Slowly We Rot (33 page)

          “I mean you’ve been
talking to ghosts for a while now.”

          Noah’s heart started
beating faster.  “No.  You’re wrong.  I’m talking to myself.  That’s all I’ve
ever been doing.  Because I’m crazy.”

          The set of Luke’s
features shifted, his eyes thinning to slits as the edges of his mouth turned
sharply upward, rising higher than should have been possible.  For the first
time, Noah thought maybe, just maybe, there was something real lurking behind
the apparition’s Luke mask.  Something inhuman, not of the natural world.  As
soon as the thought occurred to him, Luke’s face morphed again, the planes and
contours he recognized changing and rearranging.  The face it was becoming was
also one he recognized.

          The apparition now wore
the face of Shane.  The shape and texture of its body changed, too, its skin
inscribed now with the tattoos Noah remembered from that night in Hell’s Lost
Mile.  There was additional tattooing now.  His entire neck was covered in
ink.  Most of the tattoos were depictions of various kinds of serpents.  The
thing spoke in Shane’s voice as it said, “You should turn back now.  You don’t
want to go to Ventura.  You don’t want to see what’s waiting there for you.”

          Noah was afraid again. 
The gun felt too heavy in his hand and was sliding from his fingers.  “Go
away.”

          “Go home, Noah.  Spare
yourself this heartache.”

          “Fuck you,” Noah said,
anger rising up inside him despite his fear.  “Seriously, just fuck off out of
here.  I’m tired of your shit.  Don’t you have caves to slither through
somewhere or whatever that crazy shit was you said?”

          A strange thing happened
next.  The Shane-thing’s expression changed, appearing to convey immense
sorrow.  “I have to go now, Noah.  Time grows short.  Heed the warning you’ve
been given.”

          And then it was gone. 
Vanished.  As if it’d never been there at all.

          Noah stared at the
empty space the apparition had occupied a while longer, his head buzzing with
the upsetting insinuations the thing had made in its various forms.  He sort of
wished he had that bottle of cheap whiskey back, but his resolve returned in
the next instant, anger accompanying it.

          He entered the tent and
crawled back inside the sleeping bag.  The level of agitation tearing at him
was intense enough he feared he wouldn’t be able to sleep again for hours.  But
he was wrong about that.  Now that he was in a prone position again, exhaustion
overtook him.  His sleep was fitful and his dreams were tortured by images of
things he didn’t want to see.

          But that night was the
last time he ever talked to ghosts.

          He rose early the next
morning and began the last part of his journey.

PART IV:  JOURNEY’S END

Long ago,

On the eve of
apocalypse…

Strange things were happening out
there in the world as summer gave way to fall.  That much was clear to anyone
paying even a little attention.  Even Noah, who had largely ignored current
events over the course of a long year fraught with struggle and upheaval on the
personal front, knew something was seriously amiss.  Lately his father had been
keeping the big TV in the den tuned to his favorite cable news outlet on a seemingly
permanent basis, usually with the sound jacked up loud enough to hear through
the entire house.

          By that point Noah had
about a month and a half of total sobriety under his belt.  Trying to
stay
sober required such a concerted effort of will that the deteriorating world
situation was, for a while, just a lot of senseless background noise. 
Sometimes he would walk through the den and glimpse images of people rioting in
the streets at various locales throughout the world.  Some kind of plague was
gathering steam and people were freaking out about it.  Authorities in a number
of places were cracking down hard on rioters in a desperate effort to quell the
rising panic.  Judging from the increasingly agitated voices of newscasters,
this tactic was backfiring in spectacular fashion.

          Noah would watch a few
moments of these reports and then go about his business, figuring it would all
blow over soon enough.  It was all a lot of sensationalism, the media making it
all seem like a bigger deal than it really was.  He couldn’t afford to let
himself freak out about it like his father, not if he wanted to avoid another
relapse.  His biggest fear was that another one would be the end for him.  He
kept picturing himself winding up like Luke Garraty.

          Another factor in his
lack of concern over what was going on was a long-overdue waning of his
obsession with Lisa Thomas.  All he cared about now was the future and all the
possibilities that were opening up for him.  Abstaining from booze had helped a
lot in that regard.  It was coming up on a year since the last time he’d seen Lisa
and sometimes he still wished for a reunion.  Yet he was closer than ever to
accepting that he would probably never see her again.

          If nothing else, Luke’s
death had taught him that the future was not guaranteed.  The time had come to
finally let it all go and move on.  He was still young.  There would be many
other opportunities for happiness with someone else.  All he had to do was move
forward and let it happen.

