Slowly We Rot

by Bryan Smith

  The dead man in the recliner was gone.

  Noah wondered whether he might still be asleep. Maybe this was only a dream. But the world around him felt too real to hold onto that idea for long. He was awake and the dead man was really gone. This was so inexplicable it had Noah questioning his sanity. Yes, he’d been drunk—and kind of still was—but he was sure the body in that chair had been the one-hundred percent dead and gone forever kind. There had been no hint of animation whatsoever. And, on the off-chance he’d been wrong about that, what had happened to the thing? It wouldn’t have just walked away without first taking the time to tear out Noah’s throat.

  So what the fuck?

  Still shaken, Noah got to his feet and did a woozy circuit of the house. He didn’t find the corpse from the recliner, just the other, still very non-animated members of the household he’d discovered earlier. He poked at them with the empty wine bottle, belatedly regretting having taken off without first arming himself, another in a very long series of stupid mistakes. Luckily, these other corpses didn’t respond to his prodding. His confusion deepening, he returned to the living room to stare at the recliner again.

  It was still empty.

  Noah glanced at the empty wine bottle and shuddered, wondering if the wine had been spiked with some kind of hallucinogen. The situation was just that odd. And yet the seal on the bottle had been unbroken before he’d opened it. His mind went round and round on the subject, maddeningly so, but was unable to land on a plausible explanation for what had happened. Making it all worse, he was sure the corpse had really been there. It hadn’t been something falsely conjured by a booze-addled mind moments away from spiraling down into sleep.

  About that, he was absolutely positive.

  More or less.

  Becoming steadily more disturbed, Noah set the empty bottle on a table and hurried out of the house. As he jogged down the driveway, he glanced back one more time. He stumbled and nearly fell when he saw that the blind covering the big front window to the right of the door was now partly open. The living room was on the other side of that blind. It had been fully closed prior to his departure from the house. Noah had never believed in ghosts or hauntings, but now he was sure he was picking up sinister vibes from the house. He got himself relatively steady as he reached the street, at which point he took off running at full speed.

  This time he didn’t look back.

  When he got back to the house where he’d spent the previous night, he found Nick and Aubrey sitting in the canvas patio chairs out back. A shovel was propped against the brick wall behind them. Noah saw a big mound of freshly turned earth in the middle of the patch of dead grass adjacent to the patio.

  They refused to look at Noah or even acknowledge him as he approached the patio, saying nothing as he thanked them for burying Linda. Instead they stared straight ahead with identical blank expressions, sitting so still that they looked like department store mannequins. The silent treatment stirred him to irritation, but he let the feeling slide away. They were entitled to their animosity.

  He gave up trying to engage them and went into the house to take a nap.

  The journey resumed the next day.

  A month later, they were in Henryetta, Oklahoma.

  PART THREE: PURPLE SKY COUNTRY

  35.

  “Might want to put the book away, Noah. We’re almost to the exit.”

  The voice belonged to Nick. Noah heard the man’s words. Some part of his consciousness grasped their meaning. But he did not immediately acknowledge them. Most of his attention in that moment belonged to the brittle old paperback western he was reading as he walked along I-40. He had reached the last chapter and was determined to finish what had been a mesmerizing read thus far. The slim paperback had been printed more than sixty years earlier and as he turned the pages, they had a tendency to come loose from the binding. He’d left numerous yellowed pages fluttering in the breeze during this latest leg of the trek west.

  He’d resumed reading the books right after the debacle outside Jackson, preferring immersion in make believe worlds to reality. The focus on reading kept his mind off things he’d rather not think about. It also gave him an excuse to keep interaction with Nick and Aubrey to a minimum. Any actual entertainment value gleaned from the pages was a bonus.

