled Mort with disbelief, his frizzy red hair and unusual pallor making him look positively clownish.

“Zom—!“ Fred gasped.

“Take a deep breath,” Mort said, making a “calm down” gesture with his hands.

“Zom—!“ Fred gasped again.

“What is it?”

Fred sucked in another breath, shook his head, then blasted: “ZOMBIES! IT’S FUCKING ZOMBIES!”

Smiling dubiously, Mort turned to look out the window… and fell back against the counter in shock.

There were five very dead-looking people standing in the display window, swiping half-heartedly at the dusty glass. One was his neighbor, Mrs. Feinstein, looking ghastly in her cracked and peeling mud mask. The front of her fuzzy pink robe was stained black with blood. Mort gaped at them stupidly, and they gaped back, their eyes like white marbles, red-rimmed and weepy. Viscous yellow-green foam hung suspended from their jaws, jiggling and dripping when they moved.

“It’s fucking zombies!” Fred gasped. “Real fucking ass zombies!”

Fred locked the door and retreated, shaking all over.

“What do you…? Are you pulling my…?” Mort stepped around the counter to put some distance between himself and the very realistically made-up practical jokers groaning and scraping at the show window.

“I’m not shitting you, man!” Fred cried. “They’re zombies! I saw them eating some meter maid up the street. They were fucking chowing down on her. For real. Then they saw me and started chasing after me.”

The zombies were staring at Fred hungrily, faded eyes narrowed to ravenous slits, teeth bared. As Mort and Fred stood gawping at them, the putrescent group was joined by a couple more ambulatory dead folk.

“This can’t be real,” Mort said softly.

“It’s real, man! It’s fucking real!” Fred shrieked.

Mort took another step back, thinking they should maybe head toward the stockroom and go out the back before one of the gargling dead people on the sidewalk out front decided to hit the glass a little harder.

He saw the zombies look his direction.

They looked back to Fred, then Mort, and then almost as one, the ghoulish revenants shifted their attention to the much heavier man.

No fair! Mort thought. Why does everyone pick on the fat guy…?

“Umm... I think maybe we should sneak out the back door,” Mort said softly. “We can cut through the alley to my place and call the police.”

Fred looked at him, still a little out of breath, and nodded eagerly. “Yeah! Yeah! That sounds like a good idea!”

One of the deadheads-- a titanic weightlifter-- raised a veiny Arnold Schwarzenegger arm and smacked the flat of his palm against the window. Creatine-fortified protein drink mixed with bile and blood dribbled from his mouth, running down his neck and chest. The impact cracked the glass and left a big greasy handprint.

Mort and Fred wheeled around in a tight one-eighty and raced down separate aisles toward the back room.

Fred took the lead early on, of course, and was the first one through the cluttered stockroom and out the back door.

“Come on, man! Hurry!” he called over his shoulder. He hit the door lever with a loud clunk and vanished from sight!

Mort was right behind him.

Heart hammering, Mort whooshed past the white cardboard boxes filled with back issues, moving pretty fast for a fat guy. The shiny covers of last week’s new releases fluttered on their shelves as he thundered by. Mort hit the rear door before it could swing all the way back and stumbled into the alley-- just in time to see a filthy harridan leap upon his part-time employee.

Fred yelled in horror as the female zombie bore him to the ground.

The dead chick was short and slim, a petite brunette in a gore-streaked pink Hello Kitty tee shirt and jean shorts, but her Phage-induced rage and hunger had granted her superhuman strength. When Fred tried to push her off, she sank her teeth into his forearm and wrenched her head back and forth, tearing a plug of skin and muscle from the limb.

As Mort recovered from his shock enough to run to the aid of his friend, the zombie sank her thumbs into Fred’s eye sockets, popping his eyeballs out like grapes, then lifted his head and bashed it down on the filthy pavement of the alley.

“Oh my God!” Mort gasped, reaching out to his friend.

The heels of Fred’s red sneakers rattled a quick beat on the concrete as he let out an ear-piercing shriek. The zombie echoed his cry, a howl of exultation. She turned her bloody face to the sky, shaking her head in triumph, then bashed Fred’s head against the pavement again, driving it down so hard his skull split open like a melon.

Oh, hell, no!

Mort retreated as she sank her fingers into the crevasse and prized Fred’s skull further apart. Fred’s brain fell halfway out with a gush of clear fluid, almost like a baby being born, and she began to stuff hunks of brain matter between her lips. Mort looked to the mouth of the alley as several more zombies came running hungrily around the corner. Responding to her cries.

They were all more physically fit than him.

I. Am. So. SCREWED! Mort thought as he stumbled away.

He knocked over some trashcans and almost fell, skidding loudly on an aluminum trashcan lid. His heart was pounding so hard in his chest he was afraid he was going to have a coronary. Pain lanced down his left arm. Did pain in the left arm mean you were having a heart attack? Or was it the right arm?

Then he remembered: the alley going this way was a dead end.

He huffed to the wire fence which blocked the alley. The gate was chained and padlocked, of course, just like in the movies. Why would someone put a fence in an alley? he wondered angrily, eyeing the top of the barrier. What use could it possibly have, apart from serving as a suspense device in some crappy Hollywood chase scene?

If he was a prettyboy movie star, there’d be no problem. He’d be up and over the fence, no sweat, but he was a real person, and that was a real gut jiggling beneath his matching pair of authentic man breasts. The fence was only twelve feet high, but it might as well have been twelve hundred feet. He thought he could get over it, but not before the other three zombies who’d entered the alley came to drag him down and rip him apart.

Mort cast a panicked glance toward the mouth of the alley.

Two of the zombies had stopped to help the brunette eat his friend. They worried at Fred’s corpse like wolves, snarling and snapping at one another. The third had spotted Mort, of course, and was running right for him!

And it was the Arnold Schwarzenegger wannabe.

Of course…!

His breath coming in ragged whoops, Mort turned back to the fence and started climbing. He curled his plump fingers into the diamond shaped metal links and began to haul his two-fifty plus upwards. He heard a loud crash and looked over his shoulder. The Arnold zombie had slipped on the same trashcan lid he had and collided headfirst into the side of the dumpster.

Ha!

Mort climbed. It felt like his bodyweight was going to tear his fingers right off his hands, and he was having trouble getting any kind of purchase with the tips of his sneakers, but the Arnold zombie had really rattled its marbles against the side of the dumpster. Thank God! It bought Mort the precious time he needed to get up the fence and out of reach before the hungry deadhead got to its feet and lurched after him.

Mort carefully swung one thick thigh over the metal tubing at the top and sat astride the barrier. The sharp tips of the chain link fence jabbed into his ass and palms.

Zarnold snarled and hopped, lunging for Mort’s foot.

“Frack you!” Mort spat, flipping the zombie the bird.

Frustrated, the massive zombie began to howl. It was a high-pitched, plaintive cry. A moment later, Mort heard groans coming from the other end of the alley. He turned on his perch to see two more zombies stumbling up the other side of the passage. Big ones.

Great Zeus, why do you do these things to me? Mort mused.

He pulled his feet up as far as he could. He was surrounded! Zombies were swiping at him from both sides of the fence now, and there were probably more on the way.

He craned his neck and examined the walls to either side of the alley. There were electricity pipes running up the wall from a cluster of meters on one side. The roof was only a few feet higher than the fence there. The other side of the alley was a flat expanse of brick going up at least three more stories. No conundrum there.

Mort began to scoot carefully across the fence toward the electric conduits. On the ground below, the trio of zombies lunged and swung at his sneakers. Mort paused with a hiss. The chain link fence was beginning to cut his palms and rip into the crotch of his khakis. Oh please oh please oh please! he thought as he resumed his creeping progress across the top of the fence. He eased forward bit by bit, trying to ignore the pain, sweat dripping off his pudgy face. He almost lost his balance twice as the zombies jumped for him, battering the fence. Grinding his teeth, he persevered.

He made it to the end of the fence and reached out for the electricity pipes. They were almost out of reach. He strained, stretched his arm out as far as he could without overbalancing and caught ahold of one of them. Using the gray pipes as a handhold, he rose carefully until he was standing on top of the chain link fence.

Just a little bit further, Mort thought.

Mort wavered, hanging onto the electric pipe with one hand and holding his other arm out for balance. The top of the fence swung back and forth. Zarnold bashed his whole body into the fence then, snarling angrily, and almost sent Mort tumbling to the ground-- but with a big sweaty grunt, Mort managed to throw the upper portion of his body onto the roof of the comic shop.

Safe!

I’m alive! No freaking way! Mort thought, grinning in disbelief.

He was still hanging over the edge of the roof, pedaling an invisible bike, but he’d actually managed to climb the fence and get to the roof. He’d survived!

A cool breeze tickled his backside. The sharp tips of the chain links, Mort realized, had completely ripped out the seat of his khaki shorts.

Of course.

Laughing, Mort clawed his way completely onto the roof, his abraded hands leaving bloody smears on the tarry surface. Bits of gravel were stuck to his face and neck and legs, but he didn’t care. He was alive!

He rolled onto his back and blinked up at the firmament. Wispy white clouds hung motionless in the autumn sky. That one looked like a turtle if you squinted your eyes just so. That one looked like a rabbit. And that one looked like a flying saucer. Or maybe a cheeseburger.

Alive…!

Mort laughed. He listened to his laughter echo across the preternaturally quiet city. He didn’t care that he sounded like a lunatic, or that tears were running down his pudgy cheeks even as he lay there cackling.

Alive! Me!

He sobered finally, struggled to his feet. The tarry surface of the roof made a sticky shirring sound as he peeled his body from it. His legs were wobbly and weak.

Fred, he thought. Oh God, poor Fred...!

Mort shuffled to the edge of the roof and peered over the side. He was afraid of heights and the view made him a little lightheaded, but he needed to see.

In the alley below, zombies were still gnawing on his buddy. In just the few minutes that it had taken Mort to climb to the roof, Mort’s employee and friend had been reduced to little more than a skeleton. Several more zombies sidled up to the Fred buffet and began to play tug-of-war with something grayish and slick. Mort realized their rope was some of Fred’s intestines. Tasting vomit in the back of his throat, Mort looked away.

He crossed the roof to the other side of the building, the breeze chilling his sweaty clothes. Sounds of violence and pandemonium rode on that wind, faint with distance: the popping of firearms, the wailing of sirens. Mort stood there near the edge of the roof for several minutes, listening to tires squeal and people scream. Finally he turned away. Sitting in the shade of the roof access, Mort put his face in his arms and sobbed.

He sobbed for his friend Fred, and for himself just a little, too. For having come so close to such a terrible end. His tears chilled on his forearms, and he got kind of snotty, blubbering like a wuss, but he couldn’t stop himself. He had to vent the horror and sadness and disbelief, and felt that if he didn’t do it now, his head would explode.

When he finally finished crying and dried his eyes on the bottom hem of his Flash T-shirt, he rose to take stock of his situation. As crazy as it all was, he knew his survival depended on him being as rational and cautious as possible. He couldn’t afford to be careless, or deny what was going on. His sane, unremarkable life had been invaded by zombies.

He almost laughed, thinking it like that, so matter-of-factly. Not a good laughter either. It felt like a terrible, black, crazy laughter. The glee of some unshaven lunatic in a padded cell, laced into a straightjacket with a diaper full of cold shit.

Mort stuffed his fist in his mouth to stave off the giggles, which were threatening to bubble up out of him any second now. He was certain if he let even one of those giggles escape, he would just keep laughing and laughing and laughing.

No. He had to be calm. He had to be rational.

Zombies were on the loose.

Maybe they weren’t zombies like in the horror flicks, but whatever the citizens of DuChamp had been infected with, their appearance and behavior was one hundred percent B-movie zombie.

First, Mort assessed his surroundings.

The street in front of his shop was mostly empty. A couple people who looked kind of dead were shuffling down the center of the avenue. They were either zombies or deeply shocked living human beings-- who were going to be zombie chow really soon if they didn’t shake it off and find some cover. Mort didn’t yell to them to see which it was. He didn’t want to attract any unwanted attention.

Mort walked to an air conditioning console and sat. He thought for a long time. While he pondered his predicament, he heard the distant, echoing rumble of a jet. He looked up and saw the contrail of the distant aircraft. It should have been an encouraging sight, but for some reason it made him feel sad. It seemed to him, at that moment, that the jet was fleeing. Abandoning his hometown. Abandoning him.

I want to go home, Mort thought.

He rested for a little while longer, and then he rose.

Mort made his way across the rooftops to the end of the block. The buildings here were all main street type constructions with false facades, their roofs at varying heights. He had to climb a service ladder to get to the top of the curving Gym-boree roof, then lower himself about twelve feet to the roof of the art frame shop. He tried to roll his body to absorb some of the impact as he dropped down, but he had never been famous for his grace, and he landed with a meaty thud, skinning both knees and palms. From there he climbed another ladder onto the roof of a small deli, took a running leap across a four foot gap (scared half out of his wits he would not make it) and then he was at the end of the block. He could go no further without crossing the broad back alley that Fred had died in, or the open street, and there were dozens of zombies shuffling around in the street here. Cars zipped past back and forth, weaving in and out of the milling monsters, honking, running over a couple, and the zombies gave chase until the vehicles were out of sight. Breathing heavily, Mort 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, stitching the clouds together with their exhaust. The pop-pop-pop of gunfire resounded constantly all through the afternoon, some of it distant, some just blocks away. It sounded like fireworks on the Fourth of July.

As the sun rolled further down the slope of the heavens, headed on toward nightfall, Mort heard a distant, echoing explosion. He felt the bass concussion of the blast in the masonry of the building he was crouched upon. At the same time, car alarms began to tweet and honk and wail across several city blocks. A few minutes later, an oily black cloud billowed into the sky. He heard fire crackling, screams.

I think that was the Golden Gallon, Mort thought, squinting in the direction of the explosion. It’s where the blast sounded like it came from. He usually filled his car there. More often, though, it was his belly he filled, not his gas tank—on Krispy Kreme donuts, Starbucks cold mocha coffees, chips, and the hot deli food the women who ran the place fried up in the back. They knew him by name.

The dark stain of smoke hung in the air until night.

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 couldn’t help them. He shut his eyes and stuffed his fingers in his ears until his fellow citizens had been thoroughly murdered and devoured. Once or twice, he saw other people watching from the rooftops like him. One of them pointed what looked like a handgun in Mort’s direction. Mort dropped to the ground, but the guy never shot. The gunman was gone when Mort finally rose, cautiously, to peek over the ledge of the roof.

Eventually he came to the realization that he needed to study his foes. So far he had only been observing the chaos. If he wanted to survive this terrible bloodbath, he needed to know how these things behaved. What could and couldn’t they do? What stimuli did they responded to? What needs motivated them?

Mort watched the zombies the rest of the evening, and by nightfall, could predict how they would behave in different situations. He felt confident 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 which suggested 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 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 alley below. Heart pounding, he crept toward his apartment, hugging the walls of the businesses and apartment buildings standing between him and his home.

The street lights had come on. He felt terribly exposed in the brilliant arc sodium lighting, but he couldn’t stay on the roof. He’d die of dehydration and exposure. It was a terrible risk to come down from his refuge, to put himself in reach of those horrible, violent things, but he had to get home. Home was shelter and food and water. Home was a barrier he could put between himself and this nightmarish chaos until the authorities could get this plague-- this crazy zombie plague-- under control.

It didn’t occur to him (not then, anyway) that the authorities might never get the pestilence under control. That control had already been lost, and that it would remain lost. It wouldn’t occur to him until several days later that his old familiar life, his comfortable life, might be gone forever. Not until the TV stations quit broadcasting. Not until the lights went out for good.

He heard an echoing clang! and froze, his heart jumping into his throat.

A zombie moaned. It was a low, hoarse, mournful sound. It made the hairs on the back of his neck stand straight up. Somewhere close, but where?

Mort tried to locate the monster in the shadows. He checked the recessed doorways of all the businesses that lined the street, the lightless throats of the alleys, but he couldn’t see it.

But that didn’t mean, he knew, that 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 but 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 sorted through them—their chatter like crashing cymbals in the unearthly silence—then unlocked the door and slipped into his apartment building.

Climbing the stairs, creeping down the hallways, he heard his neighbors behind the closed doors of their apartments. Someone in 2B was sobbing monotonously. Fingernails scraped against the door of 3A, accompanied by a guttural moaning that made his heart race. He gave 3A a wide berth. The old woman in the apartment next to his—Ms. Finnegan, the cat lady—was praying in a 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 forsake 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 kitten.

Mort let himself into his apartment and locked the door. He put his back against it and slid to the floor with relief. His breath came out in a gust, and he sat there shuddering for several minutes.

I made it, he thought. Holy shit, I did!

After he collected himself, Mort rose and tiptoed into the kitchen. He’d had nothing to eat or drink since morning. After chugging a couple Cokes, he ravaged the leftovers in the fridge. Two pieces of cold fried chicken from KFC and a wedge of Pizza Hut pizza vanished down his gullet almost instantly. Baked beans and a couple ears of corn-on-the-cob followed shortly after. Feeling better, he limped to the living room 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 the news channels to be rife with breathless tales of zombie horror but there was not so much as a whisper of the horrors he had just endured. He flicked through the channels in disbelief. He checked MSNBC, FOX, CNN, the local stations. The anchors reported on the economy, the Middle East, even a couple human interest pieces like it was just a regular day. None of them uttered a peep about the zombie plague that was ravaging his hometown, brain-eating or otherwise. Feeling like he had stumbled into some mad alternate universe, Mort turned off the television and sat in his silent, dark apartment.

If the authorities were keeping this under wraps, he reasoned, 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 owned no weapons, but he did have knives in the kitchen. A couple were pretty big.

He thought to call his relatives and warn them, see if they were safe, ask if they’d heard anything about the pandemonium in DuChamp. He started patting pockets, but he’d left his cell phone back at the shop. He didn’t have a land line either.

Cursing, Mort sat in the floor by the window, holding the big butcher knife in his hands. He 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 building. His neighbors, the Halls, clambered out, smiling and chatting with one another as they unloaded their luggage. They’d been on vacation. Gone to Maine to enjoy autumn’s 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 the dark and tackled them. Jack and Kathy’s screams drew even more deadheads to the scene. After a while, there were more than two dozen zombies massed around the returning vacationers. The creatures ate noisily, bickering over the tastiest scraps. Mort turned from 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 hoes went crazy when they heard the machine guns, the tatatat and echoing fart of gunpowder and hot lead. They shrieked and twisted against their bindings with renewed furor as Lavender’s armed guards fired their Uzis out in front of the recreation center. Loud as they were, the cries of the sex slave zombies were lost beneath the din of shrieks and snarls coming from the front of the building. It sounded like an army of the undead had descended on the community center, a great swarm of angry diseased wasps, buzzing with hunger and mindless rage.

Mort and Cactus Pete stood paralyzed by horror as the sounds of combat grew louder and more frenzied out front.

Then: the cough and tinkle of breaking glass, the squeal of nails torn from wood, a splintering crash. The machine guns fell silent. First one, then the second. One of Lavender’s bodyguards yelled in despair. The yell started out low-pitched, but wound its way quickly to a soprano scream. Was it the big one named Landslide? Or the even bigger one named T-Rex? Mort couldn’t tell who it was, only that the poor guy sounded like he was being pulled apart.

The answer came a moment later. It was Landslide. T-Rex stumbled through the lobby door and threw his back against it, sweat gleaming on his jowly brown face. His eyes were so wide they looked like they were about to pop out of their sockets and go rolling across the floor.

“How bad is it, dawg?” Lavender demanded, platform shoes clomping across the floor. “How many’s out there?”

T-Rex ogled his boss. In his terror, he had temporarily forgotten how to speak. His mammoth man-tits flopped up and down beneath his burgundy track suit as his chins quivered. Finally, thick lips trembling, he managed to gasp: “They’s about a million o’ dem zombies out there! They got Landslide! They-- they pulled him in half like a fuckin’ wishbone!”

“Land’s sakes--!” Lavender drawled.

There was a violent thump behind T-Rex. His great body shook with the impact. Savage faces squeezed up to the wire-reinforced window in the door. Jagged teeth with bits of flesh stuck between them gnashed at the glass, leaving bloody smears. Moldy finger scrambled for purchase. T-Rex turned and threw the lock, and not a moment too soon. The door bulged as the combined weight of the zombies pressed against it.

“Where’s your chopper?” Lavender asked.

T-Rex looked in his fat palms like his machine gun had just magically disappeared. He gawped at his boss, then cursed. “Fuck! I think I dropped it.”

“Da-yamn!” Lavender swore. He stalked off toward the Coke machines. In his venomously bright, lime green leisure suit, he looked like some kind of bizarre, man-sized praying mantis. 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 craziness, and one skinny lunatic in bell-bottoms and high heel shoes could not make this new dreamlike existence any more ridiculous.

Mort watched Lavender retrieve a Mac-10 submachine gun from atop a rolling metal cart. Lavender checked 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, didn’t say a word. He was waiting for Mort to come up with a plan. Stay and fight? 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 at a loss, he looked like a child with stage fright on the premier of the grade school Christmas play.

“Forget that loon. Let’s get out of here,” Mort said. “Come on! This way!” He started toward the dark hallway that led to the mens locker room. Pete fell into step behind him, rooting in his backpack for his gun.

“Where you crackers goin’?” Lavender demanded.

Mort didn’t reply. He wondered if Lavender would open fire on them. He thought the lunatic might do just that. The “last living pimp” was not a rational person. Mort didn’t think he ever had been. Mort had sensed it the moment they met. It was the way his eyes rolled. The way he grinned. Even his smell. Call it Eau de Batshit Crazy. Available at all fine retailers.

“Ya’ll are chickenshits!” Lavender shouted after them. “Da-yamn!”

But Lavender didn’t shoot them. He watched Mort and Pete vanish into the hallway, scowling, then turned his attention to the howling masses at the lobby door.

“They getting ready to bust through!” T-Rex exclaimed, pressing his back against the door.

The metal door was bulging, warping beneath the weight of all those seething bodies. A bolt from one of the hinges snapped and went flying through the air like a cork out of a champagne bottle.

“Step out of the way, T,” Lavender said with a calm smile. His right eye veered off to the side, then returned front and center.

T-Rex nodded. He circled around behind his boss.

Another bolt snapped with a sound like a pistol shot.

Spreading his legs and taking aim at the door, the Last Living Pimp snarled, “All right, you undead muthafuckas! Come and get some!”

*****

“There has to be a back door here somewhere. It’s in the fire code for all public buildings,” Mort said desperately as he and Pete scurried through the dark. “Maybe we can sneak out of here, give those deadheads the slip. The zombies sound like they’re concentrated out front. Maybe we’ll get lucky”

“You’re the genius, big guy. Get us out of here,” Pete said, deferring to Mort for the time being.

Behind them came the snap and boom of the lobby door slamming into the floor. The crazed creatures had managed to batter their way through the steel barrier. The howls of the zombies increased in volume as they poured inside. If hell had a glee club, Mort thought, that’s what they would sound like.

“Shit! They got in!” Pete hissed.

“I know. Stay quiet. Lavender and his bodyguard will keep them occupied for a little while.”

The ground beneath Mort’s feet thrummed as the zombies swarmed into the gymnasium. T-Rex screamed. A second later, Lavender began to spray the advancing horde with 9 mm bullets.

“Shit!” Pete swore. “Shit-shit-shit! Our gooses are fuckin’ cooked, Mort!”

“Just stay calm,” Mort hissed.

They zigged through the locker room, zagged down another, shorter hallway.

“Well, it was nice hanging with you, bro. I’ve had a real swell time--”

“There’s the emergency exit! Let’s see if the coast is clear!”

The handles of the double doors were chained together, but Mort had not forgotten his crowbar. He slid it from his backpack and hooked it in the clasp of the lock. Thank goodness the chains were pulled tight, or he wouldn’t have been able to apply much force to the lock. The two men puffed and yanked together. Finally, faces red, they managed to snap the lock. Mort plucked the broken clasp from the links and the chain slithered to the floor.

Lavender had stopped shooting. Mort couldn’t tell whether the zombies had gotten him and T-Rex or not, but the deadheads were still howling and—judging by the cacophony of destruction coming from the main recreation area—the angry dead were keeping themselves occupied 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 double doors. Mort could see only the outline of Pete’s body as his partner crouched behind him. Steeling himself for battle, Mort tightened his grip on the crowbar, his palms slick with sweat.

Flip a coin, he thought. Heads we live, tails we die.

He nudged the fire exit open. Outside, rainy gray light and wet sidewalk. A waft of misty air.

Almost instantly, a female zombie lunged in at Mort.

Pete stepped forward, shoving his gun in the creature’s mouth. “Eat this!” he snarled, pulling the trigger.

The gun did not fire.

Mort had dived away from the zombie’s pinwheeling claws. He rolled onto his back and looked up at Pete and the deadhead.

“No way,” he said.

He cocked his head, trying to figure out if what he was seeing was real or not.

The female zombie stumbled back, trying to dislodge the object Pete had shoved down her throat. It was the big brown dildo Pete had taken from the apartment. In the dark hallway, and in his nervousness, Pete had pulled the dildo from his backpack instead of his weapon.

It turned out to be a stroke of good luck. The giant dildo gagged the female zombie’s howls, which might have attracted the attention of the horde in front of the building. The afro-headed zombie whipped her upper torso back and forth, her bare titties swinging, as she gnawed on the rubber shaft and tugged at the replica cock and balls.

Mort didn’t wait for her to bite through the dildo or pull it from her gullet, and Pete was going to be useless. He was just standing there, staring at the zombie with an amazed grin. Mort clambered to his feet and stepped toward her, raising 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 sizable dent in her head, too, 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 might come in handy,” Pete said with a grin.

There were no other zombies visible on this side of the housing project. Lady Luck must have the hots for one of us, Mort thought. Mort and Pete took off running, trying to stay low. They dashed around one last monolithic structure and set off across the street.

Magnolia Village receded behind them. They scurried down the sidewalk, dreadfully exposed. They ran past a pawn shop and a liquor store, an ethnic grocer and a place that offered payday loans. They tried the doors of several businesses, but found them all locked and securely barred. It wasn’t too long before they heard the howl of a nearby zombie, who had spotted them while shuffling around an empty lot, gnawing on a dead cat.

“Dang!” Mort cursed under his breath.

“This way! Hurry!” Pete urged him, taking off in a sprint.

When they first met, Mort had struggled to keep up with Pete, but weeks of exertion had begun to hone his body into a more efficient machine. Mort was surprised to find he was only falling a little behind his much slimmer partner today. He was still gasping and wheezing after only a block or two, but at least Pete didn’t have to stop and wait for him to catch up, as he’d had to do earlier.

They rounded a corner, pursued by the howling zombie, who was still holding the dead cat by its tail.

“Damn!” Pete cried, skidding to a halt.

The street ahead of them was occupied by more of the undead.

Three zombies were limping around in the drizzle, two large males and one slim girl-child in a ragged going-to-church dress. Their wet hair clung to their scalps in dark tendrils. Their clothes were ragged and colorless, as was their flesh. Their heads jerked around at the cries of the pursuing zombie, then they joined the chase, pelting toward Mort and Pete, adding their snarls to the lethal choir.

Pete turned on his heel and took off at a perpendicular angle.

Mort followed.

The two men veered across an empty lot, weaving around piles of lumber and building supplies, then leaping over the remnants of a brick wall. Well, Pete leapt. Mort flipped over it on his belly like a fat guy at boot camp and went sprawling in the mud.

The four zombies—joined now by two more of the running dead—were in hot pursuit, screaming their heads off.

Pete dropped his duffel bag and started rooting through it in the rain. He found his gun and stood up, firing a couple shots at the deadheads.

They were wild shots—wild enough to make Mort throw his arms in front of his face-- but one lucky round found its target. It struck the little girl in the going-to-church dress right in the middle of her forehead. She flew out of her patent leather shoes as her head exploded between her pigtails like a jar of strawberry jam.

“Fuck you, bitch!” Pete crowed.

Mort ran past his buddy, sliding a little in the muck. Pete fired off a couple more shots, then scooped up his duffel bag and put the pedal to the metal. He caught up to Mort in about three strides.

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 bore 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, intent on running 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 lift him, the driver realized they were real live people and tromped on the brakes.

The oncoming vehicle-- some kind of black sports car--  slewed sideways, wheels squealing on the wet blacktop. The driver steered into the slide expertly, regained traction, and then executed an impossible-looking reverse drift, curving the trajectory of the vehicle just enough to clear the two men. If the streets were not so slick, the car would have plowed right over them. As it was, it came to a stop a couple feet away.

Mort ogled the sleek sports car with amazement. The vehicle had passed so close its wind had blown his wet bangs back.

“Come on, lard ass,” Pete said, trying to pull him up.

Mort got to his feet as the driver’s side door swung up.

Up, not out.

Cool, Mort thought.

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

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

Mort and Pete looked over their shoulders-- never a good thing to do in the horror movies. Turns out, it wasn’t a bright idea in real life either. 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 dicks!” the Asian woman shouted.

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 boasted, eyeing Mort in the rear view mirror.

A moment later, she hit the brakes, then threw the car into gear and stomped on the gas pedal, bright red lips splitting back from her teeth.

The Benz rocketed forward, wheels squealing. Zombies caromed off the 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 the corner, the stunning beauty lit a cigarette and said,“The name’s Dao-ming. Who the hell are you?”

7

Da Vinci

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 had come as 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. The painting was strictly a hobby, or so she had always said to herself, but she was good. She had even sold a few pieces of her work through 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 when it sold, and was displayed in the lobby of a large law firm downtown.

She was a naturally happy person and loved her husband and her children with a ferocity that surprised even herself. Though she worked and had many hobbies, her family took precedence over all else. Her family was her life.

She went to the gym three times a week to maintain her figure, ate healthy and did her best to insure her family was healthy, happy and productive people, too. She was even a member of her school district’s PTA and room mother for her daughter Amy’s seventh grade class.

She was lithe, tan and blonde. She had fantastic legs, respectable c-cup breasts and a tight butt, not a hint of cellulite anywhere. Her husband, Sal, couldn’t get enough of her body, even after fifteen years of marriage, but that was an interest she encouraged.

Her husband was no slouch, either. Sal was still a tiger in the sack, even though he was forty. Aggressive, energetic, masculine. Not to mention very well hung. In fact, he had the biggest balls she’d ever seen. She would never have imagined she could get so turned on by balls. When she was a teenager, she and her friend Kathy Nader had shoplifted a Playgirl magazine from a convenience store, giggling over all the dirty photos later at Kathy’s house. They had both agreed that day: balls were ugly, wrinkly things. Like big pink raisins covered in kinky hair. But nuzzling up to Sal’s big coconuts made her plumbing spring a leak every time. It was shameful!

Sal was a good looking man, with curly dark hair gone gray at the temples. Women flirted with him all the time. Sometimes right in front of Anne. Every now and then she wondered if Sal had ever cheated on her—and she did this with a mixture of jealousy and arousal—but he seemed devoted to her, and she’d never once caught him flirting back.

A good old-fashioned Nice Guy, that was her Sal.

No, sir, they didn’t make ‘em like Sal anymore! He made a good living for them. He took pride in the thought that his family never had to go 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 an independent woman, but Sal was the real breadwinner. Even better, he never held it over her head, as her father used to do to her mother.

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

Anne-Marie DeAngelo contracted the Armageddon Virus on August 31, while picking up her two older kids from school. It was the same day Mort Lesser saw his first zombie, and not long after Fred Moore was murdered in the alley behind POW! Comics, his brains prized from his shattered skull and devoured by a young woman in a Hello Kitty T-shirt.

It was a Monday, a little after 3:00 PM. One of her fellow room mothers had come to the window of her car to gossip before the bell rang and let the kids out.

The other room mother, a redhead named Sharon Yates, transmitted the virus to Anne as they chatted about Helen Dorsky, a fellow room mom who was getting a divorce after her husband caught her in bed with their dentist.

Sharon was a real character, the type of gal some people might describe as “quirky”. As she laughed about Helen Dorsky’s marital problems-- “getting drilled by her dentist,” was how Sharon put it-- millions of mutated bacteriophages billowed from her mouth and nose, riding upon the microscopic droplets of her respiration. Several hundred thousand of these blew directly into Anne Marie’s face as she sat smiling and nodding behind the steering wheel of her SUV. The phages coursed into her lungs as she inhaled to chuckle with her friend. Ricky Gene, in the backseat, inhaled a couple thousand, too, as he sat sucking cherry Kool-Aid placidly from his sippy cup, cherubic lips stained pink.

Finally the bell rang, interrupting Sharon’s deadly monologue. “Oops! There’s the bell. I better get back to the car. Talk to you later, girlfriend,” Sharon chirped. She walked away, hips swinging, the rose and tribal tattoo on her lower back peeking out over the waistband of her blue jeans. In the backseat, Ricky Gene squealed, “‘Obert! ‘Obert coming, Mom!” The kids piled in. Robert first, then Amy, a butterfly sticker on her cheek.

“I want a sticker!” Ricky Gene hollered.

“This one’s mine, Ricky. I got it for good behavior,” Amy replied haughtily. “When you’re big enough to go to school, maybe you’ll get one, too.”

“Mo-ooom!” Ricky squalled.

By bedtime, all three children were infected.

Her husband, Sal, was one of the very rare people who carried the faulty gene which rendered him immune to the mutant phage, but as with so many of the immune, who would die by violence or accident in the weeks that followed the pandemic, his luck, genetically speaking, would do him little good.

Though all of the DeAngelo clan were fit, their immune systems could only fight the infection so long. All three children were feverish the next morning. Anne-Marie tried to call the school to let them know the kids weren’t coming in today, but her cell wasn’t working. It buzzed for a moment, then a recorded message stated that her service was temporarily disrupted. Technicians were working to restore it, sorry for any inconvenience. “Screw it,” Anne-Marie sniffed, and she returned to bed. “Move over, buster,” she said to Ricky Gene, who was sprawled in her bed in his PJ bottoms, face pale and sweaty.

By 10 AM, Anne-Marie was too sick to get out of bed.

She drifted in and out of strange dreams. Her muscles alternated between violent tremors and excruciating cramps. Her bloodshot eyes swam in pools of sticky tears as she coughed hoarsely, spitting up wads of yellow, infectious mucus. She woke and rolled over to check on her youngest child. When she couldn’t rouse Ricky Gene, she tried to call Sal at the post office. Her cell still wasn’t working. She tried to get up, get Ricky Gene to the hospital somehow, and collapsed onto the floor beside the bed.

She died at 12:32 PM.

Her dying thoughts were of her kids.

Sal came home early that day in a panic. There were military and police everywhere. People were rioting in the streets. He’d heard rumors of a terrorist attack, disease, but no concrete information. One of their drivers had gotten attacked, returned to the post office with several bites and scratches on her arms, hands and face. Sal left shortly after the Postmaster locked the doors, slipping out one of the rear exits because there was a crazy man at the front, screaming and banging on the glass.

Sal planned to load the family up and get them out of the city. His parents owned a cabin up north. It was remote, with stores of food and water. They would be safe there until whatever this madness was had passed and things were back to normal.

Anne-Marie was standing motionless in the middle of the parlor when he opened the front door.

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.

“Baby, we have to get out of town!” Sal said breathlessly. He had not yet shut the door.

She slowly raised her head and looked at him.

“There’s something really bad going down. I’m not sure what it is, but there are cops everywhere. People are rioting in the streets--”

He finally noticed the pallor of her skin. The foam dripping from her chin.

“Baby--?”

Before he could ask her what was wrong, she ran at him.

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 table they always threw their keys on when they came home from work, splintering the hundred-year-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 with her fingernails.

When little Ricky Gene came stumbling down the stairs in his PJ bottoms twenty minutes later, his jaw hanging open, his cowlick sticking straight up, Anne-Marie crouched over her kill and snarled at him.

Ricky Gene sidled cautiously around his mother and wandered out into the front lawn, groaning softly.

Anne-Marie watched the little boy totter across the lawn and down the street, her lips peeled back from her teeth, then leaned in between her husband’s thighs. She sank her teeth into his scrotum, then twisted her head back and to the side with a snarl, the flesh tearing, blood running down her chin. Great flutters of pleasure, like silky butterfly wings, flickered through her body as she swallowed the warm wet meat.

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 reanimated 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 bare legs, once so long and smooth and tan.

She was still dressed in the shorts, sleeveless T-shirt and housecoat she’d 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 frantically past her, too concerned with the pack of zombie dogs behind him to notice her until it was too late). Without fresh meat to fuel its life processes, the ravenous phage was eating her 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 inflexible, desiccated tissue.

She had no memory of her happy living past, but that was a blessing. She had no sense of self, no higher mental processes, no understanding of the past or the future, cause or effect. Nothing. She simply Was. And that Was was only two things: pain and hunger.

She was wandering down Parkway Road today. Across town, Mort Lesser and Peter Bolin were leaping into the back of a black Mercedes-Benz. The thing which had once been Anne-Marie DeAngelo was limping down the sidewalk, every cell of her body burning, shrieking for sustenance, a horrid, empty, withered thing.

She could feel the rain drumming down on her. It was cold and wet, but those things meant nothing to her. It was only physical sensation. Once a rainy afternoon would have filled her with a sweet melancholy, would have compelled her 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 on the moist pavement. Each step was like walking on chunks of jagged glass.

She heard a sound and came to attention, her moan trailing off. She cocked her head, listening, filmy eyes rolling in their pitted sockets.

It was a Food sound!

She didn’t actually have a word for food anymore, nor the sounds that meant that food was near. All such things were beyond her. A living human being would have thought: Music! But she no longer thought. All that remained was sensation and instinct. Stimuli and hunger.

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 rotten leeches peeled back from her teeth, which were chipped and moldy, slick and sharp. She’d broken most of them gnawing on bones, trying to get to the marrow inside, the first one on her husband’s thighbone.

She did not remember the name of the man who was singing. She’d once enjoyed listening to Johnny Cash, but the woman who used to collect vinyl record albums with her husband, buying them at junk shops and used music stores, 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, homing in on the sound, growling at the pain it drove into her head.

Kill-eat-kill-eat!

She found it with her eyes then. A small black box with a gray cord tied around the handle.

The gray cord was a clothesline, but she didn’t know that. The small black box was a battery powered tape player. She didn’t know that either. The play button was taped down with a piece of black electric tape, and the player itself was swaddled in cloth to pad it from impacts.

She only saw vague shapes through the blurry lenses of her cataract eyes, light and shadow, motion. She relied more on scent and sound to zero in on her prey.

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

Kill! Kill it! It hurt so bad!

She wanted to rip its guts out, bite it, bash it on the ground, make it dead, make it silent, and eat it.

The cord twitched. The tape deck skittered away from her.

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

It jittered down the sidewalk. Crossed the street. Jumped up over the curb.

She followed.

The twitching cord snaked across the pavement toward a gray-walled building, then angled up and disappeared into an open ground floor window.

Anne-Marie caught movement out of the corner of her eye. She 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 then, a streak of red, heard a thwipping sound.

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

A living person would have died within moments from shock or massive blood loss. The broadhead arrow tip was wicked sharp and had done massive damage during its brief passage through her body, slicing through flesh and esophagus, muscle and nerve. But Anne-Marie DeAngelo was already technically dead. Though her spinal cord had been neatly severed, she bled very little from the grievous injury 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 taut. The shaft 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 weighed one-twenty. Her weight had varied very little from that all her adult life, except when she was pregnant. The thing Anne-Marie had become, however, weighed 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. Up, up, in two foot increments. Her body flopped through the open window, boneless as a Raggedy Anne doll.

She came to rest staring 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. Even now she wanted to kill him, eat him.

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

The room was 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 pinned to cork boards. On top of 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 seventies and a large, only slightly less ancient copier. The gray industrial carpet was soiled with the concentric brown stains of the big man’s 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 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 numerous assorted recessions and gas shortages which followed. There were still train tracks crisscrossing 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 had chosen the freight company because it was familiar. He had been a midlevel department supervisor at DuChamp Freight for nearly a decade, but the job had only been a front for his actual 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 Da Vinci and relied on him to dispose of informants, pesky law enforcement officers who couldn’t be bought off and the odd business rival or two. When the Armageddon Virus swept through the city of DuChamp, Mr. Rourke was the freight company’s highest paid employee. He drew a salary which made the CEO’s look paltry in comparison. The family paid him lavishly because he was very, very good at his job.

Both of his jobs, to be honest-- his day job and his night job.

He was an effective department supervisor: methodical, pragmatic and something of a perfectionist. His underlings were terrified of him, and rightly so. He had as little patience for slackers as he did for the inept. He was jokingly called the Black Widow around the offices due to the number of employees he had terminated for failing to perform their duties to his standards, but never to his face. Never to his face. His department was the most efficient and productive crew in the company. He was not well-liked, but he was respected, and that pleased him most of all.

He was a good assassin for the very same reasons.

His only nod to individuality as an assassin was the fact that he liked to dispatch his targets 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: Da Vinci.

The design and fabrication of deadly instruments was his sole passion. In his apartment were sketches for all sorts of killing devices, from the prosaic-- knives, guns, arrows-- to the sublime.

He had painstakingly manufactured innumerable killing devices: mechanical racks that pulled people apart or whittled them down one sliver of flesh at a time. Clockwork killing machines that chewed a person from the feet up, spitting their mangled remains out the back. Strange things. Sexual things. He had a device that could be slid up a subject’s rectum and then triggered, discharging retractible razor sharp hooks. The device was self-lubricating, with a crank on the handle which could be turned to mechanically rotate the penetrating end. He sometimes employed a multi-jointed implement he called the Devil’s Codpiece, which he strapped to his cock so that he could fuck his victims to death.

He had dozens of spiral bound notebooks full of diagrams and blueprints for other equally brutal implements of torture and murder, organized and annotated, but his favorite sketches were affixed to the walls of his workshop. He called it his Altar of Death. It was his one romantic indulgence. Death was his goddess, he sometimes mused. In all her seductive forms.

His handler had seen his sketches the one time he’d visited Rourke’s workshop in person.

Rourke only knew his handler as Mr. Smith, although he’d acted as Rourke’s manager for nearly the entire decade he’d been killing for the family. Smith had come to deliver a message to the killer in person that day at the request of their employer. The man was of medium height, with slate gray hair, thick and combed straight back from his brow. An unremarkable man in every way-- except for his eyes. Da Vinci’s handler had the gray, soulless eyes of a goat.

Smith had perused all the blueprints and half-realized killing fantasies and laughed nervously. “You’re a regular Da Vinci, aren’t you?” he’d asked in his soft, cultivated voice… and the nickname had spread through the underworld like some kind of infectious disease.

Obviously Smith had been impressed enough to mention it to Rourke’s employer. He’s a regular Da Vinci... And his boss had passed the meme on. Rourke had considered finding Smith and killing him for that lapse, but in the end he let it slide. He liked his new nickname. It appealed to his vanity.

