Mort Read online

  Of course, upon closer examination, it was obvious that 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 wind blowing through the concrete canyons and the low moans and guttural garglingof 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, dreamy movements, like they were flotsam in a stagnant sea. Bloated detritus, drifting upon a languid and polluted tide.

  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 goddamn 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, absent-mindedly, corrected people’s English. It never seemed to occur to him that most people found it annoying. One of the few girls he’d dated broke up with him because he was always correcting her pronunciation. He hadn't even realized he was doing it.

  “If you noticed I was saying something wrong, wouldn’t you correct me?” he’d asked her, confused. “I’d be grateful. Not mad. Who wants to sound like a moron--?”

  “Oh—so I’m a moron now?” she’d cut him off. Her name was Dee Brinkley. She was a skinny brunette with--

  But that didn't matter.

  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? 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 had 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 grinned. “You know the rule.”

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

  The cardinal rule when travelling 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 kind of funny, actually.

  Mort was used to bullies. He’d dealt with them all his life. That’s not saying he played the role of victim in that particular social dynamic. He usually found himself cast in the part of sidekick. There was something about his demeanor-- his stocky physique, his lack of style, or maybe his oft-times hangdog expressions-- that made alpha males decide, “Hey, dude, you and me should be pals!” He supposed it kind of boiled down to him being the male equivalent of the ugly girlfriend.

  With the goose eggs and vulgar behavior, traveling with Pete was just like being in high school again.

  Most days, it was kind of fun, despite the fact that Mort was pushing thirty.

  That and all the goddam zombies.

  Mort’s post-traumatic flashbacks of his four years at Joseph Biden Community High School weren't all that bad, compared to the grim reality of recent weeks… what with all the reanimated cannibals and the entire collapse of human civilization. Wedgies and goose eggs 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. He wasn’t a cruel person. He didn’t take pleasure from inflicting pain on other human beings. Mainly, he was just dumb. He had more testosterone than brains, and he enjoyed what Mort’s father used to call grabassing. Fooling around. It was like his emotional transmission had thrown a gear when he hit thirteen.

  Mort didn't mind Pete’s roughhousing. He felt safe with Cactus Pete around. Pete was everything he 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 lost his nerve. Pete had saved him a dozen times from the endless hordes of brain munching deadheads. Despite the goose eggs, there were advantages to being a sidekick.

  If I was a chick, Mort thought ruefully, we’d probably be screwing already.

  That’s the kind of guy Pete was.

  If this were just a cheesy horror flick, Pete would play 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 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 down 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 tall, stocky fellow with thinning 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 terribly 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 paranoid amount of caution, 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.

  “I know what 'decomposition' means, by the way,” Pete muttered. “It means ‘rotting’.”

  “Yeah. I wasn’t trying to imply you didn’t know what decomposition was. I was just talking,” Mort replied. “What I don't understand is how they keep rotting, and how they keep walking around. I think they need living flesh to regenerate the cellular tissue that’s diseased in their own bodies, or maybe to keep the bacteriophage from devouring them from the inside out.”

  “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 you'll see a bunch of the really burned out ones gang up on a fresh one and strip its bones clean.”

  “Yeah, I've seen that.”

  Both of them shuddered at the memory. It was bad enough being scared of the zombies. Worse to feel sorry for one that was screaming as a horde of its fellow ghouls chewed the flesh from its bones like a bunch of starved piranha. They sounded so... human then.

  “It's like some kind of metabolic crisis, when they don't get enough living flesh to eat.”

  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 glowing in the dark along with those deadheads down there. The power plant should have melted down already.”

  A breeze ruffled their bangs. It would have felt nice if it didn’t carry the stink of decay to their noses. In every other way, zomb
ies excluded, it was a fine mid-autumn afternoon. The city was quiet but for the moans of the undead and the wind whistling eerily through the broken windows of the high rise buildings. The sky was clear and sunny, an inverted bowl of blue with a few white wisps of cloud drifting across. Birds flitted from roof to roof, chirping and squawking contentedly. Winter seemed far away.

  Then, 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 was himself. They suffered the same degrading physical and mental effects. The flu-like symptoms that came with the initial stages of 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.