  But his current read was an especially compelling tale. It was called Shadow Rider and it was about a ruthless group of outlaws who’d taken over a Colorado mining town. The gang terrorized the local populace without mercy until an unknown avenger with a rifle began taking them out one by one. Try as they might, the members of the dwindling gang could not track the marksman down. He was an elusive phantom, nameless and faceless, and some said he wasn’t even human, a theory given some credence by the way gang members who tried to flee the territory tended to get shot off their mounts. It didn’t matter what time of day or night they tried to leave—or how many precautions they took—they got gunned down just the same.

  In the last chapter, the sole surviving member of the gang was sitting alone with a bottle of rotgut in a saloon on the town’s main drag. His name was Quinn, and he was a rawboned old son of a bitch with skin that was dark and leathery from decades of tough frontier life. He was mean as a rattlesnake and had been known to gun men down for no reason at all, unless the pure pleasure of watching their brains leave their skulls counted as a reason. The saloon’s other patrons had vamoosed moments after he banged through the establishment’s batwing doors. Prior to his entrance, he’d stood out in the street under the light of the full moon and called out the unknown avenger.

  Noah was enthralled as the batwing doors swung open again and a mysterious man in black entered the saloon.

  And that was when he heard Nick’s voice again. “Noah! The exit, man.”

  Frowning, Noah glanced up from the book. His immersion in the story was so complete he’d walked past the point where the exit ramp forked away from the interstate. He turned about to look at Nick and Aubrey, who were trailing after him and had stopped in their tracks.

  Things had changed since Jackson. His sister was more aloof now. She hadn’t reverted to her previous overt hostility, but his behavior in the aftermath of Linda’s death had interrupted the restoration of their bond. In the days just ahead of the events in Jackson, things had been good between them, almost like they’d been in the old days. Now she was cold to him nearly all the time. They talked only when necessary and only in the most perfunctory way. And she and Nick always trailed well behind him on the highway. Sometimes he’d look back and barely be able to see them. On occasion the impression was so pronounced it was as if they weren’t there at all.

  Reluctantly, he closed the paperback and tucked the slim volume in a rear pocket of his jeans as he backtracked to the ramp. The fate of Quinn the outlaw would have to wait a bit longer. “We really need to check this place out?” He directed a glance skyward. It was early afternoon and the blazing summer sun was still pinned high above them in the blue sky. “It’s early yet. We could make another ten miles by nightfall if we keep going.”

  Nick shook his head. “You know we have to stop. We’re low on everything. We talked about this, but maybe you don’t remember what with having your nose stuck in a damn book all the time.”

  Noah sighed. “Fine. You’re right. I don’t remember. Why don’t you remind me?”

  “Do me a favor, kid. Check your canteen.”

  Being called “kid” still rankled, but Noah figured that was the point. Nick’s strategy here apparently involved making Noah mad to get his message across. Having no interest in playing that kind of game, he decided to humor the guy. He removed his canteen, screwed off the cap, and turned it upside down. After several seconds passed, a solitary drop of water hit the pavement.

  Nick looked smug. “Get the point?”

  Noah supposed he did. He knew without checking that his backup canteen was empty, too. They wouldn’t get a lot farther down the road if they didn’t replenish their wa
ter supply as soon as possible.

  He turned away from them and started down the exit ramp. In a few moments, Nick and Aubrey pulled even with Noah and the three of them walked side by side along the twisting brown ribbon of concrete. Before long they rounded a bend in the tree-shrouded ramp and glimpsed the outskirts of the little town of Henryetta. Initially there wasn’t much to see. A small general store was the only visible structure along the narrow stretch of road that cut through the interstate junction.

  Some of the earlier one-sided “conversation” with Nick filtered back through the haze of Noah’s previous inattention. According to the atlas, some five-thousand people had lived in Henryetta before the apocalypse. A town that small likely wasn’t rich in resources, but Oklahoma City was still some ninety miles to the west.

