Slowly We Rot

by Bryan Smith

  Nick lit a cigarette and smoked, saying nothing while Noah wheezed and held onto his stomach a while longer.

  After the pain and queasiness subsided, Noah sat up and looked at Nick. “I guess I deserved that.”

  Nick dropped the cigarette butt on the ground and squashed it beneath the heel of his boot. “I guess I agree.”

  Noah held out a hand. “Help me up?”

  Nick hauled him back to his feet.

  They stood there without saying another word for a minute while Nick lit another cigarette. After blowing out a long stream of aromatic smoke, he took the pack from his shirt pocket and offered it to Noah, who declined. Nick shrugged. “More for me.”

  Noah frowned. “All right, whatever. I’ll have one.”

  Within moments, they were both smoking and eyeing the pit of rotting bodies with varying degrees of disgust and disbelief. The disbelief was mostly on Noah’s part, who was experiencing a bit of post-traumatic stress.

  Nick grunted. “Gotta admit, kid, when I came up on this pile of dead folks and saw you lying right in the middle of them, I thought, ‘This asshole might just be too stupid to live’.” He cocked an eyebrow at Noah. “Seriously, how does a thing like that happen?”

  Noah took too deep a drag on his cigarette and coughed some before replying. “These things are stale as shit. Goddamn. Anyway, I couldn’t tell you how it happened. I don’t actually remember.”

  Nick chuckled and shook his head. “Damn, kid.”

  “Please stop calling me ‘kid’. It drives me fucking insane.”

  Nick nodded. “Fair enough. Can’t promise I won’t slip now and again, but I’ll try to keep a lid on it. Listen. Aubrey filled me in on some stuff. You’ve got your demons. I’ve got some of my own. And in a world gone to shit, I get how tempting it can be to say ‘fuck it’ and not worry about keeping them under control. But I don’t want you drinking while you’re with us. Shit like this should be all the proof you need that it’s too fucking dangerous.”

  “You sound like my dad.”

  “Your father must have been a genius.”

  Noah laughed.

  Nick’s expression sobered. “I’m serious, though. You just can’t do it.”

  Noah flicked his half-smoked cigarette into the body pit. “It’s like you said about calling me ‘kid’. I can’t promise not to slip now and then, but I’ll do my best to keep my shit together. And you need to cut me some slack here. That shit in the basement was a goddamn horror show.”

  Nick shrugged. “That shit in the basement did earn you some slack. Why do you think I only hit you once?” He chuckled at Noah’s sneering expression. “Relax, that’s a joke. Seriously, I get it. I really do. You still shouldn’t drink.”

  Noah nodded and said nothing.

  They stood there at the edge of the pit in contemplative silence for a while, each thinking about the same things but from drastically differing perspectives. For his part, Noah knew an opportunity to scavenge some alcohol would eventually present itself. The trick would be how to secure it and stow it away without the others noticing. Nick, on the other hand, almost certainly understood what Noah had in mind and would be keeping an eye out to prevent it from happening. Noah couldn’t know exactly what was in Nick’s head, of course, but he figured this was pretty close.

  His brow furrowed as he glanced at Nick. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad things worked out the way they did earlier. Like really, really fucking glad, you just have no idea. But why did you come after me at all? And how did you know what route I’d take away from the Smokies?”

  “That’s all your sister’s doing, Noah. She insisted we come after you. There was no arguing with her. The route was pure guesswork. Aubrey did some poking around in the cabin. She found something in the cellar that made her think you might have gone off in search of some old girlfriend.”

  The box of mementos from his college days. Nick couldn’t be referring to anything else. After sorting through its contents—which included old letters, notebooks, campus photos, and school-related documents—he’d found the scrap of envelope and the photo strip containing his last remaining image of Lisa. At that point, he lost all interest in everything else the box contained. The rest of it got left there on the floor. And his sister was one of the most intuitive people he’d ever known.

  He sighed. “Aubrey’s a smart girl.”

