Slowly We Rot (18 page)

          She glanced up when he
approached her.  The look on her face was carefully neutral, evincing no
obvious signs of disdain.  But there was no warmth there, either.

          He offered his
canteen.  “Water?”

          She nodded.  “Please.”

          He knelt in front of
her and let her take the canteen from him, helping her hold it when her hands
began to shake.  As she drank, he couldn’t help eyeing her ring finger.  There
was no ring there, but an indentation in her skin indicated one had been worn
there for a long period.  A wedding or engagement ring from Patrick, probably. 
Noah supposed the old man had stripped it from her at some point.

          She finally pushed the
canteen away, wiping her mouth with the back of a hand as Noah screwed the cap
back on.  “Thank you.”

          “You’re welcome.”

          He hesitated a moment
and then sat next to her against the median.  She didn’t flinch or otherwise
react when he did this, which he chose to interpret as a positive sign.  They
sat there in silence a while as Nick and Aubrey quietly conversed several yards
away.

          Then Linda’s head
turned in Noah’s direction.  “You shouldn’t feel bad.  There was nothing you
could do.  He was strong.  It wasn’t your fault.”

          Her words took him by
surprise.  He wanted to say something but was too overcome with emotion to
verbalize what he was feeling.  Linda seemed to understand and took his hand
long enough to give it a light squeeze.  She let go of it after barely more
than a second and nothing else was said for the time being, but for Noah this
was plenty good enough.  He suddenly felt better than he had since letting the
old man get the drop on him that day.

          Twenty-odd minutes
later, they were headed down the road again.

They ran into trouble a few days
later outside Jackson, the first city of any real size west of Nashville.  Until
then the one-hundred and twenty-some miles between the two cities had been
mostly desolate territory.  They encountered no other living humans and no
zombies.

          Twice they entered
smaller towns along the route to hunt for supplies.  In one of them, they broke
into a boarded-up sporting goods store, where Noah was finally able to exchange
his clunky and burdensome old-fashioned frame backpack for a more ergonomically
designed one.  Nick and the others explored the store while Noah transferred
his things from the old pack to the new one.  He did this quickly, keeping a
wary eye out for Aubrey as he crammed his weed stash into the deepest recesses
of the pack, though he believed he didn’t have much cause to worry.  As he’d
suspected back in Crossville, she’d found and disposed of the last Maker’s Mark
bottle, but she left his pot alone.  This likely had a lot to do with the way
he’d packaged it.  It didn’t look too different from his food bundles.

          Both towns yielded a
generous quantity of basic necessities, things like canned food, bottled water,
and toilet paper.  The latter was a particular luxury to Noah after years of
wiping with an assortment of old sponges he constantly had to clean in buckets
of well water.  Out on the road, hygiene had become even more problematic. 
He’d packed two sponges, but cleaning them regularly wasn’t possible, at least
not in an effective way.  In one particularly dire moment of need, he used
yellowed pages from one of his old western novels.  To say the least, it was
not a soothing experience.  So when they found the stash of Charmin in the back
of a ransacked Rite-Aid store, Noah felt like he’d discovered the Holy Grail. 
The only issue was making sure to parse out enough of it at a time so it’d last
until they happened upon the next cache of ass-coddling paper nirvana.

          By then Linda had been
able to start carrying a light bag.  They packed it with Charmin, a few cans of
food, and a couple plastic water bottles.  The practical difference for the
others didn’t amount to much, but being able to contribute even in a small way
had a discernible elevating effect on Linda’s mood.  She wasn’t suddenly
smiling all the time, but some of the darkness that’d hung about her like a cloud
lifted.  Not only that, but she was looking better by the day.  No one was
ready to pronounce her out of the woods yet, but the overload of antibiotics
they’d been feeding her on a daily basis seemed to be doing the job, so much so
that they’d begun stepping the dosage down by the time they neared Jackson.

          The first hint of
something amiss initially appeared as an indistinct dark blur on the distant
horizon.  Upon seeing it, Noah was strongly reminded of his first glimpse of the
giant Crossville crater.  At first he was sure another section of road had been
inexplicably bombed, but that impression diminished after another few moments
of scrutinizing this new anomaly.  Whatever it was, it was still too far away
to perceive details, but his subconscious picked up on something in the raw
visual data, because he was suddenly sure the anomaly was
moving
.

