by Bryan Smith
In addition to the picture, he had a scrap of envelope that had been stored along with it. The envelope was from a package Lisa’s parents had sent her prior to her disappearance from Noah’s life. Through some accident of fate, the empty envelope had wound up among his things. He’d hung onto the scrap with the Ventura home address of her parents scrawled across it, thinking he might one day fly out there and show up at their door. This had always been unlikely. He wasn’t quite that crazy, at least not back then, but the idea had always been there in the back of his head. Until the world ended, that is.
He put the picture back in his pocket when he heard footsteps crunching through the brush at the tree line to his right. Picking up the revolver, he got to his feet and watched Aubrey and Nick come into the clearing. Nick had his rifle with him, but it was slung over his right shoulder. Aubrey was still wearing the grungy black dress Noah had seen her in the other day. There were bits of bramble stuck to it here and there from the walk through the woods. She had a smug look on her sallow face as she came up to the porch.
“I knew you wouldn’t fight me on this. Fighting’s not what you’re all about, is it?” She laughed and shook her head. “No, definitely not. But running away with your tail between your legs? That’s definitely like you.”
Noah shrugged. “See it how you want to see it. I don’t care.”
Nick nodded at the revolver. “The gun’s not necessary, son. I told you before, I don’t bear you any ill will.”
Noah aimed the gun at the man’s midsection. “That’s nice. But I still don’t fucking trust you.”
Nick stared at him levelly for a moment, his expression hooded and unreadable. He then slowly slipped the rifle off his shoulder, taking care to show he had no intention of aiming it at Noah, and tossed it aside. “I’m only interested in seeing this end peacefully, kid. And, for the record, I still don’t sanction this. Left up to me, you could stay here.”
Aubrey sneered and kept her gaze on Noah. “But it’s not up to him.” She glanced at the backpack. “Looks like you’re all set to go.”
Noah slipped the revolver back in its holster, picked up the backpack, and pulled the straps up over his shoulders. After tightening and securing them, he grabbed his rifle, stepped off the porch, and started off in the direction of the road, giving Aubrey and Nick a wide berth.
But Aubrey moved quickly to put herself in his path. “Hold up, brother.”
Noah sighed, stopping in his tracks. “What now, Aubrey?”
“Open your pack. I want to see what’s in it.”
Noah shook his head. “I’m not doing that.”
“Do it, unless you want me to have Nick kill you.”
Noah glanced at the ex-soldier, who shook his head and rolled his eyes. His gaze returned to Aubrey, whose expression was sullen and hateful. “I’ll take my chances.”
He moved to go around her.
She hurried to put herself in front of him again. “Open the fucking pack.”
Noah groaned. “What do you think I’m carrying? Gold?”
“It looks overstuffed. I think you’ve got a bunch of shit in there I should have. The way I see it, you should be leaving here empty-handed.”
“I’m done humoring you. What I’m carrying with me is mine. You can’t have it. You should be happy, Aubrey. I’ve handed you the keys to the kingdom. Enjoy it.”
He moved to go around her again, picking up the pace this time. He’d gotten almost all the way to the road when he heard her footsteps pelting down the slope after him. “Noah, wait! Please!”
Against his better judgment, Noah, hearing the plaintiveness in her voice, stopped walking and turned around in time to see her come to a panting stop just a few feet away from him. Nick hadn’t moved from his position at the top of the slope, which relieved Noah. Maybe the guy was sincere about his desire for peace between them.
Aubrey had tears in her eyes as she spoke. “Don’t go, Noah. Please.”
Noah frowned. “Don’t go?” He shook his head. “Oh, I get it. You’re fucking with me now.”
Tears spilled down her cheeks. “I was just testing you. And punishing you, I guess. But I don’t want you to go, not really. Please, Noah, please stay.”
