Slowly We Rot

by Bryan Smith

  His sister had come home at last.

  “Aubrey…I…”

  She shook her head and stared straight ahead, apparently not interested in looking at her brother. “Yes, it’s me, your sweet sister. Surprised?”

  Noah couldn’t imagine a bigger understatement. He didn’t know what to say and figured it was a rhetorical question anyway.

  “You’re probably wondering where I’ve been all this time, what I’ve been doing.”

  Noah again found himself incapable of response. He was having a hard time getting a handle on his feelings. After giving her up for dead so long ago, he should be happy about this unexpected reunion, overjoyed, even. He should be drawing her into his arms and hugging her so tight she could barely breathe. In reality, he felt only trepidation and had no desire to touch her.

  She laughed again. This time there was a nastier edge to it. “You never came looking for daddy and me.”

  “That’s not fair, Aubrey. I had no idea where to look, no fucking clue where dad took you. Until just now, I was sure you were both dead.”

  She grunted. “These are the things you tell yourself so you can sleep at night.”

  “They’re the truth.”

  She finally looked at him. There was a hollow look around her pale blue eyes and her sickly pallor suggested a prolonged lack of exposure to sunlight. She was wearing a black dress and a pair of grimy old running shoes. The dress had seen better days, too. It was badly frayed, with many loose threads at the seams.

  “I don’t care, and I’m not here to argue with you. I just wanted to come back and see if you were still here, because if you’d died or something, I could have forgiven you. But you look very healthy, Noah.”

  Noah felt a tear sliding down his cheek. “Aubrey…”

  “Your tears are wasted on me, brother. Now that I know you’re alive, I’ll be moving along. Maybe we’ll see each other again, maybe we won’t.” Her gaze shifted back to the empty clearing. “Probably not, though.”

  “You should stay with me.”

  Aubrey shook her head. “No. You don’t want me here, trust me. I’d probably kill you in your sleep some night.”

  Neither of them said anything else for several minutes. They both watched as the light of the rising sun filled the valley below, Aubrey remaining in the chair despite her stated intention to move along. But the splendor of nature was lost on Noah this morning. His sister’s bitter words had swept aside his earlier trepidation. Tears continued to flow, old emotions reawakening and tearing at his heart.

  “I’m sorry. You’re right. I should have looked for you.”

  She nodded. “Yes. You should have.”

  “At least tell me what happened to you. Is dad…”

  He trailed off, unable to say it.

  “Yes, he is. He was dead barely more than an hour after you last saw him.”

  She said this in a flat, strangely emotionless tone. Her eyes looked unfocused, like those of someone far away from here in her head. For the first time, Noah had an urge to reach out and touch her, to comfort her somehow. But he made no move to do that, knowing the gesture would be unwelcome.

  “We made it out of the mountains fast. The road out of here was empty and dad drove like a maniac. The highway between here and Knoxville was another story. It was chaos. Stalled traffic as far as the eye could see, wrecked cars everywhere. Hordes of those fucking dead things.”

  Noah shook his head, picturing it. It was pretty much as he’d always imagined.

  “You should have come back.”

  “We never should have left, but daddy was determined. He would have done anything, whatever it took so I could get well again.” A very faint smile touched the edges of her mouth and then disappeared. “We’d made it a few miles through all that madness before a man in a highway patrol car blocked our way. We thought he was gonna help us, but he really just wanted to get to me.”

  A deep dread took root in Noah then. “You don’t have to talk about this.”

  “But I want to talk about it. I want you to know what’s been happening to me all these years while you’ve been enjoying the good life up here on the mountain.”

  Thinking of those years of crushing loneliness, Noah just managed to hold back a burst of bitter laughter. He wondered what Aubrey would think if he tried to tell her about his life of hopelessness and isolation. Would she finally feel something for him other than anger and hatred? And what if he told her about all the times he’d come so close to taking his own life? Maybe then she’d feel some level of empathy. But Noah restrained the impulse to argue with her. It was clear her bitterness ran too deep to counter effectively with logic.