          He screwed his eyes
shut for a moment and rubbed at them with his fists.  It’d been a long day of
walking and he was tired.  The afternoon heat had turned his clothes damp with
sweat.  He squinted when he opened his eyes again, hoping the perception of
movement had been a fatigue-induced illusion.  Because if something that size
was
moving, it could potentially be very bad news.

          Nick came to an abrupt
stop and raised the binoculars hanging around his neck.  The others stopped at
the same time, waiting as he adjusted the focus and studied the blur on the
horizon.  Several silent moments elapsed.  As the tension mounted and his
impatience for information grew, Noah cursed his lack of foresight.  He should
have swiped an extra pair of binocs from the sporting goods store when he had
the chance.  In retrospect, it seemed like an obviously vital tool for survival
on the road, but he’d been too focused on making sure his weed was safely
stashed away in his new pack.

          Aubrey stamped a foot
in frustration.  “For fuck’s sake, what do you see?”

          Nick passed the binoculars
to Noah.  “We’re gonna have to get off the road.”

          For a moment, all Noah
saw through the binoculars was a dark blob blocking both sides of the highway. 
That changed when he adjusted the focus.  “Oh, fucking hell.”

          He heard rapid
footsteps on the asphalt and then Aubrey ripped the binoculars from his hands. 
She put them to her eyes and held them there a moment before lowering them with
a startled gasp.  Noah heard terror in the sound.  He couldn’t blame his
sister.  He was pretty terrified, too.

          Noah glanced at Nick. 
“How far away, you think?”

          Nick’s brow furrowed. 
“Couple miles, maybe.  Get out that atlas.”

          Noah tugged off his
pack and knelt in the road as he opened it.  He pushed aside some items and
pulled out the battered atlas, which was already folded open to the detailed
Tennessee map.

          As Noah stood up, Nick moved
over and studied it with him.  The ex-soldier traced a red line on the wrinkled
page with an index finger.  “Shit.”

          Aubrey moved in for a
look.  “What is it?”

          “The next exit’s five
miles up ahead.”

          “And the last one we
passed is four miles behind us,” Noah added.

          Aubrey made a fretful
sound.  “Well, shit.  How far are we from Jackson?”

          Nick’s index finger
traced the red line again.  “Bit under twenty miles.”

          Noah took a look
around.  They were still on the long stretch of interstate between Nashville
and Jackson where it narrowed to two lanes on each side.  Another ten or so
miles up ahead it would widen back to four lanes per side, but even that
wouldn’t give them enough space to fight their way through that many zombies.  Getting
off the road was their only option.  The problem was that this section of
interstate was bracketed by dense stands of forest, some of which undoubtedly
covered some tricky terrain.

          Aubrey pushed Nick’s
hand away and moved her much smaller index finger over the page, deviating from
the red line in a northward direction.  Noah saw her eyes flick to the distance
scale in the corner of the page.  Then she tapped a spot where her finger had
lingered.  “This open area here, it’s not even a mile distant.  And look at
this little line here…”  Her finger moved over the page again.  “Shit, I’m not
even sure if it’s a road, there’s not any fucking names or numbers or anything
helpful like that, but it might be something, some little back country road. 
And if I’m right…”

          Nick nodded. 
“Eventually it’ll lead to a way out.  Shit, it has to, we’re not that far from
Jackson.”  He took the binoculars back from Aubrey and draped them around his
neck.  “Saddle up, gang.  Time for a nature walk.”

          Noah zipped up his pack
and pulled it on again.  He sensed Linda staring at him and turned in her
direction, unable to help wincing as he imagined her climbing the guardrail and
negotiating her way through possibly hazardous terrain.  On the other hand,
she’d endured much worse things.

          “You up to this?”

          She shrugged.  “I don’t
exactly have a choice.  Do I?”

          Noah shook his head. 
“No.  Sorry.”

          She almost smiled, a
slight twitch of her mouth that was gone so fast Noah wondered if he’d imagined
it.  “Not your fault.”

          Aubrey was already
headed for the guardrail.  “Stop flirting.  In case you haven’t noticed, the
zombie part of the zombie apocalypse is a thing again.  Let’s go.”