  Nick was right. They needed to stock up here if they could. Upon reaching the narrow road, they paused to assess the situation. The terrain surrounding the junction was largely wooded, which made it impossible to see more than a quarter mile in either direction. A sign on the opposite side of the road helpfully pointed the way to Henryetta, which was two miles from where they now stood. It was agreed, however, that they should first check out the general store.

  But the store had been cleaned out long ago. Its food shelves and drink coolers were entirely empty, as were endcap and counter displays once filled with snack items for impulse buyers. Except for a corpse that sat slumped against a wall, the storage area in back was just as empty. The dead man had been there a long time. He was little more than a skeleton clad in jeans and a T-shirt. An ID badge was pinned to the shirt. A hole in the center of the dead store employee’s forehead suggested he’d come to a less than peaceful end. Noah couldn’t help imagining a gang of apocalypse marauders robbing the place blind before putting a bullet through this poor bastard’s head. Leave out the element of a world overwhelmed by hordes of risen dead things and it wasn’t that far removed from scenarios in some of the western novels he’d read.

  It was a sobering insight. The world was a dangerous place now, but in the early apocalypse days it had been a nonstop nightmare of lawlessness and savagery. And for people like this guy there had been no mysterious lone avenger around to take out the bad guys and set things right.

  They left the store and arrived in Henryetta a short while later, weapons at the ready as they began a cautious walk down what had been the town’s modest main drag. Like most of the towns they’d explored along the way, there were no signs of recent habitation. The streets were littered with wind-scattered refuse and there was some of the usual evidence of long ago chaos, including burned-out cars that had crashed into buildings or utility poles. Being a small town, the roads leading in and out of Henryetta weren’t clogged with stalled vehicles. But it was just as eerily silent as the bigger cities.

  Silence alone wouldn’t have bothered Noah much. The whole damn world was a pretty quiet place now, except for when a storm got to brewing. In Henryetta’s case, however, the silence was imbued with an extra level of creepiness by the dozens of dead bodies hanging from power lines. The average state of decay suggested the bodies had been twisting in the wind a long time, probably for years. Like the dead man back at the general store, many of them were little more than skeletons in clothes.

  Noah addressed Nick without looking at him. “The bodies are some kind of warning, aren’t they?”

  “Got to be. And not a friendly one, either. More a ‘stay the hell out or this will happen to you’ kind of thing.”

  Noah’s forefinger jittered against the trigger guard of his rifle. He felt a rising anxiety as he studied the dark windows of the buildings lining either side of the street. Despite the hanging bodies, Henryetta gave every appearance of being a ghost town. And yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched. He knew this was almost certainly not true, that it was just paranoia, but this made his unease no less real.

  He hadn’t felt this unsettled since exploring the Jackson compound, a heavily fortified encampment that had probably been the source of the zombie horde they’d encountered on their way to that city. Evidence at the site suggested the compound had served as a reliable safe haven for a large group of people for a long time. But then something had gone wrong. Some unknown calamity had swept through the place, leaving everyone inside it dead. Picking through the belongings of those people in an ultimately fruitless effort to determine what had happened had been unnerving. A similar feeling of being watched had plagued him there.

  “Maybe we should heed the warning. I don’t like the feel of this place.”

  Nick grunted. “You’re just spooked, that’s all. Situation’s still the same. We need supplies. Besides, whoever did this is long gone.”

  Noah frowned, unconvinced. “I wish I shared your confidence.”

  His head swiveled side to side as he continued his careful visual sweep of the area. A few of the storefronts were boarded-up, but the proprietors of most of the little businesses here hadn’t bothered with this precaution. Noah supposed in some cases there simply hadn’t been time, the owners having taken far too long to grasp just how apocalyptically dire the spreading global crisis really was. Others maybe did comprehend the situation all too well and came to the conclusion that protecting soon to be worthless retail property was a low priority.

  “Is that what I think it is?”

  This was the first time Noah had heard Aubrey’s voice in a while. It was as cool and unemotional as ever. The binoculars Nick had swiped from that sporting goods store several weeks earlier dangled from a strap around her slender neck. She put the binoculars to her eyes now and quickly adjusted the focus.

