by Bryan Smith
It was a locket attached to a delicate gold chain. Noah let go of the rifle and snatched up the necklace. He opened the locket and frowned at the picture inside it, which showed an attractive young blonde woman posing with a man about the same age. He assumed the woman was the zombie he’d just killed. The necklace had obviously slipped to the floor after his accidental removal of her head. Noah guessed the guy had been her husband or boyfriend. They had their arms around each other in the picture. They were smiling and happy. Like the picture of Lisa in his pocket, the locket photo was a glimpse of a better time.
Noah closed the locket and pressed it into the dead woman’s withered hand, grabbed the rifle, and backed out of the van. After he’d finished strapping on his backpack, he started on down the road.
14 .
As expected, getting out of the Smokies took several hours, a process lengthened by the necessity of having to stop on occasion to rest and consult his atlas. By the time he was clear of the mountain range, the day had stretched into the early afternoon hours. Shortly afterward, he came to a junction of roads and was forced to consult the atlas again. This time he studied it for a protracted period, committing the next few sections of the route to memory.
He spent another couple hours making his way through a maze of small town streets. Along the way, he passed numerous buildings, including places of business and the usual array of residential structures. Some of these were still in very good shape, looking as if they’d been occupied and maintained until just recently. The illusion was ruined by an unbroken landscape of overgrown lawns and the total absence of a visible human population. The relatively pristine-looking structures, however, were outnumbered by those in disrepair. There were a lot of boarded-up windows. Many of those not boarded-up had been shattered. Whether they’d fallen victim to vandals or the elements was hard to tell.
And then there were the cars. He encountered quite a few of them as he continued through the area. Some streets were choked with stalled vehicles, particularly the ones leading out of town in the direction of the mountains. There were remains in many of the vehicles, all in an advanced state of decay. Noah couldn’t help wondering what had happened to keep these people from getting any farther than they had.
A lot of the cars were pocked with bullet holes, just like the VW van he’d made the mistake of sleeping in last night. The similarly tight grouping of the holes again suggested heavy-duty automatic weapons. He pictured men in military vehicles firing machine guns into the cars. The thought troubled Noah. Assuming the people in the cars had been alive at the time, why would soldiers have slaughtered civilians?
He thought of the scenes of chaos and madness he’d glimpsed on TV the rare times they’d watched news reports in those early months of hiding away in the cabin. Civilization collapsed at a rapid rate. There was widespread rioting everywhere. The people in charge quickly lost any ability to control the situation. Without a functioning chain of command, it was possible some elements of the military had gone rogue, morphing into self-contained groups of mercenaries. And maybe some of those units had decided to cut off access to the mountains with plans of turning it into a safe haven for themselves.
The theory explained a lot, but it was all a lot of after-the-fact supposition with only a small amount of supporting evidence. The problem with it was that he’d encountered no signs of a military presence anywhere in the Smokies during his many far-ranging scavenging expeditions. But the mountain range covered a lot of territory. It was possible he’d avoided running into mercenaries out of sheer luck, if they’d settled far enough away. On the other hand, military guys meant guns, lots of them. Until Nick took that shot at his cabin the other day, it’d been years since he’d heard gunfire in the mountains, except for when he was firing his own rifle. He supposed it was possible the soldiers had all died not long after the massacre of the civilians. The virus had been spreading like wildfire. Maybe they had all been infected.
Out of curiosity, Noah poked at various sets of remains with the rifle, testing them for evidence of reanimation, but there was no repeat of the episode with the zombie remnant from this morning. By mid-afternoon, he was out of the area and headed toward Knoxville, the first city of any significant size on his planned route. He traversed various lengthy stretches of rural and small town highway, easily following the route he’d committed to memory, eventually reaching the interstate.
Fatigue finally set in after so many hours of walking. Now that he was out of the mountains, the problem with the backpack bar banging into his lower back was less of an issue, but the weight of the pack itself was wearing him down. The years of surviving on his own with no access to fatty junk foods had left him in good shape. He was sure the Noah of five years ago wouldn’t have been able to make half the distance he’d managed today. But now he was tired.
Noah stopped in his tracks in the middle of the highway. He’d come a long way today and it was almost time to stop for the day. Scouting around for a place to make camp was the smart thing to do at this point. But now he turned about and stared in the direction from which he’d come. He chewed on his bottom lip, fretting now about the man in whose company he’d left his sister. Maybe he’d been one of the military guys who’d machine-gunned all those people. But that was supposing soldiers had been the perpetrators. There was no proof of that. Civilians could have commandeered the vehicles and weapons.
Still, Noah couldn’t help worrying. Aubrey had treated him with scorn and spite, but she was the only family he had left. And there was the matter of her apparent change of heart the day he left, the one he’d rebuffed with so little thought. Her cries of distress haunted him.
