by Bryan Smith
Hal grinned. “Should make stringing this one up on Main Street the boy’s first chore, Shane.”
The young man who’d been assigned to train Noah grimaced, not bothering to conceal a distaste for the fat man. “That’s your job and you should get to it, unless you want the Judge to hear about you trying to shirk your duties.”
Hal’s grin faded. “Don’t do that. Jesus. It was just a fucking joke.”
“Do yourself a favor. Don’t make jokes. Humor really isn’t your forte.” Shane glanced at Noah, beckoning him forward with a tilt of his head. “Come along now. The show’s over.”
The posse member accompanying them gave Noah a push in the back. He started moving again, albeit haltingly at first, unable to resist taking a last look at Nick’s lifeless body as he went. A part of him still couldn’t accept that Nick was dead. It had happened with so little preamble. His thoughts then went to Aubrey, who was somewhere locked away in that big house, probably still holding out hope for a miracle, maybe entertaining visions of her man escaping and performing various feats of heroism.
But no hero would be coming to her rescue, not now or ever.
Another shove in the back, this one more insistent, sent Noah stumbling forward. A short while later he was chained to a wall in one of the sheds.
39.
Time passed in a haze, each new day indistinguishable from any preceding day. Days accrued into weeks and then after a while it seemed as if enough time had gone by that he must have been where he was for months, maybe even years. In truth he was having trouble being sure of anything at all, the passage of time being the least of it. On occasion a slice of uncomfortable reality would cut through the mental fog he existed in, inducing a state of paralyzing anxiety. But the fog always encroached again in time to pull him back from the brink of total mental collapse.
The foggy condition persisted even during daylight hours. He performed the dreary menial work his captors required of him in a kind of trance. This was possible because the work was so simplistic. His thoughts were always far away, focused on things in the distant, lost past while his hands worked with the stiff but efficient precision of a robot. Mostly he was again preoccupied with memories of Lisa Thomas. It was strange. She was the reason for the long trek westward, yet Noah at some point had relegated thoughts of her to some dark, rarely examined corner of his mind.
But now he often became so immersed in images from that semester at college with Lisa that it was fleetingly possible to believe he was back in that time again. Disconnecting from the present wasn’t difficult. He would be working in the yard outside the mansion in Henryetta, shirtless body drenched in sweat, and then all that would fade away. Next thing he knew he would be strolling around campus with Lisa by his side, both of them again floating through the days without a thought to the future. These immersive reveries felt so real it frequently seemed as if the apocalypse had been nothing more than some terrible fever dream.
The truth was always lurking just beneath the surface, though, relentlessly crowding in at the edges of his memories. Sometimes holding it back required more than simply recalling the past. He eventually conjured an alternative version of events in which he and Lisa stayed on at the university for the following semester. In this radical reconstruction of the past, they managed to overcome their issues, cutting back on the booze and recklessness in favor of harder studying and other practicalities. To make the scenario seem more realistic, Noah envisioned some points of contention between them, but these were minor compared to…well, the other version of their lives.
At night he dreamed of things he didn’t want to think about. Unfortunately, his sleeping mind didn’t have the luxury of shunting these images away at will. They taunted him relentlessly, causing him to sweat and shake in his sleep. Among other things, he often dreamed that he was back in the house outside, Jackson, TN, the one with the disappearing corpse. He would see himself fall asleep—pass out—in that dark living room over and over. Each time when his dream-self came to in that living room, the setting had changed slightly, with different corpses appearing and disappearing. Sometimes it was just the one original corpse sitting next to him in that recliner. Other times there were other dead people in the room. Some were seated and some were standing up. None of them appeared to move at all, yet somehow during the course of the dream the bodies shifted position until they were staring right at him. Sometimes they were the usual rotting old corpses. Other times they were Nick and Aubrey. Aubrey with her brains bashed in and Nick with his throat cut. Still other times he was completely alone in the room. For reasons that mystified him upon his return to the actual, waking world, it was this latter scenario that filled him with the deepest sense of dread.
