by Bryan Smith
He rose shakily from the chair as Noah came striding rapidly toward him with the hammer cocked back to deliver a blow. The chair scraped noisily on the floor as he tried backing out of the way. He raised a shaking hand in a feeble effort to ward off the oncoming blow, but it was a useless gesture. The head of the hammer hit the old man in the temple, knocking him sideways against the table.
Noah grabbed him by the shirt collar and hauled him away from the table. The old man’s feet got tangled and he collapsed to his hands and knees. An effort to get up failed when the next hammer blow connected with the back of his skull. He sagged face-first to the floor. When Noah rolled him over, he was blubbering and pleading for mercy.
Mercy, however, was in no way part of Noah’s agenda. The blows he’d delivered so far were measured ones. They weren’t intended to kill. He wanted to allow the old man time to appreciate the pain. The next few blows were also delivered at about half-force, but they elicited pained cries that were music to Noah’s ears. Just as pleasing was the audible splintering of bone as the hammer connected with his jaw and collarbone. The old man initially tried fighting back, but he wasn’t able to mount much of an effort in his debilitated condition.
As Noah’s rage intensified, the measured blows gave way to more savage ones, his face twisting in fury as the hammer came down harder and faster. The old man wailed in agony. At one point, he raised a trembling hand to tug at Noah’s shirt sleeve, mumbling a barely coherent plea for mercy. Noah pinned the hand to the floor and went to work on it with the hammer, demolishing knuckles and smashing fingers in a rapid flurry. The loud sound of the knuckles cracking made his rescuers gasp in dismay. Noah ignored this and resumed whacking away at the old man’s face.
A hand settled lightly against his shoulder. “Just finish him, Noah. You’ve punished him enough.”
Noah shrugged his sister’s hand away. “Get away from me!”
But then he was sobbing and Aubrey’s hand settled on his shoulder again.
Footsteps came his way after a few more moments passed.
Nick cleared his throat. “Step back, please.”
An automatic pistol was clutched in his right hand. Noah met his gaze and held it a moment before nodding wearily and moving away.
Nick aimed the pistol at the old man’s head and fired a single shot. It was a big-caliber handgun. The one bullet was sufficient to blow the top of his head apart.
Noah stared at his dead former tormentor, feeling his rage drain away only to be replaced by other feelings that were just as corrosive. Memories of his utter inability to defend himself against the old man prior to the rescue came roaring back. In that moment, he saw them as incontrovertible proof that he wasn’t strong enough to survive out in the world on his own.
He glanced at Aubrey. “Where’s my backpack? Is it still outside?”
She frowned. “Yeah. Why?”
Noah didn’t reply as he headed for the kicked-in side door. Aubrey said something else as he stepped outside, her tone plaintive and concerned, but this Noah ignored, too. Spying his backpack, he sat on the stoop and pulled it close. He tore at the straps in a frenzy to remove it from the aluminum frame.
Aubrey stepped out onto the stoop with him. “What’s in there, Noah? What do you need so bad?”
Noah had the backpack open now. He quickly rooted through its contents and extracted an unopened bottle of Maker’s Mark.
“Noah, no, that’s a bad idea.”
After peeling away the bottle’s red wax seal, Noah unscrewed the cap and took a long first drink. He tilted his head back and upended the bottle, letting the equivalent of two double-whiskey drinks pour down his throat before taking the bottle away from his mouth.
He got to his feet and glared at Aubrey. Her look of distress reminded him strongly of how she’d been before the end of things, back when he was still going through the troubles that had ensued in the wake of his breakup with Lisa. Back then everyone had been so worried about him, including his little sister. He remembered making her cry on more than one occasion.
“What the fuck do you care? You hate me.”
Aubrey flinched at the vitriol in his voice. “I don’t hate you, Noah.”
His laugh was tinged with bitterness. “Yeah? You could have fooled me, you fucking bitch. You told me to leave, remember? Hell, you even threatened to kill me. So, yeah, I’ve got a real hard time buying this concerned sister act.”