Take the arrow he’d used to catch Anne-Marie, 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’d used a barred turkey feather for the fletching of the arrow, though he preferred peacock when he was feeling whimsical. The arrowhead was his own design, elegant and deadly, and though he’d contracted a local metal fabrication company to produce it, he’d 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 from any other penetrating bolt cattle gun, its stainless steel barrel and hand grip were deliberately phallic. Resembling an H. R. Giger prop designed for a sci-fi/horror flick, the pistol he carried now toward the paralyzed zombie was as frighteningly erotic as it was lethal.

It was one of his favorites.

Gladius Mortis.

Cock of Death.

He had used it quite often in 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. The bolt penetrated the victim’s skull, scrambling his or her brains. It killed them instantly. After being discharged, the bolt retracted into the barrel. With no bullet or casing left behind for some forensic examiner to study, it was nearly impossible for law enforcement to glean any evidence from the remains of his hits.

If those bodies were ever found. Most weren’t.

He usually climaxed when using it, too.

It didn’t matter whether his hit was male or female. It wasn’t even the killing that got him off. Not exactly. It was the intimacy of that final moment that drove him over the edge. It was the thing he shared with them right before he sent them-- begging for their lives, usually-- into the endless darkness.

Richard Rourke had a secret.

It was a terrible, dark, dirty secret-- and he shared that secret only with the men and women he’d marked for death.

And in that sharing, they died together.

For DaVinci, la petite mort. The little death.

For his victims… the real deal.

Rourke crouched down beside the zombie, which continued to glare at him with blank rage. It might once have been an attractive woman, but it was just a thing now, a mindless, murderous thing. He pushed a strand of its stiff and colorless hair away from its face with a fingertip and watched its mouth writhe, disgusted by its moldy teeth and frothy black lips. Its cataract eyes twitched back and forth in their sockets like caged animals.

In the good old days, before the zombie phage wiped out the entire living world, Da Vinci often incapacitated his victims before killing them. If he was not in a hurry. Sometimes he tied them up or bound them to chairs with duct tape. Sometimes he severed their tendons so they could not move. It was only then, when they were helpless in his grasp, that he felt confident enough to reveal his secret to another human being.

He had cherished that interaction, the power he held over his victims before he killed them. Sometimes he talked to them for hours, and when the time arrived for them to die,  he did it as quickly and painlessly as possible—for that was the mark of a true assassin—and as the bolt slid into their brain or the blade sank into their flesh or the garrote cut off their air supply, he leaned in close to them, his lips brushing the delicate, sensual flesh of their ears, and he whispered his deepest darkest secret to them, allowing himself to cum, his hard cock spitting a copious amount of hot, slick semen into his jockey shorts. La petit mort. As he extinguished their life.

But these… things. He felt nothing for them. He had talked to them at first, but quickly came to realize they didn’t understand anything he said to them. They had no intelligence. No soul. Although killing them still made him hard—they still looked somewhat human, he supposed, and his sexual response was stimulated by that—he did not feel any real intimacy with them. He couldn’t share his secret with them… and he never came.

He was starting to get backed up.

His dick a solid lump in the crotch of his pants, Da Vinci put the captive bolt pistol to the zombie’s lips. “You wanna know what my dad used to do to me?” he asked. He stroked the cool metal tip of the weapon against its lips, eased it into its mouth. The zombie grimaced and tried to bite the barrel of the pistol. He squinted into its eyes, looking for the slightest glimmer of intelligence, then angled the weapon toward the roof of its mouth and pulled the trigger in disappointment.

The creature, which had once been a nice lady named Anne-Marie DeAngelo, twitched for a few seconds, her brains scrambled, then died for the second and final time on the floor of the DuChamp Freight Company shipping and receiving office.

Da Vinci pulled his arrow through the back of the zombie’s neck, set it aside, then stood and fetched his meat hook. He chunked it up through the jaw of the carcass like a butcher hooking a slab of beef and dragged the thing from the room.

He hauled the corpse through the hallways, letting it thunk and plonk down the stairs, then heaved it into one of the loading bays. Inside the chamber were piles and piles of zombie bodies, neatly stacked like cords of firewood. The smell of the loading zone was ferocious. There were clouds of flies. Maggots all over the bodies.

Da Vinci deposited the cadaver onto the stack he was working on today, then sauntered back to his office to troll for another.

He was trying to break his daily record. He was up to 14 today. Three more and he would surpass the total he’d killed last Monday. His all-time high score.

It was something to do.

8

Shining Path and Winter Plum

Dao-ming roared through the streets of DuChamp, expertly dodging the pileups and abandoned cars. She dodged the zombies who raced out into the street in pursuit of them, too… for the most part. Every now and then there were just too many obstacles for her to juggle mentally and she couldn’t help but run one down, but she tried to avoid hitting the deadheads as much as possible. Hitting a full grown zombie head on was like hitting a deer, and nobody wants a zombie to crash through a windshield into their lap.

Mort and Pete introduced themselves from the backseat as the Mercedes slalomed through the streets. Pete did most of the talking, however. Mort was a little tongue-tied.

“Hi, there! I’m Peter Bolin. You can call me Pete. Some folks call me Cactus Pete, and that’s all right, too!” Pete hooked a thumb toward his companion. “This little guy is my buddy Mort. He don’t say much, though. He’s kind of shy.”

Pete was doing his best to sound casual, a big aw shucks grin on his face, but Mort could hear the strain in his voice. Both men were squeezing their butt cheeks tight enough to crack walnuts. The speed their rescuer was streaking through the zombie infested streets was worse than nerve-wracking. It was like being strapped into a sadistic and out-of-control theme park ride.

Mort elbowed Pete in the ribs. He was going to say, “I’m not shy.” Before he could get the words out, however, Dao-ming took a corner at what felt like a hundred and seventy miles per hour. Mort slid helplessly across the backseat and smashed into Pete as all four wheels squealed over the pavement. Pete’s face squished against the window. Dao-ming’s hair flew in a raven black swirl as she twirled the steering wheel. She wrenched the gear lever up and down, stomped on the gas and brought the Mercedes out of its drift.

Mort and Pete buckled in frantically after that.

“That’s probably a good idea,” Dao-ming laughed                       as the two men worked the buckles of their restraints. Mort glanced up and caught the woman studying them in the rear view mirror. The skin around her eyes crinkled as if she were smiling. Then she winked at him, and Mort felt his cheeks flush.

The Asian beauty sent the Mercedes screaming around another corner, wheels smoking. Even buckled up, centrifugal force leaned hard against Mort and Pete each time she made a sharp turn, and the candles, canned foods and ammunition tossed haphazardly in the floorboard of the car went rolling one way and then another. If they hadn’t buckled up, Mort would have gone sprawling again, sliding from side to side like a penny in a Sucrets can.

Dao-ming didn’t look back at him again. Her narrow eyes were intent on the road ahead. She did, however, speak to him haltingly. “So, Mort… are you from DuChamp?” The car jolted up onto the sidewalk to avoid a crashed and burned out school bus, then juddered back onto the street.

Mort’s mouth worked silently for a moment before he managed to find his voice. He finally stammered, “Y-yeah.” After the Mercedes pealed around another corner, he continued. “I own a comic book shop here in town. Or rather, I used to own a comic book shop here. Before… you know... all the zombies.” He tried to keep the boxes of ammo from jarring against one another with his feet, afraid a round might go off and injure someone.

“I’m from Kentucky originally,” Pete interjected. “I’ve been living in New York the last few years. Workin’ as a male model. Maybe you seen me. I was here in DuChamp to do a show when the shit hit the fan.”

“You did those Calvin Klein ads in Cosmo earlier this year, right? The underwear ads?” Dao-ming asked.

“Yeah, that was me.”

“I thought I recognized you when you jumped in the car.”

“That right?” Pete asked with a lopsided grin. He winked at Mort. “I used ta get recognized a lot before the zombie apocalypse.”

“Let me ask you something,” Dao-ming said as she steered in and out of two converging hordes of howling zombies. “You stuff your crotch in that photoshoot?”

Pete opened his mouth to deny it, his face turning red.

“My little sister says no, but I heard all you male models stuff,” Dao-ming continued.

Truth was: he had stuffed. Sort of. Underwear models didn’t use socks to pad their shorts, as was the common myth.   They used a band with a velcro fastener. It kept their junk semi-erect and pushed everything up and out. He didn’t like doing it, didn’t think he needed it, but it was something nearly everyone in the business did. He wasn’t explaining all that to this chick, though. He didn’t like her attitude. Instead,  he shut his mouth and leaned back in his seat, crossing his arms.

Mort looked from Pete to the back of Dao-ming’s head, confused. Pete had turned on the charm, grinning his best country boy grin, and the woman behind the wheel had shut him down. And not too gently.

“What about you?” Mort asked the Asian woman.

They all ducked as the Mercedes clipped a zombie and sent it spinning away like a scarecrow in a twister. The impact cracked the passenger side window and left a broad black fan of splattered goo across the side of the car.

“You need to slow down, babe!” Pete yelled, turning his head to watch the zombie smash through the plate glass window of a music store.

“If I slow down, those jiang shi will follow us, dummy,” Dao-ming snapped. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to crash. I’ve been a stunt driver for three years. I was here in DuChamp to celebrate my parents’ thirtieth anniversary when the Phage hit town… And don’t call me babe.”

After that, Dao-ming leaned to her right and lifted a walkie-talkie from the passenger seat. She had to push aside a couple of very nasty and very large automatic weapons to get to it. Driving one-handed, she depressed the talk button and said, “Dongmei, I’m about five minutes away. Are you ready? Over.”

The walkie-talkie crackled, and then a young female voice replied, “I’m ready. You got any jiang shi chasing you? Over.”

Dao-ming glanced in the rearview mirror. Mort turned in his seat to help her look. Pete sat with his arms crossed and a sour look on his face. In the street behind them, three zombies were shambling after the vehicle. They were running pretty fast, but the rate of speed the Mercedes was traveling made them shrink into the distance pretty quickly.

Mort held up three fingers. He added another finger as a fourth deadhead dashed from a Salvation Army thrift store and gave chase.

“Four. Maybe more. Be ready,” Dao-ming said into the walkie-talkie.

“Roger. Over and out.”

Dao-ming tossed the walkie-talkie aside and executed a tight, high-speed S curve, zigging from one street onto another. The closely spaced structures of uptown DuChamp gave way to affluent homes with sprawling wooded lawns. Mort watched a young girl dash from the front door of a large, fenced in private residence at the far end of the street. The dark haired girl ran to the high black gate which secured the street entrance of the property and began to tug it open. The girl, Mort noted, had a rather hefty rifle slung over her shoulder.

“That’s my sister,” Dao-ming said.

Dao-ming didn’t slow down until they were perilously close to the entrance of the home. The house grew so quickly that Mort was certain their beautiful driver wouldn’t be able to stop in time, that they were going to crash through the back wall of the garage and burst out the other side before she could get the car stopped. Dao-ming hit the brakes. The sudden deceleration shoved Mort and Pete into the seat ahead of them. The Mercedes-Benz bounced up onto the private drive, missing the girl by less than a foot, and screeched into the open garage.

Before the men could gather their thoughts, Dao-ming flung herself from the car and ran to help her little sister shut the gate.

Mort unbuckled his seatbelt with trembling hands and got out of the car. He had to lean against the side of the Mercedes for a second. His legs were all rubbery.

He tottered forward to help the sisters, but quickly discovered they needed no assistance. As Dao-ming secured the big steel gate, her little sister put the rifle to her shoulder and picked off any zombies attracted by the car’s engine. She was a little sharpshooter, he saw. One shot, one kill. It was kind of intimidating.

“Good job, Dongmei,” Dao-ming said, ruffling her sister’s hair. The younger girl lowered her rifle and smiled prettily.

Dao-ming turned and looked at Mort. “Let’s unload the Mercedes and get inside before we attract any more of them.” Mort nodded eagerly. She yelled to Pete: “Hey, cowboy! You wanna get out and lend us a hand?”

The sisters were holed up in their parents’ million dollar townhouse. The place was huge, Mort discovered. Four bedrooms, three baths, fireplace, pool, the works. An eight foot tall welded steel fence ran the perimeter of the property, the kind with decorative spear tips lining the top. Dao-ming’s father, Zhao Bohai, had owned a chain of Chinese-American restaurants before the zombie apocalypse. Bohai’s Buffet. His success had made him paranoid about security. The more money he had, the more fearful of robbery he’d become. The Zhao home was a fortress, with grated windows and a multitude of security cameras. The women had weathered the plague and all the chaos that ensued with little difficulty. Money might not buy you love, Mort thought, but it could certainly buy you a buttload of security.

The only problem was: it was a castle sitting on top of a powder keg.

Mort followed Dao-ming and her little sister as the women loped into the garage. He tried not to stare at the older of the two as he trailed behind them, still catching his breath, but it was hard to resist. Dao-ming was slim and fit, and her one-piece clung like a second skin.

The ladies walked with cute bouncing strides, their arms swinging broadly. Babes on a mission. Pete got out of the car as they approached, a sullen expression on his face.

The younger sister, Dongmei, peppered her sibling with questions: “Where did you find these guys? What’s their names? Did they save you or something? I hope you got me some smokes. I’m almost out. Did you see any other live people, or is it still just zombies everywhere?” She looked curiously from Mort to Pete as she babbled.

“We didn’t save her,” Mort said. “She saved us.”

Pete turned away to spit. He sniffed and wiped his nose.

“Is that true? Did you save them?” Dongmei asked her sister. “What happened? I hope they’re nice guys and not, like, rapists or something.”

“I don’t know if they’re nice guys,” Dao-ming replied. “If they aren’t, well, I guess we’ll just have to shoot ‘em.”

She looked back at Mort when she said it and smiled.

Mort put all the pieces together as Dao-ming explained to her younger sister how she’d met Mort and Pete. The beautiful stunt car driver had been on a supply run when she ran across the two fleeing men. That explained why the backseat and trunk of the vehicle was piled with groceries, candles, and ammunition. Just as Mort thought, she had almost mistook them for zombies and run them down, but had realized they were survivors when Pete tried to help Mort to his feet. Zombies didn’t do things like that.

“It was a close call,” Dao-ming said to her little sister. “In fact, I shut my eyes at the last second. I just knew I was going to run them down.”

Mort grinned queasily as he helped Dao-ming carry in the provisions. He wondered just how many people had died during the pandemic from accidents, rather than at the hands of the ferocious dead. Probably a lot.

“So what’s your names?” Dongmei asked.

“I’m Mort,” Mort said. “This is my buddy Pete.”

Pete tipped an imaginary hat.

Dongmei eyed Pete up and down. “He’s cute,” she said.

Pete grinned, then looked uncomfortable as the pigtailed little girl continued to stare at him. She was young, maybe thirteen, but had the stare of a man-hungry divorcee.

Mort and Dao-ming finished unloading the Mercedes while Pete and Dongmei sorted the supplies and put them away. The décor of the Zhao home was understated but refined. When Mort commented on the beauty of her home, Dao-ming smiled sadly. “Mother had good taste,” she said.

“Did she die during the outbreak?” Mort asked.

Dao-ming nodded. “Mother and Father both. I’ll tell you about it later. We should walk the fence before we relax. Just in case any more zombies followed us back.” After that, the four of them walked the perimeter of the property to make sure no other zombies had been attracted to the vicinity by the sound of the Mercedes’ engine or Dongmei’s gunshots.

The exterior of the home was just as splendid as the interior, with decorative trees and bushes, flower gardens and fountains and a large Koi pond. Mort walked alongside Dao-ming, feeling as if he’d stumbled into yet another alternate universe, a fantasy world with no monsters, no Phage, just blossoms and beautiful women, warm sunshine and tranquility. The only thing that spoiled the illusion were the guns. Both women were carrying large caliber firearms, and Pete his Saturday Night Special.

If this is a dream, I don’t want to wake up, Mort thought, listening as Dao-ming talked about her old life, when she was a stuntwoman and not just a survivor. He told her about his life, too, before the plague turned the world upside down, and was gratified when she seemed genuinely interested in him. He had expected her eyes to glaze over, like most people’s eyes glazed over when he talked about himself. Turned out she was a big sci-fi buff. She was into anime and science fiction films. Even had a good working knowledge of comics. From the movies, mostly, but it gave them something to talk about.

“What was the last movie you saw at the theater before the zombie outbreak?” Mort asked.

“The new Batman,” Dao-ming confessed, ducking her head with embarrassment.

“Me, too!” Mort cried, and they laughed together.

“Nerds,” Pete muttered behind them, rolling his eyes.

The back lawn abutted a neighbor’s yard, so it was relatively secure. Only the south side and the front of the property bordered the street. Luckily, apart from the zombies Dongmei had shot down, the area was clear of deadheads.

Dongmei skipped along beside Pete, babbling and preening in front of the older man, trying to get his attention. Pete kept eyeing the girl’s older sister, but Dao-ming was studiously ignoring him.

Dongmei tried to talk Pete into getting in the pool with her. “You can borrow my dad’s shorts,” she cajoled him, when he told her he had nothing to go swimming in. “You could even swim in your underwear if you want. They’re no different than Speedos. You can at least wash up. You’re really dirty. You smell like old tennis shoes and BO.”

“Naw, I don’t feel like swimmin’,” Pete said. “Besides, it’s kinda rainy. I bet that water’s freezin’.”

“It’s not cold. Come on! I’ll show you.”

“Nah, maybe later.”

“Your sister’s a good shot,” Mort said to Dao-ming as they headed back to the house. They were walking past the inground pool again. Ripples spiraled on its surface as the overcast sky continued to drip.

“We both had to learn to shoot quick when the zombies started getting really bad,” Dao-ming replied, tracing a finger along the slick black barrel of her gun. “For a couple days, we were shooting them in shifts. I thought the bodies would pile up high enough for them to climb over each other and get inside.”

Mort glanced at the base of the fence. “There aren’t any zombies there now.”

“I dragged the dead ones away after they finally stopped coming,” Dao-ming said. She smiled at him, waving a hand in front of her nose. “Put them in our neighbor’s yard. They stank so bad! Whoo!”

“What happened to your mom and dad?” Mort asked. “You don’t have to talk about it if… you know, it’s still painful.”

Bohai and his Japanese wife Satori had died during a riot at a military blockade, Dao-ming explained. The military had quarantined the city shortly after the outbreak started. The Zhao family had tried to flee from the city and found themselves caught up in the riot at the edge of town. Army gunmen had shot her parents along with several dozen others when the crowd tried to charge through the barricades. Mort had heard about the shooting on the radio. He was still hunkered down in his apartment at the time. The guy on the radio had babbled hysterically about it for an hour before playing “The Star-Spangled Banner”. After the national anthem, he had raged about the fascist government and the Biblical endtimes for another hour. Dao-ming and Dongmei had gone with their parents when they tried to escape the city, of course, but they had gotten separated from them in the chaos. Dao-ming saw her parents go down and retreated home with her little sister, shell-shocked and horrified.

“My mother… she was just shot in the shoulder. I saw when the bullet hit her. I don’t think it would have killed her. But then the crowd turned, and she fell. They trampled her, all those people... trying to run away. I couldn’t do anything to help her. All I could do was grab Dongmei and run, too.”

Dao-ming shuddered, her eyes far away.

“Why were they barricading the roads?” Mort asked. “That seems like kind of a lost cause. Virus Z was pretty much everywhere when the riot happened. I heard about it on the radio before they went off the air. Or got shut down. I’m not sure what really happened to the local radio stations. They just went off the air, one after another, that first week.”

Dao-ming shrugged. “I guess they were just confused, like everyone else. They probably still thought they could contain it.”

In the house, Dongmei tore open a pack of Marlboros and angrily stuck a cigarette in her mouth. She was frustrated with Pete’s lack of cooperation, and didn’t like thinking about her parents’ cruel fate. “You got a light, cowboy?” she asked Pete. She was dressed in Daisy Dukes and a pink spaghetti strap t-shirt, a smallish teenage girl with short cropped black hair and a round face with large, epicanthic eyes, heavily made up. Two ponytails stuck up jauntily from both sides of her head, like Mickey Mouse ears.

“Are you kiddin’?” Pete asked. “You look like you’re about twelve. You shouldn’t be smoking.”

Dongmei snorted. “I’m fifteen, you hillbilly. I may not live to see sixteen. In case you haven’t noticed, the whole planet’s been taken over by zombies. So… you got a light or not?”

Pete looked at Dao-ming, who shrugged.

Eyes wide, Pete dug a lighter from his pocket and handed it over.

Dao-ming laughed as her little sister blew out a smoke ring. She glanced at Mort to gauge his reaction, held her gaze just a moment too long and looked away self-consciously, flipping her raven black hair back over her shoulder.

Mort shifted on his feet, suddenly uncomfortable. He could feel his cheeks heating up. Pete was staring at the two of them with a confused, slightly disgusted expression.

Mort was just as confused. Did this beautiful, exotic woman really like him? Was that possible?

Dao-ming was probably the most gorgeous creature he had ever seen. Tall, slim, athletic, with dark almond-shaped eyes and long silky black hair. She had full hips and breasts  and a waist so narrow he could probably encompass it in his hands. She liked the same things he did, but even more amazing, she seemed as attracted to him as he was to her, though he could not fathom why. He was fat, his hair was thinning--

Well, he thought, to be honest he wasn’t really that fat anymore. Looking down at his belly, he realized it had shrunk tremendously over the last four weeks. It was like a part of him was missing. He was still shocked when he looked down and could see his crotch rather than a big mound of belly jelly.

Dongmei filled their awkward silence by addressing Pete: “You look really familiar, dude. Where have I seen you before?”

Pete frowned. “You’re pretty forward for a runt.”

Dongmei smiled around the butt of her smoke. She looked a lot like her older sister, just a tad shorter and plumper. Her face had yet to lose its baby roundness. “My mother and father raised me to be outspoken. They said it was the American way to speak whatever’s on your mind.”

Dao-ming nodded. “She’s telling the truth.”

Pete shrugged. “Before the zombie virus, I did a little TV. Soap operas. Sitcoms. A few commercials. I mostly modeled.”

“You were a fashion model?” Dongmei asked.

“An underwear model,” Dao-ming elaborated, as if it were a silly thing to do.

Dongmei looked from her sister to Pete, snorting with delight. “Awesome! I can see that. You are one smoking hot piece of dick.”

“Dongmei!” Dao-ming gasped.

The three of them laughed while Pete blushed furiously and muttered, “You’re just a kid. You shouldn’t be talkin’ like that!”

After that, Dao-ming asked what Mort and Pete had been doing when the three of them met, or more precisely, when she had nearly ran them over.

Mort explained they were trying to get out of the city, and then he told her why. He felt like a heel ruining the good thing these two women had here, in their million dollar fortress, but they needed to know about the danger they were in, the danger posed to all the city’s survivors by the DuChamp nuclear power facility.

“By all accounts, it should have blown already,” Mort explained. “There must be someone there maintaining it, but they’re only going to be able to keep it from melting down so long.”

“And then it will go up like an A-bomb?” Dao-ming asked. She glanced at her sister with a horrified expression.

“That’s not likely. There are a lot of safety systems built into nuclear power plants. We went there on a field trip when I was in grade school. It’s why I thought about it. It won’t go up like a nuclear bomb, but it could blow up, start fires, and then there’s the radiation and fallout. If any fires start, well, you know, there’s no emergency services to put them out anymore. You could try to hide in a fallout shelter, but you’d probably run out of supplies before it was safe to come out. I think our best bet is to get out of the city and try to find someplace to stay in the countryside. There will be fewer zombies to contend with. Less fallout the further away we get.”

Dao-ming looked to Dongmei. “I never thought about the power plant! We just thought we’d stay here until the zombies all died. They can’t keep running around forever. Most of the ones I’ve seen the last few days are starting to look a little… well, rotten.”

Mort spread his hands. “I’m not trying to tell you what to do, Dao-ming. I’m just telling you what Pete and I have decided to do.”

Dao-ming nodded. “Yes… Yes, I understand. I’ll have to think about it.”

Mort nodded.

“But do you think it’s really likely? A meltdown?” Dao-ming asked.

“It’s going to happen. The only question is how much damage it’s going to cause, and how much radiation it’s going to release into the environment.”

Dao-ming scrubbed her face with her hands. She looked at her little sister then and said, “Give me one of those cigarettes.”

They talked until night fell, then shifted their palaver to the den, which was an inner room with no windows. They could safely use candles there without the light attracting hordes of zombies. Dao-ming and Mort went into the kitchen and prepared dinner before it got too dark to see: spam sandwiches, potato chips, canned fruit and vegetables, and for dessert… Hoho’s.

“My favorites!” Mort cried.

Dao-ming smiled up at him, candlelight dancing in her eyes.

Mort was hyper aware of Dao-ming’s movements. He felt a mild tingle of electricity every time her body moved anywhere close to his, and wondered if it was real or just a figment of his imagination. He jumped when her hand brushed his. He felt drunk on the smell of her. He imagined kissing her and got lightheaded.

The two of them talked about their parents as they worked together in the kitchen. Dao-ming was still in mourning for hers. She couldn’t even really believe they were dead. Mort’s father had died during a triple bypass almost a decade earlier, he told her. His mother had retired to Miami the previous year. He hadn’t been able to contact her since the outbreak.

Mort was unaccustomed to attention from such a beautiful woman and had difficulty speaking coherently. His dick was a hair’s breadth away from a full on hard the whole time, even though he tried to think of the most disgusting things he could to keep from embarrassing himself: geriatrics in soiled Depends tongue-kissing, the chest bursting scene from the movie Aliens, Burt Reynold’s face… post-facelift.

Dao-ming was well aware of the effect she was having on him, but didn’t act put-off at all. In fact, she seemed flattered by his discomfort. She patted his butt when she walked around him to the other side. She pushed him out of the way with her hip as he fumbled with the dressing. “What’s the matter, Mort?” she asked teasingly. “You’re all sweaty and clumsy.”

“Ah…um… ahem! I guess my… uh, sugar’s low. I haven’t eaten since this morning.”

Smooth operator.

They returned to the den and ate by candlelight. The quartet talked some more, even joked around a little. Everyone was relaxed and happy. Everyone except Pete. Pete was unusually jumpy, mostly due to Dongmei. Dao-ming’s little sister was all over Mort’s buddy. She tried to sit in his lap. She walked behind the sofa he was in and played with his hair. She kept making suggestive comments to him-- and some that were just downright nasty.

“Damn! You kiss your mama with that mouth?” Pete finally exclaimed.

“My mother’s dead,” Dongmei said huffily, and Pete looked miserable and ashamed.

Mort was having the time of his life!

When the Zhao sisters finally put them up for the night, Pete snuck into Mort’s room and shut the door firmly. “That kid is like a cat in heat,” Pete complained, his voice a stage whisper.

Mort snickered.

“Hey, it ain’t funny. I’m no pedophile.”

“Didn’t you just screw a zombie earlier today? Besides, it’s the end of the world, dude. Do you want her to die a virgin?”

“Har-dee-fuckin’-har.”

Pete had stripped and started to climb into bed with Mort.

“Whoa! Wait! What are you doing?” Mort asked, clutching the sheets around him. “We got our own separate beds tonight!”

“I don’t like sleeping by myself anymore,” Pete said, sounding more than a little petulant. “I have bad dreams.”

“Go sleep with Dongmei then.”

“No way.”

“Really, I—”

“Oh, I get it. You think Dao-ming is going to sneak in here in the middle of the night.”

“No!”

“Mort want sucky-sucky, fucky-fucky?”

“That’s not even… that’s not very nice.”

“Yeah, right.” Pete jerked the covers from Mort’s hands and scooted into the bed. “Oh, Mort! Me want you so bad! Me love you long time!” Pete mocked him, his voice pitched high.

“You’re such an asshole!”

Pete chortled. Mort’s buddy fluffed his pillow and  turned over, pulling the covers up over his shoulder.

“She’s not that good looking anyway,” Pete said after a moment.

Mort didn’t respond.

“And she’s a bitch.”

Exhausted, Pete was snoring within minutes.

Mort lay beside him, unable to sleep for what felt like hours. He stared up at the ceiling, then turned on his right side. Couldn’t get comfortable. Rolled onto his left side. Still couldn’t find a good spot. He finally decided he needed a drink and slipped carefully out of bed. There were cases of bottled water in the kitchen.

Mort crept to the door, wincing when the floor creaked. He glanced at Pete, teeth gritted, but Pete was still snoring softly. He inched the door open and stepped out into the hallway.

Dao-ming froze, staring at him. She was wearing a black silk teddy and little else. She’d been tiptoeing down the hallway toward his room.

“Oh! Hi, Mort,” she whispered awkwardly.

“Hi.”

“Can’t sleep?”

“No.”

“Me either.”

“Oh.”

“So… umm... you want to fool around?”

Dao-ming smiled, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear.

Be cool, Mort! This will never, ever happen again! Not in a million years!

“Um, sure.”

“Your room?”

“No, Pete’s in there.” He chuckled at the look she gave him. “We, uh, kinda got in the habit of sleeping together. Well… not sleeping together. Just…”

“It’s okay. I understand. Dongmei’s in my room. Come on. Let’s go to the guest bedroom.”

Dao-ming took Mort’s hand, which was suddenly very sweaty, and led him through the dark hallways of the large townhouse to a bedroom on the far side of the property. Once they were inside, she locked the door and slipped into his arms.

Mort held her close, enjoying the scent of her hair, the soft, firm pressure of her breasts against his belly. She seemed to shrink inside herself within his embrace, becoming smaller, more childlike. She took a deep breath, exhaled long and slow.

“You’re so big,” she said softly. “I feel safe in your arms.”

“You smell good,” Mort replied.

Smoooooth…

“I’m not normally such a slut,” Dongmei whispered. “I just want to make love with someone sweet and gentle, and you seem like a really nice guy. It’s been a rough month.”

“It’s okay. It’s the end of the world, right?”

She leaned her head back, so he put his lips to hers. He guided her to the bed as they kissed. Dao-ming moved away from him for a second to pull her gown off over her head.  Her bare skin glowed faintly in the moonlight. Mort pushed his boxer shorts down and kicked them into the corner. He wished there was more light in the room so he could see her better. Then he felt her hand on him, down there, and he couldn’t really think straight anymore.

“Nice,” Dao-ming murmured.

“Ditto,” Mort replied, putting both palms on her breasts. He circled her nipples with his thumbs. They were hard as pebbles. “I should probably warn you. It’s been a long time since--”

“Hush!”

Dao-ming lay on the bed and pulled him between her thighs. Mort groaned as he sank down upon her. They fit perfectly, no fumbling around. And she was so hot! So hot and tight!

“Oh! Slow down, sweety. You’re kind of big,” Dao-ming gasped.

Mort replied: “Ohshitdon’tmove! Oh, no! Arrrhhh! Ah... ah, darn it.”

She stroked his hair as he panted on her shoulder. “Um, Mort… did you just cum?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry. I told you it’s been a long time.”

Dao-ming laughed softly. “That’s okay. We can try again in a few minutes.”

Mort was quiet a moment. “I don’t need to wait. I think it’s still hard.”

Wrapping her legs around his waist, Dao-ming smiled in the dark. “Atta boy…” she purred.

9

The Last Living Pimp Gets Saved

As Mort made love to the woman of his dreams, Lavender Baasim sat on the ledge of the rec center roof, staring disconsolately at the zombies down below.

He kicked his legs idly, watching the horde mill in circles on the sidewalk in front of the building. They shuffled around like ragged sleepwalkers. When two of them collided, they tottered off in opposite directions, like billiard balls rebounding off one another. There was not as many down there as there was earlier that day. A lot of them had drifted away after they busted into the rec center, but there was still plenty of them hanging around. Enough to keep him from climbing down off the roof. He was stuck for now.

He was stuck, and he was all alone.

All alone.

It was a terrible thought. It made him feel small and lost and vulnerable. Landslide was gone. T-Rex was gone. Even those two crackers he’d met today were gone. He didn’t know if the zombies got them too or not. He kind of hoped they got away. Not that it mattered. Everyone was gone now but him.

When the zombies busted into the rec center, T-Rex and Lavender had retreated to the small office back behind the basketball court. There was a low drop-ceiling in that room. T-Rex had lifted him into the ceiling, helping him escape, a moment before the zombies battered their way into the room.

Unfortunately there was nothing Lavender could do to help his companion in return. There was no way he could have pulled T-Rex up. The man weighed over four hundred pounds. And even if he could have lifted the big man off the ground somehow, there was absolutely no way the drop ceiling could have held that kind of weight. Lavender had almost fallen through the paneling himself, and he only weighed a buck fifty.

He had watched helplessly as the hungry dead swarmed around T-Rex, as they bore him down and ate him alive. They just kept pouring into the room, howling and snatching at the man, ripping his clothes off, fighting each other to get at him. T-Rex had held Lavender’s gaze for an unbelievable length of time, finding the strength somehow to stay on his feet as they devoured the flesh right off his bones. He had screamed, on and on and on, as they bit off chunks of his skin, as they disemboweled him and thrust his jiggling guts into their mouths, and Lavender had crouched there in the dusty, hot space between the drop-ceiling and the roof, holding the man’s gaze, staying there with him until a great gout of blood frothed up out of his mouth, and the big man sank into the mob like some great continent subsiding into a churning sea.

It was more than enough to give a nigga nightmares… maybe forever.

Lavender shuddered at the memory, tearing his eyes from the zombies below. He looked up at the sky, trying to push that terrible last image of T-Rex from his mind. Trying... and failing.

“His name was Theodore,” Lavender mused.

They’d been friends since they were children, T-Rex and Lavender. They’d both lived here at Magnolia Village their entire lives. Landslide, too. Landslide’s real name was Harold.

Lavender chuckled.

Harold Cooper... Such a cracker name!

He traced the city skyline with his eyes. There were a couple lights winking faintly, the windows of some distant apartment building, way up high above the streets where it was safe. Other survivors like him, he supposed, huddled beside candles or maybe gas lanterns. He wondered who they were, how they were getting by, but what did it matter? They were there. He was here. Their lives were not going to intersect in any meaningful way. They would never even know that he had noticed them, had sat here in the dark staring at their light.

At least it had stopped raining. The clouds were breaking up, revealing a bright half-moon and a smattering of winking stars. He was cold, his clothes wet, but there was plenty to drink up here on the roof. The rain had collected into several large puddles. He wouldn’t die of thirst anytime soon, but he had no food, and his belly was starting to make some very loud gurgling sounds.

No surprise there. Judging by the position of the moon and stars, he figured it was just about midnight. He hadn’t eaten in sixteen hours.

He prayed the zombies would wander away so he could climb down. Perhaps by morning they would be gone. Then he could come down, get himself something to eat and rearm himself. There was still plenty of weapons left scattered around the projects. Magnolia Village had been a war zone even before the zombie outbreak. Gang violence. The drug trade. After he’d eaten and gotten some rest, he’d climb up to the roof of his apartment. Have a little target practice. Clear the place out again.

But for now he was stuck. He was wet, cold, hungry and stuck.

He put his hands over his ears, trying to shut out the howls and groans of the zombies down below. Oh, that sound made him feel so crazy! It was maybe a good thing he was out of bullets, because if he had to listen to that moaning and groaning all night long, he might just put the Mac-10 in his mouth and pull the trigger. In the movies, zombies sounded scary, but in real life, they sounded like a bunch of lunatics having an orgy!

As Lavender held his ears and squeezed his eyes shut, he felt a queer prickling sensation in his head. The prickling felt like someone poking thin silver needles into his brain. For a moment, he remembered being in a hospital, a massive hospital with endless, labyrinthine hallways and ugly pale green walls. He remembered the tests they’d run on him after the accident, when he complained to his granny about the voices in his head. He was just a little boy then, the stitches in his scalp still itching, and the voices had been so loud, so insistent. It wasn’t like he was imagining other people talking inside his head either. The voices sounded real, like people were standing right behind him, or in the next room. Sometimes they seemed more real to him than the voices of the flesh-and-blood people who cared for him.

For a moment, Lavender wasn’t himself anymore. He was smaller, weaker. But he wasn’t afraid, because there was another person here with him. Someone bigger and stronger than he was. Someone who could protect him.

He suddenly felt like he was being watched and he scrambled from the ledge of the building, bringing up the barrel of the submachine gun. He knew it was out of bullets, but he felt better with the gun in his hand. Bigger. Braver.

“Who’s there?” he demanded. His voice was deeper now, more authoritative.

There was no one on the roof behind him, of course. How could there be?

You’re starting to imagine things, brother, he thought. You need to chill the fuck out.

But then he caught some movement at the periphery of his vision. Something moving in the sky, flying. Some kind of bird... or bat.

He craned his head back and watched as several dark objects descended through the moonlight. The figures were distant at first, tiny and indistinct, but grew larger by the second. As they drew nearer, he realized they were people. Flying people! And they were headed right for the roof!

“What the fuck?” he snarled. He almost fell back, he was so shocked. If he had, he would have pitched right over the ledge of the roof, and there wasn’t nothing beyond that but hard concrete and hungry zombies!

The flying people were approaching at a terrific rate of speed. Fast as they were going, he expected them to punch right through the roof, maybe even keep going down all the way through the rec center. At the last moment, however, they unfurled great black capes and settled with hardly a whisper onto the rooftop before him.

He blinked as a wave of dizziness swept over him.

Not capes, he realized. Wings! Great feathered wings!

There were six of them. They stood slightly apart, eyeing one another archly, as if they did not quite trust one another, or did not feel comfortable being so close together. There were two women and four men. The one standing closest to Lavender smiled.

“Lavender,” he sighed.

The creature’s voice was deep and smooth. It instantly put him at ease. A voice so suave could not possibly belong to anyone who might wish to harm him.

“You do not need that weapon, my friend,” the winged man said, stepping toward him.

Lavender watched as the flying man’s wings folded against his back and seemed to shimmer halfway out of sight. He rubbed his eyes with his free arm and looked again, but those black wings continued to shiver in and out of existence, like a mirage. He remembered his granny talking about angels and devils and he couldn’t help but wonder which one these flying people were. Maybe he’d finally just completely lost his marbles.

“You are mad,” the flying man said. “Your mind is broken. I can feel it.”

Lavender drew back as the little needles poked into his brain some more. He had forgotten all about the ledge. “You’re hurting me,” he gasped.

“I apologize.”

“What do you want from me?”

“From you?” the man asked. “Very little. Nothing you can’t spare. I’ve come to save you, Lavender. Would you like to be saved tonight?”

The man was close enough now that Lavender could make out his face in the moonlight. He had a thin angular face, long black hair down to his breast, straight and shiny. And he was white. Not just white like the crackers who had run out on him today. This dude was white like chalk, like someone had sucked all the blood out of him and filled him back up with milk. He had large, dark eyes that seemed to grow larger the longer you stared into them. Eyes like whirlpools. And very red lips, with bright shining teeth. Beautiful, but terrible: his face, his eyes, his teeth. His entire body seemed to glow a little in the moonlight, like there was a cool mist bleeding from his flesh, catching the light, diffusing it.

“But your name’s not really Lavender, is it?” the flying man asked, frowning a little.

“Nuh—no.”

“There are so many of you in there. It’s really quite marvelous. But which is the real you? Not Lavender. No, not that caricature. Not the strong one either. Your name is… Lawrence, isn’t it? Your mind broke when the ravenous ones devoured your grandmother. You ran out of your medication, the medicine that kept all the voices away, and then the unclean ones came...”

Lavender felt hot tears on his cheeks. “Why you makin’ me remember dat? I don’t wanna remember dat shit!” He stepped back, retreating from the memories, and the ledge of the building caught him in the calves. He toppled back, spinning his arms, the wind making his clothes snap and flutter.

The flying man swept Lavender into his arms. Lavender clutched at him without thinking. The angel drew him back from the ledge.

“Shhhh! It’s all right, Lawrence,” he murmured. “You don’t have to remember. We’re going to take you to a place where you’ll never have to remember anything ever again. Isn’t that right, HaMerkavah?”

“Sure. Whatever,” one of the flying ladies said with a sneer.

The man was so hard and cold. It was like being cradled in the arms of a marble statue. Lavender shivered in the man’s embrace. “Are you angels or devils?” he asked.

The cold white creature smiled. He inclined his head and whispered into Lawrence’s ear:“What if we’re both?”

10

Goodbye, DuChamp

Shortly after they woke, Dao-ming announced that she and her sister would accompany Mort and Pete on their journey. The threat of the DuChamp nuclear power plant had factored heavily into her decision, but so had her loneliness and the promise of a safer and more simple life in the country. Dongmei, who was still in panties and a t-shirt, was sitting at the dining room table noisily eating some dry cereal when her sister made the announcement. The teenager sat up in excitement and clapped her hands, eyes shining. She’d developed a fierce crush on Pete. In fact, she followed him everywhere he went the rest of the morning, as if she were afraid he might try to sneak away when she wasn’t looking. She even talked to him through the bathroom door while he was taking his morning constitutional, sitting Indian-style on the hallway floor and prattling on aimlessly until Pete finally yelled at her from the other side.

“Beat it, kid! I’m trying to take a dump in here fer Christ’s sake! Let a guy shit in peace, why don’tcha!”

Mort wasn’t surprised, but he was happy. He was still on cloud nine from the night before. He and Dao-ming had made love half the night. She’d done things to him he was too embarrassed to ask a woman to do, even in his fantasies. He was not quite as ecstatic as Dongmei, but only because he was worried about protecting the two women.

Pete tried to act as if he didn’t care one way or the other, but he was not very good at hiding his emotions. He was jealous of Mort and Dao-ming’s fast rapport, and exasperated by Dongmei’s clumsy romantic overtures.

After breakfast, the four of them cleared the table and tried to come up with an escape plan. Mort believed the safest course of action would be the most straightforward one, and Dao-ming agreed. They would load up the Mercedes with as many supplies and weapons as they could fit in it and drive out of town together, with Dao-ming behind the wheel. She was, after all, a professional driver. They would take just the one car so there was no chance of getting split up, and they would head straight for the countryside, no stops to search for supplies or survival gear. Dao-ming assured them she knew at least two routes that would get them out of the city successfully. She had studied a map of DuChamp, and had been checking out the conditions of the streets whenever she went on a supply run, just in case she and her sister needed to bug out. She had made it all the way to the outskirts of town on two occasions before returning home.

They retrieved the street map her father kept in his office and unfolded it on the dining room table. “This is the safest route I’ve found so far,” she said, tracing the proposed course with a yellow highlighter. “There’s a big wreck here at the intersection of 27th and Green, but you can get around it by driving on the sidewalk. Lots of, uh, deadheads here-- by the mall-- but I think I can weave through them without too much difficulty. It’s a seven lane highway. Plenty of room to maneuver. And they’re not as thick as they were at the start of the outbreak.”

“Sounds like a pretty solid plan to me,” Mort said finally, standing straight. He hesitated when his three companions looked at him, feeling self-conscious, then forced himself to plunge on: “However, I think we all need to understand just how dangerous this is going to be. I think it’s safe to say this is an all or nothing, uh, thing. If we stay here, where it’s safe, and the power plant blows, we’re going to get cooked by radiation. But if we do this, try to get out of town, we could get surrounded by zombies, or run into another group of survivors. Maybe aggressive ones. Heck, we might even have a flat tire. If any of those things happen, our gooses are cooked.”

Eyes wide, Dao-ming kissed her little sister’s head.