          Noah’s first inkling his
newly awakened hopes for the future might not come to fruition was the
afternoon his father came home with a brand new SUV overloaded with various
kinds of survivalist gear and provisions.  Attached to the rear of the SUV by
trailer hitch was a midsized transport wagon loaded with several large steel
drums, which Noah’s father informed him were filled with gasoline.  His father
had dabbled in doomsday prepping for years.  The family cabin up in the Smokies
had a lot of similar provisions stored there already, so much so that Noah
found himself alarmed by the sheer volume of fresh supplies his father brought
home that day.  It seemed like overkill and he said as much.

          “That’s not what you’ll
be thinking six months from now,” his father told him, glancing up from a
handwritten checklist of items.  “The world will be in total chaos, that’s if
there’s a world left at all.  By then you’ll be grateful I had the foresight to
prepare.  And you’ll be glad you’re up there away from it all and living in
comfort.”

          “But--”

          “But nothing,” his
father said, flipping the little black notepad shut.  “Listen, Noah, I have to
head out to the Smokies and offload this stuff.  I’ll drive straight through
until I get there.  Then I’ll head on back as soon as the job’s done.  While
I’m gone, you need to keep watch over your mother and sister.  Things aren’t as
bad here as in the big cities, but that won’t last.”

          He opened the SUV’s
rear hatch, took out a rifle and a box of shells, and thrust them at his son,
who reluctantly accepted them.

          “Um…what am I supposed
to do with this shit?”

          His father slammed the
SUV’s hatch shut.  “If anyone shady comes around here, you’re to shoot them in
the head, no questions asked.”

          Noah frowned.  “What? 
You can’t be serious.”

          The man gripped his son
by a shoulder, digging his fingers in so hard Noah couldn’t help wincing.  Noah’s
father had fixed him with some stern looks in the aftermath of his various alcohol-related
mishaps, looks meant to put the fear of God in him, but they all paled in
comparison to the one leveled at him now.

          “Son, I’m more serious
than I’ve ever been.”  Some of the hardness faded from the man’s features and Noah
glimpsed a deep well of compassion and sadness lurking beneath the surface.  In
a way, Noah found this far more disturbing than anything he’d said.  “Look, the
world you grew up in is going away, probably forever.  I hate it.  I wish it
were otherwise.  Given the chance, I think you would’ve gotten past all your
troubles.  You would have made us all proud eventually.  I really believe
that.”

          Noah shook his head. 
“Dad, you’re sort of starting to scare me.  You sound like a crazy man.”

          Noah’s father took his
hand from his son’s shoulder and rubbed at red-rimmed eyes with his thumb and
forefinger.  Only then did it hit Noah how tired the man looked.  “Good, you
should be scared,” he said, taking the hand from his face.  “And the only
reason I sound crazy is because you’ve been too wrapped up in your own problems
to grasp the seriousness of what’s happening.  But this is real, Noah.  The
goddamn world is ending.  We’ve got a small window of time to get things
squared away before that happens.  I’ll be back around noon tomorrow.  The rest
of you need to be packed and ready to go.”

          “What?  Go where?”

          His father grimaced,
his patience clearly wearing thin.  “To the mountains, son.  Jesus Christ, I’m
counting on you to keep your mother and sister safe.  Pull your head out of
your ass and try to focus on what I’m telling you.  Load that weapon and be
ready to use it.  In my absence, you’re the protector of this family.  Please
don’t let me down.”

          Noah sighed.  “I’ll do
my best.”

          His father nodded.  “I
know you will.  And I know you didn’t ask for this.  But it’s time for you to
step up and do what needs doing, no matter how tough it is.  You’ve never
managed to do it before, but you have to now.  Are you ready?”

          Noah didn’t know about
that, not really, but some previously dormant reserve of strength within him
was awake and responding to his father’s words.  His grip tightened around the
stock of the rifle.  “Yeah.  I think so.”

          His father clapped him
on the shoulder one more time.  “I know you are.  This is a world of fools,
Noah.  Time has grown short and it’s later than anyone thinks.  But I believe
in you.  You’re stronger than you know.”

          And that was the end of
the man’s speechifying.

          He got in the SUV and drove
away.  Noah watched it go until it disappeared from sight.  Then he sat on the
porch outside the house he’d grown up in, opened the box of shells, and loaded
his weapon.

Noah arrived in Ventura two weeks
and a few days after the strange campfire conversation with a thing that might
have been the ghost of Luke Garraty.  He remained unsure of what the thing
actually was, but he had become convinced it wasn’t some illusory
externalization of something in his subconscious.  It might not have been a
ghost he’d talked to that night, but
something
had been there.  Whether
that thing was a ghost, demon, or shapeshifter able to assume a human guise was
impossible to say.

