Slowly We Rot (2 page)

The encounter with the zombie
left Noah unsettled the rest of the day.  He felt more restless than usual and
anxious in a vague way.  This was no delayed fear response to the dead thing’s
unexpected intrusion into his territory.  It’d never presented any real threat,
being too frail and decomposed for that.

          No, this was more about
the unanticipated disruption of a long-unchanging norm.  For so many hundreds
upon hundreds of days, things had been almost exactly the same.  He spent his
time in total isolation.  Nothing remarkable ever happened.  It wasn’t a
healthy way to exist.  Human beings were social creatures.  They craved companionship
and stimulation.

          Noah was no exception
to this rule.  The long period of isolation frequently made him susceptible to
despair.  There had been many times he’d considered taking his own life.  He’d
braced his rifle’s muzzle beneath his chin so often it’d almost become a kind
of ritual, but he’d never been able to take that final step and squeeze the
trigger.  Something in him just wouldn’t allow him to do it, despite the fact
that he could think of no compelling reason to go on living.

          He had stopped doing
the thing with the rifle when he finally realized there was little chance he
would go through with it, at least as things stood now.  There would likely
come a day when circumstances forced him to reconsider.  Assuming he spent the
remainder of his days up here on the mountain, old age or illness would
eventually push him beyond the brink.  If he developed some debilitating
disease, there would be no way to treat it.  In that kind of scenario, a high-caliber
round fired through his skull would be the only good option.

          For the time being,
however, he was resigned to plodding through the days of his colorless
existence.  Though he sometimes deviated from it for the sake of preserving his
sanity, Noah’s routine was well-established.  By this point in the day, edging
toward late afternoon, he would normally sit in the rocking chair out on the
porch until sunset.  Often he would read a book as he did this.  Other times he
would pack a pipe and spend those hours maintaining a pleasant marijuana buzz. 
Sometimes he read while he was high.

          His library was
comprised mostly of books he’d scavenged from other cabins in the area.  He had
a lot of time to fill and wasn’t fussy about the reading material he acquired. 
Those scavenging trips had turned up an array of bestsellers from yesteryear,
but he’d also accumulated numerous biographies, romance novels, and self-help
books.  Given the state of the world, those in the latter category usually struck
him as bleakly comical.

          He’d turned up his most
prized literary find yet in the cellar of a cabin near the top of one of the
neighboring peaks—almost a dozen boxes crammed full of old western pulp novels. 
Transporting them back to his place had required multiple trips over a two week
period, but it had been well worth the effort.  He had enough reading material
to forestall the necessity of rereading things for a long while.

          The pot supply also had
its origins in a scavenging expedition.  He’d found dozens of plants in the
area around a neighboring cabin.  Under the circumstances, being high on a
near-constant basis seemed to Noah a pretty benign habit.  It was something to
do.  And being high made being completely alone more bearable.  Tending to the
plants also helped fill the time.  The work was simple, but there was a basic
kind of comfort in it.

          But today he didn’t
feel like doing any of those usual things.  He especially didn’t feel like
getting high.  A buzz would ease the nebulous anxiety that had gripped him.  However,
for reasons rooted in his past, not accepting the artificial relief the weed
would grant him felt important.  This restlessness felt different in some hard
to identify way from the usual strain of boredom he so often experienced.  He
wanted to allow it room to breathe and see if it might eventually lead his
thoughts in an interesting or unanticipated direction.

          Odds were good nothing
of the sort would happen.  He figured he would become frustrated with the
effort to uncover some hidden truth or insight and give up, succumbing to the
temptation of the weed when he realized no such revelation was forthcoming, not
today or on any other day.  The truth was simpler.  His boredom was such that
any deviation from the norm made him want to invest the event with some deeper
meaning than it really possessed.

          But Noah wasn’t ready
to let it go just yet.

          Instead of sitting out
on the porch until the sun completed its slow slide toward the horizon, he went
back into the cabin and sat in the sofa in the outer room, where he frowned at
the large-screen TV mounted on the opposite wall.  Once upon a time, the device
had been a marvel of modern technology, with a stunning HD display.  Now,
though, it was a useless hunk of nothing hanging from the wall for no good
reason.  The local power grid had failed long ago.  Luckily, the cabin had a
powerful generator.  But there had been no fuel to run the thing for years,
despite the initial ample supply Noah’s father had stocked the property with at
the outset of the plague.