Another recurring dream involved him recovering his copy of Shadow Rider from the Walmart store. In these dreams, he would open the book to that unread last chapter, begin reading, and become captivated all over again. He would turn the pages fast, devouring the words, but each time something happened to derail him. The book became longer than it was in reality. No matter how many pages he turned, he couldn’t seem to reach the end. Other times the printing on the brittle old pages would fade to the point of invisibility. Or the opposite, the words would become blotchy and unreadable, the ink turning wet and spreading in black smears across the pages. Noah figured these dreams were a simple manifestation of frustration, but knowing that made them no less maddening.
Still other dreams seemed derived from High Plains Drifter, which could be attributed to the strange incident at Walmart. In them he rode slowly through the dirty streets of a small Old West town. The inhabitants of the town were nowhere in sight, but he knew they were there, quivering with fear as they hid inside and peeked at him through windows and cracked doors. These dreams were strangely lucid, alive with tactile sensation in a way his fantasies about Lisa, vivid though they were, were not. He felt the heat of the sun burning his neck as his horse plodded along beneath him. The saddle’s pommel was a solid presence within the firm grip of his right hand. His throat was always painfully dry during the Old West dreams, parched in the wake of a long ride through a brutally hot desert. His ride through the town never seemed to come to an end. That it was a small town was an indisputable fact in his mind, yet it seemed to stretch on forever.
He was in the midst of another dream about Jackson when a hard kick to his side brought him back to the world in which he lived as a shed slave outside a sprawling estate in Henryetta. Groaning in pain, Noah rolled onto his back and stared blearily up at Shane, the manor employee who’d trained him during his early days of servitude.
Shackles clanked as Noah lifted his hands to rub at his eyes. Despite the pain in his side, he still felt groggy from sleep. He sat up with another groan and took a look out the shed’s lone, barred window.
Frowning, he glanced at Shane. “It’s still dark out. Stencil usually lets me sleep until dawn.”
Shane nodded. “You can forget about Stencil. He’s not a factor in your life anymore.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“He’s gone. Erased.”
Noah’s frown deepened. “What?”
“He doesn’t exist anymore.” Shane moved away from him, into the center of the little shed. “Fate has taken a turn, Noah, one I doubt you saw coming.” He said this with his back to Noah, but now he turned again and there was something subtly different about his face. There was also a faint tinge of yellow in his eyes. “The lady of the house has taken an interest in you.”
Noah stared at him for a long moment, confusion etched in the lines of his face, which were far more pronounced than they had been before he’d left the mountain. “She has? Why?”
“That’s for her to say.”
Noah thought about that. As Shane said, it was an unexpected twist. He’d last seen the Judge just before Nick’s execution. Since then she’d been an invisible and only rarely invoked presence in his life. As far as he knew, she never ventured beyond the
confines of the mansion.
Shane moved away again. He now stood framed in the shed’s open door, the first faint traces of dawn visible behind him. “You’ll be cleaned up and made presentable ahead of your audience with the Judge. That means a bath, a shave, and some new clothes. I have other duties to attend to now, more tunnels, caves, and other dark places through which I must slither and howl, but others will be along to assist in your transformation shortly.”
And then he was gone, the doorway standing open and empty.
40.
As it turned out, Shane’s definition of “shortly” didn’t quite square with Noah’s lifelong understanding of the term. At least two hours elapsed before the “others” Shane had referred to came to fetch him. During the wait, he noted the steady brightening of light through the barred window. The lack of noise from outside was curious. By now he should be hearing the gruff shouts of minders rousting shed slaves and getting them ready to start another day of toiling in the fields. But the silence was close to absolute. Perhaps, like his own minder, they had “ceased to exist”, whatever that meant.
Noah hoped it meant the bastards were all swinging from Main Street power lines.
