Slowly We Rot (30 page)

The town with the bookstore was
somewhere in New Mexico, a fact Noah figured out in the process of fleeing the
place.  This required no genius leap of deduction—it was evident in the
abundance of abandoned automobiles with New Mexico plates—but he never did
learn the name of the town.  Fortunately, the part of it he’d found himself in
upon awakening wasn’t far from the interstate.  He was able to follow signs to
a junction that led him back to I-40 West within a couple hours.

          As he’d hoped, he was
able to put some significant distance between himself and the zombies even
while pushing the loaded-down cart.  Not having to abandon most of his stuff put
him in a celebratory mood.  He started taking regular slugs from the whiskey
bottle as he pushed the cart along the interstate ramp.  He was moving at a
much slower pace by that point, having left the dead things behind a while
ago.  The boozing continued once he made it out to the interstate.  Like many
stretches of open highway between major cities, this one was largely empty.  Abandoned
vehicles were few and far between and he saw no zombies at all.

          The rest of that day
was spent pushing the cart on down the road while steadily drinking and
smoking.  His only regret about saddling himself with the cart was how the
attention it required during his daily travels had drastically reduced his
reading time.  On occasion he’d entertained the idea of fashioning some kind of
harness that would allow him to pull the cart down the road rather than pushing
it.  That would free up his hands for reading.  But he didn’t act on the notion
for several reasons, the most compelling of which was just how basically
ridiculous it was.  So he contented himself with a bit of reading time at the
end of each day and instead turned to the world of fantasy for distraction while
he walked.

          As he continued down
I-40 in the ensuing days, those fantasies became more immersive and realistic
than ever.  He imagined himself on this same stretch of interstate in an
alternative timeline.  In this scenario, he and Lisa Thomas were traveling
across the country in a red convertible with the top down on a bright and sunny
summer day.  Noah was behind the vintage car’s steering wheel while Lisa was
kicked back in the passenger seat with her bare feet up on the dash.  He could
almost feel the wind in his face as it whipped his hair about.  This was during
a break between semesters at the university.  They were headed to California,
where Noah would be meeting Lisa’s parents for the first time.  With plenty of
free time on their hands after the crunch of studying for exams, they had
decided to drive to Ventura and see the country.  It was a blissful time.  They
were happier than they had ever been.

          At night when he was
done reading, he returned to this fantasy time and again when he settled down
to sleep.  In the world of dreams, variations of the fantasy sometimes
continued.  At times these dreams of Lisa were as joyful as his waking
fantasies.  Other times they devolved into hideous nightmares.  He woke up with
a scream on his lips more than once.

          Sometimes when he
stopped for the day he would set up camp right there on the interstate.  He
would pitch his tent at the side of the road and crawl inside it with his
flashlight, pistol, and current read.  Other times he ventured away from the
highway to set up camp in a nearby field.  But there were also times when he
was too drunk to set up his tent.  When this happened, he would usually cover
the cart with a tarp, crawl under it, and pass out.  Now and then he would just
come to a dead stop and fall over in the middle of the road.  The latter was
becoming more frequent all the time.

          The towns adjacent to
the highway were littered with places to scavenge booze and Noah never
hesitated to do so.  Every once in a very long while a meek voice of reason
would surface from the depths of his booze-addled mind to suggest he should
maybe consider an end to this behavior, especially if he wanted to keep on
living much longer.  But Noah mostly found this voice easy to ignore.  Another
slug of whiskey rarely failed to shut it up.

          Every morning when he
woke up he would crawl out of his tent—or out from under the tarp—and look up
at the sky, hoping to see that it had finally reverted to its normal shade of
baby blue.  But three weeks or so down the road from the town with the
bookstore, this had still not happened.  Mostly the sky retained that
washed-out purple hue, but other times it was neon green or a bright shade of
scarlet.  The first time he woke up to a red sky he was sure he’d finally died
and gone to hell.

          Maybe he had, at that.

          More time passed and
now the days and weeks bled into each other without distinction.  It was no
longer accurate to say they passed in a blur, because that implied some faint
awareness of time’s passage.  For Noah, things became simpler than ever.  He
was awake and then he was not awake.  After a while, even his fantasies of Lisa
slipped away, leaving him with no thought in his head other than the basic
necessity of pushing the cart ever forward.