Aubrey wiped tears away. “I tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen. I was just mad. I was…”
Noah snorted. “Right. You were punishing me. That’s what you said last time, right?”
“Noah--”
“Shut up.”
Nick appeared in the doorway behind Aubrey, his features arranged in an expression of stern reproach. “You can’t talk like that to your sister. Show some respect.”
Noah took another long slug of bourbon, feeling the anger rise up inside him again at this rebuke. As always, the booze fueled the anger, twisting up his feelings and making him see every perceived slight as ten times worse than it really was.
“Fuck you. Fuck both of you.”
Noah regretted these words as soon as they were out of his mouth. They were no worse than the other ugly things he’d said to Aubrey already, but he knew he was being petty and hated himself for it. He owed these people his life. Owed them everything. But there was no taking the words back, at least not right now, while the alcohol was doing its usual dark work.
He turned away from them and began a rapid, grim march across the back yard of the old man’s house. The unfenced yard was bordered by a dense expanse of forest. Noah was nearly at the tree line when he heard Aubrey calling out to him, pleading for him to return. He ignored her and plunged through the tree line, not bothering to slow down once he’d entered the woods. He shouldered his way through low-hanging branches as his feet crunched on undergrowth. As he walked, he took many more slugs of Maker’s Mark. All the booze he was pouring down his throat would be hitting his system in a big way soon, he knew. His thoughts were already turning foggy by the time he came up over a slight rise into a small clearing and saw the pit full of bodies.
23 .
Six years ago…
The cab driver who picked Noah up the day he was discharged from Discoveries had been instructed to take him straight back to his parents’ house. His father had paid the fare in advance. There were to be no stops or detours along the way. Noah felt like a high-risk inmate being transferred from one prison to another. In his view, this impression wasn’t far from the truth. His stay at the clinic had been so tightly regulated he couldn’t imagine minimum security incarceration being much different. And now he was headed home for a stay of indefinite duration, where his father would be watching him like a hawk, ready to give him the boot if he slipped up even one more time.
Noah had exactly forty-one dollars in cash on him. He’d turned the money over—along with his wallet, cell phone, and keys—upon checking in at Discoveries. Now it had been returned to him. As the driver, a middle-aged Mexican, steered the cab through sluggish city traffic, Noah removed the bills from his wallet and offered the money in exchange for a stop at a convenience store. Heedful of his customer’s strict instructions, the driver was initially reluctant, but it was obvious he found the bit of extra cash tempting. Noah made a pained face and feigned a dire need to get to a restroom. He swore he’d be in and out of the store inside of five minutes, not nearly enough time for his father to suspect a deviation from the planned route.
The driver pocketed the money and stopped at a Speedy Mart. Noah went in and took up a position in a corner at the back of the store to get the lay of the land. The shop wasn’t a big one. Only one clerk was on duty, a teenager currently busy with a fat white woman in a cringingly small halter top who was apparently set on spending her week’s wages on lottery tickets.
Satisfied that the circumstances were optimal for committing petty theft, Noah sidled over to the beer co
oler, eased a door open, snapped a tall can off a random brand of beer, and tucked it away in his jacket. The clerk barely glanced at him as he walked back out of the store and got in the cab. He took the can out of his jacket and popped the tab with practiced, quiet precision as the driver pulled back into traffic. Noah had been inside the store for maybe two minutes. The driver made lingering eye contact with him once in the rearview mirror to show he had not been fooled, but otherwise he did not acknowledge what Noah had done.
He was dropped off at his parents’ house in the suburbs just shy of a half hour later. By then Noah had finished the tall can of Miller Lite and had shoved it back into his jacket pocket. His father was waiting for him on the long porch of the two-story Plantation style home. The old man’s face was impassive as he acknowledged Noah with a nod before tipping the driver.
They faced each other there on the semi-circular driveway, neither saying anything for an extended period.