          The apocalypse quip
made Noah grin.  It was the closest Aubrey had come to sounding like her old
self since before her long absence.  But the grin slipped as the “flirting” part
of the comment registered.  Sure, Aubrey was being flippant, but, for murky reasons
he wasn’t ready to examine too closely, it bothered him.

          Linda was no longer
looking at him.  Noah figured she was feeling some level of vague embarrassment. 
It felt like a mild setback.  Obviously that hadn’t been Aubrey’s intent, but
when someone was as emotionally fragile as Linda, it didn’t take much to derail
any meager progress.  That was something he knew well from personal experience.

          But they were in the
midst of a crisis and there was no time to worry about it.  Nick and Aubrey
were already on the other side of the guardrail.  Noah cast another glance
westward.  The horde of zombies was still miles away and moving at the standard
sluggish pace, but the dead things weren’t standing still either.  Movement was
now detectable with the naked eye.  Lingering here even a moment longer than
absolutely necessary would be a mistake.

          Noah and Linda hurried
to the side of the road and climbed over the guardrail.

Once they were through the tree
line, the ground rose steeply upward, precipitously so.  They were forced to crawl
up the hill, reaching for and grabbing onto every available handhold.  It was
similar to mountain climbing, only they were doing it without proper gear and
weighted down with supplies.  The strap of Noah’s rifle kept wanting to slip
off his shoulder.  Several times Linda missed grabbing a handhold.  Noah was
there to steady her every time, otherwise she would’ve gone tumbling back down
the hill.  The first few times she quietly thanked him, but after that she kept
her mouth shut.  At first Noah took this as additional evidence of
embarrassment, but when he looked at her, he saw nothing but determination in
the tight set of her features.  She was frustrated by her relative weakness
compared to the rest of them and was straining herself to push harder.

          After a seeming
eternity, they arrived gasping at a more level patch of land and were able to
shift from a crawl to walking slightly stooped over.  Despite his relief at
this development, Noah kept himself positioned behind Linda in case of
emergency.

          As they continued
trudging through the dense woods, Noah’s thoughts turned back to the dead
things on the highway.  Until just a few minutes ago, he’d been sure the
possibility of encountering zombies in large numbers was virtually nil.  The
original apocalypse zombies had long ago fallen victim to decomposition.  Those
still animate in spite of decomposition were nonetheless too deteriorated to go
shambling down the highway.  And so few people were left in the world that the
possibility of new hordes of zombies rising should have been remote verging on impossible.

          On one of the last news
transmissions he’d seen before power went out at the cabin for good, a haggard newscaster
said the human race stood “poised on the brink of extinction”, with a projected
worldwide death rate in the ninety percent range.  Another person on the same
broadcast labeled this a conservative estimate, insisting that ninety-five percent
was more realistic, with ninety-eight percent not out of the question.  It was
at about that point that Noah decided to delve into his father’s Blu-ray
collection again.

          “Hey, Nick?”

          The big man was only
intermittently visible.  He kept disappearing as he threaded his way through
the dense greenery.  His reply, however, came back loud and clear.  “Yeah?”

          “You know how there’s
basically hardly anyone left in the world?”

          The back of Nick’s head
came into view for a moment through the foliage.  He continued moving ahead
without glancing back.  “What about it?”

          Noah ducked beneath a
branch.  He experienced a moment of intense panic when he popped back up and
realized he’d lost sight of all three of his traveling companions.  A big
tree—probably the tallest and thickest he’d encountered yet—was right in front
of him.  He shuddered in relief as he stepped around it and caught a glimpse of
Linda’s back.

          Once the distress of
the moment passed, he pitched his voice louder to catch Nick’s attention
again.  “So how do you explain that undead mob back there on the interstate?  There
were hundreds of them, maybe thousands.  And they looked more or less freshly
risen.”

          Aubrey piped up before
Nick could respond.  “Isn’t it obvious?  Some large group of people was holed
up somewhere.  I guess they were all able to stay safe for a long time, but
something happened and now they’re all fucking dead.”

          His sister’s theory seemed
plausible.  And the implications were pretty frightening.  “Well, here’s my
concern.  Whatever happened to wipe out a group this big might still be out
there.  If we cross paths with it…”

          Aubrey grunted.  “We’re
fucked.”