For the first time, Noah’s certainty that he was doing the right thing began to slip. Maybe he was making a huge mistake. It was a big, wide world out here. Even if by some miracle the girl he’d set out to find was still alive, there was no guarantee she would be in her hometown. In truth, the odds were against it. But his sister was definitely still out there in the Smokies, not that far away. If he turned back now, he could be back at the cabin in a couple days. Conversely, every day he pressed forward on his journey greatly reduced the likelihood of ever seeing Aubrey again. He had about an hour of daylight left. Maybe he should get a head start on making his way back to the mountains.
Noah leaned against the concrete highway median and stewed on it a while. Yes, he was worried about Aubrey, but he knew fear of what might lie ahead of him out there on the road was a bigger factor in this sudden bout of second-guessing. The urge to continue his journey was still there, fueled by the memories he’d inadvertently reawakened. Though he’d done his best to forget her, somewhere not so deep inside he’d never stopped yearning for closure with Lisa. Not even the end of the world had changed that.
Fool’s errand or not, he wanted to make the attempt.
Noah eventually decided it would be a mistake to decide on a course of action now. It was late in the day. He needed to stop and rest and devote some serious time to thinking the matter over. With this idea in mind, he pushed away from the median and spent some time checking out some of the stalled cars clogging the highway. There were more out here than in the smaller community he’d left behind. Most were in decrepit condition, though none bore evidence of being machine-gunned. But there were more wrecks and burned-out hulks here, the result, he imagined, of the panic that had gripped the area as a zombie horde swept through it. He based this on the many traces of remains in the street.
He spotted more human remains inside many of the vehicles. Only a few of the cars had been occupied by a lone driver. Most had been filled with families seeking a refuge fate prevented them from finding.
Eventually, he came upon a black SUV with tinted windows that looked like a good candidate for temporary shelter. One of its windows had been shattered and the front driver’s side door was hanging open, but at first glance it looked empty. A closer look confirmed this. There were no remains inside and plenty of room to stretch out in
back.
Sighing with relief, Noah undid the straps of the backpack, tossed it inside, and took a final look around, verifying that, as usual, only the dead were watching him.
Then he climbed into the SUV and pulled the door shut.
15 .
The night passed without incident. Noah awoke early in the morning and climbed out of the SUV to stretch his legs. The sun was shining brightly in the mostly cloudless sky. It was warm, but not yet hot. That would change by mid-afternoon. This being mid-May, however, the heat wouldn’t reach the point of being uncomfortable for at least a couple more weeks. He hoped to cover a significant amount of ground during what little was left of this pre-summer period. Long stretches of the journey ahead would be arduous, and it was important to gain whatever kind of edge he could along the way.
Noah took some food from the backpack and climbed up on the roof of the SUV to eat. He wanted to get going on today’s leg of the journey, but it was important to provide his body with fuel for the road. His breakfast this morning consisted of a wedge of dried meat and some mushrooms. It wasn’t the most exciting meal in the world, but it would do the job for now. At some point down the road, though, he would take the time to hunt. Some fresh-cooked meat by a campfire would make for a nice change of pace.
As he ate, it hit him that the decision he’d anguished over yesterday had apparently been made at a subconscious level during the night. He’d been awake not quite a full half hour, but until now his thoughts had been on nothing but the journey westward. No resumption of the prior internal debate accompanied the realization. Noah took his mind’s automatic focus on pushing forward as the surest sign possible that it was what he needed to do.
He finished his meal and took a conservative swig from his canteen, which was now a bit more than half empty. He hadn’t yet opened his backup canteen, but he made a mental note to check the atlas for the nearest natural water supply.
The time had come to hit the road, but Noah remained atop the SUV a few moments longer, surveying the clogged lanes of eternally stalled traffic. It struck him that he was sitting in the middle of a vast graveyard. Not only that, but he’d slept in it. Being a lone wanderer in the ruins of the old world was bad enough, but this impression genuinely disturbed him. It made him feel like a ghoul.
Noah climbed down from the SUV, packed his gear, and strapped on the utility belt. He felt another twinge of the surreal as he started walking. Strolling down the middle of an interstate highway with no fear of being squashed flat by a trailer truck just felt strange. Stranger still was the near absolute silence. There were all sorts of noises he associated with a sea of unmoving vehicles. Horns honking, a steady rumble of engines, music blaring from open windows, maybe a scream of sirens as emergency vehicles streaked along the shoulder of the road to a wreck somewhere far up ahead. But there was none of that. The only sounds were the soft sighing of the mild breeze, the tread of his shoes on asphalt, and his own breathing. It was spooky enough that he whistled for a bit just to hear something else, but he soon stopped. The whistling didn’t feel right in the midst of all this echoing nothingness.
The miles ticked by as the morning lengthened and grew warmer. In a few hours, he caught his first glimpse of tall buildings in the distance, denoting the location of Knoxville’s downtown area. At first they were just blurs on the horizon, but they came into crisper focus another mile or so down the road. Road signs promised downtown exits not far ahead. For a while, he considered going into the city to forage for supplies. There were some good reasons to follow the impulse. Even a dead city would still possess a wealth of potential resources, far more than he could hope to find in the vast nothing between cities. He might even get really lucky and find a working vehicle, one that had been stowed in a garage and protected from the elements all this time.