He stared at her for a long time, trying to discern whether she was being sincere. In the end, he decided it didn’t matter. He’d been rotting up here on the mountain long enough, staying alive just for the sheer sake of it, existing with no purpose. Well, he had a purpose now, a new course fate had set for him, and he meant to pursue it as far as he could. Chances were good he was setting off on a dangerous fool’s errand, but at least he would be doing something. He’d be out in the world again, looking for something lost long ago.
Noah turned away from his sister and resumed walking away.
Aubrey screamed his name several times, begging him to return. The sound of it resounded through the valley below, an endlessly echoing testament to pain.
Noah kept walking.
PART TWO: OUT IN THE WORLD
12 .
The walk down from the mountain took up all the remaining daylight. It was a sometimes treacherous journey down a narrow, winding road, which had become overgrown in places through the years of disuse. Getting clear of the mountain range would take even longer. He knew from memory the road would eventually take him to a two-lane highway that stretched snake-like throughout the Great Smoky Mountains. From his many trips out here in his youth, he remembered it as a scenic passage through nature at its most breathtaking.
A part of him was surprised to find the highway still there when he reached the end of the barricaded mountain access road, it’d been so long since he’d last glimpsed it. There was a closed gate at the end of the road. It was secured with thick lengths of rusty chain. Parked alongside the gate facing the highway was an old yellow school bus with flat tires. Its hood was up and Noah could see as he approached it that its engine had been gutted. Whoever had parked it here had taken pains to ensure that moving it would be extremely difficult.
The reasoning behind this had been sound. With society collapsing, so many of the people with property up here had feared being targeted by roving gangs of bandits and other predators. And there actually had been a few tense standoffs with some shady people who came poking around in the early days. But the incidents were infrequent and soon ceased altogether, likely thanks to the devastatingly fast spread of the plague.
Noah circumvented the gate and moved past the bus to take a look out at the highway. Because of the way the road curved, he could only see a short distance in either direction. The highway looked more or less as he remembered it. The guardrail was still there. He spied a speed limit sign off some distance to his right. But there had been some natural erosion to the asphalt, which was dotted here and there with potholes small and large. Weeds had grown up through cracks in a lot of places. The erosion matched what Noah had imagined. With no maintenance crews to patch holes and occasionally put down a new layer of blacktop, nature was free to encroach. One day the roads out here would be fully overtaken by greenery, a prospect Noah might have found depressing if he believed civilization might one day mount a comeback. But he had no such hope and thus there was a kind of beauty in nature taking back the land and undoing the work of humanity.
There were other hints of calamity. The first Noah glimpsed was the burned-out hulk of a pickup truck. It had smashed into the guardrail some thirty yards to his left, in the westbound direction, which was where he’d be heading. The truck’s windows had been blown out in the crash, its tires melted in the resultant fire. At least he supposed the fire was a result of the crash. But maybe the fire had come first, causing the crash. Not that it mattered. Whoever had been driving the truck was long dead. There might even still be remains in the truck’s cab. Noah had no desire to verify this. He kept his gaze straight ahead as he set off down the road and walked past the truck.
The avoidance was pointless, he knew. The crashed truck would be just the
first of countless examples of how the world had died in chaos and flames. He would encounter things far more unsettling. He was, after all, headed out into a world blanketed with the corpses of billions. There would be more remains and he wouldn’t always be able to turn away from them.
He winced at the way the old backpack’s aluminum frame banged into his back as he continued down the steep slope of the road. Several times he reached behind him to grab onto the bottom bar in an effort to keep it from doing that. It helped, but holding onto the bar also became tiresome after a while. He resolved to exchange the old pack for one of the newer, more ergonomic ones at the earliest opportunity, even if it meant resorting to robbing the dead.
