Slowly We Rot (22 page)

Noah drank the whole bottle of
George Dickel as he wandered around the abandoned neighborhood.  It got him good
and drunk, but this time a fifth of whiskey wasn’t nearly enough to take him into
blackout territory.  This likely had something to do with the overabundance of
adrenaline in his system.  There just wasn’t enough booze in the bottle to burn
through it and take him into the realm of oblivion, which he craved even more
than the alcohol itself.

          In the interest of
securing more whiskey, he decided he would explore some other houses in the
area.  Even in his inebriated state, however, it was clear most were too
decrepit to safely enter.  In many cases, severe storm damage was apparent from
a distance, but the severity of it was even worse upon closer inspection.  The
houses were obvious deathtraps.

          The oblivion Noah sought
was the temporary kind.  He wasn’t quite feeling suicidal.  Not yet anyway.  With
Linda dead, his original goal was front and center again.  If anything, it was
more important than ever.  But he couldn’t resume the journey without first
administering a heavy dose of self-abuse.

          The first house he
found that seemed safe to enter was three streets over from where he’d spent
the night.  A compact car sat in the driveway, but it obviously hadn’t been
operational for years.  Its tires were flat and the sun had baked the red
paintjob, turning it into a blotchy mess.  A faded Bile Lords sticker was on
the rear bumper.  Noah glanced inside the car on his way up to the house and
saw a six-pack of beer on the passenger seat.  At first it seemed like another
gift from above (or below).  But when he peeled a can from the plastic
ring-holder and popped the tab, he hesitated before trying it.  The old beer
smelled nasty.  At last, he took a tentative sip and wound up gagging.  It had
gone bad.

          He tossed the can away
and approached the house.  When he found the front door locked, he went around
to the back.  The door there had a window.  He broke it and reached inside to
unlock the door.  There was no whiskey in the house, but he found a bottle of
cheap wine in the refrigerator, along with a lot of rotten, shriveled food. 
The bottle had never been opened.  Nose crinkling in disgust at the
refrigerator’s rancid contents, he extracted the bottle and opened it.  To his
surprise, the wine tasted okay.  It didn’t make him want to throw up, which was
good enough.  He drank it as he wandered about the house.  He found some badly
decomposed corpses, but they were the non-animated kind.

          One of the dead people
sat in a recliner in the living room.  Noah plopped down on a nearby sofa and
drank more wine.  After a while, he started talking to the dead man (he guessed
it was a man, anyway), telling his unresponsive host about what had happened to
Linda and how, almost without fail, everything he touched turned to shit.  He
was cursed.  No one could deny it.

          Noah finished the wine
and slipped into unconsciousness.  When he came to, it was much later in the
day.  Fading late afternoon sunlight filtered in through the closed blinds.  It
would be dark soon.  This he noted only dimly, because something far more
startling had seized his attention.

          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.

“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 water 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.