by Bryan Smith
Noah shook his head. “No point. I’m already hell-bound.”
A chilly smile briefly lifted the corners of the sheriff’s mouth. “That you are.” He glanced at the deputy. “Let him out, Danny. No point delaying this thing any longer.”
Deputy Danny took a ring of keys from his belt, flipped through them until he found the right one, and slid it into the cell door’s lock. There was a loud clank as he gave it a turn. He then pulled the door open, beckoning Noah out with a tilt of his chin.
Noah stepped out into the hallway, not bothering to resist as the deputy turned him around and bound his wrists behind his back with a length of rope. The terror he knew he should be feeling was strangely absent as they marched him out of the building. Part of it was that he felt disconnected from what was happening. It was so much like countless scenes from old movies that he felt more like an actor playing a role than a real person moments away from swinging from the end of a rope. Resistance was futile. There was no escaping what was about to happen.
There were people milling about in the street as he was led through the town to the gallows, where more people were waiting. It didn’t take long to get there, Hell’s Lost Mile not being a big place. Again, however, he was taken aback at how many people were present. He was seeing actual crowds for the first time since before the end of the world. They watched as he was made to climb the steps to the gallows. Some had solemn expressions, a few were crying, but the greatest percentage of them looked almost eager to see this happen. Not because they were genuinely angry with him, but for the entertainment value.
A noose dangled from a pole that extended out over the center of the platform. Below the noose was a trapdoor. A nudge in the back from Deputy Danny sent Noah trudging over to the center of the platform. He stood squarely in the middle of the closed trapdoor, waiting while the noose was tugged down over his head and fitted snugly around his neck. Again, resistance was pointless.
The priest had his bible open and was reading from it. Noah’s refusal of religious counsel didn’t matter. This was just how this kind of thing was done. There was a collective intake of breath as the priest finished reading. The money part of the show, the thing everyone was here for, was seconds away from happening.
The sheriff locked eyes with Noah as his hand settled on the lever that would open the trapdoor. “Go with God, son.”
Noah snorted. “Yeah, right.”
The sheriff’s hand noticeably tightened on the lever. Before he could pull it, however, the heads of everyone present turned to stare down the street. Noah was mystified for only a moment, because the sound of approaching hoofbeats finally registered. It was a thunderous sound, multiple beasts coming at a gallop. A cloud of dust was visible first. Then, out of it, came two horses. Both were saddled, but one was riderless. Atop the other one was a rifle-wielding man dressed all in black. Black clothes, black hat, and a black bandanna masking his face. Women screamed at the sight of him and the crowd scurried out of the way as the mystery man and his beasts came charging toward the gallows.
The lawmen reached for their weapons, but the man in black aimed his repeating rifle and fired before they could draw them from their holsters. They cried out as bullets struck their hands. Another blast from the mystery man’s rifle severed the rope hanging from the pole above Noah’s head.
After some initial moments of bewilderment, Noah understood this was something he should have expected. And perhaps he had, at a subconscious level. That sense of being an actor playing a role was stronger than ever. Yet he didn’t feel like a man lost in a dream world. This was reality. Or at least reality as he understood and experienced it these days. He was awake and aware. The noose around his neck was actually there, drawn tight enough even with the rope severed to make him feel nauseated. But it wasn’t that simple, either. The reality felt enhanced in some way he couldn’t identify. Embellished somehow.
The man in black aimed his rifle at the trembling, terror-stricken priest. “Cut him loose, padre.”
The man in black’s voice was subtly familiar, but Noah couldn’t place it. He frowned and stared at the man’s eyes, the only part of his face visible above the black bandanna. That didn’t help matters, because nothing there triggered a similar feeling of familiarity.
The priest produced a folding knife from a pocket and tucked his bible away as he set about cutting through Noah’s bonds. Once the length of rope had fallen from his wrists, Noah tugged at the noose until it was loose enough to tug over his head and toss away.