          In those early months
on the mountain, having a working alternate power source made it occasionally
possible to buy into an illusion of normality.  Perhaps sensing the necessity
of distraction, Noah’s dad had brought along a large selection of movies on
Blu-ray discs.  After their mother died, Noah and his sister spent a lot of
time right here on this sofa watching those movies.  They mostly avoided
watching the news after events out in the world took several apocalyptically
bad turns.  Civilization was a lost cause and watching the erratic
documentation of its downfall had been too depressing.  Up here in the
mountains, it had almost been possible to pretend that none of it was happening.

          But then things
changed.

          The gas reserves ran
low.  They scavenged for more and found enough to help for a while, but it
wasn’t enough.  It never could have been enough.  And then the gas ran out,
except for what was in the SUV’s tank, which had to be conserved.

          Then his sister got
sick.

          It started with
coughing fits, which got progressively worse.  Noah remembered the fear he’d
felt at that first sight of blood on Aubrey’s lips.  Blood meant something
serious.  It wasn’t the zombie virus.  They’d been in the mountains for months
by then and Aubrey had been effectively shielded from contact with the dead
things the entire time.  But the blood was bad.  And soon there was a lot more
of it.  Every time he saw blood dribble out of her mouth, a deep dread seized
Noah.  A picture of a dire future took shape in his head, one possessed with a
grim and undeniable inevitability.

          He knew exactly what
would happen before it happened.  His sister would just keep getting sicker. 
Her illness, whatever it was, would not respond to any home remedy.  Their
increasingly distraught father would try something desperate and everything
would change forever.

          Noah was right about
all of it.

          His father bundled the deathly
ill Aubrey into the SUV and drove back down the mountain in search of a
still-functioning hospital or doctor.  Noah had wanted to go with them, but his
father insisted he remain behind as he had his hands full with Aubrey and
couldn’t possibly protect both of them.  Noah wasn’t a child.  He was a young
adult a year or so removed from a disastrous post-high school stint in
college.  He reminded his father of this, pointing out that they were headed
into an incredibly dangerous and uncertain situation, into a world in tumult,
and that he could certainly use his goddamned help.  But the emotional display
only solidified his father’s resolve.  So they left Noah there alone on the
mountain.

          He never saw either of
them again.

          That was over five
years ago.

          Noah got up from the
sofa, went out to the porch, and packed his pipe.  The need to divine some
deeper meaning from the angst gripping him in the aftermath of dealing with the
zombie had deserted him, at least for the time being.  The only thing he cared
about at the moment was driving back the painful old memories.  With this aim
in mind, he settled into the rocking chair and got higher than he had in a very
long time.

Night had fallen by the time
Noah’s eyes fluttered open hours later.  He was still in the rocking chair out
on the porch, having drifted off at some indeterminate point.  The glass pipe
had slipped from his fingers while he was unconscious.  After stretching his
arms a moment, he scooped the pipe up from the porch.  There was still a small
bit of weed tamped down in the bottom of the bowl, and he briefly considered
smoking the rest of it.  Instead he tucked the pipe in his shirt pocket and
frowned as he stared out at the dark clearing.

          Noah rarely allowed
himself to fall asleep outdoors for extended periods.  His father had instilled
in him a deep-seated wariness of leaving himself exposed and vulnerable in a
world in which the old rules no longer applied.  Doing so would, of course,
render him susceptible to zombie and animal attack, but his father had also
cautioned him against trusting live human beings, who were potentially an even
bigger threat.  There was no law anymore.  A man could kill you and rob you
blind without fear of being locked up or sent to death row.

          But Noah no longer
considered this a real possibility.  Years without seeing another living person
made it seem remote.  In the early days of being alone, however, he’d dreaded
nightfall, the darkness heightening the already crushing sense of isolation. 
He’d had a hard time sleeping back then, overreacting to every little sound in
the vicinity of the cabin.  In his mind, a probably harmless animal snuffling
around in the darkness became a stealthy bandit creeping up for a look at his
property.  The paranoia didn’t begin to ease until more than a full year alone
in the mountains.  Though it
did
finally ease, the wariness remained.

