by Bryan Smith
SLOWLY WE ROT
By Bryan Smith
First Digital Edition
Copyright 2015 by Bryan Smith
All Rights Reserved
www.thehorrorofbryansmith.blogspot.com
Cover design copyright 2015 by Zach McCain
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the permission of the author. All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
This one is for Lashon Miller.
PART ONE: UP ON THE MOUNTAIN
1.
The dead thing came up the slope so slowly it hardly seemed to be moving at all. Each shuffling, shaky step it took brought it only a few inches closer to the cabin. The thing’s withered, nude body was rotted almost to the bone in many places. A frailty Noah had once associated with the very aged and infirm was evident in its every movement, though what the thing’s true age had been at the time of its long ago death was impossible to determine. In life, the zombie had almost certainly been a man. This was obvious despite the missing genitals, which had probably been torn away by an animal or another of the dead things. Despite its decrepit condition, the walking corpse was tall and possessed a large frame. This had been an individual of some considerable size and strength once upon a time. But not anymore. Now the thing looked weak enough to be knocked over by a strong gust of wind.
Noah sat on the top step of the cabin’s porch and chewed absently on a piece of jerky, savoring its salty taste as his gaze shifted away from the zombie to take in the vista of the valley below and the range of other mountains on the opposite side of the river tributary where he did his fishing. Winter had passed, but the tips of some of the highest peaks were still snowcapped.
Noah’s cabin was at a low enough elevation that the last of the snow had melted away weeks ago. The temperature, however, was still at a chilly enough level at night to warrant getting a fire going. That would remain the case another week or two, he guessed. But right now it was the middle of the afternoon and warm enough to comfortably sit outside in a short-sleeved shirt and jeans. Until now, it had been a nice day. But now the vague good feeling he’d awakened to this morning was tinged with some of the darkness that normally colored his thoughts and emotions. Enjoying anything on any level had become such a rare thing, and now he felt bitterness at having allowed himself to trust that good mood.
His attention shifted back to the zombie, which had managed to trudge a few more feet farther up the slope. Noah took another bite of jerky and slowly chewed it as he observed the creature’s lurching progress. As it drew inexorably closer, he could hear the creak of its brittle bones. He put the odds of it actually making it up the rest of the slope to the cabin somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty-fifty. One of its tibia or femur bones might well snap the next time it took one of those halting steps forward, sending it tumbling back down the slope, never to rise again. But it would crawl. Of course it would. That was the thing about the dead things. They were slaves to relentless instinct. As long as the spark of pseudo-life animating it continued to burn, it would keep on coming.
Noah felt sorry for it. You couldn’t blame a zombie for being a zombie any more than you could blame a shark for being a shark. It was what it was, and the drive propelling it forward would never allow it to rest. He wondered how long the creature had wandered about in the wild in futile search of warm human flesh to consume. A very long time, from the looks of things. The man it had once been had been dead at least a year, maybe twice that long. The bits of leathery flesh still clinging to its bones were among the most rotted he had ever seen, though that wasn’t saying much.
Thanks to his father’s preparations, Noah and his family had been safely stashed away up here in the mountains when the rest of the world came tumbling down. They had been spared exposure to the worst of the chaos, though they were not spared devastating loss. Their mother succumbed to the virus not long after their arrival at the cabin. Until then, no one had known she’d been infected. She had hidden it from them. Noah couldn’t blame her. In the early days of the plague, there had still been some confusion regarding whether the condition of apparent death followed by reanimation was something that could be reversed.
It wasn’t.
Almost six years had passed, but the memory of what his mother became moments after that last spark of life faded from her eyes still haunted Noah’s dreams. He’d held her hand and tried to talk to her when she reanimated. He had still been trying when she lunged for his throat. If his father had hesitated even an instant, Noah’s life would have ended that day, too. The loud bang of the gun and the image of the top of his mother’s head blowing apart as the bullet penetrated her skull were among the many other things that tormented him in his sleep.
The zombie kept coming closer. By the time it reached the top of the slope, Noah had finished the piece of jerky. He wiped his mouth with the back of a hand and got to his feet, frowning as he stared at the advancing creature. Now that it was on level ground, it was moving faster. He had been hoping it would take that tumble down the slope, but at this point he had no choice but to deal with it.
He went into the cabin, leaving the door open behind him. The cabin was small, with a kitchenette, two cramped bedrooms, a cellar, and an outer room that comprised the bulk of the place. He crossed through the outer room to the kitchenette, where he paused at a table to pick up the canteen he’d left there this morning. He took a long swallow of warm water, sighed, and screwed the cap back. Then he went back outside.
The zombie was halfway across the clearing by then. Its eyes were dead in their sockets, as rotted as the rest of the thing’s body, but they nonetheless somehow seemed to track Noah as he stepped off the porch and went around to the side of the cabin.