  Noah squinted as he followed her gaze. At first he wasn’t sure what had captured her attention, but soon the shape of a structure much larger than any others they’d encountered in Henryetta came into fuzzy focus. It was several blocks down on the right-hand side of the main drag, too far away to have perceived its potential significance. Until now.

  Aubrey lowered the binoculars. “Holy shit. It’s a Walmart supercenter.”

  A little farther down the street, Noah could see she was right. The store had that familiar Walmart sprawl, along with the usual gigantic parking lot. It seemed strange that the former retail giant would have put one of its megalithic commerce centers in such a small town, but only at first. Noah had been up on the mountain a long time and had forgotten much about the way things once were out in the world, including the ubiquity of some retailers.

  “Told you coming here was the right thing,” Nick said. “There’s the answer to all our problems right there.”

  Noah didn’t quite share Nick’s unbridled optimism. The store wouldn’t solve all their problems. It would, however, solve some of them.

  Unless, of course, that theoretical gang of apocalypse marauders had cleaned out the supercenter, too. Noah cringed at the thought, irked by the way it infringed upon his improving mood. He considered voicing the possibility, but in the end he kept his mouth shut. Either the store had been looted or it had not.

  One way or another, they would find out soon enough.

  36.

  One of the store’s two main entrances was barricaded. The other entrance was open and they paused there a moment before entering the store. At some point in the (probably) distant past, someone had used a large vehicle to smash through the sliding doors. A spray of glass littered the sidewalk outside the entrance as well as the lobby floor inside it. The vehicle, of which there was no sign, had also smashed some shopping carts. Noah pictured a big heavy duty truck smashing through the doors.

  Or a bulldozer.

  Noah unshouldered his pack and knelt carefully on the glass-strewn sidewalk. He unzipped the pack and glanced up at Nick, whose brow was furrowed in worry as he peered into the store’s dark interior. “What do you think? Did they leave us anything?”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  Noah took a flashlight from the pack and thumbed the switch, testing
it to see if the batteries were still good. The cone of light it projected when he pointed it at the store’s entrance was a relief. They’d picked up the flashlights at a hardware store in Little Rock. Because he hadn’t used electric devices of any type in so long, he had trouble trusting even simple ones to work. He’d also been dubious about the batteries, suspecting they wouldn’t still hold a charge after so many years sealed in their packaging. Thus far he’d been wrong on both counts, but he remained wary.

  Nick and Aubrey had their own flashlights out.

  They went on into the store.

  Noah got to his feet and pulled on his pack. Before venturing into the store, he took a last look around at the mostly empty parking lot. It looked as desolate as the rest of the world. Large clumps of weeds had grown up around the base of every light pole. There were several rust-flecked shopping carts at random spots throughout the lot, perhaps where looters had deposited them prior to driving away with a haul of pilfered goods. Seeing them dampened his previous optimism about the store. His fear was that it was as barren of useful items as that general store. But not exploring it wasn’t an option, so in he went.

  He trod warily through the glass-strewn lobby. Some while back he’d traded in his heavy boots for a pair of athletic shoes. They were better for long-distance walking, but he often worried the soles were more susceptible to being carved up by glass or other sharp objects. A hobbling foot wound was the last thing he needed with so many miles still to go to his ultimate west coast destination. At least the lobby floor wasn’t littered with rusty nails, which were an occasional hazard of walking through decaying residential areas.

  After making it into the store without incurring injury, he swept the beam of his flashlight in a wide right-to-left arc. Some twenty feet ahead of him was a weathered-looking cardboard bin partially stocked with cheaply-priced DVD’s still sealed in shiny shrink-wrap. To the left of the DVD bin were some self-checkout registers. Beyond these was a long row of standard checkout registers that stretched nearly to the opposite side of the store.