Slowly We Rot (5 page)

          And with that, the
former marine turned away from Noah and stalked out of the cabin.

8.

A couple hours later, the fifth
of Maker’s Mark was nearly empty and Noah was drunker than he’d been in a very
long time.  He sat at the table in the kitchenette and brooded over the talk
with Aubrey’s emissary, getting angrier with each glass of bourbon he tossed
down his throat.  Even as he was doing this, he knew what a mistake he was
making.  Drinking when he was angry almost always led to bad things, sometimes
even outright disaster, but he hadn’t been able to make himself stop.  The rage
building inside him demanded the alcohol.

          By the time he decided
he couldn’t stand another drop, barely more than a quarter inch of bourbon was
left at the bottom.  It was such an insignificant amount that he considered
finishing it off despite a burgeoning queasiness.

          Instead he decided it
was time to do something smart for a change and go stretch out on the sofa for
a nap.  Later, when his head was clear again, he could give Aubrey’s ultimatum
the deeper, more thoughtful consideration it required.  Maybe he would even be
able to think of a way to effectively placate her and stay up here on the
mountain.  Right now, with his head wobbling from the booze, that didn’t seem
possible.

          But when he got to his
feet, he was hit by a wave of severe dizziness.  He had to grip the edge of the
table just to keep from falling to the floor.  And then, just when he was sure
the spell of lightheadedness had passed, the queasiness intensified.  His
stomach gave a dramatic lurch, sending a tide of scalding bile into his throat. 
He gagged and wheeled away from the table, stumbling toward the back door.  He
got it open just in time to stagger outside and drop to his knees at the edge
of the garden.  At that point, his stomach gave another big lurch and he
sprayed vomit all over a row of tomatoes.

          The retching went on for
many more minutes, his stomach continuing to strain long after it was empty. 
When the spasms finally ceased, Noah toppled over onto his side, crushing several
of the tomato plants.  After allowing himself a few moments to catch his
breath, he rolled onto his back and held up a hand, staring at a palm wet with
tomato juice and speckled with damp bits of soil.  He winced, feeling a pang of
regret at the damage he’d caused to his garden.

          He tried to lever
himself up off the ground, but his eyes felt heavy and suddenly it seemed like
just too much effort.  Sighing, he let his head fall back against the earth and
closed his eyes.  He woke up maybe an hour later, still kind of drunk and in
dire need of catching some additional shuteye in a more comfortable place. 
This time he successfully got to his feet and went back inside, kicking the
door shut behind him.  It slammed into the frame, but rebounded, failing to
stay completely closed.  Noah didn’t notice.  He wobbled his way over to the
sofa in the outer room and fell clumsily upon it.  Within moments, he was
unconscious again.  This time he stayed that way until dusk.

          When Noah’s eyes opened
again, it was about fifty percent darker in the cabin, but there was still enough
natural light to see by.  He sat up with a groan.  His head was pounding and at
first he couldn’t remember why he’d gotten so drunk.  But then it came to him
and he shook his head.

          “Fuck.”

          Noah was angry at
himself.  Yes, it’d been natural to get upset in the wake of the news Nick had
delivered, but drinking wasn’t the answer.  It never had been before.  There
was no reason things should be different just because the world had ended.  It
hadn’t helped that his tolerance for booze had slipped considerably during the
years of abstinence.  There’d been a time when he could have twice what he’d
had today and still be going strong.  The old tolerance level might return if
he stayed in the habit, but clearly that was a really bad idea for many
reasons.

          After cleaning himself
up and changing clothes, Noah got the wood stove going and set a pot of coffee
to brewing.  He didn’t have coffee often, preferring to conserve his supply and
have it only when he really needed it.  This seemed like such an occasion.  While
he waited for the water to come to a boil, he closed the back door more
securely and did a bit of cleaning up around the place.

