Slowly We Rot (9 page)

          The thing’s head came
away from its shoulders when Noah tried pulling the thick blade out of the skull. 
He backed out of the van and held the impaled head aloft, frowning as he turned
it this way and that, again mystified by how something so fragile could have
remained animated for so long.

          Noah shivered as he
thought about his hours asleep in the van, all that time of sitting there
oblivious while this thing worked determinedly to extract itself from the
tangle of remains in the back and come after him.  He was extremely fortunate
it had been so weak and decayed.  A stronger, or even slightly less
deteriorated, zombie would have killed him during the night.  If nothing else,
a lesson had been learned.  He wouldn’t survive very long out here if he didn’t
exercise proper caution.  And any set of remains, no matter how decayed, had to
be considered a threat until confirmed otherwise.

          He pried the knife
loose, tossed the head over the guardrail, and leaned into the van again. 
Before retrieving the backpack from the passenger seat, he peered into the back
of the van to verify that there were no more feeble old dead things trying to
get to him.  Detecting no hints of reanimation among the other sets of remains,
Noah sheathed the hunting knife, grabbed the backpack, and got out of the van. 
He reached in one more time to grab the rifle, pausing as something on the
floorboard caught his eye.

          It was a locket
attached to a delicate gold chain.  Noah let go of the rifle and snatched up
the necklace.  He opened the locket and frowned at the picture inside it, which
showed an attractive young blonde woman posing with a man about the same age.  He
assumed the woman was the zombie he’d just killed.  The necklace had obviously
slipped to the floor after his accidental removal of her head.  Noah guessed
the guy had been her husband or boyfriend.  They had their arms around each
other in the picture.  They were smiling and happy.  Like the picture of Lisa
in his pocket, the locket photo was a glimpse of a better time. 

          Noah closed the locket
and pressed it into the dead woman’s withered hand, grabbed the rifle, and
backed out of the van.  After he’d finished strapping on his backpack, he started
on down the road.

14
.

As expected, getting out of the Smokies
took several hours, a process lengthened by the necessity of having to stop on
occasion to rest and consult his atlas.  By the time he was clear of the mountain
range, the day had stretched into the early afternoon hours.  Shortly
afterward, he came to a junction of roads and was forced to consult the atlas
again.  This time he studied it for a protracted period, committing the next
few sections of the route to memory.

          He spent another couple
hours making his way through a maze of small town streets.  Along the way, he
passed numerous buildings, including places of business and the usual array of
residential structures.  Some of these were still in very good shape, looking as
if they’d been occupied and maintained until just recently.  The illusion was
ruined by an unbroken landscape of overgrown lawns and the total absence of a
visible human population.  The relatively pristine-looking structures, however,
were outnumbered by those in disrepair.  There were a lot of boarded-up
windows.  Many of those not boarded-up had been shattered.  Whether they’d
fallen victim to vandals or the elements was hard to tell.

          And then there were the
cars.  He encountered quite a few of them as he continued through the area.  Some
streets were choked with stalled vehicles, particularly the ones leading out of
town in the direction of the mountains.  There were remains in many of the
vehicles, all in an advanced state of decay.  Noah couldn’t help wondering what
had happened to keep these people from getting any farther than they had.

          A lot of the cars were
pocked with bullet holes, just like the VW van he’d made the mistake of
sleeping in last night.  The similarly tight grouping of the holes again
suggested heavy-duty automatic weapons.  He pictured men in military vehicles firing
machine guns into the cars.  The thought troubled Noah.  Assuming the people in
the cars had been alive at the time, why would soldiers have slaughtered
civilians?

          He thought of the
scenes of chaos and madness he’d glimpsed on TV the rare times they’d watched
news reports in those early months of hiding away in the cabin.  Civilization
collapsed at a rapid rate.  There was widespread rioting everywhere.  The
people in charge quickly lost any ability to control the situation.  Without a
functioning chain of command, it was possible some elements of the military had
gone rogue, morphing into self-contained groups of mercenaries.  And maybe some
of those units had decided to cut off access to the mountains with plans of
turning it into a safe haven for themselves.

          The theory explained a
lot, but it was all a lot of after-the-fact supposition with only a small
amount of supporting evidence.  The problem with it was that he’d encountered no
signs of a military presence anywhere in the Smokies during his many far-ranging
scavenging expeditions.  But the mountain range covered a lot of territory.  It
was possible he’d avoided running into mercenaries out of sheer luck, if they’d
settled far enough away.  On the other hand, military guys meant guns, lots of
them.  Until Nick took that shot at his cabin the other day, it’d been years
since he’d heard gunfire in the mountains, except for when he was firing his
own rifle.  He supposed it was possible the soldiers had all died not long
after the massacre of the civilians.  The virus had been spreading like
wildfire.  Maybe they had all been infected.

          Out of curiosity, Noah
poked at various sets of remains with the rifle, testing them for evidence of
reanimation, but there was no repeat of the episode with the zombie remnant
from this morning.  By mid-afternoon, he was out of the area and headed toward
Knoxville, the first city of any significant size on his planned route.  He
traversed various lengthy stretches of rural and small town highway, easily
following the route he’d committed to memory, eventually reaching the
interstate.