Once this was done, the man in black gestured at the riderless horse with his rifle. “Mount up, Noah. We need to go now.”
Noah frowned. “Who are you?”
“No time for that. Get on the damn horse.”
Sighing, Noah moved to the edge of the platform and frowned down at the horse. For a brief instant, he considered trying to jump into the saddle from the platform, a thing he’d seen done often in movies. But Noah was still hangover-weak and, besides, was no stuntman. He descended the steps at the side of the gallows to the ground, approached the riderless horse, carefully inserted a foot in a stirrup, and mounted the beast that way.
And then they were off, galloping out of Hell’s Lost Mile in another cloud of dust.
Once they were safely out of the town with no evidence of pursuit, the men slowed their mounts to a trot and Noah was able to try pumping his rescuer for information again.
“Seriously, who the fuck are you? Where are we going? And why did you rescue me? I mean, I’m grateful, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t get it.”
The man in black kept his eyes staring straight ahead as he replied in that same strangely familiar voice. “Not important. What is important is that you resume your journey. Time grows short, Noah. It’s later than you think.”
After that, nothing else was said. Noah no longer wanted to talk to the man in black. A deep uneasiness had taken root inside him.
He had finally recognized the man’s voice.
48.
Time continued to pass in an elastic way. After departing Hell’s Lost Mile, a period of days went by before he arrived at a long overdue breaking point. It might only have been a few days or as much as a week or slightly longer. On the day it happened, the first thing he saw when his eyes snapped open in the morning was the clear blue sky above him. This was the first time it had reverted to its natural color in weeks or months. Longer than he could remember, at any rate.
But Noah felt no relief, nor was he able to spend any time marveling over what should have been a happy development. He’d awoken in a state of excruciating pain, the worst he’d experienced by far over the course of a long string of miserable hangover mornings. His gut felt like it was on fire and his legs were cramping badly. Bile rose into his throat and he began to cough and gag. Because he’d passed out on his back, the scalding bile immediately went back the way it’d come, causing him to cough harder and gasp for air. Panic seized him as he realized he was on the verge of choking to death on vomit. An image from another hangover morning, one from the pre-apocalypse days, flashed through his mind, and his panic spiked to its highest level yet.
In desperation, he forced himself to turn onto his side. The cramps in his legs had not eased one iota and the physical effort redoubled the agony there. He wanted to scream, but couldn’t because he was choking. Tears blurred his eyes as he clawed at highway asphalt and flopped over onto his stomach. His arms trembled as he put all his remaining strength into pushing himself to his hands and knees. He managed to do it but paid a price in the form of more mind-searing agony. His entire body felt on the verge of utter surrender. And yet his survival instinct was still functional. Caring about nothing other than clearing the blockage in his throat, he coughed harder and harder and pounded at his chest with a fist. He was thinner than ever and frail after too many weeks of not eating well. The pain from pounding his chest was almost too much to take, but he kept at it anyway, still unable to accept the only remaining alter
native.
At last, just as he was sure he was about to die, the blockage cleared and he sucked in the first of several deep, wheezing breaths. After a few moments of weeping in relief, he realized he wouldn’t be able to hold himself up much longer. He gathered his strength one more time, repositioned his body as best he could, and shoved himself backward, crying out when his back smacked against a concrete lane divider. Still trembling all over, he clutched at his legs and tried to massage out the cramps. After a period that felt interminable, they finally began to ease and he again wept in relief.
He then put his face in his hands as tears came faster and harder. His whole body shook with the force of emotional misery. For many minutes, he was powerless to stop the outpouring of anguish. He wasn’t even sure what he was wailing about by that point, other than perhaps a generalized combination of loss, exhaustion, and self-pity.
