Slowly We Rot (13 page)

          Through the door was
only blackness.  A queasy feeling ignited in Noah’s gut upon peering into that
dark rectangle.  As they got closer to the door, the impression of perfect
blackness yielded to an even more disturbing reality.  He glimpsed a concrete
landing and, beyond it, a wooden handrail at the top of a staircase.  When he
realized the old man meant to put him in a basement, he finally recovered
enough of his wits to attempt resistance.  He tried bracing his feet flat on
the floor to get some traction, which would hopefully give him just enough
leverage to try jerking his hands free.  But the old man saw what he was doing
and countered by giving his wrists a painfully hard yank.

          Then they were through
the doorway.  Noah felt his ass sliding over concrete and realized time was
running out.  Any remaining chance of escape would vanish if the old man
managed to get him secured down there in the darkness.  And he had a hunch it
would be better to die now than let that happen.  This old man wasn’t just an
apocalypse survivor defending his territory.  There was something wrong with
him, an impression backed up by the avid glint in his eyes.  He was obviously a
sadist and was enjoying Noah’s terror.

          In a last desperate
gambit to escape imprisonment, he hooked a foot around an edge of the
doorframe.  The sudden resistance threw the old man’s stride off slightly, almost
enough to make him lose his grip on Noah’s wrists.  Noah experienced an
exhilarating moment of hope, but he wasn’t able to act fast enough to seize an
advantage.  The old man recovered quickly.  He tightened his grip and gave
Noah’s wrists a hard yank, pulling him the rest of the way through the doorway.

          The old man hauled him
to his feet on the landing, turned him around, and punched him hard in the
small of the back.  Noah’s knees hit the concrete at the edge of the
staircase.  His vision blurred as he peered down into the darkness.  He made
out some dim shapes but nothing would come into focus.

          His right hand groped
shakily for the handrail.  Before he could grip it, the heel of the old man’s
boot slammed into Noah’s back and the next thing he knew he was tumbling down
the stairs.  The pain was immense, the worst yet, and when he landed with a
thump at the bottom of the stairs he couldn’t move.  At first he was afraid
he’d broken his neck in the fall and was paralyzed, but soon he realized he still
had sensation throughout his extremities.  He was just too bruised and
battered—too thoroughly in the grip of all-encompassing pain—to attempt
movement.  None of his limbs seemed broken, but it was impossible to be sure
about that just yet.  For the moment, he was nothing but a lump of immobile
flesh trapped in a dark, scary place.

          He heard heavy
footsteps clomping down the stairs, the old man coming to check on his catch. 
The sound made Noah’s breathing quicken.  He tried reaching out a hand to grope
around for some kind of weapon, anything at all he could use to take a good,
hard swing at the old man’s hateful, ugly face.  But he wasn’t able to extend
his hand more than an inch without sending a lance of agony sizzling down the
length of his arm.

          The old man laughed
when he heard Noah’s anguished whimper.  His inability to do anything at all to
defend himself infuriated Noah.  This was the most helpless and ineffectual
he’d felt since the week after he got out of rehab.  Things had ended in
disaster then and it was looking as if history was about to repeat itself.

          Another sound from
deeper in the darkness temporarily distracted Noah from his terror.  A
whimpering.  It was very faint, but there was something in the timbre of it
suggestive of femininity.  A sudden certainty gripped him.  He wasn’t the only
prisoner in the basement.  There was a woman down here with him and she was
either afraid or in pain.

          Or both.

         
Probably both
,
Noah thought.

          He quivered in fear as
he sensed the old man standing directly above him.  His tormentor drew in a
satisfied-sounding deep breath and slowly exhaled it.  Then the heel of the old
man’s boot settled against the center of Noah’s back, resting lightly there
without bearing down.

          “Welcome to your new
home, boy.”

          He began to bear down
on Noah then, grinding the heel of his boot into his back hard enough to make
it feel like his spine was on the verge of splintering.  Noah squirmed beneath
him and begged for mercy, hating the pitiful sound of his high-pitched voice. 
He heard another pathetic sound drift out of the darkness and realized the
other prisoner was crying.  Whether it was out of fear for herself or sympathy
for Noah’s suffering, he couldn’t say.  Again, it was probably both.

          Noah cleared phlegm
from his throat and sniffled.  “Why are you doing this?”