“You’re a regular ray of sunshine this morning, aren’t you?” Pete guffawed.

“I have no doubts about Dao-ming’s driving skills,” Mort declared. “I trust her behind the wheel without reservation. I’m just worried about Murphy’s Law.”

“Murphy’s Law?” Dongmei asked.

“If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong,” Pete said. Dongmei blinked at him gravely and Pete shrugged.

“The two biggest dangers we’re going to face if we try to drive out of town are blocked streets, or hitting zombies with the car and wrecking it,” Mort said grimly. “The roads are littered with crashed and abandoned vehicles, and the deadheads run right into the path of moving vehicles. They’re like kamikazes.”

“We’ll make it,” Dao-ming said confidently.

Mort looked into her eyes. He nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “We will. We’ll make it.”

“If we do make it out of DuChamp in one piece, which way should we travel?” Pete asked.

“Northwest, I think,” Mort answered. “It’s not very heavily populated once you get past the suburbs. Mostly just open country.” He smiled at his companions. “My gramma used to live out there,” he explained.

“We should probably stay away from the interstate altogether,” Mort went on. “There will probably be more pileups on the highways than on county roads. More zombies, too. There’s also more of a chance of meeting military or survivalists on the interstates. We don’t want to get into a shootout with some crazy rednecks or run across a bunch of nervous soldiers with itchy trigger fingers.” Mort put his finger to his lower lip. “Let’s see. What else…? Oh! We need to avoid bridges as much as possible, too. We don’t want to get stuck in the middle of a bridge with a bunch of zombies beating on the car windows and no way to turn around.”

“Agreed,” Dao-ming said.

“So I guess we find us a nice deserted farm somewheres and set up our own little hippy commune,” Pete snorted. “I spent eighteen years tryin’ to get out of Mayberry.”

“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 meltdown, 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, blue bonnet plague. Or… whatever.”

Mort resisted the urge to correct his friend. It wasn’t  blue bonnet plague. It was bubonic plague.

“You’re right,” he said instead.

“How far away should we go?” Dao-ming asked.

“To be safe from radiation?” Mort asked. He shrugged. “I don’t know. As far as we can safely get. Does your father have any more maps? A road atlas, maybe? We’ll look for an area that is very lightly populated, someplace wooded, with a lake or river nearby so we have a consistent supply of fresh water and food.”

“I’ll go look in his office,” Dao-ming said, rising.

Bohai did, and they decided on a region about eighty miles northwest of DuChamp. “Here! The Quabbin Reservoir!” Mort said, stabbing the atlas with his finger. “It’s a manmade lake that supplies most of the drinking water for the state. It’s remote, fenced off, lots of wildlife so we can hunt and fish. Should be far enough away for now.”

“So it’s decided then,” Dao-ming said. She smiled apologetically. “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 Mercedes together, you two could stand a bath and a fresh change of clothes. No offense, gentlemen, but you’re both pretty ripe.”

Dongmei nodded, wrinkling her nose. “Word!”

“Oh, yeah. Sure.” Mort’s face reddened. He was suddenly, horribly embarrassed. He didn’t want to imagine 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 to fit into. She knew neither of her two new cohorts would be able to fit in her father’s pants or shoes. They would have to keep the jeans and footwear they were currently wearing unfortunately, but Bohai liked his shirts oversized. She was sure she could find some tops both men could wear.

She felt a stab of pain in her heart going through her father’s closet. Dao-ming brought a couple of his shirts to her nose and breathed in: his natural scent and Drakkar Noir, the cologne her father had favored. She remembered the last time she’d seen him, pushing through the crowd at the military barricade, a short stout man with thinning hair and little round spectacles. He had been shouting at the soldiers like the rest of the crowd, waving a fist, demanding to be released.

A few seconds later, the soldiers had opened fire.

Dao-ming shuddered, pushing away those thoughts. No time for that now.

Mort and Pete were waiting at the edge of the swimming pool. She joined them, carrying shaving cream and deodorant, soap, washcloths and her father’s clothing.

Mort took them from her arms with a sweet smile and a thank you, and she let her eyes linger on his face. He had a soft, round face, with kind eyes and a handsome smile. She was grateful she had met someone so gentle. Gentle and smart and just... nice! Nice was so underrated.

Well, not anymore.

Pete began to disrobe. Mort hesitated, glancing toward Dongmei, who was watching from the sliding glass door with avid interest.

“I’ll leave you two to it, then,” Dao-ming said.

“You can stay. I’m not shy,” Pete called over his shoulder.

“No, thanks,” Dao-ming retorted, smiling at Mort, who had rolled his eyes at his friend. She started toward the house, corralling her sister in front of her. “Oh, no, you don’t!” Dao-ming shouted at her sister as they stepped through the patio door. “You’re staying here with me. And don’t let me catch you peeking out the window!” Dongmei squinted out at Pete one last time before Dao-ming slid the door to.

Both men disrobed beside the Zhao’s kidney-shaped pool. It was still relatively early in the morning, cool from last night’s rain, but at least the sun was shining today. Light danced on the surface of the water, bending wavering patterns onto the powder blue tiles beneath. The water in the pool was still relatively clear, Mort noted, despite the fact that there’d been no electricity to run the filters the last couple weeks.

After they were done with their baths, he thought, smelling himself, it was probably going to be a lot less clean.

“So I noticed you weren’t in bed when I got up to pee last night,” Pete said casually as he sat on a wooden lounge to tug off his boots. He wasn’t looking at Mort when he said it, was squinting off toward the trees on the other side of the back fence.

“No,” Mort admitted. He tried to restrain the goofy grin that wanted to erupt from his face but failed miserably. He was glad Pete wasn’t looking at him. He hung his head, trying to hide his blushing cheeks.

“I guess you two knocked boots then,” Pete said. He looked toward Mort, smiling. “Made the beast with two backs. Did the horizontal boogie. Bumped uglies.”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“Hey, don’t be sorry about that!” Pete chided. He rose and began shucking his stiff pants down his legs. “I wouldn’t be apologizing if she’d picked me over you.” He checked the windows to make sure Dongmei wasn’t peeking, then stripped off his baggy underwear. The underwear he’d been wearing was grayish brown—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 praisin’—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 a big, hairy tub of lard.

“The water’s so cold!” Mort complained, teeth chattering. He splashed water on his head, impressed how dirty it was as it trickled back into the pool.

Pete smirked. “So I see.”

“I’m a grower not a shower.”

Mort grabbed his own soap and washcloth and started scrubbing down his Pillsbury rolls.

“Truth is: I should be the one apologizin’,” Pete admitted. “I’ve been kind of a jackass to you and Dao-ming. I was just jealous. Dao-ming is fucking hot. I don’t know what she sees in you—“

“Gee, thanks.”

“—But I won’t get in the way. I promise. You ‘n’ me, we’ve got too close to be stabbin’ each other in the back over girls. Bros before hos, right?”

Mort and Pete looked at one another solemnly.

“Thanks,” Mort said. “Really.”

Pete grinned and flexed his biceps. “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 out!” Mort put his hands behind his head and made his stomach undulate in and out. One of his aunts had been a bellydancer, had taught him how to do it. It got him a lot of laughs in college.

“Ha! Not too bad, Mort-for-Short. You’re starting to slim down some! I might have to break me off 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 in Father Zhao’s shirt, though. Looked like a kid playing 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 Dao-ming picked him over Pete anyway? As they sat to pull on their socks and shoes, Mort decided to quit worrying why Dao-ming liked him. Instead, he asked his friend what he intended to do about Dongmei.

Pete shrugged. “I don’t know. Fuck her, I guess. She’s begging for it. And Dao-ming acts like she wants me to hook up with her little sister, but it’s kind of weird, you ask me. Dongmei probably still has peach fuzz down there, but, you know, it’s the end of the fuckin’ world, right? What if we all die today? I wouldn’t want to check out without gettin’ my ass tapped at least once, if I was a chick. ‘Specially by someone that looks as good as me!”

“You’re a real prince,” Mort laughed.

Pete snickered.

“That’s a tough call though,” Mort said, sobering. “She’s cute and all, but…”

“Yeah. But.”

Dao-ming slid open the patio door. “You guys going to sit and drink International Coffee all morning, or are we going to blow this shitty town?”

Mort and Pete jumped to their feet.

“We’re ready,” Mort said.

It took them an hour to pack the Mercedes. They filled the trunk and the back seat with supplies: canned food, first aid products, bottled water, toilet paper, spare clothes and camping gear. They stuffed anything they thought they might need, so long as it fit in the car. They packed plenty of guns and ammo, too, and Dongmei even found a couple old fishing rods and a tacklebox tucked in the back of a spare bedroom closet. Dao-ming could not remember her father ever going fishing, but there they were. The rods and tackle would certainly come in handy if they actually made it to Quabbin Reservoir. They even allowed Dongmei to bring a little case of cosmetics and one of her stuffed teddy bears. Her father had gotten it for her as a Valentine’s Day gift the previous year, and she was determined to bring it.

“Just make sure it doesn’t block my rear view mirror,” Dao-ming said to her younger sister. She didn’t have the heart to tell the girl no. There were a lot of keepsakes she wished she could bring as well. Family photos, mostly. Her mother and father’s wedding pictures. But there just wasn’t room.

“Is this everything?” Mort asked, swabbing the sweat from his brow.

“I can’t think of anything else,” Dao-ming said uncertainly.

“I always feel like I’m forgetting something whenever I pack,” Mort said with a nervous little laugh.

“I don’t see how we’re all going to fit in there,” Pete said, scratching his head.

“I’ll sit in your lap,” Dongmei volunteered.

“Nah, I don’t think so...”

“I don’t think you have a choice,” Dao-ming said, and her younger sister grinned up at Pete exultantly.

“Damn,” Pete sighed.

Mort sat in the front seat with Dao-ming. He had to hike his knees to his chest because the floorboard was filled with cases of bottled water. Pete slid into the backseat 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. When everyone had gotten comfortable, they turned to look at Dao-ming, who hadn’t even started the engine yet.

Dao-ming smiled back. Finally she said, “Someone has to get the gate.”

“Oh!” Mort said, then laughed. He climbed back out of the car and trotted to the end of the driveway.

Mort peeked through the iron rails of the security fence. Sun-dappled shade shimmered on the street. The trees traded secrets in the brisk autumn wind, their leaves a palette of oranges and reds and browns. The gutters were clogged with the leaves that had already fallen, and everyone’s yard needed to be mown one last time before winter, but there was no one left to clear those gutters of leaves, no one left to fire those mowers up and tend to the grass.

Mort looked up and down the street, checking for deadheads. Apart from the four Dongmei had shot the day before, lying halfway up the block like piles of refuse, he saw no zombies. That didn’t mean they weren’t there-- behind a tree or just around the corner of the house-- but the coast wasn’t going to get any clearer.

Saying a quick prayer under his breath, his heart knocking ninety beats a second, Mort unlocked the gate manually and heaved it open.

Dao-ming backed the car to the gate, waited for Mort to jump in. He waved her past with a jerking motion, feeling very vulnerable and exposed. When Dao-ming finally understood what he wanted her to do, she reversed out onto the street and waited for him. Mort trotted out onto the street, pulling the gate shut. He made sure the locking mechanism clicked into place, then ran to the passenger side of the Mercedes and leapt into the car.

“I didn’t want to leave the gate open in case we have to fall back,” Mort explained breathlessly.

“Smart,” Dao-ming said.

“That’s why he’s the brain,” Pete said, then winced and  pushed Dongmei back onto a thigh. “Kid, I swear...!”

“Sooor-rrry,” Dongmei trilled, not sounding very sorry at all.

Dao-ming stared down the street a moment, her eyes narrowed, the engine of the sports car idling. She took a deep, calming breath, cleared her thoughts, then said, very softly, “Ready?”

“Let’s go,” Mort said.

“Punch it!” Pete cried.

“Go! Go! Go!” Dongmei squealed.

Dao-ming yanked the gear lever and stomped the gas pedal to the mat.

The Mercedes-Benz pealed down the street, tires smoking.

The shady residential streets slid past, moving quicker and quicker as the Mercedes accelerated. Mort had to swallow down his breakfast. A little of it had come back up, hot as acid, in his mouth.

Mort Lesser was not a religious man. He believed there was a God. Not so much in all the other mumbo-jumbo organized religion would have people buy into. Nevertheless, as he led his friends into the wilderness that morning, Mort prayed. He prayed he was doing the right thing, that he was right about this, that he wasn’t leading them all to their doom. Somehow he had assumed responsibility for this group. They were letting him call the shots, but what if he was wrong? What if the nuclear power plant didn’t blow up? What if they would have been safer hiding out at Dao-ming’s house until the Phage ran its course? The deadheads weren’t immortal. They could be killed. He’d killed them himself. Eventually the Armageddon Virus would simply burn itself out. Maybe they should have just stayed where they were and crossed their fingers. He was going to get them all killed!

He didn’t believe it though. In his head, there was a graph, and it charted two variables. One was the odds of the DuChamp nuclear power facility melting down. The other was the odds of being killed and eaten by zombies. Right now, both those variables were climbing into the red zone, but if their luck held out, if they could get out of town before one or the other hit one hundred percent, the chances of dying from either plummeted close to zero. They’d be safe, and he would be the hero for a change!

But he couldn’t stop thinking what if. It was, he realized, the price of trying to be a hero.

Within a block, the Mercedes 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.

They pelted after the car, snarling and slavering, little bits and pieces of them falling off into the street, but the Mercedes was already going fifty miles per hour, and the animals shrank quickly into the distance.

Mort leaned hard against his seatbelt as Dao-ming took a sharp turn at full speed. He ground his teeth together and tried his best to hold onto the rifle and shotgun 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 squeezed it between his thighs as canned food and flashlights and ammo rattled in the backseat.

Just around the corner, a deadhead was stumbling in the middle of the street. It was a female, skin blue and mottled with mold, dressed in a ragged hospital gown. The Mercedes squealed around the corner, missing her by inches. Her hospital gown whipping in the air, the deadhead turned and tottered after the vehicle, groaning, but the Mercedes was a block away before the creature had shambled three steps in pursuit of it.

Dao-ming narrowed her eyes and fixed the totality of her concentration on the road ahead. Until they cleared the city, she needed all of her skills to navigate the crash-littered and zombie-infested streets of DuChamp. She weaved through a wagon train of burned out military transports. Went up onto the sidewalk to sidestep a big pileup at an intersection. All along the street, the dead lifted their heads as the Mercedes roared past. They gave chase, their faces twisted in hunger and rage.

It was another roller coaster ride through zombie hell.  Mort was horrified by the city’s dissolution. Homes and businesses had burned to their foundations. In some place, entire city blocks had burned, looked like photos of World War II destruction. Bodies lay piled in the gutters, flyblown and bloated. 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 double date. Pete stroked the back of her head and told her it was going to be all right, forgetting his annoyance with her for the time being. 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 onto the weapons and his breakfast.

They saw one other band of survivors during their escape from the city. A group of college-age kids in an old green van. The van had crashed into a light pole and sat immobile, hood buckled up, 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 chew their way through the crunchy outside to get to the gooey center. The college kids-- two boys and two girls-- 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 boy was clutching a barking dog to his chest, waiting for the two of them to be eaten alive.

“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 squeezed his eyes shut, fighting off the tears. He nodded.

Nothing they could do.

Mort opened his eyes.

He grabbed the dash with his free hand and howled, “No! No! No!”

The street up ahead was completely blocked, packed from one side of the road to the other with deadheads. Half the city seemed to be gathered there, for what he could not see, but the street was impassable.

Dao-ming saw it as soon as he did, however. She stomped the brakes, brought the Mercedes to a squealing halt.

“Back! Back! Back!” Mort said, twisting around in his seat. “We have to take an alternate route!”

“I know!” Dao-ming said tersely.

As the great mob of deadheads gave chase, Dao-ming wheeled the car around. The Mercedes took off like a rocket.

Watching the deadheads shrink into the distance, Mort blew out his cheeks. He settled back into his seat. “That was close!” he breathed.

“Naw, she’s got it under control,” Pete said from the backseat.

Dao-ming glanced back at him in the rear view mirror and gave him a faint, but genuine, smile.

Finally, the city began to thin. The high rise buildings gave way to a low suburban sprawl. There was less debris in the streets, fewer smashed cars. There were fewer zombies to dodge, too. 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 lots, but not many. Most employees had probably called in dead the last couple weeks, Mort thought. He only saw two zombies: a rotten scarecrow shuffling in the middle of a parking lot, wandering between abandoned cars, and a second one limping along the ditch, dragging a partially devoured human leg behind it by the ankle.

Parkway Road travelled west toward a large gray building with a sign out front that said DuChamp Freight Company. Another street ran perpendicular there, heading north and south.

“Parkway connects to some backroads,” Dao-ming said. “There’s some wooded lots and warehouses, the city dump, and then we’ll be out of DuChamp.”

“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 coughed from the center of the windshield. Mort squeezed his eyes shut as a hail of glass shards peppered his forehead and cheeks. There was no sound other than the blast of rupturing glass. One minute everything was fine, the next a four inch hole had magically appeared in the front windshield of the Mercedes-Benz.

“What was that?” Dao-ming cried, her nose and ear bleeding. The Mercedes slewed into the ditch as she tried to blink the glittering debris from her cheeks and eyelashes, but she recovered and steered the car back onto the street.

Then from the backseat, Pete moaned: “Oh, God! Oh, Jesus!”

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.

Pete’s face was covered in blood. There was blood all over his shoulder and chest. Blood sprayed across the inside of the back window. Blood all over the back seat. He tried to stench the flow from the teenager’s head with his right hand but it was futile. The girl was mortally wounded.

“Dongmeeeiii!” Dao-ming screamed.

The car jerked as one of the front wheels ruptured.

The Mercedes swerved, jounced into the ditch, then struck a fence post and came to a wrenching halt. The hood popped up. Steam began to billow from the radiator.

Screaming, Dao-ming tried to claw her way into the back seat, but she was still buckled in 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. “I think someone shot her…”

Mort had struck his forehead pretty hard on the dash when the Mercedes ran into the fence post. He shook his head to clear his rattled thoughts, then checked the area around the vehicle 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 finally realized she was still buckled in. 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’d glimpsed that deadly 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 him, mouth agape. It was rotted so bad its gender was indecipherable. It dropped the leg and tottered toward him, clawing at the air with leathery hands.

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. There you are, he thought. His mind was surprisingly clear, the thought surprisingly lethal. He sighted on the shadow figure in the window, his finger twitching on the trigger. A moment later, he felt a blast of heat in his thigh and found himself dropping to the pavement.

He shot me!

He observed his fall with a dreamy sort of detachment, as if he were floating outside his own body. Pete yelled 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 drifted up to meet his body. There was a beer can in the ditch. It was a Pabst Blue Ribbon, half-crushed and caked with dirt. Dao-ming shouted her sister’s name in the wrecked car behind him, her voice low and slow. The pavement was warm, he noticed, when his cheek finally settled upon it, light as a feather. It was actually kind of nice, that warmth.

He looked down at his jeans. Scowled. There was a hole in his thigh. Blood was pouring out of him. Quite a lot of blood. This whole plot is full of holes, he thought irrationally.

Then he noticed something else. The ground was vibrating beneath him. He felt it more than he heard it, a deep bass hum. The quake swelled in intensity, then began to ebb. The ground thrummed once again, more intensely, and 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 into the sky.

Oh crap, he thought.

11

When Morton Met Peter

Morton Lesser met Peter Bolin the day Mort lit out for the territories. Mort’s plan was straightforward. Travel light, and get the heck out of Dodge before the nuclear power plant redlined. He didn’t take a lot with him, just food and water and some basic survival gear stuffed in his old backpack from high school. He knew trying to carry too many supplies would only slow him down, and lord knows, he was slow enough as it was. Besides, he reasoned, he could probably scavenge anything he needed along the way.

When he decided it was now or never, he grabbed his backpack, laced his tennis shoes good and tight, threw up in the kitchen trashcan and made his way cautiously to the  deserted street below. Within a few hours of abandoning his apartment, Mort was pinned down in a Frito-Lay delivery truck, surrounded by the hungry dead.

Peter Bolin rescued him, but only because he thought Mort was a chick.

But before that, in the week following Fred’s death,  during the most violent phase of the zombie epidemic, Mort holed up in his apartment. During that first chaotic week, Mort had no intention whatsoever of stepping foot outside his apartment until the government or army or somebody got the zombie outbreak under control. He didn’t care what authority stepped up to the plate, just so long as they put the world back in order. If it was Nazis from the moon, he’d heil with the best of them. If it was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he’d happily bike around town 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.. Heck, he’d grok alien intervention. They could probe him all they wanted! Unfortunately, the government was a no-show. The army spent a day or two shooting healthy but frightened American citizens at the edge of town before hauling stakes, and Jesus and the Nazi Party were previously engaged. When the TV and radio stations went off the air-- and shortly after that, the lights-- Mort realized the cavalry wasn’t coming.

This isn’t so bad, he thought, sitting in his dark apartment. His apartment ran warm without air conditioning, but he could live with it. Emphasis on the word “live”. Sweating through his undies and going to sleep at sundown were minor inconveniences compared to being ripped apart and devoured by his fellow Massachusetts. He’d just keep his head down until the zombie infection ran its course. Things might never be the same again, but at least he’d be alive.

He found an old Walkman in one of his dresser drawers and popped some batteries in it. Tuning to 107.3, Mort spent his days listening to some guy ranting on what used to be the local rock ‘n’ roll station, DCFM, home of “Stinkie and the Fonz”. He didn’t know who the guy was. He certainly wasn’t Stinkie or the Fonz, but he sure had some wild ideas, and every now and then he would actually report some halfway credible news. He even played some music here and there. Mort finally dubbed the guy Ravin’ Ronnie, because of his tendency to get hysterical and babble, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying, and sometimes a little of both. One day Ravin’ Ronnie claimed the zombie outbreak was a supervirus that had escaped from some government lab. The next day, he claimed the virus had come from outer space. Day three, it was mutated AIDS, and God was punishing the world for all the immorality and dirty fucking going on. 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, sometimes the best course of action was simply taking no action at all.

He estimated he could survive for at least three weeks without the need to leave his apartment. He’d spent the first forty-eight hours following Fred’s death prepping. He’d barricaded the door, filled every container, jug, coffee mug, drinking glass and basin in his apartment with drinking water. He began to ration his food immediately, eating only when he could ignore his hunger pains no longer, although he did gorge himself on his entire Little Debbie stores one evening in a fit of boredom and despair. He’d slept the next twelve hours in a sugar coma.

Hell, he might be able to push it further than three weeks. It depended on just how long the taps continued to work. Potable water was the crux. He’d installed a filtration system in his kitchen sink a couple years ago, hoping to strain some of the rust and little black bits from the city’s unpalatable drinking water, so quality was not a big deal, just so long as water came out when he turned the valve. A human being could go weeks without food as long as they had a continuous supply of drinking water. He just hoped it wasn’t the water supply that was spreading the infection. His filters could remove chlorine and lead. It couldn’t remove viruses or bacteria. He didn’t think so, anyway.

Then one night, about a week after he hunkered down to wait out the zombie plague, he dreamed the DuChamp nuclear power facility blew up.

To be more precise, he dreamed he was visiting the plant when it blew up.

In his dream, he was a teenager again. This was a grade school version of Mort Lesser: fat, unpopular, face like a pepperoni pizza, with C-cup titties and a belly that hung over the waist band of his blue jeans like a small awning. Mort the Dork, a living, breathing KICK ME sign. He was in junior high and his school had taken all the seventh and eighth graders by bus to the nuclear power plant on the north side of town as part of Ronald Reagan’s “Nuclear Power is Your Friend” public service program, the nuclear power industry’s pithy attempt to reach out to the U.S.’s nuclear power communities and allay their fears following the Chernobyl disaster in Russia.

His dad, who was still fifteen years away from dying during a triple bypass operation, had scrawled his name on the permission form. Mort remembered because his dad was monging on a banana when he did it and got banana goo on the paper, which upset Mort tremendously. He didn’t want his teacher, who was young and slim and pretty, to see the banana goo and think Mort had gotten the permission slip all gooey.

So they toured the facility, approximately sixty giggling, grabassing, know-it-all teenagers, paying little attention to the tour guide’s canned speech and secretly rolling their eyes and cutting jokes at the expense of all the goofy, grinning, uncool adults who ran the power plant and kept their community in lights and ice cubes without turning the city into a big radioactive crater in the middle of Massachusetts.

When the tour had come to an end, the perky tour guide—a petite brunette with a ponytail—asked the DuChamp junior high schoolers if anyone had any questions. Before he could stop himself, Mort spoke up: “Yeah. So, um... could this place blow up? Like Chernobyl, I mean? My dad says it can. He says the longer the plant is operating, the higher the, uh, probability is that an accident will happen.”

The entire group fell silent. About half of the seventh and eighth graders looked at Mort. The other half, including the teachers, looked at the tour guide. Mort felt his cheeks heat up at all the stares. The tour guide’s grin grew just slightly brittle before she answered.

“Like Chernobyl? Um, no. The Chernobyl disaster is something that just isn’t going to happen here in the United States. For one thing, the incident at Chernobyl was triggered by a very unlikely set of circumstances. An unauthorized experiment was being conducted and, unlike nuclear power plants in the United States, the Soviet facility did not have any form of hard containment vessel.”

“But what would happen if, say, all the people disappeared and there was nobody left to run the plant?” Mort continued. “Would it blow up then?”

The tour guide laughed, relieved her questioner had veered so quickly into the realm of make-believe. “Well, if everybody in the world just disappeared”—she said, making quotation marks with her fingers—“The emergency diesel generators would kick in and continue to cool the reactor core for about a week. After that, the cooling system would eventually fail, and the plant might melt down, but the energy would still be contained within the power plant’s nuclear containment shielding.”

“Even in a worst case scenario,” the tour guide continued. “The reactor core would melt down through the floor and continue to burrow through the earth’s mantle until it cooled or struck some type of water table. In any event, the core would be safely shielded, by the plant’s structure, or by the planetary crust.”

Everyone seemed very impressed and reassured by her answer. Both the teens and adults nodded and smiled at one another, but Mort was not so comforted. He’d overheard his mother and father discussing the Three-Mile Island incident, which had taken place in the US in the late seventies. Mort’s dad, who had grown up in Pennsylvania, sometimes joked when he was in his cups that the radiation he’d been exposed to when he was in high school was the reason he had such a giant schlong. His parents had protested this very plant’s construction when GE decided to build a nuclear plant in DuChamp. Mort was in pre-school when this happened. Failing to halt its construction, his parents had always maintained a simmering paranoia regarding the nuclear power plant that ran their appliances and cooled their home in the summer.

As they were being escorted out of the plant in his dream, Mort noticed that a pipe was leaking and brought it to the tour leader’s attention. Hot, bubbling water was spraying from the leaky pipe with a rattling raspberry sound.

“If it’s so safe, ma’am, then why is this pipe leaking?” he’d asked, pointing at it with his index finger.

The tour guide looked horrified. “Oh no!” she cried. “Everybody run!”

But it was too late. In his dream, the plant exploded. Hot steam enveloped his classmates, broiling them instantly.  Flying debris chopped his teachers and the perky tour guide into bloody chunks. Ms. Hancock, his pre-algebra teacher, was skewered by a flying piece of piping with such force that she was pinned to the wall like a butterfly, blood spraying from her mouth, legs quivering. Then the radiation blossomed out of the shuddering walls, red and hot like the light that comes from an electric heater. Mort stood in the center of the maelstrom like a ghost, untouched, amazed by the destruction. He wondered how he could be standing there unaffected as the plant blew up around him. It was impossible! Then he felt a tingling sensation in his arms and looked down at them. His mouth dropped open in horror as he watched his skin begin to bubble, great blisters welling up and bursting in his flesh. He realized he could see his bones through his skin, like when he was a kid and he would hold his fingers over the lens of a flashlight, but it was not just the flesh of his fingers he could see through. It was his whole body.

Mort jerked awake with a snort. He found himself bolt upright in his bed.

He recalled that long ago tour guide answering his hypothetical long ago question: “Well, if everybody in the world just disappeared, the emergency diesel generators would kick in and continue to cool the reactor core for about a week.”

For about a week…!

Mort packed a bag and departed the next day.

He figured it would take three or four days to get out of the city on foot. Maybe as little as a day if he could find a ride with the keys in the ignition and some gas in the tank. He couldn’t take his little jalopy. Some lady in a Porsche had crashed into it on the third day of the outbreak, shoving it up onto the sidewalk and wedging it against a light pole.

He just hoped the backup generators at the power plant held out three or four more days. He was optimistic. The city’s power was still on in some areas. He could see the lights at night, glowing on the horizon. Surely that must mean someone was still manning the power plant… but how long could they hold out?

He didn’t want to stick around and find out.

The thought of leaving the safety of his apartment was terrifying. Putting himself in the reach of those awful creatures...! He knew what they would do if they got ahold of him! The cowardly part of his mind tried to talk him out of it all morning, insisting he was jumping the gun, that order would soon be restored and the zombies dealt with, that the power plant’s safety features had multiple redundancies. Heck, they probably even had protocols for just such an emergency. He was going to get himself killed, and for what? A bad dream?

But Mort was a firm believer in Murphy’s Law. His father had always said, “Shit happens... and shit stinks.” Mort suspected that things in DuChamp—things all over the world—were just going to keep sliding deeper and deeper into the tar pit. All the lights in DuChamp would go out, and a week after that, give or take a few days, the plant would melt down. The backup generators would fail, the coolant would stop circulating, the reactor core would begin to heat up, and then... kaboom!

So he watched the street from his window, and when a couple hours had passed with no sign of deadheads, he unblocked his door and crept through his dark and silent apartment building to the sidewalk down below.

He leaned out the door, peering up and down the street. The only sound was the mournful hooting of the wind. That, and the thudding of his heart. He stuck out a foot, almost balked, then forced himself to step completely out in the open.

“You can do this,” he whispered to himself.

He stood there beneath the open sky, the sun on his face, the wind blowing through his hair, waiting for a pack of starved zombies to come bolting from an alley or some recessed doorway, but nothing happened. The world was silent, the street deserted.

Mort started down the avenue, headed south. He slipped from doorway to alley, peeking around each corner, hunkering down behind every wrecked car he came to, trying to stay out of sight. He checked the abandoned vehicles but most were locked tight or too damaged to drive. He made it to the end of the street and turned right, heading west. A couple blocks from his apartment, he found a crowbar in the open trunk of a gray Ford Taurus that had crashed into the brick wall of a Dollar General store. The driver of the car had been flung partially through the windshield. He’d also been eaten from the waist up.

There were a few fat autumn flies crawling over the man’s gnawed bones. They rubbed their hairy little forelegs together and skittered around, taking to the air and landing restlessly, wings buzzing. The man didn’t look real. He could have been a prop in a horror movie. He smelled pretty real, though. Mort had to cover his nose and mouth to get close.

Mort hefted the crowbar. He liked the weight of it in his hands. He took a few practice swings and continued on.

A few blocks past that, he chanced upon a Frito-Lay truck. The delivery truck was parked neatly at the curb. The driver, a woman with curly bottle-blonde hair, sat slumped in her seat. Mort approached cautiously. He wasn’t completely sure she was dead-dead, but the vehicle appeared unscathed. Maybe he could drive it out of town.

He eased open the door, grimacing at the smell that blossomed from the interior.

He poked the woman experimentally with his crowbar.

He waited to see if her eyes would flash open,  expected the corpse to come to life and lunge at him, but she didn’t so much as twitch. She was as stiff and lifeless as a store mannikin.

Dead-dead, he thought.

He quickly realized how she’d died. It was pretty obvious up close. She’d slit her own throat with a box cutter. A large, crusty grin was carved into her neck from ear to ear, her uniform black and stiff with blood, the box cutter in her lap. How hopeless and frightened must she have been to do such a thing, Mort wondered. He didn’t think he could do it. She must have gotten trapped, surrounded by zombies--

You don’t have time for this, a voice spoke up in his head.

He leaned in to check the ignition and couldn’t help but grin.

Keys!

Mort was getting ready to haul her out of her seat when he heard soft, bubbly exhalations behind him.

Hair standing up on the back of his neck, Mort turned to see where the phlegmatic breathing was coming from.

“Oh, crap,” Mort whispered.

A few yards away, a very large and very zombified Rottweiler was creeping toward him.

Head lowered, lips peeled back from its teeth, the beast stalked forward. Its eyes were filmy gray marbles. Its black and tan fur had fallen out in clumps.

“Uh... good doggy,” Mort squeaked, easing backwards. He stepped onto the running board of the delivery truck.

Foam drooled from the Rottweiler’s twitching muzzle as it padded toward him. It began to growl deep in its chest. If it hadn’t been in such an advanced state of putrefaction, Mort realized, the creature probably would have been able to take Mort down before he’d noticed it coming up behind him, but the beast appeared to have died days before, and death had ravaged its tissues, making it slow and stiff and clumsy.

Mort slid up onto the delivery driver’s lap. He jumped a little as the driver wheezed. The weight of his body had forced a whoosh of gas from the dead driver’s guts. He gagged. The smell was awful beyond description.

“That’s a good boy,” Mort gulped, trying to keep his voice steady. “Sta-aaay...”

The Rottweiler leapt.

The animal’s jaws snapped shut just inches from one of his ankles. Mort swung the crowbar down with panicky strength, striking the huge dog in the head. The impact rattled up his entire arm, almost jerked the crowbar from his grip, but he did not feel it. He would not feel it until later that night, when he was safe in Pete’s basement hideout. By nightfall, his arm would be so sore he could raise it no higher than his chest, but there was so much adrenaline pumping through his veins right then he could have ripped the whole blamed arm off and not felt it.

The big dog fell to the ground on its side, rotten flesh and maggots peppering the pavement around it. It writhed around for a moment, its skull dented in like a rotten melon, then it struggled to its feet.

Gasping, Mort pulled his legs into the delivery truck and slammed the door shut.

The Rottweiler drove its head against the side of the truck hard enough to make the vehicle rock on its wheels. The beast did it again, making Mort cry out, and then it must have decided that mushing its head against the door of the delivery truck was a bad idea, because it began to bark: hoarse and loud. Its baying was answered a second later by the howl of a human zombie.

Mort sat in the dead blonde’s lap, his entire body trembling. He couldn’t believe how close he’d come to getting bit, maybe even killed. Down the street, a zombie lurched around the corner, headed in his direction.

Gotta get out of here, he thought. Get this crate moving before you’re surrounded!

He scooted to the open compartment beside the driver’s seat and tried to pull her out of the chair. The blonde’s head and shoulders tilted a little, but he couldn’t dislodge her from her seat. He yanked again, grunting. For a second, he thought she was adhered to the seat with the dried glaze of her own blood, then he realized she was still buckled in.

Mort yelped as a zombie slapped its palms against the driver’s side window. It was a male, still fresh and strong, with coppery curls and a big hunk of skin missing from its cheek: a bite wound, ragged and oozing. It had heard the Rottweiler howling and come a-running. The curly-headed zombie slapped its hands against the glass twice more, gnashing its teeth and hissing.

Gasping, dizzy with fear, Mort slid back onto the blonde’s lap, the steering wheel gouging him in the belly. He keyed the ignition, praying under his breath. Please oh please oh please, God, I don’t ask for much! The engine caught right off, the whole cab shaking, then died an instant later. He tried again... with similar results. He finally thought to check the instrument panel and saw with horror that the fuel indicator was pointing at E.

Empty!

“No!” Mort cried. “No! No! No! Oh, you stupid fat idiot!”

The howls of the curly-headed zombie had attracted more deadheads to the stalled truck. Mort watched with steadily rising terror as two, three, four came pelting around the street corner. The Rottweiler continued to bark. The zombies howled and snarled and shrieked. They ran to the Frito-Lay truck and began to scratch at the sides. They pawed the windows, smearing them with goo and gore. Mort locked the door just in case one of them accidentally hooked the door handle with their flailing fingers, then slid from the dead driver’s lap into the floorboard and put his face in his hands.

“You’re dead, Mort,” he said to himself, voice pitched high in disbelief. “You just killed yourself!”

One mistake. He’d made one mistake…!

But in Zombie World, one mistake is all you got.

Mort blinked up at the driver as he sat in the floorboard. She’d once been a lovely, middle-aged woman. Mid-forties, thin, her face a little too wrinkled from tanning, with a narrow nose and a sharp prow of a chin. She looked like one of those bittersweet blondes life always seemed to cure into female beef jerky. The kind of woman who drank too much, smoked too much and couldn’t help but fall for the bad boys, no matter how many times they burned her. Her final grimace was stamped forever now onto her lipsticked lips, just three or four inches above the joker smile she’d carved into her own throat.

She had nice fingernails, Mort noted. French manicure, like his mother always got. The stiff fingers of her right hand were still curled around the box cutter.

He thought about taking that box cutter from her bony fingers and doing himself a like favor. They could sit here in the Frito-Lay truck together, grinning side by side, for all eternity.

She’d probably made just the one mistake, too. Forgot to fill up the delivery truck, or maybe she had checked the gauge that morning and thought, I’ll just get it at lunch, no big whoop... He wondered how long she’d sat in the truck, trapped by the hungry dead, before she decided to off herself.

It couldn’t have been too long ago, because she wasn’t all rotten and maggoty.

Mort jumped as more zombies drummed the side of the truck.

“Shut up!” he screeched at the howling revenants.

Within an hour, there was something like fifty zombies surrounding the van, playing bongos on the side panels and scraping at the windows with their ragged, bony fingers. The vehicle shuddered and rocked. If they were smart enough to coordinate their efforts, go for the windows at once, the zombies could have gotten at him in an instant, but they were mindless things. They attacked one another as often as they did the van. Mort rose, duckwalked into the back. He opened a cardboard box and grabbed several bags of chips. He returned to the front and opened them, eating the salty snacks glumly. He stared out at the zombies as he munched, face pale, brow furrowed.

When he was full, he took the box cutter from the blonde’s stiff fingers and put the blade to his neck. He squeezed his eyes shut and screamed.

1-2-3-NOW!

Okay... 1-2-3-NOW!

He screamed until he was out of breath, but he just couldn’t do it!

He threw the box cutter down, tears beading his eyelashes.

Coward!

A second later: two gunshots.

Mort jerked as the gunshots echoed in the air. Before the sound had even died away, the zombies quit howling and pummeling the delivery truck. In the sudden dead silence, Mort raised up. He scrambled across the truck driver’s lap. Peeking through the smeary window, Mort spotted the gunman. The guy stood on the sidewalk across the street from the van, legs spread, a shotgun in his hands. He was a lanky fellow with shoulder-length feathered blonde hair and broad shoulders. Dressed in tight straight-leg jeans, a blue Chambray shirt and cowboy boots, Mort’s rescuer flashed a big grin and fired another shot in the air. He looked every inch the hero, shotgun belching smoke, the sun flashing off expensive aviator sunglasses.

“Come get some, you undead assholes!” the man yelled.

Mort heard the words clearly. The zombies were just standing there ogling the man. Perhaps, in their own dim way, the deadheads were just as impressed as Mort was at the man’s reckless bravery. Mort didn’t quite believe what he was seeing, didn’t dare to hope. Was he imagining it? Was this some last desperate fantasy?

No, he thought. This is real.

Someone was trying to rescue him!

As the zombies began to drift toward the gunman, Mort’s rescuer backed away, pumping another round into the sky. It was like a gunshot signaling a race. The zombies began to howl all at once. They gave chase like a single terrible organism, feet rumbling on the pavement. The blonde man fired one last shot, this one aimed dead center at the approaching mob. It must have been some kind of buckshot, because the round took down several stumbling deadheads, knocked them right off their feet. An instant later, they were trampled.

“Go! Go!” Mort cried, rooting for his savior.

With a whoop of excitement, Mort’s rescuer jumped in the air, doing a strange sort of kung fu kick, then he turned tail and ran.

Fast as the zombies could be in their desperate hunger, Mort’s hero was faster. A veritable Mercury, the lanky fellow shagged ass to the end of the block, then turned and waited for the deadheads to come closer. Mort watched in stunned disbelief as nearly all the revenants who had surrounded the delivery truck abandoned their trapped quarry. Even the Rottweiler took off after the blonde gunman, trotting away from the van with a ragged, limping gate.

The guy in the cowboy boots sprinted around the corner of the building, vanishing from sight.

Mort reached for the door handle, knowing he had to take this opportunity to escape, but he hesitated. Not all of the zombies had taken off after his rescuer. There were still three of them swiping at the windows of the Frito-Lay truck.  It’s now or never, you big chicken, he said to himself. He grabbed the crowbar and gripped it in a tight, sweaty fist. If you don’t run now, they’re going to come back, and then you’re going to die!

But he was scared.

Tears of shame and frustration stung his eyes. His body began to tremble all over as he battled with his fear. Big, greasy blobs of sweat oozed from his cheeks and forehead, and then he opened his mouth and let off a growl that would have made Conan the Barbarian proud.

Just as Mort lunged for the door handle, the lanky blonde came around the far corner of the building and pelted toward the delivery truck.

One of the zombies that stayed behind finally took notice of Mort’s rescuer. It was a humped and desiccated woman with a great mane of permed black hair. The deadhead took three tottering steps toward the blonde in the aviator sunglasses, arms outstretched, but before she came close, Mort’s deliverer leveled the shotgun at her and blew her out of her Crocs. Scalp and big chunks of gray brain matter splattered the driver’s side window.

“Come on out of there, honey!” Mort’s rescuer called. “We need ta git while the gittin’s good!”

Mort fumbled the door open and spilled out onto the street.

“What the fuck?” the blonde gawped, recoiling in surprise. He looked past Mort into the cab of the delivery truck. “Where’s the chick?” he asked, his upper lip curled.

“Dead,” Mort said.

“Dead?”

“Dead.”

“Shit! It’s just you in there?”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“Shit!”

The blonde in the cowboy boots swung a kick at the sidewalk, looking disgusted. Up close, his handsomeness was astounding. He had high cheekbones, squinty blue-gray eyes and full, sensuous lips. Mort wasn’t attracted to other men, but he was momentarily stunned by his rescuer’s good looks. The guy was a fucking movie star. The kind teenage girls swooned over. The kind their mom’s fantasized about while their dads sweated and bounced on top of them. Mort felt like the fattest, ugliest man in the world.

Another zombie shuffled toward them from the far side of the delivery truck. A geriatric in a hospital gown. Mort turned and clubbed him down with his crowbar. The old man fell, growling and foaming at the mouth. Mort clubbed him again and again until he fell still.

His rescuer was walking in a circle with his hands on his hips, disgusted and angry that Mort was Mort and not the buxom blonde he’d expected. He cursed some more, kicked the front wheel of the truck. Finally, he forced himself to calm down.

“Okay. Take a deep breath and let it out,” the guy muttered. His chest rose, then he pursed his lips and blew.

The mob of zombies that had chased Mort’s rescuer around the block were beginning to clear the far side of the building. Zombies weren’t very bright though. About half of them seemed to have forgotten what they were chasing and went loping away in random directions, still howling and waving their arms. The rest stampeded toward the Frito-Lay truck.