  “That she is.”

  Another, briefer silence followed this comment.

  Then Nick said, “I’ll be keeping an eye on you. You know that, right?”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  Nick tilted his chin, a gesture meant to indicate the body pit. “What do you think the deal is with this horrific fucking shit? It’s pretty goddamn weird. Seriously? A body pit in the middle of nowhere? I mean, I’ve seen things like it. Burned-up piles of bodies in trenches dug by soldiers, but that was an anti-zombie containment measure. This…well, this is something else.”

  “The old guy was a serial killer.”

  Nick glanced at Noah, an eyebrow arched. “Yeah?”

  Noah nodded. “He all but confirmed it. I think if you dug up his back yard, you’d find more remains, but they’d be older, from before the end of the world. After the apocalypse, he didn’t have to worry so much about hiding evidence, but he didn’t want a bunch of corpses stinking up his house either. So he dug this pit.”

  “And when he was done with someone, he’d drag them out here and dump them in it. Only it looks like he didn’t bother finishing the job with some of them.”

  “I ran into another one he didn’t finish off on the way out here.”

  “A zombie?”

  “Yeah. I took a look at its wallet after I put a knife through its head.” Noah jerked a thumb over his shoulder while keeping his gaze on the body pit. “That woman back there? There were pictures of her in it.”

  “Jesus. No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  They both chewed that over a moment longer before Nick said, “We need to get back. I don’t like leaving Aubrey alone this long.”

  “Okay. I’m tired of looking at dead things anyway.”

  And with that, they turned away from the pit and walked out of the woods.

  25 .

  They set up camp in the old man’s back yard that night. Fearful the evening would be haunted by revenants and echoes of past atrocities, no one wanted any part of sleeping in a deceased serial killer’s house. There was a similar lack of interest in seeking shelter in other houses in the area, primarily because they were spaced so far apart. Everyone was too tired to go off exploring. Thus it was decided that they should rest and save their energy for the next day.

  Nick raided a shed behind the house and turned up a shovel. He used it to dig a crude fire pit in the approximate center of the big yard, well away from both the nightmare house and the tree line. Noah helped by gathering wood for the fire. With June just around the corner, cold nights were not an issue. The fire was to drive away the darkness. Not just the night itself, but the darkness encroaching on their thoughts. They were huddled around it now, with the exception of Linda, the woman from the basement. She was sleeping in Noah’s tent, loaded up on antibiotics and zonked-out on powerful painkillers.

  Aubrey discovered the meds during a thorough search of the old man’s house. He’d accumulated an impressive range of pharmaceuticals. Some had probably been scavenged from the homes of dead neighbors. The various names on the vials—patient names and the names of prescribing doctors—made this obvious. But the bulk of it was in generic bottles and packages with labels identifying the various drugs. At some point, apparently, he’d emptied an abandoned pharmacy of its contents.

  Noah sat on the other side of the fire from Nick and Aubrey. He glanced at his tent as he drank from his canteen. A snoring sound from that direction was just audible over the crackling of the flames.

  Noah capped the canteen and looked at Nick. “How’s she doing?”

  The big man shrug
ged. “Hard to say. Nothing we can do about any internal damage. The antibiotics will hopefully help fight infection, but they might have lost some potency over time. We’ll feed her as many as she can take and hope it does the trick. That old bastard beat her to hell, though.”

  A grim silence descended. The fire crackled and Nick and Aubrey held hands as they peered into the flames. Noah squeezed his eyes shut and bit down hard on his bottom lip, willing himself to hold back tears.

  His eyes opened when he tasted blood. “It’s funny, isn’t it?”

  Aubrey’s gaze shifted from the flames to her brother. “What is?”

