Slowly We Rot

by Bryan Smith

  He raised the pistol and shot the lead zombie. Then he shot the other two. His aim was off with the last one and he needed two shots to put it down. The gun clicked on an empty chamber as he reflexively squeezed the trigger another time.

  Yet another zombie emerged from an alley between buildings.

  And then another.

  And another.

  Until there were more than a dozen of them in the street, all heading his way at roughly the same slow, lurching pace. Unlike the first two, these had all been dead quite a while. There were more of them than he’d run into at one time since that horde outside of Jackson. He’d been wrong not to immediately flee the area upon correctly reading the obvious portents.

  He sighed. “Time to go.”

  He returned to the bookstore at a run. It was the fastest he’d moved in a long time. The whiskey and THC in his system made it a more arduous thing than it should have been. Fortunately, there were no additional zombies blocking the way back. A glance up at the sky showed it had turned a darker shade of almost angry-looking purple. Yet another sign.

  Noah picked up the pace.

  When he reached the bookstore, he went inside and grabbed his rifle and utility belt. He ran back outside, set the rifle in the cart, and strapped on the belt. Once he had it secured around his waist, he went back inside for his pack. He grabbed it and started toward the entrance, but then, hesitating, he stopped in his tracks and glanced back at the rows of bookshelves.

  He fretted for a few moments before poking his head outside to gauge how much time he had. The zombies were about a half block away. And they were among the slowest shamblers he’d ever seen. Deciding to take the chance, he ran back to the spot where he’d passed out the night before, opened the pack, and crammed dozens of old pulps in before zipping it shut again.

  Heart pounding, he ran back outside, dropped the pack in the cart, got himself set behind the handle, and glanced back at the pursuit one more time. They were closer than he would have liked, but he thought he could still outrace them, even with having to push the heavily weighted-down cart. In the event he was wrong about that, he was prepared to abandon the cart, but he really hoped that wouldn’t be necessary.

  He steeled himself first with a slug of whiskey and then pushed the cart into the street.

  44.

  The town with the bookstore was somewhere in New Mexico, a fact Noah figured out in the process of fleeing the place. This required no genius leap of deduction—it was evident in the abundance of abandoned automobiles with New Mexico plates—but he never did learn the name of the town. Fortunately, the part of it he’d found himself in upon awakening wasn’t far from the interstate. He was able to follow signs to a junction that led him back to I-40 West within a couple hours.

  As he’d hoped, he was able to put some significant distance between himself and the zombies even while pushing the loaded-down cart. Not having to abandon most of his stuff put him in a celebratory mood. He started taking regular slugs from the whiskey bottle as he pushed the cart along the interstate ramp. He was moving at a much slower pace by that point, having left the dead things behind a while ago. The boozing continued once he made it out to the interstate. Like many stretches of open highway between major cities, this one was largely empty. Abandoned vehicles were few and far between and he saw no zombies at all.

  The rest of that day was spent pushing the cart on down the road while steadily drinking and smoking. His only regret about saddling himself with the cart was how the attention it required during his daily travels had drastically reduced his reading time. On occasion he’d entertained the idea of fashioning some kind of harness that would allow him to pull the cart down the road rather than pushing it. That would free up his hands for reading. But he didn’t act on the notion for several reasons, the most compelling of which was just how basically ridiculous it was. So he contented himself with a bit of reading time at the end of each day and instead turned to the world of fantasy for distraction while he walked.

  As he continued down I-40 in the ensuing days, those fantasies became more immersive and realistic than ever. He imagined himself on this same stretch of interstate in an alternative timeline. In this scenario, he and Lisa Thomas were traveling across the country in a red convertible with the top down on a bright and sunny summer day. Noah was behind the vintage car’s steering wheel while Lisa was kicked back in the passenger seat with her bare feet up on the dash. He could almost feel the wind in his face as it whipped his hair about. This was during a break between semesters at the university. They were headed to California, where Noah would be meeting Lisa’s parents for the first time. With plenty of free time on their hands after the crunch of studying for exams, they had decided to drive to Ventura and see the country. It was a blissful time. They were happier than they had ever been.

  At night when he was done reading, he returned to this fantasy time and again when he settled down to sleep. In the world of dreams, variations of the fantasy sometimes continued. At times these dreams of Lisa were as joyful as his waking fantasies. Other times they devolved into hideous nightmares. He woke up with a scream on his lips more than once.

  Sometimes when he stopped for the day he would set up camp right there on the interstate. He would pitch his tent at the side of the road and crawl inside it with his flashlight, pistol, and current read. Other times he ventured away from the highway to set up camp in a nearby field. But there were also times when he was too drunk to set up his tent. When this happened, he would usually cover the cart with a tarp, crawl under it, and pass out. Now and then he would just come to a dead stop and fall over in the middle of the road. The latter was becoming more frequent all the time.

  The towns adjacent to the highway were littered with places to scavenge booze and Noah never hesitated to do so. Every once in a very long while a meek voice of reason would surface from the depths of his booze-addled mind to suggest he should maybe consider an end to this behavior, especially if he wanted to keep on living much longer. But Noah mostly found this voice easy to ignore. Another slug of whiskey rarely failed to shut it up.