          When the coffee was
ready, he poured a cup and carried it out to the front porch, where he settled
into the rocking chair and stared out at the clearing.  The sky was even darker
now and he was grateful for that.  His head wasn’t pounding quite as painfully
now, but bright sunlight would have been hard to endure.

          He thought about his situation
in an absent way as he sipped coffee.  The cup was about half-empty when a
startling thought occurred to him from seemingly nowhere, one so alien and
revolting he initially found it hard to believe it’d originated from his own
brain.  A disgusted scowl twisted his features in the ensuing moments.

          Noah had always thought
of himself as basically a decent person.  He was no pushover, but he was no
callous, cold-blooded psychopath either.  Despite his long isolation, he was a
civilized
person, someone who had firm lines he would never consider crossing.

          And yet he was the one
who’d been forced into an untenable situation by the unfair, arbitrary whims of
others.  Furthermore, wasn’t being banished from the mountain tantamount to a
death sentence?  He knew how to survive up here in the ordered, neat little
world he’d created for himself, but out there in all that dead nothing was
another story.  Of course, he didn’t necessarily have to go out into the larger
world.  He could maybe find refuge in some other part of the Smokies, far
enough away to reduce the odds of ever encountering Aubrey or Nick again to
near zero.  But in Noah’s mind just then that didn’t matter.  He’d be forced to
start over in strange territory, so it amounted to the same thing.

          There was a way out of
it, though.  A very simple one, really.

          He could just kill
them.

          Just hunt them down
tonight before the deadline passed.  Once he’d found their camp, he could slit
their throats while they slept.  Or, if they weren’t sleeping, put bullets
through their heads.  And with that one ruthless act, all his problems would be
solved.  With the exception, maybe, of living with a tortured conscience the
rest of his life.

          Noah stared out at the
darkening sky and felt a chill settle deep inside him.

          He stayed right there in
the rocking chair until well past full dark, his mind seething with troubled
thoughts.

Noah’s mood spiraled downward
throughout the night.  By the time he carried an oil lamp down to the cellar,
he had been mired in a state of deep melancholy for hours.  Somehow, though,
he’d resisted the temptation to start drinking again.  When he’d had his
troubles with alcohol in the past, an encroaching dark mood had always made
resistance next to impossible, so he counted this as a victory.  He’d even
opted against smoking weed.  Pot didn’t exacerbate depression issues the way
booze did, but he wanted his head clear for the rest of the night.

          He was on the precipice
of a major transitional moment in his life.  His path forward still wasn’t clear,
but change was coming, that much was certain.  In order to make some of the
hard choices he was contemplating, he felt compelled to look to his past for
guidance and context.  And that meant locating and rummaging through the
contents of some boxes he hadn’t opened since before the world ended.

          He banged around in the
semi-darkness, threading his way through a maze of things that had been stored
down here over the years.  Many were items he’d procured during his scavenging
expeditions.  These included a large inflatable raft and the paddles that went
with them.  It was among the many things stored in the cellar he’d never had
occasion to actually use.  Near the raft was a full set of golf clubs in a
sturdy bag.  Those he’d gotten some use out of for a brief time.  After
acquiring the clubs, he’d set a tee in the middle of the clearing and had
practiced knocking golf balls down into the valley.  But he ran out of balls
and so the set of clubs had taken up residence down here with so many other
forgotten things.

          The cellar was a
graveyard of memories.  Some of them didn’t mean much, but others were
dangerous.  Those in the latter category included painful things regarding his
family and their life together before the end of everything.  For a long time,
he hadn’t been able to look at pictures of his family without becoming
despondent, even suicidal.  Eventually he packed away all the mementos of his
former life and tucked them away down here, fully believing he would never want
to look at them again.

          At the time, this had
been a wise decision.  Not having access to visual evidence of days gone by
allowed him to move on and fixate on other, more constructive things.  It was
possible, perhaps even likely, that doing this had saved his life.