An axe was embedded in the old tree stump he used for chopping wood. Noah planted a booted foot against the edge of the stump, gripped the handle, and worked the blade free. Propping the handle on his shoulder, he returned to the clearing and saw that the zombie had nearly reached the cabin.
Heaving another sigh, Noah lifted the axe off his shoulder and approached the zombie, getting himself into position to take a swing. The creature turned toward him and bared its blackened teeth, a low wheeze of rancid breath escaping its mouth. This was one of the countless things about the creatures that puzzled Noah. Their hearts weren’t beating, but their lungs continued to draw in and expel breath. As he had so many times over the years, he wondered if some scientist hidden away in a secure lab somewhere had ever unlocked any of the virus’s many mysteries. He supposed it was possible. Not that it mattered anymore. The world was dead. There wasn’t anyone left to benefit from the knowledge.
The zombie was less than a half dozen feet away.
Noah tightened his grip on the axe handle and swung it as hard as he could. The blade chopped into the creature’s rotten skull, killing it instantly.
It was the first zombie he had seen in at least a year.
And the first one he’d killed in almost twice that time.
2.
Noah returned the axe to the tree stump, burying the blade deep in the wood. He needed to get rid of the body. Unlike in the early days, there was no rush. Back then the appearance of one zombie often meant another might not be far behind it, and being extra vigilant for a period of time was always advisable. But there were far fewer people in the world these days, either dead or alive, and the odds of another walking dead man showing up any time soon were remote.
So, instead of immediately disposing of the corpse, he went back into the cabin and sat for a few moments at the little table in the kitchenette. He had a few more long drinks from the canteen an
d chewed on another piece of jerky as he stared through the open front door and thought about times gone by.
Disposing of the dead things was something Noah had done often during that first post-outbreak year. Quite a few other people, forward-thinking ones like his dad, had also retreated to remote properties in the Smokies. Many of them, however, had arrived at their mountain hideaways already infected. They all eventually succumbed to the virus, of course, and a lot of them reanimated and set off in search of food. Inevitably, a percentage of them wound up wandering onto his father’s property. A few Noah had even known when they were alive. These were acquaintances of his father, fellow businessmen who also owned property in the area.
His dad had dispatched them with little discernible emotion, going about the task in a way that marked it as just another job that had to be done, unpleasant but necessary. When Noah looked back on those days, he always wondered how much of that had been an act. Had his father really felt nothing at all when shooting or dismembering the bodies of his former associates? These were men he’d broken bread with and drank with before the world died. He must have felt something. His father had not been an emotionless robot. He was a warm and caring family man.
But he’d also been a man who didn’t shrink away from the hard things in life. Noah suspected he’d hidden his true feelings about a lot of things. He’d done this to toughen up his children, particularly Noah, who, being a young man, needed preparing for a return to the hunter-gatherer ways of their ancestors.
In that regard, at least, his father had succeeded. The man was years dead, presumably, and in that time Noah had put all the lessons he’d taught him to good use. He was able to tend to all his own needs without help from anyone else. He’d become adept at hunting and fishing. The river tributary was a good source of food, as was the surrounding wilderness. Fortunately, the fish and wildlife seemed immune to the virus that had wiped out most of the world’s human population.
Noah went back outside, seized the dead thing by the wrists, and dragged it out into the woods. The thing had lost so much of its body mass over time that this was not physically difficult work. He pulled it along with ease until he was some fifty yards deep in the woods. Judging this far enough, he let go of the thing’s wrists and started back in the direction of the cabin, but he stopped in his tracks before he’d gone more than a few feet.
He turned around and approached the dead thing again, frowning as he stood over it and stared at its sunken, hollow-cheeked features. The leathery skin was so rotted that it was difficult to tell what the man had looked like in life, whether he had been ugly or handsome, fair-skinned or tanned. There was nothing there to accurately guess what kind of person he had been. He might have been an agreeable, good-humored man with lots of loved ones and friends. Or he could have been a lone mountain dweller, a survivalist type who’d shunned the company of others even before the fall of civilization. He was just a blank. A dead thing. Nothing more.
Except that wasn’t really true. The withered dead skin was a mask, one that obscured the real story about a human being who’d once lived, laughed, and loved like anyone else. This wasn’t a zombie anymore. The axe through the skull had seen to that. What he was looking at here was what was left of a man, not some monster. He thought about his mother in those moments just before and after reanimation. She hadn’t been a monster, either. Instead, like this man, she had been a blameless victim, robbed of life and humanity by a goddamned virus.
Tears blurred Noah’s vision.
These were the first tears he’d shed in longer than he could recall. They were silent tears. He didn’t descend into hysterics. That wasn’t something that could happen anymore, especially not over this man he’d never known. He’d become too hardened for that, but he nonetheless felt genuine sadness for the dead man. He felt he owed it to him. No one else was around to mourn him.
After a while, Noah wiped the tears away and walked back out of the woods, but he wasn’t yet done with the dead man. He fetched a shovel from the shed behind the cabin and traipsed back through the woods until he again arrived at the spot where he’d left the body. It had not been disturbed in his absence, not that he’d expected anything else. The remaining scraps of flesh still clinging to the bones were too rotten to be of much interest to wildlife.