  Every morning when he woke up he would crawl out of his tent—or out from under the tarp—and look up at the sky, hoping to see that it had finally reverted to its normal shade of baby blue. But three weeks or so down the road from the town with the bookstore, this had still not happened. Mostly the sky retained that washed-out purple hue, but other times it was neon green or a bright shade of scarlet. The first time he woke up to a red sky he was sure he’d finally died and gone to hell.

  Maybe he had, at that.

  More time passed and now the days and weeks bled into each other without distinction. It was no longer accurate to say they passed in a blur, because that implied some faint awareness of time’s passage. For Noah, things became simpler than ever. He was awake and then he was not awake. After a while, even his fantasies of Lisa slipped away, leaving him with no thought in his head other than the basic necessity of pushing the cart ever forward.

  Then came the time when he woke up at night rather than in the morning just outside a town called Hell’s Lost Mile, which, apparently, was in Arizona. He was flat on his back on a dusty dirt road when his eyes fluttered open. The first thing he saw was a sign that provided the location information. It was a painted wooden one mounted on two tall poles. He could just barely make out the words in the moonlight. Until then, he’d been unaware that he’d finally left New Mexico behind. He was now in the last state standing between him and his destination.

  He sat up and took a look around, grimacing upon realizing he was somewhere in the middle of the goddamn desert. There were clumps of sagebrush around the wooden sign. Nearby was a stand of tall cactus plants. A jolt of panic hit him when he felt something crawling in his hair. He flashed back to that odd moment in Henryetta when the beetle had dropped out of Aubrey’s hair, but the desert locale suggested a far more disturbing possibility. Hoping he wasn’t about to get stung by a scorpion,
he swatted at his hair and heaved a relieved breath when he saw a lizard drop to the ground next to him. It promptly scurried away into the darkness.

  Noah stood up and hurriedly patted himself down. He was relieved to find Mother Nature had planted just the one unpleasant surprise on his person while he was asleep. His heart was still hammering away in his chest, however, and he decided he needed a drink to calm down.

  But then he panicked when he realized he didn’t know where the shopping cart was. He usually slept within about a dozen feet of the thing, believing it was smart to have within easy reach in the event of an emergency. But this wasn’t always possible. Sometimes he was so drunk he failed to take the usual precautions. This appeared to have been one of those times.

  He turned in a circle in the middle of the narrow road, squinting as he scanned the dark terrain for any sign of the cart. While he did this, he couldn’t help noting a cluster of lights in the distance. The lights were not quite a mile down the road from where he’d passed out. They merited investigation, but he couldn’t go have a look until he was absolutely certain he’d lost the cart.

  Just as he was on the verge of giving up hope, he spied a glint of moonlight on something metal about twenty yards away. This was in the opposite direction of the cluster of lights. It looked as if he’d stashed the cart behind a clump of sagebrush at the side of the road. Though he still had no memory of what had happened, figuring out the sequence of events wasn’t too difficult. After initially sighting the lights in the distance, he’d hidden the cart to protect it from scavengers while he ventured a bit farther up the road to check things out. The only problem was he’d been too drunk and had again performed his new favorite trick of falling over in the middle of the damn road.

  Noah felt woozy as he backtracked to the cart’s hiding place. He supposed he hadn’t been out long enough for the effects of the alcohol in his system to wear off. This wasn’t unusual. Waking up with some level of lingering buzz happened a lot. He was arriving at a point where he was virtually never completely sober. Despite his deeply entrenched alcoholism, this might have bothered him if he was still living in a world in which things mattered, but that just wasn’t the case. He was alone again and probably would be for what little remained of his life, which was a depressing thing on a lot of levels, but it did have its advantages. In a way, for instance, he was freer than almost anyone who’d ever existed. If he wanted, he could drink himself to death and so what if he did?

  Upon reaching the cart, he spent some time verifying it was intact and that he hadn’t lost anything important while he was in blackout. As best he could tell, the cart was in good shape despite having been pushed along a dirt road for who knew how long. The darkness made it difficult to discern much about the terrain, but he had the sense that he’d traveled a significant distance since leaving the interstate, which wasn’t at all visible here in the desert night. He couldn’t imagine why he would have done this, even in a state of extreme intoxication, except that perhaps something compelling had caught his attention and he’d gone off in search of whatever it was.

  But maybe it had something to do with that cluster of lights, which he meant to investigate very soon. First, however, he needed a brace of alcohol to steady himself. An open pint bottle of Jim Beam rested in the retractable rear compartment of the cart. It was about a quarter full. Noah downed the rest of it, cocked his arm back, and flung the empty bottle away from him with all his might. The glass caught a glint of moonlight as it went sailing away and a moment later shattered when it hit something solid on the ground, probably a rock. He considered further fortifying himself with a hit or two of weed from the pipe, but he decided against it, figuring he should have at least some of his senses about him once he got closer to those lights. The lights meant there were live human beings in the area and there was a better than even chance they were hostile.