          Then came the time when
he woke up at night rather than in the morning just outside a town called
Hell’s Lost Mile, which, apparently, was in Arizona.  He was flat on his back
on a dusty dirt road when his eyes fluttered open.  The first thing he saw was
a sign that provided the location information.  It was a painted wooden one mounted
on two tall poles.  He could just barely make out the words in the moonlight. 
Until then, he’d been unaware that he’d finally left New Mexico behind.  He was
now in the last state standing between him and his destination.

          He sat up and took a
look around, grimacing upon realizing he was somewhere in the middle of the
goddamn desert.  There were clumps of sagebrush around the wooden sign.  Nearby
was a stand of tall cactus plants.  A jolt of panic hit him when he felt
something crawling in his hair.  He flashed back to that odd moment in Henryetta
when the beetle had dropped out of Aubrey’s hair, but the desert locale
suggested a far more disturbing possibility.  Hoping he wasn’t about to get
stung by a scorpion, he swatted at his hair and heaved a relieved breath when
he saw a lizard drop to the ground next to him.  It promptly scurried away into
the darkness.

          Noah stood up and
hurriedly patted himself down.  He was relieved to find Mother Nature had
planted just the one unpleasant surprise on his person while he was asleep. 
His heart was still hammering away in his chest, however, and he decided he
needed a drink to calm down.

          But then he panicked
when he realized he didn’t know where the shopping cart was.  He usually slept
within about a dozen feet of the thing, believing it was smart to have within
easy reach in the event of an emergency.  But this wasn’t always possible. 
Sometimes he was so drunk he failed to take the usual precautions.  This appeared
to have been one of those times.

          He turned in a circle
in the middle of the narrow road, squinting as he scanned the dark terrain for
any sign of the cart.  While he did this, he couldn’t help noting a cluster of
lights in the distance.  The lights were not quite a mile down the road from where
he’d passed out.  They merited investigation, but he couldn’t go have a look
until he was absolutely certain he’d lost the cart.

          Just as he was on the
verge of giving up hope, he spied a glint of moonlight on something metal about
twenty yards away.  This was in the opposite direction of the cluster of
lights.  It looked as if he’d stashed the cart behind a clump of sagebrush at
the side of the road.  Though he still had no memory of what had happened,
figuring out the sequence of events wasn’t too difficult.  After initially
sighting the lights in the distance, he’d hidden the cart to protect it from
scavengers while he ventured a bit farther up the road to check things out. 
The only problem was he’d been too drunk and had again performed his new
favorite trick of falling over in the middle of the damn road.

          Noah felt woozy as he
backtracked to the cart’s hiding place.  He supposed he hadn’t been out long
enough for the effects of the alcohol in his system to wear off.  This wasn’t
unusual.  Waking up with some level of lingering buzz happened a lot.  He was
arriving at a point where he was virtually never completely sober.  Despite his
deeply entrenched alcoholism, this might have bothered him if he was still
living in a world in which things mattered, but that just wasn’t the case.  He
was alone again and probably would be for what little remained of his life,
which was a depressing thing on a lot of levels, but it did have its
advantages.  In a way, for instance, he was freer than almost anyone who’d ever
existed.  If he wanted, he could drink himself to death and so what if he did?

          Upon reaching the cart,
he spent some time verifying it was intact and that he hadn’t lost anything important
while he was in blackout.  As best he could tell, the cart was in good shape
despite having been pushed along a dirt road for who knew how long.  The
darkness made it difficult to discern much about the terrain, but he had the
sense that he’d traveled a significant distance since leaving the interstate,
which wasn’t at all visible here in the desert night.  He couldn’t imagine why
he would have done this, even in a state of extreme intoxication, except that
perhaps something compelling had caught his attention and he’d gone off in
search of whatever it was.