          There had been no more
encounters with ghosts or other strange creatures since that night, unless you
counted happening across the occasional ambulatory dead thing.  But Noah
remained unnerved by his apparent experience with the otherworldly.  He had the
nagging sense the thing had been shadowing him a long time.

          And yet he was sure it
was gone now.  He had no actual evidence to support this feeling, but he believed
it.  The thing had attached itself to him a long while ago, maybe somewhere
back there in Tennessee, but now it had fled, its purpose in tagging along somehow
fulfilled.  That campfire talk had been the ultimate culmination of whatever it
was trying to do.  Sensing this, however, didn’t prevent him from being spooked
by strange sounds in the night.

          Despite his uneasiness,
he did not hurry along to his destination.  In fact, the pace of his progress
slowed considerably as he made his way across California.  This was a deliberate
thing.  Noah had felt stronger with each passing day early on, more like his
old self, but a look at himself in the mirror of a putrid gas station bathroom
three days after his last drink told a different story.  He looked hollow-eyed
and gaunt, his skin a sickly shade of yellow that indicated either disease or
malnutrition.  He needed more time to get better, thus the leisurely pace,
which eventually paid off.  By the time he reached Ventura, his health and
appearance had improved significantly.

          Breaking into a
convenience store was one of the first things he did after arriving in Ventura. 
Unlike so many of the stores he’d encountered along the way, this one was still
locked up tight.  Some of the usual detritus was scattered about the parking
lot, but the store itself looked pristine.  A look inside revealed a clean
floor and orderly rows of merchandise.  Positioned in a corner by the beer
coolers was a duplicate of the bikini model cutout Noah had lashed to his
now-abandoned shopping cart so long ago.

          He almost regretted
having to shoot out the plate glass entrance doors.  The store’s interior was a
perfectly preserved glimpse into the past and it seemed a shame to spoil that. 
Under other circumstances, he might have walked on down the road in search of a
store that didn’t exist as a kind of accidental museum.  But there was
something in the store he needed.  A wire rack by the checkout counter was
stocked with foldout paper maps of the area.  He’d lost the atlas he’d set out
with long ago.  A map would be necessary to locate the address scrawled on the
ancient scrap of envelope in his pocket.

          Shooting out the door
required two shots from the .357 Magnum.  Before entering the store, he filled
the empty chambers with spare rounds from his pocket, taking a glance around
the vicinity to see whether the noise had attracted any attention.  He spotted
a solitary dead thing a few blocks down the street.  It was scrawny and moved
at a slow lurch.  Deciding it wasn’t a serious threat, he entered the store,
plucked a map from the rack, and spread it open on the counter.  Locating the
address he wanted took a few minutes, but he eventually found it and determined
that it was about six miles from his current location.

          He folded up the map
and stuffed it in a rear pocket.  The dead thing he’d spotted earlier was gone
when he exited the store.  Getting to the place where Lisa had lived with her
parents before the end of the world required heading in the direction where
he’d last seen the thing.  He wasn’t interested in heading straight there
anyway.  Not because he feared the thing—he didn’t—but because he feared what
he would find—or not find—when he got there.

          Ventura was a coastal
city.  There were surf shops and palm trees.  He wanted to see the ocean again
before facing whatever was waiting for him at the end of the road.  With that
goal in mind, he set off in search of the beach.  For this, he didn’t need to
consult the map.  There were prominent signs to guide the way.  He got there maybe
an hour later.

          The wind was picking up
when he walked out onto the beach.  He stood there a long time, feeling
hypnotized by the gorgeous horizon and the gently lapping waves that endlessly
rolled up on the sand and receded.  A feeling so alien he scarcely recognized
it came to him while he was there.  It was a kind of perfect calmness.  He’d
experienced it before, but that had been many years ago, when he was still a
kid, long before any of the bad things happened.

          The thing he was
feeling was peace.  The ocean was eternal.  It was utterly unaffected by the
human tragedy that had engulfed the planet.  The planet was eternal.  It would
move on and endure as it always had.

          After a while, he
shrugged off his pack and sat in the sand.  He had a brief pang of regret at
having gotten rid of his weed.  A nice, natural ganja buzz would have added a
perfect enhancement to all this beauty.

          But the feeling passed.

          He’d made a vow.  He
hadn’t kept many of the vows he’d made in his life—hardly any of them, in
fact—but this one was different.  It was almost sacred.

          About an hour later, he
got to his feet with a sigh, picked up his pack, and turned away from the
ocean.

          It was time to go to
his destiny.