Slowly We Rot

by Bryan Smith

  A short while later, his guess proved correct when he arrived at the edge of an enormous crater. He was careful not to get too close, fearing that the ground along the crater’s perimeter wouldn’t be stable enough to support his weight. Several feet short of the edge was near enough to have a sense of how colossally powerful the detonation had been. Its impressive depth induced a mild attack of vertigo, causing Noah to back away a few more inches.

  The crater closely resembled pictures he’d seen of bomb and meteor impacts. The only question was which of those things this had been. A meteor strike seemed more likely, if only because he could think of no sensible scenario in which anyone would have dropped a military-grade explosive device in this area. That didn’t mean such a thing hadn’t happened. A lot of bizarre and seemingly unbelievable things had occurred since the plague outbreak. Regardless, he found the meteor scenario more plausible.

  The question of what had happened here fascinated Noah, but it was time to turn his attention to the issue of what to do next. He craned his head around, studying the area. The crater’s perimeter extended well beyond the section of evaporated road. Off to the left was a wooded area. The blast had wiped out some of it, but the woods beyond the crater’s edge still stood. From Noah’s vantage point, it was impossible to tell what might be on the other side of all those trees. The land to the right looked somewhat more promising. It was unobscured by trees and would be easier to negotiate as he attempted to make his way around the crater. He squinted and was able to make out a scattering of smallish structures. It was hard to tell from this distance, but he thought they might be houses. Houses meant the possibility of supplies he could scavenge. There might even be book collections in some of them.

  The choice here wasn’t a real choice at all. It was the absolute unknown versus the potential he saw in the opposite direction. There was a chance those houses had been stripped of anything useful long ago. If nothing else, though, a house would be a good place to crash for the night, much better than another disgusting old car that had been open and exposed to the elements for years.

  Noah put some more distance between himself and the edge of the crater and set off toward the right. He climbed the guardrail and pushed through some greenery, scaling a modest slope to the top of a hill. On the other side of the hill was an access road that dead-ended at a power junction. Chain-link fencing surrounded electrical equipment and utility poles. He continued across the access road rather than walking along it, because it only led straight into the crater. After pushing through another small thatch of greenery and trees, he emerged into a wide-open expanse of ground. The structures he’d spotted earlier came into view again. This time he could see that they were houses, just a few of them scattered along a rural road less than a mile distant.

  The first house he came to had the usual overgrown lawn but looked in good shape, absolutely unscathed by the upheavals that had taken place in the world around it. In this way, it reminded him of the family cabin in the mountains. The thought made him wonder if the people who’d lived in these houses might have survived the zombie plague. It didn’t seem likely. The dead had risen and killed in virtually all population centers, regardless of how small.

  He approached the house with caution, keeping his rifle at the ready in the event of anything unexpected. There was a strong chance anyone living here would not welcome the approach of an armed stranger. But as he walked up the driveway he became certain the house was unoccupied. There was just nothing in the area to indicate otherwise. A survivor by necessity would have lived off the land the way he had in the Smokies, but there was no sign of a garden. Maybe any resident, if there was one, hunted for food exclusively. That was possible, but Noah doubted it. The overall impression was of a place abandoned long ago, which was good news for him.

  He set his rifle down to take a look through a front window, cupping his hands around his face to cut the glare of the sun. What he saw was a pretty standard-looking living room, with a sofa, recliner, coffee table, flat-screen TV mounted on the wall opposite the sofa, and some bookshelves. The bookshelves excited him for a moment, but the feeling faded when he realized they contained nothing but items that were utterly useless in this post-apocalypse age, mostly DVD’s and video games.

  Noah was still studying the contents of the living room when he sensed movement to his right and reached for his rifle. The sound of a shell being racked into the chamber of a shotgun made him wish he’d gone for the revolver at his hip instead. He might have been able to clear the holster in time to get back on equal footing with whoever this was. Instead, the interloper had gotten the drop on him and he had no choice but to freeze just before his hand could close around the barrel of the rifle.

  “Hands up and back away from the rifle, boy.”

  The voice had a gravelly quality that identified the speaker as an older man, a hunch that was verified when Noah glanced to his right. He put the man’s age at anywhere between sixty and seventy. He had a wiry build with the kind of hard muscles that came from a lifetime of grueling physical labor. Noah’s heart was already pounding from the scare induced by the racking sound, but this first glimpse of the man’s bearded visage made it race even faster. Something in the rheumy eyes and the sharp planes of his hawk-like face strongly suggested a deep capacity for cruelty.

  Noah put his hands up and backed away from the house. “You don’t need to threaten me. I was just trying to see if anyone lived here.”

  “So you could rob the place.”

  Noah shook his head. “No, sir. Your house looked unoccupied. I’m just passing through and thought I might sleep here tonight if it was empty, but I can move on to somewhere else. I’m really not a threat to you, I swear.”

  The old man smirked. “You ain’t just passing through, boy. You’ve reached the end of the road.”

  The fear gripping Noah worsened. His breathing quickened and he began to feel lightheaded, like he might fall over at any moment. “Jesus. I haven’t done anything to you. You don’t need to kill me.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that. But if you cooperate and don’t try anything funny, you’ll live a little longer at least. Now then, real slow and easy, take out that pistol and drop it on the ground.”