His father’s expression was still unreadable as he broke the silence by saying, “Is that beer on your breath?”
Noah nodded. “So is this the part where you put me out on the street?”
His father shook his head, the impassiveness giving way to a look of disappointment mixed with sadness. “No, son, it isn’t.”
“But I thought I couldn’t slip up even once. I mean, that is what you said. I was there. I heard you. You don’t forget shit like that.”
His father shrugged. “What I said was said in anger. You’re my boy. I’m not giving up on you that easily.”
The effect these words had on Noah was instantaneous and intense. He broke down sobbing where he stood. His father, so taciturn usually, came to him and embraced him while the toxic emotions that had been dammed-up inside him came flooding out.
After that, Noah commenced a much more sincere effort to finally get his shit together. And it wasn’t that hard for a while. His parents’ house had been purged of anything containing alcohol prior to his return. This included not only booze but cough medicine, cooking sherry, and rubbing alcohol. While he was in the house—which was most of the time those first few weeks—he was able to stay on an even keel.
The problems began about a month later when Luke Garraty got in touch with him via a Facebook message. He had just been discharged from Discoveries and expressed a desire to stay in touch. After their contentious first encounter in group, Luke and Noah had bonded. Their relative youth compared to most other patients at the clinic fostered a tentative kinship. Now that they were both out in the world again, Luke suggested they could use each other for support to stay sober. Noah remained wary because of Luke’s prickly personality, but he could see the wisdom in the idea.
Two weeks later Luke suggested they go to an AA meeting together. According to Luke, he’d been going to meetings daily since his discharge. Noah, however, had yet to attend one. The counselors at Discoveries had relentlessly stressed the importance of daily meetings in those first few post-rehab months. When Noah told his parents about his plan to head into Nashville to go to a meeting with his rehab “friend”, they’d been all for it, seeing it as a positive development in their son’s ongoing recovery.
By then Noah had a “new” car to replace the second wrecked Camaro, a decades-old beater that cost less than two grand. His license had been suspended, but it had been reinstated upon completion of his rehab stay. He had the lenient judge who’d presided over his case to thank for that. The Pontiac had little in the way of bells and whistles, not even a working radio. But this didn’t bother Noah, who was just grateful to have a roadworthy set of wheels. On the day he drove away from his parents’ house to meet up with Luke, he did so with every intention of attending the meeting and staying on the straight and narrow. It was the first time he’d been out of the house in nearly a week and a half.
He was three miles from home when he pulled up at a traffic light that had just turned red, glanced to his right, and saw a Kwik-Stop convenience store. In the next moment, an image of Lisa Thomas popped into his head and triggered a strange swelling of heat in his chest. Until then, he’d done a decent job of making himself not think about her. For the first time since the day he was discharged from Discoveries, he had a recurrence of that old feeling of the universe conspiring against him. It was as if some dark, malevolent force had picked just the right moment to taunt him with her memory.
The light turned green.
Horns honked behind him.
Noah’s hands tightened around the Pontiac’s steering wheel in a death grip. The honking became more belligerent. He closed his eyes for a moment and counted to ten. When he opened his eyes, he cranked the steering wheel to the right and pulled into the Kwik-Stop’s parking lot.
His father had been giving him forty dollars cash a week, what he jokingly called a “modest stipend”. The intent was that he’d have a bit of walking around money if he needed it. Because he spent so much time at home, the money had been piling up. As he sat there behind the wheel of the Pontiac and tried to talk himself out of what he knew he was about to do, he had just over one-hundred and forty dollars in his pocket.
It was more than enough to go completely off the rails for one night. After several minutes of sitting there, Noah got out of the car and went into the Kwik-Stop. Shortly thereafter, he reemerged with a twelve-pack of Bud. Back in the car, he ripped the pack open, popped the tab on the first can, and headed out to Nashville to meet Luke.
By the time he arrived at his destination, he’d finished off three more.