“Damn it all,” Mort’s rescuer cursed. He turned and swung his shotgun, nodding his head to one side. “Well, come on, fatso. If you want to live, follow me. And try to keep up. I ain’t waiting on you.”

With that, the blonde in the cowboy boots and aviator sunglasses took off in a sprint.

Mort grabbed his backpack and followed.

Mort tried to keep up with his handsome rescuer, but the longer they ran the further Mort fell behind. He clenched his teeth and gave it everything he had, but he could feel his gut and man-tits bouncing up and down with each stride. His lungs burned. Sweat poured down his face and neck and torso. He could hear the howls of the pursuing mob growing louder and louder behind him, tried to run faster, but he was giving it all he had.

Despite his threat to leave Mort behind, the blonde had paused at the mouth of an alley. He waited impatiently for Mort to catch up, waving him on.

“Come on, lardbutt! Move!” he yelled.

Mort called him every foul name he could think of… in his head. Aloud, he gusted, “I’m trying!”

The blonde leaned out, tried to decide if the fat guy was going to make it or not. “They’re right behind you, tubbo!” he yelled.

Mort finally caught up with Cowboy Boots. “This way!” Mort’s rescuer said, and bolted down the alley. Mort wheezed after him. Midway down the alley, a flight of concrete steps descended to a sub ground-level steel door. The blonde pelted down the steps and whisked through the entrance. Mort panted right behind him. As soon as Mort plodded through the entrance, the blonde slammed the door and barred it with a two-by-four. He crouched down and waited.

Wheezing and huffing, Mort stood with his hands on his knees. He began to cough.

“Quiet!” the blonde hissed.

Mort tried to slow his breathing but he was too winded. He’d never been—by even the most creative stretch of the imagination—a fit person, and he’d spent the last week hiding in his apartment, getting zero exercise and living off his stocks of potato chips, Little Debbie cakes and canned meats. Mort’s face was red and splotchy, and his clothes were soaked through with sweat. He backed away from the door, hoping the deadheads wouldn’t hear him, mouth working like a fish out of water. He propped his butt against a bare cinderblock wall, chest heaving, and concentrated on not passing out. His heart was beating so hard it felt like someone was slapping him on the back.

When he was sure they’d eluded the zombies, Movie Star wheeled on Mort angrily. “That was a goddamn dirty trick,” he said accusingly.

“What do you... mean?” Mort gasped.

“Pretending to be a chick.”

“I… wasn’t pretending… to be anything.”

“I saw a blonde inside that truck. She was moving around and screaming.” He looked Mort up and down, nose curled with disgust. “What were you doing? Eating her?”

Mort laughed breathlessly. “That was… me screaming… You saw her moving… when I tried to pull her… out of her seat. She was already dead.”

“How?”

“She… cut her own throat… with a box cutter. I was about… to do the same.”

The guy in the cowboy boots grinned. “Well, huh… I guess I rescued me a fatty.”

Mort was finally beginning to catch his breath. He wiped the sweat from his face with the back of his hand. “Yeah. Yeah, you did. Thanks. If there’s anything I can do to repay you, just let me know.”

“I can think of one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You can give me a blowjob.”

Mort’s head jerked up. “What?”

“You said if there was anything you could do to pay me back… so give me a blowjob. You owe me one, at least. I did just save yer life. Hey, and don’t forget to slob on muh balls while yer at it. That always gets me off real good.”

Mort drew away from the cowboy, opening his mouth to protest.

Movie Star cracked up. He laughed and slapped his knee. “Oh, shit, son! You should see yer face! Oh, Jesus, that was funny! Take it easy. I’m just pulling yer leg.” Mort’s rescuer wiped his streaming eyes and chuckled. “I’m Peter Bolin, by the way. My friends call me Cactus Pete. What’s yer handle?”

“Morton. Morton Lesser. Mort, for short,” Mort answered, relaxing a bit.

Cactus Pete thrust a hand out. Mort took it, surprised how calloused it was. He hadn’t expected such a rough, firm shake from a man who was so… well, admit it, guy-pretty. And Pete was strong, too. Mort’s bones crackled in his grip.

“Mort for short,” Pete echoed. “Hey, that rhymes!” And he laughed again.

Pete placed his shotgun in a wood crate near the door. The crate, Mort saw, bristled with weapons: rifles, a shotgun, a couple axes, a baseball bat with nails driven through the business end. Mort’s new friend was armed for bear.

Beside the crate was a heavy wooden table with a vice clamp attached to it. The table was littered with various wood crafting tools. Hammers, chisels, drills, a couple wood planers and sanding pads. There were screwdrivers and coffee cans full of odds and ends: bolts, screws, drill bits, nails. On the wall was a girlie calendar, some brunette in Daisy Dukes soaping up the hood of a sports car. They’d taken refuge in someone’s neglected workshop, Mort surmised. Faint yellow light filtered through dusty windows set high up in the wall. The windows were barred, thank goodness.

“Come on, Mort-For-Short. Let’s kick back for a little while,” Pete said, waving for Mort to follow him.

With a clank, Mort set his crowbar on top of the woodshop table and followed Pete into the next room.

Pete had made a fort for himself in the adjoining room. His hideout was smaller than the woodshop, a storage area with only two small windows for light. A mattress lay on the floor, a tangle of pillows and blankets piled on top of it. There was a battery powered radio and a small black-and-white TV. A Coleman lantern sat on a scarred coffee table amid a collection of empty beer cans, overflowing ashtrays and crumpled food wrappers. Pete’s hideout looked, Mort thought to himself, like a very messy kid’s private club house.

“Make yerself at home,” Pete invited, indicating the lumpy mattress.

Mort eyed the pornographic magazines stacked beside the mattress. It was pretty hardcore stuff. No tame standards like Playboy or Penthouse in those piles! Pete’s collection included titles like Gangbang Café, Juicy Cherry Holes and Squirting Sluts. One peek at the cover illustrations made Mort leery of reclining on Pete’s mattress. He was afraid the sheets might stick to him.

Pete cracked open a beer. “You want something to drink?” he asked. “They’re warm, but it’ll take the edge off.”

Mort started to decline, then thought, Why the hell not?

“Yeah, hand me one,” he said with an exhausted smile.

Pete grinned and tossed Mort a warm brew.

Steeling himself for an unpleasant surprise, Mort eased down on the mattress. He popped the can open and drank. Though he wasn’t much of a drinker, Mort’s mouth and throat were parched from his flight from the zombies. He chugged half the brew in one gulp, then let out a massive belch. “Excuse me,” he gurgled.

Pete guffawed. “Goddamn, son! I felt the wind off that all the way over here!”

Mort perused the small room. Pete had plenty of food stocked up. Junk food mostly, piled haphazardly on a handmade shelf that took up most of the back wall. Cases of beer were stacked in front of the shelf. There was bottled water and pop, too, but most of Pete’s drinking supplies was beer. The mattress he was sitting on was pushed up against a second door. The second door didn’t quite shut, hung crooked in its frame, but Pete had secured it with a large screwdriver shoved down through a hinged lockplate.

Pete sauntered to the windows. He stepped up on a wooden box so he could look out at the street. He pushed a threadbare curtain aside. Slurping his beer, he muttered, “Zombies are still wandering around out there. Probably wondering where we disappeared to.” He snorted. “Dumb fuckers.”

“That was a close call,” Mort said. “I thought I was a goner for sure.”

Pete nodded, hopped down from the box. “So what’s yer story, hoss?” he asked.

They spent the rest of the evening talking.

Pete, it turned out, was a surprisingly worldly man. Born in Kentucky, he’d wandered all over the Midwest, settling finally in Memphis, Tennessee, where he’d met a girl named Hannah. They started dating, moved in together. Pete even considered proposing. Hannah thought Pete was good looking enough to be a TV star. She sent pictures of Pete to various agencies in New York. When a modeling agency in the Big Apple showed some interest, Pete and Hannah moved east and Pete started working as a model. He’d even landed a gig on a daytime soap.

“Things were going good. I was making decent money, starting to get known. Then I come home early from a fashion show in Boston. They had to cancel because the designer got busted for solicitation. I didn’t call her, wanted it to be a surprise. I took a taxi home from the airport, let myself into the apartment and what do you know? I catch her banging my agent on the livingroom couch!” He shook his head, scowling. “It would have been fine if she told me she wanted to swing. Heck, I might have jumped right in! But she did it behind my back. How could I trust her after that? I got my own place. Went back to work. I even got a job modeling Calvin Klein underdrawers. I was really startin’ to make a name for myself when all this zombie shit went down.” He crushed his can and tossed it into the corner, looking angrily toward the windows. “Fuckin’ zombies,” he snarled.

Pete told Mort how he’d gotten his nickname—his grandfather had nicknamed him Cactus Pete after a local kids show host when he went to live with his grandparents in Southern Illinois. Mort described his comic book shop, talked about his friend Fred and how Fred had gotten killed and eaten by zombies. Pete asked him about his family-- “My dad died several years ago,” Mort said. “Mom moved to Florida with her new boyfriend. No brothers or sisters.”-- and told Mort about his. “Mom and dad live in Kentucky,” Pete said. “I got three older brothers, one in prison, one in Alabama, and one in the military. Last I heard, Billy, the one in the military, was fighting over in Afghanistan. I wonder if they got zombies over there, too.” When Pete asked Mort how he’d come to be trapped in the Frito-Lay delivery truck, Mort informed him of his plan to escape DuChamp before the power plant melted down.

“What do you mean the power plant’s going to melt down?” Pete asked.

After Mort explained, Pete volunteered immediately to accompany him. “I sure don’t want to be sitting here when Nagasaki blows up!” Pete declared, but he also wanted to go because he was bored. He was tired of hiding in a basement, tired of spending his days drinking beer and stroking off to porno magazines. Most of all, he was tired of being alone. Peter Bolin was a gregarious person, and he was going crazy with nobody to talk to but himself.

Plus, he liked Mort.

They were total opposites. Mort was thoughtful, intelligent, reserved. Pete was brash, immature and outgoing. But somehow they clicked. Their personalities were like two adjoining puzzle pieces. They fit, and in a city with so many zombies and so few survivors, that fit was something both men were reluctant to let slip through their fingers.

They set out the next morning.

12

Da Vinci Gets Off

I was right, Mort thought as the pavement thrummed beneath his body. He watched a column of superheated steam billow into the sky. It was already taking on that nightmarish mushroom shape.

The reactor really did blow up!

There was a part of Mort that was surprised, but the larger part of his intellect was not. Nope. Not surprised one bit. He knew nuclear power plants were built with numerous fail safes. Their reactors were housed inside layered shells of concrete and steel—all designed to keep the core from breaching and spilling its radioactive guts into the surrounding area. The DuChamp nuclear power facility’s containment building was supposed to be strong enough to endure a missile strike, but Mort was also a firm adherent to Murphy’s Law.

If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong.

Murphy’s Law was why the nuclear power plant on the north side of town was belching radioactive clouds of steam and ash into the atmosphere like some deadly man-made volcano. It was also why he was lying on the pavement with a gunshot wound in his leg, bleeding out in some industrial park he’d never heard of, even though he’d lived his whole life in DuChamp.

And they’d been so close to escaping!

Murphy’s Law.

He’d survived gaggles of zombies, forged unlikely bonds of friendship with a small but resilient group of fellow survivors. He’d even met a smart, sexy woman who found him attractive, who’d picked him over his much more handsome companion. Actually laid him! No muss. No fuss. And now he was dying like a dog in the road because his group had stumbled across some psycho with a sniper rifle.

Well, screw Murphy! Murphy sucked ass!

Dao-ming was still wailing for her sister. Poor Dongmei. The sniper’s bullet had taken out the right side of the teenager’s head. Most of her brains had splattered across Pete’s face and chest. All she wanted to do was have an adventure, maybe seduce Mort’s buddy Pete if she could wear him down or get him drunk enough to forget she was fifteen. Now she was dead, and Mort’s gal, her older sister, was shrieking in rage and loss and disbelief in the backseat of the Mercedes-Benz.

That bullet could have hit any of them. Mort doubted the shooter had aimed for the child purposely. Most likely, he (or she) was simply shooting at the Mercedes-Benz, trying to take out a wheel or maybe the radiator. Dongmei was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Mort’s current predicament was a little more explicable. After the sniper killed Dongmei, Dao-ming lost control of the Mercedes, putting it into the ditch. Mort had jumped out with his rifle, anger overriding his natural cautiousness. He meant to shoot the sniper before the murderer could hurt any more of his companions. He’d spotted movement in one of the buildings, sighted in on their ambusher, but the other man had fired first.

So much for being a hero! Bullets bounced off Superman. Mort Lesser... not so much.

Judging by the amount of blood pulsing from the hole in his pants, the bullet had severed an artery, too.

Mort tried to poke his finger in the hole. He knew he needed to stem the flow of blood somehow.

It was not one of his better ideas. The pain felt like someone had jammed a red hot poker in his leg. He jerked his finger away, gritting his teeth. Black spots danced in his vision.

“Hang on, Mort!” Pete yelled from the backseat of the Mercedes. Mort’s friend was trying to extricate himself from Dao-ming and Dongmei. He looked almost comical, the whites of his eyes staring out round and white from the middle of his gore-splattered face. Pete looked like Sissy Spacek in that old Stephen King movie Carrie, right after her high school tormentors splashed a bucket of pig blood on her at the prom.

The world was going dim and distant. Mort pushed himself up on his palms, tried to shout back, “Don’t worry about me. Just get out of here.” He opened his mouth to speak, but his lips and tongue were too sluggish to do their job. Instead, he just kind of grunted.

Pete spilled out of the backseat, landing on his knees. Dao-ming continued to cry, cradling her dead sister in her arms.

“Hold on, buddy! Don’t give up on me!” Pete babbled, scrambling to Mort on his hands and knees. He was gripping something in his fist.

Mort shook his head. Didn’t Pete understand? That sniper could have taken Mort out, but he hadn’t. He’d left Mort as bait, to draw the other passengers from the car.

He concentrated hard, dragging himself back from the dim, comforting place his thoughts were drifting towards.  He swallowed, finally got his mouth parts to work. “’S too late, Pete,” he said weakly.

“You shut that shit up, lardass! You’ll be fine. Just hold on.”

The thing in Pete’s fist was a strap from Pete’s battered duffel bag. Pete wrapped it around Mort’s thigh, setting the tourniquet up high above the bullet wound. Mort cried out as Pete cinched it tight and fumbled a knot in the stiff material.

Mort grabbed Pete’s shirt with a bloody fist and pointed north.

“It blew up,” Mort hissed.

Pete’s eyes grew even wider. “Oh shit.”

Sitting in the Mercedes, Pete hadn’t felt the tremor when the plant exploded. The vehicle’s shocks had absorbed the vibration. With Dao-ming screaming and crying in his ear, he hadn’t heard the resounding drumroll of the reactor breach either. As far as they were from the plant, it had only sounded like a peal of thunder.

“Radiation,” Mort gasped. “You and Dao-ming need to go… now!”

“Fuck me runnin’,” Pete murmured, staring at the thickening plumes in the sky. Mort could tell by his blank expression that Pete had no idea what to do next. There were too many variables, too many problems, for his single track mind to process. Radiation cloud. Mort shot. Car wrecked. Girl dead. Zombies. Gunman. Mort could almost see the tilt signs flashing in his buddy’s eyes.

“Run, Pete. Take Dao-ming. Head west. Fast as you can,” Mort said.

“No!” Pete cried. “I’m not leaving you here.”

“Don’t move!” a gravelly voice called out behind him.

The gunman!

The sniper, or one of the snipers-- there might be more than one, Mort thought-- stepped out from behind the parking lot’s security shed. He was a big man, broad and solid, with a shiny bald head and a gray-stubbled chin. His body was barrel-shaped, massive with muscle. His arms looked as big around as Mort’s thighs, and that was saying something! He had a large high-powered rifle braced against his shoulder and was staring down the sights at Pete, his upper lip peeled back from his teeth.

“Put your hands up,” the gunman barked at Pete. “Lace your fingers behind your head!”

He was dressed all in black. Black tee, black jeans. He wore military-style lace up boots.

“You!” he said, the barrel of his gun sliding from Pete to the Mercedes-Benz. “Get out of the car, bitch! Right the fuck now!”

Dao-ming cursed the gunman in Chinese or Japanese. Mort didn’t know which it was. Maybe a mix of both.

“Get out or I’m going to blow your boyfriend’s head off,” the big man snapped.

Dao-ming obeyed, wobbling out on unsteady legs. She was covered in her sister’s blood. Her face was swollen, her eyes red and raw. She cursed the shooter again and spit in his direction.

“Save it, sister,” the gunman said with a smile. He cocked his head. Listened for a moment. As Dao-ming dropped to her knees beside Mort, putting her hands on him lightly, the sniper said breezily, “Sounds like all this racket has attracted some attention.”

His three captives listened. They heard it too. Zombies, several of them, on the hunt. The cries arose from multiple locations in the sprawling industrial park. They were getting louder and closer by the second.

“On your feet,” the big man said, gesturing with his rifle. “We need to get inside before they find us.” He smiled grimly when Pete and Dao-ming did not move. “It’s me or the zombies, kids. Take your pick.”

Dao-ming and Pete rose hesitantly. They hooked their hands under Mort’s arms to help him stand.

“Leave him,” the gunman said. “He’ll keep the rotters occupied while we take cover.”

“Fuck you!” Pete spat. “I ain’t leaving him for the deadheads. He’s my buddy.”

Their captor laughed. “Bring him along, then,” he said. “The more the merrier.”

Pete and Dao-ming heaved Mort up.

Mort shouted in pain.

“Go on! Leave me!” he gasped.

“We’re not leaving you behind,” Dao-ming sobbed. “Please, honey, try to stand up.”

“I can’t,” Mort moaned. The pain was a dark vortex and his soul was caught in its pull. He could feel his thoughts circling that sucking whirlpool like a fragile paper boat, spinning faster and faster. Any second now that little boat was going to sink down into darkness, and that would be it for him. No more Mort.

He fought that dreadful pull. He grit his teeth and pushed down with his legs. Blood pattered the pavement beneath him. His pants were soaked. Dao-ming and Pete were struggling to hold him up, so he tried to bear a little more of his own weight. The pain freshened him right up. Seething and spitting through his gritted teeth, Mort hobbled forward. There was so much blood running down his leg his shoe squished with each step.

“Shit, you’re heavy,” Pete grunted. “‘S like trying to carry a moose.”

Mort snorted a ragged laugh.

Dao-ming said nothing. Though she helped Mort walk, she had retreated into her own anguish. She sniffed, eyes downcast, still crying for her sister as they moved.

Impatient, the gunman gestured them past him. He directed them toward the big building at the end of the street: the DuChamp Freight Company. “Pick it up,” he barked as he followed behind. He listened to the pursuing zombies. The howls were getting closer. “There. Through those doors,” he gestured with the rifle. “Hurry. If those zombies see us, we’ll have a mob of them to contend with.”

Each shuffling step was agony for Mort. He could feel his consciousness waxing and waning. Mort, Pete and Dao-ming entered the freight company building through a large set of double glass doors. Ahead of them stretched a long tiled hallway with offices on both sides. Their captor forced them at gunpoint down the hallway, around the corner, down another hallway and then up a staircase. The stairs, finally, were what defeated Mort. Halfway up the flight of steps, he passed out.

This is it for me, Mort thought as the world went very still and slow. It was like being buried in warm gray ash. I hope they make it without me. The thought came without fear or remorse.

Time passed. How much time, Mort wasn’t sure. There was a sense of its passage when his awareness stirred and he began to surface from the dark pool of unconsciousness-- a fuzzy count of the number of times his heart had beat while he was comatose, the progression of his bodily processes. His belly gurgled, demanding nourishment. His bladder strained with the need to urinate.

He’d had his gall bladder removed a few years before, collateral damage of a lifelong love affair with bad food. Coming to felt kind of like coming out of the anesthesia when he’d had surgery. One moment he was nothing and nobody and nowhere, and then he was awake, but he felt dislocated and unreal, like he’d become lucid inside one of his own dreams. He couldn’t quite remember where he was, who he was, or how he’d come to be wherever it was he abruptly found himself.

“Mort! Hey, buddy! You’re awake!”

A familiar voice. Pete! Somewhere off to his right.

Mort turned his head and there was Pete. His buddy. His bro. Pete smiled. His teeth were too white. His face was still covered in blood, dried and brown now, like some kind of flaky shellack.

“Pete,” Mort whispered, his voice crackling.

Pete jerked his shoulders in an odd way, and Mort realized his friend was bound to his chair. Bands of gray duct tape encircled his chest, wrists, even his ankles.

Coming more fully awake, Mort looked for Dao-ming. She was nodding in another chair in the corner of the room, similarly bound. Her cheek rested against her shoulder. Her silken black hair hung in her face.

Mort tried to rise and found he was also restrained. He pulled against the bindings but could not break them. His efforts did little but make his head throb. The wound in his thigh, however, was numb. Pete’s tourniquet had stopped the bleeding, but it had also cut off the circulation to the limb. His right leg had gone to sleep.

Mort surveyed the room they were being held in. Judging by the metal shelves and filing cabinets, it was some kind of storage office. Its chrome shelves were stocked with shipping supplies, neatly organized: rolls of bubble wrap, boxes of tape and padded envelopes, labels, markers. The room was about twenty feet wide and twenty feet long. There were no windows, only one door. A Coleman lantern hissed on a desk over in the corner, its glow white and without glamour.

“Where… where’s the gunman?” Mort croaked.

Pete shrugged. “I dunno. He made me tape you to that chair, then he made Dao-ming tape me, then he did her and took off. He’s been gone about an hour, I think.

“How many are there?” Mort asked.

Pete shook his head. “I only seen the one guy.”

Mort was afraid they’d been ambushed by a survivalist group. This was better. If it was just the one guy, they had a better chance of escaping.

“How’s Dao-ming?”

Pete looked toward their sleeping companion. He made a pained expression, cut his eyes toward Mort. He didn’t have the heart to say it, but his expression was eloquent enough. Dongmei’s murder had broken her sister’s spirit. Dao-ming had given up. That’s why she was sleeping when she should have been fighting, trying to come up with some plan to win their freedom.

“We need to figure out what the guy wants,” Mort said. They heard footfalls coming down the hallway and Mort clammed up. A moment later, the door opened. The sniper strolled in, pushing a metal cart in front of him.

“The city is burning,” their captor said cheerily. “It’s beautiful. The skyline’s all orange and red. It looks like heaven is bleeding.” He glanced at Mort and his eyes flashed. “You’re still alive! And awake! I didn’t expect that. I thought you’d die while I was preparing.”

Dao-ming roused. She caught sight of her sister’s killer and began to struggle against her bindings, cursing. Mort realized he’d been wrong about her. She hadn’t given up. She’d merely been resting until her enemy returned.

The killer raised his eyebrows. His gut tightened with laughter, barely restrained. “I’m impressed. Who would have thought such a pretty little thing could know so many nasty curse words.”

Dao-ming’s cheeks trembled. “I want to kill you!” she screeched. She lunged upwards with her body, making the chair hop and scrape across the floor. “If I get loose from here--!”

“Shut up,” the gunman said mildly, and he leveled a kick into Dao-ming’s breast, knocking her, and the chair, onto their backs.

Dao-ming gulped like a fish. The blow had knocked the wind out of her. She stared at the ceiling, gasping, her hair fanned out on the floor in a glossy black corona.

“Stop!” Mort cried. “Listen, dude—please!-- don’t hurt her! What do you want? Maybe we can come to some kind of arrangement. We don’t even know why you’re holding us. We don’t have anything of value. We’re just trying to get out of the city.”

Their captor glanced at Mort with false sympathy. “It’s probably too late already,” he said without rancor. He swiveled his cart around carefully, one of the wheels squeaking. It was a big stainless steel cart, the kind they used in the food service industry. “I’m sure we’re being dosed with gamma rays and neutron radiation even as we speak. That explosion earlier was the nuclear power plant blowing up. The whole city’s in flames.” He lifted an odd-looking instrument from the wheeled cart. It was a phallic metal implement, greasy blue, with a pistol grip. Just the sight of it froze Mort’s heart.

The bald man caressed the barrel of the tool. He encircled the shaft with his hand and stroked it slowly up and down. “Nobody gets out of this world alive,” he said with a dreamy leer. “That’s something my father used to say. It’s a truism, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have some fun first!”

The big man stroked the bulbous end of the weapon against his cheek and lips, then snapped out of whatever fantasy world had claimed him there for a moment. He strolled across the room toward Mort. Though he was mountainous, his gait was smooth and cat-like. The muscles in his thick arms twitched and jerked as he stroked the cock-like barrel of his-- weapon? tool?-- whatever it was. Mort realized the man had gotten an erection. The gunman’s organ bulged against the front of his jeans, angled up and to the left, looking very large and very hard. The sight of the man’s erection, the intense look in the man’s eyes, withered any hope Mort might have had of release. Their captor was no bandit. He was a lunatic!

Straddling Mort’s thighs like a lover, the madman whispered into his ear: “My name is Richard Rourke, but the people I worked for had a nickname for me. They called me Da Vinci. Oh, you’ve never heard of me! No one has. I was very, very good at my job. I used to kill people for a living, you know? But now the world has ended. The world has ended, and I’m just doing it to occupy my mind.”

Mort tried to twist away from the terrible, unwanted intimacy, the weight of the man’s body in his lap, the heat of the man’s breath on his skin, but the lunatic, Da Vinci, turned Mort’s face back with the cold steel barrel of the weapon.

“Your name is Mort,” he murmured, looking piercingly into Mort’s eyes. “I heard your friends call you that. I think name’s are important. They’re magic, almost. So much summed up by so little. You’re whole life. Your identity. Your memories. One syllable. A breath. A pursing of the lips. The flick of a tongue against the roof of the mouth.  Mort, Mort, Mort...”

“Get off him, you big fag!” Pete hectored. “Leave him alone!”

Da Vinci glared toward Pete, annoyed. “Relax, pretty boy. You’ll get your turn.” He returned his attention to Mort.  His eyes were gray and soulless, but bright, like a serpent’s eyes. Though emotion played across the madman’s features, those same emotions did not touch his eyes. His gaze reminded of cold, desolate plains covered in snow. Secret groves locked in ice. Places where it would be a simple thing to hide a body. Maybe even a lot of bodies.

“I normally like to take my time, get to know the people I kill. Sometimes we even become friends. The way the city’s burning, though, I don’t think we’ll have the time to get to that place. It’s a shame, really. I’ve been so lonely these past few weeks. I haven’t had anyone to play with except the dead, and they’re no fun at all.”

Mort sensed the man’s words belied a deeper, darker sentiment. A longing. He needed something from Mort—but what? If Mort could figure out what that need was, maybe it could win their freedom.

The man leaned in. His lips brushed Mort’s ear. “My mother was a Christian woman. She dragged my father and I to church every week, twice on Sunday and once every Thursday night,” he whispered. “We hated church, me and pop. All those phonies in their fancy Sunday clothes, pretending they believed. Even when I was a kid I knew it was all just an act. They were only there for the show. That’s what my father said, and it was a thing that I beheld to be true. I could see it in their faces, the way they looked a person up and down, like they were wondering just how tasty you might be. When we got home after church, my father would change into work clothes while my mother made us lunch, and after we had eaten, he would take me out to the forest. Every churchday we went to the forest to chop wood. We were very, very poor. Do you know what else we did in the forest?”

Mort shook his head, half-hypnotized by the man’s silky voice.

Da Vinci licked his lips. He leaned in even closer, putting the barrel of the weapon to Mort’s skull. “My father hunted me. He hunted me and when he caught me, he raped me. Every Sunday. Every time we went to chop wood. It was our secret game. Or maybe ritual is a better word to describe it. The forest was our temple, Mort. The temple of the only real God. Mankind is ruled by his animal nature. Not some invisible old man floating up in the clouds. You can feel it... in here... down there... When you fuck. When you kill. It pulls at you, as insistent as gravity, and yet men pretend to be something more than animals. He pretends to be clean and good and tame, dresses his vulgar nakedness in fine clothes and talks of love and peace and forgiveness, but it’s just a lie, or a ruse. My father showed me the truth. We’re all just animals, rutting and killing and shitting in the wilderness.”

Mort’s head was pounding. The metal barrel of the weapon felt very cold and slick against his temple.

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” Mort said.

The killer reared back, looking angry for a moment. Maybe even a little confused. He put his lips to Mort’s ear once more. “You pity me? Save your pity. I pity you. And do you know why? Huh? I pity you because you’ve only learned the truth now, at the end of your life. You see, my father made me promise never to tell. ‘You can never ever tell, Richie. Never tell anyone. If they suspect you know the truth, they’ll put you down like a mad dog.’ And I promised him.”

“But you just told me,” Mort said.

“I know,” the madman replied slyly.

“Oh, God.”

Da Vinci pulled the trigger.

Mort’s body stiffened as a slim steel bolt, about six inches long, shot from the barrel of Da Vinci’s phallic weapon. With a bang and a puff of acrid blue smoke, the rod punctured Mort’s skull, plunging into his brain, before  recoiling into its barrel.

It happened in less than a second.

Da Vinci tossed back his head as Mort twitched between his powerful thighs. He held Mort tight between his legs, his buttocks clenching, his eyes squeezed shut, blood and cranial fluid dripping from his face.

“Mort! No! Mort!” Pete cried in horror. “You fucker! You killed my best friend!”

Da Vinci straddled Mort’s thighs until the body finished quivering, his expression almost saintly in the intensity of his relief. Finally, the muscles of his back and shoulders uncoiled. He exhaled slowly. Opening his eyes, he stood and turned toward Pete. There was a broad moist circle at the front of his pants.

The fatso’s redneck boyfriend was next, Rourke decided, and after that, the chink. Save the best for last. Oh, yeah, he was going to enjoy himself tonight! Just like Nero, playing the fiddle while Rome burned. He was going to fiddle all night long!

The redneck was crying for his dead friend. His raw emotion was enticing. Da Vinci wanted to lick those tears from his face. Taste his pain. Eat it. Have it inside him.

“Let me out of this fuckin’ chair so I can kill you,” the redneck hissed, tears running down his cheeks.

Da Vinci chortled.

He dropped the captive bolt pistol on the cart with a clang. The barrel of the weapon was stippled with beads of blood and gelid globs of brain matter. He’d have to clean it later, painstakingly, lovingly, but for now he perused the other instruments on the table. His eyes lit upon a particularly cruel looking implement and his cock began to stiffen once more. No big surprise there. It had been a while since he’d entertained a lover. He was pretty backed up.

He lifted the instrument delicately. It was a very fine thing, one of his most beautiful creations. It gleamed like gold in the lantern light, but it was oh so sharp! There were two hoops at the base through which he could insert his erection, and rear-facing barbs just below the slivered curve of the blade. Went in like a hot knife in butter, but when it was pulled out…

Yes, this would do just fine!

The assassin put his fingers to his forehead. He frowned. It felt like someone was poking his brain with red hot needles.

The redneck stiffened in his seat then, mouth twisting in discomfort. “The fuh…?”

Behind the killer, Mort stirred. He had a hole in his head and blood was trickling down his cheek and neck, but somehow, amazingly, he wasn’t dead!

Mort blinked around, eyes dim with pain and confusion. He was drooling. Urine had puddled on the floor between his feet. “What? Where am I?” he gurgled.

He wasn’t dead! Somehow he wasn’t dead! Da Vinci forgot about the strange prickling in his skull. He stared at Mort, aghast. The fat one was still alive, and he knew…! He knew Da Vinci’s secret! The one he’d sworn to his daddy he’d never ever tell a soul!

Rourke snatched a knife off the table and turned back toward Mort, ready to finish off the resilient fellow. The hot needles were still digging into his brain, but it was more important that he kill his confessor. No one could know the Secret and live!

The door of the storage room blew off its hinges.

It opened with such force it shot across the room and clapped off the far wall, narrowly missing Mort and the assassin. It hit the floor with a bang and bounced into a filing cabinet, crumpled like a parking ticket.

Rourke and Pete gaped at the man who stepped into the room. Mort just continued to drool.

“Here you are!” the stranger said mildly.

He was tall, slim, dressed all in black. His skin was pale, his eyes dark. Long black hair flowed down from a high widow’s peak.

Pete squeezed his eyes shut, opened them again. Looking at the newcomer made his head hurt. The pale man seemed to shimmer as he strode into the room. His image wavered like he was more mirage than man.

“My apologies. We had a bit of trouble finding you,” the pale man said. “The radiation, I believe. For a moment I was afraid we would have to abandon you to your fates.”

Two others followed him into the room, a male and a female. Like their leader, the newcomers were tall and pale, dressed in armored, black leather garments with large dark eyes and narrow, angular faces. The female rested her hand on the pommel of a very large sword. The second male was coiling a whip.

Da Vinci eased toward his cart, head lowered, eyelids slitted. There was a curious, almost bemused expression on his face, but he did not speak. Without turning his gaze from the newcomers, he let his fingers glide across the instruments on the table. They fluttered over several delicate implements, then seized upon the handle of a large, strange-looking cleaver.  With a yell, he brought the cleaver up over his head and charged across the room at them.

“Oh, no you don’t.” The one at the fore said in a gentle voice. He flicked his long white fingers like a man preparing to play piano and Da Vinci froze in mid-charge with a grunt of surprise. Narrowing his eyes, the newcomer murmured, “That’s better. Now, let’s have a look in there and see what we can see…”

Da Vinci’s face twisted. He mewled in pain. “Stop it! That hurts!”

“Goodness, you’re a rotten one,” the pale man said softly, as if to himself. “Such a corrupt philosophy. You’re a very, very naughty boy, aren’t you, Richard? I’m afraid we can’t take you with us.”

He looked over his shoulder to his companions. “HaMerkavah, Gabriel, could I trouble you to dispose of this one? I’m afraid he’s far too dangerous to take with us to New Jerusalem.”

As Pete watched in mute astonishment, the two pale interlopers took Da Vinci by the arms and led him from the room. Pete expected their captor to struggle, but the big man did not put up much of a fuss at all. He allowed the strange beings to escort him from the room, meek as a lamb.

Mort tried to follow the exchange, but he was having trouble staying conscious. His head felt like a squashed tomato. Warm fluid trickled down his neck and chest. Dao-ming lay on the floor on her back, trying to see what was happening. “What is it? Who’s here?” she asked. “What’s going on, guys?” It was almost funny, the pitiful state of their group.

Da Vinci finally objected as the two pale beings led him through the doorway and into the hallway outside, but there was no force in his voice. He sounded like a sleepy child being led back to bed. A moment later, out of sight, there was a brief scuffle, a cry and then moist slurping sounds.

“My name is Metatron,” the pale man said as he approached Mort, looking sympathetic. “We’ve come to save you.”

Mort sucked his drool back into his mouth and tried to speak. “What are you?” he croaked.

“What do you think I am?” Metatron asked.

Mort peered into his eyes. They were jewel-like, the pupils broad-rimmed and deep. His brain prickled vaguely, but no glamour swept across his thoughts to blind him to the reality of the thing. The creature standing before him was gaunt as a concentration camp inmate, chalky skin stretched taut across bone. He had red lips and rows of sharp, shark-like teeth. Blue veins wriggled beneath his flesh like strands of yarn. Mort opened his mouth to name the creature, but found he could no longer recall the word. He frowned and shook his head, which made his thoughts waver and go far away for a moment.

Metatron leaned close. His nostrils flared. He stood straight, a smile of satisfaction on his lips. “You’re a little worse for wear, my friend, but don’t worry. We’ll nurse you back to health in no time. You—and your companions—are so very precious to us. More than you know. So very…  precious.”

The others had returned to the room, ruddy and satisfied. Da Vinci was nowhere in sight.

The one called Metatron turned then toward Da Vinci’s cart and selected a blade from its surface. He examined the instrument’s keen edge, eyes half-lidded, then cut away the bands of tape binding Mort to his seat.

Despite his bulk, Metatron lifted Mort into his arms and carried him from the room as if he weighed no more than a child.

Mort did not resist.

The others were helping Pete and Dao-ming to their feet. Both of his friends looked wobbly and confused, but for some reason Mort knew they would be safe in the care of these emaciated creatures. Though he could not recall their name, not so much as the shape of the word, he knew the one carrying him had spoken the truth. We are precious to them, Mort thought. Of course we are. It’s a no-brainer.

Outside, the city burned. A great black cloud of smoke loomed over the skyline, belly as red as a ruby. Hot flakes of ash drifted down around them, incandescent orange. Mort gaped in wonder as the being called Metatron floated with him into the air. It was as if they’d suddenly become buoyant, like bubbles in a pool, unshackled from gravity’s pull.

He was flying, like a character in one of his comic books!

DuChamp receded beneath them. The city looked as if it had been stitched together by fire. The wind whipped and gusted, chilling his skin, making whooshing sounds in his ears.  They passed through a billow of smoke, its warmth and acrid stink enveloping them for a moment, and then they were clear of it. Their ascent slowed. They hung motionless in the sky, weightless, like a pair of wandering spirits. Metatron wheeled slowly in the air, pointed west. The moon at their shoulder, the city below, they flew.

13

The Infirmary

“Good morning, Mort. Remember me? I’m Marilyn Beecher. I came to see you last Thursday. I was hoping you felt well enough to talk to me for a little while today. You don’t mind, do you?”

Mort woke from a dream of flying and blinked at the woman who’d just walked into his room. He scrubbed his bleary eyes, then pushed himself up in his bed and smiled. His cheek was creased from his pillow and his hair was tousled—what little hair the surgical team hadn’t shaved off when they treated his head injury. Which wasn’t much. Although his face was still a little swollen and bruised, the warm pink flush of good health was returning to his cheeks. He’d recovered speedily in the last three weeks.

Marilyn Beecher was a nice-looking woman. A psychologist by profession, she was blonde, thin as a rail. She had a narrow nose and a smattering of freckles on her cheeks: a girlish face she tried to disguise with rectangular granny glasses set low on the bridge of her nose. She was dressed in a light blue scrub jacket and a dark skirt today, and carried a clipboard and a stack of square white cards. The cards were eight inches by eight inches.

“Good morning,” Mort said hoarsely. He winced and touched his throat. He hadn’t done much talking lately. “Come on in.”

It had been three weeks since the flying creatures rescued Mort and his two companions from the psycho called Da Vinci. Mort had spent the first two weeks in the critical care unit of New Jerusalem’s hospital, which everyone simply called the infirmary. At first, Mort’s caregivers-- and Mort himself, to be honest-- weren’t too sure he’d pull through. Da Vinci had wounded him grievously. The captive bolt pistol the killer had shot him in the head with had done quite a bit of damage, and Mort had lost a lot of blood. Nearly five pints, they told him, which was usually fatal. Mort had spent his first two weeks in New Jerusalem in a dreamy haze of pain and confusion, so drugged up at times he couldn’t remember his own name. Yet somehow Mort had survived. He’d clawed his way back from the grave. None of the staff could quite believe it. Some of them had even told him so now that he was on the mends. A few days ago, the staff had moved him from CCU to the unskilled ward.

Ms. Beecher set her clipboard and flash cards on the bedside table and poured him a cup of water. Mort checked to make sure his IV wasn’t snagged on the sheets, then reached for the cup. He bent his mouth to the bendy straw. The water was warm and flat, but it soothed his rusty throat. “Thanks,” he sighed, smiling in gratitude. He handed the empty cup back to the psychiatrist.

“So how are you feeling?” the woman asked, placing the cup on the bedside table. She sat primly in the chair beside his 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. Still a lot of pain. Especially when it rains. But I’m doing better.”

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

“No, ma’am.”

“Hallucinations? Phantom smells?”

“No.”

Ms. Beecher moved down her checklist, ticking off an assortment of ills and complaints, most of which Mort answered negatively. 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 they be called. 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 little frown disappeared and her normal kind smile took its place, like the sun peeking from behind a dark cloud. For some reason, her smile reminded him of pink divinity, the candy his mother used to make at Christmas. “You should try to call them something besides ‘things’ or ‘monsters’, though. The other survivors might take offense. I know they seem strange, perhaps even frightening, but 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, flashing back on the supply room, Da Vinci breathing into his ear, the beings who had burst in to save him and his friends. “I know. I’m sorry.”

Marilyn laughed softly, patting his hand. “Quit apologizing, Mort! I’m not reprimanding you. I’m only telling you so you don’t have problems when you integrate with the general population. Which, considering the speed of your recovery, may be sooner than you think.”

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

He realized then that the pretty blonde had derailed him. He supposed the small and overworked staff here in New Jerusalem’s only medical facility 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 spoken with either of them since the night the… the… Archons delivered them to the Appalachian complex. He’d seen his friends briefly as they were hurrying him into surgery. Dao-ming had hugged and kissed him, telling him to be strong, and Pete had threatened to kick his ass if Mort up and died on him, and then the medical 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.  No one had expected him to survive. But he did, and he thought his friends would come see him after he awoke, but they never came, and he hadn’t seen hide nor hair of them since.

It annoyed him how smoothly Ms. Beecher had distracted him, 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. You’ve suffered damage to the part of your brain which processes visual information. We’re going to do some exercises that will help you with your disability. I need you to look at the pictures on these flash cards and tell me the word you think is most closely associated with the images 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 you eat…” Mort ruminated, thinking hard.

Ms. Beecher waited for a little while, giving Mort plenty of time to work it out for himself. After a minute, she said, “Remember what we talked about. Do your word associations. You have to train your brain to think around the sections of it that are damaged, 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 appeared 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 had instructed, tried to think sideways around the vacant spots in his head. His mind was once a well-stocked and organized pantry, everything in easy reach, but no longer. Everything was a jumbled mess in there now, and there was so many empty shelves. It frightened and depressed him every time he peeked inside.

“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 was proud of himself.

“I’m very pleased with your progress, Mort,” Ms. Beecher said, putting away her clipboard and flash cards. “Considering the extent of your injuries, and the fact that you received only the most basic medical care immediately following the trauma to your brain, the speed at which you’re recovering is a little hard to believe.”

They had discussed it before. Prompt medical treatment was extremely important following severe neurological trauma. So much so, it was called the “golden hour”. Mort had received very little medical care following his injury. It had taken almost three hours for the... Archons to transport Mort and his companions to New Jerusalem. It was a miracle he’d survived at all.

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

“The most important thing to remember,” Ms. Beecher said, “is that your recovery, whether it’s eighty percent or one hundred percent, is entirely dependent upon you. Your will. Your determination to recover. 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 the tiniest victory over you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Mort nodded.

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

“You ready for P. T., Mort?” the man asked. He laughed at Mort’s immediate groan.

Ms. Beecher rose and patted Mort’s forearm. “I’ll see you in a few days, hon. I wish I could come see you every day, but I’m the only therapist here, and there are a lot of survivors who need my assistance.”

“I can imagine,” Mort said.

“Just do those exercises we talked about.”

“Okay.”

She didn’t say goodbye. She smiled at Mort, nodded to the physical therapist, and departed. Mort’s physical therapist studied the psychiatrist’s behind as she receded down the hallway, heels clicking on the tiled floor. He cut his eyes toward Mort and winked.

Mort smirked. “Nice,” Mort said.