  Noah waited for her to continue, but she had fallen silent. He glanced at her and saw she was looking at him with an expectant expression, as if she’d been hoping for the argument he’d opted not to pursue. The look on her face hardened as their eyes met. “Don’t have anything to say for yourself?”

  “There’s plenty I could say, but you wouldn’t listen.”

  “You’re right. I wouldn’t. I lost any interest in hearing your side of things after years of being held prisoner in a pervert’s basement.”

  Noah looked out at the clearing, unable to hold her gaze any longer as his eyes misted again.

  “That’s right, look away. You shouldn’t be able to look at me, if you’ve got any kind of conscience left at all. The pervert was a cop before the end of the world, which was how he was able to fool daddy into getting out of the SUV. The sick fuck was wearing his uniform, made us think he was still on the job. He killed daddy and he took me. I was too weak to resist. Once he had me locked up in his basement, he fed me a bunch of antibiotics and I got better. It wasn’t long before I was wishing he’d just let me die.”

  Noah let out a breath and uttered two barely audible words: “I’m sorry.”

  Aubrey snorted. “Apology not accepted. He raped me, of course. More times than I could ever count. And he got me pregnant. I had the baby. He killed it moments after it came out of me, while I was crying on that filthy fucking floor and begging to hold a goddamned rape baby because that’s what my instincts told me I should do. He laughed at my tears and tossed the thing out in the woods.”

  Noah grimaced. “Jesus.”

  “Jesus doesn’t have shit to do with it.”

  Aubrey got up from the rocking chair and stepped off the porch, positioning herself in front of Noah with her hands on her hips. “All that time I had one hope, one idea keeping me barely sane, and that was the belief that you were out there hunting for me, that one day you’d find me and set me free.” The sharp twist of her mouth betrayed a deeply entrenched, malignant bitterness. “But, of course, you weren’t doing any such thing, were you?”

  Noah at last summoned the will to defend himself. “I couldn’t possibly have known what you were going through or where to even start looking for you. You must know that. You could have been anywhere in the world.”

  Aubrey’s sneer deepened. “I don’t give a fuck about your excuses, brother. I was depending on you and you let me down, bottom line. But guess what? Mr. Rapist died a few months ago. Heart attack or something. But I was still chained up in the basement with no way out. I might have died down there, too, if Nick hadn’t come along and saved me.”

  Noah frowned. “Who’s Nick?”

  “He’s the friend who has you in the crosshairs of his rifle as we speak.”

  Noah gaped at her in astonishment. “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  Noah’s head snapped to the right, his eyes scanning the line of trees at the edge of the clearing. The laughter he’d heard last night had come from that direction. Assuming this Nick person wasn’t some figment of Aubrey’s imagination, he was probably somewhere out there.

  “You look scared. Good.”

  Noah swallowed a lump in his throat and forced his gaze back to his sister. “So you’re here to kill me, after all.”

  Aubrey shrugged. �
��Nick’s just protecting me. For now. I had him hang back because this needed to be between just you and me.”

  “How do I even know this Nick person is real?”

  Aubrey lifted an index finger, pointing toward the sky. The loud crack of a rifle made Noah flinch. A high caliber bullet hit a corner of a support beam at the end of the porch, resulting in a spray of splinters.

  Noah gasped. “Holy shit.”

  “That was my signal for a warning shot, in case you couldn’t guess.” Aubrey lowered her hand and smiled. “I’ll be on my way now, Noah. I’ve done what I came here to do, which was to make you face up to the damage you’ve done. I hope we never see each other again, because if we do, I can’t guarantee I won’t have Nick kill you. My advice? Stay in your little area here and don’t ever leave.”

  Before Noah could say anything to that, she turned away from him and headed for the woods. In a few moments, she had disappeared through the tree line. Noah stared in that direction for a long time, his thoughts a confused jumble and his emotions in turmoil. Now that Aubrey was out of sight, her reappearance seemed like something out of a dream, like something that couldn’t possibly have actually happened.