  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 had 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 hissed. “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. “I think the sun's getting' to you, man,” he said.

  Mort nodded. “Probably.”

  Yeah. Probably the sun. It couldn’t possibly be the end of the world that was bothering him.

  2

  The Merry Shanty

  In his pre-zombie life, Mort 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 was pertinent. Vietnam was like a million years ago. The kids nowadays who frequented his shop wouldn’t know a prisoner of war from a Power Puff Girl. They 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 invariable accompanied by a big, Technicolor POW!

  The swift and simple justice of the comic book world had always appealed to him. 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. He’d read comics since childhood. For Mort, it was an escape. Reading a comic became 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.

  His business turned a profit. Not a great one. He was never going to be rich. The main compensation of owning his own business was that he was his own boss. He never woke in the morning with a feeling of dread at the prospect of going to work. He was never going to get yelled at for doing something wrong, or get blamed for something that he was not responsible for. He was never going to work under someone who was unqualified or unsuitable for a management position. 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. He had a nice, if small, apartment. He made enough money to splurge every now and then on his vinyl album collection or some new clothes. He owned a decent car, had a big TV 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 too easy to throw in the towel. His bachelor lifestyle was probably a good thing when the Armageddon Virus struck, though. 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 that “family values” Republican having gay sex in an airport washroom. It was just one of those weird little pieces that grab the limelight for a day or two because it made people say “Ew!”

  The Tale of the Merry Shanty.

  Fishermen working off the New England coast on a boat named the Merry Shanty had hauled several unmarked barrels on deck when pulling in their trawling nets. One of the 55-gallon drums had ruptured, exposing the men to a highly toxic and unknown chemical. As the anchorwoman reported, it was not unusual for trawlers to haul in illegally dumped toxic waste. It was becoming a real problem, apparently. What set this incident apart was that one of the fishermen died shortly after being exposed, and three others were admitted to a local hospital for severe chemical burns and seizures. Two of those men were reported to be in critical condition. The EPA was investigating the incident, but had not yet issued a statement.

  When Mort saw the news report on television while sitting at home in his La-Z-Boy recliner, his evening meal on a wooden TV tray in front of him, he wrinkled his nose and said, “Ew! Sucks to be them.”

  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 afterschool rush. The kid’s name was Fred.

  They joked about their names, sometimes. Mort and Fred. It was almost like their parents had purposely wanted to condemn them to lives of nerdery. Fat Mort and Red Fred. Why couldn’t their parents have named them Max and Fallon? Mike and Frank?

  Fred was thin to the point of making other people squeamish. He was also ginger, and not just your average, run-of-the-mill ginger, but Ginger with a capital G. Hair 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 on 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. I’ve been too busy.”


  Fred grinned ghoulishly. “Well, I was reading on a blog this morning that the guy who was in critical condition died about four a.m. I mean, he flatlined and the doctor pronounced him and everything. Then, about fifteen minutes later, he sat up and bit one of his nurses on the arm. Guy was crazy. Tried to gnaw it off like he was rabid or something.”

  Mort smirked suspiciously. “Where did you read that?”

  “On some dude’s blog. Some orderly that worked at the hospital put it on his website. The orderly 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 fisherman down 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) Fred’s email popped up and Mort delayed his nightly massage to follow the hyperlink to the zombie blog.

  “That’s strange,” he muttered.

  Clicking the link had brought up a DNS screen. 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 redirected his browser to Dynamite DP’s. It was a premium porno website. He’d been a subscriber for years. He smiled and picked up his bottle of lotion, squirting some in his left hand. “Hello, ladies…!” Squirt-squirt!

  The next morning, as he sat in his recliner munching his morning 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. The Merry Shanty made headlines yesterday following a fatality when the unlucky fishermen netted several 55 gallon drums filled with an unidentified toxic chemical. One man died and three were admitted to a local hospital following their exposure to one of the ruptured canisters. Tragically, two more of the men expired overnight, succumbing to an as-yet-unidentified viral organism. Experts at the CDC think the deadly virus is linked to the toxic waste the men were exposed to the previous day. The CDC has isolated the bodies and is in the process of contacting the other crewmen of The Merry Shanty so they can be screened for possible infection.”