But even a car protected from the elements would have a dead battery by now. And if he could procure a functional battery, which he doubted, it wouldn’t matter, because any gas left in the tank of a long-unused car would have gone bad long ago.
Noah dropped the idea and did not veer into the city as the exit ramps drew closer. He figured he’d wind up wasting a lot of time there to no good end. He had enough food and water to last him a little while yet, so onward he went.
Time crept by. More miles ticked away. He began to near the outskirts of the western side of the city. The lanes of stalled traffic had thinned out for a while, but now he discerned a thicker concentration of vehicles up ahead. This was where traffic had ground to a halt flowing out of the city in the direction of Chattanooga. As he drew closer to the tangle of vehicles and observed more signs of long ago chaos, he thought about all these people making that last minute call to get out of the city before it was overrun. He couldn’t understand why they had waited so long. On the other hand, his dad had acted far earlier than most and it still hadn’t been soon enough to avoid tragedy.
Noah supposed he couldn’t blame these people too much for their shortsightedness. The majority of people in the civilized world simply hadn’t been able to believe society could collapse that quickly. They’d had a blind faith in the ability of the people in charge to come up with a solution. When it finally became clear there would be no solution, it was too late for almost everybody.
Noah shifted his shoulders and pulled at the straps of the backpack, an attempt to relieve the discomfort of bearing the weight of the thing. It was nearly time to stop and take his first rest of the day, maybe even help himself to a few more sips from the canteen. Before doing that, he did a mental inventory of the pack’s contents, frowning when he remembered the two fifths of Maker’s Mark. The impulse to bring the booze along bothered him, as did the way he’d rationalized it. Given his penchant for alcohol-related disaster, having the bottles in the pack was like carrying around a pair of ticking time bombs. Getting rid of them when he stopped would be the smart thing to do. Not only would he have removed a dangerous temptation, but the pack would be lighter, too.
Another fifty-some yards down the road, the desire to stop and rest moved into the realm of absolute necessity. He removed the pack, leaned against the median, and drank some water. These weren’t the conservative sips he’d limited himself to until now. He knew as soon as he’d done it what a mistake it was, but he blamed the distraction of his troubled thoughts for it.
After he capped the canteen and reattached it to the utility belt, he knelt and opened his pack, rooting through the contents until he’d located the bourbon bottles. He pulled them out and stared at them a long while, trying to work up the will to smash them on the asphalt. Many minutes passed as his thoughts drifted back to his troubled past. His hands clenched tight around the necks of the bottles as he remembered still more things he’d tried hard to forget.
In the end, he returned the bottles to the pack, rearranging the contents to ensure they were secure. He wrapped clothes around them for padding to reduce the risk of accidental breakage. Once this was done, he sat with his back against the median and cursed his weakness.
16 .
Six years ago…
The name of the place was Discoveries. It was a drug and alcohol addiction treatment center, probably the best-known one in the area. Noah had seen ads for the place on TV. In them, an announcer whose tone straddled the line between somber and optimistic promised addicts a place of tranquility where they could rediscover themselves as they began their “journey of recovery”. The ads boasted of a relapse rate among the lowest in the country.
Noah had snickered at the ads when he was younger, secure in the belief that he would never set foot in such a place, which were only for losers and weak people unable to manage their habits. His was a life of promise and privilege. His dad made a good living and provided well for his family. They’d never wanted for anything. He just wasn’t the kind of person who wound up hopelessly hooked on substances or locked in a seemingly intractable downward spiral.
But life had surprised him in a lot of nasty ways in
the year since graduating high school. One of the biggest shocks was how emotionally unprepared he was for dealing with moments of genuine setback. At first it seemed he would bounce back from the one-two punch of his “breakup” (if that was the right word) with Lisa and the academic disaster that was his first semester of college. He got a job shortly after coming home in early December and did his best to convey an image of repentant sobriety. It was an act he managed to pull off convincingly through the holiday season and a few weeks into the New Year.
In truth, however, he was partying hard with his new coworkers at the Winn-Dixie grocery store in his hometown. He was able to maintain the façade of sobriety for a time because he was rarely at his parents’ house that first month back. When his shift ended at midnight, he would go off with his friends and drink until dawn. Sometimes there was cocaine involved and the party would go on even longer. The group he partied with all lived the same way. They’d sleep through the day and get up just in time to go back to work. Noah always crashed wherever he happened to pass out any given night.
He was drowning his sorrows in a big way, but at the time he managed to convince himself he was having fun. The truth became apparent when his excesses began to go well beyond those of his hard-partying friends. He drove his Camaro off the road one night and crashed it into a tree. The car was totaled and later he realized he probably should have died. It was pure luck he’d been wearing his seatbelt that night, because this was something he frequently forgot to do. He walked away from the crash and hid out at a friend’s place overnight. The next day he told the cops the car had been stolen and probably crashed by the thief. The cops were dubious, as were his parents, but no charges were filed. He got off lucky that time, relatively speaking.