          But now his sister was
back and she was no longer the person he remembered.  He’d entertained the idea
of killing her, and, to his horror, had been unable to immediately reject the
notion, instead seeing it as the fastest, cleanest way out of his predicament. 
But before he could go any further in that direction, he needed to look upon
images of Aubrey as she’d once been.  It felt like the only way to comprehend
the true weight of the decision facing him.

          The boxes he wanted were
stacked in a corner at the back of the cellar.  When he found them, he set the
oil lamp on the dusty floor, took down the box from the top of the stack, and
sat on the floor with his legs crossed beneath him.  He stared at the crumpled,
folded flaps of the box for a long moment, the old reluctance to see their
contents suddenly reasserting itself.  But he strengthened his resolve, pulled
the box closer, and opened it.

          The box was filled with
photo albums and thick white envelopes stuffed with more photos, the ones his
mother had never gotten around to arranging in an album.  His old-fashioned mother
had been distrustful of changing picture-taking technology, believing that
images stored in a digital format lacked the inherent permanency of photos
developed from film.  In this way, she had been remarkably prescient, and Noah
was grateful for that.

          He took out the photo
album at the top and opened it.  It was one of the more recently compiled
albums, with most of the pictures in it ranging from one to two years before
the world ended.  The photos on the first page were all from his father’s
forty-fifth birthday party.  In each of them, the gray-haired, bespectacled man
was beaming at the camera, proudly displaying various gifts from his family. 
Aubrey was visible in one picture on this page, smiling and standing off to the
side as she watched her father open a present, pleasure evident in her features
even though she wasn’t fully facing the camera.

          More pictures of Aubrey
appeared a little deeper into the album.  Again, the event depicted was a
birthday.  Her fourteenth, according to the candles on the cake.  Aubrey had
turned fourteen roughly a year before the fall.  The ache Noah felt upon seeing
this group of photos was intense and almost instantly overwhelming.  His sister
had been well on her way to becoming a beautiful young woman when these shots
were taken.  She looked radiant and full of life.

          A flood of memories
assailed him then.  He recalled Aubrey’s bubbly personality and her bright,
musical laugh, and he remembered how he’d delighted in teasing her about the
many boys who’d taken an interest in her.  Noah kept turning the pages of the
album and eventually came across a picture of Aubrey that made him laugh.  In
it, they were on a beach somewhere, probably in Florida, and they were mugging
for the camera, making the usual kind of stupid faces.

          By that point Noah
already knew he wouldn’t be killing his sister.  It didn’t matter what she had
become.  What she thought of him now also didn’t matter, nor did the threat
she’d relayed via Nick.  What it came down to was simple.  Aubrey wouldn’t
yield or listen to reason.

          Therefore he had to
leave.

          It was the right thing
to do under the circumstances.  All doubt about that had departed.  Knowing
this, however, made the prospect no less scary.  His life up here on the
mountain had been a lonely one, yes, but it had become a relatively comfortable
one.  He would be losing his routine and everything he’d built here.  And he
still needed to figure out where he meant to go.  But that was something he
could set aside for later consideration.  There were practical matters that
needed tending to first, preparations he would have to make, including
gathering supplies and deciding how much he could take with him.

          Noah knew he needed to
get to work right away, but something kept him where he was a while longer.  He
turned the pages of the photo album until he reached its end, more long-forgotten
moments from the past coming to life in his head, a few so startlingly vivid it
was as if they’d only just happened.  Some were unconnected to anything in the
photos.  They were from the other part of his life he’d tried to forget.

          But it was all coming
back now.

          That semester at the
University of Memphis.

          The girl.

          The drinking.

          Noah eyed a box at the
bottom of the stack in the corner.  It was where the few surviving mementos
from that time were stored.  He hadn’t looked at any of those things in going
on six years.

          He wasn’t sure he
wanted to look at them even now.

          After a while, however,
he got up and started moving boxes.