by Bryan Smith
Bringing the bottle to his mouth necessitated a focus of will that made him feel extra pathetic. The required physical effort initially seemed impossible. The bottle felt like it weighed a ton. His hand shook uncontrollably and he had to fight to hold onto what felt like Thor’s fucking hammer, only managing to do so when he at last was able to grasp the bottle with his other hand as well. Seemingly every movement, regardless of how tiny, brought with it a fresh array of pains in new areas. His joints were as stiff and achy as those of an arthritic old man.
At last, however, he was able to get the bottle to his lips. He upended it, tipping the whiskey into his parched mouth. A whimper of relief escaped his throat as the moisture touched his tongue. Unsurprisingly, a taste wasn’t nearly enough to quench the terrible thirst consuming him. He kept the bottle upended until it was empty. When he’d sucked the last drop of liquid from it, he relaxed his grip and the bottle slipped free of his trembling hands. He swept it to the floor when it landed in his lap.
This Herculean task accomplished, he allowed his eyes to flutter shut again. Things went fuzzy for a few moments as he fell into a doze, but he did not return to a state of full unconsciousness. The throbbing in his head and the various other aches throughout his body rendered the sanctuary of sleep unreachable. Of the many infringements on his comfort, his stiff neck might have been the worst of them. Of course, it hadn’t helped that he’d slept sitting up.
Noah’s brow creased as he thought about that. He edged closer to full consciousness again. Something was amiss. He’d been so intent on getting the bottle to his mouth that nothing about his surroundings had registered. His sleep-fuzzed vision hadn’t helped in that regard, either. He wasn’t sure why, but getting a fix on where he was and his general situation suddenly seemed imperative.
With a grimace of effort, he forced his eyes open. The first thing he saw was a shelf stuffed full of old paperback pulp novels. There were more shelves below and above it. For a moment, he was sure he was back at the mansion in Henryetta. But he wasn’t there anymore and hadn’t been for a while. Some time had passed since his departure. How much he wasn’t sure, but it’d been weeks at least. Time’s passage was becoming more difficult to gauge than ever. He existed in a perpetual haze, stumbling ever closer to his ultimate destination as the days and nights bled into each other in an endless blur.
With another grimace of effort, he craned his head about and took in his surroundings. As he did this, fragments of memory from the previous day came back to him. He was in a small used bookstore, sitting in a cramped, narrow aisle between shelves of books. His neck was resting against the edge of a shelf behind him. It was little wonder he felt so stiff and achy.
The bookstore was in yet another of the countless small towns he’d explored along the way. Like nearly all the other towns, it was an empty, haunted place. He’d heard the whispers of ghosts while strolling through its detritus-strewn streets. That these were the hushed voices of spirits rather than those of lurking survivors was something he didn’t question. He felt the truth of it in his bones. In this town, he had only the dead for company and he was fine with that. After his experiences in Henryetta and Jackson, he would be happy if he didn’t see another living person until he reached Ventura.
Apparently he’d crashed into the bookcase behind him prior to sliding to the floor and passing out. In the process, dozens of books had tumbled off the shelves and he now sat in a drift of old paperbacks. The shelves had been crammed full of books—double stacks and double rows—so there were a lot of them on the floor now. He picked one up at random and squinted at it.
After staring at its familiar cover in disbelief for many long moments, he laughed and flipped it open and finally read the last chapter of Shadow Rider. It didn’t take long, maybe ten minutes, and it ended in a satisfying way, with the lone avenger killing off the final bad guy before fading away into the night, never to be seen again by anyone in the town. The book was among his favorites of the many westerns he’d read and he decided he’d like to keep a copy and maybe read it again someday.
He looked around for his pack but didn’t see it anywhere in the aisle. Heaving a sigh, he decided it was high time he got his ass up and moving anyway. Making that happen was a grueling ordeal that ended with his entire body shaking and covered in sweat. He felt sick and might have thrown up if there’d been any food in his belly. But the important thing was he was back on his feet. The copy of Shadow Rider in hand, he went off in search of his pack and found it resting atop a little checkout desk at the front of the store, along with his rifle and utility belt. Before tucking the book away in the pack, he set it on the desk and grabbed his canteen. Its weight told him it was about a third full. He screwed the cap off and took a long drink, nearly draining it.
Groaning in relief, he sagged against the desk and braced a palm on its surface to keep from falling over. He still felt shaky, but the water helped. After taking a final gulp, he screwed the cap back on the canteen and opened his pack. He tucked the book away and left the pack open. He’d stumbled upon a mecca of old pulp material. He owed it to himself to spend some relatively sober time here picking some books to take with him before he hit the road again.
But he was still a walking collection of aches and tremors. He needed something extra to steady him before looking at books. Reaching into the pack again, he took out his much-diminished bag of weed. He’d started out with a pound, but he estimated he had maybe a third that much now. He hadn’t started smoking it in earnest again until after leaving Henryetta. The rate of depletion suggested that’d been longer ago than he’d realized, beyond even the outside range of his estimates. It made him wonder what month it was now. Standing there thinking about it, he belatedly noted the slight chill in the air. Summer was either over or nearly over. Of course, there would be significant temperature variations depending on his geographical location.