          The old man laughed and
said nothing.  The boot came away from Noah’s back.  The relief this afforded
him was short-lived, because the next thing he knew the toe of the same boot
was slamming into his side.  Noah screamed in agony.  More savage kicks
followed the first.  Noah screamed some more.  Then the stomping ceased and for
a moment there was an ominous silence.

          Then, somewhere in the
darkness, the woman’s whimpers increased in volume.  The old man had shifted
his attention to her.  His laughter accompanied the meaty sound of his fist
pounding into her flesh.  The woman’s whimpers gave way to gasps of pain. 
There was a sense of the methodical in the way the old man delivered his
punches.  Instead of coming in rapid succession, they were spaced several
seconds apart, as if to allow the woman time to properly appreciate the pain
inflicted before giving her another dose of the same.  The weird thing was that
she wasn’t begging him to stop.  Noah supposed the most likely explanation was
that he’d worked her over so often she no longer held out any hope of mercy. 
Or maybe it was a kind of defiance.

          Noah’s eyes began to
adjust to the darkness, a process aided by the wedge of faint sunlight filtering
in through the open door at the top of the staircase.  Shapes in the basement
came into fuzzy focus.

          The nude woman the old
man was working over was chained to a pipe running across the basement’s
ceiling.  She was slender and of about medium height.  The old man had adjusted
the length of the chain so she could only stand on her tiptoes, which meant her
arms were at full extension all the time.  The constant strain on her muscles
had to be excruciating.  When Noah lifted his head and squinted at her, he was
able to make out another detail.

          Her mouth had been sewn
shut.

          And there was something
else, a hint of dim familiarity.  At first Noah believed this was a false
impression, but then it came to him where he’d seen her before.

          She was the woman in
the pictures in Patrick Brasher’s wallet.

After beating on the woman for a
seemingly interminable time, the old man went to work on Noah again.  This
second thrashing was no less brutal than the first.  He was kicked so hard so
many times he feared he was in danger of expiring from internal injuries.  But
that didn’t happen and soon the old man ceased kicking Noah and moved away from
him.  Some subsequent noises suggested he was moving some things around in the
basement.  Noah assumed this would be another brief respite before the beating
resumed, but in a few moments he heard the man’s footsteps clomping up the
stairs.  Seconds after that, the door slammed shut, a sound followed by a click
as the lock was turned.

          Noah had been left
unbound on the floor.  It was hard to take this as anything but a sign of
contempt from his jailer.  The old man didn’t think he was a threat.  Realizing
this stirred a flicker of anger, as well as a faint desire to gather his
strength, get up off this floor, and go kick that door open.  A fuzzy fantasy
of beating the man to death with his fists fluttered through his head, but all
this drifted away as consciousness began to ebb.  His body was too overwhelmed and
needed to shut down for a while.

          When consciousness
returned, there was light in the basement and Noah had been chained to another
of the overhead pipes.  Like the woman, the length of the chain securing his
wrists had been adjusted so he could only stand on his toes.  The strain on the
muscles in his arms was already significant.  Every little movement sent pain
lashing down his back.  Also like the woman, all his clothes had been removed. 
There was no sign of them anywhere in the basement.  Noah’s terror level edged
even higher at this revelation.

          Noah craned his head
around as far as he could.  The old man wasn’t in the basement at the moment,
but the door at the top of the staircase was open.  The wedge of light shining
through it was brighter than before, which made Noah believe a significant
amount of time had passed while he was unconscious.  Daylight had been on the
verge of beginning its early evening fade when the old man took him prisoner,
which meant he must have slept through the night and into morning.  It was hard
to fathom having been out that long, but Noah supposed the severity of the
beating he’d taken had something to do with that.

          The light visible
through the door wasn’t the only source of illumination in the basement.  A lit
kerosene lamp sat on a card table against the basement’s back wall.  When
Noah’s attention settled on the old man’s other prisoner, he briefly wishing
for a return to unconsciousness.  The sight of the woman’s badly beaten body
was a hard thing to take.  Her midsection was covered in ugly purple bruises as
well as other livid marks that looked like places where the old pervert had
bitten her.  Noah was grateful she was unconscious.  He didn’t think he could
take looking into her eyes while knowing there was nothing he could do to help
her.  But then she startled him by sucking in a big breath, opening her eyes, and
lifting her chin slightly to peer in his direction.