When the outpouring at last began to subside, he took his hands from his face and opened his eyes. He sucked in a breath and pressed his back harder against the lane divider when he saw the dead thing staring at him. It was standing in the street, its head rolling around on its shoulders as its body swayed slightly. The zombie was tall and thin and had long, scraggly hair sticking out in all directions. The thing’s body was still mostly intact, but it had achieved a level of putrefaction that marked it as at least six months dead. It was wearing a long leather duster, which was hanging open wide enough to reveal a Joy Division T-shirt. Noah’s hand went to the holster at his hip. The revolver he’d lost in Hell’s Lost Mile had been replaced by a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum he’d scavenged from a gun shop at some point in the fairly recent past.
In truth, he wasn’t sure he was still strong enough to fire the thing without being blasted off his feet. But it didn’t matter much, because now he remembered he’d never gotten around to loading it. And his shopping cart was out of reach, along with the other weapons inside it. It was some twenty yards away to his left. Bright sunshine glinted off the clear packing tape he’d used to weatherize the bikini model cutout. It might as well have been twenty miles away. He still lacked the strength to get to his feet, much less do anything to protect himself.
He tensed as he waited for the dead thing to come at him. His only hope was to get a good grip on its throat once it got within grabbing range. If he could manage to hold it far enough away from his body to avoid bites long enough, he just might be able to summon enough strength to overpower it and maybe bash its head against the lane divider.
As it turned out, none of this was necessary. After staring at him in that dumb, expressionless zombie way for several minutes, the dead thing turned away from him and continued on down the road. Noah frowned, staring after the thing in utter incomprehension. He was so dumbfounded by the encounter that he made no attempt to get to his feet despite finally feeling capable of it. Since the beginning of the plague outbreak, he’d never known a dead thing to turn away from a potential meal. It was hard not to take it as another ominous portent, though of what he wasn’t sure. He was so rattled by it that he continued staring after the zombie until it was an indistinct shape on the horizon.
Eventually, however, he shook off his stupefaction and got shakily to his feet. Once he was upright and sure he wasn’t about to topple over, he staggered over to the shopping cart and peered into it for a long time. Though the cramps in his legs had abated, the fire was still burning in his belly and his hands were trembling. His stomach felt corroded, a result perhaps of too much booze and a diet that barely existed. A part of him feared this might be a symptom of something direr, maybe his liver failing on him. He wanted to believe he was still too young for cirrhosis, but he knew it was foolish to think that way. The amount of alcohol he’d been pouring down his throat every day for so many months was far beyond what would have been considered excessive even for skid row bums in the pre-apocalypse era. Maybe his liver wasn’t quite ready to fail or shut down just yet, but it was, at the very least, horrendously overburdened.
Inside the cart were dozens of bottles of various kinds of booze. He couldn’t remember having acquired most of the stash. In a world that had died fast, there was a virtually endless supply of the stuff wherever you went. He’d been in the habit of grabbing more at almost every stop along the way since leaving Henryetta. At his current rate of consumption, what he had right here might last a week or two. He typically got through two or three fifths of liquor in each waking period of any significant duration, enough to take him right up to the brink of acute alcohol poisoning, perhaps beyond.
There was a case of bottled water in there with all the booze. The shrink-wrap encasing the bottles was intact. Thinking about it now, he couldn’t recall the last time he’d drank anything other than booze. Days, at least. It was no wonder the morning cramps were getting so severe. He was in a state of perpetual dehydration. Somehow he’d managed to keep going like this well beyond the point of stretching his body to its absolute limits, but he knew the time to stop had finally arrived. He doubted he’d survive another episode like the one he’d just endured.
Noah ripped open the shrink-wrap and took out a water bottle. Sometimes water stored in plastic bottles went bad or the bottles themselves degraded and the water leached out. Other times they were fine and the water as pure, seemingly, as the day it was bottled. It seemed to depend on the materials and bottling processes used by the various companies. Over time Noah had gotten a feel for which brands were the most dependable. This particular brand was one of the very best. He opened the bottle and guzzled down its contents fast. He then opened another bottle and did the same, feeling slightly better when he was finished.