At last, he heard a sound of low voices from somewhere outside his shed. Moments later, Alma entered the open doorway, accompanied by another well-dressed manor servant and a shotgun-toting field hand doubling today as an enforcer. Alma was Shane’s demure twin sister. He’d last seen her that day in the Judge’s library. Noah wasn’t sure how he knew her name, except that perhaps Shane had mentioned it at some point. Or maybe one of the other slaves. Or she’d visited him before during one of his trances and he’d forgotten. Yes, it could have been something like that. He didn’t know or care, really.
The enforcer handed Alma a key ring, which she then passed to the other manor servant, a slender young blonde girl who reminded Noah fleetingly of Lisa Thomas. The blonde approached him and paused a moment to glance nervously at Alma, whose only response was a terse nod of encouragement.
The girl heaved a big breath and knelt next to Noah. As she worked to unlock the heavy iron shackles clamped tight around his wrists and ankles, the enforcer had a few stern words of warning, letting Noah know he would shoot him if he tried to escape or looked like he was about to get violent.
Noah had no intention of trying any such thing and said so. The enforcer smirked at his overly earnest tone, but he didn’t say anything else, being more interested in leering at the blonde’s shapely posterior while she remained bent over next to Noah. That leer triggered a twinge of distaste in Noah, yet he wasn’t immune to the buxom gal’s charms. He couldn’t resist a peek down the scooped front of her blouse as she unlocked his wrist shackles. For a moment, she looked up and met his gaze. He expected a look of disgust, but instead she smiled and gave his wrist a little squeeze before getting to her feet and moving out of the way.
He was then taken out of the shed and marched across the large back lawn at gunpoint. Before they arrived at the mansion, Noah’s gaze was drawn to the spot where Nick had been forced to kneel in the moments before his execution. At least he believed it was the right spot. It was hard to tell. There were no signs that anything violent had happened there. Of course, there wouldn’t be after so much time, but that patch of unmarred lawn was disconcerting nonetheless.
But he didn’t have time to dwell on it as the march across the lawn continued at a brisk pace. A rear door of the mansion was opened by someone inside moments before they reached it. Another female manor servant held the door open as Noah and the others stepped inside. This one was young and petite, a slender girl with doll-like delicate features. She seemed somewhat skittish, keeping her gaze directed at the floor as they walked by her. Though she seemed outwardly composed, something in her big, clear eyes conveyed an impression of fragility. She looked ready to burst into tears at any moment.
Noah interpreted her demeanor as proof that manor servants only had it marginally better than the routinely brutalized shed slaves. Her clothes and body were clean, yes, but she was still trapped in a life of forced servitude, kept in line by the ever-present threat of punishment or execution.
During his imprisonment, he’d tried hard not to think about Aubrey, having learned early on how counterproductive that was. Dwelling on her predicament made him crazy with the need to get free and go to her rescue. The problem was how clearly impossible that was.
Now, though, he was wondering about her again. Unless she’d done something extreme to invoke the Judge’s ire—which, unfortunately, was not out of the question—she was likely working as a manor servant. He tried to imagine Aubrey in the standard servant’s uniform, but it wasn’t an easy thing to picture. The old-fashioned attire made Noah think of books and movies about Edwardian England. He was sure being made to dress like the meek girl at the door made his sister less than happy.
They moved at a fast clip down the long, wide hallway Noah remembered from before. When the arch that led into the library came up on his right, Noah glanced into the room, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Judge. As he did this, though, the man with the shotgun gave him a firm push in the back, making him stagger past the arch too quickly to get a good look inside. Noah sensed the timing of the shove was deliberate. Someone—the Judge?—didn’t want him studying the room’s interior, despite the fact that he was already very familiar with it from his last time here. Try as he might, he couldn’t think of a non-sinister reason for that.