“Nice,” the physical therapist agreed. “Now,” he said, turning his attention to Mort and 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 one of those people who could never stand still. A fidgeter, Mort’s mother would have said. Even when he was idle, Scott was constantly in motion: tapping his feet, cracking his neck, swinging his arms, whistling. “If someone put a gun to your head and said don’t move, you’d last about two seconds,” Mort told him yesterday, after watching the man twitch and hop and lick his lips nervously for ten minutes. Scott had ducked his head and confessed, “You’re probably right. I have Attention Deficit. Let me know if I’m driving you crazy, and I’ll try to throttle it back a bit.”

He was dressed in a white tee-shirt and blue sweatpants today. It was the only outfit Mort had seen him wear, though sometimes he added a matching blue sweat jacket to the ensemble. Mort imagined a closet full of neatly hung white tee-shirts and blue tracksuits.

Scott had thick, curly hair that was graying prematurely (he called it his “jewfro”) and a broad, almost manic smile. He was short and fit, with handsome earnest features. He was also a talker. What little information Mort had gleaned of the... the... androids? No. It started with A... Ar. All. Ah, screw it!—the monsters... he’d learned from Scott the Physical Therapy Guy.

Scott called in a nurse to remove Mort’s IV. They were still giving him antibiotics every day. Something called Rocephin. “Call me when you’re finished with him,” the nurse said to Scott. “He needs to finish the bag.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Scott saluted. He lowered the bedrail and helped Mort out of bed. “You okay?” he asked, as Mort steadied himself. Mort sometimes got dizzy when he rose. He’d thrown up a couple times, too.

“I’m okay,” Mort said after a moment.

“You’re not going to puke on me again, are you?”

“I don’t think so,” Mort chuckled.

“Awesome!”

Holding his elbow, Scott the Physical Therapy Guy walked Mort down the hall to the P. T. room. They stopped for a moment at the nurse’s station to say hi to the evening shift nurses. Mort had become their pet since moving to the unskilled ward.

“You’re looking so much better,” one of the nurses chirped. “I bet the doctor’s going to discharge you before long.”

Another, a pretty redhead named Molly, said, “Don’t think you’re getting away that easy. When you get out of here, you’re taking me out to dinner!”

They all laughed.

“I think she meant that,” Scott said in a low voice as they continued on.

“Yeah, right,” Mort snorted.

“Don’t say that,” Scott replied. “You’re still a good looking guy. Not that I swing that way, mind you. I’m just saying.”

“I look like Frankenstein’s monster,” Mort said.

“No way, man! I mean, you did at first, but you’re healing up really well. Besides, a lot of women think scars are sexy.”

“Really?” Mort asked.

“Sure.”

Mort’s eyes stung, and he tried not to weep. Everyone had been so supportive of him here at the infirmary. He wondered if the entire population of New Jerusalem would treat him so kindly. He thought maybe they would. This strange new solidarity was a result of the terrible chaos they had all survived. The Phage. The plague of the hungry dead. Perhaps they had learnt, at long last, how precious human life was. They were, after all, the last living human beings on the planet. Once an all-consuming wildfire, the race of man had been reduced to a few guttering sparks, with no guarantee that those dim embers would not soon be extinguished as well. Extinction was a powerful motivator to get along.

“How you doing?” Scott asked as they turned to enter the P. T. room.

“Good,” Mort said.

And he did feel good. He felt strong. In the last couple weeks, Mort had progressed from walker to cane. Now he was walking completely on his own, though the staff continued to accompany him whenever he ventured outside his room, just in case he fell. His leg still went out on him every now and then.

“Awesome,” Scott said. “What say we start with some stretches...”

As Mort sweated in the P. T. room under Scott’s watchful eye, they talked about the Archons and the city of New Jerusalem.

The refuge the Archons had brought Mort and his companions to was a large government complex. They called it New Jerusalem like it was a city, but it wasn’t. It was more of an internment camp. It was originally constructed during the Bush administration as a site to house domestic “enemy combatants” during the war on terrorism. 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 911 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 public. But after the world was ravaged by Virus Z, the… Archons were employing them 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, administration buildings, even a fully stocked hospital. There were garages, fuel and food depots, storehouses 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 a population of 5,000, not including staff. 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.

Though their saviors scoured the surrounding states tirelessly for survivors, and seemed to possess incredible-- almost magical-- superhuman abilities, their numbers were small. The strange beings claimed there were only a couple hundred of their kind in the States. And not all of them were trying to save humanity, the Archons had confessed. Some of their brethren didn’t care if humanity survived or perished.

“So what are they exactly?” Mort had asked Scott during his first P. T. 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, like in Star Trek. I think they mean extra-dimensional space. 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, telepathy, 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 Physical Therapy 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 mysterious creatures.

Scott was rescued by the flying things from the roof of his home in Southern Indiana, after his hometown was overrun by zombies. He’d escaped from the ravenous deadheads by climbing out a window after the creatures battered their way through his barricades. Completely surrounded, he could do nothing but sit on his roof and try to wait the creatures out. When the Archons found him, he had been there for two days straight with no food or water. He 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 volunteered to work at the infirmary shortly after they treated him for dehydration and exposure. New Jerusalem’s need for medical 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 everything.”

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

“I guess that’s possible,” the physical therapist had said, frowning that little frown that everyone frowned when Mort was even mildly critical of humanity’s saviors.

They had an efficient little system going on here, Scott had said. The Archons brought in survivors. Once the survivors’ injuries were treated, their blood was tested for the Phage. There was no treatment for Virus Z. Not yet, Scott had said. But they could test for it now. Once the survivors were cleared to join the general population, all new arrivals were assigned housing and job duties.

“What if you have it?” Mort had asked. “The virus, I mean? What happens to you if you start... turning?”

“There’s nothing anyone can do,” Scott said. “Most people ask to be euthanized. We take them into a room downstairs and the doc gives them pentobarbitol. It’s painless, and for some reason the pentobarbitol keeps them from... you know... coming back. If they refuse that, we have to put them out. They have to leave the camp. I know it sounds cruel, but we don’t have a choice. About half the people here are immune to the Phage, but the other half aren’t, and we have to protect them from being exposed.”

Immunity was determined by blood test as well. Apparently there was some kind of enzyme, but they didn’t know how it neutralized the Phage, or why some people produced it and other people did not. Mort, of course, was not immune. They told him shortly after he awoke from surgery. A nurse had counseled him how to protect himself from the virus. This involved washing his hands several times a day, cleaning and disinfecting any open wounds, no matter how minor, and abstaining from unprotected sexual contact. Not that he had to worry about that, with his shaved and stitched up head! That’s why they were giving him all the antibiotics, the nurse had said. They wanted to make sure he did not contract the Phage because his immune system was low.

Once a week, Scott had said, a meeting took place at the Green Yard Auditorium. There, the city’s administrators gave a presentation explaining the rules and regulations of New Jerusalem. During orientation, 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. If anyone exhibited symptoms of infection, they were immediately isolated. After that, they were given a few hours to get their affairs in order, say their goodbyes, and then they had to decide: exile, or euthanasia.

“You’re doing really good, Mort,” Scott said, looking impressed as Mort did leg extensions. “I think you’ll be getting around on your own pretty soon. Maybe they’ll let you out of this lousy place.”

“I hope so,” Mort grunted, sweaty and red-faced. “I’d like to see what my friends have been up to.”

But would he? Why hadn’t they come to see him? It had been weeks since he came out of surgery.

“You should attend an orientation after you’re discharged,” Scott said, counting off Mort’s reps with his fingers. “That way you can have another look at the Archons. 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 Da Vinci. He remembered the door blowing off the hinges like someone had stuck a blob of C4 to it, then those terrible things striding inside. 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 a Bible passage, the one where Jesus called the Pharisees whited sepulchers, full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean. But was that right? Was it fair? Were the Archons whited sepulchers? Were his memories of them real?

The creature that brought Mort to this safe haven had been only gentle and sympathetic towards him. It had rescued him from that psycho and asked for nothing in return. But 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’d stood there with the hot 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 spreading flames, 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 today.”

His words had roused Mort from his torpor, and Mort had watched two tears spill down the thing’s taut white cheeks: tears which 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 helium balloon, 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.

When his physical therapy 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 mindful not to slip in the sudsy runoff. He didn’t care that Scott lingered to watch. Any extended stay in a medical facility robbed a person of modesty pretty quickly. You could only pee in a jug being held by a teenaged nurse’s aid 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 bathroom. He wondered aloud if Archon females could mate with human men. “I wonder if they even have sex with each other, like human beings do,” he said, tapping a foot nervously.

Mort visualized the creature that had rescued him and shuddered. Who’d want to shag something like that? But he kept his opinion to himself. He didn’t want to get The Frown again.

“Looks like you’re finally putting on a little weight,” Scott said, arms crossed.

Mort glanced down at himself. His body was pale and bony. Weeks of running from zombies, then his extended stay in the hospital here at New Jerusalem, eating lime Jell-o and chicken broth, had shrunk him from two-fifty to a skeletal one-sixty. It was like some skinny guy had swapped bodies with him when he wasn’t looking. Not that he was complaining. Now that his belly was gone, he could actually see his ding-dong. And it was pretty dang big. Bonus!

He said as much to Scott, and the physical therapist roared. “It’s hard to believe you were ever that big,” Scott said after his laughter had died away. He wiped his eyes.

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 P. T. session had drained him, and the wounds in his thigh and the side of his head were beginning to throb nastily.

“You should give some thought to which work crew you want to sign up for 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, he said, “I’ll tell Nurse Ratchet you’re done with P. T. so she can change your dressings and give you some pain medicine.”

Scott bid Mort good-bye. Fifteen minutes later, a nurse came in to change his bandages. They had begun to peel off because of the shower.

“You all done for the evening?” she asked.

This nurse’s name was Betty Vaughn. If there was ever a real Nurse Ratchet, she was her. Brusque, efficient, not exactly unkind, but certainly unsympathetic. She was the type of nurse that made you want to get better as fast as you could just so she’d quit looking at you like you were some kind of faker.

“Where’s Molly?” Mort asked.

“Helping someone who’s really sick,” Nurse Vaughn replied.

Mort laughed. “I love you, Betty.”

“I know you do.”

A portion of his bandages were still stuck to his thigh. It ripped out a good chunk of hair when she removed it, but she just sniffed at his yelp of pain. She said sorry, but she didn’t sound sorry.

He peeked at the gunshot wound in his thigh as she disposed of the soiled bandaging and prepared to put a new dressing on it. It was bright pink and looked sort of like melted wax.

“Quit picking at it,” Betty said, slapping his hand away.

“It itches,” Mort complained.

“It’s going to. It’s healing.”

The wound in his leg was almost completely healed, they both agreed, though his head injury was still draining, he saw, looking at the yellow-brown stains on the gauze.

“You’re going to have a dent in your head when it’s completely healed,” she opined, poking at his skull with her gloved fingers.

“Great. Like I’m not ugly enough already.”

“Mmm-hmm…You’re not going to have enough hair to comb over it either,” she added, compounding his misery.

Nurse Ratchet taped fresh bandages to both wounds and then cleaned up her mess of used tape, gauze and plastic packaging, tossing the ball of soiled linens into the trash can.

“How is your pain, Mr. Lesser?” Nurse Vaughn asked as she hooked him back up to his IV. He still had to finish the baggy of Rocephin. “Do you need any pain medicine?” The way she said it, Mort felt like she was implying he didn’t need any, but if he wanted to be a big baby, she’d go get him some.

“God, yes!” Mort groaned. He felt like an invisible man was standing over him, stomping his head with cleated boots.

Nurse Vaughn sighed and left the room. She returned a few minutes later with a pill in a paper cup. He swallowed it eagerly and lay back, letting his eyes drift shut.

“Looks like your hair’s starting to grow back a little,” Nurse Ratchet said as she fussed with the dressing on Mort’s head one last time. “Except for the big circle on top that’s bald.”

So she did have a sense of humor after all! Mort smiled as she petted on him. Let her tease. Her voice was floating away like a helium balloon released into an April sky… or a vampire flitting across a burning city.

His body gave a little twitch at that.

That was weird! Why did he think vampire? They were called Archons.

No matter. It felt too good to just lay there and drift.

“All right then, Mr. Lesser. You get some rest,” Nurse Ratchet said. “I’ll bring your dinner in later. Looks like the doctor’s finally going to put you on solid food. I hope you like beef stew and lime Jell-o.”

He would have griped about that lime Jell-o—even to grumpy Nurse Ratchet-- if he were still awake.

14

Scout Crew Unit Two

Officially, the work crew Peter Bolin volunteered for shortly after arriving at New Jerusalem was designated Scout Crew Unit Two, but some wiseacre who’d passed through the unit before Pete had nicknamed it “Screw U 2”, and the nickname had stuck. Proud of its reputation, most of its veteran crewmen wore tee-shirts with the slogan emblazoned across the back. It was even spray painted on the side of squad leader’s truck.

It wasn’t the most clever pun in the world, but Pete thought it was pretty cool. It had, in fact, become a point of pride among the scout crew teams to pull at least one tour on Screw U 2. No other crew ranged as far from base as Screw U 2. No other crew boasted as many sanctioned deadheads, as many rescued survivors, or as many casualties as the Screw You’s. They dared claim to be the wildest, deadliest, horniest motherfucking zombie killers in the world. And the truth was, they just might have been.

The makeshift government of New Jerusalem maintained fifteen scouting crews in total. The teams were organized in a quasi-military fashion. Each unit consisted of about ten vehicles—jeeps, buses and flatbed trucks—and a squad of twenty to thirty heavily armed volunteers called scouts. Scouts reported to their squad leader. Squad Leaders reported to squad masters, who coordinated three to five units each from the field. Finally, squad masters reported to the squad major, whose lazy ass never left the outcamp administration building. Every grunt held firm to the belief that Squad Major Dick Neimeyer, who oversaw all fifteen scout units, spent the vast majority of his time alternating between vigorous jerkoff sessions in Outcamp’s mens room and chasing his secretary around his desk. When he wasn’t reading funny books and taking naps, that is.

Scout teams had three primary duties. Ordered by mission priority, they were: one, locate survivors and transport them to New Jerusalem, two, gather supplies for home base’s continually swelling population, and three, sanction all deadheads with extreme prejudice. Though most scouts claimed their job was keeping New Jerusalem stocked with toilet paper and condoms, the scouting crews were vital to the success of the tiny community of survivors.

Only men and women who were immune to Virus Z were allowed to serve on scout crews. If your body did not produce the enzyme that rendered the Phage inert, you were not allowed to volunteer for outcamp duty. Peter Bolin, already a big winner in the looks and physical endowment lotteries (if not the brains sweepstakes), won big on that, too. He wasn’t just immune to the Phage, his blood sample was so heavily saturated with the anti-phage, it bent the virus over and drilled it in the butt.

Once accepted, volunteers had to complete a weeklong course in firearm proficiency and self-defense (called zombie-jitsu). One week wasn’t much preparation. Most of the scouts’ casualties could be directly attributable to a lack of training, but the precarious existence of their burgeoning civilization demanded the reckless pace. More survivors arrived every day, and New Jerusalem’s stores of food were diminishing with frightening rapidity.

Cactus Pete, who was too lazy for real work, preferred the scout crews to any other work detail. He’d rather risk his hide roaming through the Fearlands (which is what they’d come to call the zombie-infested country outside their fenced safe haven) than break his back slinging hash in the cafeteria, and the brief stint he’d pulled in the administration building, helping register new arrivals and assign them quarters in the dormitories in Yellow and Blue, had put him to sleep his second day of work. Literally. He’d gotten discharged when the bitch who ran registration caught him snoozing in a supply closet.

Well, fuck her, thought Pete Bolin. She’s an ugly old dyke anyway! Pete marched his ass right over to outcamp services and signed up for the scout crews.

Besides, it wasn’t like joining the army. A scout could quit any time he or she wanted. It was hazardous work with no pay, but if you wanted to live in New Jerusalem you had to do something. Their society was, in essence, a big hippy commune. Everyone who could work had to work. That was the rule. If you weren’t disabled, you had to sign up for some kind of duty crew or you didn’t eat. New Jerusalem had a strict “no freeloaders” policy.

Pete breezed through firearms and self-defense training. He was a natural born athlete, in prime physical condition, and had handled firearms since he was a kid. Even better, he drew Screw U 2 his first rotation, and found the motley crew of hellraisers and asskickers to be a perfect fit. At the end of his first tour of duty, the unit’s regulars had invited him to join the squad permanently, or at least until some zombie ate his ass or he lost his nerve and decided mopping floors would be a better way to spend his days. “Hell, yeah!” said Pete, and they all proceeded to get drunk before heading home the next morning.

Despite the danger, Pete was happy in the scouts.  Most of the time there really wasn’t much to do but ride around and enjoy the scenery. Every now and then they’d have a hairy shootout with a bunch of hungry deadheads, but the Phage seemed to be running its course. Zombies, it turned out, were only a little hardier than ordinary living creatures. They were subject to the laws of physics just like everything else. As they ran out of fresh human flesh to eat, the virus began to devour them from the inside out. Once the population of the living had zeroed out, they preyed on what few wild animals they could catch... or one another. In fact, most of the deadheads Pete had seen in recent days were little more than shambling bones wrapped in beef jerky. Most everyone agreed, the dead were dying again.

“By this time next year,” one of his crewmates had said, “there won’t be any deadheads left. The world’ll be ours again!”

Not that the creepazoids couldn’t get you. They were still dangerous in large groups. Even the really burned out ones. There were still towns crawling with the onerous creatures like maggots on roadkill. And you never knew when a fresh one was gonna come busting out a barn door, howling its crazy head off and running straight at you.

The scouts had developed a pretty good system in the brief time they’d been operating. Whenever they moved on to a new community, the caravan would roll through the streets at about fifteen miles per hour. A loudspeaker attached to the top of the lead vehicle played country music. For some reason, country-western music drew the zombies out better than any other genre of music. Especially Conway Twitty. Conway Twitty drew them in groves. His deep-pitched wailing really seemed to piss them off. When the zombies started shagging ass toward the trucks, the scouts opened fire.   They continued to shoot, cruising just fast enough to stay out of any deadhead’s reach, until all the zombies were dead, and then they looted the town for supplies and rounded up any survivors.

The Screw You’s had gotten so efficient at killing zombies they’d made a game of it. Every clean headshot scored you one point, but you had to claim it right then, and your H. S. partner had to verify. Killing two zombies with one shot was worth ten H. S.’s, but it had to be verified by at least three other scouts. Three or more zombies with one shot scored a whopping fifty H. S.’s, but as yet no one had dared claim that accomplishment.

H. S.’s were traded in at the end of the day for goods and services. Ten H. S.’s got you a carton of smokes. Twenty-five got you a dip from the goody bag-- the squad leader kept a duffel bag chock full of girly mags, illicit drugs and various sundries the goody-two-shoes back home might find objectionable.  Fifty H. S.’s got you a blowjob from Vicki Rungold, the only female scout currently in the squad.

Vicki herself had offered that particular prize. Vicki  Rungold was as wild as any of her male crewmates. She was a fine looking piece of ass, could drink any Screw You under the table, and liked nothing better than going down on a nice hard dick after a long day of shooting deadheads. She said it helped her relax. Even better, she wasn’t too dainty to swallow.

Wild as they were, the Screw You’s took their job seriously, and their most important task was rounding up survivors. While Conway played on the lead truck’s loudspeaker, a second loudspeaker broadcast a looped message from the rear: “If there are any survivors in the area, do not run toward these vehicles. You will be shot. Find a high safe place and flag us with a brightly colored object. We will find and rescue you. If you shoot at these vehicles, we will return fire. Repeat: If there are any survivors…”

There were never many survivors. In a town of five thousand, like the one they just departed, they’d rescued one. A little boy, half-starved, who had hidden out in his tree house. He had heard the looped recording and started waving a ragged red tee-shirt from the doorway of his hideout. In the overgrown lawn below, his zombified family circled like hungry sharks. After the Screw You’s put fresh blowholes in every member of his family’s skulls, the boy told them he’d been stuck in the treehouse for days, living off the candy and soda pops he’d squirreled away before the zombie apocalypse came to town like some corrupt and lethal county fair.

It just about broke Pete’s heart, seeing the little tyke with his sunk-in belly and hollow, haunted eyes. The kid’s name was Billy, just like Pete’s brother in Afghanistan.

“I look at him, and I think, fuck, there can’t be no God. How could He allow something like that to happen if there was,” Pete said to Vicki later that night, sitting out back of the caravan, drinking a beer. “I know there has to be a God, ‘cause of the angels and all, but damn, why’s He got to be such a prick?”

Vicki had taken Pete’s cock out of her mouth and asked, “Are you going to cum anytime soon? My jaw’s starting to get sore.”

“Oh, yeah... sorry,” Pete had mumbled.

One little boy, and they’d shot how many deadheads that day? Five hundred? Six hundred? Pete had personally sanctioned dozens of mombies and dabbies that afternoon. Grambies and kibbies, too. He didn’t feel anything for them. They were dead and gone. But seeing the little boy crying over his mom and pop had turned the monsters back into human beings. It made them regular people again, not deadheads, not villains. Sick, yes, deranged and deadly, yes, yes...but still people. And seeing them lying twisted and motionless in the streets of their once idyllic hometown, their bodies emaciated and dressed in rags, Pete was reminded of the concentration camp photos from his Grampa’s old World War II magazines, and it took all the fun out of the killing.

But he had a job to do. They all did. Pete had become an expert marksman in the last couple weeks, maybe second best in the unit, right behind Vicki. He could blow out their brains without even half trying. Blam! There goes Granny in a mumu dress! Blam! There goes Reverend Tully running starkers through the church yard! Blam! There goes Aunt Petunia in her blood-splattered sundress.

A few of the Phage’s victims had already burnt out. They lay motionless where they dropped, their feet wore down to nubs, their bodies just piles of dry bones, twice devoured--first by the mutant virus that had decimated the world, then again by nature’s clean up crew: the buzzards and bugs, and possums and crows and coyotes.

Later that night, wrapped up in a blanket in the back of his truck, Pete turned his face into the crook of his arm and wept silently.

He missed Mort.

He didn’t want to admit it, but there it was. He missed Ol’ Lardbutt worse than he ever would have believed it was possible. He’d always fancied himself a tough guy, but Mort had a way of listening that made a person lower his guard. A feller could tell Mort anything without worrying about being judged, not like the guys (and gal) of Screw U 2, who were always trying to outdo one another, always jockeying for status, trying to be the alpha dog. If he told one of his crewmates he was sad and lonely and homesick, if they caught him crying like he was crying right now, they’d laugh and call him something cute like Crybaby Pete or Bawlin’ Bolin. They wouldn’t let him live it down. Mort would look at a guy with those big somber eyes and say, “Yeah, man, I understand. I’m homesick, too.” And then he’d try to make you feel better.

Fuckin’ Mort! Pete thought, laughing softly against his sleeve.

He decided to go see the slob as soon as this tour was up. His unit was returning to New Jerusalem soon. They were due a week off for some R and R. He’d try to sneak past the nurses at the infirmary, or look him up in the housing registry if they’d finally discharged him. He’d have to wait a couple days. All returning scouts had to go through a twenty-four hour quarantine before they were clear to mingle with the other survivors, but after that, Cactus Pete and his ol’ buddy Mort were going to drink some beers and shoot the shit. He just hoped Mort wasn’t mad at him.

He’d tried to get in to see Ol’ Blubberbutt two or three times after the angels brought them to New Jerusalem. The last time Pete had thrown a real fit, but the hospital staff just wouldn’t let him in. They explained that Mort was not immune. They told Pete he was just as dangerous to Mort as Mort’s injuries were. With his immune system compromised and all the medication he was on, it was very possible Mort could get infected with the zombie virus without even being bit. His body just wouldn’t be able to fight it. They’d have to put him down like a rabid dog. Pete didn’t think he could stand to see Mort go zombie, so he’d stayed away, but surely the fat butt was better by now! They couldn’t keep him in the infirmary forever.

Just thinking about visiting Mort made him feel better. Pete dried his eyes, thought about joining his comrades. They had circled the wagons at sundown and lit a bonfire in the middle of camp, like they usually did. Pete could hear several of his crewmates talking, laughing, cutting up. They had camped in the boonies, about ten miles from town. It was late, the weather cool, and their laughter, the crackle of the campfire, was suddenly a little more inviting.

They were okay, his new buddies. They were all balls and bluster, like Pete, wouldn’t show their sensitive side if you paid them a hundred bucks. Not that money meant anything anymore. They used money to start campfires now. Or wipe their asses on, if they were out of toilet paper.

Hoping his eyes weren’t too red or swollen, Pete climbed down from the flatbed and went to join his crewmates.

The next morning, Pete was roused by a shout from one of his fellow Screw You’s. He snapped awake instantly—like all scouts did—thinking one of the Screws had spotted some inbound deadheads, but when he sat up in the back of the flatbed, his blankets falling away from his head, he saw that it was snowing.

“Look at that!” the scout who woke Pete cried out, eyes wide, a big goofy grin on his face. “The first snow of the season!”

It was one of the rookies. They had them every tour. There was always someone retiring from the scout crews or stumbling into the teeth and claws of some chompy rotter. This rookie’s name was Travis Bentley, though everyone called him “Get Bent” because he was kind of whiny and annoying. He was a young guy, maybe twenty-six. Thin, Caucasian, still a little wet behind the ears, and not a very good shot. There was a running wager how long he’d last outcamp before he bought the farm or decided there was an easier way to earn his fried chicken and cornbread. He’d awakened Pete from a very cozy dream, his mom and dad and brothers, grilling out on the deck, Billy and Steve playing frisbee with their blue setter Hank, but Pete was hard pressed to be impatient with the rookie this morning. The snow was something of a minor miracle.

The air was still, the kind of still that made you feel like your ears were stuffed with cotton, and drifting down through that throbbing hush were the biggest, fluffiest, whitest snowflakes Pete had seen in his entire life. The sun hadn’t yet peeked over the hilly horizon but its glow was in the sky, a kind of bluish lavender orange, and that fantastic multicolored hue limned the edges of those monstrous snowflakes, making them seem ethereal, like the dancing fairies in Walt Disney’s Fantasia.

“Cool, huh?” Get Bent said, nudging Pete with an elbow.

“Mucho cool,” Pete agreed, his words coming out in little puffs of vapor.

They had circled the caravan in an open field near the shoulder of a blacktop highway, Rural Route 23 on their maps, about halfway between the towns of Cooper’s Hollow and Kershaw. Their squad leader was planning to ride through Cooper’s Hollow later that day, and then they were homeward bound.

The field had been planted with corn, but the corn was all dead now, looked like rows of stubby yellow spears. Dense black wilderness surrounded the field on all three sides and pushed up to the ditch on the other side of the road. There was a farmhouse and barn perched atop the ridge to the south, hazy with distance, and low blue mountains to the east. The field and the road was already obscured beneath a delicate dusting of white, like some celestial baker had sprinkled the world with confectioner’s sugar.

“Reminds me of Christmas when I was a kid,” Get Bent said, climbing to his feet.

Pete rose with him. Scratching his head and checking on the other scouts, most of whom were wrapped up in their sleeping bags, snoring, Pete said, “Uh, yeah. It’s pretty.”

Mort could have taken one look and thought of some fancy way to describe the scene, Pete thought, hugging himself and stamping his feet. Could have made it sound like poetry, too, most likely.

“When is Christmas, anyway?” Get Bent asked. “I lose track of the days.”

“Soon,” Pete answered. He leaned over the side of the truck and cleared his sinuses, pressing his thumb against the side of his nose. One of the Screws standing guard in the next truck leaned out and Pete saluted. “It’s November 26 today, I think,” Pete said,  “so about four more weeks.”

“Hey, you remember doing this?” Get Bent asked, and then he hopped down from the flatbed and stepped across the ditch onto the blacktop. Grinning, he turned in a circle with his tongue hanging out. His boots left black marks like commas on the snow-dusted tarmac. In the woods behind him, a tree branch crackled and fell, too brittle to support the weight of the gathering snow. The sound was curiously flat, like two large stones being clapped together.

Pete laughed. “You better watch it, Bent, ‘for something grabs ya!”

He no sooner said it than it happened.

As Travis Bentley pirouetted in the middle of Rural Route 23, catching snowflakes on his tongue like a grade school boy, something leapt out of the shadowy woods. It didn’t make a sound, and it was so rotten Pete couldn’t exactly make out what it was, but it was big and it was black and it was mean. The rookie didn’t stand a chance.

It plowed into Bent like a fur-covered fastball. Eyes wide, Bent made a gusty oof sound and tumbled back into the ditch. Pete heard a ripping sound, like a shirt being rent down the middle, and the kid grunting and gasping.

Pete yelled in surprise, reaching for his pistol, but he’d taken the gun and holster off last night before he crawled into his blankets. The scout on guard duty yelled, too, and someone took a shot, but no one had a clear line of sight. There was nothing anyone could have done to save the kid. It just happened too damn fast.

Get Bent let out one breathless cry and then the beast tore his throat out and swallowed it down hungrily.

Pete scooped up Bent’s rifle and ran to the end of the flatbed, flicking the safety off. He braced the stock against his shoulder and drew a bead on the creature.

“Smile, motherfucker!” Pete shouted.

The animal twisted its head up to snarl at him, muzzle streaked with wet gore. Its lips peeled back from yellow curved fangs. Bentley lay between its front paws, staring up at the fat drifting snowflakes with a heartbreaking expression of confusion. He was still twitching, blood bubbling from his mouth and savaged throat, but his eyes were already getting that faraway look, that dead look that Peter Bolin had become all too familiar with in the last six months or so. Travis Bentley would never catch another snowflake on his tongue.

Pete could identify the creature now. It was a wolf. A zombie wolf, to be exact, its eyes glazed and sunken, its coat hanging limp and kind of empty off its spindly, angular bones, like a matted old fur coat tossed upon a sawhorse.

It growled, low and dreadful, and then it took a step toward him.

Pete fired off a round, and the animal’s top lifted off its head like a hat someone had set a firecracker beneath. The dead canine fell on top of Bentley, hind legs trembling.

Pete cussed and hopped off the back of the flatbed. He was shaking. Adrenaline hangover. The rest of the squad was running his direction, shouting in confusion, asking what was going on, who was shooting, was somebody hurt? Vicky drew up close behind him, touching him lightly on the shoulder.

“Was that Bent?” she asked, peering into the ditch.

“Yep,” Pete said grimly.

“Looks like he ain’t going home.”

“Nope.”

“I guess I win then. You owe me a foot rub.”

“Looks that way.”

Then from the woods surrounding the caravan: howls, rising to the snowy heavens. Mournful and haunting, the chorus made Pete’s hair stand up. He heard the crash and crackle of the rest of the pack racing through the underbrush.

“Wolves!” Pete yelled at the top of his lungs, curling one hand around the side of his mouth.“Zombie fuckin’ wolves!”

They burst out of the forest in all directions, converging on Screw U 2... dark, humped, hairy things, hungry for living flesh.

Looked like he was earning his biscuits and gravy this morning.

15

Dorm Life

Mort was sitting beside the window, enjoying his Thanksgiving dinner-- turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, green beans and lime Jell-O-- when Dr. Whalen rapped on the door frame with his knuckles.

“How you doing today, Mort?” the man asked. He didn’t wait to be invited in, just entered the room and started flipping through Mort’s chart.

“Good,” Mort answered. “What are you doing here today? It’s Thanksgiving.”

New Jerusalem’s only physician (and a very tired one at that), Doctor Whalen was a tall handsome gentleman with wavy black hair, gone gray at the temples, and a nut brown golfer’s tan. “Oh, I don’t have time for holidays, my friend,” the physician said. “Not until the Archons haul in a couple more doctors to help take the load off. Then I’m taking a loooong vacation.”

“That sucks,” Mort said.

“Eh, it’s not so bad,” Whalen drawled. “I have a nice little cot in the closet by the nurses’ station.” To his credit, there was no real rancor in his voice. Chin to his chest, he scanned Mort’s paperwork. He snapped the chart shut and returned it to the plastic box at the foot of the bed. “So! What say we throw you out of here tomorrow morning?”

“Really?” Mort asked. “Tomorrow?”

“Sure, I think you’re ready,” the doctor said. “Don’t you?”

“Y-yeah, I guess so,” Mort stammered, brow furrowed.

“Ms. Beecher says you’re ready, and Scott thinks so too. I’d say it’s time for this little birdy to fly the nest.”

Mort drew himself up and said more confidently, “Yeah. Yeah, it is.”

And it was. He could think of no reason why he should remain in the infirmary. His head was mostly healed up. His leg had mended. He was getting around fine by himself. He still had to use a cane, but he wasn’t falling out in the floor anymore. He’d even been taking walks outside, and his physical therapy sessions had gone especially well lately. The more he thought about it, the more he felt like a louse, taking up a hospital bed when some other new arrival might need it more than he did.

The doctor checked him over, examining his injuries, shining a light in his eyes, assessing his strength and reflexes. When he was finished, he pronounced Mort healthy as a horse. He told Mort to enjoy his Thanksgiving dinner, then left to finish his rounds.

Mort was too nervous to eat any more Thanksgiving turkey, however. He rolled his tray to the door and shuffled around his room, gathering the few personal items he had accumulated since his arrival: some clothes, and a couple books and periodicals the nurses had brought to him. He piled them on his bedside table and then sat on the edge of his bed, thinking of all the things he must do when they discharged him from the infirmary in the morning.

At 8:00 PM, Nurse Vaughn brought in his pain med.

“I hear you’re getting discharged in the morning,” she said.

“That’s what the doctor said,” Mort grinned, popping the pill in his mouth.

“Excited?”

“Nervous,” he admitted, taking a swig of water.

“Well, here,” she said, throwing her arms around him. She smashed his face to her generous bosom. She smelled like bleach and old lady. “I won’t be here in the morning to say goodbye so let me get my hug now. And don’t worry. You’re a tough cookie. You’ll be fine.”

“I know. Thanks. For everything.”

“It’s been my pleasure, Mr. Lesser,” she said. “All right, I have to get back to my duties now. Use your call light if you need anything,” and then she departed.

He thought he would have a hard time sleeping, but he dozed off as soon as his head hit the pillow. Morning came so suddenly it shocked him.

He rose, took a shower, and changed into his outside clothes. Dr. Whalen returned briefly during his morning rounds, eyes bleary. He gave Mort some last minute instructions, wrote him out a prescription for pain medicine, then bid him good luck and went about his business.

Is that it? Do I just walk out? Mort wondered.

He put his things into a plastic bag, grabbed his cane and limped from his room.

One of the nurses called out to him as he stumped down the hallway. “Are you trying to sneak off without saying goodbye?” she asked, hands on her hips. After a few rounds of hugs and well-wishes from the staff, Mort showed himself to the door.

He limped out to the sidewalk and surveyed his surroundings, shivering in the late November chill. New Jerusalem was a sprawling prison-like complex enclosed by a double set of high chain link fences topped with barbed wire. Guard towers, looking like the Martian ships out of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, divided the fences into fifty yard lengths. The sky was low and gray, and to the east: the Unicoi mountain range, its dark shoulders wreathed in a hazy stole of low-lying clouds.

A light snow was falling and he could see his breath in front of his face, but he was dressed warmly enough (jeans, sweatshirt, toboggan and jacket) so it was not exactly like they were putting him out in the cold. Only it felt that way. No one had accompanied him to the door, and there was no welcome wagon waiting outside. He’d been cut loose with vague directions to the housing office and that was about the extent of it.

Feeling lonely and a little depressed, Mort set his shoulders and began to hobble his way toward the administration building. He would get his dorm assignment there.

The sidewalks were not icy, thank goodness, but he used his cane anyway, just to be safe. He felt strong—certainly healthy enough to get out on his own, finally. The medical crew wasn’t giving him the bum’s rush. Still, his right leg was probably going to be a little tricky the rest of his life, and the cold made his head throb, despite the toboggan he’d been given to wear.

There were a few people roaming about in the wintry chill this morning. He watched them scurry along the sidewalks, running errands, running to meet their friends... or their lovers. None of them paid him a whit of attention. All were strangers. He paused to let a few military-looking vehicles rumble past. SCU-7 was stenciled on the side of each vehicle. One of the drivers, a scowling man in aviator sunglasses, nodded down at Mort as the caravan rolled by, and Mort nodded back. He waited until all the trucks had gone past, then crossed the street.

He heard the joyful sound of children playing, their squeals and the high-pitched babble of their voices. Several small kids—three boys and two girls—were chasing each other in the white-dusted grass between two buildings. New Jerusalem had no playgrounds. It looked like they’d settled for tag. Watching them play in their toboggans and scarves and thick padded winter coats cheered him, especially the sight of their cherry noses and rosy cheeks.

He watched them for a few minutes, huddling in his light jacket, and tried to imagine having children with Dao-ming. What would they look like? Though he tried for a minute or two to summon up an image, a little boy or girl with his round face and Dao-ming’s exotic eyes, the picture eluded him. He shook his head finally. The image wouldn’t come.  In truth, he was having trouble simply recalling her face. It was the brain damage, he supposed. Whatever brain cells had stored the image of his true love’s face, they’d met an abrupt, messy end at the hands of the psycho Da Vinci.

One more thing the killer had stolen from him...

A thin boy with lanky brown hair was chasing a plump girl with long coarse black curls. “I tagged you! I tagged you! You’re it!” the boy cried, but the girl continued to flee him, shaking her head and giggling. Feeling self-conscious (he didn’t want anyone to think he was some kind of kiddie-creeper) Mort limped on.

An elderly woman peeked out the front door of one of the dormitories as he turned, calling, “Drew? Drew! Come in for a little while and get warmed up. You’re going to catch your death!”

Mort continued on to the administration building, trying to limp as little as possible. He didn’t want any passersby to see his infirmity and feel sorry for him.

As he approached the corner of a building, he was tempted to stop and peek down the alley before crossing. Checking for deadheads...! He had to laugh. New Jerusalem was safe, he reassured himself. The DOD camp was surrounded by twenty foot tall chain link fences. The towers were manned by armed guards 24 hours a day. Not only that, their haven was remote, miles and miles from any heavily populated town. Standing in the middle of the compound, a person could turn 360 degrees and see not one sign of human civilization beyond the prison-like fences, just a couple meandering one lane roads and a few close outbuildings. The DOD camp had been built along the border of the Cherokee National Forest, Nurse Vaughn had told him, almost perfectly centered in a vast tract of wilderness and river runs. Not one zombie had stumbled upon the complex, Scott the Physical Therapy Guy assured him.

Not yet, anyways! Mort thought grimly.

Taped to the glass door of the administration building was a 8 1/2 X 11 printed sign. It said:

NJ ADMINISTRATION BLDG

Registration 1E

Information and Government 1H

Adjudication and Law 1J

Work Assignments 2A

Housing 2B

WELCOME TO NEW JERUSALEM!

Mort pushed through the door and into the building’s warmth and bright artificial light.

It still seemed like a minor miracle: heat and lights. After the power went out in DuChamp, it had taken him several days to stop flipping the light switches when going in or out of a room. It would probably be a couple more weeks before he began to take modern luxuries for granted again. He sighed in appreciation as the warmth enveloped him. It was good to be alive-- even better to be warm and dry! The throbbing in his leg and head eased as he started down the hallway, checking the signs on the doors.

Administration’s interior was clean and modern: glossy tile flooring, neutral-colored gypsum walls and fluorescent lights. There was a water fountain, a Coke machine and a few benches in the hallway for people to sit on while they waited. The place smelled like all government facilities smell: old gym shoes and Pinesol.

Mort limped down the hallway to room 1E and peeked inside. A couple spinsterish old women and one plump chick in pastel polyester pants craned their heads toward him. A teenage boy with acne and a shag haircut sat with his hands between his knees, frowning anxiously.

“Can I help you?” the blue-haired spinster closest to the door asked. Reading glasses dangled from her wattled neck by a silver chain. Her voice was appropriately nasal.

Mort stepped inside. “Yeah. I, uh… I guess I need to register... and get my work and room assignments?”

The lavender-headed spinster sitting beside the blue-headed spinster asked, “Are you a new arrival?” She looked well past retirement age, with a humped back and a profusion of coffee-colored liver spots.

“Well, not exactly... I’ve been here a little over a month now.”

Blue-hair: “A month? Why haven’t you registered yet?”

Lavender-hair: “You’re supposed to register as soon as you arrive. Didn’t anyone tell you that?”

Blushing, Mort hooked his thumb vaguely behind him. “Um, I’ve been in the infirmary,” he stammered. “They just let me out.”

“O-ooohhh!” Blue and Lavender said as one.

Lavender-hair took some papers from her desk drawer and handed them to Blue-hair.

“I’ll register you right here,” Blue-hair said. She clicked her pen, bent to her papers and said, “Name?”

“Mort Lesser.”

That caused a little stir in the room. All four stared at him with new interest. Even Shaggy Pimpleface.

“Mort Lesser?” Blue-hair asked, arching her eyebrows.

“Yeah, that’s me,” Mort said, looking around suspiciously. “Why is everyone staring at me?”

“You’re the guy the Archons saved from a serial killer,” the teenaged boy spoke up. He picked at a big zit on his cheek, his eyes wide. “I heard the guy shot you in the head with a cattle gun, like in that movie… Uh, what was it called again?”

“I don’t know,” Mort said, blushing fiercely.

“There Will Be Blood?” Pastel Polyester asked.

“No. No...” the teenager said, shaking his head. “Something about old country... or old men... Anyway, I heard your brains were hanging out when the angels got you here.” The teenager eyed Mort’s toboggan intently.

Mort laughed and tapped his head. “Well, they’re back inside now.”

“You must be doing pretty good if they released you from the infirmary,” Blue-hair observed.

“Yeah, better.”

Mort shifted his weight from leg to leg as they gawked at him. His left leg was beginning to throb again. “I don’t mean to be rude, but is there a chair I can sit on? I’m not used to walking around this much. My leg is starting to hurt.”

“Of course!” Blue-hair said with a start. “Jeremy, give this man your chair! He’s handicapped!”

The teenaged boy leapt up, looking ashamed. “Sorry,” he mumbled, and swung his chair forward so Mort could sit down. Blue-hair clicked her pen, then frowned and clicked it again, and fired up the paperwork machine.

“Mort... Lesser...” she said as she wrote. “How do you spell Lesser?”

He spelled it for her.

“Do you have any identification from your previous life? Drivers License? Social Security? We try to verify everyone’s identity.”

“Uh, no...”

“Don’t worry about it,” Blue-hair said. “Only half of our new arrivals do. Most folks were lucky to have survived...”

By the time they were finished with him, Mort was registered as an official citizen of New Jerusalem, assigned to Room 4-D in Dorm Eight and was signed up for light duty in one of the compound’s mess halls. The ladies in registration took care of all his assignments, as there had only been a few rescues lately and the offices on the second floor were closed. He was given chits for personal items he might need like clothes and grooming supplies, and a laminated ID badge with codes on it to indicate his immunity status (no immunity, which meant he had to report once a week to the infirmary for a blood test to make sure he hadn’t become infected) his special needs and medical conditions, and also his privileges and security clearance. Apparently, like the book by George Orwell, some animals were more equal than others here at New Jerusalem.