          Which was why he almost
always kept the rifle with him when he sat out here at night.  In the wake of
the unplanned, extended nap, however, he was unarmed.  He considered going back
inside for the rifle, but he did not immediately get up from the chair.  His
thoughts returned to the zombie from this afternoon.  Some of the unsettled
feeling from earlier also came back to him.

          This time, though, he
felt like he had a handle on at least part of why he felt so out of sorts.  It
wasn’t about any negligible threat the zombie had presented.  It was more about
the disruption of an illusion.  In a way, it was similar to what he and the
rest of his family had experienced when there was no more gas for the
generator.  This shift in perception, however, wasn’t as stark and dramatic as
that had been.  This time the illusion had been more subtle.

          He had been up here on
the mountain so long that the life he had known before the fall had come to
seem like something from a dream, or, perhaps, a story he’d fabricated in his
mind to stave off the boredom of isolation.  Objectively, he knew this wasn’t
true, but the notion was invested with a seductive quality that made belief
seem possible.  His memories of the old world now seemed like lies, or like
fairytales twisted beyond recognition through generations of retelling.  The
images in his head from that time felt like glimpses of an alien world.  Until
this afternoon, he had been able to envision a day, maybe not so far into the
future, when his weary mind would allow him the comfort of believing he’d
always
lived up here on the mountain.  That the old world had never really existed.

          The zombie had changed
that.

          The dead thing was a
reminder not only of the incontrovertible existence of the old world, but also
of that world’s cataclysmic demise.  And there was even more to it than that. 
Civilization might have passed away, but its corpse was still out there.  In his
head he saw empty cities standing in ruin, dark skyscrapers with shattered
windows, streets choked with the decaying remains of countless dead.

          Noah abruptly rose from
the rocking chair, deciding he needed another way to divert his mind from these
dark thoughts.  Getting high again so soon after passing out on the porch
wasn’t an attractive option, so he decided he would spend the rest of the night
reading a selection from his cache of western novels by the light of an oil lamp.

          He was on the verge of
stepping through the door into the cabin when he heard a sound that made his
heart lurch in his chest.  He braced a hand against the doorframe to keep from
falling over.  The moment of terror was intense, easily surpassing anything
he’d experienced in the last few years.  But not allowing fear to paralyze him
into inaction was yet another lesson his father had hammered home time and
again.

          Noah backed away from
the door and turned to stare out at the dark woods.  Several silent moments
passed as he stood there and peered into the darkness, waiting to hear the
sound again.

         
I didn’t hear what I
thought I heard
, he thought. 
It’s just my mind fucking with me in some
new, even more messed-up than usual way.

          This might even have
been true.  Hell, it was
probably
true, because the sound Noah
thought—or imagined—he’d heard had been a brief burst of laughter.

          There’d been a lilting,
distinctly feminine tinge to the sound.  Or so he’d thought.  But the longer
the silence drew out, the more sure he was that his ears had misinterpreted
some animal sound.  It was the most logical explanation.  He could think of no
good reason why a girl or young woman would suddenly be in the woods outside
his mountain cabin, years after his last glimpse of another human being.  And why,
for fuck’s sake, would she have laughed?  This wasn’t a situation or setting
conducive to laughter.  Unless, of course, the person doing the laughing was
deranged.

          Noah shivered.

         
Now
there’s
a
comforting thought
.

          Noah was by no means an
expert on the subject of mental illness, but he thought it was a good bet that
any lone person laughing in the woods at night was probably some kind of
lunatic.  Or maybe there was an even more sinister underlying truth.  Maybe
this was a sign he was cracking up.  He wanted to shrug off the idea as ludicrous,
but this wasn’t easy to do.

          The sound came again.

          Noah went into the
cabin and closed the door, locking it behind him.  He scurried rapidly around
the cabin’s interior, bumping into things in the dark as he scrambled to lock
all the windows and shut the blinds.  He got one of the oil lamps lit and
carried it over to the fireplace, where he planned to park himself for the rest
of the night.  This would give him the best defensive central position against
anyone trying to enter the cabin.  He set the oil lamp down, retrieved the
rifle from the kitchen, and dragged a chair from the dining table over to the
fireplace.

          He sat in the chair and
braced the rifle across his legs.

          The sound had been
clearer the second time.  And closer.  It’d definitely been the laughter of a
girl or young woman.

          And there had
definitely been a taunting quality to her laughter.

          Noah stared at the door
and waited for something to happen.