Slowly We Rot (12 page)

          The atlas told him the
next town along the way was a place called Crossville, population slightly
north of ten-thousand as of the 2000 census.  Noah was sure the current number
of living souls in the plainly-named town was roughly around zero.  In its
heyday, however, he figured it had possibly been just large enough to warrant
the presence of at least one bookstore.  Noah decided he’d check the place out when
he got there.  The time had come for a good foraging expedition anyway.

          Crossville was still
some twenty miles distant down I-40 when Noah made this decision, far enough
that he figured he wouldn’t get there until sometime the next day.  In the
meantime, he would read another book and keep trying not to think about the
many things troubling him.

          He had gone another few
miles when he began to perceive a road anomaly in the distance.  At first he
thought this was an optical illusion, the heat and brilliance of the sun
colluding with dips and rises in the road to create a hazy impression of
something wrong.  Sometimes the impression would fade and leave him convinced
he was seeing things, which was possibly a side effect of road weariness.  But after
another few miles he began to understand that the way the anomaly would
sometimes seem to disappear was the real illusion.  There was something
seriously amiss about the road another several miles distant.

          Within about another
hour he’d drawn close enough to the anomaly to discern its basic nature.  It
was a huge hole in the earth, a very wide one that encompassed all lanes of
traffic and a fair amount of the surrounding territory.  This puzzled Noah.  To
his knowledge, this part of Tennessee had never been prone to earthquakes of a
magnitude that would cause damage this severe.  That left very few obvious
possibilities.  If forced to guess, however, he’d put his money on a detonation
of some kind, one packing even more devastating force than the tanker explosion
outside Knoxville.

          A short while later, his
guess proved correct when he arrived at the edge of an enormous crater.  He was
careful not to get too close, fearing that the ground along the crater’s
perimeter wouldn’t be stable enough to support his weight.  Several feet short
of the edge was near enough to have a sense of how colossally powerful the
detonation had been.  Its impressive depth induced a mild attack of vertigo,
causing Noah to back away a few more inches.

          The crater closely
resembled pictures he’d seen of bomb and meteor impacts.  The only question was
which of those things this had been.  A meteor strike seemed more likely, if
only because he could think of no sensible scenario in which anyone would have
dropped a military-grade explosive device in this area.  That didn’t mean such
a thing hadn’t happened.  A lot of bizarre and seemingly unbelievable things
had occurred since the plague outbreak.  Regardless, he found the meteor
scenario more plausible.

          The question of what
had happened here fascinated Noah, but it was time to turn his attention to the
issue of what to do next.  He craned his head around, studying the area.  The
crater’s perimeter extended well beyond the section of evaporated road.  Off to
the left was a wooded area.  The blast had wiped out some of it, but the woods
beyond the crater’s edge still stood.  From Noah’s vantage point, it was
impossible to tell what might be on the other side of all those trees.  The
land to the right looked somewhat more promising.  It was unobscured by trees
and would be easier to negotiate as he attempted to make his way around the
crater.  He squinted and was able to make out a scattering of smallish
structures.  It was hard to tell from this distance, but he thought they might
be houses.  Houses meant the possibility of supplies he could scavenge.  There
might even be book collections in some of them.

          The choice here wasn’t
a real choice at all.  It was the absolute unknown versus the potential he saw
in the opposite direction.  There was a chance those houses had been stripped
of anything useful long ago.  If nothing else, though, a house would be a good
place to crash for the night, much better than another disgusting old car that
had been open and exposed to the elements for years.

          Noah put some more
distance between himself and the edge of the crater and set off toward the
right.  He climbed the guardrail and pushed through some greenery, scaling a modest
slope to the top of a hill.  On the other side of the hill was an access road
that dead-ended at a power junction.  Chain-link fencing surrounded electrical
equipment and utility poles.  He continued across the access road rather than
walking along it, because it only led straight into the crater.  After pushing
through another small thatch of greenery and trees, he emerged into a wide-open
expanse of ground.  The structures he’d spotted earlier came into view again. 
This time he could see that they
were
houses, just a few of them
scattered along a rural road less than a mile distant.

          The first house he came
to had the usual overgrown lawn but looked in good shape, absolutely unscathed
by the upheavals that had taken place in the world around it.  In this way, it
reminded him of the family cabin in the mountains.  The thought made him wonder
if the people who’d lived in these houses might have survived the zombie
plague.  It didn’t seem likely.  The dead had risen and killed in virtually all
population centers, regardless of how small.

          He approached the house
with caution, keeping his rifle at the ready in the event of anything
unexpected.  There was a strong chance anyone living here would not welcome the
approach of an armed stranger.  But as he walked up the driveway he became certain
the house was unoccupied.  There was just nothing in the area to indicate
otherwise.  A survivor by necessity would have lived off the land the way he
had in the Smokies, but there was no sign of a garden.  Maybe any resident, if
there was one, hunted for food exclusively.  That was possible, but Noah
doubted it.  The overall impression was of a place abandoned long ago, which
was good news for him.

          He set his rifle down to
take a look through a front window, cupping his hands around his face to cut
the glare of the sun.  What he saw was a pretty standard-looking living room,
with a sofa, recliner, coffee table, flat-screen TV mounted on the wall
opposite the sofa, and some bookshelves.  The bookshelves excited him for a moment,
but the feeling faded when he realized they contained nothing but items that
were utterly useless in this post-apocalypse age, mostly DVD’s and video games.

