Slowly We Rot (8 page)

12
.

The walk down from the mountain took
up all the remaining daylight.  It was a sometimes treacherous journey down a
narrow, winding road, which had become overgrown in places through the years of
disuse.  Getting clear of the mountain range would take even longer.  He knew from
memory the road would eventually take him to a two-lane highway that stretched
snake-like throughout the Great Smoky Mountains.  From his many trips out here
in his youth, he remembered it as a scenic passage through nature at its most
breathtaking.

          A part of him was surprised
to find the highway still there when he reached the end of the barricaded
mountain access road, it’d been so long since he’d last glimpsed it.  There was
a closed gate at the end of the road.  It was secured with thick lengths of
rusty chain.  Parked alongside the gate facing the highway was an old yellow
school bus with flat tires.  Its hood was up and Noah could see as he
approached it that its engine had been gutted.  Whoever had parked it here had
taken pains to ensure that moving it would be extremely difficult.

          The reasoning behind this
had been sound.  With society collapsing, so many of the people with property
up here had feared being targeted by roving gangs of bandits and other
predators.  And there actually had been a few tense standoffs with some shady
people who came poking around in the early days.  But the incidents were
infrequent and soon ceased altogether, likely thanks to the devastatingly fast
spread of the plague.

          Noah circumvented the
gate and moved past the bus to take a look out at the highway.  Because of the
way the road curved, he could only see a short distance in either direction. 
The highway looked more or less as he remembered it.  The guardrail was still
there.  He spied a speed limit sign off some distance to his right.  But there
had been some natural erosion to the asphalt, which was dotted here and there
with potholes small and large.  Weeds had grown up through cracks in a lot of
places.  The erosion matched what Noah had imagined.  With no maintenance crews
to patch holes and occasionally put down a new layer of blacktop, nature was
free to encroach.  One day the roads out here would be fully overtaken by
greenery, a prospect Noah might have found depressing if he believed
civilization might one day mount a comeback.  But he had no such hope and thus
there was a kind of beauty in nature taking back the land and undoing the work
of humanity.

          There were other hints
of calamity.  The first Noah glimpsed was the burned-out hulk of a pickup
truck.  It had smashed into the guardrail some thirty yards to his left, in the
westbound direction, which was where he’d be heading.  The truck’s windows had
been blown out in the crash, its tires melted in the resultant fire.  At least
he supposed the fire was a result of the crash.  But maybe the fire had come
first, causing the crash.  Not that it mattered.  Whoever had been driving the
truck was long dead.  There might even still be remains in the truck’s cab. 
Noah had no desire to verify this.  He kept his gaze straight ahead as he set
off down the road and walked past the truck.

          The avoidance was pointless,
he knew.  The crashed truck would be just the first of countless examples of
how the world had died in chaos and flames.  He would encounter things far more
unsettling.  He was, after all, headed out into a world blanketed with the
corpses of billions.  There would be more remains and he wouldn’t always be
able to turn away from them.

          He winced at the way
the old backpack’s aluminum frame banged into his back as he continued down the
steep slope of the road.  Several times he reached behind him to grab onto the
bottom bar in an effort to keep it from doing that.  It helped, but holding
onto the bar also became tiresome after a while.  He resolved to exchange the
old pack for one of the newer, more ergonomic ones at the earliest opportunity,
even if it meant resorting to robbing the dead.

          The road continued to
sharply twist and lead him in a steeply downhill trajectory, requiring him to
hang onto the backpack’s bottom bar almost constantly.  It wouldn’t be so bad
once he reached something like level ground, but for now dealing with it was a
tedious exercise in endurance.  His annoyance level was enough that he began to
consider stopping for the night after walking barely more than a mile down the
highway.  He might have strengthened his resolve and pushed on for a while
anyway if not for the impending approach of full dark.  There was hardly any
light left in the sky, the last faint traces of dusk fading rapidly.

          Deciding to stop was
the easy part.  He’d set off late in the day, with no real expectation of
getting very far before nightfall.  Tomorrow he could rise early and work at
finishing the trek out of the mountains.  Unless he found a working vehicle and
acquired gas to drive it—unlikely—the march westward was going to take a very
long time, possibly several months.  Nothing he did tonight would shorten or
lengthen the journey to any significant degree.

          The more difficult
aspect of stopping was where to do it.  He couldn’t pitch his tent right in the
middle of the road, despite the extremely remote—approaching zero
percent---possibility of a vehicle coming along to run him over.  There was
just no point in taking the chance.  Besides, he would feel too exposed.  He
was on the verge of deciding his best option would be to hop over the guardrail
and set up camp in the woods when he discerned the shape of another vehicle up
ahead.

          This one was a vintage
VW van, a relic from the 60’s or 70’s that had achieved antique status long
before the apocalypse.  Unlike the truck, it was no burned-out hulk, nor did it
appear to have crashed.  Except for the multiple flat tires, it looked almost
roadworthy.  Or so it appeared at a distance of more than twenty paces in the gathering
darkness.  When he got closer, Noah examined the van’s exterior more closely
and noted a pattern of bullet holes zigzagging along one entire side of the
vehicle.  Someone had fired on the van with an automatic weapon, expending a
lot ammunition in an apparently determined effort to kill its passengers.