          But maybe it had
something to do with that cluster of lights, which he meant to investigate very
soon.  First, however, he needed a brace of alcohol to steady himself.  An open
pint bottle of Jim Beam rested in the retractable rear compartment of the
cart.  It was about a quarter full.  Noah downed the rest of it, cocked his arm
back, and flung the empty bottle away from him with all his might.  The glass
caught a glint of moonlight as it went sailing away and a moment later
shattered when it hit something solid on the ground, probably a rock.  He
considered further fortifying himself with a hit or two of weed from the pipe,
but he decided against it, figuring he should have at least some of his senses
about him once he got closer to those lights.  The lights meant there were live
human beings in the area and there was a better than even chance they were
hostile.

          After filling the
chambers of his pistol, Noah shoved some extra ammo into both hip pockets and
holstered the weapon.  That done, he took out the tarp, shook it open, and covered
the cart.  Next he stepped back out to the road and took another look at the
cart’s hiding place.  He was convinced someone passing by at night would not notice
it.  Distinguishing it from all the other vague shapes out there in the dark
would be next to impossible.

          Convinced he’d done all
he could to protect his property, Noah headed off in the direction of Hell’s Lost
Mile.

A half mile farther down the road,
it became clear there were more lights burning out there in the dark than he’d
imagined.  Previously many of the light sources blurred together, forming
indistinct luminous blobs.  Now, though, they resolved into separate points of brightness. 
Soon he was able to make out the shapes of buildings.  Hell’s Lost Mile wasn’t
a big place.  There was a longish main street flanked by a row of buildings on
each side.  In addition, there were some shorter offshoot streets and a handful
of outlying structures.

          As he neared the town,
rowdy voices and other sounds of merriment became audible.  Somewhere in the
midst of it all raucous barrelhouse music was being pounded out on piano.  In a
separate location, seemingly, someone else was strumming a guitar and singing
in a high, plaintive voice.  The words were in Spanish, a language Noah didn’t
know well, but the song’s message of yearning and loss came through anyway
thanks to the singer’s achingly expressive performance, which stood in stark
contrast to the otherwise festive atmosphere.

          His original plan was
to circle around the town and enter it in a cautious, furtive way through one
of those side streets.  He was a stranger in Hell’s Lost Mile and those who
lived here had no reason to trust him.  But this plan fell by the wayside as he
reached the town and walked right into it, feeling his sense of trepidation desert
him as he strode without incident down that wide main boulevard.  He didn’t
pass unnoticed.  A number of curious looks were directed his way, but none were
openly hostile.  To the contrary, most of the looks were quite friendly.

          This was particularly
true of one building he passed where a number of attractive women in lingerie
were lounging on a porch, most of them with drinks in their hands.  Several women
called out to him as he walked by, inviting him inside to engage in various
erotic activities.  It didn’t take long to figure out this was a whorehouse. 
He was tempted by the offers, but he had no idea what he could exchange for
services rendered so he kept on walking.

          A bit farther down the
street, he located the source of the raucous piano music, which hadn’t let up
since he’d started hearing it.  Several horses were tied to hitching posts
outside a drinking establishment with batwing doors at the entrance.  A painted
sign above the awning identified it as the Sidewinder Saloon.  The Sidewinder
had a second floor with a long balcony that overlooked the street.  Sounds
emanating from up there suggested the saloon doubled as a place of prostitution,
which apparently was a big business in Hell’s Lost Mile.

          A powerful sense of
déjà vu assailed Noah as he paused in the street and stared at the building. 
He felt as if he’d been right here, in this very place and moment, not just
once before, but many other times.  This made no sense, because he knew for
certain he’d never previously visited Arizona.  But the impression that he’d
somehow experienced this moment many times remained.  He couldn’t fathom how
that could be regardless of how hard he tried.  An accompanying compulsion to
enter the saloon and belly up to the bar was just as strong.  In the end, it
was impossible to resist.

          Wood planking creaked
beneath his tread as he climbed the steps to the porch and pushed through the
batwing doors into the saloon.  The place was packed and hardly anyone took
notice of Noah’s arrival.  A large, open main room was crowded with tables.  Damn
near every seat was occupied.  Noah was astonished.  He hadn’t seen this many
people in one place since before the apocalypse.  Until now, he would have bet
there weren’t this many people still alive in the entire world.  This was
strange enough, but even more puzzling was how they’d all wound up in this
remote little desert town.

