Slowly We Rot (23 page)

One of the store’s two main
entrances was barricaded.  The other entrance was open and they paused there a
moment before entering the store.  At some point in the (probably) distant
past, someone had used a large vehicle to smash through the sliding doors.  A
spray of glass littered the sidewalk outside the entrance as well as the lobby
floor inside it.  The vehicle, of which there was no sign, had also smashed some
shopping carts.  Noah pictured a big heavy duty truck smashing through the
doors.

          Or a bulldozer.

          Noah unshouldered his
pack and knelt carefully on the glass-strewn sidewalk.  He unzipped the pack
and glanced up at Nick, whose brow was furrowed in worry as he peered into the
store’s dark interior.  “What do you think?  Did they leave us anything?”

          “Only one way to find
out.”

          Noah took a flashlight
from the pack and thumbed the switch, testing it to see if the batteries were
still good.  The cone of light it projected when he pointed it at the store’s
entrance was a relief.  They’d picked up the flashlights at a hardware store in
Little Rock.  Because he hadn’t used electric devices of any type in so long, he
had trouble trusting even simple ones to work.  He’d also been dubious about
the batteries, suspecting they wouldn’t still hold a charge after so many years
sealed in their packaging.  Thus far he’d been wrong on both counts, but he
remained wary.

          Nick and Aubrey had
their own flashlights out.

          They went on into the
store.

          Noah got to his feet
and pulled on his pack.  Before venturing into the store, he took a last look
around at the mostly empty parking lot.  It looked as desolate as the rest of
the world.  Large clumps of weeds had grown up around the base of every light
pole.  There were several rust-flecked shopping carts at random spots
throughout the lot, perhaps where looters had deposited them prior to driving
away with a haul of pilfered goods.  Seeing them dampened his previous optimism
about the store.  His fear was that it was as barren of useful items as that
general store.  But not exploring it wasn’t an option, so in he went.

          He trod warily through
the glass-strewn lobby.  Some while back he’d traded in his heavy boots for a
pair of athletic shoes.  They were better for long-distance walking, but he often
worried the soles were more susceptible to being carved up by glass or other
sharp objects.  A hobbling foot wound was the last thing he needed with so many
miles still to go to his ultimate west coast destination.  At least the lobby
floor wasn’t littered with rusty nails, which were an occasional hazard of
walking through decaying residential areas.

          After making it into
the store without incurring injury, he swept the beam of his flashlight in a
wide right-to-left arc.  Some twenty feet ahead of him was a weathered-looking
cardboard bin partially stocked with cheaply-priced DVD’s still sealed in shiny
shrink-wrap.  To the left of the DVD bin were some self-checkout registers. 
Beyond these was a long row of standard checkout registers that stretched
nearly to the opposite side of the store.

          Noah idly wondered
whether there might still be money in those registers.  As best he could tell,
the registers were all closed and showed no signs of having been tampered with
by looters.  Given the worthlessness of currency in the wake of the apocalypse,
this was not a surprise.  He might not have given the matter any further
thought, except that he then remembered the single crumpled dollar bill in his
hip pocket, the one he’d taken from Patrick Brasher’s wallet.  Thinking about
it inevitably brought his thoughts back around to Linda.  He’d never told her
about his encounter with her husband’s reanimated body.  At first he felt bad
about this, wondering if it had been a mere lapse or a kind of passive
cowardice.  But he consoled himself with the certain knowledge that nothing
good could have come of telling her about the incident.

          He redirected the
flashlight, aiming it in front of him as he continued deeper into the store.  A
glimpse of movement somewhere in the wide aisle up ahead gave him a brief
start.  There were several display bins lined up down the middle of the
aisle—more shiny lures for dead impulse buyers—and whatever had moved was now
hidden behind one of them.  But then he caught another glimpse of movement and
shifted his flashlight in time to see his sister flitting around between the
various bins.  The way she kept appearing and disappearing made her look like
some kind of strange shadow creature.  As he watched her, she grabbed an item
from a display and tossed it into a shopping cart at the side of the aisle. 
The object made no discernible sound as it dropped into the cart.

          Noah stepped closer for
a better look at the contents of her cart.  The object that had landed without
a sound was a large package of toilet paper.  That was a good find.  They’d run
out a while ago, making do since then with rags.  The cart was already half-full
with other things as well.

          One thing confused
Noah.

          “How do you mean to
transport all this shit?  Just push this cart down the highway?”

          Her reply came from the
darkness:  “How else?”

          Noah frowned.  “Shit, I
don’t know.  I do know that would get tiring as hell after a while.  And sooner
or later it’ll break down.”

          Aubrey shrugged and
disappeared into the women’s clothing section.

          Noah continued down the
wide main aisle to the back of the store, where he encountered the electronics
department.  The first thing he saw was the circular customer service desk with
its glass cases of cell phones.  One of the cases had been smashed open and was
empty, but the others were undisturbed.  He saw a wide range of what had been
some of the most coveted gadgets before the end of the world.  All useless
now.  As were the computers, printers, and video game systems lining the
shelves behind the help desk.  More computers had been swiped than phones,
probably by overly optimistic types with an irrational faith in the ability of
the Internet to survive the end times.

          Noah turned away from
all this and continued down the wide aisle that ran parallel to the back end of
the store.  It took him past the largest part of the electronics department. 
In this area, a vast assortment of flat-screen televisions were mounted on the
rear wall.  The array of black screens made him think of the one back at his
mountain cabin.  He’d spent so much lonely time staring at the thing, often
imagining scenes from his favorite movies playing on it.  Sometimes when he’d
gotten very stoned and done that, his cannabis-enhanced imagination made him
feel as if he’d watched an entire movie.  In reality, all that had happened was
that his mind had turned inward and become absorbed in vivid memories of films
he used to like.  When he wasn’t stoned, the television had been nothing more
than a useless piece of boring wall decoration.