          Tears leaked from the
corners of her eyes as she met his gaze.  The strange thing was Noah had the
sense this was more out of sympathy for him than any concern for herself.  It
was possible he was perceiving something that wasn’t there, but he didn’t think
so.  The longer he held her gaze, the more he was sure his first impression was
correct.  In a way, it made sense.  She had obviously endured a lot of abuse
over a significant period of time and was possibly resigned to her fate, while
his suffering was just about to begin.

          Her pity made Noah’s
anger flare brighter than it had at any point since the beginning of his
ordeal.  He peered up at the pipe to which the length of chain binding him was
connected.  It wasn’t very thick at all, maybe an inch or so in diameter, but
it looked sturdy.  There was no discernible give when he stood up on the tips
of his toes and yanked on it.  The woman made a muffled sound of distress when
he did this.  She shook her head when Noah looked at her, her eyes wide with
alarm.  He frowned, unsure why his testing of the pipe distressed her, but then
he heard the first heavy thump of the old man’s booted feet coming down the
steps.

          Noah bit back a cry of
fear.  His tormentor was returning to torture him again and he was even less
capable of defending himself than before.  The unfairness of it all made him
want to scream.  He had survived the apocalypse and endured the loss of his
family, had spent all those years alone up on the mountain, afraid to come back
out into the world.  To wind up here after all that, chained up in some
loathsome psychopath’s basement torture chamber, struck him as a horrible
cosmic joke, an ultimate “fuck you” gesture from an unforgiving and uncaring
universe.

          At the very least, the
apocalypse should have acted as a total reset for humanity, a way of wiping the
slate clean of filth like this monster.  But obviously at least one had
survived.  Maybe the sadists and other bottom feeders were like cockroaches,
resistant to toxins and prone to coming out into the light when their natural
enemies weren’t present.

          The old man chuckled as
he approached Noah and looked him up and down.  “You’re a skinny fuck, but at
least you ain’t all beat to hell yet, not like this one.”

          “Why are you doing
this?”

          The old man smirked. 
“Because I can.  And because I like it.  Why else?”

          Noah grimaced.  “You’re
sick.  There’s something wrong with you.”

          The old man slugged him
in the face, snapping his head sharply backward and making him screech in
agony.  Even in the midst of pain, Noah hated crying out like that.  It made
him sound weak, more like a small, sniveling child instead of a grown man.  On
one level, he knew this wasn’t logical.  He was at the mercy of a deranged
individual.  Grown or not, terror was the only reaction that made sense.  And
the man tormenting him wasn’t just any old sicko.  He was
strong
.  His
punches packed a devastating power.  Not crying out wasn’t a real option.

          None of which negated
the self-loathing Noah felt when the man’s fists pounded into his abdomen,
eliciting the usual shrill cries of pain as well as his first blubbering pleas
for mercy.

          The begging seemed to
appease the old man.  He backed off after giving Noah a last hard slap across
the face.  The blow was delivered in a casual way, but it landed with enough
force to make his whole head throb painfully.  He squeezed his eyes shut as hot
tears spilled down his cheeks.

          When he opened them
again, the old man was sitting in a folding chair retrieved from the darker
recesses of the basement.  He had positioned the chair at a midpoint between
his hanging prisoners but set far enough back that he could watch them both
simultaneously.  As he did this, he rubbed at the bulge in his jeans, slowly
working himself into a frenzied state.  After a while, he opened his pants and
took out his engorged member, openly masturbating in front of them for several
minutes.

          Noah stared at the
floor, unable to take the old man’s leering scrutiny while this happened.  His
skin crawled with revulsion.  His whole body thrummed with terrified
anticipation of what might happen next.  He couldn’t help whimpering when he
heard the chair’s legs scrape on the concrete floor as the old man got to his
feet.  The next sound Noah heard was a fleshy pounding.  His gaze remained
riveted to the floor, but it was clear from the woman’s muffled whimpers that
she was being assaulted.  More tears gushed from his eyes as he realized what
he felt most strongly in that moment was relief that the old man had picked the
woman instead of him this time.  This was followed by the deepest, most
gut-wrenching sense of shame he’d ever felt.

          In a very short while,
the assault on the woman ended.  The next thing Noah heard was a zipper being
pulled up, which was followed by the sound of footsteps coming his way.  “I know
what you’re thinking, boy.  You’re glad that wasn’t you I was putting the wood
to this time.  Your time is gonna come, don’t you worry about that.  The bitch won’t
last much longer.  It’s a good thing you came along when you did, ain’t it?”

