Slowly We Rot (16 page)

          “I would say you should
get out of there before it’s too late, but you look like you’ve figured that
out already.”

          Noah glanced up and saw
Nick standing at the edge of the pit.  The look on his face was amusement
tinged with annoyance.  He went to a knee and extended a hand.  “Come on, kid,
get over here and I’ll pull you out.”

          “Where’s Aubrey?”

          “Back at the house
looking after the woman.  Now get your ass in gear.”

          Noah needed no further
prompting.  He got to his feet and started making his way to the side of the
pit.  Bones crunched beneath him with every step.  The bodies shifted and
settled deeper, yielding to the pressure.  At one point a dead thing’s abdomen
gave way beneath his booted right foot, which plunged into a mass of putrescent
organs.  This one hadn’t been dead as long as many of the others and Noah
couldn’t help reading an imaginary reproach for the insult done to its body in
its twisted features.  He groaned and extracted his foot.  Another time he saw
bony fingers emerge from the mass of flesh and strain to reach him.  His heart
felt ready to leap from his chest by the time he arrived at the side of the pit
and reached up to grasp Nick’s hand.

          The ex-soldier hauled
Noah out of the pit with little discernible effort.  Then, before he could
thank the man, he drilled a fist into Noah’s gut, knocking him to the ground. 
Noah wheezed as he rolled onto his side and nearly fell back into the pit. 
Disaster was avoided when Nick grabbed him by an arm and pulled him well out of
range—nearly to the tree line—before letting him go again.

          Nick lit a cigarette
and smoked, saying nothing while Noah wheezed and held onto his stomach a while
longer.

          After the pain and
queasiness subsided, Noah sat up and looked at Nick.  “I guess I deserved
that.”

          Nick dropped the cigarette
butt on the ground and squashed it beneath the heel of his boot.  “I guess I
agree.”

          Noah held out a hand. 
“Help me up?”

          Nick hauled him back to
his feet.

          They stood there
without saying another word for a minute while Nick lit another cigarette. 
After blowing out a long stream of aromatic smoke, he took the pack from his
shirt pocket and offered it to Noah, who declined.  Nick shrugged.  “More for
me.”

          Noah frowned.  “All
right, whatever.  I’ll have one.”

          Within moments, they
were both smoking and eyeing the pit of rotting bodies with varying degrees of
disgust and disbelief.  The disbelief was mostly on Noah’s part, who was
experiencing a bit of post-traumatic stress.

          Nick grunted.  “Gotta
admit, kid, when I came up on this pile of dead folks and saw you lying right
in the middle of them, I thought, ‘This asshole might just be too stupid to
live’.”  He cocked an eyebrow at Noah.  “Seriously, how does a thing like that
happen?”

          Noah took too deep a
drag on his cigarette and coughed some before replying.  “These things are
stale as shit.  Goddamn.  Anyway, I couldn’t tell you how it happened.  I don’t
actually remember.”

          Nick chuckled and shook
his head.  “Damn, kid.”

          “Please stop calling me
‘kid’.  It drives me fucking insane.”

          Nick nodded.  “Fair
enough.  Can’t promise I won’t slip now and again, but I’ll try to keep a lid
on it.  Listen.  Aubrey filled me in on some stuff.  You’ve got your demons. 
I’ve got some of my own.  And in a world gone to shit, I get how tempting it
can be to say ‘fuck it’ and not worry about keeping them under control.  But I
don’t want you drinking while you’re with us.  Shit like this should be all the
proof you need that it’s too fucking dangerous.”

          “You sound like my
dad.”

          “Your father must have
been a genius.”

          Noah laughed.

          Nick’s expression
sobered.  “I’m serious, though.  You just can’t do it.”

          Noah flicked his
half-smoked cigarette into the body pit.  “It’s like you said about calling me
‘kid’.  I can’t promise not to slip now and then, but I’ll do my best to keep
my shit together.  And you need to cut me some slack here.  That shit in the
basement was a goddamn horror show.”

          Nick shrugged.  “That
shit in the basement
did
earn you some slack.  Why do you think I only
hit you once?”  He chuckled at Noah’s sneering expression.  “Relax, that’s a
joke.  Seriously, I get it.  I really do.  You still shouldn’t drink.”

          Noah nodded and said
nothing.

          They stood there at the
edge of the pit in contemplative silence for a while, each thinking about the
same things but from drastically differing perspectives.  For his part, Noah
knew an opportunity to scavenge some alcohol would eventually present itself. 
The trick would be how to secure it and stow it away without the others
noticing.  Nick, on the other hand, almost certainly understood what Noah had
in mind and would be keeping an eye out to prevent it from happening.  Noah
couldn’t know exactly what was in Nick’s head, of course, but he figured this
was pretty close.

          His brow furrowed as he
glanced at Nick.  “Don’t get me wrong.  I’m glad things worked out the way they
did earlier.  Like really, really fucking glad, you just have no idea.  But why
did you come after me at all?  And how did you know what route I’d take away
from the Smokies?”

          “That’s all your
sister’s doing, Noah.  She insisted we come after you.  There was no arguing
with her.  The route was pure guesswork.  Aubrey did some poking around in the
cabin.  She found something in the cellar that made her think you might have
gone off in search of some old girlfriend.”