That was another thing. He didn’t know where he was. It wasn’t just that he couldn’t remember the name of the town. He couldn’t remember what state it was in. This likely had a lot to do with his mind’s increasingly shaky ability to properly interpret sensory input. The weed almost certainly wasn’t helping where that was concerned, nor was the booze. These things might have bothered Noah if he still gave a shit about anything other than reaching the end of his journey. But he did not, in fact, give even one little shit. Being alone again, he had no one to answer to, nor any good reason to moderate his behavior.
He took out his pipe and tamped some weed into the bowl. After lighting up with a match, he filled his lungs with smoke, holding it in for several moments before coughing it back out. He immediately filled his lungs again, tilted his head back, and closed his eyes, holding the smoke even longer this time. It’d be a few minutes at least before he got the full effect. The weed had been harvested a while ago and had lost a bit of its potency, but it still did the job effectively if he smoked enough of it. He took one more hit before putting the pipe down.
A glance through the store’s plate glass front window stopped Noah in his tracks as he was turning back to the rows of bookcases. There was something moving out there, an indistinct shape bobbing around behind a car parked against the curb opposite the bookstore. His first thought was that someone was out there spying on him. Maybe there were survivors lurking in this town after all.
His heart pounding, Noah reached for his holstered pistol, which sat with his utility belt on the desk. He felt ill-prepared for confrontation in his sickly state, but he was okay with that. A violent, unexpected demise might be the most merciful fate he could hope for at this point. Despite the increasingly morbid tone of his thoughts, though, he wasn’t about to go down without a fight. The times he’d allowed that to happen hadn’t worked out too well for him. He took the pistol from the holster and edged around the desk toward the door. But then the shape emerged from behind the car and staggered into the middle of the street.
Noah let out a breath.
It wa
s a dead thing. He’d encountered a few zombies since departing Henryetta, but this was the first he’d seen in a while. It looked as if it’d been dead only a few months. Despite its staggering gait, its body’s structural integrity was still sound. There were no missing limbs or glaring, debilitating wounds.
It took another lurching step toward the bookstore.
Noah opened the door and stepped outside.
43.
The first thing Noah noticed once he was out on the sidewalk was the sky. It was a washed-out shade of purple. Somehow he hadn’t noticed this when peering through the bookstore’s smudged plate glass window. He’d never seen anything quite like it and for a moment could do nothing but gape skyward, temporarily oblivious to the threat still lurching toward him. The shade of purple darkened some toward the horizon in every direction.
At first he wondered if this might be another in a long line of indicators that something had gone wrong in his head. Granted, he was keeping himself in an altered state as much as possible, but maybe what he was experiencing now was a sign of something deeper than that. An intense panic gripped him when the idea that a growing tumor lodged somewhere in his brain was responsible for all his perceptual problems, including the sky’s strange color today. It was an idea he couldn’t easily dismiss, but that sense of overwhelming panic departed mere moments later, yielding to Zen-like acceptance. Whatever was happening inside him, if anything, was nothing he could do anything about. This was the new world. There were no healers or headshrinkers he could consult. All he could do was muddle his way through until he couldn’t anymore.
The zombie was almost upon him.
Noah got his left hand up in time to brace it against the thing’s chest and give it a hard shove. The creature took a few staggering steps backward but did not topple over, despite wobbling precariously for a moment. When it had regained its balance, it came at Noah again.
He put the muzzle of his pistol against the thing’s forehead and squeezed the trigger. It’d been a while since Noah had fired any of his weapons and the tremendous boom of the gun’s report in the empty street made him wince. A spray of blood and brain matter erupted from the back of the zombie’s head and it took a final awkward step backward before dropping like a sack of rocks in the street.
On the sidewalk was a shopping cart loaded with things Noah had scavenged from various stops along the way since leaving Henryetta. It contained cases of bottled water, some canned food, another pair of never-used athletic shoes in a box, and an array of other items. Some of the other things could generously be classified as necessities, while others, like the cardboard display cutout of a bikini model holding a can of beer he’d lashed to the front of the cart, were just random, useless things that had captured his imagination. He was turning into something of a post-apocalyptic packrat. The bikini model cutout had been meticulously wrapped in multiple layers of clear packing tape to protect it from the elements. Noah had no memory of having done this and assumed it had happened while he was in a blackout.
That kind of thing happened a lot.
The cart also contained numerous bottles of whiskey.
Noah shoved the pistol into a hip pocket and reached into the cart to retrieve one of the bottles. He broke the plastic seal and removed the cap. After taking a long slug from the bottle, he resumed his scrutiny of the sky. He was sure it would revert to its natural color at some point. Whatever the explanation for the purple hue was, it couldn’t stay this way forever. But now that he was past the shock of it, there was an undeniable beauty in this strange, purple sky. He recalled stories he’d heard about the sky changing colors ahead of a tornado, but those mostly involved it turning green or greenish-yellow. He didn’t know for sure, having never witnessed this firsthand.