          The piano he’d been
hearing was against the wall to his right.  Men and women holding drinks were
gathered around it, their voices raised in song as a pudgy old guy in a derby
hat pounded the keys.  Though he only had a partial view of the piano player’s
face from where he stood, a spark of recognition galvanized Noah.  He started
threading his way through the tables, his hand going to the gun at his hip. 
The fat man banging out the boogie music was Hal, the sleazy member of Connor’s
gang who’d molested his sister and killed Nick.  Avenging Nick’s death wasn’t
anything he cared about, not in light of Aubrey’s revelations about the man. 
But what he’d done to Aubrey in itself justified public execution.

          At the back of his
mind, though, a secondary voice was clamoring for attention, reminding him of how
far he’d journeyed from Henryetta.  The odds of running into the man he loathed
so much this far down the line were so low they bordered on impossible.  But
that wasn’t the biggest reason it seemed so unlikely.  While imprisoned in
Henryetta, Noah had heard something about Hal being hanged for crimes against
the Judge.  His purposeful gait slowed as murderous intent gave way to
confusion.  The piano player was a dead ringer for Hal, but how could it be
him?

          Another possibility
occurred, one so startling it brought Noah to a dead halt between two tables
that were a little too close together.  There were many things wrong about this
town, not the least of which was its very existence.  Maybe its name suggested
something more sinister than a macabre sense of humor on the part of its
founders.  Could it be he’d somehow slipped through a gap between planes of
existence and had stumbled into an actual section of Hell itself?  The skeptic
in him wanted to scoff, but it would explain a lot, including why there were so
many people here.  It would also explain the possible presence of a dead man
who didn’t look dead.

          Maybe these people
weren’t apocalypse survivors at all.

          Maybe, instead, they
were the Damned, those dark and tainted souls deemed not good enough for
admission to Heaven.  Perhaps something about his state of constant inebriation
had allowed him to access pathways not available to other living beings, routes
and haunted byways he’d been traveling without knowing for some time.  Roads
and places on the map that superficially resembled those in his world, but were
subtly different in ways perceivable only by the sufficiently altered mind.  This
might also explain why the sky kept changing color.

          Alternatively, maybe
even entertaining this idea was further evidence that he’d lost his damn mind.

          Someone seated at the
table to his right pushed a chair back and tried to rise, but Noah was in the
way.  He excused himself and moved closer to the piano, positioning himself for
a better look at the fat man’s face.  Now there could be no doubt.  The man
didn’t just closely resemble Hal, it
was
him.

          Reeling from this
revelation, Noah backed away from the crowd gathered around the piano before
Hal could look his way and recognize him.  He didn’t want that to happen just
yet.  Some time to process what this revelation actually meant was needed
before he started shooting up the place.  In the process of backing away,
however, he nearly collided with a waitress carrying a tray loaded with
drinks.  She gave him a withering look and told him to watch where he was
going.  Noah mumbled an apology and headed for the bar.

          Space there was at a
premium, too, but he managed to wedge himself between two men attired in
standard cowboy gear—riding chaps over dungarees, boots, wide-brim hats, and
vests open over wool shirts.  Their skin was dark and leathery and their
clothes had the trail-worn look of men who’d put in a lot of hard miles riding
under the desert sun.

          Many men in the
Sidewinder had a similar look.  However, not everyone appeared to have chosen
their wardrobe from a catalogue of late nineteenth century fashions.  Here and
there among the crowd were a few people in garb of a more recent vintage,
including a large, bearded man in a Harley-Davidson shirt and a pretty blonde
girl in a Bile Lords shirt.  The blonde glanced Noah’s way as his gaze lingered
on her.  Their eyes met for a moment.  Then she smirked and went back to
talking to a woman in a long black dress who wore a veil over her face.

          Noah turned away from the
crowd and tried to catch the bartender’s eye, getting another big shock when he
saw Shane looking right at him from the other side of the bar.  The house
servant from Henryetta was wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, revealing
extensive tattooing on the arms that hadn’t been there the last time Noah set
eyes on the man.  A bolo tie was cinched tight at the collar of his shirt.

          Shane grinned when
their eyes met.  He was drying his hands on a little white towel as he said,
“What can I get for you, stranger?”