  After filling the chambers of his pistol, Noah shoved some extra ammo into both hip pockets and holstered the weapon. That done, he took out the tarp, shook it open, and covered the cart. Next he stepped back out to the road and took another look at the cart’s hiding place. He was convinced someone passing by at night would not notice it. Distinguishing it from all the other vague shapes out there in the dark would be next to impossible.

  Convinced he’d done all he could to protect his property, Noah headed off in the direction of Hell’s Lost Mile.

  45.

  A half mile farther down the road, it became clear there were more lights burning out there in the dark than he’d imagined. Previously many of the light sources blurred together, forming indistinct luminous blobs. Now, though, they resolved into separate points of brightness. Soon he was able to make out the shapes of buildings. Hell’s Lost Mile wasn’t a big place. There was a longish main street flanked by a row of buildings on each side. In addition, there were some shorter offshoot streets and a handful of outlying structures.

  As he neared the town, rowdy voices and other sounds of merriment became audible. Somewhere in the midst of it all raucous barrelhouse music was being pounded out on piano. In a separate location, seemingly, someone else was strumming a guitar and singing in a high, plaintive voice. The words were in Spanish, a language Noah didn’t know well, but the song’s message of yearning and loss came through anyway thanks to the singer’s achingly expressive performance, which stood in stark contrast to the otherwise festive atmosphere.

  His original plan was to circle around the town and enter it in a cautious, furtive way through one of those side streets. He was a stranger in Hell’s Lost Mile and those who lived here had no reason to trust him. But this plan fell by the wayside as he reached the town and walked right into it, feeling his sense of trepidation desert him as he strode without incident down that wide main boulevard. He didn’t pass unnoticed. A number of curious looks were directed his way, but none were openly hostile. To the contrary, most of the looks were quite friendly.

  This was particularly true of one building he passed where a number of attractive women in lingerie were lounging on a porch, most of them with drinks in their hands. Several women called out to him as he walked by, inviting him inside to engage in various erotic activities. It didn’t take long to figure out this was a whorehouse. He was tempted by the offers, but he had no idea what he could exchange for services rendered so he kept on walking.

  A bit farther down the street, he located the source of the raucous piano music, which hadn’t let up since he’d started hearing it. Several horses were tied to hitching posts outside a drinking establishment with batwing doors at the entrance. A painted sign above the awning identified it as the Sidewinder Saloon. The Sidewinder had a second floor with a long balcony that overlooked the street. Sounds emanating from up there suggested the saloon doubled as a place of prostitution, which apparently was a big business in Hell’s Lost Mile.

  A powerful sense of déjà vu assailed Noah as he paused in the street and stared at the building. He felt as if he’d been right here, in this very place and moment, not just once before, but many other times. This made no sense, because he knew for certain he’d never previously visited Arizona. But the impression that he’d somehow experienced this moment many times remained. He couldn’t fathom how that could be regardless of how hard he tried. An accompanying compulsion to enter the saloon and belly up to the bar was just as strong. In the end, it was impossible to resist.

  Wood planking creaked beneath his tread as he climbed the steps to the porch and pushed through the batwing doors into the saloon. The place was packed and hardly anyone took notice of Noah’s arrival. A large, open main room was crowded with tables. Damn near every seat was occupied. Noah was astonished. He hadn’t seen this many people in one place since before the apocalypse. Until now, he would have bet there weren’t this many people still alive in the entire world. This was strange enough, but even more puzzling was how they’d all wound up in this remote little desert town.

  The piano he’d been hearing was a
gainst the wall to his right. Men and women holding drinks were gathered around it, their voices raised in song as a pudgy old guy in a derby hat pounded the keys. Though he only had a partial view of the piano player’s face from where he stood, a spark of recognition galvanized Noah. He started threading his way through the tables, his hand going to the gun at his hip. The fat man banging out the boogie music was Hal, the sleazy member of Connor’s gang who’d molested his sister and killed Nick. Avenging Nick’s death wasn’t anything he cared about, not in light of Aubrey’s revelations about the man. But what he’d done to Aubrey in itself justified public execution.

  At the back of his mind, though, a secondary voice was clamoring for attention, reminding him of how far he’d journeyed from Henryetta. The odds of running into the man he loathed so much this far down the line were so low they bordered on impossible. But that wasn’t the biggest reason it seemed so unlikely. While imprisoned in Henryetta, Noah had heard something about Hal being hanged for crimes against the Judge. His purposeful gait slowed as murderous intent gave way to confusion. The piano player was a dead ringer for Hal, but how could it be him?

  Another possibility occurred, one so startling it brought Noah to a dead halt between two tables that were a little too close together. There were many things wrong about this town, not the least of which was its very existence. Maybe its name suggested something more sinister than a macabre sense of humor on the part of its founders. Could it be he’d somehow slipped through a gap between planes of existence and had stumbled into an actual section of Hell itself? The skeptic in him wanted to scoff, but it would explain a lot, including why there were so many people here. It would also explain the possible presence of a dead man who didn’t look dead.