This was something different. He was pretty sure of that. For one thing, there were no gathered storm clouds on the horizon. The phenomenon was also nothing like the way the horizon would sometimes light up in various shades of crimson at sunset. This was nothing of the natural world, at least not as he’d known it up until now.
He was still staring at the sky with the bottle poised at his mouth when a noise somewhere off to his right brought him back to earth. A glance in that direction made him frown. Another dead thing emerged from the open door of a boutique across the street. Like the one he’d just put down, this one appeared not to have been dead very long. It was a female in a pretty burgundy and black dress, the hem of which hit just above the knees. She wore sandals and had long black hair. Though she was in the process of turning into a rotting mess, Noah sensed she’d been pretty in life. The bloat that had occurred in death made her flesh strain against the fabric of the dress, but he discerned enough of her normal body shape to confirm this opinion to his satisfaction.
The dead thing’s head snapped in his direction as it came out onto the sidewalk. Its mouth dropped open, emitting the usual inarticulate growl. Noah sighed as it came off the sidewalk and started toward him. It was hard not to take running into two zombies in the space of a few minutes after not encountering any for so long as a sign of some kind, an ominous portent, especially happening in conjunction as it did with the arrival of the purple sky. He needed to grab his shit from the store and head back to the interstate while it was still daylight.
He put the cap back on the bottle and set it in the rear compartment of the cart. Taking the pistol out of his pocket, he stepped out into the street. The zombie’s mouth opened wider and it growled again. Noah couldn’t help noting that it moved more gracefully than the usual dead thing, with only a mild stagger. He supposed that was a product of only being recently dead. On the other hand, the male zombie he’d shot moments ago looked as if it’d been at about the same stage of decay as this one. Maybe what he was seeing in this thing’s gait was some final lingering vestige of the woman it had been.
Noah shoved the pistol in his pocket again as he neared the zombie, a bizarre and possibly suicidal impulse abruptly overriding his common sense. The dead thing growled again when it got within grabbing range, its mouth opening wide as it lunged for his throat. Noah stopped the lunge with another straight-arm shove, but this time it wasn’t executed with the same level of force he’d used on the male zombie. When it came back at him, he again braced a hand against its chest, this time at a spot dead-center just above its breasts. He slipped his other hand around its waist, allowing it to settle at the small of the dead thing’s back. The creature growled louder and clutched at him, its mouth straining again to reach his throat.
A brief moment elapsed during which Noah wondered whether he was really about to do this. It was something a sane man would never consider. He was putting his life at risk for a moment of wildly inappropriate whimsy.
But he didn’t care.
Noah executed an awkward turn in the middle of the street with the zombie still clutching at him. There was a hitch in the dead thing’s step as it moved with him, but he was able to keep it upright by only slightly increasing the pressure of his hand against its back. Satisfied that it wasn’t about to slip from his grasp and fall to the street, he turned with it again and this time it managed a bit of that lingering grace he’d detected before, with a much less pronounced hitch.
Soon he fell into a nice rhythm and moved with the zombie down the street in a series of turns that felt almost smooth and practiced. Twice he pushed the dead thing away. Each time it came immediately back into his embrace, returning with a fluidity that almost made the thing seem like a willing partner. Noah knew this was a false perception. He was already buzzed from the relatively modest amount of weed and booze he’d had since regaining consciousness, but he wasn’t so far gone yet that he could believe something of the woman this thing had once been was really awakening.
But it was a nice illusion and he opted to revel in it a while longer. He started humming as he twirled the zombie down the street and in his head he heard ballroom music. He imagined he was on a dance floor at some swanky society event, a gala bal
l with everyone decked out in flowing gowns and tuxedos. There was laughter and chatter all around him. A big band orchestra was playing on a bandstand. Magic was in the air.
Noah pushed the zombie away yet again and this time when it came back into his embrace he botched getting his hand properly braced against its chest. One of its hands was able to get to his neck. A long fingernail tore into his skin, drawing blood. Noah cried out and gave the dead thing a much harder shove. This time when it came back at him survival instinct kicked in and he jerked the pistol from his hip pocket. He was able to get it up and aimed just in time to put a bullet through the creature’s forehead. His heart was pounding and he was shuddering in relief as he watched it hit the street.
But he felt a twinge of sadness once he’d calmed down. He stared at the now permanently dead creature and for a moment moisture blurred his vision. For a few moments, he’d interacted in an almost intimate way with a thing that at least looked like a woman. He knew the emotion was stupid. The reality of what he’d done was far removed from how he’d seen it in his head. But he’d become sure the real thing would never happen again. That night with Linda now seemed stranger somehow than his dance with the zombie, like an anomaly that didn’t fit with the reality of this empty world.
Noah heard fresh stirrings in the vicinity and wiped the moisture from his eyes. He turned about and saw three dead things moving slowly toward him down the middle of the street. Where they’d come from he didn’t know. The one in the lead was no more than a dozen yards away. It was significantly more decrepit-looking than the two he’d already killed, moving with a loping, wobbling gait. One of its arms was missing. The others were right on its heels. Noah was startled to realize how close he’d come to being taken by surprise. Another few moments of wallowing in melancholy and he would have been dead.