          Noah didn’t say
anything.

          The old man laughed. 
“There ain’t many people left in the world, you know.  Shit, what am I telling
you for?  You’ve been out there.  These days a man has to take what he can
get.  And, hell, a hole’s a hole, right?”

          The old man cackled, a
sound alive with pure glee.  He sounded like a demented child.  Noah had a
feeling he’d been the kind of kid who tortured animals and burned insects with
a magnifying glass.  He guessed the old man had been doing this kind of thing
since long before the end of the world.  He lived in a rural area.  The houses
out here—the ones still standing anyway—were spaced well apart from each
other.  It was the perfect place for a maniac like this guy to conduct his
grisly work.

          A quizzical,
squinty-eyed look replaced the old man’s grin.  “I can see the wheels spinning
in your head, boy.  You got something you want to say?”

          “You’re glad the world
ended, aren’t you?”

          “What makes you say
that?”

          Noah grunted.  “Because
you don’t have to bury your victims out back anymore.  Why would you?  There’s
no more law around to worry about, right?”

          The old man’s
expression turned shrewdly appraising.  “Maybe you’re sharper than I figured. 
Got anything else you think you know about me?”

          “Matter of fact, I do.”

          “Well, spit it out.”

          “You’re a piece of
fucking vermin.  And like vermin, you should be exterminated.”

          The look on the old
man’s face turned cold and furious.  His eyes bulged and his nostrils flared as
he sucked in air through clenched teeth.  There was nothing Noah could do in
the face of the explosion of rage he knew he was coming.  But he didn’t regret
his words, despite the pain he knew they’d earned him.

          To Noah’s surprise,
though, the savage beating he expected didn’t happen.  After seething for
several moments, the old man unclenched his teeth and grinned again.  “Got a
death wish, eh?  Well, you ain’t gonna goad me into doing anything I ain’t
ready to do.  You’re gonna be here a long time, boy.  But maybe I’ll get out my
needle and thread and do to you what I done to her, then you’ll get to eat mush
through a straw the rest of your miserable life.  How’d you like that?”

          Noah didn’t say
anything.  The chilling words effectively squashed his defiance.

          The old man smirked. 
“That’s what I thought.”

          He laughed as he turned
away from Noah and headed for the staircase.  The laughter continued as he
climbed the stairs and disappeared through the doorway.  A moment later, the
door slammed shut, leaving Noah to stew over the old man’s horrifying parting
words.  A glance over at the woman was all the reminder he needed that his
captor didn’t make idle threats.

          Noah wanted to scream.

          But he didn’t dare make
a sound.

21
.

Hours passed before the door at
the top of the stairs creaked open again.  Noah had spent the entire time wide
awake, the victim of an agitated mind overwhelmed by lurid visions of
mutilation and abuse.  The urge to scream never went away, an impulse the
ever-present fear kept at bay.  But he was unable to hold back a little cry of
terror as he heard the by now familiar heavy clomp of the old man’s boots as he
came down the stairs.

          Noah’s gaze went to the
floor.  Soon footsteps were moving in his direction.  Tremors racked his body
as more pleas of mercy trembled at the edge of his tongue.  The words went
unspoken as the footsteps continued past him.  Seconds later, the woman
squealed loudly as the old man approached her.  There was also a clank of
twisting chain links as she flailed about in a desperate, vain attempt to get
away from her tormentor.

          Noah told himself not
to look, to just keep staring at the floor while the old psycho perpetrated
whatever fresh atrocity he had in mind.  But something inside him compelled him
to turn his head toward the woman anyway.

          The old man had a
hammer clenched in his right fist.  The moment Noah looked his way, he took his
first swing at the flailing woman.  She turned her head just in time to prevent
her jaw from absorbing the full impact of the hammer’s blunt end.  It clipped
her chin instead, making her squeal even louder.  The sound the hammer made
when it struck her made Noah’s gut clench.  Then it thudded into the woman’s
flesh a second time.  After that, the struggle ceased and he watched as the
entire sickening assault played out.

          At least another dozen
blows connected, the old man concentrating most of them around the meatier
sections of her body, though her ribs absorbed a few, too.  The woman’s pitiful,
mewling cries tore at Noah’s heart.  More half-formed fantasies of revenge
flitted through his head, but Noah pushed them away, unable to stomach how impossible
they were.