But that was okay with Mort. He was just happy to be alive, to be a productive member of a sane and ordered society again. Anarchy, he could leave to the anarchists. They were welcome to it.

He was tempted to inquire about his friends. He missed Pete and Dao-ming, but he wasn’t sure if these women would tell him what dorms his companions had been assigned to, or even if his old cohorts would welcome him back into their lives now that they were safe. Had there really been a connection there? If so, why hadn’t Pete or Dao-ming sought him out?

Before he left for Dorm Eight, Blue-hair suggested he attend the next orientation. “It’s in three more days. Starts at 7:30 PM at the auditorium. You can find the auditorium on the map we gave you with your new arrival package. Be sure you read the citizen’s handbook, too. New Jerusalem has a lot of rules and regulations, but they’re for the safety and security of everyone here.”

Mort nodded, flipping through the handbook as the woman talked. There were a lot of rules, but none he considered unusually oppressive in light of their situation. Still, there were always rule breakers. Mort wondered what the governors of New Jerusalem did to the men and women who had trouble following rules. There were always a few bad apples in every crate.

He was curious but refrained. He had a pretty good idea what they did with troublemakers here. What they had to do.

Stuffing his papers and pamphlets into his bag, he thanked the women (and young man) for their help. He used his cane to push himself up from his seat and then hobbled to the exit.

The wind whipped around him as he pushed through the door, chilling him instantly. Heavy gray clouds gripped the sky like great fists. It was still early, but the day was twilight dark, and it was snowing again. The snow drifted straight down for a few moments before swirling in an eddy of wind. The air was nippier than it had been when he originally crossed the grounds to the administration building. He huddled deeper in his coat, puffing white clouds of steam. His leg and head throbbed.

Dorm Eight… Dorm Eight…

Mort looked around the complex, suddenly lost. He clamped his cane beneath his arm so he could slip his map from the package the registration ladies had given him. He unfolded it. It was a hand-drawn diagram. Mort turned the map one way and then another, trying to figure out which way was supposed to be up. The amateur who had drawn the map hadn’t thought to indicate compass directions. He tried to orient himself using the administration building and the infirmary, but he couldn’t make sense of the markings on the photocopy. He scowled in frustration, his hands shaking.

It’s not the map, dummy, it’s your brain, he thought.

The neurological damage he’d suffered had turned a simple hand-drawn map into a jumble of unfathomable glyphs. It was just like the pictures in the magazines the nurses had given him. He knew he should know what he was looking at, but his brain only saw blobs of color.

His cheeks flushed with fear and embarrassment. How was he going to function in society when he couldn’t do something as simple as read a map?

Remember what Ms. Beecher taught you, he said to himself, trying to calm his racing heart. Most of the information is still there, but you have to think sideways to get to it now. It’s like when you have a word stuck on the tip of your tongue. You can’t tackle it straight on. You have to sneak up behind it.

Mort closed his eyes for a moment.

Think of something else.

He thought about his old life, his comic book shop, all the joy he’d derived from reading comics over the years. He thought about his favorite comic book heroes: Green Lantern, the X-Men, Doctor Strange, the Fantastic Four. Some people might dismiss such fictions as childish and two-dimensional, but those stories encompassed fundamental themes: good versus evil, justice, civic responsibility, and the moral application of force. These were the themes that had informed his ethical development as a youngster. Moral philosophy writ large in six panel pages.

There it is! he thought, stabbing the map with his right index finger. Thinking about comic book panels had made the boxes and rectangles on the map come clear to him.

He put the map away and hurried forward before he could get confused again.

By the time he found Dorm Eight, he was limping like a peg-legged pirate.

He paused for a moment to take in the cinderblock and steel confabulation. It was bleak, tall, with rows of tiny windows and an arched roof. Painted on the face of the building next to the entrance was a big blue 8. The blue denoted Blue Yard, the section of the complex where most of the unmarried men were housed. Yellow, Blue-hair had said, was where the women, couples and children stayed. Men weren’t forbidden from visiting Yellow Yard, she’d said. The laws of New Jerusalem weren’t quite that draconian, but he might be stopped and questioned if he did. Nobody wanted to segregate the sexes at New Jerusalem, but there had been a couple “unfortunate incidences” early on.

Bad apples...

There were several men loitering in the common area when Mort pressed through the door. They all turned to look at him when he hobbled in from the cold. An older gentleman with a big beer gut was sprawled on a ratty sofa, watching Tim Allen in the Santa Clause on a flatscreen TV. Two younger fellows were playing ping pong at the back of the hall. Near the entrance, a guy in a cowboy hat was sitting behind a large polished wood booth, reading a novel. Mort stumped up to the reception desk, forcing himself to smile despite the throbbing in his leg.

The skinny cowboy manning the desk set aside his paperback. He was dressed in red flannel and blue jeans. “Howdy!” he grinned. “What can I do for ya?” The book he was reading, Mort saw, was The Stand by Stephen King.

“Um, hi,” Mort replied, swinging his bag onto the counter. He began to dig out his papers, explaining, “I’m Mort Lesser. I just got released from the infirmary. I’ve been assigned to this dormitory.”

“All right. Which room ya in?”

“Uh, 4-D, I think.”

“Ouch! That’s on the fourth floor,” Cowboy winced, eyeing Mort’s cane. “No elevator,” he explained when Mort looked at him questioningly.

“Oh. Well... that’s okay, I guess,” Mort mumbled.

Mort signed in and stuffed another sheaf of papers into his little bag, which was getting full pretty fast, then followed the skinny guy up the four flights of stairs to his room.

“I’m Kelly Woolridge, by the way,” the skinny guy said as they ascended. “I live down in 2-Double G. Used to live in Nashville, before all the... you know.” He held his arms up and rocked back and forth, mime for zombie.

Mort absorbed his new home as he lurched up the zigzagging stairs. Dorm Eight was essentially a prison cellblock. There were no bars or any other feature that would indicate that the building had been designed to house people against their will, but it was stark, utilitarian, everything painted in drab grays and beige. There were four stories with walkways overlooking the commons, and the door of every room had a reinforced glass window and a metal flap that a food tray could be slid through, yet the boarders had managed to make their new residence almost... homey. The babble and crash of small televisions came from numerous doorways: DVDs, most likely, as there were no longer any broadcasting television stations. Wreaths and pictures of snowmen and Santas hung on the doors and walls, and the rails of all four landings had been wrapped in sparkling red and green garland. Though it was discouraged in his orientation papers, people were cooking on hotplates in their rooms, and a mishmash of scents floated in the air: stew, vegetables and… was that fried bologna? Mort’s belly gurgled.

“Here ya go!” Kelly said, pushing the door of 4-D inwards. “At least it’s near the stairs.”

His room was small but not claustrophobically so. About ten by twelve, with a generously sized set of bunk beds, a toilet, a sink and a couple shelves and a closet.

“It ain’t much, I know,” the cowboy apologized as Mort peered inside.

“It’ll be fine,” Mort said.

“I’ll leave you to it then,” Kelly said. “Just give me a yell if you need anything. I work the desk ‘til three. I’ll let the boss-lady know you’re here, too. She’ll probably want to meet ya.”

“Thanks,” Mort called after him.

Mort forgot to flip the light switch when he entered the room. He walked back and turned the lights on, then poked around the cabinets and drawers for a minute, looking for linens. All the cupboards were bare. It looked like he was the first and only tenant of 4-D.

At least he had a window: a narrow rectangle of wire reinforced glass overlooking the yard. Mort leaned toward the window and peered out, watching the snow swirl around the   gloomy compound. The sky was so overcast the floods had come on, and the snow created swarming gray halos around each blazing globe. His breath steamed the glass and he turned his attention to his own reflection.

This is how Dorian Gray must have felt, Mort thought, squinting at his reflection. His face was gaunt, eyes set in deep pools of shadow, skin stretched too tight across the protuberances of his skull. He didn’t remember ever being so thin, not even in college, when he’d gone on a starvation diet hoping to get himself a girlfriend.

I look so… insubstantial.

Mort pulled off his toboggan and touched the bald patch on his head. His scar was smooth and strangely sensitive. His hair was growing back, but it was salt-and-pepper now.

I’ve turned into an old man, Mort thought.

“Knock knock,” someone called out cheerily behind him.

Mort jumped and turned from the window. “Yes?”

A man and a woman stood grinning in his doorway. The man was wiry, short, with lips like a catfish and bulging eyes. The woman was tan and blonde and very pregnant.

“We’re the welcome wagon!” the pregnant woman trilled.

Her companion held out his hands and waved them back and forth. “Welcome-welcome!”

They laughed in unison, leaning toward one another affectionately.

The ugly little guy stepped into the room, pumping Mort’s hand. “Howyadoin? I’m Bob Hawthorne. This is my fiancé Tina Laramie. We’re in charge of Dorm Eight.” Mort introduced himself, squeezed the pregnant woman’s hand. She was a stunning woman, statuesque, blond, with patrician features and a Barbie doll smile. “Kelly said we had a new resident, so we thought we’d come up and introduce ourselves, give you a quick tour of the facility.”

Mindful of his disability, the tour mainly involved the three of them standing at the rail of the fourth floor landing while Bob and Tina pointed out different areas of interest: the drink machines, the galley, the chapel and laundry facilities.

“The showers are over there,” Bob said, pointing toward the back of the commons. “Tina uses the facilities over in Yellow Yard so don’t worry about walking in on any women.  It’s basically a 24-hour a day sausage fest in there.”

Tina laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. “Ew!”

“Our office is there if you need us. Feel free anytime. There are mop closets and cleaning supplies there and there. Everyone’s expected to keep their rooms clean. There’s no maid service.” Bob looked at his fiancé. “What else?”

“The cameras,” Tina said.

“Oh, yeah. The cameras.”

They told him not to worry about the closed circuit camera in his room; the CCTV system had been disabled. No one would be monitoring him. “So feel free to fap to your heart’s content,” Bob leered, earning himself another giggle and slap on the arm.

The guy reminded Mort of someone, but he couldn’t put his finger on who it was. Finally it came to him. Bob was a spitting ringer for the actor Steve Buscemi. He looked from Bob to Tina and had to remind himself that beauty was only skin deep.

Mort could get supplies from an attendant there if he needed toilet paper, shaving cream or razors, anything like that, Bob went on, pointing. “You’ll have to use your credits, but we always have a good stock of toiletries, thanks to the scouts.”

“What about blankets? Clothes?” Mort asked. “I only have one other outfit.”

“I’ll bring you sheets and some nice warm blankets,” Tina volunteered. “Those are provided free to every resident of New Jerusalem. You won’t have to use any credits. Would you like anything to eat or drink while I’m down there? Snacks?”

“Could you bring me something to eat? I’m supposed to take my pain medication with food.”

“I’ll grab you something to eat and a few sodas,” Bob said, eyeing Mort sort of pityingly. “You like chips and bologna sandwiches?”

“Yeah, anything’s fine.”

“Good. Good.”

They waved their hands when he offered them his credit chits, telling him not to worry about it tonight. Mort wasn’t sure how New Jerusalem’s economy worked, what the value of a single credit was, but it didn’t seem all that important to the couple-- for the time being, anyway.

“Oh!” Tina said, pausing a couple steps down the landing. “I almost forgot to answer your question. You can get clothes at the commissary in Orange Yard. I’ll show you were that is in the morning if you want. You’ll have to spend your credits there, though. They’re real sticklers about it.”

“Thanks,” Mort said. “Thanks so much.”

“Hey, man, we’re glad to have you,” Bob said, slapping Mort on the back, and then he followed his fiancé to the stairwell.

After making his bed, eating a cold bologna sandwich and swallowing a pain pill, Mort stretched out on his bunk and stared at the ceiling. It was still early in the evening. Before the zombie apocalypse, he normally piddled around his apartment ‘til the wee hours of the morning, sometimes retiring at two or three am, but he was exhausted and in pain. Ten minutes after swallowing the Lortab, sleep rushed in and put out the lights.

He had strange dreams. People running. People screaming and dying. Mort dreamed about Da Vinci. Da Vinci whispering in his ear. Telling him dirty, forbidden secrets. Putting the cattle gun to his head.

Mort woke with a start.

He felt like he’d just drifted asleep, but several hours must have passed because the dormitory was all but silent. He lay in bed, listening. He heard a TV droning softly, the murmur of a CD player, a low conversation coming from somewhere down the landing, all of it echoing in the cavernous hall, but most of the residents of Dorm Eight had settled in for the night, it seemed.

He pushed his blankets off and swung his feet to the floor.

Cold!

Making a mental note to buy some slippers at the commissary in the morning, Mort rose and walked to the window. It was pitch dark outside, still snowing, but the precipitation had lightened. There were just a few sparse flakes wheeling slowly earthward now. The yard was white. Looked like at least three inches of accumulation, he judged.

He sat in the niche which housed the window and watched the snow fall.

He thought about Dao-ming and Pete. He wondered where they were right then. Were they alone like him, or were they cuddled up with new lovers? Maybe they were sitting awake right that moment, just like him, thinking about their ol’ pal Mort. He didn’t think it likely either of them were wasting much time worrying about him. If they were, they would have come to see him in the infirmary. Mort tried not to be self-indulgent, but he felt abandoned.

He told himself he should lay back down, try to get some more sleep, he had a lot to do in the morning, but he was wide awake. He wished he had something to do. Something to read. Something to keep his mind occupied so it would stop turning to Dao-ming and Pete, or the psycho who had crippled his brain.

After half an hour, Mort felt a weird tickle inside his skull. He rubbed his temple, dizzy.

Out in the yard, three Archons drifted out of the black sky. They swooped in like dark kites, landing lightly on the icy grounds. The sight of them descending from the snowy heavens like characters from a J.M. Barrie novel jolted him with surprise and a feeling which was very close to horror. Being a superhero aficionado, you’d think he wouldn’t find flying people so disconcerting, but there was something hideous and unnatural about creatures who seemed so disconnected from the laws of physics. It might be wondrous in the movies to watch Superman or Jean Grey lift into the air in defiance of gravity, but in reality, the sight was terrifying.

Mort leaned close to the cold glass and squinted down at the figures, his heart galloping.

They were holding people in their arms. Rescued survivors. As Mort watched, the Archons—dressed like leather fetishists— touched down lightly and released their wards. The humans fell to their hands and knees or took off running away from them in fear, making ugly black gashes in the pristine snow. The Archons didn’t help them up or give chase, just stood there, wasted humanoid figures in strange leather garments, their buckles and snaps glinting in the garish overhead lights.

Mort could not see their faces, only the bald white knobs of their heads.

“No wings,” he whispered under his breath. Everyone said they were like angels with great shining wings. Everyone claimed they were stately, beautiful creatures, but when Mort looked at them, he saw no wings, and they were certainly not stately or beautiful.

More like mummies with shark teeth.

Several human beings hurried out into the snowy yard.  They intercepted the fleeing survivors as the Archons stood there watching. The Archons must have signaled ahead somehow. Radio, maybe. Or telepathy. Everyone seemed to think the Archons could read minds, too.

The human agents scurried after the survivors with flashlights and blankets. For a moment the yard was chaotic,  beams of light swinging around wildly, everyone running in different directions. A heavyset man in bib overalls tussled with a rescuer before they both sprawled in the snow. A little girl fought like a wildcat as they swept a blanket around her. The Archons watched for a moment longer, then turned their bony heads skyward and, one by one, came untethered from the earth.

Without their human cargo, the strange creatures shot straight into the air like bottle rockets.

Mort watched them go, heart in his throat.

What’s wrong with me? Mort wondered as the creatures vanished into the dark. When everyone else called them angels, why did he behold monsters?

16

Romancing the Apocalypse

Mort had never been one of those people who made friends quickly. He was much too introverted for that. So he was a little disconcerted when Bob Hawthorne decided, right off the bat, that the two of them were going to be buddies.  After years of schoolyard bullying, Mort was conditioned to suspect anyone acting unusually friendly towards him. What unerringly followed, in his experience, was some kind of prank. His pants yanked to his ankles. Nair poured down his jockey shorts. An atomic wedgie. Rationally, he knew that Bob would do no such thing. Grownups didn’t behave like that, but he was suspicious anyway. He couldn’t help wondering why this stranger was being so nice to him.

Maybe he saw in Mort a kindred spirit, someone whose life had been nearly as charmless as his own. Bob certainly looked like he had suffered a few atomic wedgies himself over the years. Maybe it was just pity. Mort wasn’t sure what the guy’s motives were, but he tried to put aside his suspicions and accept the man’s overtures of friendship at face value.

The day after Mort took up residence in Dorm Eight, Bob escorted him to the commissary in Orange Yard.

He awakened Mort with a rap on the door and a hearty: “Kemosabe! Throw some britches on, and I’ll take you to the commissary and getcha some extra clothes and supplies.”

Mort hadn’t slept well the night before, but he swung his feet to the floor anyway. “All right. I appreciate it,” he said fuzzily.

Later, downstairs, in the small quarters the caretakers shared, Tina fed them a couple hotcakes drizzled with syrup (good ones, too!) and then Mort and Bob headed across the compound to get Mort some provisions.

As they crossed the grounds, their shoes crunching in the snow, Bob threw his arm around Mort’s shoulders.

“So what’s your story, bub?” he asked.

“Story?”

“Everybody’s got a story,” Bob said, sweeping his arm to indicate the entire complex. “I wanna know where you used to live, what you used to do, what happened when God decided to drop a big steaming clinker on Planet Mort. You know, the whole nine yards.”

“It’s not really that interesting,” Mort replied, trying not to slip on the icy sidewalk. “Why don’t you tell me your story instead?”

Bob’s thick lips split into a grin. “I know what you’re really wondering,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re wondering how a dude as ugly as me hooked up with such a stone cold fox.”

Mort laughed. “No.”

“Admit it!”

“No!”

“Suit yourself. I’m going to tell you anyway.”

“Okay,” Mort chuckled.

“I was a masseuse working at a swanky spa in Beverly Hills...”

“What?”

“No, wait! That was a fantasy. Oh, yeah, I remember now. I was the superintendent of an apartment building in Indiana, a place called Rosemont Heights...”

He went on to tell Mort how he had survived the first chaotic days of the pandemic. Like most survivors, he had simply kept his head down, holing up in his apartment while the world went crazy around him. He was amazed how many people didn’t have the common sense to just hunker down and stay put. He had watched in stunned disbelief as the street in front of his apartment building jammed up with refugees fleeing the epidemic. Shortly after, those living refugees were replaced by a slow parade of the undead, most of whom were probably said refugees. He didn’t meet Tina until a week or so after the Phage had burned through his hometown. By then, the Rosemont was all but deserted, her tenants fled to whatever strange roads, and fate, lay in wait for them.

Their paths crossed one afternoon while he was out looting. He was returning to his apartment from a local Piggly Wiggly, slinking through a narrow alley, a paper sack bulging with canned food in his arms, when he heard squealing tires, then the crunch and tinkle of a car meeting its own personal Armageddon. He ducked down in a mound of refuse, feeling no compulsion to investigate whatsoever-- not Myrtle Hawthorne’s boy, Bob, who was a firm believer in that old saw about curious cats. A minute or two later, a dude in basketball shorts, a white tee-shirt and sandals went clip-clopping past the mouth of the alley, running for everything he was worth.

“Fuckin’ flip-flops!” Bob snorted. “You believe that happy crap? Zombie apocalypse and the guy is wearing flip-flops!” He laughed, shaking his head.

Bob heard deadheads moaning in the distance and realized he was talking out loud to himself. He clamped his mouth shut with a snap. In the old days, talking to yourself might give people the idea that you had a screw loose. Now, it could get a guy killed. He crouched down behind a dumpster, hoping no rotting cannibals had overheard him.

The moans and groans were getting louder. Mr. Flip-flops had gotten the weirdos stirred up, and it was a sure bet the block would be crawling with them before too long. They were like ants that way. You see one, you can pretty much bet a whole gaggle of them were soon to follow. There was no time to try to make a break for it. Bob leapt into the garbage and started scooping it up over his body.

That’s when the pregnant woman limped around the corner.

Tina Laramie shuffled into the alley, cradling her stomach in one hand and clutching an injured leg with the other. Her hair was disheveled, and little blobs of red, like poppies, were blooming down her pants leg.

Bob froze in his pile of refuse, stunned by the woman’s beauty.

“You know that old saying, ‘she took his breath away’,” Bob said to Mort. “I know it’s cheesy, but that was how I felt. I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to call out to her, help her, but for a second or two, my jaw just wagged up and down. I couldn’t get anything out. Even banged up and preggers, she looked like a frickin’ movie star!”

Tina Laramie was a teller at a local credit union. She and her boyfriend, a personal trainer named Calvin Voyles, had survived the initial bloodbath of the pandemic and were attempting to escape from the city in Calvin’s Jaguar. About three miles from their house, Calvin had ripped around a corner doing about seventy and was startled by a mob of zombies. They were just milling around in the street like crackheads, their usual behavior when they weren’t pursuing a victim. Calvin tried to weave through them, but there were too many. He plowed over about a half dozen, almost made it through the horde, but then he rolled over a really fat one and the wheels came up off the pavement. They careened into a light pole at about forty miles per hour, all the luggage he’d strapped to the top of the car tearing loose and skidding down the street, flinging their belongings in a wide fan of garments and foodstuffs and Calvin’s high school sports trophies. The airbags had deployed, sparing them both from severe injury, but the impact had dizzied Tina, and by the time she shook off the little stars spinning around her head, she realized her sweety had abandoned her to her fate. Calvin had bailed on her, leaving the driver’s side door open. Tina glanced in the rear view mirror as she fumbled with her seatbelt and saw about five dozen zombies stumbling in her direction.

“You goddam coward!” she hissed through gritted teeth, and then she flung herself from the steaming Jag and ran for her life.

She limped into the alley, breasts heaving, bloody, bruised and suffering from adrenaline burnout. Fear and maternal instinct had given her the burst of strength she needed to outrace the mob of zombies chasing after her, but she was wiped out. She had to hide or climb or... or something. She couldn’t run much further.

“Over here!” Bob hissed at her.

Startled, Tina let loose a little squeal of terror.

“Quiet!” Bob whispered. “Are you trying to attract them?”

“Who are you?” Tina asked, scanning the littered alleyway with wide, frightened eyes.

“Santa Clause, who do you think?” Bob quipped, and the statuesque blonde stood upright and planted one fist on her hip.

“Ha ha,” she said humorlessly.

With a frustrated sigh, Bob raised up out of the garbage and waved his arms at her. “The name’s Bob. If you want to live, follow me.” And then he dived back under the refuse, vanishing once more from sight.

Tina Laramie wrinkled her nose. “Gross,” she said, but the cries of the pursuing zombie horde were getting louder and louder, closer and closer, and she was out of steam. She limped further into the alley and Bob helped camouflage her beneath a redolent heap of old newspapers and tin cans, rotten banana peels and coffee grounds.

They clung desperately to one another, bodies trembling, as the zombie horde thundered past the alley. A couple snarling weirdos broke away from the mob and slunk into the alley to have a sniff, clothes hanging in tatters from their desiccated limbs, milky eyes rolling around in sunken sockets. One of them came within a couple feet of the two strangers, raw feet scraping the ground as he turned in circles, sniffing and making low inquisitives in his chest. Tina’s fingernails dug into Bob’s shoulder. He was certain she was going to lose it, that she’d start screaming and break from cover any second, give them both away, and that would be it for Myrtle Hawthorne’s baby boy, Bob.

But she didn’t. Tina squeezed her eyes shut and bit her lower lip and managed to stay quiet long enough for the zombies to lose interest. The two deadheads that had stopped to investigate the alley moved on-- rejoining their pack, you might say-- grotesque appetites mercifully unsatisfied.

“Well, that was fun,” Bob said, rising cautiously from the garbage.

Tina followed a moment later. She brushed eggshell from her hair, plucked a half-eaten McBurger from her ample cleavage. Then she saw it, and her body spasmed with surprise and horror. “Oh, no!” she moaned, gaping down at her groin.

The crotch of her lavender maternity pants was soaked with bright red blood.

Bob escorted her back to his apartment, the two of them sneaking through the alleys, moving in fits and starts. They crossed paths with a couple weirdos and had to backtrack or wait around the corner until the creatures had wandered away, but the zombies they encountered were none too bright, thank God, and they were able to slip past the infected without too much trouble.

Tina stumbled along, holding her distended belly, blood seeping down her thighs. She tried to be stoic, but she faltered a couple times as cramps bolted through her abdomen, her face tightening. She grabbed his hand and squeezed it.

“Are you all right?” Bob asked, which was probably the stupidest thing he’d ever said, but he didn’t know what else to say.

“I’m going to lose my baby if I don’t find some place to rest,” Tina gasped, beads of sweat rolling down her face.

“My place is just around the block,” Bob replied. He tried to pull his hand from hers. She was squeezing it so hard he wouldn’t have been surprised if the bones inside it started crunching.

“Is it safe?” Tina asked.

“Safe as anywhere else, I guess. You want a guarantee or something?”

It might have sounded cruel, but he smiled when he said it, the epitome of gallows humor, inviting her to laugh with him in the face of all the death and destruction they had lived through thus far, and to her credit, Tina Laramie had looked at him, one eye narrowed down to a slit, and she had laughed. Her face was waxy and slick with sweat. Pain and fear was etched into her features, but she had laughed, and Bob Hawthorne had fallen just a little bit in love with her.

He got her back to his apartment safe, if not sound, and she had collapsed onto his bed with a gust of relief. She didn’t know him from Adam. For all she knew, he could have been Hannibal Lecter, but there was something in his face, something in his big froggy eyes, that spoke to her instincts. This is a good man, her intuition said, and she thanked God for him, because she was in no condition to take care of herself right now. Lord knows Cal had resigned from that post readily enough.

“What can I do to help?” he had asked, standing at the side of the bed with an anxious expression on his face.

“There’s nothing you can do,” Tina replied, staring up at the ceiling and trying to halt the spontaneous abortion of her child by sheer force of will. “If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen.”

“I could maybe boil some water, or...”

Tina had laughed softly. “I’m not in labor, Bob. I’m losing my baby.” Tears had welled up in her eyes.

“But she didn’t lose it,” Bob said to Mort as they got in line at the commissary. It was a long line, despite the cold. It extended from the front door of the building some thirty yards out into the snowy yard. “I don’t know how. I think it was pure stubbornness. After a while, she just stopped bleeding. She spotted the next two or three days, and that was that. I know she talks like a Southern Belle, but that dame is tough as nails.”

“What about the boyfriend?” Mort asked.

“Oh, he turned back up,” Bob said with a moue of distaste. He and Mort shuffled forward as the line advanced. “About a week later. I was getting ready to sneak outside. We needed more food. And toilet paper. I never knew women used so much toilet paper. I can make a roll last two weeks, but not Tina. I think she wraps herself up in it, you know, puts on a little fashion show in the bathroom mirror. Anyway, Tina was watching the street. We were waiting for the weirdos to thin out so I could slip out unnoticed, and that’s when I hear her give a little squeak.

“The way she looked at me, like she just saw the devil, I knew what it was. There’s not much that ruffles her tailfeathers. I went to the window and peeked out over her shoulder and sure enough, he was down there. I could tell it was him ‘cause of his outfit. Basketball shorts and a white tee-shirt and those ridiculous fucking flip-flops. I don’t know how he managed to keep ‘em on, but he was still wearing them, swear to God!

“He was deader than dogshit, face half eaten off, all black and shit with foam running out his mouth, but it was him. Weird thing is, he was just sort of wandering around in circles in front of the apartment complex.

“Tina starts shaking after a few minutes and then she says, ‘He knows we’re in here,’ in this weird little girl voice. You might think she meant we as in me and her, but she didn’t. She meant her and the baby. That gave me the heebie jeebies, let me tell you! Cold chills went running up my back. But I says, ‘He don’t know that, hon. It’s just a coincidence. He’ll wander off soon enough. They always do.’

“But she insisted. He knew she was there. Her and the baby, and finally I asts, ‘Well, what do you want me to do about it?’ and she looks me dead in the eyes.

“‘I want you to kill him,’ she says.”

Mort gaped at the man. “What did you do?”

Bob shrugged. “I killed him.”

“Oh, she didn’t mean it in a vengeful way,” Bob went on as the line advanced toward the front doors again. “It wasn’t like she wanted to get him back for abandoning her in the car. She just wanted me to put him out of his misery. She loved him, and she felt sorry for him. He was her baby’s daddy. Plus, she wanted to make sure her child was safe. She didn’t like the way he just stood there at the foot of the building and stared up at our window like he could see right through the walls. It unnerved her.

“So I says, ‘Okay.’ Just that, and then I grabbed my shovel and went downstairs.

“I eased out into the alley, and when the coast was clear, I kind of give out a whistle. Poor ol’ Calvin heard me right off, and he come running after me like someone rang the dinner bell. It kind of startled me. Tina told me later he used to run track in high school, and I was like, ‘Thanks for warning me, lady,‘ but that was after. I waited with my shovel cocked back, and when he came in range, I let him have it. I nailed him right in the head. Klong! Knocked him right out of those fucking flip-flops. Finally! And before he could get back up, I stepped across him and used the edge of the shovel to cut his head off.”

All this he told Mort as they waited in line at the commissary.

He didn’t tell Mort how he’d had to chop at Calvin Voyles’s neck again and again before he finally severed it completely, or how he had puked all over them both when the man’s head finally came off and went rolling away down the alley, leaving a trail of ichor behind it. He didn’t tell Mort how the man’s head retained a semblance of savage life even after he’d cut it off, and that it had stared at him with mindless hatred when he picked it up by the hair and carried it to the nearest dumpster, how it had bared its teeth and snapped, how its lips had wriggled like black slimy worms as if it were cursing him. He didn’t tell Mort how he woke up screaming that night, sheets soaked with sweat, and how Tina had lain down beside him, just meaning to comfort him, but they had somehow ended up making love, her on top, and though she was the most beautiful woman he had ever made love to, and though he loved her, he could not shake a terrible sense of guilt, as if they had conspired together to murder a living man.

It made no sense. Calvin Voyles was already dead, just another victim of the Phage, one out of billions, but Bob felt guilty all the same.

Sometimes, when he was exhausted or depressed, and he happened to catch a glimpse of himself in a mirror or a darkened window, the thought rose up, unbidden, in his mind, only it wasn’t his voice, it was the voice of Sister Harris, one of the nuns who taught at the private school he’d attended as a boy, and in her crow-like crone’s voice, which had so terrorized him as a child, she denounced him: Murderer! He knew Tina had only asked him to kill her boyfriend out of mercy, and mercy was the only reason he had gone down into that alley to kill Mr. Flip-flops-- mercy, and the fear that maybe she was right, it made no sense but maybe her dead boyfriend did know she was there, and he might figure out some way to get at her and her baby (some of the weirdos were creepily clever)-- but sometimes Bob wondered how he was going to look at her baby after the child was born and not feel like a murdering usurper.

Some things you just couldn’t tell the gimp down the hall, no matter how trustworthy he might seem to be.

Instead, he told Mort how the Archons had saved them.

They were eating supper-- canned Spam, canned green beans and canned corn-- when Tina put her fork down with a little clink and began to massage her temples. Bob opened his mouth, intending to ask her if she was okay. She got migraines sometimes, didn’t know why, but they were so bad she had to lie in bed with a cool rag on her forehead. The next thing he knew, he was standing on the roof of the Rosemont.

It was like a drunken blackout, a phenomenon he was all too familiar with from his salad days. One minute he was sitting at the kitchen table in his apartment, candle flickering between the two of them, a spoonful of lukewarm canned corn hovering a couple inches from his mouth. The next he was outside, stars sprawled across the sky overhead and the whole dark, dead city spread around them.

Tina was standing beside him, the wind was blowing through her hair, a chill autumn wind that smelled of rot and burned rubber. Facing them across the roof were several shadowed figures, their bodies unnaturally tall and slender. He didn’t get a good look at them. All he had was a sense of long, wasted limbs and cold white skin.

And eyes.

Even in the dark, he could feel their eyes on him, and it made the hair on the back of his neck stand straight up.

Tina started beside him as if she had just become aware of her surroundings and cried out, “Bob! What are those things?” The fear in her voice spurred him to action. Adrenaline surging, he balled his hands into fists and stalked toward them.

And that’s when the one nearest to him spread its wings.

Great wings snapped from behind the creature’s back with a sound like a whipcrack as the emaciated creature shouted, “Stay your violence, human! We have come to deliver you from this dead city!”

Bob, who was raised a Catholic, fell to his knees like he’d been hamstrung. His jaw dropped to his chest but no sound came out of him save an exhalation of disbelief. Behind him, Tina moaned, “Oh, Jesus!” but her voice was very distant. For the first time since he laid eyes on her, Tina Laramie was insignificant to Bob Hawthorne. Less than insignificant. She was a dream of a dream. There was room in his mind for only one thing: the angel walking gravidly toward him, wings gulled out in a feral threat display.

“I am Paraplex,” the creature said, holding its hand toward him.

“Buh-Bob,” he stammered. “Bob Hawthorne.”

“We know who you are,” the creature said.

He took the being’s hand and felt himself hefted into its cool embrace. Slowly the creature’s wings lowered, the primary feathers closing with a tiny rustling sound and then folding, like the blades of a window blind, over the secondary feathers. A part of him was frightened, but the fear was as distant as the woman standing on the roof with him. The greatest part of his awareness was occupied by awe, awe and disbelief.

Bob only caught the name of one of the others, a childlike female named Hekate. Paraplex and Hekate carried Bob and Tina to New Jerusalem while the others flapped away in a different direction-- searching for more survivors, he presumed.

They were among the first to arrive at New Jerusalem.

“Which one rescued you?” Bob asked as he and Mort moved steadily toward the doors. “If you don’t mind me asking,” he added.

“I don’t mind. Its name was Metatron.”

“Wow,” Bob said, impressed. “He’s one of the high muckamucks. He’s like Yaldabaoth’s second-in-command, or personal assistant or something.”

“I’ve heard of him.”

“Yaldabaoth?” Bob asked.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, he’s...” He didn’t know how to describe the creature, so he waved his hands and blew through his lips.

Finally, they moved into the building. Mort relaxed as the warmth enveloped him, fingers working on the tender muscle of his left thigh. They chatted a little longer as they made their way to the first window, and then they were occupied with getting Mort the provisions he needed. Mort stepped aside and let Bob haggle with the commissary staff, amused by his new friend’s tenaciousness. Bob was like a bulldog.

“Twenty credits!” Bob screeched in disbelief. This over a pair of jeans. “Look at the poor schmuck! Don’t you think he’s got it bad enough without you people trying to rip him off? My homeboy here needs all the credits he’s got. Can’t you see he’s got a medical condition? He’s practically a cripple!” Mort hadn’t worn his toboggan this morning and Bob gesticulated wildly toward the scars on his head.

The guy behind the counter sighed wearily. “Listen, Bob, we all got a sad story. We’re still waiting for the scouting crews to bring back more clothes and stuff. I can give him a break on some socks and underwear, but I gotta charge full price for the retard’s pants and shirts.”

“All right, all right... Twenty credits for the pants, but the socks and underwear are free.”

Walking back with his new clothes, Mort said,“I’m not really retarded, you know.”

Bob laughed.“I know that, bro. But you got some free drawers. You gotta learn how to work the system, man! You look like Cujo’s chew toy. You should take advantage of it while you can.”

17

Reunion

Mort reported for his first day of work in the blue yard cafeteria on a bitterly cold Monday, December 1.

A couple days had passed since his release from the infirmary. He had used that time to settle into his new “apartment”, such as it was, and his new life in New Jerusalem. Bob and Tina, Dorm Eight’s unofficial “den mom and dad” were an enormous help. They talked Mickey Hahn into trading rooms with him so Mort wouldn’t have to limp up and down four flights of stairs every day. Mickey had one of the primo rooms on the first floor and was reluctant to give it up, but Tina had unleashed the full force of her syrupy sweet Southern charm on him. She was nearly due and big as a house, but she could still tempt the devil out of his tights if she set her mind to it, she was that gorgeous. Mickey had moved his belongings to Mort’s fourth floor apartment with a goofy, if somewhat confused, grin on his face, not really sure how or why he’d volunteered to trade his digs to the gimpy new guy.

After the move, Tina helped Mort with his bedding and put his clothes away. She had seen him fumbling around with the sheets, favoring his bad leg, through the open door and waded in, ordering Mort to sit down and let her do it. Mort was embarrassed, and watching the morbidly pregnant woman make his bed and fold his new drawers, his cheeks began to burn with shame, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer.

“So how do you like your new room, sugar?” she asked as she folded his blanket back and fluffed his pillow.

“Love it!”

“I doesn’t have any windows, but it’s warmer down here by the commons,” she said, moving to the pile of laundry sitting on the counter by the sink.

“It’s nice. Big.” His leg didn’t seem to throb as badly either.

Tina finished folding and putting away his new underwear and stood up straight, pushing an errant strand of honey blond hair from her face. “You know what this room needs?” she asked, hands on her hips.

“What?”

“Christmas decorations!” she cried. “I’m going to get some!” She marched from the room, returning a few minutes later with a brown paper sack full of garland and sparkling glass globes. “Mickey was such a grinch,” she said. “He wouldn’t let me put up anything.”

“Please,” Mort said, rising, “let me help.”

“All right, sweety. We’ll do it together.”

For the next half hour, the two of them hung Christmas ornaments and strung garland. When they were finished and Mort’s new room was properly “yuletided”, Tina grabbed them a couple sandwiches and pops and they had lunch together in his room, exchanging stories of their fondest Christmas memories. For Mort, it was the year his father got laid off from work. His dad had spent all of December and January at home, drawing his unemployment benefits.

“Money was kind of tight so I didn’t get a lot of presents that year,” Mort said, “but I didn’t care. My dad and I hung out that whole Christmas break.”

“Awwww,” Tina said, taking his hand and squeezing it. “That is so sweet!” She laughed and wiped her eyes. “Oh, now look--! I’m leakin’ again! Don’t mind me, hon. It’s just pregnancy hormones.”

“You look like you’re ready to pop any day now,” Mort said.

Tina laughed, “I know! I’ve gotten big as a house! I swear, I keep waiting for my belly button to pop out like the cooking button on a Thanksgiving turkey. It’s my first child. I wish it was Bob’s, but we didn’t know each other before the plague. We didn’t meet until all the... the bad stuff happened. He looked out for me until the Archons saved us and brought us here to New Jerusalem. Well, actually, he still looks after me. He’s a wonderful man.”

They sat smiling at one another. Without warning, Tina leapt to her feet and started gathering the remains of their lunch. “Listen to me! I swear, my daddy was right! My tongue is hinged on both ends. You look wore out. I’ll just clean this up and let you get some rest.”

She looked tired herself, Mort reflected. Her naturally tawny skin was a tad too yellow, her eyes hollow.

“You should get a little rest yourself,” Mort said. “You look a little peaked.”

“Peaked?” Tina laughed softly, rubbing the impressive mound of her stomach. “That’s a nice way of puttin’ it. My feet are swelled up like sausages. Yeah, I think I’ll do that. Bob would chew my butt if he knew I been puttin’ up Christmas decorations.”

Mort thanked her and told her to thank Bob for him too, then popped a pain pill and stretched out on his new bunk. He dropped off to sleep almost immediately and dozed through the whole afternoon despite the noise coming from the common area.

He woke that evening, walked across the campus to one of the cafeterias and had a solitary dinner, then returned to the dorm. The TV in the commons was playing It’s a Wonderful Life. Mort sat on the ratty sofa next to a guy who looked like he might have been a big rig driver in his former life, but he couldn’t get interested in the movie. He had watched it too many times growing up. It had been his mother’s favorite holiday film.

That was his excuse anyway. He didn’t want to dwell on the fact that he was having trouble following the images on the screen. He couldn’t seem to keep track of who was who. All the faces just sort of drifted around like blank gray balloons.

He rose and limped to his room. He popped another pain pill, worried he would have trouble weaning himself off them once he was completely recovered, but that was a bridge he would cross when he came to it, he decided. He needed them right now, couldn’t sleep without them.

He woke in the wee hours of the morning, confused and frightened. He had dreamt about zombies. In his dream, he was back in his apartment in DuChamp. The undead had found him somehow, sniffed him out, and were howling and battering at his door. They were going to bust in any moment, and when they got in they would tear him apart, eat him alive. He scrambled out of bed as if bits of the nightmare had followed him into the waking world and were squirming around in his bedsheets like vermin. He was dripping with sweat, felt polluted, unclean.

He went to the sink and splashed some water in his face, then put on some fresh clothes. It was too early to report to work, his papers said he needed to go in at six, so he puttered around his room for a while. Bored, he went and sat in the commons. The lights were low, the dormitory echoey in the hush. He found an old People magazine stuck down in the cushion of the sofa and started flipping through it. Let’s see what Tom and Kate were doing before the zombies ate ‘em, he thought.

He frowned, trying to make sense of the images on the glossy pages. He could read the words, but the pictures, for the most part, refused to come clear. They were just swirls of color. Frustrated, he tossed the magazine aside.

After a while, the residents of Dorm Eight began to stir. A few alarm clocks went off. A couple guys wandered to the showers and emerged with wet hair and clean clothes. Neither spoke to him. They drank coffee and departed for their jobs.

Finally, Bob got up. He plodded to the kitchen and emerged with a cup of coffee. He was dressed in sweatpants and a tee-shirt, hair smashed flat on one side and sticking up in spikes on the other.

He saw Mort and wandered over. “Morning.”

“Morning.”

“Sleep good?”

“Yeah.”

“Today’s your first day of work, ain’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Excited?”

“Nervous. It’ll be good to have something to do, but I’m worried I won’t be able to handle it. Physically, I mean. My leg’s still a bit tricky. It wants to go out on me when I’m not expecting it.”

Bob slurped his coffee, nodding. “Well this ain’t a workcamp,” he said when Mort finished speaking. “If yer supervisor gives you any shit, just tell him to kiss yer ass.”

Tina called for him then and he saluted Mort with his coffee cup. “Duty calls.”

When it was light out, Mort rose and hobbled to his room. He grabbed some clean clothes and crossed the hall to the showers. An old man in oversized underwear followed Mort around the locker room, flapping his gums about some war or other. Mort listened politely as he showered and got dressed for his first day of work. Finally, he had to interrupt. “Well, it’s been nice talking to you, but I have to get going. I don’t want to be late for work.” The old man was still talking when Mort sidled from the locker room.

He limped out the front door at six am.

The sky was clear, the sun a brilliant silver coin clutched between the knuckles of the Unicoi Mountains. It had quit spitting snow sometime during the night, but it was bitterly cold. Before he’d even walked halfway across the compound, Mort’s nose was red and running and he was shaking all over like he’d stuck a fork in a power outlet. Even with the cane, Mort slipped on the icy sidewalks a couple times. The second time he almost took a girl down with him. The young woman had noticed Mort floundering on the treacherous walk and trotted over to lend him a shoulder.

“I’m so sorry,” he gasped, clutching at her for support. “Did I hurt you?”