          Noah gaped at him in
silent stupefaction, his brain temporarily incapable of cogent thought.  But
then he let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding and said, “You don’t
remember me, do you?”

          Shane frowned.  “Don’t
think so.  But I meet a lot of people.  Can’t remember them all.  Sorry,
friend.  It’s the nature of the job.”

          “You were there in
Henryetta, at the mansion when the Judge was there.  My sister took over the
place.  Aubrey.  You must remember her.”

          Shane leaned over the bar,
dropping his voice to a whisper that was barely audible over the din of the
crowd.  “That was years ago.  I’m someone else now.”  His grin returned as he
leaned back again, although the expression wasn’t as warm as before.  “And
that’s all I’ll say about that, friend.  Now what can I get you?”

          “Years ago?  That can’t
be.  It’s only been weeks, months at the most.”

          “I’m afraid you’re
mistaken.”  Shane’s expression darkened.  “Paying customers only at the bar,
sir.  If you’re not ordering anything, I suggest moving along.  Maybe all the
way out of town.”

          It was undoubtedly a
wise suggestion.  Noah figured it was advice he should heed.  But an impulse
prompted him to say, “I don’t have any money.  It’s been so long since I had to
pay for anything.  If I’d known it was a real possibility, I’d have scavenged
some along the way.”

          Shane set a glass on
the bar in front of Noah and poured a generous amount of tequila into it.  He
was smirking as he did this, the set of his features conveying a deep contempt.
 The texture of those features morphed as Noah stared back at him, his brow
becoming ridged and more prominent.  For the briefest moment, horn-like nubs
were visible at the sides of his forehead.  They were there and gone in the
blink of an eye, so fast Noah guessed it had to have been his mind fucking with
him again.  Shane set the bottle down next to the glass.  It was about a third
full.  He looked normal again as he said, “On me.  For old time’s sake.”

          He was gone before Noah
could reply, moving down to the opposite end of the bar to take drink orders
there.

          Noah eyed the glass of
tequila warily for a moment.  He felt like he shouldn’t trust a drink offered
freely in a place like this, especially one from someone as shady as Shane. 
But the booze was calling to him, telling him he needed a fresh infusion to
start thinking clearly again.

          As always, the pull of
it was impossible to resist.  He picked up the glass and knocked back a gulp of
tequila.  He shivered and clutched the glass tighter a moment before tossing
the rest of it down the hatch.  He then refilled the glass from the bottle
Shane had left him and drank that down even faster.  A couple shots later his
buzz had been restored to that optimal level just shy of genuine drunkenness.

          As always, he was
unable to stop there.

          The bottle was nearly
empty when the cowboy to his left leaned close to whisper in his ear.  “Heard
what you told the barkeep about being broke.  You want to make a few bucks?”

          Noah eyed the man
warily.  “How?”

          “By sucking my dick in
the alley out back.”

          Noah grabbed the
diminished bottle of tequila and pushed away from the bar, departing without
replying to this proposition.  He threaded his way back through the tables,
heading for the batwing doors at the front of the saloon.  His intent was to
keep his head down and get the hell out before he could get into any trouble,
but he couldn’t resist shooting a glance in the direction of the piano, where
Hal was still pounding out a relentless boogie rhythm.  This time the fat man happened
to look his way.  Their eyes met and Hal sneered at him around a stub of
smoldering cigar.  Noah flashed on an image of Aubrey between his splayed legs,
with his fat fingers moving around under the hiked-up hem of her dress.

          Hal winked at him and
looked away, pounding the keys of the piano harder than ever as the revelers
gathered around him raised their voices even louder.  The dismissiveness of
that wink irked Noah.  There was no question in his mind that Hal had
recognized him.  Not only that, but he was utterly unconcerned by Noah’s
presence here.

          Noah banged through the
batwing doors and stood outside on the saloon’s porch for a few moments, swigging
more tequila straight from the bottle as he stewed over that look Hal had given
him.  His rage kept building the whole time.  When the bottle was empty, he
tossed it in the street and paced back and forth across the porch’s wood
planking.  The tequila was gone, his common sense along with it.  His head was
wobbling on his shoulders and felt barely tethered to the rest of his body.