Upon reaching the foyer at the front of the house, Alma nodded for Noah to head up the spiral staircase to the second floor. Before starting up the stairs, he couldn’t help noting how quiet this part of the house seemed. Unlike last time, no voices were issuing from the second floor. Also, the mansion seemed emptier now. The girl who’d met them at the back door was the only other servant he’d seen since entering the place.
The giant estate now finally reminded him of all the deserted, tomb-like post-apocalypse buildings he’d explored with Nick and Aubrey during the long and often harrowing journey down I-40. The still air seemed staler now, too, as if the place had been sealed tight against the outside world for a period of years. Noah tugged at the collar of the filthy old shirt he was wearing and flapped the fabric against his scrawny belly in an effort to relieve the feeling of stuffiness.
Alma snapped her fingers in front of Noah’s face, startling him. “Up the stairs. Don’t make me tell you again.”
“Right. Sorry.”
About halfway up the stairs, Noah glanced down into the now empty foyer. A mild sense of vertigo made him grip the curving bannister harder to stay upright. He felt a light touch at the small of his back and looked over his shoulder. The blonde servant girl met his gaze for an instant before looking away, an almost imperceptible smile dimpling the corners of her mouth. Hers was the steadying hand against his back. It was the second small gesture of kindness she’d shown him. A possibly disproportionate feeling of gratitude welled up inside him and he was again momentarily mesmerized by her resemblance to Lisa. She gave him a gentle nudge and they continued up the stairs.
Soon they had him installed in a room on the second floor. The enforcer remained out in the hallway with the door open while the women tended to Noah. He was first instructed to remove all his clothes and drop them in a cloth sack. The rotting, grime-encrusted garments would, he was told, be burned and he’d be given new ones. Discarding the old clothes in favor of fresh, clean ones was not an issue for Noah. He’d been walking around in a rancid cloud of filth for too long.
What he did have an issue with was undressing in front of the women, who made no offer to avert their eyes. This he found embarrassing. These were attractive women. Clean and neatly dressed women. And he was a scrawny, filthy mess. He begged them for privacy, but apparently it was not an option.
Upon realizing they intended to make him comply via any means necessary, Noah yielded to the inevitable and stripped off his clothes. The blonde held open the cloth sack and he du
mped the garments inside it. She had started cinching it shut when he gasped and snatched it from her grip.
“Sorry,” he said, shooting the blonde an apologetic look. “Something I need in here.”
He rooted around in the sack until he located his jeans and pulled them out. Alma gave him a look of reproach and looked as if she were considering calling the enforcer into the room. Noah ignored this and dug a hand into a hip pocket of the decaying jeans, extracting the picture of Lisa and the scrap of envelope with the address of her parents’ place in California scrawled on it.
After stuffing the jeans back inside the sack, he handed it back to the blonde, saying, “I have to have these. They’re everything to me.”
The blonde’s eyes flicked to the items in his hand. Another of those little smiles touched the corners of her mouth when she saw the picture of Lisa.
Alma cleared her throat. “You may store your precious items in that drawer there.” She indicated a little end table next to the bed. It had but a single drawer. “Miranda, that’s the young blonde lady here, will take care of you this afternoon. I advise you not to give her any trouble.”
“Why would I give her trouble?”
A side of Alma’s mouth lifted in a small smirk. “You won’t, if you know what’s good for you.”
She walked out of the room without another word, leaving the door open. The enforcer stayed where he was out in the hallway, standing with his back to the door. An impulse to take a run at him briefly gripped Noah. There was a decent chance he could surprise the guy, maybe tackle him and take the gun from him
But then what?
Well, that was the problem. Yes, the mansion was strangely quiet today, but Noah was sure Chance and some of the Judge’s other people were lurking around somewhere. An escape attempt was still too much of a risk. Besides, his sister was somewhere in the mansion. Maybe he would take a shot at getting out of here at some point, but he needed to get a fix on Aubrey’s location first. He wasn’t leaving here without her.