  “You did the thing I couldn’t do, the thing you condemned me for. You came down from the mountain and saved me from a situation just like the one you were trapped in all those years.” Noah’s hands clamped tight around the canteen. He wished so desperately it was a whiskey bottle instead. “I’ve never believed in any kind of higher power, you know. That’s kind of why I had so much trouble with AA and the twelve-step zombies. But maybe I’ve been wrong all along. Maybe what happened here is that motherfucking higher power teaching me the most obvious object lesson in history.”

  Now it was Aubrey who was blinking back tears. “I’m sorry, Noah. This never should have happened. I shouldn’t have been so mean.”

  “Don’t apologize. You were right. I deserved it. I’ve deserved every bad thing that’s ever happened to me.”

  Nick sighed. “Don’t read anything bigger into what happened here, man. The universe isn’t trying to teach you anything. Life is randomness and chaos. The proof is all around us. And sometimes things line up in a way that make us see signs or omens that aren’t really there. That’s all that happened here.”

  Noah drummed his fingers on the canteen and grunted. “If you say so.”

  Aubrey gave him one of her typically shrewd, appraising looks. “You really wish that had booze in it, don’t you?”

  “That obvious, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  Noah shrugged. “You know, I hardly drank all those years you were gone. I’d hoarded a bunch of liquor, yeah, but I mostly left it alone. I kind of thought I was over my issues, but I guess not. It doesn’t matter that the world ended. The same old fucking pattern plays out again anyway. I’m hopeless.”

  Nick cleared his throat after a brief silence. “Well, that sort of brings us around to a subject we should discuss.”

  Something in the ex-soldier’s tone triggered a reflexive defensiveness in Noah. “I don’t need to hear another goddamn ultimatum or lecture. I got the fucking message already.”

  Nick shook his head. “I’ve said my piece as far as that goes. I think we both know where we stand there. And I actually don’t think it’s realistic to expect you to never drink again. You’re an alcoholic. Which is why I think when we break camp in the morning, we need to head back to the Smokies.”

  Noah’s expression hardened. “Not happening.”

  Nick held up a placating hand. “Just hear me out. I know you’ve got this goal in mind, but it’s one you conjured up out of desperation. You need to let go of this fantasy about reuniting with some girl who’s probably dead and focus on what’s real. You’ve got part of your family back. You want to look for signs in something? Start right there. Because that’s a goddamn miracle. You need to embrace that and head back to the mountain with us. We’ll be safe there.”

  Noah said nothing for a while as he thought about his close call out there in the body pit. If Nick hadn’t come along when he did, some reanimated dead thing would eventually have crawled up out of the muck to take a bite out of him. The world outside his former retreat was a perilous place. Nick was undeniably right about the wisdom of returning to the mountain.

  For Noah, though, it didn’t matter.

  His course was set, for better or worse.

  “You and Aubrey can head back. I’ll be okay out here on my own.” Noah said this without confidence. His track record so far pointed to a high likelihood of calamity if left to his own devices. But recognizing this in no way lessened his determination to keep going. “I’m not going back and that’s all there is to it.”

  Nick heaved a frustrated sigh. “Noah--”

  “You’re wasting your breath, man. I’m seeing this through.”

  “But why?” Now there was an edge in Aubrey’s voice that hadn’t been there since that last day on the mountain. “Nick’s right. She’s probably dead. And even if she isn’t, she’s thousands of miles away. You’ll never find her.”

  Noah nodded. “You’re right. You’re both right about everything. But one way or another, I’m getting to California to find out for myself.”

  Aubrey shook her head. “I just wish I understood why.”

  Noah shrugged. “If I went back to the mountain with you, we could all live safely up there a long time. I don’t dispute that at all. But what you’re not taking into account is how lonely I’ve been. And I’m talking about lonely in a way that having you guys around ain’t gonna help. You and Aubrey have each other. That’s everything. You don’t understand how big that is. But me? I’ve got nobody. And if I go back to the mountain, that’s how it’ll always be. Maybe Lisa’s dead. You’re probably right about that. But even a small chance that she’s still out there somewhere makes the risk worthwhile to me. If you can’t understand that, fine, but I’m doing this anyway.”

