Slowly We Rot (26 page)

          Noah watched with
mounting distress as the men escorting Nick came to an abrupt halt and shoved
him to the ground.  His knees hit the dirt and his head sagged forward.  He
tried to get up, but Connor’s men converged on him, whipping him about the face
with the stocks of their weapons.  A thin line of blood and saliva depended
from a corner of his mouth as he again got to his knees.  He coughed and
struggled to lift his head.  The fat man in the derby hat, Hal, moved into
position in front of Nick and lifted the bat embedded with spikes off his
shoulder.

          He wound up and took a
swing.

          Noah’s stomach clenched
as he watched multiple thick spikes punch deep into the side of Nick’s head.  His
eyes went wide and his body stiffened.  A moment later, he toppled over with
the spikes still embedded in his skull.  Hal glanced Noah’s way, winked, and
braced the heel of a boot against Nick’s throat as he ripped the spikes loose. 
They came away coated with dripping gore.

          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.

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.

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 dumped 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.

          Miranda was smiling
when his gaze came back to her.  She gestured to a door in a corner of the
room.  It stood partly open, just wide enough to give Noah a glimpse of a
bathroom.  “Shall we?”

          Noah belatedly noticed
a reddish tinge to her hair he could swear hadn’t been there before.  It was
the shade somewhere between red and blonde he’d heard described as strawberry
blonde.  Until now, he’d been sure her hair was the same shade of yellow blonde
as Lisa’s.  It bothered him for a moment, but then he decided he’d merely been
projecting his memories of his lost love on Miranda.  Some other similarities
seemed slightly less pronounced now, but not in a startling way, just subtle
things in her features that were now more obviously different.  The obsession
with Lisa was messing with his head in ways he didn’t like.  The healthy thing
would be to finally let go of it.

          But he couldn’t.

          In defiance of all
common sense, he simply
couldn’t
.

          He shrugged it off,
tucked his mementos away in the end table’s drawer, and followed Miranda into
the bathroom.