He reached into the cart and took out a bottle of Patron tequila. He cracked the seal on the neck, removed the cap, and sniffed from the opening, sighing at the intoxicating scent. A pang of nostalgia accompanied it. He thought of Mexican restaurants and good times he’d had in the past. His mouth watered as he recalled the taste of tacos so vividly it almost made him swoon.
Sighing again, he upended the bottle and poured it out on the pavement. He did the same with bottles of Maker’s Mark and Stoli. What he was doing was the right thing, of that there was no doubt, but the smell of the booze awakened that undying need inside him. He considered taking a slug from the next bottle he opened, a fifth of Jack Daniel’s. Just for old time’s sake. But that was his addiction talking. He poured out the fifth of Jack. After that, he decided to cut down on the possibility of surrendering to temptation by smashing the bottles on the street. Pouring them out was just taking too long.
The destruction of his booze stash took several more minutes. Once it had been accomplished, the relief he felt was so profound it bordered on exhilaration. Not for the first time, he was standing on the precipice of freedom. There were tears in his eyes as he contemplated a future in which he was no longer a slave to the bottle. He’d been here before. Many times. In the end, the need had always been stronger. It couldn’t be vanquished, not entirely. And it could be endlessly patient, just waiting for that right moment of weakness to arrive.
And maybe that moment would yet come again. Hell, it probably would. But he made a deal with himself as he stood there in silent contemplation of all that broken glass glittering in the sunlight. He would stay sober until he reached Ventura. He didn’t have far to go now, having crossed the border into California at some hazy point within the last day or so. On the off-chance Lisa was still there—and still alive—he needed to be healthier than he was now when they were reunited. He was a walking wreck. Maybe she’d really loved him once upon a time, but he didn’t see how she could feel anything other than revulsion at seeing him in his current condition. So he would stay sober and do what he could about that in the days ahead. And he’d hope for the best.
Noah glanced at the bikini model cutout strapped to the front of the shopping cart. Her smile seemed phonier than ever now, no longer as inviting as he’d once imagined. The bottle of beer in her hand no longer added to her appea
l. He decided he’d seen quite enough of her for one lifetime. He took a knife from his utility belt, cut the shiny, tape-wrapped slab of thin cardboard free of the cart, and tossed it into the street.
Then he put the knife away, took up his usual position behind the cart’s handle, and started walking again.
49.
He made camp in a field adjacent to an interstate ramp later that night, setting up his tent for the first time in ages and then using a foldout entrenching tool to dig out a fire pit. These were some of his first steps in a renewed effort to live like a decent human being again. Tonight he would sleep under proper cover rather than sprawled out in the middle of some road or wherever else he happened to pass out at the end of any given day. Also, after subsisting on canned food for longer than he could remember, he decided it was time to dine on something with a little more substance to it.
To make this happen, he ventured into a nearby wooded area, where he managed to capture and kill a nicely plump rabbit. He got a fire going in the pit and cooked the rabbit on a spit. It was the best-tasting thing he’d eaten in just about forever. Compared to his usual fare of barely tolerable crap, it was like feasting on filet mignon at a five-star restaurant in Manhattan or Paris.
Noah ate all of it he could stand, which was a surprising amount. His stomach gave him some trouble, but not as much as he’d feared. He forced himself to have more than he really wanted, knowing his body was in dire need of an infusion of fuel that wasn’t half-rotten. There was nonetheless a good bit left over. He saved what he could of the unused portion, packing it away in the bag that had once contained his weed stash.
The weed was gone now, scattered to the wind shortly after he’d set up camp. This was done with mixed feelings. He had functioned well for years as a regular pot user during his years of isolation on the mountain, with things only going to hell once booze entered the equation again. This wasn’t mere rationalization. It was just the damn truth. And yet he knew he had to divest himself of the temptation anyway. He had arrived at a critical stage of his journey and didn’t need anything clouding or coloring his feelings. One way or another, whatever it took, he meant to honor the deal he’d made with himself. He was abstaining from all intoxicating substances at least until he got to Ventura.