The road continued to sharply twist and lead him in a steeply downhill trajectory, requiring him to hang onto the backpack’s bottom bar almost constantly. It wouldn’t be so bad once he reached something like level ground, but for now dealing with it was a tedious exercise in endurance. His annoyance level was enough that he began to consider stopping for the night after walking barely more than a mile down the highway. He might have strengthened his resolve and pushed on for a while anyway if not for the impending approach of full dark. There was hardly any light left in the sky, the last faint traces of dusk fading rapidly.
Deciding to stop was the easy part. He’d set off late in the day, with no real expectation of getting very far before nightfall. Tomorrow he could rise early and work at finishing the trek out of the mountains. Unless he found a working vehicle and acquired gas to drive it—unlikely—the march westward was going to take a very long time, possibly several months. Nothing he did tonight would shorten or lengthen the journey to any significant degree.
The more difficult aspect of stopping was where to do it. He couldn’t pitch his tent right in the middle of the road, despite the extremely remote—approaching zero percent---possibility of a vehicle coming along to run him over. There was just no point in taking the chance. Besides, he would feel too exposed. He was on the verge of deciding his best option would be to hop over the guardrail and set up camp in the woods when he discerned the shape of another vehicle up ahead.
This one was a vintage VW van, a relic from the 60’s or 70’s that had achieved antique status long before the apocalypse. Unlike the truck, it was no burned-out hulk, nor did it appear to have crashed. Except for the multiple flat tires, it looked almost roadworthy. Or so it appeared at a distance of more than twenty paces in the gathering darkness. When he got closer, Noah examined the van’s exterior more closely and noted a pattern of bullet holes zigzagging along one entire side of the vehicle. Someone had fired on the van with an automatic weapon, expending a lot ammunition in an apparently determined effort to kill its passengers.
Curious, Noah approached a blown-out side window and peered inside the van, grimacing as he spotted at least three sets of skeletal remains, all clad in the tattered remains of rotting clothes. Judging by the awkward positioning of the remains, these people had died in contortions of agony. Given the many bullet holes, this was a logical enough deduction.
Noah had hoped to find the relatively intact van empty, thinking it might serve as an acceptable temporary shelter for the night. But there was no way he was sleeping in what amounted to a tomb on wheels. Unless, maybe, he worked up the nerve to drag the remains out of the van. A shiver of repulsion went through him at even having entertained the idea. These people, whoever they’d been, deserved better than being dumped by the side of the road like garbage. This was their final resting place. Disturbing them would just be wrong.
Setting up camp in the woods was again seeming like his best option. He figured he would do just that in a few minutes, but he first wanted to check out the van’s front seats. The door on the driver’s side was open a crack. He pulled on the handle and it came open with a groan of rusty hinges, a sound that was disconcertingly loud in the otherwise still night. He poked his head inside and saw there were no remains up front. The partly ajar door on this side suggested the driver might have attempted to flee. Hell, maybe he’d even been successful. Perhaps he’d escaped into the woods and was living somewhere out there to this day. It would be nice to think so, even if it was extremely unlikely.
Noah undid the backpack’s painfully constraining straps, shrugged the pack off his shoulders, and leaned into the van to wedge it into the front passenger seat. He then did the same with the rifle, taking care to ensure that it was in a stable, secure position. Once these things had been accomplished, he climbed into the van, pulled the door shut, and settled in behind the wheel. The decision to do this was nothing but raw impulse. He was acting on it before the idea had fully formed in his head.
Even after all the years of mountain living, he’d never developed much of a taste for sleeping out in the woods. It hadn’t often been necessary, the rare exceptions mostly limited to his extended scavenging missions. He figured he’d seek to avoid it whenever possible even now. Sleeping in close proximity to the remains in the back of the van wasn’t ideal, but they were just a bunch of old bones, really. He had nothing to fear from them.
Noah closed his eyes and fell asleep within minutes.
13 .
Noah woke up to a clicking sound sometime shortly after sunrise. He groaned and stretched, squinting his eyes against the bright sunlight visible through the van’s grime-covered windshield. The clicking sound repeated, but it was very faint, and its possible implications did not immediately register. This changed when he felt something sharp prod weakly at his ankle.