“No, I’m fine,” the girl snorted, amused by their slipping and sliding. “Maintenance really should salt these sidewalks before somebody breaks a leg.” She was young, maybe twenty, with long brown hair, high cheekbones and the hooked nose of Native American ancestry. She was pretty, but skinny. Bony, really. “I’m Jean, by the way.”

“Mort.”

“Careful Mort!” she cried as his legs went out in the splits. She laughed as he clutched her coat, putting her arm around his narrow waist. “Oh my god! We almost fell down again!”

She delivered him to blue yard cafeteria, then hurried on her way with a cheerful wave (and maybe even a brief interested glance down and up).

Since he was on light duty, Mort was only required to work four hours a day to receive his allotment of credits. Mort’s supervisor was a stout older man named Burt Maguire. He was gruff-- a retired marine, he said-- but he didn’t seem inclined to push Mort harder than was necessary. After looking over Mort’s papers, he gave Mort the grand tour, outlined his responsibilities, then set Mort loose so he could tend to his own duties.

Mort was grateful to have something to do. It was boring just hanging around the dorm. He sat at one of the stainless steel prep tables and peeled potatoes for lunch. Breakfast was still being served out front, but the blue yard cafeteria served several hundred people every day and lunch had to be prepped while diners were still coming in for their morning meal. Large pans of ground beef slathered in tomato sauce were lined up on the table next to him, ready to be slid into the ovens. White beans bubbled in five gallon pots on the stove.

Mort peeled potatoes as quick as he could while the rest of the kitchen staff scurried to and fro around him. A few of them stopped for a moment to introduce themselves and welcome him to the crew, but none of them tarried to chat. There was just too much work to do.

When Burt stopped to check on him a couple hours later, Mort confessed he didn’t feel like he was helping much.

“Don’t worry about it, son. You’re doing fine,” the old fellow said. “Besides, this is just your first day. We’ll have you slinging hash with the best of ‘em soon enough.”

Before he knew it, Mort’s four hours were done. Mort found his boss and said, “I’m not really tired. You mind if I work a little longer?” What would he do back at the dorm? Watch those blank faces float around the TV some more? Count the cracks on the wall?

Burt pulled a large pan of meatloaf from the oven and slid it onto the prep table behind him. “That would be great, son. The other guy that was supposed to start today never showed,” he said. He slapped a ladle in Mort’s palm and told him to go up front and help serve. Mort spent the next two hours scooping mashed potatoes and gravy onto lunch trays.

Some might consider such work demeaning, but it was not much different from working at his comic book shop. He enjoyed serving others, and even chatted with some of the diners as they scooted their trays down the bar slides. He didn’t know any of them, save a nurse he’d seen once or twice during his stay at the infirmary. It was just good to be among people, to feel as if he were contributing to society again-- as diminished as that society might be now.

The lunch crowd began to pile in at 11:30, and by noon the cafeteria buzzed with conversation, every table occupied. Mort worked as quick as he could, sweat trickling down his ribs, his leg and head throbbing, but he was determined not to punk out. Not until the lunch rush was over.

Someone plucked at the shoulder of his shirt. He turned to see what the guy wanted and fell back against the counter, his mouth dropping open.

“Burt told me to check on you,” a slim black man said. He was dressed in a white tee-shirt and pants, with an apron and a black doo rag-- no gaudy leisure suit, no jewelry-- but there was no mistaking that face: leonine and gaunt, with disconcerting gray eyes. It was Lavender Baasim... the last living pimp! “You okay? You need someone to relieve you?”

Mort’s mouth flapped open and shut, but for a moment or two, he was too stunned to speak. Finally, he managed to sputter, “Luh-Lavender?”

The slim man frowned at him. “Huh?”

“Lavender Baasim?”

“Lavender?” the black man repeated, and he scowled at Mort like he was one card shy of a full deck. “I don’t know no Lavender. The name’s Lawrence.”

“Lawrence?”

“Look, you need me to relieve you or not?” the slim man asked testily. “If not, I got things to do.”

“No. No, I’m fine,” Mort said. “I was planning to work until the lunch rush is over.”

“Fine,” the man said and stalked away. “He’s fine, Burt!” he yelled before disappearing into one of the walk-in coolers. Burt looked up from a big industrial mixer and gave Mort a thumbs up. Mort turned back to his station, confused and embarrassed. He scooped mashed potatoes and gravy onto a diner’s tray and splattered the guy’s shirt.

“Hey, man! Watch it!”

“Sorry!” Mort said quickly. “Sorry!” He handed the diner a towel and the guy mopped himself off.

The fellow Burt sent to check on him was Lavender Baasim! He was certain of it! Somehow the lunatic had survived. The Archons must have rescued the guy, just like they’d rescued Mort and Pete and Dao-ming, and brought him here to New Jerusalem.

Mort peeked back at the guy, who was opening a #10 size can of green beans now. He certainly looked like the pimp Mort had encountered in DuChamp, but he didn’t act like the guy. Lavender Baasim had moved with an exaggerated slinkiness, like the Pink Panther, more parody than person. This guy, Lawrence, was bopping around like a regular dude.

Mort turned back to his station, rubbing the scar on his head.

Maybe he was wrong. The psycho named Da Vinci had turned his brain into scrambled eggs. He had trouble just finding his shoes in the morning now. The part of his brain that processed visual imagery was gone, blasted with a captive bolt pistol.

Yeah, that must be it, Mort thought. Brain just short-circuited there for a second.

The guy must think Mort was nuts.

Mort concentrated on his duties, promising himself he’d apologize to the guy later. He didn’t want his co-workers to think he was a headcase.

In the press of the hungry crowd, Mort didn’t see Pete come in the front door—but Pete saw him.

“Mort!” Pete declared. “Fuck me sexy Jesus! Mort!”

Mort looked up in shock as Pete elbowed his way to Mort’s station. A couple people snarled at him for cutting into line, but Pete ignored them.

“Pete!”

“Mort! I’ve been looking for you since I got back!”

Mort grinned, forgetting all about Lavender/Lawrence. “You have?”

“Yeah!”

A guy standing midway down the serving line hollered, “Come on, guy! You’re holding everybody up!”

Pete waved him off, asked, “How much longer you got to work? We should hang out.”

“Actually, my shift was over a couple hours ago. I’ve just been helping out.”

“So fix us a tray and we’ll have lunch together. We got some catchin’ up to do.”

Mort nodded, “All right. Just a second.” Flustered and elated, he handed his ladle to the worker next to him. The guy blinked at him, a ladle in both hands, and Mort shrugged apologetically. “Sorry! He’s an old friend,” he said. He abandoned his station, untying his apron. “Hang on!” he called after Pete.

Mort went back into the kitchen and explained to Burt what was going on. His boss nodded, told him to go have lunch with his buddy, they had everything under control. “Thanks, son. You’ve been a big help today,” Burt called after him as Mort hurried away. Mort prepared a couple lunch trays and carried them out into the dining area. Pete was sitting at one of the far tables. He saw Mort limping toward him and jumped up.

“Here, let me get those,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“Damn, that psycho did a number on you,” Pete said, eyeing Mort’s head as he sat down across from him. “I can’t call you lardbutt anymore either. You’re skinny as a beanpole. To be honest, I almost didn’t recognize you.”

“Yeah, I’ve lost a lot of weight. I’m doing better though. Today’s my first day back to work.”

“How’s your brain? I mean, after... you know...” Ever the sensitive one, Pete put his finger to his head like a gun and pulled the trigger. “I thought that psycho killed you.”

“I have some damage to my visual cortex, or something like that. I have trouble recognizing what I’m looking at now. Faces. Objects. My eyes see them, but the part of my brain that identifies them is messed up. It doesn’t… you know… compute. For instance, I have trouble finding my shoes now. I’ll see them on the floor, but my brain doesn’t lock onto them and say: there are your shoes.”

“Fuck! That really sucks, man, but I’m glad you’re out of the hospital.”

“Yeah. They kicked me out of the infirmary a few days ago. It got pretty crowded in there towards the end, what with all the survivors those… uh…Archons keep bringing in.”

Pete leaned in close. “Yeah, what do you think about those things? Pretty crazy, huh? My gramma always told me about guardian angels and stuff like that, but I never thought it was really real, you know? I always thought all that Bible stuff was made up so people would feel bad and go to church, but I guess it’s all true.”

Mort shrugged, noncommittal. He wanted to talk to Pete about that, but not in such a crowded setting. The other survivors could get really worked up about the Archons, especially if anyone questioned the strange beings’ motivations or origins. He’d seen two men nearly come to blows over the Archons in the commons yesterday evening. One thought they were aliens. The other insisted they were Biblical angels. Bob and Kelly had pulled them apart before anyone got hurt, but only just.

“So what have you been doing?” Mort asked, changing the subject. “I thought you’d come see me at the infirmary, but you never showed.”

Pete looked a little ashamed. “I did come see you a couple times, but you were really out of it. I sat and talked to you once, but you just kind of mumbled like you were talking in your sleep. I signed up for the scouting crews after that, been outcamp ever since. The scout crews go out, look for survivors, bring back supplies. I just got back, actually. I went to look you up at the hospital as soon as they let us out of quarantine, but when I got there and asked about you, they said you were gone.” Pete laughed. “At first I thought they meant you were dead and I about shit myself, but then they said you weren’t gone like that. They meant you’d been discharged.”

Mort snorted along with Pete. “Sorry about that.”

Pete shook his head. “It’s all good, man. I’m just glad you ain’t dead.”

“Me, too.”

“So anyways… I went to housing to find out where you were staying. They said dorm eight, but you weren’t there either. I asked around and some pregnant chick said you were working. I says where and she says blue cafeteria… so here I am!”

“I’m glad you came to see me. I’ve been pretty lonely. You don’t happen to know what happened to Dao-ming, do you?”

Pete frowned. “Last I heard, she signed up to look after the orphans in one of the dorms in Yellow Yard. They keep all the orphaned kids in one dorm. They call it the orphanage. You mean she hasn’t come to see you?”

“No.”

“That’s weird.”

Mort felt a pang of sorrow. Pete had found him easily enough. Dao-ming had been here in the camp all this time and hadn’t bothered to come looking for him. That could only mean she didn’t want to see him.

“Do you think she blames me?” Mort asked. “You know... for Dongmei?”

“Why?” Pete asked. “Mort, that wasn’t your fault.”

“It was my idea to drive out of the city,” Mort pointed out.

“Yeah, and you were right about that plant blowing up, too. You couldn’t have known about that psycho. Besides, if we had stayed, we’d all be dead from the radiation by now. Jesus Christ, Mort, you saved us! You can’t blame yourself for every bad thing that happens in the world.”

Mort scooped up a spoonful of mashed potatoes and let it drop back onto his tray. Plop! “Yeah... I guess.”

After eating, the two retired to Mort’s room. Pete ragged his buddy over all the Christmas decorations, and when Mort said it had been Tina’s idea, Pete confessed he wouldn’t mind tickling her tinsel. Mort laughed. “You’re incorrigible,” he said, and Pete replied, “Well, I don’t know what ‘incorrigible’ is, but that baby would come out brain damaged, I’ll tell ya that!”

Pete decided they should toast their reunion. He left for a little while and returned with a six pack of beer. Alcohol was prohibited in the dorms, so he smuggled it in in a beat up duffel bag. They closed Mort’s door and cracked open a couple brews.

“To good friends and good beer,” Mort said, raising his can.

“Here’s to Hell!” Pete replied. “May our stay there be as fun as our way there!”

Mort wasn’t much of a drinker. He was tipsy by the time he’d finished his first beer. They finished getting caught up as afternoon proceeded toward evening, and Pete-- four beers down the hole by then-- convinced Mort to accompany him to the orphanage so they could find out why Dao-ming had never visited Mort in the infirmary.

Mort was reluctant to go, but allowed Pete to talk him into it. With his cane in one hand and Pete’s shoulder under his arm, they walked across the cold compound to the dorm where the orphaned children were boarded. Pete was swaying a little and Mort’s bad leg buckled at least twice on the way, but they managed to get there without sprawling on the icy sidewalks.

They didn’t even have to go inside.

Dao-ming was standing outside the front door with a tall muscular guy in blue jeans and a sweater. The guy’s broad back was turned to Mort. Dao-ming was facing them, but she did not look in their direction. She smiled up at the guy as he smoked, then nodded, laughed, said something too low for Mort to understand. Mort’s heart sank as Dao-ming drew close to her suitor, putting a hand on his big bicep.

“What a fuckin’ bitch!” Pete snarled.

Feeling suddenly nauseous, Mort said, “Let’s go back, Pete.”

“No way! Let’s go kick that cocksucker’s ass! I’ll hold him down and you can whip him with that cane.”

“No, Pete! Please! Just... just help me walk back to the dorm. I don’t want her to see me.”

Pete objected, but Mort refused to confront Dao-ming. What was the point? She had moved on, and why not? What could he offer her now? His eyes felt hot and watery. “Come on,” Mort hissed urgently, and Pete relented.

They shambled back toward Dorm Eight. Halfway there, Mort felt his lunch and the two beers he’d drank with Pete come rocketing up from his belly. He doubled over and puked into the slushy snow.

“Aw, man!” Pete groaned, but he held onto the back of Mort’s jacket as he vomited.

Mort stood up, wiping his chin. He started to apologize, then doubled over to ralf again.

“There there… let it all out,” Pete said sympathetically. He patted Mort on the back.“Ew! It still looks like meatloaf!”

Mort started laughing then. Snot dangling from both nostrils, he stood humped forward, waiting to see if anything else was going to come shooting out of him. When he felt like he was done puking, he raised up, wiped his mouth and nose and said,“You got any more beer?”

Pete grinned.“I think I can locate us another six pack.”

They got really wasted.

18

Orientation

The scouting crews had their own barracks, but Pete slept over at Mort’s place that night to drink and reminisce, which they did. A lot. Sometime after midnight, Mort announced he needed to get some sleep. He was supposed to report to work early the next morning. “Yeah, I’m pretty bushed, too,” Pete admitted. “You got sheets for this top bunk?” Mort did, and after they had made the second bunk, Pete stripped to his skivvies and climbed in. Mort dozed off to the comforting din of Peter Bolin snoring, which sounded by turns like a sputtery push mower chewing through high grass and an old man drowning in a bowl of congealed oatmeal.

Pete was still snoring the next morning when Mort woke.

Mort swung his legs out of bed, knocking over a couple empty beer cans. He checked his clock to see how much time he had to get ready, but it was still early. No rush.

Mort grabbed his cane and stood up gingerly, testing his bad leg before putting too much weight on it. His head began to throb as he limped around the room, picking up beer cans and hiding them in his trash can. Booze was verboten in the dorms. He wasn’t sure what would happen if he got caught drinking, but he didn’t want to find out. Bob and Tina had been too good to him to put them on the spot like that.

How many of these did I drink? he wondered, concealing the cans under some soiled paper plates and crumpled wrappers. The way his head felt (like there was an invisible imp standing on his shoulder, jabbing it with a pitchfork) the answer could only be: too many. He couldn’t remember how long it had been since he’d had such a bad hangover, or if he’d ever had such a thumping morning after. The veins in his temples felt like they were ready to pop.

He shuffled to the toilet to empty his bladder. Evidence of last night’s indulgence gurgled out of him for what felt like five minutes. No matter how much it made the big head hurt, though, it was always a pleasure to drain it back out the little head. He sighed as his needle dropped from full to empty. He didn’t flush, afraid it would wake his buddy, and got dressed for his second day of work.

Pete lay on his back, blankets kicked to the foot of his bed. Mort’s friend looked childlike with his tousled blond hair and lax expression. Except for the ginormous morning wood, Mort thought with a snicker. Pete continued to snore noisily as Mort grabbed his cane and hobbled to the door. Mort glanced back at his buddy with an affectionate smile, then stepped out into the commons, closing the door behind himself as quietly as possible.

Bob Hawthorne, Tina’s boyfriend, was waiting for him. He was manning the reception desk this morning, clipboard in hand. Bob waved Mort over as soon as he stepped out of his room. “Hey, Mort! Can I ast you to do me a favor?”

Mort limped over to the desk. “Sure. What is it?”

Bob looked tired. His eyes were bloodshot, his face drawn and ashy. “Tina’s supposed to report for her blood test today, but she’s caught the flu or something. You’re N.I. like her. Will you tell the nurse she’ll be in as soon as she’s feeling better?”

Mort was planning on getting his test done after his shift today. All non-immune residents were required to submit for testing at least once a week. He nodded. “I don’t mind. Are you sure she’s okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, she’ll be fine. Diarrhea and vomiting. No brain munchies.” He wiped his mouth. “She’s probably just getting ready to have the baby. She rearranged our room last night. Nesting, I guess.”

Mort nodded. He didn’t tell Bob that Tina had decorated his room as well. He hoped she hadn’t overtaxed herself. “I’ll let them know. I hope she gets to feeling better.”

“Yeah, me too,” Bob said. He stood up from the desk and headed toward his room. A couple steps away, he hesitated, turned back to Mort. “Thanks, bud. I... I really appreciate it.”

“No problem.”

Mort thought about his new friends, Tina and Bob, as he walked to the blue yard cafeteria. Their relationship seemed very romantic to him this morning, a real life beauty and the beast story. Bob hadn’t just been beaten with the ugly stick. Someone had attached the ugly stick to a paddle machine and cranked the dial to turbo. Yet, Tina saw past his physical appearance. She never seemed embarrassed when she was with him, and Mort had never seen her so much as glance at any other man. And Bob... well, Bob was totally devoted to her.

Then he thought about Dao-ming, shivering in the cold with her new fellow while he smoked, the way she had gazed up at the guy, laughed, stroked his arm. Mort didn’t know which hurt more: his leg, his head or his heart.

Sunlight glared on the snow, making his eyes water.

It had probably been a bad idea to drink so much last night, what with all the pain meds in his system, not to mention being shot in the head with a cattle gun less than two months ago, but seeing Dao-ming with some other guy, realizing she had moved on so quickly-- without even a goodbye, so long, or a nice to know ya!-- had cut him much deeper than he ever would have expected. He thought years of disappointment had immunized him against such heartache. Guess not. Even Pete had told him to slow it down last night when he cracked open his third beer.

“Take it easy, dude,” he’d said, eyeing Mort with a combination of sympathy and dismay. “You’re just going to barf again.”

“We need another six pack, Pete,” Mort had replied with a belch. “How can a guy drown his sorrows with just three beers?”

He’d known. Somehow. Somewhere deep down in his guts. That’s why he’d hesitated to look her up when he got released from the infirmary. He could have found out where she was living, what job duties she had been assigned to, just as easily as Pete had tracked him down, but he had procrastinated. It was one thing to suspect, another to have it rubbed in your nose. The former hurt a lot less.

“Look, Mort, we all have to deal with stuff like this sooner or later,” Pete told him last night. “You guys only fucked once, right?”

Yeah, just say “fucked”. It’s easier if it was just a fuck.

“Dao-ming ain’t the first chick to use a guy’s dick for a comfort blanket,” Pete went on, trying to cheer him up. “It’s kind of lousy to dump someone out of your life like that, but there’s worse things than finding out your girl’s a skank.”

Yeah, Mort had thought. Like finding out your girlfriend doesn’t want to be Frankenstein’s Bride.

“It’s just bitches being bitches,” Pete said dismissively. “Congrats. You nailed an Asian chick. There’ll be plenty more where she came from, especially the way you look now. Girls love a guy with scars, man. It gets ‘em wet.”

Pete’s words had comforted him last night, and they comforted Mort again this morning as he trekked to blue yard, his shoes crunching in the crusty snow.

The blue yard cafeteria served hotcakes every Tuesday morning, and the place was a madhouse when he arrived, but Mort was grateful for the chaos. It kept his mind off his aching heart. Every time he had a moment to think, his brain trotted out little mental movies of Dao-ming under some other guy, gasping and moaning and scratching his back as he drove her from one gut-wrenching orgasm to the next. It made him nauseous, made him tremble with helpless rage, but he couldn’t make it stop. He didn’t know how to. He had never been so obsessed with a woman.

“You okay, Mort?” Burt asked. “You look kind of green around the gills.”

“I’m fine. Little under the weather today.”

“Well, don’t overdo it. You’re supposed to be on light duty. There ain’t no need for it. I appreciate you staying over yesterday to help out, but you go home on time today and get some rest.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mr. Maguire slapped him on the back and sauntered off. A moment later, he started cursing one of the cooks. The guy had dropped a bowl of pancake batter.

Mort finished his shift and limped to the infirmary. He was afraid he’d have to wait a long time, but there were not many people sitting in the waiting room. Most of the residents of New Jerusalem were immune to the zombie virus. As he waited to have his blood drawn, several of the nurses who had cared for him during his stay came down to say hello. Even Nurse Ratchet waddled down to give him a hug. “We miss you, baldy,” she said gruffly. “I don’t have anybody to tease now.” It helped distract him from his self-pity. At least somebody still cared whether he lived or died!

After Nurse Ratchet departed, the clinic’s receptionist called his name. He was escorted into one of the examination rooms where a nurse drew what seemed to him to be an enormous amount of blood from the big vein in his arm.

“Leave some for me,” Mort only half-joked as the nurse plugged another vacuum tube to the needle in his arm.

“Sorry, I know,” the nurse said as Mort’s blood squirted into the tube. “We need a lot of blood to get a clear result. We’re working with very basic equipment here.” She put that tube into a carryall and plugged another one on. “Last one. I promise. So, how are you doing?”

“I’m doing pretty good,” Mort answered. “Doing great, really. Getting along.”

He told the nurse that Tina Laramie was ill and would come in to have her blood tested when she felt better. The nurse arched an eyebrow, her lips a thin line. “All right, I’ll mark her down for tomorrow, but these tests are not voluntary, Mr. Lesser. They’re very important for the safety of our community. If someone should become infected, it could spread to all the non-immune survivors very quickly. You tell her she has to come in tomorrow to be tested. This isn’t something we can afford to be loosy-goosy about. Especially considering how far along she is.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Mort replied contritely.

The nurse withdrew the needle and snapped off the rubber strap that she had cinched around his bicep. She taped a cotton ball to the crook of his arm and said, “Thank you, Mr. Lesser. It takes twenty-four hours to get the results back. We’ll get in contact with you tomorrow if your test should come back positive.”

That was a cheerful thought.

“How many people are still getting infected?” Mort asked, flexing his arm.

“Not many,” the nurse said vaguely, examining the last tube of his blood.

“One or two a week?”

She put the tube with the others and peeled off her gloves. “Well… not quite that many. You really have to be bitten for the virus to get a toehold. It seems to be concentrated in the salivary glands… and it’s present at dangerous levels in other bodily fluids, too. Blood, feces, urine. Um, semen and vaginal secretions. We’ve been trying to study it, but the facilities here are very limited. The Archons have been helping out with that, too. They’re completely immune to it, like most non-human species, but I think they’re worried it may mutate. Can you imagine if the Archons suddenly become vulnerable to the zombie virus? That would be a big ‘game over’ for all of us, I think.”

Mort chuckled. “Thanks! I’ll rest a lot easier now.”

The nurse laughed, too. “You asked…!”

Pete was still snoring when Mort returned. He jerked upright as Mort shut the door behind him. “Whussat!” he snorted, blinking around in confusion.

“It’s okay. Just me,” Mort said, peeling his coat off and throwing it across the back of his chair.

Pete shuddered, rubbing his bare arms. “I was dreaming about wolves.”

“What wolves?”

Pete jumped down from the top bunk and went to the toilet to piss. As he voided his bladder, he told Mort about the zombie wolves that had ambushed his scouting team near the town of Cooper’s Hollow.

“It was the scariest fuckin’ thing I think I ever seen,” he confessed. “And I’ve seen some shit, let me tell ya! We both have. Zombie people are bad enough, but these things…” His bare skin prickled into goose bumps.

“I think all human beings have an instinctive fear of wolves,” Mort said.

Pete nodded. “Right? So… what are you planning to do today?”

Mort sat on his bunk. “I don’t know. I thought I might go to orientation tonight. I never got a chance to attend one.”

“That’s cool. I went to orientation a couple days after the Archons brought us here. It was interesting. I’ll go with you if you want.”

“That sounds good.”

“So it’s a date.”

“Yeah.”

Pete chuckled. “Ugh… we’re gonna have to find us some women before we turn queer for each other. Now that you’re all skinny and hot-lookin’, I’m startin’ to fantasize about raping you in your bunk.”

Mort laughed. “Sorry. All my holes are exit only.”

Pete leered. “Your mouth says no but your butthole says yes!”

Mort retorted: “My butthole says…” Frrrtt! and he ripped a juicy one.

“Dude, that’s sick!” Pete laughed, waving his hand in front of his nose. “Crack the fuckin’ door, man! I can’t breathe!”

Mort chortled.

Pete gathered up his clothes and started to dress. “Listen, bro, I need to check in with my squad, let them know I haven’t gone AWOL.” He stuffed his legs into his jeans, sat down to pull on his boots.

“Can you get in trouble for that?” Mort frowned.

“Naw! Just a figure of speech. The Scouts is strictly volunteer. I just don’t want anyone to wonder where I’m at. I’ll be back later and we’ll go to orientation.”

“Okay.”

Pete departed with a salute. Tired and hung over, Mort stretched out on his bunk. Despite the headache, Pete had cheered him up, but his thoughts soon returned to Dao-ming and his mood quickly soured.

He rolled onto his side facing the wall. He didn’t want to think about Dao-ming, the night they had slept in one another’s arms, her cheek to his chest, their lovemaking, their comfortable and satisfied pillow talk afterwards, but his mind, it seemed, had ideas of its own. It replayed their intimate moments over and over, a film loop of bittersweet pleasure that made him breathless with loss. He dozed off thinking about her, but sleep was no respite. He even dreamed of her, and it was so real his heart ached when he awoke. His fingers snapped closed on the ghostly flesh that had, only moments before, lay within their grasp.

Pete snapped on the lights as he clomped into the room. “Wake up, scarface! I got held up,” he shouted. “We don’t have much time to get to the auditorium!”

Mort was so startled he almost lurched off his bunk. “Where’s my shoes?” he asked, blinking blearily around the floor.

“On your feet, dummy,” Pete answered.

Mort looked down. “Oh. That’s good.”

“Here, gimme your hand,” Pete said, and he hefted Mort out of bed. “Here’s your cane.”

Mort squinted into the blustery December wind as they crossed the dark complex to the auditorium. It was spitting snow again, the sky low and starless. There were several people loitering outside the auditorium, smokers mostly, hardy souls willing to suffer the cold for their nicotine addiction, but no line. They got right in.

Mort was shocked how many people were inside. There had to be a hundred, at least. They milled up and down the aisles, gossiping, laughing, sitting down, getting up. Most of the people seemed cheerful and excited. Their voices merged into a low roar, making the auditorium hum like a beehive.

Mort scanned the faces around him, hoping-- and fearing-- he might see Dao-ming amid the crowd. He was fairly confident he would recognize her if he saw her. Her face was there, behind his eyelids, every time he closed his eyes. Da Vinci hadn’t stolen that from him, at least-- although he wasn’t completely sure that was a blessing. He also couldn’t say whether he was relieved or disappointed when he didn’t spot her.

“Come on, man. Let’s sit down before all the good seats are taken,” Pete said, nudging him forward.

The auditorium was surprisingly large. It was warm, too, further away from the doors. A lone podium stood on the stage in front of a row of metal folding chairs. Pete spied some empty seats near the middle of the floor and started pushing through the crowd, yelling, “Coming through! Disabled guy here! Let us through!” A couple guys pushed him back and one lady called Pete a jerk, but most of the people caught a glimpse of Mort and parted for him amicably enough. Mort and Pete took off their coats and sat.

The noise of the crowd grew, became a physical thing that seemed to thrum, like a swarm of insects, just below the arching roof. Mort craned his head back and saw a balcony jutting above the main floor. There were people sitting up there, too, though not many. Teenagers mostly.

“Wow, there’s a lot of people here,” Mort said.

“What?” Pete yelled.

“I said wow--!”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

They had to rise a couple times so people could penguin by. After a few minutes, several men and women in business suits climbed onto the stage and milled aimlessly around the metal folding chairs, chatting, shaking hands, laughing. They looked like they were playing a really laid back version of musical chairs, only without the music. One of the women on the stage was the heavyset blond from administration, but the rest were strangers to Mort. An older gentlemen in a blue three-piece suit finally peeled himself away from the group and stepped up to the podium. The others sat and looked at him expectantly.

“May I have your attention please,” he said, thumping the mic with a finger. “Excuse me. Can I ask everyone to please take your seats. We’d like to begin orientation.”

Pete reared up from his chair and hollered, “Everybody sit down and shut up!”

There was some laughter, and a few cries of, “You sit down and shut up!” but everyone meandered to their seats. The roar of conversation dropped by several orders of magnitude.

Pete sat and grinned at Mort.

Mort grinned back, shaking his head.

“Thank you, kind sir,” the guy in the three piece suit said. There was a whine of feedback and everyone winced. The buzz of the crowd diminished to a murmur-- although there was, of course, that one guy who couldn’t stop coughing.

The gentleman at the podium smiled benevolently. Mort thought he looked like that guy off the old Hawaii Five-O show, but with the wavy silver hair of a TV evangelist. “Good evening, everyone. For those of you who have just arrived, my name is Charles Eckenberg. Before the epidemic I was the duly elected Representative of the great state of South Carolina, serving in the United States Senate. Republican.”

There was some applause, a few boos, a little bit of laughter at the boos.

“I’ve been serving as chief administrator of this community since its founding and will continue to do so until the crisis has passed and we can rebuild our society. I know a few of you have called for elections. I would be quite relieved-- and you can take my word for it-- to pass my responsibilities on to someone else, but for the time being we simply do not have the resources to hold an election. Survivors are arriving at this complex as quickly as we can process and house them, survivors like yourselves, many of whom are in dire need of medical and psychological treatment.  We have all, myself included, been through a harrowing ordeal. We have survived, but our struggles are far from over.”

Administrator Eckenberg cleared his throat, continued:

“First, let me welcome you to New Jerusalem. I know this complex looks oppressive, but we hope you will come to think of it as your home. The fences, the guard towers, the armed guards: they are here for your protection. Please do not feel you are being held against your will. You are free to leave at any time, if any of you wish to do such a foolish thing, but we hope that you will stay. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how important each and every one of you are to the continuance of our species.

“So... what exactly is this place, this New Jerusalem? This complex was constructed by the US government, as far as we can tell, in the event of some kind of national emergency. Its was originally purposed to house domestic combatants. I think some people, conspiracy theorists mainly, called it a FEMA camp before the epidemic. Its new name, however, was chosen by the Archons. Not us. Now, I’m sure you’re all very curious about these strange and wonderful beings, but please bear with me for a little while longer...”

Mort listened, fascinated, as the administrator spoke at length about the complex, the society which had formed within it and the rules and regulations they must all abide by to ensure the survival of the race. Eckenberg reminded everyone that human survival was not guaranteed, even with the help of the Archons. In many places, the epidemic still raged. There were wars and rumors of war. There had been nuclear incidents. They had recently lost contact with a Midwest refuge called Eden and believed there had been some kind of battle there with militant survivalists. They had not heard anything from the camp in several days, and were waiting for news of the camp’s fate from the Archons who were active in that region. He revealed there were currently seven known DOD camps being used by the Archons to house survivors in North America, not counting Eden, all in radio communication with one another. All told, something like 17,000 people had survived the zombie plague in the United States, so there was hope. With the Archons stepping forward to help, he said, there was even greater hope.

“Now before I turn the podium over to Mrs. Walters, I think it would be good for our spirits if we all rose and said the Pledge of Allegiance together,” Mr. Eckenberg intoned. There was a great round of applause to that.

The teenage boy from the registration office quickstepped from the wings of the stage with the United States flag and the applause grew even louder. The woman sitting next to Mort broke down in tears. Mort felt tears on his own cheeks, and saw that Pete was rubbing his eyes, too.

Mort rose to his feet as everyone did. He put his hand to his heart and said the familiar words, his voice lost in the chorus of his fellow survivors, swearing allegiance to a country that might, for the time being, be dead, but that might also—that must!—rise from the dead like the zombie hordes which had so recently tried to consume it.

As Mort spoke the words, he felt a needling pain inside his skull. He winced, looking instinctively toward the left wing of the stage. There, behind the curtains, standing next to an emergency exit, was one of the Archons.

The creature was staring at him.

It was hideous. Bleached white skin drawn tight across the sharp angles of its skull. Great gleaming black eyes. Red lips encircling rows of shark-like teeth. How could anyone think those things were beautiful? Were his fellow survivors all mad, or was the delusion his—a manifestation of the damage the psychotic Da Vinci had inflicted upon him?

Mort’s tongue felt nerveless. His mouth was suddenly dry as cotton. He clutched his head as the pain intensified.

Pete nudged him.

Mort tore his eyes from the Archon and saw his buddy mouth, “What is it?”

Mort nodded toward the Archon, his heart laboring.

Pete leaned forward to look, then turned back to Mort with a shrug. “What?”

Mort looked back at the Archon, which appeared to be frowning in his direction. He felt another stab of pain, even stronger, and cried out. He sat heavily, but no one noticed because everyone was sitting now. The Pledge reaffirmed, the entire assemblage was returning to their seats.

Pete leaned toward him. “What is it, Mort? You’re white as a sheet.”

Mort shook his head. The pain had begun to abate. What had been dirty slivers of glass stabbing into the tender gray tissue of his brain moments ago had diminished to a dull throb behind his right eye. He peeked toward the Archon and saw with relief that the creature had lost interest in him. It was gazing toward the stage now.

As Mrs. Walters took to the podium to address the assembly, Mort examined the theater more closely. He spotted a second Archon standing in the shadows on the other side of the auditorium. It was smaller, thinner: a female, perhaps. It gave the impression of femininity, despite the fact that it had no breasts and was, like the others, completely bald. It was, thankfully, paying no attention to him.

Mrs. Walter detailed housing regulations, and then a fellow named Howard Brewer spoke about work assignments and the credit system. When Brewer had finished talking, another man rose to speak about the (for want of a better term, he said) “zombies”. Everyone around Mort seemed suddenly uncomfortable. Anxious glances shot to and fro as the speaker, some kind of scientist, apparently, discussed what they knew about the zombie outbreak, nothing of which was a surprise to the people sitting in the audience. They all had plenty of experience dealing with the ravenous creatures. No one knew for sure where the bacteriophage had come from, the scientist said. A guy in the row ahead of Mort muttered something about military experiments. Someone behind Pete said it was bible prophecy, the dead rising, only it wasn’t exactly what people had thought it would be. Mort didn’t know and didn’t think it mattered where Virus Z came from. You didn’t question where the sharks came from when the fins were circling you in the water. You just got the hell out of the water!

The presentation was coming to a close. Doctor Whalen climbed onto the stage from the theater floor and said that the infirmary still needed volunteers to help distribute iOSAT. The iodine supplements would help reduce the uptake of irradiated iodine should any fallout reach their community from the regions where there had been nuclear incidents.

“Please keep in mind, this is simply a precaution, but I think it is a wise one. We do not know how much radioactive fallout we may be looking at,” Dr. Whalen said. “Hopefully, weather patterns will persist as they have, in our favor, but we have to be prepared for any eventuality.”

A frightened stir in the crowd.

Before anyone could think about it too much, Eckenberg stepped back to the mic and thanked the doctor. He urged anyone who wished to volunteer to sign up on the volunteer forms in the lobby. He smiled a toothy politician grin. “Now, I know you’re all very curious about the creatures who have stepped forward to assist us in this, our most dire hour of need. Please help me welcome the spokesman of the Archons, Yaldabaoth!”

The applause made the walls of the auditorium tremble. Mort clamped his hands over his ears.

On cue, a tall and impressive being glided from behind the curtains. It was an awesome, if gruesome, sight. Standing a good foot and a half over Eckenberg, Yaldabaoth strode regally to the podium. The wizened creature crouched down to speak into the microphone, hesitated as the applause continued, then murmured into the mic: “If I may.”

Its three words silenced the crowd instantly.

“Thank you,” it said. The being possessed a rich and resounding voice.

The contrast between its melodic voice and physical appearance was quite startling. Like the rest of its kind, its flesh was leathery, drained of all color, and drawn tight across the contours of its skull. Yet there was a gentleness in its glittering black eyes when it surveyed the room. Its smile seemed genuine, if ghastly. The first word Mort thought of to describe the being was leonine. It was certainly lion-like, with its broad, flat features, chin like a block of marble, and black, almond-shaped eyes.

“I hope you’ll forgive me if I struggle with your colloquial English. It is not my native tongue.”

Though Mort believed it to be a mild joke, no one laughed.

Yaldabaoth smiled faintly, pressed on: “My name is Yaldabaoth. I am an Archon. I have been chosen to act as a liaison between my people and the provisional government you have established at this refuge.

“My people have shared this world with yours, in secret, for as long as we can remember… and we Archons have a very, very long memory. I myself am over six hundred years old. Among my people, that’s considered only a little past middle age.”

Mort smiled. It—he!—had a sense of humor!

“I know you all must be horrified by our appearance and abilities—“

No! No! the crowd shouted. We love you! You’re beautiful! Angels!

“--let me just reassure you. We have no ulterior motives. We wish only to save your race. We have shared this world in secret with you for millennia and cannot imagine continuing without you. Throughout the eons, we have come to love you. Though we have been called gods by your people in the ancient past, and more recently angels, we no more wish to rule you than we wish to see you perish. When this terrible crisis has passed, we will vanish from the world of man, and become, once again, the stuff of legend.

“Our people are few and we are solitary beings. It was only this disaster which forced us to recant our vows of noninterference. We have watched your race with great interest and affection for the last five thousand of your human years, hoping you would continue to evolve so that your people could take your place at our sides as stewards of this world.

“I pray that day still comes.”

His words were met with stunned silence.

Yaldabaoth smiled and peered across the crowd, which continued to gape adoringly at him. Mort watched as the creature’s inhuman eyes moved toward him. That needling pain in his head returned as those eyes drew nearer, growing rapidly in intensity. And then the Archon looked at him fully, and Mort jerked in his seat. He lunged to his feet, shouting in agony. It felt as if someone had hammered a railroad spike into his forehead.

The other two Archons stepped toward the assembly, toward Mort, alarm registering on their mummy-like faces.

!!!PAIN!!!

Mort clutched his head. For a moment, it looked as if he were trying to pull it off his neck. He howled uncontrollable, his entire body quaking. Pete reached toward him in concern, shouting his name, but Mort was oblivious to his friend, oblivious to the crowd turning to stare at him with curiosity and surprise, oblivious of everything but the horrid chrome-bright blades of agony stabbing into his brain. Not even Da Vinci’s cattle gun had hurt so badly.

“Mort!” Pete yelled, catching one flailing arm. “What is it? What’s wrong with you?”

Mort’s body arched back, his spine bending until it seemed the bones must snap and come undone, and then he toppled. He fell stiffly against his seat, eyes rolling back in their sockets, limbs flopping spastically.

“He’s having a seizure!” the woman seated beside him cried.

“Somebody grab that doctor!” Pete pleaded.“My buddy needs help!”

Mort slid sideways onto the floor, his body as stiff as a board. Pete tried to grab him before he went over but was jerked off balance, almost fell on top of him. Mort landed face down with a crunch in the space between the seats... and then everything went blessedly dark.

19

Interview with the Archon

In the movies, when someone woke in a hospital after a traumatic event, they opened their eyes to find all their family and loved ones gathered around the bed, faces lined with concern, but life was no movie, and Mort came to alone.

He was in the infirmary.

Again.

He blinked around, disoriented, raised his arm, saw a blood oxygen monitor clamped to his trigger finger and an IV needle taped to the crook of his elbow. A heart monitor beeped steadily beside the bed. He raised his other arm—this one wasn’t attached to any electronics or tubes—and gingerly probed his face. His fingers encountered gauze and tape. He couldn’t breathe through his nose, and it felt like he had the world’s worst sinus headache. He recalled the sickening crunch he’d heard inside his head when he flopped face first onto the auditorium floor. A guy didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that he had broken it when he fell.

Great… like I’m not ugly enough already!

Mort found the bed controls and raised himself. He looked toward the window, saw that it was still night out and had to repress a shudder. He had never been scared of the dark before, but now... now... He pressed the call button and waited for a nurse to respond.

Rather than speak to him over the intercom, a night shift nurse strode into the room. It was a nurse Mort recognized from his previous stay in the infirmary, an RN named Peggy Martin. “Back again, huh?” she said cheerfully. “You just can’t seem to stay away. I’m starting to think you might be sweet on me, Mr. Lesser.”

Mort smiled politely. “Can you let me out of here?”

His voice sounded funny with his nose broken. Nasal and kind of furry around the edges.

Nurse Martin frowned. “Oh-hhh, no! You’re staying overnight for observation. You had a grand mal seizure in the middle of orientation.”

“But I feel fine,” Mort objected. “I don’t want to stay here. I want to go home.”

He felt weepy. What were they giving him in that IV?

Peggy patted his arm. “I know you do, hon, but Doctor Whalen really wants you to stay overnight.” She tried to distract him: “Do you want something to drink? How about something to help you rest?”

Mort sighed. He really did feel fine, apart from the broken nose. Moreover, he knew exactly what had happened to him. When the Archons trained their attention on him in the auditorium, they’d poked inside his brain with their mind-reading powers—meaning no harm, he was sure, just wanting to have a looksee inside his noggin—and they’d inadvertently triggered a seizure. Now that he was away from them, and none of them were telepathically digging in his brain, he’d recovered. It was as simple as that. But how could he explain that to Nurse Martin? She’d think he was off his rocker. Or disparaging the Archons, and people in New Jerusalem were very protective of their flying saviors. They’d probably start looking for a nice padded cell for him.

“No, it’s okay. No pills,” Mort said, defeated.

It was all coming clear to him now.

Since no one else in New Jerusalem was falling over with seizures, he had to assume that the neurological damage he’d suffered at the hands of the madman Da Vinci was interfering somehow with the Archons’ telepathy. The damage to his visual cortex was why he saw them as they truly were, too. Their angelic appearance was some kind of... of telepathic projection!

But why were they doing it?

So that humans would accept their aid instead of running away in horror, he thought. Or shooting them out of the air like quail.

“Are you sure?” Nurse Martin asked.

Mort nodded distractedly.

Da Vinci had shot him in the head with a captive bolt gun, damaging the part of his brain which processed visual information. The resulting trauma had rendered him incapable of recognizing his shoes when he got dressed in the morning, or being able to tell the difference between an apple and a Frisbee, but it had also made him immune to the Archons’ telepathic illusions.

That’s why everyone saw angels when they looked at the Archons and Mort saw… things. Ugly, shark-faced things. Whatever they were.

Excited, Mort questioned Nurse Martin. “Say, Peggy, have you seen my friend Peter Bolin around? I’m sure he came here with me. Do you know when he left?”

“Your friend?” Nurse Martin asked, fiddling with his IV pump. “He was here just a little while ago. I think he went down to the waiting room to get some coffee. I’m sure he’ll  be right back.”

“Okay. Thanks. I don’t need anything else.”