          The box of mementos
from his college days.  Nick couldn’t be referring to anything else.  After
sorting through its contents—which included old letters, notebooks, campus
photos, and school-related documents—he’d found the scrap of envelope and the photo
strip containing his last remaining image of Lisa.  At that point, he lost all
interest in everything else the box contained.  The rest of it got left there
on the floor.  And his sister was one of the most intuitive people he’d ever
known.

          He sighed.  “Aubrey’s a
smart girl.”

          “That she is.”

          Another, briefer
silence followed this comment.

          Then Nick said, “I’ll
be keeping an eye on you.  You know that, right?”

          “Yeah.  I know.”

          Nick tilted his chin, a
gesture meant to indicate the body pit.  “What do you think the deal is with
this horrific fucking shit?  It’s pretty goddamn weird.  Seriously?  A body pit
in the middle of nowhere?  I mean, I’ve seen things like it.  Burned-up piles
of bodies in trenches dug by soldiers, but that was an anti-zombie containment
measure.  This…well, this is something else.”

          “The old guy was a serial
killer.”

          Nick glanced at Noah,
an eyebrow arched.  “Yeah?”

          Noah nodded.  “He all
but confirmed it.  I think if you dug up his back yard, you’d find more
remains, but they’d be older, from before the end of the world.  After the
apocalypse, he didn’t have to worry so much about hiding evidence, but he didn’t
want a bunch of corpses stinking up his house either.  So he dug this pit.”

          “And when he was done
with someone, he’d drag them out here and dump them in it.  Only it looks like
he didn’t bother finishing the job with some of them.”

          “I ran into another one
he didn’t finish off on the way out here.”

          “A zombie?”

          “Yeah.  I took a look
at its wallet after I put a knife through its head.”  Noah jerked a thumb over
his shoulder while keeping his gaze on the body pit.  “That woman back there? 
There were pictures of her in it.”

          “Jesus.  No shit?”

          “No shit.”

          They both chewed that
over a moment longer before Nick said, “We need to get back.  I don’t like
leaving Aubrey alone this long.”

          “Okay.  I’m tired of
looking at dead things anyway.”

          And with that, they
turned away from the pit and walked out of the woods.

25
.

They set up camp in the old man’s
back yard that night.  Fearful the evening would be haunted by revenants and
echoes of past atrocities, no one wanted any part of sleeping in a deceased
serial killer’s house.  There was a similar lack of interest in seeking shelter
in other houses in the area, primarily because they were spaced so far apart.  Everyone
was too tired to go off exploring.  Thus it was decided that they should rest
and save their energy for the next day.

          Nick raided a shed
behind the house and turned up a shovel.  He used it to dig a crude fire pit in
the approximate center of the big yard, well away from both the nightmare house
and the tree line.  Noah helped by gathering wood for the fire.  With June just
around the corner, cold nights were not an issue.  The fire was to drive away
the darkness.  Not just the night itself, but the darkness encroaching on their
thoughts.  They were huddled around it now, with the exception of Linda, the
woman from the basement.  She was sleeping in Noah’s tent, loaded up on
antibiotics and zonked-out on powerful painkillers.

          Aubrey discovered the
meds during a thorough search of the old man’s house.  He’d accumulated an
impressive range of pharmaceuticals.  Some had probably been scavenged from the
homes of dead neighbors.  The various names on the vials—patient names and the
names of prescribing doctors—made this obvious.  But the bulk of it was in
generic bottles and packages with labels identifying the various drugs.  At
some point, apparently, he’d emptied an abandoned pharmacy of its contents.

          Noah sat on the other
side of the fire from Nick and Aubrey.  He glanced at his tent as he drank from
his canteen.  A snoring sound from that direction was just audible over the
crackling of the flames.

          Noah capped the canteen
and looked at Nick.  “How’s she doing?”

          The big man shrugged. 
“Hard to say.  Nothing we can do about any internal damage.  The antibiotics will
hopefully help fight infection, but they might have lost some potency over
time.  We’ll feed her as many as she can take and hope it does the trick.  That
old bastard beat her to hell, though.”

          A grim silence
descended.  The fire crackled and Nick and Aubrey held hands as they peered
into the flames.  Noah squeezed his eyes shut and bit down hard on his bottom
lip, willing himself to hold back tears.

          His eyes opened when he
tasted blood.  “It’s funny, isn’t it?”

          Aubrey’s gaze shifted
from the flames to her brother.  “What is?”

          “You did the thing I
couldn’t do, the thing you condemned me for.  You came down from the mountain
and saved me from a situation just like the one you were trapped in all those
years.”  Noah’s hands clamped tight around the canteen.  He wished so
desperately it was a whiskey bottle instead.  “I’ve never believed in any kind
of higher power, you know.  That’s kind of why I had so much trouble with AA
and the twelve-step zombies.  But maybe I’ve been wrong all along.  Maybe what
happened here is that motherfucking higher power teaching me the most obvious
object lesson in history.”

          Now it was Aubrey who
was blinking back tears. “I’m sorry, Noah.  This never should have happened.  I
shouldn’t have been so mean.”

          “Don’t apologize.  You
were right.  I deserved it.  I’ve deserved every bad thing that’s ever happened
to me.”

          Nick sighed.  “Don’t read
anything bigger into what happened here, man.  The universe isn’t trying to
teach you anything.  Life is randomness and chaos.  The proof is all around
us.  And sometimes things line up in a way that make us see signs or omens that
aren’t really there.  That’s all that happened here.”