  Another of those contemplative silences descended, but it was short-lived.

  Aubrey locked eyes with Noah across the fire. “I’m going with you.”

  Noah gave his head an adamant shake. “No way. I appreciate what you did for me today, but you don’t owe me anything else.”

  “I’m going, goddammit.” Aubrey smirked. “I can be just as stubborn as you, brother, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  Nick threw up his hands in surrender. “Fuck it. We’re all going. I’d get bored as shit on that goddamn mountain sooner or later anyway.”

  An impulse to argue further came and went. In truth, Noah was hugely relieved by this development. He had little to no faith in his ability to get to California on his own. Aside from the additional support and protection having company along for the journey would afford him, the biggest thing was not being alone. He’d had enough of that for several lifetimes.

  Nick stood up and stretched, groaning loudly as he twisted his back. “You two get some sleep. I’ll take first watch.”

  A big yawn made Noah realize how sleepy he really was. He stretched out on the ground near the fire and laid his head down on his backpack, using it for a pillow. Within seconds, he was asleep and dreaming about Lisa Thomas. In the dream, she was smiling and standing on the rear balcony of a beach house somewhere in California. She was as radiantly beautiful as Noah remembered.

  Until her flesh began to rapidly rot and slide off her bones as the bright California sky turned blood-red behind her.

  26 .

  Several days later they reached the outskirts of Nashville. By then it was early June and getting hotter. The increasing heat made them sluggish and reduced the amount of ground they could cover each day. Linda Brasher’s deteriorated physical condition also contributed to a slower than optimal pace. In the beginning, she was incapable of traveling any significant distance by foot.

  Nick’s solution was to improvise a carry sling with some bed sheets pilfered from the old man’s house. He carried Linda on his back, transferring the burden of transporting his gear to Noah and Aubrey. Nick was the biggest and strongest of them all by far, making him the obvious man for the job, but even he could only carry her a few miles at a time before rest became necessary.

  All the while, they kept doing what they could to improve Linda’s health, giving her water and feeding her a generous daily ration of antibiotics. They even coaxed her into having the occasional bite of dried meat. At first making her eat was difficult. Her lips were still painfully sore from having been sewn together the last few weeks, but eventually hunger overrode her discom
fort.

  By the third day, she had recovered enough strength to walk for short stretches at a time. Her reliance on Nick lessened significantly each day thereafter, to the point where she was traveling entirely under her own power by the time they reached Nashville.

  They had agreed to venture into the city more than a day ahead of arrival, with the intention of foraging for supplies. As with Knoxville, the highway lanes leading out of the city were clogged with dead cars. If anything, the evidence of chaos and destruction was even more abundant here. This included a massive pileup of vehicles unlike anything Noah had ever seen. It was even worse than the chain reaction of carnage that had apparently occurred in the wake of the tanker blast outside Knoxville. For a long stretch, it was impossible to discern the shape of anything much like an even partially intact car, just mounds of twisted, blackened metal strewn everywhere. There was so much of it that threading their way through the wreckage was not an option, so they climbed over the concrete median to the other side of the highway and kept going.

  The downtown skyline was still several miles distant when it came into view. Noah’s first glimpse of it as it resolved into focus through the afternoon heat haze stirred feelings of dread. This had little to do with any potential danger lurking inside the city. The real reason for it was that he hadn’t been back there since that fateful day spent carousing with an unhinged Luke Garraty.

  As they drew closer to downtown, however, dread gave way to a mixture of horror and astonishment. There were gaping holes in several of the buildings. A few of the more structurally unsound ones looked on the verge of collapse. Noah was sure at least one skyscraper was no longer standing. The wounded skyline featured a gap that didn’t match his memory. He pictured mounds of rubble clogging the area where it had stood, his mind conjuring images similar to his fuzzy memories of the 9/11 tragedy in New York City. The remaining tall buildings were likely all death traps. Anything worth scavenging wouldn’t come from that direction.