He punched the shovel blade into the ground, drove it in deep, and cranked the handle back and forth until he had worked loose the first scoop of moist earth. It had rained recently, which made the work easier than it might have been. The hole in the ground grew larger in short order, as did the pile of dirt next to it. The work was strenuous enough to generate a good sweat and he had to pause numerous times to wipe moisture from his brow.
Had there been anyone else around, he might have been asked why he was bothering to dig a grave for this stranger. It wasn’t something he’d ever done for the dead things, after all. A small part of it was related to granting this particular dead thing some measure of dignity. Mostly, though, it was because his days were largely empty and this gave him something to do. For at least a little while, he could feel like he had some purpose other than just existing.
The grave wasn’t quite the standard six feet deep by the time Noah judged it good enough. He climbed out of the hole and rolled the corpse into it. After filling it in and patting the earth down with the back of the shovel blade, he returned to the cabin and washed up. The work he’d done had stirred his appetite, so he got the wood stove going in the kitchenette and set about preparing a meal. When it was ready, he carried the plate of meat and vegetables out to the porch, where he sat on the top step and ate in contemplative silence as he stared out at the valley and the other mountain peaks in the distance.
As he often did, he wondered about the world he couldn’t see, the one outside the Smokies. He tried to imagine it as it might be now, rather than those last televised images of chaos and destruction from years ago. A part of him wanted to envision it as rejuvenated. He wanted to believe humanity had endured and pulled together at last to triumph against adversity.
When he was done eating, Noah set the plate aside on the porch and stared up at the empty sky. He’d caught not even a single glimpse of anything man-made flying across it in years.
He stared for a long time.
The sky stayed empty.
3.
The encounter with the zombie left Noah unsettled the rest of the day. He felt more restless than usual and anxious in a vague way. This was no delayed fear response to the dead thing’s unexpected intrusion into his territory. It’d never presented any real threat, being too frail and decomposed for that.
No, this was more about the unanticipated disruption of a long-unchanging norm. For so many hundreds upon hundreds of days, things had been almost exactly the same. He spent his time in total isolation. Nothing remarkable ever happened. It wasn’t a healthy way to exist. Human beings were social creatures. They craved companionship and stimulation.
Noah was no exception to this rule. The long period of isolation frequently made him susceptible to despair. There had been many times he’d considered taking his own life. He’d braced his rifle’s muzzle beneath his chin so often it’d almost become a kind of ritual, but he’d never been able to take that final step and squeeze the trigger. Something in him just wouldn’t allow him to do it, despite the fact that he could think of no compelling reason to go on living.
He had stopped doing the thing with the rifle when he finally realized there was little chance he would go through with it, at least as things stood now. There would likely come a day when circumstances forced him to reconsider. Assuming he spent the remainder of his days up here on the mountain, old age or illness would eventually push him beyond the brink. If he developed some debilitating disease, there would be no way to treat it. In that kind of scenario, a high-caliber round fired through his skull would be the only good option.
For the time being, however, he was resigned to plodding through the days of his colorless
existence. Though he sometimes deviated from it for the sake of preserving his sanity, Noah’s routine was well-established. By this point in the day, edging toward late afternoon, he would normally sit in the rocking chair out on the porch until sunset. Often he would read a book as he did this. Other times he would pack a pipe and spend those hours maintaining a pleasant marijuana buzz. Sometimes he read while he was high.
His library was comprised mostly of books he’d scavenged from other cabins in the area. He had a lot of time to fill and wasn’t fussy about the reading material he acquired. Those scavenging trips had turned up an array of bestsellers from yesteryear, but he’d also accumulated numerous biographies, romance novels, and self-help books. Given the state of the world, those in the latter category usually struck him as bleakly comical.
He’d turned up his most prized literary find yet in the cellar of a cabin near the top of one of the neighboring peaks—almost a dozen boxes crammed full of old western pulp novels. Transporting them back to his place had required multiple trips over a two week period, but it had been well worth the effort. He had enough reading material to forestall the necessity of rereading things for a long while.
The pot supply also had its origins in a scavenging expedition. He’d found dozens of plants in the area around a neighboring cabin. Under the circumstances, being high on a near-constant basis seemed to Noah a pretty benign habit. It was something to do. And being high made being completely alone more bearable. Tending to the plants also helped fill the time. The work was simple, but there was a basic kind of comfort in it.
But today he didn’t feel like doing any of those usual things. He especially didn’t feel like getting high. A buzz would ease the nebulous anxiety that had gripped him. However, for reasons rooted in his past, not accepting the artificial relief the weed would grant him felt important. This restlessness felt different in some hard to identify way from the usual strain of boredom he so often experienced. He wanted to allow it room to breathe and see if it might eventually lead his thoughts in an interesting or unanticipated direction.