          Curious, Noah
approached a blown-out side window and peered inside the van, grimacing as he
spotted at least three sets of skeletal remains, all clad in the tattered
remains of rotting clothes.  Judging by the awkward positioning of the remains,
these people had died in contortions of agony.  Given the many bullet holes,
this was a logical enough deduction.

          Noah had hoped to find
the relatively intact van empty, thinking it might serve as an acceptable
temporary shelter for the night.  But there was no way he was sleeping in what
amounted to a tomb on wheels.  Unless, maybe, he worked up the nerve to drag
the remains out of the van.  A shiver of repulsion went through him at even
having entertained the idea.  These people, whoever they’d been, deserved
better than being dumped by the side of the road like garbage.  This was their
final resting place.  Disturbing them would just be wrong.

          Setting up camp in the
woods was again seeming like his best option.  He figured he would do just that
in a few minutes, but he first wanted to check out the van’s front seats.  The
door on the driver’s side was open a crack.  He pulled on the handle and it
came open with a groan of rusty hinges, a sound that was disconcertingly loud
in the otherwise still night.  He poked his head inside and saw there were no
remains up front.  The partly ajar door on this side suggested the driver might
have attempted to flee.  Hell, maybe he’d even been successful.  Perhaps he’d
escaped into the woods and was living somewhere out there to this day.  It
would be nice to think so, even if it was extremely unlikely.

          Noah undid the
backpack’s painfully constraining straps, shrugged the pack off his shoulders,
and leaned into the van to wedge it into the front passenger seat.  He then did
the same with the rifle, taking care to ensure that it was in a stable, secure
position.  Once these things had been accomplished, he climbed into the van,
pulled the door shut, and settled in behind the wheel.  The decision to do this
was nothing but raw impulse.  He was acting on it before the idea had fully
formed in his head.

          Even after all the
years of mountain living, he’d never developed much of a taste for sleeping out
in the woods.  It hadn’t often been necessary, the rare exceptions mostly
limited to his extended scavenging missions.  He figured he’d seek to avoid it
whenever possible even now.  Sleeping in close proximity to the remains in the
back of the van wasn’t ideal, but they were just a bunch of old bones, really. 
He had nothing to fear from them.

          Noah closed his eyes
and fell asleep within minutes.

13
.

Noah woke up to a clicking sound
sometime shortly after sunrise.  He groaned and stretched, squinting his eyes
against the bright sunlight visible through the van’s grime-covered
windshield.  The clicking sound repeated, but it was very faint, and its
possible implications did not immediately register.  This changed when he felt
something sharp prod weakly at his ankle.

          Frowning, he glanced
down at the gap between the seats.  He gaped in frozen disbelief at what he saw
down there on the floorboard.  Then he screamed and surrendered to blind
instinct, shifting around in the seat and scrambling backward as he groped for
the door handle.  He got the door open after a few failed, frantic tries and
fell backward out of the van, screeching in pain as the back of his head
thumped against the guardrail behind him.

          He sat there panting a
few moments, still unable to process or believe what he’d seen.  Then came the
panic.  He sat up straight, ignoring the fresh burst of pain this triggered,
and pulled up the cuff of his right pants leg.  He pushed down the sock he was
wearing, turned his ankle, and examined the skin, sighing heavily in relief
when he saw it was unbroken.  He’d just managed to avoid infection by the
frailest half-zombie remnant he’d ever seen.

          After allowing himself another
moment to finish collecting his wits, he got to his feet and edged closer to
the van, peering carefully inside.  The frail dead thing was stuck between the
front seats.  Though it was immobilized and pitiful-looking, Noah knew better
than to treat it as anything other than what it was—a dangerous, potentially
deadly threat.

          There was no bottom
half to the thing.  In life, it had been a woman, he was pretty sure.  Clumps
of long blonde hair still clung to a badly rotted scalp.  The size of the bones
suggested a small person.  Thinking about it, Noah realized the zombie might as
easily have been a young girl, or even a boy with longer locks than the old
norm.  It really was little more than a pile of bones loosely connected by the
flimsiest bits of sinew and rotten flesh.  He’d never seen an animated corpse as
diminished as this one.  The one that had come to his cabin a few days ago had
been robust by comparison and until now it had been one of the frailest-looking
dead things he’d ever seen.

          Noah took a hunting
knife from his utility belt and leaned through the open door into the van
again.  The dead thing turned its head in his direction, jaw opening to display
rows of yellow teeth and shriveled, blackened gums.  The jaw snapped shut and
opened again.  A bony finger reached out and scratched weakly at the uncarpeted
floorboard, seeking purchase.

          Noah observed it a
while longer, unable to comprehend how the spark animating the thing hadn’t
gone out long ago.  In theory, the viability of the reanimating virus was
dependent on the presence of a minimally functioning brain.  This thing’s state
of decay was so advanced that any withered biological trace of its brain had to
be about as functional as a rock.  And yet here this thing was, animated and
still driven by a compulsion to attack and consume flesh.

          How that could be
possible was beyond Noah’s understanding.  He was no scientist.  The thing was
creepy as hell and in dire need of being put out of its misery.  That was all
he needed to know.

          Noah leaned a little
closer and the thing’s jaw opened and snapped shut again.  He raised the blade
and slammed it down through the top of its skull.  It immediately ceased
struggling.  At the outset of the plague, it’d been quickly determined that you
killed the dead things by killing their brains.  This one had been no
different, despite its deteriorated condition.