  The impression was compounded by the memory of how his sleep had been plagued by troubling, often gruesome lucid dreams for many months after his sister and father disappeared. These dreams were always full of foreboding and usually focused on their unexpected return. Sometimes his family members came back as zombies, other times as ghosts. Still other times they would initially seem normal, but the illusion would crumble as the dreams took a horrific twist. Noah had spent that time feeling like he was being tortured by his brain.

  And now he found himself wishing this morning’s revelations really had been nothing more than just another resurrection dream and that, as he’d always assumed, Aubrey had died somewhere out there in the world years ago.

  7.

  Noah spent little time outside the rest of the day, emerging only when he needed to visit the outhouse. He sat on the sofa, smoked weed, and stared at the dead TV screen for hours, his thoughts unfocused and drifting much of the time. Now and then one of the many hurtful things Aubrey had said to him would flit through his mind, but he always let the words fly away without examining them too closely. A fair amount of turmoil was happening below the surface, stirring up a number of troubling issues he would undoubtedly have to confront later, but, with the aid of the weed, he was able to keep it all submerged for a while.

  At first he figured the hiding away was a symptom of depression brought on by the revelation that the sibling he’d long assumed dead hated him. Later in the day, after he’d set aside the pipe and allowed his head to clear, he realized the larger reason was fear. His mind kept returning to the crack of that rifle and the accompanying sound of the bullet taking out a chunk of the support beam. Despite his sister’s intimation that he wouldn’t be killed so long as he stayed in the area right around his cabin, Noah couldn’t help feeling apprehensive.

  Aubrey had changed drastically during her long time away. She was mean and vindictive now, a far cry from the sweet teenager he remembered. There was nothing but blackness in her heart where he was concerned. He tried to imagine her mellowing over time, maybe even eventually letting go of her anger, but he just couldn’t do it. It was far easier to imagine the man named Nick returning at any random time to fire another bullet from the woods.

  The fear eased somewhat the next day. He even spent a good chunk of that morning and afternoon sitting out on the porch. This was the defiant part of his personality asserting itself after a day spent cowering inside like a frightened animal. The fear wasn’t completely gone. An urge to go back inside and lock the door behind him recurred numerous times. But he fought through it, trying his best to project an air of unconcerned nonchalance to anyone who might be watching.

  After a while, however, he decided it was time to tend to some other things. He did some work in the garden, then he pulled up some water from the well and filled several plastic milk jugs. He took the jugs into the kitchenette and stored them in the refrigerator, which, without power, essentially functioned as a large cupboard or pantry. Next he did an assessment of his food supply and concluded he’d have to go on a hunt again soon.

  On a shelf in Noah’s cabin were several books on off-the-grid living. These had belonged to his father. Noah had read them cover to cover, teaching himself the art of preserving meat through smoking and curing. It was a skill that had served him well during his years alone, at least as much as the lessons his father had taught him. There had been a feeling of pride and accomplishment in managing to do it successfully. It helped, of course, that searches of cabins in the area turned up a wealth of the materials necessary to do it properly.

  The idea of going on a hunt appealed to him for more than the practical reasons. It would be a way of taking his mind off the things troubling him. Thinking about food and the impending hunt made him hungry, so he opened the fridge and took out a container of homemade jerky. He was chewing on a strip of it when he heard the knock at the front door.

  Noah set the jerky aside, picked up the rifle, and went to the window by the door. A tall, burly man in frayed military garb was on the porch. He had a rifle slung over his shoulder by a strap. He had a thick beard and a lot of scraggly, greasy hair. There was a tattoo on his right bicep, but it was too faded to discern details from the window. This had to be Nick. Seeing a second living person in as many days after all this time was surreal and for some moments Noah couldn’t help studying him, much as he would a curious specimen of wildlife. But then he remembered that this was the man who’d fired at his cabin and felt a surge of fury.