          Noah was still studying
the contents of the living room when he sensed movement to his right and reached
for his rifle.  The sound of a shell being racked into the chamber of a shotgun
made him wish he’d gone for the revolver at his hip instead.  He might have
been able to clear the holster in time to get back on equal footing with
whoever this was.  Instead, the interloper had gotten the drop on him and he
had no choice but to freeze just before his hand could close around the barrel
of the rifle.

          “Hands up and back away
from the rifle, boy.”

          The voice had a
gravelly quality that identified the speaker as an older man, a hunch that was
verified when Noah glanced to his right.  He put the man’s age at anywhere
between sixty and seventy.  He had a wiry build with the kind of hard muscles
that came from a lifetime of grueling physical labor.  Noah’s heart was already
pounding from the scare induced by the racking sound, but this first glimpse of
the man’s bearded visage made it race even faster.  Something in the rheumy eyes
and the sharp planes of his hawk-like face strongly suggested a deep capacity
for cruelty.

          Noah put his hands up
and backed away from the house.  “You don’t need to threaten me.  I was just
trying to see if anyone lived here.”

          “So you could rob the
place.”

          Noah shook his head. 
“No, sir.  Your house looked unoccupied.  I’m just passing through and thought
I might sleep here tonight if it was empty, but I can move on to somewhere
else.  I’m really not a threat to you, I swear.”

          The old man smirked. 
“You ain’t just passing through, boy.  You’ve reached the end of the road.”

          The fear gripping Noah
worsened.  His breathing quickened and he began to feel lightheaded, like he
might fall over at any moment.  “Jesus.  I haven’t done anything to you.  You
don’t need to kill me.”

          “I’ll be the judge of
that.  But if you cooperate and don’t try anything funny, you’ll live a little
longer at least.  Now then, real slow and easy, take out that pistol and drop
it on the ground.”

          Noah undid the
holster’s snap and slowly withdrew the revolver, holding it gingerly by the
handle, avoiding the trigger guard.  He let it slide from his fingers the
moment it cleared the holster and it hit the ground with a soft thump.

          The old man grinned. 
“Good job, boy.  You know what?  You look like you’re about to cry.”

          Noah clenched his teeth
and tried hard to project strength rather than weakness.  His guess about the
man’s cruel nature appeared to have been correct and he had a feeling showing emotional
vulnerability would be a very bad thing.  The effort was at least partially
successful.  He was no longer on the verge of fainting and his features were
set in a hard glare.

          But the old man was
unimpressed.  “Trying to act tough, huh?  Well, we’ll see how tough you really
are soon.”  He gestured with the barrel of the shotgun.  “You turn around and
start walking thataway.  Don’t try running or I’ll cut you down, sure as shit.”

          Noah turned around. 
What choice did he have?

          “Where are we going?”

          “My house.  It’s just
up the road a piece.”

          Noah frowned as he took
his first steps in the indicated direction.  “But I don’t get it.  If this
isn’t your place, what do you want with me?”

          “You’ll find out in due
time, boy.  In the meantime, hush your yackin’ and walk.”

          Noah had many other
questions for his probable executioner, but he held his tongue and walked on in
silence.

19
.

Like the one they’d left behind, the
old man’s house appeared to have weathered the upheavals of the past fairly
well.  It was smaller than that one, lacking an attached garage.  Someone,
presumably the old man himself, had actually been doing a decent job of
maintaining the yard.  As they drew closer to the house, Noah spied an
old-fashioned manual push mower stowed next to a side door stoop.  But the yard
was a big one.  Mowing it manually would require a significant investment of
time, not to mention a high level of patience.  Then again, this was the world
after the fall.  Time was all anyone still alive had.

         
Except for me
,
Noah thought. 
I’m about out of time
.

          The old man directed
Noah to the side door stoop, ordering him to a halt just short of it.  He then
had Noah remove the backpack and utility belt.  Noah did as instructed, setting
the items on the ground near the push mower.

          “Go on inside.  Move
real slow.  You even twitch going through that door, you’re a dead little son
of a bitch.”

          Noah climbed the steps
to the stoop and turned the knob to open the door.  Through the door was a
large kitchen awash in shadow.  The window blinds at the back of the house had
been raised, letting in enough sunlight to see by.  In a corner of the big
kitchen area was a large, round dining table.  Pinned to the wall next to a row
of cupboards was a calendar from the year before the end of the world.

          An unsettling thought came
to Noah as he continued into the kitchen—
This is where I die.

          “Turn around, boy.”

          Noah sighed and did as
ordered.

          A hard fist slammed
into his stomach, knocking the air from his lungs and dropping him to his
knees.  Before he could begin to recover from the first blow, the old man’s
fist came arcing toward him again.  This time knuckles crashed against Noah’s
jaw.  An explosion of pain went off in his head as he pitched sideways onto the
dusty hardwood floor.  It was so intense it briefly made cognizance of anything
else impossible.  When the first wave of pain receded, he realized the old man
had him by the wrists and was dragging him across the floor.  The son of a
bitch had set his shotgun down, but Noah was effectively incapacitated and
incapable of gaining any advantage from this.  He twisted his head around and
glimpsed their likely destination—an open door in a corner of the kitchen.