          “Yeah.  Basically.”

          “You’re both making
some big assumptions.”  Nick’s voice came in clear as a bell, though he was
somewhere well up ahead and out of sight again.  “Think back to how it was in
the early days.  How fast it spread.  Maybe these people got complacent about
security.  All it’d take is one dead thing getting in undetected long enough to
infect a few people.  Pretty soon, they’re all dead.  There’s not necessarily
some other big threat looming out there.  In fact, I’d bet against it.”

          Noah let it go after
that.  What Nick was saying was sensible enough.  He just hoped the guy was
right.

          The ground beneath them
continued to level out as they kept pushing forward.  Before long the denseness
of the greenery lessened significantly.  There were multiple exclamations of
relief as they caught sight of a road beyond the thinning stand of trees.

          An incipient smile
froze on Noah’s face as he glanced down and noticed a snake slithering across
the ground directly in front of him.  Long and black and tinged with flecks of
yellow, it was disconcertingly thick.  He sucked in a startled breath as he
came to an abrupt stop.  Linda glanced back at him with a concerned expression.

          “You okay?”

          The snake zipped by him
and disappeared into some undergrowth.  Noah could tell from the look on
Linda’s face that she hadn’t seen it.  He heaved a breath and forced a tight
smile.  “I’m fine.  Let’s just get out of the goddamn woods.”

          Linda shrugged and kept
going.

          Moments later they
emerged from the woods into the open area Aubrey had spotted on the map.   The
road was so narrow it was more like a paved pathway than an actual road, which
possibly accounted for why it wasn’t labeled in the atlas.  On the other side
of the road was a large patch of barren-looking field.  Beyond it was another
stretch of forest.

          Nick asked for the
atlas again.

          Noah opened his pack
and removed the atlas.  He handed it to Nick and opened his canteen, taking a
long drink as he glanced up and down the pathway, which was predictably studded
with potholes after the long period of neglect.  Aubrey leaned in close to Nick
as the two of them studied the map.  Linda was standing several feet away from
everyone else, a vacant gaze trained on the stretch of pathway to Noah’s left. 
He turned in that direction to see if anything in particular had captured her
attention, but saw only trees and a degraded stretch of winding asphalt.

          But then Nick cocked
his head in the same direction and said, “Think we gotta go that way.  It
should allow us to circumvent the horde and eventually get back to the
interstate.”

          He showed Noah the map,
indicating a point where the unlabeled squiggly blue line petered out, possibly
indicating a dead end.  That was far from certain, however, because the line
stopped just short of intersecting with a thicker line describing the path of a
numbered state route.  The numbered road continued in a looping westerly direction
before curving back toward an interstate exit.  The key thing was that the exit
appeared to come out several miles behind the zombie horde.

          Noah shrugged.  “That
should work, I guess.”

          Nick handed the atlas
back to Noah, who stashed it away again.  In a few more moments, they set off
in the agreed upon direction.  They covered the first two miles at a good clip. 
Everyone was feeling slightly rejuvenated after the short break.  Even Linda
had a little more spring in her step.  Noah was beginning to feel pretty good
about her chances for a full recovery.  On a physical level, at least.  The
psychological part of the equation might be trickier.  But her recent tentative
stabs at conversation had him hopeful they might be able to talk about that
aspect of it at some point.  Maybe they could help each other.

          The defining
characteristic of the pathway was its many dips and rises and sharp bends,
which reminded Noah of the treacherous mountain road he’d taken out of the
Smokies.  The frequent bends undoubtedly accounted for the squiggly nature of
the line on the map.  It was also why they didn’t catch even a glimpse of the dead
things until they were almost right up on them.

          Aubrey was at the head
of the procession.  She was full of a nervous energy that made her impatient
with the pace the rest of them were setting.  For a brief instant, she
disappeared from sight completely after going around another of those sharp
bends.  Noah thought nothing of it until she let out a high-pitched shriek.  Nick
called out her name and charged ahead at full speed, unslinging his rifle from
his shoulder as he ran.  Noah and Linda were right on his heels.