  Noah undid the holster’s snap and slowly withdrew the revolver, holding it gingerly by the handle, avoiding the trigger guard. He let it slide from his fingers the moment it cleared the holster and it hit the ground with a soft thump.

  The old man grinned. “Good job, boy. You know what? You look like you’re about to cry.”

  Noah clenched his teeth and tried hard to project strength rather than weakness. His guess about the man’s cruel nature appeared to have been correct and he had a feeling showing emotional vulnerability would be a very bad thing. The effort was at least partially successful. He was no longer on the verge of fainting and his features were set in a hard glare.

  But the old man was unimpressed. “Trying to act tough, huh? Well, we’ll see how tough you really are soon.” He gestured with the barrel of the shotgun. “You turn around and start walking thataway. Don’t try running or I’ll cut you down, sure as shit.”

  Noah turned around. What choice did he have?

  “Where are we going?”

  “My house. It’s just up the road a piece.”

  Noah frowned as he took his first steps in the indicated direction. “But I don’t get it. If this isn’t your place, what do you want with me?”

  “You’ll find out in due time, boy. In the meantime, hush your yackin’ and walk.”

  Noah had many other questions for his probable executioner, but he held his tongue and walked on in silence.

  19 .

  Like the one they’d left behind, the old man’s house appeared to have weathered the upheavals of the past fairly well. It was smaller than that one, lacking an attached garage. Someone, presumably the old man himself, had actually been doing a decent job of maintaining the yard. As they drew closer to the house, Noa
h spied an old-fashioned manual push mower stowed next to a side door stoop. But the yard was a big one. Mowing it manually would require a significant investment of time, not to mention a high level of patience. Then again, this was the world after the fall. Time was all anyone still alive had.

  Except for me, Noah thought. I’m about out of time.

  The old man directed Noah to the side door stoop, ordering him to a halt just short of it. He then had Noah remove the backpack and utility belt. Noah did as instructed, setting the items on the ground near the push mower.

  “Go on inside. Move real slow. You even twitch going through that door, you’re a dead little son of a bitch.”

  Noah climbed the steps to the stoop and turned the knob to open the door. Through the door was a large kitchen awash in shadow. The window blinds at the back of the house had been raised, letting in enough sunlight to see by. In a corner of the big kitchen area was a large, round dining table. Pinned to the wall next to a row of cupboards was a calendar from the year before the end of the world.

  An unsettling thought came to Noah as he continued into the kitchen—This is where I die.

  “Turn around, boy.”

  Noah sighed and did as ordered.

  A hard fist slammed into his stomach, knocking the air from his lungs and dropping him to his knees. Before he could begin to recover from the first blow, the old man’s fist came arcing toward him again. This time knuckles crashed against Noah’s jaw. An explosion of pain went off in his head as he pitched sideways onto the dusty hardwood floor. It was so intense it briefly made cognizance of anything else impossible. When the first wave of pain receded, he realized the old man had him by the wrists and was dragging him across the floor. The son of a bitch had set his shotgun down, but Noah was effectively incapacitated and incapable of gaining any advantage from this. He twisted his head around and glimpsed their likely destination—an open door in a corner of the kitchen.

  Through the door was only blackness. A queasy feeling ignited in Noah’s gut upon peering into that dark rectangle. As they got closer to the door, the impression of perfect blackness yielded to an even more disturbing reality. He glimpsed a concrete landing and, beyond it, a wooden handrail at the top of a staircase. When he realized the old man meant to put him in a basement, he finally recovered enough of his wits to attempt resistance. He tried bracing his feet flat on the floor to get some traction, which would hopefully give him just enough leverage to try jerking his hands free. But the old man saw what he was doing and countered by giving his wrists a painfully hard yank.

  Then they were through the doorway. Noah felt his ass sliding over concrete and realized time was running out. Any remaining chance of escape would vanish if the old man managed to get him secured down there in the darkness. And he had a hunch it would be better to die now than let that happen. This old man wasn’t just an apocalypse survivor defending his territory. There was something wrong with him, an impression backed up by the avid glint in his eyes. He was obviously a sadist and was enjoying Noah’s terror.

  In a last desperate gambit to escape imprisonment, he hooked a foot around an edge of the doorframe. The sudden resistance threw the old man’s stride off slightly, almost enough to make him lose his grip on Noah’s wrists. Noah experienced an exhilarating moment of hope, but he wasn’t able to act fast enough to seize an advantage. The old man recovered quickly. He tightened his grip and gave Noah’s wrists a hard yank, pulling him the rest of the way through the doorway.

  The old man hauled him to his feet on the landing, turned him around, and punched him hard in the small of the back. Noah’s knees hit the concrete at the edge of the staircase. His vision blurred as he peered down into the darkness. He made out some dim shapes but nothing would come into focus.