          At this point, however,
it’d been weeks since he’d last gotten high, which was why he had no immediate
explanation for the event that made him come to an abrupt halt and turn toward
that wall of dead televisions.  He stared at them for many long moments, hardly
daring to breathe as he tried to convince himself he hadn’t seen what a part of
him was sure he had.  After all, he’d caught only the most fleeting glimpse of
it in his peripheral vision.  Given his prior train of thought, it was logical
to believe his mind had played a trick on him.

          The screens remained
dark and the illusion did not recur, which was a huge relief.  While thinking
about his old way of entertaining himself back at the cabin, one of those
screens on the back wall had seemed to light up, displaying a scene from a
movie made before Noah was born.  The image had been of a young Clint Eastwood
on horseback.  Clint was wearing a hat and a poncho and had a lit stogie
clenched between his teeth.

          The image was there and
gone in the space of about a second.

          The notion that his
mind had deceived him was the only logical explanation.  The illusion aligned neatly
with things he’d been preoccupied with today.  Things that, in addition to his
cabin memories, included the western novel tucked in his back pocket.  So it wasn’t
a big leap to believe his mind had conjured an image from
High Plains
Drifter
or some other old Eastwood western, along with an illusory
perception of it appearing on one of these screens.

          Just as he was about to
resume his exploratory circuit of the store, that same screen in the middle of
the wall lit up again.  The image was the same, Clint Eastwood on horseback
riding at an unhurried pace through the center of a corrupt Old West town. 
This time it did not immediately go away.  Noah swallowed with difficulty and
shivered as he watched the familiar scene unfold.  He felt cold in spite of the
oppressive summer heat, which until now had been just shy of unbearable here in
the depths of a huge building with no working air-conditioning.  There was no
sound, but he could hear the voices in his head.

          After watching the
scene for at least a full minute, he took a look around, hoping to see Nick or
Aubrey approaching, but there was no sign of them in the shadow-cloaked store. 
Noah reluctantly allowed his gaze to return to the wall of screens.  The movie
was still playing and the light from the screen was bright enough that it lit
up a good portion of the electronics department.  This detail unnerved Noah as
much as the fact of the movie itself.  He had a hard time believing a mere
hallucination would be so realistically rendered.

          He contemplated calling
out to Nick and Aubrey.  His hope was that the illusion would vanish once they
appeared, but he resisted the impulse for a couple reasons.  For one thing, say
the supposed illusion did vanish.  If he then tried to explain what he’d seen,
they would think he was crazy.  It would be the end of being taken seriously on
any level.  Also, if he continued seeing what was on the screen while they did
not, it would mean something had gone terribly wrong with his brain.

          He sucked up his
resolve and turned away from the screen, seeing it go black in his peripheral
vision.  He started down the wide aisle again and did not glance back, fearing
the illusion—or whatever it was—would recur yet again if he did so.

          Soon he arrived at the
sporting goods department, where a voice called out to him.  “That you, Noah?”

          “Yeah.”

          “Come here a minute.”

          Noah followed the sound
of Nick’s voice and found him in a narrow side aisle.  Like Aubrey, he had a
cart with him and had loaded it up with an array of items, including aluminum
baseball bats, a toolbox, some rolls of duct tape, two pump-action shotguns,
and several boxes of ammo.  On the bottom rack were two cases of bottled water
in shrink wrap.  The shotguns surprised him.  He’d been sure the first looters
through the door would have taken all the firearms.

          Nick was currently
examining an assortment of home hardware items hanging from metal pegs.  Noah
couldn’t see what use any of them would be to people hiking thousands of miles
across the country.  Then again, that applied to a number of items already in
the cart.

          “Can I ask you a
question?”

          “Knock yourself out.”

          “What’s with all the
random shit?”

          Nick stood and tossed
two packets of long ten-penny nails in the cart.  “I’m just gathering a lot of stuff
to pick through later.  Once we get back outside, I’ll sort through it all and
decide what’s really practical to bring with us.  A lot of it, maybe most of it,
will get tossed aside.”

          “Like the baseball
bats.”

          “Maybe not.  Bats could
be a good alternate way of taking out slower-moving dead things.”

          “It’d conserve ammo, I
guess.”

          Nick nodded. 
“Exactly.  Anyway, I see you don’t have a cart.  You should get one.  But first
how about we check out the pharmacy together?  It could be locked down tight
and I might need your help breaking into it.”

          Noah had no objection
to that.  They were on the verge of heading off in search of the pharmacy when
a chillingly familiar sound stopped them cold.  Somewhere in the darkness
someone racked the slide on a pump shotgun.  In the next instant, Noah realized
he’d heard more than one slide being racked at the same time.  There were
currently at least two, perhaps even three, shotguns aimed in their direction. 
Then came a secondary realization.  The slides had been racked for one reason
only—the intimidation factor.  These people, whoever they were, wanted to scare
them, not necessarily kill them outright.  In a situation like this, of course,
that was subject to change.

          Nick raised his voice
to bark out a question:  “
Who’s out there?
”

          Before a reply could
come, Noah reached absently for the strap of the rifle slung over his shoulder.

          “Stop right there,
son,” came a deep, resonant voice.  “Move even an inch again and you’re dead.”