Slowly We Rot

by Bryan Smith

  The man picked up one of the glasses and sipped from it. “Good stuff. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I’m Nick, by the way.”

  Noah nodded. “You know my name, I guess.”

  Nick picked up his glass again, taking another small sip. “Yeah, you’re Noah. I’ve heard plenty about you these last few months.”

  Noah grimaced. “I can imagine.”

  “Let’s get something straight right off the bat,” Nick said, leaning forward and bracing his elbows on the edge of the table. “Your sister’s anger is misplaced and unfair. I know that. There’s no way you could have come to her rescue. That’s the common sense side of it, the absolute truth, you and I know that, but your sister…” Nick shrugged. “Look, I’ve got no plans to hurt you. If Aubrey asks me to kill you, well, I just ain’t gonna do it. I was humoring her yesterday with the warning shot business, but that’s as far as that goes. And, shit, man, if it were up to me, we might even become friends, maybe get together now and then and work on drinking up all your bourbon.”

  Noah spent a few moments digesting all this before saying, “But it’s not up to you.”

  Nick shook his head. “It’s not.”

  Noah knocked back the bourbon in his glass and poured some more. “Why do I get the feeling Aubrey’s message is some kind of ultimatum?”

  “She wants you to leave. Doesn’t care where you go, just as long as it’s somewhere far away from here.”

  “This is different from what she told me yesterday.”

  A pained look crossed Nick’s face. “Yeah, well, I think seeing and talking to you again got her all riled up. She thinks you’ve got a sweet set-up here and wants to claim it for herself.”

  “I’ve worked hard to make this place what it is. She’s got no right to it.”

  “I don’t disagree, son.” Nick pushed back from the table and folded his arms. “In a fair situation, I’d suggest sharing some of the wealth with us. After all, you’ve had a big head start on us in terms of scavenging the area and hoarding supplies. I’m sure you’re a fair-minded person and might even be okay with an arrangement like that. The problem is that Aubrey’s not interested in sharing. And like I said, I won’t kill you for her, but I can’t stop her from taking matters into her own hands.”

  “You really think she’d kill me? My own sister?”

  Nick’s expression turned grave. “I think she might, yeah.”

  Noah fell silent for a long stretch of moments. He picked up the whiskey glass and held it in his lap, squinting at the amber fluid inside it as if he could divine answers from its depths. As he looked into the glass, a smile formed at the edges of his mouth. And then he laughed. He was still staring into the glass when he sensed Nick’s façade of perfect calm finally slip a little.

  “Something funny, kid?”

  Noah looked up from the glass. “What are you to my sister, Nick? Exactly, I mean. Are you just a benevolent traveling companion and protector, or are you fucking her?”

  A corner of Nick’s mouth twitched and his eyes narrowed, betraying a hint of something truly dangerous lurking behind them for the first time. “Watch your mouth, son.”

  Noah’s own expression hardened. “You’re, what, somewhere in your forties? Aubrey’s only just turned twenty-one. And, yes, I remembered her birthday, because I’m her goddamned flesh and blood. That’s an unbreakable bond, no matter what she thinks. You’re just some sleazy old predator taking advantage of her because she thinks she doesn’t have any other options.”

  Nick abruptly stood up from the table. His jawline quivered as he glared down at Noah, nostrils flaring as he appeared to be building toward some kind of explosion. But then he blew out a breath and shook his head. “You’re upset, and I’m not gonna let you goad me into doing something I’ll regret. You’re not wrong about your sister and me, Noah, but I’m no predator. You can believe that or not, I don’t give a shit. It’s a different world out there. Not a damn one of us has any good options anymore. Aubrey wants you out of here by sundown tomorrow. If I were you, I’d be gone by then.”

  And with that, the former marine turned away from Noah and stalked out of the cabin.

  8.

  A couple hours later, the fifth of Maker’s Mark was nearly empty and Noah was drunker than he’d been in a very long time. He sat at the table in the kitchenette and brooded over the talk with Aubrey’s emissary, getting angrier with each glass of bourbon he tossed down his throat. Even as he was doing this, he knew what a mistake he was making. Drinking when he was angry almost always led to bad things, sometimes even outright disaster, but he hadn’t been able to make himself stop. The rage building inside him demanded the alcohol.

  By the time he decided he couldn’t stand another drop, barely more than a quarter inch of bourbon was left at the bottom. It was such an insignificant amount that he considered finishing it off despite a burgeoning queasiness.

  Instead he decided it was time to do something smart for a change and go stretch out on the sofa for a nap. Later, when his head was clear again, he could give Aubrey’s ultimatum the deeper, more thoughtful consideration it required. Maybe he would even be able to think of a way to effectively placate her and stay up here on the mountain. Right now, with his head wobbling from the booze, that didn’t seem possible.

  But when he got to his feet, he was hit by a wave of severe dizziness. He had to grip the edge of the table just to keep from falling to the floor. And then, just when he was sure the spell of lightheadedness had passed, the queasiness intensified. His stomach gave a dramatic lurch, sending a tide of scalding bile into his throat. He gagged and wheeled away from the table, stumbling toward the back door. He got it open just in time to stagger outside and drop to his knees at the edge of the garden. At that point, his stomach gave another big lurch and he sprayed vomit all over a row of tomatoes.