          Fatigue finally set in
after so many hours of walking.  Now that he was out of the mountains, the
problem with the backpack bar banging into his lower back was less of an issue,
but the weight of the pack itself was wearing him down.  The years of surviving
on his own with no access to fatty junk foods had left him in good shape.  He
was sure the Noah of five years ago wouldn’t have been able to make half the
distance he’d managed today.  But now he was tired.

          Noah stopped in his
tracks in the middle of the highway.  He’d come a long way today and it was
almost time to stop for the day.  Scouting around for a place to make camp was
the smart thing to do at this point.  But now he turned about and stared in the
direction from which he’d come.  He chewed on his bottom lip, fretting now
about the man in whose company he’d left his sister.  Maybe he’d been one of
the military guys who’d machine-gunned all those people.  But that was
supposing soldiers had been the perpetrators.  There was no proof of that. 
Civilians could have commandeered the vehicles and weapons.

          Still, Noah couldn’t
help worrying.  Aubrey had treated him with scorn and spite, but she was the
only family he had left.  And there was the matter of her apparent change of
heart the day he left, the one he’d rebuffed with so little thought.  Her cries
of distress haunted him.

          For the first time, Noah’s
certainty that he was doing the right thing began to slip.  Maybe he was making
a huge mistake.  It was a big, wide world out here.  Even if by some miracle
the girl he’d set out to find was still alive, there was no guarantee she would
be in her hometown.  In truth, the odds were against it.  But his sister was definitely
still out there in the Smokies, not that far away.  If he turned back now, he
could be back at the cabin in a couple days.  Conversely, every day he pressed
forward on his journey greatly reduced the likelihood of ever seeing Aubrey
again.  He had about an hour of daylight left.  Maybe he should get a head
start on making his way back to the mountains.

          Noah leaned against the
concrete highway median and stewed on it a while.  Yes, he was worried about
Aubrey, but he knew fear of what might lie ahead of him out there on the road was
a bigger factor in this sudden bout of second-guessing.  The urge to continue
his journey was still there, fueled by the memories he’d inadvertently
reawakened.  Though he’d done his best to forget her, somewhere not so deep
inside he’d never stopped yearning for closure with Lisa.  Not even the end of
the world had changed that.

          Fool’s errand or not,
he wanted to make the attempt.

          Noah eventually decided
it would be a mistake to decide on a course of action now.  It was late in the
day.  He needed to stop and rest and devote some serious time to thinking the
matter over.  With this idea in mind, he pushed away from the median and spent
some time checking out some of the stalled cars clogging the highway.  There
were more out here than in the smaller community he’d left behind.  Most were
in decrepit condition, though none bore evidence of being machine-gunned.  But
there were more wrecks and burned-out hulks here, the result, he imagined, of
the panic that had gripped the area as a zombie horde swept through it.  He
based this on the many traces of remains in the street.

          He spotted more human
remains inside many of the vehicles.  Only a few of the cars had been occupied
by a lone driver.  Most had been filled with families seeking a refuge fate prevented
them from finding.

          Eventually, he came
upon a black SUV with tinted windows that looked like a good candidate for
temporary shelter.  One of its windows had been shattered and the front
driver’s side door was hanging open, but at first glance it looked empty.  A
closer look confirmed this.  There were no remains inside and plenty of room to
stretch out in back.

          Sighing with relief, Noah
undid the straps of the backpack, tossed it inside, and took a final look
around, verifying that, as usual, only the dead were watching him.

          Then he climbed into the
SUV and pulled the door shut.

15
.

The night passed without
incident.  Noah awoke early in the morning and climbed out of the SUV to
stretch his legs.  The sun was shining brightly in the mostly cloudless sky. 
It was warm, but not yet hot.  That would change by mid-afternoon.  This being
mid-May, however, the heat wouldn’t reach the point of being uncomfortable for
at least a couple more weeks.  He hoped to cover a significant amount of ground
during what little was left of this pre-summer period.  Long stretches of the
journey ahead would be arduous, and it was important to gain whatever kind of
edge he could along the way.

          Noah took some food
from the backpack and climbed up on the roof of the SUV to eat.  He wanted to
get going on today’s leg of the journey, but it was important to provide his
body with fuel for the road.  His breakfast this morning consisted of a wedge
of dried meat and some mushrooms.  It wasn’t the most exciting meal in the
world, but it would do the job for now.  At some point down the road, though,
he would take the time to hunt.  Some fresh-cooked meat by a campfire would
make for a nice change of pace.

          As he ate, it hit him
that the decision he’d anguished over yesterday had apparently been made at a
subconscious level during the night.  He’d been awake not quite a full half
hour, but until now his thoughts had been on nothing but the journey westward. 
No resumption of the prior internal debate accompanied the realization.  Noah
took his mind’s automatic focus on pushing forward as the surest sign possible
that it was what he needed to do.

          He finished his meal
and took a conservative swig from his canteen, which was now a bit more than
half empty.  He hadn’t yet opened his backup canteen, but he made a mental note
to check the atlas for the nearest natural water supply.