“All right,” the RN said with a reassuring smile. She patted his arm again. “Just try to get some rest. I’m sure Doctor Whalen will let you out of here soon. He’s just concerned about the seizure.”

Mort nodded. He was eager to speak to Pete. Pete would listen. Pete wouldn’t think he was crazy. Pete might not believe him. He might not even understand, but he wouldn’t think Mort was insane.

But there was more to it than that, wasn’t there?

Yes, Mort had to admit.

He was scared.

He needed Pete because he was scared. Pete was the one with the balls. Pete was Mort’s backbone.

The Archons were not what they appeared to be. They were hiding their true appearance. He could understand why they might feel it was necessary, but he wondered what other secrets they might be concealing. It also begged the question: if they weren’t angels, what were they?

Mort heard his friend coming up the hallway. He recognized Pete by the clop-clop-clop of his cowboy boots. He listened as Pete paused to say howdy to the ladies at the nurse’s station. Pete said, “How’s that?” Low conversation, and then clop-clop-clop again, a little bit faster. Pete came through the door, grinning. “Mort! You woke up!”

“Yeah.”

Pete sat on the chair beside the hospital bed. “How you feeling?”

“Fine.”

“Man, you scared the shit out of me.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“The doctor said you had a Pall Mall seizure. Said it was probably due to the hole in your brain.”

“Grand mal,” Mort corrected. Mort smiled, but it felt forced. He was trying to think of some way to broach his suspicions with Pete without his buddy freaking out.

“Pall Mall… grand mal.  I thought you were dying.”

Before Mort could think of some way to bring up his paranoid-sounding suspicions, someone rapped softly at the door. Mort and Pete looked as one toward the man standing just outside the room. It was Mr. Eckenberg, the chief administrator of New Jerusalem.

Mort’s heart did a little flip-flop. His extremities suddenly felt cold and tingly.

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” the man said politely. “I was wondering if I might speak to Mr. Lesser.”

He was still dressed in the blue three-piece suit he’d worn during orientation. Up close, he seemed a little smaller than he had when he was standing at the podium. He was also a strikingly handsome man, very TV-star-like, though tired-looking, with dark circles under his eyes and wrinkles bracketing the corners of his mouth. He seemed anxious, too. His brow was creased, his shoulders hunched, as if he expected trouble.

Pete rose and extended a hand. “How ya doin’?”

Mr. Eckenberg shook his hand. “Good. It’s been a long day, but good.”

“Pete Bolin. Screw— er, Scouting Crew Unit Two,” Pete introduced himself.

Mr. Eckenberg grinned. “Were you about to say Screw You?”

“Yeah.”

“I rode with Screw You when I first got here.”

“No shit?”

“Nope.”

Mr. Eckenberg’s smile faded as he remembered why he’d come. He leveled a sober gaze at Mort and said, “Morton Lesser, the leader of the Archons would like to speak with you. Yaldabaoth sent me here personally to invite you to his office.”

“No shit?” Pete asked, looking impressed.

But Mort wasn’t impressed. He was terrified. His heart monitor jumped from 60 BPM to 120. An oily sweat suddenly gleamed on his brow. “Why does he want to see me?” Mort squeaked.

Pete picked up on Mort’s fear and scowled.

Eckenberg smiled, shrugged. “I’ve been dealing with those thi—the Archons for a couple months now, and I still have no clue how their minds work. They don’t think the same way we do. I believe Yaldabaoth feels responsible for your seizure during orientation. I think maybe he wants to apologize to you.”

Mort nodded. He felt numb. That was what fear did to you when you realized there was no way out. He had felt the same fatalistic nothingness when he got trapped in the Frito Lay van, when he realized he was going to die and there wasn’t any way he could avoid it. Pete had rescued him then, of course, but Mort wasn’t going to endanger his friend. If Yaldabaoth wanted to see him, he would go. What else could he do? If he refused, it would only alert the creatures that he knew their secret. And what might they do if they knew that he knew?

“Okay,” Mort said breathlessly. “Am I going there now?”

Eckenberg nodded. “He’d like to see you tonight. Doctor Whalen has already approved your discharge.”

Mort’s stomach churned. This was happening too fast. He hadn’t even had a chance to tell Pete the things he suspected.

As Mort’s thoughts raced, trying to anticipate the outcome of this much-too-rapidly approaching confrontation, Nurse Martin strode in with a sour look on her face. She unhooked all of the monitoring equipment with quick, jerking movements. She unbandaged Mort’s arm and removed the IV-- being gentle with this-- then taped a cotton ball over the tiny wound.

“It’s very cold out,” Mr. Eckenberg said. “Do you mind getting Mr. Lesser some warm blankets for the… um… ride over?”

Nurse Martin flashed Eckenberg a disdainful look and went to the room’s linen closet. As she took down a couple thin hospital blankets, an orderly entered the room and lowered the rail of Mort’s hospital bed. Pete and the orderly helped Mort into a wheelchair, though Mort felt perfectly capable of walking across the compound himself. The orderly flipped the footrests down and then departed.

Eckenberg started to say something to Peggy, but the RN turned sharply and stamped from the room.

Eckenberg whistled, eyebrows arched.

“I’m going along, too,” Pete said, taking the handles of the wheelchair.

“You don’t have to do that,” Mort said.

“That really isn’t necessary--” Eckenberg said at the same time.

“I’m goin’,” Pete replied, thrusting his chin out.

Eckenberg looked from Mort to Pete and sighed. “Very well.”

Mort allowed Pete to roll him from the room. He knew better than to argue with Peter Bolin. Pete would wrestle the devil to get his way. Besides, if the Archons meant to harm him, there was nothing either man could do to prevent it. The strange beings could fly. They could read minds. Hell, they could probably murder Mort telepathically if they wanted. Make his head blow up like the guy in that old movie Scanners. That could only mean that they didn’t plan to kill him, but Mort was frightened nonetheless. He didn’t know what they wanted with him, but he suspected it would be unpleasant. “Unpleasant” happened to Mort so often it should have been his middle name.

Eckenberg whistled the theme of The Andy Griffith Show as they crossed the hallway. At the nurse’s station, Dr. Whalen scowled, fists planted on his hips. Eckenberg seemed to take no notice of the daggers shooting from the eyes of the hospital staff. He walked beside Mort’s wheelchair with a bland expression, eyes front and center.

Eckenberg continued to whistle in the elevator as they made the short descent to the lobby. Despite his fear, Mort was tempted to whistle along with the man. I’m going crazy, he thought.

The camp administrator nodded and said hello to a couple of the people waiting in the lobby as they rolled past--  the politician in him—then they were outside in the piercing cold. As the three of them crossed the complex, Eckenberg picked up his tune where he’d left off.

The sky was cloudless. The stars seemed very bright and close. The moon was three quarters full and blazed like a silver lamp in the heavens. It was so bright, in fact, Mort could make out the jagged peaks of the Unicoi Mountains, the snowy summits a luminous blue in the ethereal light.

“Man, the air’s got a nip in it tonight!” Pete exclaimed, his breath steaming from his lips.

His voice seemed much too loud in the still December air.

The administration building loomed in the moonlight. Its windows were dark but for the top floor. Eckenberg directed Pete and Mort to a side entrance and fumbled out his keys. He let them through a red metal door with a peephole and directed them down a short, dark corridor to an elevator.

Eckenberg started to whistle again, but Pete said sharply, “Dude! You mind?”

“Sorry,” Eckenberg apologized.

The silence was worse, Mort thought as they made the short trip.

The elevator dinged and the door slid open. Mort spotted the Archon as soon as the doors parted. It was loitering at the end of the hallway, arms behind its back.

Mort recognized the creature. It was the being who had rescued him from Da Vinci, the one that called itself Metatron.

It turned as Pete pushed Mort from the elevator. Its eyes, black as pitch, narrowed just the tiniest bit.

It recognizes me! Mort thought. It remembers me from DuChamp! And for a moment, he was back there again. Metatron carrying him across the roof of the DuChamp Freight Company building, the hot wind blowing in their faces, embers swirling around them. The creature had gazed off across the inferno and murmured, “See your city burn, Morton Lesser. If I had a heart, I think it would have broken a thousand times already.” Its face had only been inches from his, and though Mort was only half-conscious, his brain visible through a hole in his head, he knew instinctively what manner of creature was holding him in its arms. Knew it and feared it, as the rabbit fears the hound.

He wanted to scream. He wanted to grab the frame of the elevator door. He wanted to leap up and run. Throw himself through the nearest window.

But he did none of these things.

Instead, Mort let Pete roll him from the elevator and onto the plush burgundy carpeting of the fourth floor hallway.

“Good evening, Metatron,” Eckenberg said to the creature.

Metatron bowed at the waist with a flourish, an anachronistic gesture. Its great glittering black eyes rolled toward Mort and its red lips tightened: a hideous grin, too wide, too full of teeth. “I remember you,” it murmured. Its voice was perfectly modulated. Beautiful, really. Was that honey-sweet voice also an illusion? “You’re looking well, Morton Lesser.”

Mort’s mouth felt like it was stuffed with cotton, but he managed to croak, “More or less.”

Metatron laughed softly. “Indeed.”

Mort expected the creature to delve inside his brain, but that strange tickle did not come. There was no pain.

“Yaldabaoth would like to speak with Mort alone,” Metatron said. “Would you mind waiting here with me, Mr. Eckenberg? Mr. Bolin?” He glanced pleasantly from Pete to the administrator.

“Naw, that’s fine,” Pete murmured, eyes unfocused.

“Yes, fine, fine,” Eckenberg echoed.

Metatron took the handles of Mort’s wheelchair, turned him toward Yaldabaoth’s office. The doors were cherry wood, deeply varnished. He could see his reflection in it, but no Metatron. Mort watched as the doorknobs turned of their own accord and the doors swung silently inward.

Metatron pushed him forward.

Mort didn’t know what to expect. Bare stone walls, dripping and slimy. Hooks and chains dangling from the ceiling. Instead, Yaldabaoth’s chamber was richly appointed, even charming. An abundance of lamps and wall sconces blazed cheerily. The walls were lined with books. Real books, too, not the fake ones rich people put on their library shelves to look worldly and well-read. A copper statue of Atlas, the Earth on his muscular shoulders, stood on the corner of a mahogany desk. Affixed to the far wall was a huge map of the United States, with circles and indecipherable symbols marked on it in red ink.

“Leave us, please,” Yaldabaoth said. He was sitting in a high-back leather chair, facing away from Mort.

Metatron bowed and withdrew, shutting the doors with a barely perceptible click.

“How are you feeling, Mort?” Yaldabaoth asked. He didn’t turn.

“Fine. Everyone keeps asking me that. I’m fine.”

Mort felt the creature probe his mind, a feather-light tickle.

“Please don’t do that!” Mort said quickly, his heart skipping a beat.

“I apologize. It’s a hard habit to break once you become accustomed to eavesdropping on the thoughts of other sentient beings. It’s always a great temptation.”

Mort felt the ghostly probe withdraw from his skull and relaxed... a little.

“Would you care for a refreshment? I have water, coffee.”

“No. No, thank you.”

Mort wished Yaldabaoth would turn. He didn’t like speaking to the back of the man’s chair. It left his imagination to run wild, and his imagination needed no encouragement.

His host was quiet for almost a full minute. Finally, gently, Yaldabaoth whispered, “You see us as we truly are. Naked, stripped of our glamours.”

It was not quite a question. Not quite a statement, either. It hung ambiguously in the air between them.

“I suppose so,” Mort said, just as softly.

The leather chair swiveled then, and the immense Archon turned with it, coming into Mort’s sight by degrees. Mort swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing, but he did not drop his gaze. He took in the features of the wizened creature, trying not to flinch: the white, withered skin, the reflective black eyes and moist red lips, a bloody wound from which sharp white teeth, like crooked pickets, erupted. Its ears were tiny and pointed, Mort observed. Funny, he hadn’t really noticed their ears before.

“You know what we are?” Yaldabaoth inquired. Mort sensed there was no danger in answering the question. The creature was only curious.

“Vampires, right?” Mort said.

Yaldabaoth smiled. His chin dipped down, then came back up. “That is the modern name for my race. Your… human word for our kind. We don’t particularly care for it. So many negative connotations.”

Yaldabaoth did something very surprising then. He took a pack of cigarettes from his desk drawer and put one in his mouth. He didn’t light it with some tacky display of magical power. He lit it like everyone else: with a cheap plastic lighter. Puffing out a cloud of smoke, he shrugged. “A bad habit I acquired from a mortal acquaintance. That was… back in the 1920’s, I believe. You start to lose track of the decades when you hit four or five hundred years old.” He drew another lungful and blew it out. “You don’t mind, do you?”

Mort shook his head. “Nuh—no.”

“Good. I have to admit, I’m a little disconcerted by you, Mort.”

“By me?” Mort scoffed.

“Yes. My people have an instinctive fear of being seen by your kind. By that I mean, seen for what we truly are. In our natural form. Historically, you mortals have demonstrated an uncontrollable compulsion to drive sharp wooden stakes through our hearts. It’s a rather unpleasant trait. Very rude.”

Mort laughed. He couldn’t help himself.

Yaldabaoth smiled, his eyes twinkling. “Yes, we have a sense of humor. Some of us more than others.”

“So what are you going to do to me now that I know your secret?” Mort asked, feeling bolder. “Are you going to kill me? Change me into one of you?”

Yaldabaoth’s eyes widened. His grin widened too. “You’re very perceptive, Mort Lesser. That is why I summoned you here. I need to know what you intend to do with your knowledge. I cannot glamour your mind. The injury you sustained has rendered you immune to our telepathic abilities. Since I cannot make you forget what you have deduced, I need to ask you what you plan to do about us. Our motivations must be transparent to you.”

“Yes. You have to save our race because you feed on us. If we die, you die.”

“Precisely. Not exactly as… selfless as I’ve led your people to believe, I’m afraid.”

Mort shrugged. “It’s better than mutual extinction.”

Once more, Yaldabaoth’s eyes widened. “Precisely again. I’m a little shocked. You’re such a reasonable creature.”

Mort smiled. “What do you expect me to do? Lead a revolt against you? Find out where you hide your coffins and drive wooden stakes through all your hearts?”

Yaldabaoth looked grim. “It’s happened in the past.”

Mort leaned forward. It was his turn to ask a question. “Just tell me one thing, and be honest,” he said. “If you plan to kill me, you’re going to kill me. It’s not like I can do anything to stop you. I just want to know how your people see us. Are we cattle to you? Is this place, this New Jerusalem, some kind of... of farm?”

Yaldabaoth jerked back, offended. “Of course not! Mr. Lesser—Mort—we love you! I am not lying when I say that. Without your people, our race would wither and die. I would go so far as to say your species, your people, each and every one of you, are holy to us. We try very hard not to harm you. We can drink from you without killing, and when we are done, we charm your minds so that you do not even suspect what has happened. Please, you have to believe me. The only reason we use our mental abilities to hide our true nature is because your kind find us so repulsive. In the past, your people have led crusades against us. You drove us nearly to extinction less than a millennia ago.”

Mort sat back.“All right, I believe you. I don’t know why exactly, but I do. I promise, I won’t tell anyone. I’ll keep your secret safe. I swear.”

Yaldabaoth looked remorseful. He sighed and stabbed out his cigarette.“I wish it were that simple,” he said.

20

The Death of Morton Lesser

Dao-ming sobbed inconsolably on his chest. Pete stood off a pace, trying very hard to keep a grip on his emotions. Mort looked at them both, his feverish eyes gleaming, and thought: As I die, I will hold them close in my thoughts. Until the very last moment.

Melodramatic, yes, but Mort thought he deserved to be a little theatrical. He was, after all, dying today.

Doctor Whalen had left the room so Mort could spend some time alone with his friends. The doctor had been in and out all morning. He’d even placed the IV himself. In just a few minutes, they would wheel Mort into O. R. and administer a lethal dose of pentobarbital.

It was funny how things worked out.

Not ha-ha funny. No, not today. Funny in the mean-spirited way the Fates always seemed to reserve for people like him. But he was used to it. It was no different from all the times he’d been beaten up on the grade school playground or high school bullies poured Nair down his gym shorts or his college roommate stretched Saran Wrap across the toilet bowl so his piss splashed back all over his legs and feet. One thing could be said about a life that was so predictably vexatious: it taught a fellow to endure pain.

Like this pain, for instance.

Even with the drugs, the pain was bad. The zombie’s bite had swelled his arm so much it didn’t even look like a human arm anymore. It looked like a giant sausage with Mort’s stubby fingers poking out the end. If it swelled much more, Mort was pretty sure it was going to split wide open, like a hot dog that had spent a little too much time spinning in the microwave. The doc had given him morphine to help with the pain, but even the morphine couldn’t quite trump the agony that bolted through his body whenever his arm shifted just the tiniest bit. Yes, sir, the pain was pretty bad, but strangely, he wasn’t really all that scared of the dying part.

He had expected to be more frightened than he was. To be honest, he thought he’d be pissing his pants right about now, but aside from a cold cramp of anxiety in his guts, he was keeping it together pretty good. More than anything, he was afraid he would lose his dignity, change his mind, start begging and blubbering, shame himself, but he’d done no such thing. He was calm. Calm and rational and unafraid.

It would all be over soon. His life. The universe according to Mort. Gone off the air like a bad television sitcom: quick and without much fanfare. But the pain would be over, too, and he wouldn’t have to suffer the degradation of turning into a zombie, so there was that. That was something, wasn’t it?

Besides, Dao-ming had come to see him.

“It’s not fair,” Dao-ming sniffed against his chest. Her raven black hair swooped across his shoulder. One tiny strand  kept tickling his nose, but he couldn’t bring himself to brush it away, didn’t want to, worshipped that tiny strand of hair.

“It’s okay,” he consoled her. “It’s going to be fine.”

“No, it’s not, Mort!” she sobbed angrily. “It’s not going to be fine!”

The chest of his hospital gown was soaked with her tears. It was kind of gratifying. Pathetic as it might sound, it was almost worth dying to find out she really did care for him.

She’d only stayed away, she said, because of his non-immune status. While she was in the CCU with him, waiting for him to wake up after his brain surgery, one of the hospital staff had taken her aside and warned her she could infect him with the Armageddon Phage, especially if they were ever intimate again. The thought had horrified her. She decided that night, while he was still under, that it would be easier for him if she just quietly disappeared. Made a clean break of it. “I knew what you’d say if we talked about it,” she told him. “You’d say you wanted to be with me no matter what, and I would have given in. It was stupid. We could have been together all this time!” After Mort had gotten bit, Pete had marched over to the orphanage and cussed her up one side and down the other for abandoning his friend. As soon as she found out that Mort had become infected, she’d rushed to his side.

“I’m so sorry, Mort,” she cried. “Please, please, forgive me! If I knew this was going to happen anyway, I would have spent all the time I could with you. We could have been together!”

“It’s okay,” he consoled her, cradling the back of her head in his good hand. He even laughed a little, surprised by her outpouring of grief. “I understand. It doesn’t matter. You’re here now and that’s all that counts.”

They’d only slept together once. Mort didn’t know if that qualified as the love of his life, but it was going to have to do. Holding her in his good arm, he thought of that one sweet night they’d spent together, and he decided it didn’t matter if it was one night or a million. It was more than some people got.

And Pete… Pete was beside himself. He was mad, he was sad, and he didn’t really have the mental equipment to deal with it all. Pete blamed himself for Mort getting bit, and nothing Mort said to him could convince him otherwise.

None of it even seemed real. Everything had happened so quickly. Maybe it was a cliché, but he felt like this was all just a dream, one that he would wake up from any moment now. Or maybe his life had been a dream, and here now, at the end of it, he was finally getting ready to wake up.

After Mort’s interview with the Archon Yaldabaoth, Pete had escorted Mort from the administration building.

“You want to go back to the infirmary?” Pete had asked.

“Are you kidding? No way!” Mort exclaimed. “I’m so sick of that place it’s not even funny. Let’s just head back to the dorm and go to bed. I’m wore out, and I need to think.” He was still shaking from his confrontation with the leader of the Archons. Yaldabaoth had given him twenty-four hours to settle his affairs.

There was a misty ring around the moon. Mort couldn’t remember what it was called when there was a ring around the moon. Was it lover’s moon or liar’s moon? When he was a kid, his mother had always commented on it when they were out at night and saw one, but that was a long time ago, and his memory was dodgy now, thanks to Da Vinci.

Pete had swerved Mort back and forth on the icy sidewalks, almost spilling him a couple times, and even slipped and fell once himself. Pete was giddy with relief. He’d expected the worst when the leader of the Archons had asked to speak to Mort. He might not be the sharpest needle in the sewing box, but he was smart enough to know that “the worst” dogged Mort’s footsteps like a smitten stalker.

“Stop, Pete! Stop! You’re making me dizzy!” Mort cried as Pete zoomed back and forth on the icy sidewalk. Despite his jangled nerves, Mort laughed.

Pete quit making race car noises. “All right. Don’t get your panties in a bunch.”

As they drew near the dorm, Pete asked in a more serious tone what the Archon had wanted to talk to Mort about.

Mort was quiet a moment, thinking, then lied, “He just wanted to apologize for frying my brain with his psychobolts at orientation. Their telepathy kind of fritzed out my nuerons.”

Pete had laughed. “Is that all?”

“Yep.”

“Poor old brain-damaged Mort.”

“Yeah. Poor old brain-damaged Mort. But look on the bright sight. We’re on an equal playing field now, mentally speaking.”

“I think that was an insult.”

“It was.”

“Jackass!”

Laughing together, they’d pushed through the front door. The dorm was silent as a crypt. It was late. Everyone was asleep.

“Here’s your cane, buddy,” Pete stage-whispered, retrieving the walking stick from the pouch on the back of the wheelchair. Mort grunted upright and Pete folded the chair and pushed it next to the wall by the door.

“Thanks.” The bandage across his broken nose made it sound like “thangst”.

“No problem.”

Pete headed toward the galley as Mort limped toward his room, leaning heavily on the cane. The cold had really done a number on his bad leg. His nose and cheeks were throbbing, too. Lortab, here I come, Mort thought.

“You want something to drink?” Pete called over his shoulder.

Mort’s mouth was dry. His interview with the Archon had been nerve-wracking, and the deal he had made with the creature called Yaldabaoth brought to mind a certain jaded scholar by the name of Johann Faust. Rather than continue to his room, he turned and followed Pete.

“Yeah. See if there’s some pop left in the cooler,” Mort called.

And maybe something sweet, he thought. He didn’t have to worry about getting fat again anymore. After tonight, the simple comfort of a sugary treat would be a foreign thing to him, as alien as he would be to the people he now called friends. Tonight he was going to pig out. He deserved it. He’d just made a deal with the devil.

There was a clatter and a cry from Bob and Tina’s quarters. The couple shared a room beside the kitchen. It was originally a guardroom, but Bob and Tina had converted it into a small apartment.

“You want red or purple?” Pete asked, sauntering from the galley with his hands full. He hadn’t heard the noises, or wasn’t concerned about them, but Mort had heard, and it had gotten his wind up. Not that it mattered in the grand scheme of things. His life was over. It had been the moment the Archons found out he could see them as they truly were.

He started across the commons toward Pete, brow furrowed. From Bob and Tina’s apartment: a cry, and then a female screech of rage.

Mort opened his mouth to shout a warning to Pete. At the same moment, the door of Bob and Tina’s apartment slammed open. Even before the echoes of the slamming door had died away, Bob stumbled out, cradling a baby in his arms. The homely man was covered in blood. His face, his hands, his shirt and pants glittered, like someone had dashed him with a five gallon bucket. His eyes were wide, his neck a ragged mess. He opened his mouth to speak but could only make a choked gargling noise.

Pete dropped the soft drinks. They hit the floor and one of the plastic bottles began to spin in frothy circles.

“What the hell--?” Pete gawped.

Bob tottered toward Pete, put the baby in his arms, then collapsed to his knees.

Pete looked down at the wet, squirming baby, then blinked at Mort in shock. He was literally too stunned to move. His brain had vapor locked.

Bob sat back, his shoulders rising and falling. Mort limped forward to help him as Pete just stood there staring.  Blood coursed from the man’s ripped throat. His froggy eyes rolled toward Mort, and a strange expression passed across his face. It was a look of satisfaction and contrition, and Mort knew instantly what had transpired in their room that night, what he and Tina had done, and why.

Bob Hawthorne raised his right arm, pointing at the child, then toppled onto his side.

Pete’s jaw worked. Finally, he managed to stammer, “Muh-Mort?”

Mort heard a phlegmatic growl. A moment later, Tina eased through the doorway, glazed eyes glaring from sunken sockets, hair in bloody tangles. She was naked but for a terrycloth robe, her belly hanging open, coils of guts dangling like wet laundry from the dripping cavity.

Mort’s mind, damaged as it was, kicked into high gear. Only an instant passed from the moment he saw her to the moment she launched herself at Pete and the baby, but he already knew he was going to have to do something to fend off the child’s transformed mother. Pete would not be able to defend himself with a baby in his arms. No one could save the two but him.

“Hey! Over here!” Mort yelled at the creature, hoping to draw her attention from Pete and the newborn in his arms, but the child picked that exact moment to start crying. Tina’s eyes snapped toward the child and she lunged at Peter Bolin, fingers hooked into claws, lips peeled back from bloody teeth.

With a great shout, Mort leapt between them and swung his cane at her head. It swished through the air and caught her in the jaw and she went down on one knee.

“Get the baby out of here!” Mort yelled.

Tina shook her head, then rose clumsily to her feet, more of her guts tumbling from the ragged maw of the crudely performed Caesarian. She glared at Mort with those awful cataract eyes and spat like a cat, pestilent foam spraying from her lips.

Her snarls were rousing the dormitory. Lights came on in several of the rooms. Someone flipped on the big overheads and the commons brightened with a series of metallic popping sounds. Mort heard some of the other dormers cry out in horror and dismay, but he knew there was no time for any of them to intercede. Tina’s glistening body was already coiling to attack. Mort raised his cane above his head.

She jumped forward, howling, and he brought the cane down in the middle of her skull. He used both hands, but he no longer had the weight he used to have to put behind the blow. His attack barely slowed her.

She bowled into him, advancing faster than he could retreat. Her nails slashed at his eyes as he fell beneath her. He tried to grab her flailing wrists. He caught ahold of one, wrestled with her a moment, and then she twisted in his grasp. Her head tucked down, fast as a striking snake, and she sank her teeth into his hand. His cane dropped from his spasming fingers, clattered on the floor. Mort yelled and Tina wrenched her head back, tearing out a plug of his flesh. She chewed the meat with relish, once, twice, then swallowed and went back for more.

Mort kicked her, sending her sprawling across the floor, but he had lashed out with his good leg and his bad leg buckled under him. She scrambled after him, crab-like, snarling and snapping her teeth, but Pete stepped in before she could get to him. He kicked her in the head with the sharp toe of his cowboy boot, still holding the squalling newborn. Tina slumped onto her side, stunned. Before she could recover, one of the other residents jumped in and kicked her.

A crowd quickly gathered around the bloody scene. Someone scooped Mort’s cane from the floor and began to pummel the zombie with it. Tina made wheezing sounds as the throng of sleepy, frightened men-- most of them still in their skivvies-- rained down blow after blow.

Mort slid away from the violent mob on his butt, cradling his bleeding hand. A few feet away, Tina Laramie writhed as the crowd continued to pummel her. She was completely covered in blood, looked like a newborn herself. She howled in frustrated rage. Bare breasts flopping, she swiped at their ankles with her nails. Finally, someone stomped on her head, and her skull caved in and she went still. The frightened men, adrenaline pumping, continued to batter her, but she did not move, other than twitching from the impacts of the blows.

“Mort! You okay?” Pete asked, holding the squalling baby. He saw Mort’s wound then and moaned, “Awww, fuck!”

Mort had looked up at his friend, holding his injured hand to his breast. “I guess this is it for me,” he said with a queasy smile.

And it was. After Pete raced him to the infirmary, the hospital staff had pumped Mort full of antivirals and antibiotics, but the bacteriophage had already entered his bloodstream. Dr. Whalen even tried an experimental treatment, transfusing blood from immune donors into Mort’s body in the hopes that it would halt the spread of the infection.

It didn’t even slow it down.

The mutant bacteriophage replicated quickly, subverting his cells, turning him into one big virus production machine. Mort was surprised how hard everyone worked to save him, but he knew it was all in vain. He was doomed. Had been from the moment he went to meet the Archon Yaldabaoth.

Finally, he told them, “No more. It’s time to let me go.”

And now that time had come. Doctor Whalen would be returning soon.

Mort waved Pete closer. Pete grabbed his friend’s good hand. “Listen, you stupid redneck,” Mort said. “I want you to get this through your thick skull: none of this is your fault. There’s nothing you could have done to save me. It’s just my bad luck. When your number comes up, your number comes up, and that’s all there is to it.”

Pete’s lower lip quivered. His bloodshot eyes probed Mort’s, which were beginning to sink into his skull. Soon they would glaze over, become those horrible gray orbs, soulless and insatiable. “But I—“

“Stop being such a crybaby,” Mort interrupted. His breathing was growing labored. He sucked in a breath, hissed, “We all die, buddy. It’s inevitable.”

Pete laughed and sobbed at the same time. “That’s four syllables! You know the rule.”

“Actually, it’s five syllables, you illiterate hillbilly.”

“I don’t even know what ‘inevitable’ means.”

“I know. It’s okay.”

The door whisked open. Doctor Whalen and good ol’ Nurse Ratchet walked in.

“No! Please!” Pete pleaded. “Just a few more minutes!”

The doctor looked at Mort and Mort nodded. Mort kissed Dao-ming’s silky hair, then pushed her into Pete’s arms. She collapsed, sobbing, but Pete grabbed ahold of her. Pete held her on her feet as Mort said goodbye, then the doctor and nurse wheeled him from the room.

He watched the fluorescent lights scroll past.

“How are you feeling?” Nurse Ratchet asked.

“Like shit,” Mort answered. “One of my eyes isn’t working anymore.” He felt her hand, warm and soft as talcum powder, settle on his forearm.

They rolled down the hallway, turned a corner, rolled down another hallway.

“Will it hurt much?” Mort asked.

“You won’t feel a thing,” Dr. Whalen answered, his voice tight with emotion. “It will be like falling asleep.”

“Good. I’m glad. I’m pretty scared.”

They bumped through the doors into the surgical room. There were several more hospital employees waiting. They all wore matching scrubs. Gloves and goggles too. They gathered around the hospital bed. Someone dabbed his forehead with a cool cloth. Someone else strapped restraints around his good wrist and both ankles-- in case he fought them, he supposed.

“It’ll all be over in a moment,” Dr. Whalen said gently.  Mort saw the man’s eyes narrow, and then the doctor touched his temple.

Mort felt a familiar prickling sensation in his brain, right in the center of his forehead. He turned his head and looked toward the entrance of the surgical room. He still had one good eye, but everything was getting dark.

Yaldabaoth, accompanied by two other Archons, glided silently into the room.

“We’ll take it from here, Dr. Whalen,” the creature said.

Epilogue

Pete Gets Saved

He’d never noticed how pretty her eyes were, like antique copper with little flecks of gold in them. Pete smiled at Vicki. “Looks like we’ve bought the farm, babe,” he said.

Just inches to his left, about four dozen deadheads were beating on the cooler doors, slobbering and howling. The glass was already cracking. The dumb creepazoids didn’t have the sense to grab the handles and pull the cooler doors open, but then, they didn’t really need to, did they? Any second now, those glass doors were going to give up the ghost with a great crash and tinkle, and Pete and Vicki were going to be zombie chow. Human filet mignon. Extra rare.

Hope I give ‘em diarrhea, Pete thought.

After Mort died and they cremated his body, Pete had returned to Scout Crew Unit Two.

He had harbored a lot of anger after his buddy Mort went to the great comic book shop in the sky. It felt like a tumor inside him, growing bigger and more virulent with each passing day. He knew he had to get it out of him, slice it open and let all the nasty stuff drain out, and the only thing he could think of that would do that was killing zombies. Lots of them!

Fortunately, there was still plenty of them left shambling around the villages surrounding New Jerusalem. You could think of it as putting them out of their misery if you wanted to be all noble and shit, but really Pete just wanted to get that hurt and anger out of him. It was like he was infected with the Phage. It was eating him from the inside out.

It was actually kind of pathetic. The whole world died and it hadn’t really bothered him that much, but Mort buys the farm and it’s like a trapdoor dropped open beneath his heart.

Fucking Mort!

How’s that for laughs, kiddies and titties? Ol‘ Chunky-Butt was the one that finally got to him!

Mort was just a big fat nerd, the kind of guy Pete would have tormented ruthlessly in high school, but Pete had cried his eyes out when they rolled his buddy off to be euthanized, and then he’d stomped out of the clinic and gotten three sheets to the wind. Next thing he knew, he’s out on patrol again, aerating as many deadheads as he could. He couldn’t reload his gun fast enough. Call it aggressive therapy.

Unfortunately, his team had stumbled across a hornet’s nest of zombies.

It was just a shitty little town sitting in the middle of nowhere-- Freewill, Tennessee, population 1,203-- but it was right smack dab in the middle of a massive zombie outbreak. The town was pretty isolated. That’s why it had gotten infected so much later than the surrounding region, Pete supposed—and now they were trapped, he and Vicki. They were cut off from their unit, hunkered down in the soda pop cooler of some stupid convenience store, and about three seconds away from being dragged out and eaten alive.

They’d gotten used to the burned out ones they’d been smoking the past week or two-- him, Vicki... hell, all the Screw You’s. That was what happened. They weren’t being careful like they should have been and rolled right into a nest of them. Now they were trapped. They were cut off, and it was their own damn fault.

Vicki had called frantically for backup after they found some cover, but the whole town was crawling with the undead, and their squad leader told them they had to hold out a little bit longer. The Calvary was coming, but it was going to have to shoot its way through hundreds of infected townsfolk to extract them.

“I don’t think we got enough ammo to hold out that long,” Pete said, peering through the metal racks. The cooler was warm and smelled of spoiled milk. The howling horde beat on the coolers’ glass doors, gnashing their teeth like starved piranha in some kind of weird aquarium. The double pane glass was already cracking. Any moment now, one of those cooler doors was going to shatter, or a zombie would accidentally grab a handle and pull a door open, and they would drag Pete and Vicki out and eat them alive.

“I ain’t going out like this!” Vicki said fiercely, baring her teeth. Her eyes were bugged out, her nostrils flaring.

Pete couldn’t give two farts.

After rejoining the Screw You’s, Pete had fallen into a black depression. For a week or two, he’d even contemplated suicide.  He’d sit in the back of one of the trucks after they made camp for the night and imagine putting his pistol in his mouth and pulling the trigger, making all the hurt and guilt go away. Finally one night, he did it. He’d opened his mouth and slid the gun in there, tasting the oily metal, feeling his teeth scrape across the barrel, but before he pulled the trigger, he imagined how horrified Mort would have been. Mort would have been disgusted with him. Mort would have tried his best to talk Pete down, would have urged him to seek counseling, so Pete had taken the gun out of his mouth and went to sleep. After his first tour outcamp, he went to see the psychiatrist at the infirmary.

The shrink was a pretty little blonde with a cute freckled nose and granny glasses. She told Pete about a psychiatric disorder called “survivor’s guilt” and turned out, she’d known Mort, too. They talked for a couple hours about his friend, and when his session was over, he felt a little better. He didn’t even take the pills she gave him.

Maybe it was survivor’s guilt making him not care now.

He heard the tinkle of glass. Vicki yelled and started shooting.

And then something awesome happened.

Pete felt that weird tickling sensation inside his head. Through the cooler doors, Pete watched as part of the convenience store’s ceiling ripped clean away, exposing the orange and purple twilight sky. The whole structure shook when the ceiling peeled off, and then angels descended.

Pete and Vicki watched in awe as the Archons ripped the zombies a new one.

There were seven of them, dressed in shining breastplates, wings outspread, their robes floating fluidly around them. The deadheads turned and went after them, but the angels were armed with clubs and swords. Some of them even had guns. It was something like fifty versus seven-- so no contest. It was the coolest thing Pete ever saw.

Zombies were hewn in half. Those halves were hewn into quarters before they even hit the ground. One of the angels, a tall male Archon with short-cropped brown hair, was destroying the deadheads with some kind of invisible force. As Pete watched, the Archon gestured and one of the zombies whipped through the air and punched through a wall, leaving just a splintered hole and a puff of dust in its wake like some crazy cartoon. The Archon gestured again and another zombie burst into juicy pieces.

Vicki hooted in triumph. “Yes! Oh my God! Whoooooooo!” She jumped up and down in the cooler, clapping like a contestant on The Price Is Right.

Pete recognized two of the Archons. Metatron and HaMerkavah. They were the angels who had saved Mort and Pete in DuChamp. Metatron was using some kind of invisible force like the brown-headed one. The female was armed with a huge sword and shield, and tore into the zombies like a Cuisinart with tits.

Inside five minutes, the deadheads had been annihilated. Pete and Vicki scrambled from the cooler to thank their saviors.

The Archons accepted their gratitude in their typical reserved manner-- not rude, just cool and standoffish-- then walked outside and flapped into the air. The last two to depart was the skinny one named Metatron and the brown-headed angel, whom Pete had never seen before.

Looking at the brown-headed one made Pete’s eyes water. He suddenly felt dizzy, like the floor was swinging back and forth under his feet. His temples started throbbing, felt like a morning after banger.

The brown-haired Archon was, of course, glorious to look at. Beautiful, pale, with wry Cupid’s bow lips. But still masculine! There was no mistaking his maleness! He was tall, powerfully built, with a square cleft chin like something out of a superhero comic. His armor was ornate, a kind of burnished bronze, with a lightning bolt inside a raised ring in the center of the breastplate. The symbol looked vaguely familiar to Pete, though he couldn’t exactly place it.

And those wings...!

The archon’s wings were white with strokes of tan and black. He’d seen the angels a hundred times now. Hell, he’d worked right beside them once or twice, but he would never get over his sense of wonder, seeing those huge wings!

Their eyes met and the Archon smiled at him.

“Be careful, Peter Bolin. I won’t always be around to save you,” the Archon said.

There was a familiarity in his tone the Archons did not often take with human beings. Not that Pete had ever heard, anyway.

Metatron grasped the auburn-headed Archon by the upper arm and pulled him toward the door. For a moment, the angel’s image rippled, like a reflection on the surface of a pool of water, and Pete grinned in dawning wonder.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” Pete exclaimed.

The angel looked over his shoulder at Cactus Pete-- only he wasn’t an angel anymore. For just a second, he was something-- someone!-- else.

“Not if you behave,” the Archon winked.

The brown-headed Archon walked out into the parking lot. He turned and spread his wings and, with a great gust of wind, swept them down and shot like an arrow into the sky.

“Up, up and away,” Pete murmured, grinning and shaking his head.

About the Artist

It has been said that artist Mike Dubisch can see into other dimensions. Fans praise his alien brain, declaring, "Imagination lives!" Japanese horror writer Ken Asamatsu cries, "KAMIWAZA!!! He has the God Hand!"  Illustration luminary Rick Berry proclaims, "The whole EC golden age of comics has a true son in you, Mike Dubisch!"

Dubisch's art and subject matter is pulled from pulp science-fiction, EC comics, Heavy Metal, fantasy art and horror fiction. He counts among his greatest influences comics illustrators Frank Frazetta, Richard Corben, Bernie Wrightson, Moebius, Barry Windsor Smith, Wally Wood, Greg Irons, Alex Niño and Jack Kirby.

Virtually all of those artists were discovered by Dubisch at a young age, as an interest in Marvel Comics’ Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, the Fantastic Four and Devil Dinosaur led to questioning his father, "Who is your favorite super-hero?" In an act of questionable judgement, sealing the artist’s fate, his father exposed him to the extraordinarily graphic Wonder Wart-Hog appearance in "The Best of Rip-Off Press." A pile of Heavy Metal magazines and Wally Wood's Witzend were also in his parent's bookshelves, as well as Richard Corben's epic weird fantasy Den. His mother’s paperback reprints of EC comics seeded a deep affection for Weird Science, Tales from the Crypt and EC's Ray Bradbury editions, which he read by flashlight beneath his covers late into the night.

While in high school, Dubisch began showing his work around local comic book conventions in Albany, New York. By his sophomore year, Dubisch was working professionally as a comic-book colorist at Tom Vincent's Bi-Frost studio. Additionally, Albany comic book store and underground publisher FantaCo's small press publication GoreShriek featured short horror comics and masterful black and white illustrations from the young artist.

Dubisch honed his skills at art school where he met his future wife and collaborator Carolyn Watson, and continued to create comics for small publishers. After graduation, Dubisch pursued illustration work and began appearing in science fiction and fantasy magazines before starting a long career in role playing games, creating illustrations and toy designs for Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons, and RIFTS books.

In recent years Dubisch has become a well-known figure in the world of Cthulhu Mythos fandom, publishing his Cthulhu Mythos space fantasy Weirdling, a graphic novel collecting his independent comic book, and releasing the limited edition collectible art-book The Black Velvet Necronomicon: Black Velvet Cthulhu.

Mike will be releasing several graphic stories in the immediate future. "The Wet Nurse", from publisher Strange Aeons, will be featured in an extra large format in time for the H.P. Lovecraft Film festival in Portland, Oregon. The second issue of the anthology, Bela Lugosi's Tales From The Grave, will feature another tale, "Take Out/ Order In Chaos," a Cthulhu Mythos tale set in a Chinese fast food delivery.

About the Author

Author Joseph Duncan was born and raised in Southern Illinois. He spent his idyllic childhood running wild through the wooded highlands of the beautiful Illinois Ozarks, a veritable “lost boy”... a hillbilly heathen, if you will. Despite his rural upbringing, Joe’s home environment was very creative and liberal. His mother was an avid reader and his father was a talented amateur artist. From an early age, he was exposed to a vast world of science fiction and fantasy literature, art, comic books and movies. He was particularly influenced by the classic underground comic book scene of the sixties and seventies, titles like the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and the works of Robert Crumb and Richard Corben, as well as European graphic albums by artists like Moebius, Enki Bilal and Milo Manara.

By age 9, he was reading Tolkien and Stephen King. He wrote his first novella at age 10, a story called “Scratch”, which featured a telekinetic cat trying to protect its mistress from a bloodthirsty serial killer.

In his salad days, Joe tried his hand at art, and landed a few gigs penciling underground horror comics, but his comic book career never really took off, and he was artistically sidetracked by opening a business and starting a family. Fast forward through the everyday ups and downs of family life and business and...

In 2009, the first e-readers began to appear on the market, and Joe realized he could bypass the gatekeepers of traditional publishing and get his creative efforts out to the public. He immediately began writing his first novel, The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All. The indie novel was a surprising success, allowing Joe to close down his business and devote himself full time to writing. He followed Oldest Living Vampire with an occult detective novel and a zombie/vampire mashup, and the rest, as they say, is history.

If you'd like to contact Mr. Duncan, you may do so at cobraebooks@gmail.com. You can also “friend” him on Facebook, or visit his (sporadically updated) blog Red Ramblings.

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