  The retching went on for many more minutes, his stomach continuing to strain long after it was empty. When the spasms finally ceased, Noah toppled over onto his side, crushing several of the tomato plants. After allowing himself a few moments to catch his breath, he rolled onto his back and held up a hand, staring at a palm wet with tomato juice and speckled with damp bits of soil. He winced, feeling a pang of regret at the damage he’d caused to his garden.

  He tried to lever himself up off the ground, but his eyes felt heavy and suddenly it seemed like just too much effort. Sighing, he let his head fall back against the earth and closed his eyes. He woke up maybe an hour later, still kind of drunk and in dire need of catching some additional shuteye in a more comfortable place. This time he successfully got to his feet and went back inside, kicking the door shut behind him. It slammed into the frame, but rebounded, failing to stay completely closed. Noah didn’t notice. He wobbled his way over to the sofa in the outer room and fell clumsily upon it. Within moments, he was unconscious again. This time he stayed that way until dusk.

  When Noah’s eyes opened again, it was about fifty percent darker in the cabin, but there was still enough natural light to see by. He sat up with a groan. His head was pounding and at first he couldn’t remember why he’d gotten so drunk. But then it came to him and he shook his head.

  “Fuck.”

  Noah was angry at himself. Yes, it’d been natural to get upset in the wake of the news Nick had delivered, but drinking wasn’t the answer. It never had been before. There was no reason things should be different just because the world had ended. It hadn’t helped that his tolerance for booze had slipped considerably during the years of abstinence. There’d been a time when he could have twice what he’d had today and still be going strong. The old tolerance level might return if he stayed in the habit, but clearly that was a really bad idea for many reasons.

  After cleaning himself up and changing clothes, Noah got the wood stove going and set a pot of coffee to brewing. He didn’t have coffee often, preferring to conserve his supply and have it only when he really needed it. This seemed
like such an occasion. While he waited for the water to come to a boil, he closed the back door more securely and did a bit of cleaning up around the place.

  When the coffee was ready, he poured a cup and carried it out to the front porch, where he settled into the rocking chair and stared out at the clearing. The sky was even darker now and he was grateful for that. His head wasn’t pounding quite as painfully now, but bright sunlight would have been hard to endure.

  He thought about his situation in an absent way as he sipped coffee. The cup was about half-empty when a startling thought occurred to him from seemingly nowhere, one so alien and revolting he initially found it hard to believe it’d originated from his own brain. A disgusted scowl twisted his features in the ensuing moments.

  Noah had always thought of himself as basically a decent person. He was no pushover, but he was no callous, cold-blooded psychopath either. Despite his long isolation, he was a civilized person, someone who had firm lines he would never consider crossing.

  And yet he was the one who’d been forced into an untenable situation by the unfair, arbitrary whims of others. Furthermore, wasn’t being banished from the mountain tantamount to a death sentence? He knew how to survive up here in the ordered, neat little world he’d created for himself, but out there in all that dead nothing was another story. Of course, he didn’t necessarily have to go out into the larger world. He could maybe find refuge in some other part of the Smokies, far enough away to reduce the odds of ever encountering Aubrey or Nick again to near zero. But in Noah’s mind just then that didn’t matter. He’d be forced to start over in strange territory, so it amounted to the same thing.

  There was a way out of it, though. A very simple one, really.

  He could just kill them.

  Just hunt them down tonight before the deadline passed. Once he’d found their camp, he could slit their throats while they slept. Or, if they weren’t sleeping, put bullets through their heads. And with that one ruthless act, all his problems would be solved. With the exception, maybe, of living with a tortured conscience the rest of his life.

  Noah stared out at the darkening sky and felt a chill settle deep inside him.

  He stayed right there in the rocking chair until well past full dark, his mind seething with troubled thoughts.

  9.

  Noah’s mood spiraled downward throughout the night. By the time he carried an oil lamp down to the cellar, he had been mired in a state of deep melancholy for hours. Somehow, though, he’d resisted the temptation to start drinking again. When he’d had his troubles with alcohol in the past, an encroaching dark mood had always made resistance next to impossible, so he counted this as a victory. He’d even opted against smoking weed. Pot didn’t exacerbate depression issues the way booze did, but he wanted his head clear for the rest of the night.

  He was on the precipice of a major transitional moment in his life. His path forward still wasn’t clear, but change was coming, that much was certain. In order to make some of the hard choices he was contemplating, he felt compelled to look to his past for guidance and context. And that meant locating and rummaging through the contents of some boxes he hadn’t opened since before the world ended.

  He banged around in the semi-darkness, threading his way through a maze of things that had been stored down here over the years. Many were items he’d procured during his scavenging expeditions. These included a large inflatable raft and the paddles that went with them. It was among the many things stored in the cellar he’d never had occasion to actually use. Near the raft was a full set of golf clubs in a sturdy bag. Those he’d gotten some use out of for a brief time. After acquiring the clubs, he’d set a tee in the middle of the clearing and had practiced knocking golf balls down into the valley. But he ran out of balls and so the set of clubs had taken up residence down here with so many other forgotten things.