          The three of them came
to a nearly simultaneous abrupt halt after rounding the bend, but not before
almost crashing into Aubrey.  She was standing stock-still in the middle of the
pathway.  It was immediately obvious they would be unable to continue in this
direction.  Barely more than a dozen feet from where they stood, the way ahead
was blocked by dead things.  The horde stretched back as far as the eye could
see.

          Aubrey heaved a
breath.  “We’re dead.”

          A silent beat passed.

          Noah said, “The fuck do
we do now?”

          But there was no time
for further discussion, because by then the zombies were belatedly reacting to
the presence of living humans.  They had been eerily silent, but now a chorus
of hungry moans rose up and they started shambling forward at a faster rate.

          Noah’s instinct was to
turn and run as fast as he could in the opposite direction, but Nick apparently
had other ideas.  He gripped Aubrey by an elbow and tugged her toward the line
of trees to the right.  Noah wasn’t thrilled by the prospect of another flight
through the woods, but there weren’t any other good options.  He shot a glance
at Linda as he raised his rifle.  “Into the woods. 
Now
.”

          After sighting down on
the nearest zombie, he squeezed the trigger and experienced an instant of deep,
primal satisfaction as the top half of its head blew apart.  It toppled over,
knocking down another dead thing directly behind it.  Noah shifted his aim and
worked the rifle’s bolt to put another round in the chamber.  He squeezed the
trigger again, putting a bullet between another zombie’s eyes.

          Linda flinched at each
report of the rifle.  Noah was briefly frustrated that she hadn't taken off
into the woods as instructed, but a glimpse of her shell-shocked expression
squashed the feeling.  He put a hand at the small of her back and pushed her in
the direction of the woods, yelling at her to move her ass.

          By then the dead things
had halved the original distance between them.  Noah was already regretting the
impulse to fire at them.  After years of practice, he was fast with the rifle,
but the few seconds the action required had been too many.  It was something
he’d done out of anger and frustration, with no forethought.  But now he was
remorseful, because taking the time to do it might be the difference between
life and death.

          They were plunging
blindly through the woods moments later.  This section of forest was less dense
than the section bordering the interstate, but that made the undergrowth no
less hazardous, especially at breakneck speed.  Despite this, Linda was
managing an impressive pace.  Noah was thankful for that, but in a moment he
would regret focusing so much of his concentration on her.

          After more than a
minute of running full-out, he stepped in a hole and cried out as he pitched
forward and landed in an awkward, painful sprawl.  He lost his grip on the
rifle and it flew away from him, sliding out of sight beneath a clump of
greenery.  The hard landing sent a shockwave of pain through his body.  This
was in addition to a knot of throbbing agony in his ankle, which felt as if it
had taken a hard twist but was not broken.  In nearly any other situation, he
would have remained right where he was for several minutes while waiting for
the pain to recede.  Doing that now, however, would seal his fate.

          Despite this grim
knowledge, several crucial seconds elapsed before he was able to plant his
hands on the ground and push himself to his knees.  Once he’d managed this
feat, he scanned the area for his fallen rifle.  His heart started pounding
when he heard clumsy footsteps somewhere behind him.  The dead would have some
difficulty making their way through the rougher wooded terrain, but their sheer
numbers guaranteed some of them would get to him if he stayed where he was much
longer.  The situation was compounded by a deep reluctance to give up the rifle
as lost.

          He crawled forward on
his hands and knees and started patting the undergrowth, hoping to feel either
the rifle’s stock or the solid steel of its barrel.  As the search continued,
the footsteps behind him grew louder, his ears discerning the disquieting
reality that there were multiple sets of them.  When he heard the crunch of a
twig behind him, he knew it was time—far past time, really—to surrender to the
obvious.  The rifle was gone.  And he would be too if he didn’t get up and
start running
right now
.

          Unfortunately, he
failed to account for the tenderness of his injured ankle when he tried to
stand.  He got the foot planted beneath him and tried using it to propel
himself upright.  This resulted in another bright flare of pain that made him
drop to his hands and knees again.  The footsteps behind him were closer.  He
heard moaning.  Terror engulfed him as realized he was about to die.  But just
as this awareness dawned, he heard more movement, this time from somewhere in
front of him.  He glanced up in time to catch a glimpse of Linda rushing past
him, a big hunting knife clutched in her right hand.  It was the only piece of
weaponry she had on her.