24 .
Noah stared dazedly up at a patch of clear sky for a while before realizing he was flat on his back, freshly emerged from a state of deep unconsciousness. At first he was too groggy to have anything but the vaguest sense of where he was or why he felt so terrible. The ache in his head was so monstrous it compelled him to squeeze his eyes shut against the glare of the sun. His mouth was uncomfortably dry, which suggested alcohol had played a role in whatever had happened to him.
Fragments of memory came drifting back in the wake of this insight. He remembered the hurt look on Aubrey’s face as he lashed out at her. Some of the vicious things he’d said echoed in his head now, making him wince. His sister might have earned some of his ire, but he'd gone too far. After all, she’d come to his aid in his moment of deepest despair. She deserved gratitude and forgiveness. Instead she’d been subjected to the return of an older nightmare, Drunk Noah, mean and bitter as ever.
Shit.
The bottle of Maker’s Mark was still clasped loosely in his right hand. Noah lifted it slightly and gave it a shake. The lack of a sloshing sound told him it was empty. He let it go with a sigh, his thoughts turning immediately to the one remaining bottle in his backpack. At least he still had that. Or did he? Panic gripped him as he pictured Aubrey pouring out the bottle’s contents after a search of his pack. The image wasn’t baseless paranoia. His parents had done similar things after uncovering booze stashes in his room. Aubrey had been there for that, witnessing his embarrassment and hearing all the shouted, bitter recriminations.
She would have searched the backpack, he was sure of it. And she would definitely have dumped out the bottle. Hell, she might even have gotten rid of his weed, an even scarier prospect. He could do without booze if he had the weed. A good pot buzz always eased the cravings for what he really wanted.
He needed to gather his strength, get up off the ground, and head back to the house, hopefully arriving in time to avert total disaster. He was convinced Aubrey would let him keep the weed if he could just explain things properly. As he stretched and twisted his sore back, however, he realized there was something very wrong about the texture of the ground beneath him.
Noah turned his head first to one side and then to the other.
After a brief, horrified moment of recognition, he sat bolt upright with a screech of fright and repulsion. He was down in the pit with all the bodies, resting atop some of them. There were dozens in various stages of decay. They were
all around him, a couple layers deep at least. A slight shifting beneath him suggested the presence of reanimated remains somewhere in the midst of this mass of putrefied flesh. Something that wanted to get to him and turn him into another hungry dead thing. Even in the grip of deep repulsion, he experienced a moment of intense self-awareness. This kind of situation kept recurring. It was hard not to take it as a sign from above that his ultimate fate would involve similar circumstances.
“I would say you should get out of there before it’s too late, but you look like you’ve figured that out already.”
Noah glanced up and saw Nick standing at the edge of the pit. The look on his face was amusement tinged with annoyance. He went to a knee and extended a hand. “Come on, kid, get over here and I’ll pull you out.”
“Where’s Aubrey?”
“Back at the house looking after the woman. Now get your ass in gear.”
Noah needed no further prompting. He got to his feet and started making his way to the side of the pit. Bones crunched beneath him with every step. The bodies shifted and settled deeper, yielding to the pressure. At one point a dead thing’s abdomen gave way beneath his booted right foot, which plunged into a mass of putrescent organs. This one hadn’t been dead as long as many of the others and Noah couldn’t help reading an imaginary reproach for the insult done to its body in its twisted features. He groaned and extracted his foot. Another time he saw bony fingers emerge from the mass of flesh and strain to reach him. His heart felt ready to leap from his chest by the time he arrived at the side of the pit and reached up to grasp Nick’s hand.
The ex-soldier hauled Noah out of the pit with little discernible effort. Then, before he could thank the man, he drilled a fist into Noah’s gut, knocking him to the ground. Noah wheezed as he rolled onto his side and nearly fell back into the pit. Disaster was avoided when Nick grabbed him by an arm and pulled him well out of range—nearly to the tree line—before letting him go again.