Frowning, he glanced down at the gap between the seats. He gaped in frozen disbelief at what he saw down there on the floorboard. Then he screamed and surrendered to blind instinct, shifting around in the seat and scrambling backward as he groped for the door handle. He got the door open after a few failed, frantic tries and fell backward out of the van, screeching in pain as the back of his head thumped against the guardrail behind him.
He sat there panting a few moments, still unable to process or believe what he’d seen. Then came the panic. He sat up straight, ignoring the fresh burst of pain this triggered, and pulled up the cuff of his right pants leg. He pushed down the sock he was wearing, turned his ankle, and examined the skin, sighing heavily in relief when he saw it was unbroken. He’d just managed to avoid infection by the frailest half-zombie remnant he’d ever seen.
After allowing himself another moment to finish collecting his wits, he got to his feet and edged closer to the van, peering carefully inside. The frail dead thing was stuck between the front seats. Though it was immobilized and pitiful-looking, Noah knew better than to treat it as anything other than what it was—a dangerous, potentially deadly threat.
There was no bottom half to the thing. In life, it had been a woman, he was pretty sure. Clumps of long blonde hair still clung to a badly rotted scalp. The size of the bones suggested a small person. Thinking about it, Noah realized the zombie might as easily have been a young girl, or even a boy with longer locks than the old norm. It really was little more than a pile of bones loosely connected by the flimsiest bits of sinew and rotten flesh. He’d never seen an animated corpse as diminished as this one. The one that had come to his cabin a few days ago had been robust by comparison and until now it had been one of the frailest-looking dead things he’d ever seen.
Noah took a hunting knife from his utility belt and leaned through the open door into the van again. The dead thing turned its head in his direction, jaw opening to display rows of yellow teeth and shriveled, blackened gums. The jaw snapped shut and opened again. A bony finger reached out and scratched weakly at the uncarpeted floorboard, seeking purchase.
Noah observed it a while longer, unable to comprehend how the spark animating the thing hadn’t gone out long ago. In theory, the viability of the reanimating virus was dependent on the presence of a minimally functioning brain. This thing’s state of decay was so advanced that any withered biological trace of its brain had to be about as functional as a rock. And yet here thi
s thing was, animated and still driven by a compulsion to attack and consume flesh.
How that could be possible was beyond Noah’s understanding. He was no scientist. The thing was creepy as hell and in dire need of being put out of its misery. That was all he needed to know.
Noah leaned a little closer and the thing’s jaw opened and snapped shut again. He raised the blade and slammed it down through the top of its skull. It immediately ceased struggling. At the outset of the plague, it’d been quickly determined that you killed the dead things by killing their brains. This one had been no different, despite its deteriorated condition.
The thing’s head came away from its shoulders when Noah tried pulling the thick blade out of the skull. He backed out of the van and held the impaled head aloft, frowning as he turned it this way and that, again mystified by how something so fragile could have remained animated for so long.
Noah shivered as he thought about his hours asleep in the van, all that time of sitting there oblivious while this thing worked determinedly to extract itself from the tangle of remains in the back and come after him. He was extremely fortunate it had been so weak and decayed. A stronger, or even slightly less deteriorated, zombie would have killed him during the night. If nothing else, a lesson had been learned. He wouldn’t survive very long out here if he didn’t exercise proper caution. And any set of remains, no matter how decayed, had to be considered a threat until confirmed otherwise.
He pried the knife loose, tossed the head over the guardrail, and leaned into the van again. Before retrieving the backpack from the passenger seat, he peered into the back of the van to verify that there were no more feeble old dead things trying to get to him. Detecting no hints of reanimation among the other sets of remains, Noah sheathed the hunting knife, grabbed the backpack, and got out of the van. He reached in one more time to grab the rifle, pausing as something on the floorboard caught his eye.