  His right hand groped shakily for the handrail. Before he could grip it, the heel of the old man’s boot slammed into Noah’s back and the next thing he knew he was tumbling down the stairs. The pain was immense, the worst yet, and when he landed with a thump at the bottom of the stairs he couldn’t move. At first he was afraid he’d broken his neck in the fall and was paralyzed, but soon he realized he still had sensation throughout his extremities. He was just too bruised and battered—too thoroughly in the grip of all-encompassing pain—to attempt movement. None of his limbs seemed broken, but it was impossible to be sure about that just yet. For the moment, he was nothing but a lump of immobile flesh trapped in a dark, scary place.

  He heard heavy footsteps clomping down the stairs, the old man coming to check on his catch. The sound made Noah’s breathing quicken. He tried reaching out a hand to grope around for some kind of weapon, anything at all he could use to take a good, hard swing at the old man’s hateful, ugly face. But he wasn’t able to extend his hand more than an inch without sending a lance of agony sizzling down the length of his arm.

  The old man laughed when he heard Noah’s anguished whimper. His inability to do anything at all to defend himself infuriated Noah. This was the most helpless and ineffectual he’d felt since the week after he got out of rehab. Things had ended in disaster then and it was looking as if history was about to repeat itself.

  Another sound from deeper in the darkness temporarily distracted Noah from his terror. A whimpering. It was very faint, but there was something in the timbre of it suggestive of femininity. A sudden certainty gripped him. He wasn’t the only prisoner in the basement. There was a woman down here with him and she was either afraid or in pain.

  Or both.

  Probably both, Noah thought.

  He quivered in fear as he sensed the old man standing directly above him. His tormentor drew in a satisfied-sounding deep breath and slowly exhaled it. Then the heel of the old man’s boot settled against the center of Noah’s back, resting lightly there without bearing down.

  “Welcome to your new home, boy.”

  He began to bear down on Noah then, grinding the heel of his boot into his back hard enough to make it feel like his spine was on the verge of splintering. Noah squirmed beneath him and begged for mercy, hating the pitiful sound of his high-pitched voice. He heard another pathetic sound drift out of the darkness and realized the other prisoner was crying. Whether it was out of fear for herself or sympathy for Noah’s suffering, he couldn’t say. Again, it was probably both.

  Noah cleared phlegm from his throat and sniffled. “Why are you doing this?”

  The old man laughed and said nothing. The boot came away from Noah’s back. The relief this afforded him was short-lived, because the next thing he knew the toe of the same boot was slamming into his side. Noah screamed in agony. More savage kicks followed the first. Noah screamed some more. Then the stomping ceased and for a moment there was an ominous silence.

  Then, somewhere in the darkness, the woman’s whimpers increased in volume. The old man had shifted his attention to her. His laughter accompanied the meaty sound of his fist pounding into her flesh. The woman’s whimpers gave way to gasps of pain. There was a sense of the methodical in the way the old man delivered his punches. Instead of coming in rapid succession, they were spaced several seconds apart, as if to allow the woman time to properly appreciate the pain inflicted before giving her another dose of the same. The weird thing was that she wasn’t begging him to stop. Noah supposed the most likely explanation was that he’d worked her over so often she no longer held out any hope of mercy. Or maybe it was a kind of defiance.

  Noah’s eyes began to adjust to the darkness, a process aided by the wedge of faint sunlight filtering in through the open door at the top of the staircase. Shapes in the basement came into fuzzy focus.

  The nude woman the old man was working over was chained to a pipe running across the basement’s ceiling. She was slender and of about medium height. The old man had adjusted the length of the chain so she could only stand on her tiptoes, which meant her arms were at full extension all the time. The constant strain on her muscles had to be excruciating. When Noah lifted his head and squinted at her, he
was able to make out another detail.

  Her mouth had been sewn shut.

  And there was something else, a hint of dim familiarity. At first Noah believed this was a false impression, but then it came to him where he’d seen her before.

  She was the woman in the pictures in Patrick Brasher’s wallet.

  20.

  After beating on the woman for a seemingly interminable time, the old man went to work on Noah again. This second thrashing was no less brutal than the first. He was kicked so hard so many times he feared he was in danger of expiring from internal injuries. But that didn’t happen and soon the old man ceased kicking Noah and moved away from him. Some subsequent noises suggested he was moving some things around in the basement. Noah assumed this would be another brief respite before the beating resumed, but in a few moments he heard the man’s footsteps clomping up the stairs. Seconds after that, the door slammed shut, a sound followed by a click as the lock was turned.

  Noah had been left unbound on the floor. It was hard to take this as anything but a sign of contempt from his jailer. The old man didn’t think he was a threat. Realizing this stirred a flicker of anger, as well as a faint desire to gather his strength, get up off this floor, and go kick that door open. A fuzzy fantasy of beating the man to death with his fists fluttered through his head, but all this drifted away as consciousness began to ebb. His body was too overwhelmed and needed to shut down for a while.

  When consciousness returned, there was light in the basement and Noah had been chained to another of the overhead pipes. Like the woman, the length of the chain securing his wrists had been adjusted so he could only stand on his toes. The strain on the muscles in his arms was already significant. Every little movement sent pain lashing down his back. Also like the woman, all his clothes had been removed. There was no sign of them anywhere in the basement. Noah’s terror level edged even higher at this revelation.