  He unlocked the door and yanked it open, aiming the muzzle of his rifle dead-center at the man’s face. “The fuck do you want?”

  The man seemed strangely unfazed at having a firearm pointed at the spot right between his eyes, his expression conveying neither fear nor anger. “Please lower the weapon, son. I’m not here to hurt you. I just want to talk.”

  “Yeah, right. You need to get off my property.” Noah gestured with a tilt of his chin. “Go on, man. Get the fuck out of here.”

  The man sighed heavily, sounding as weary as he looked. “I really just want to talk. Look, if I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead already. I know you’ve got no reason to trust me. I get that. But I’m here because your sister wanted me to deliver a message.”

  “Great. Tell me what it is and go.”

  The man heaved another of those bone-weary sighs. “We really should sit down and talk. Believe it or not, I’m no threat to you, but your sister is another story. We need to talk about her and what’s gonna happen going forward. If it makes you feel any better, I’ll set aside my weapons.”

  Before Noah could reply, his visitor had unslung his rifle and set it against the porch rail. Next he removed a utility belt and set it in the rocking chair. He pulled up the leg of his faded uniform trousers and removed a pistol from an ankle holster. The handgun joined the belt on the rocking chair.

  “There,” the man said, once the process of disarming himself was complete. “I’m defenseless. Now can we have a civilized discussion?”

  Noah regarded him intently over the sight of his rifle a moment longer, still not fully trusting the man or his intentions. The thing that finally swayed him was how placid his demeanor remained in the face of Noah’s open hostility. Maybe he was a master of deception and would suddenly strike the moment Noah let his guard down, but he didn’t think so. Besides, he was curious to hear another perspective on his sister’s state of mind.

  He lowered the rifle and waved the man inside. “Have a seat at the table.”

  The man nodded and entered the cabin. He went into the kitchenette, pulled a chair back from the table, and sat down.

  Noah sat across from him, balancing the rifle in his lap. He kept his expression neutral as he gave Aubrey’s friend another look of silent appraisal, looking more closely at
the tattered green tank top he was wearing. Emblazoned across the front were the letters USMC. But both the shirt and the camo pants he was wearing looked loose. Noah guessed they were at least a size too large. “Were you really in the marines or did you swipe the gear from a dead man?”

  The man shifted sideways in the chair and turned his arm to give Noah a good look at the faded ink of the old tattoo on his right bicep, which depicted the globe, eagle, and anchor insignia of the marines. “Satisfied?”

  Noah shrugged. “I guess. No reason to have the ink if you weren’t the real thing once upon a time. I’m curious, though. Why still wear the uniform after all these years?”

  “In this world, a man needs every edge he can get. Even after all this time, the uniform suggests authority and people reflexively defer to authority, whether they mean to or not. It helps, believe me, even if it looks baggy on me now.” A tired smile briefly touched the corners of his mouth. “Blame that on the Apocalypse Diet. Now let’s talk about your sister.”

  Noah shrugged. “Fine. But first, how about we have a drink?”

  “What kind of drink?”

  “Bourbon.”

  “That’ll work.”

  Noah got up and propped the rifle in a corner by the back door. He opened a cupboard and took down two whiskey glasses and a bottle of Maker’s Mark. The cupboard’s top shelf was crammed with extra bottles. There were even more bottles in the cellar, a lot more, pilfered loot from abandoned neighboring cabins. He’d transported the booze to his place years ago, powerless against a compulsion to stockpile the stuff despite having abstained since before the apocalypse.

  Even after the very long dry period, he remained wary of imbibing again, fearful it would trigger a recurrence of old problems. But so many of those problems were rooted in old world circumstances that no longer applied. And this was a situation that called for whiskey, a thing he understood on a gut level.

  Noah set the glasses on the table, poured two fingers of bourbon into each, put the bottle in the middle of the table, and sat back down.