  The cellar was a graveyard of memories. Some of them didn’t mean much, but others were dangerous. Those in the latter category included painful things regarding his family and their life together before the end of everything. For a long time, he hadn’t been able to look at pictures of his family without becoming despondent, even suicidal. Eventually he packed away all the mementos of his former life and tucked them away down here, fully believing he would never want to look at them again.

  At the time, this had been a wise decision. Not having access to visual evidence of days gone by allowed him to move on and fixate on other, more constructive things. It was possible, perhaps even likely, that doing this had saved his life.

  But now his sister was back and she was no longer the person he remembered. He’d entertained the idea of killing her, and, to his horror, had been unable to immediately reject the notion, instead seeing it as the fastest, cleanest way out of his predicament. But before he could go any further in that direction, he needed to look upon images of Aubrey as she’d once been. It felt like the only way to comprehend the true weight of the decision facing him.

  The boxes he wanted were stacked in a corner at the back of the cellar. When he found them, he set the oil lamp on the dusty floor, took down the box from the top of the stack, and sat on the floor with his legs crossed beneath him. He stared at the crumpled, folded flaps of the box for a long moment, the old reluctance to see their contents suddenly reasserting itself. But he strengthened his resolve, pulled the box closer, and opened it.

  The box was filled with photo albums and thick white envelopes stuffed with more photos, the ones his mother had never gotten around to arranging in an album. His old-fashioned mother had been distrustful of changing picture-taking technology, believing that images stored in a digital format lacked the inherent permanency of photos developed from film. In this way, she had been remarkably prescient, and Noah was grateful for that.

  He took out the photo album at the top and opened it. It was one of the more recently compiled albums, with most of the pictures in it ranging from one to two years before the world ended. The photos on the first page were all from his father’s forty-fifth birthday party. In each of them, the gray-haired, bespectacled man was beaming at the camera, proudly displaying various gifts from his family. Aubrey was visible in one picture on this page, smiling and standing off to the side as she watched her father open a present, pleasure evident in her features even though she wasn’t fully facing the camera.

  More pictures of Aubrey appeared a little deeper into the album. Again, the event depicted was a birthday. Her fourteenth, according to the candles on the cake. Aubrey had turned fourteen roughly a year before the fall. The ache Noah felt upon seeing this group of photos was intense and almost instantly overwhelming. His sister had been well on her way to becoming a beautiful young woman when these shots were taken. She looked radiant and full of life.

  A flood of memories assailed him then. He recalled Aubrey’s bubbly personality and her bright, musical laugh, and he remembered how he’d delighted in teasing her about the many boys who’d taken an interest in her. Noah kept turning the pages of the album and eventually came across a picture of Aubrey that made him laugh. In it, they were on a beach somewhere, probably in Florida, and they were mugging for the camera, making the usual kind of stupid faces.

  By that point Noah already knew he wouldn’t be killing his sister. It didn’t matter what she had become. What she thought of him now also didn’t matter, nor did the threat she’d relayed via Nick. What it came down to was simple. Aubrey wouldn’t yield or listen to reason.

  Therefore he had to leave.

  It was the right thing to do under the circumstances. All doubt about that had departed. Knowing this, however, made the prospect no less scary. His life up here on the mountain had been a lonely one, yes, but it had become a relatively comfortable one. He would be losing his routine and everything he’d built here. And he still needed to figure out where he meant to go. But that was something he could set aside for later consideration. There were practical matters that needed tending to first, preparations he would h
ave to make, including gathering supplies and deciding how much he could take with him.

  Noah knew he needed to get to work right away, but something kept him where he was a while longer. He turned the pages of the photo album until he reached its end, more long-forgotten moments from the past coming to life in his head, a few so startlingly vivid it was as if they’d only just happened. Some were unconnected to anything in the photos. They were from the other part of his life he’d tried to forget.

  But it was all coming back now.

  That semester at the University of Memphis.

  The girl.

  The drinking.

  Noah eyed a box at the bottom of the stack in the corner. It was where the few surviving mementos from that time were stored. He hadn’t looked at any of those things in going on six years.

  He wasn’t sure he wanted to look at them even now.

  After a while, however, he got up and started moving boxes.

  10.

  Seven years ago…

  In late August, the first week of classes for the fall semester was just a few days away. For Noah, this would mark the beginning of his college career, a landmark event he’d looked forward to throughout his high school years. He would be on his own for the first time, out from under the thumb of his loving but overly protective parents. The increased level of freedom would be nice. For a long time, that had been the thing he’d looked forward to the most, but that had changed during the weekend he’d spent on campus back in July for freshman orientation. In the weeks since then, all he’d been able to think about was the girl.

  Her name was Lisa Thomas. She was a student at the university, but she was a sophomore rather than part of the incoming freshman class. Lisa was an ambitious, motivated young woman. In addition to a wide range of other extracurricular activities, she was a campus volunteer, which meant she helped out in a number of ways at various events.