Free Slowly We Rot by Bryan Smith

precisely as he remembered
her.  He stared at the seven-year-old image and wondered how much she might
have changed in their long time apart, assuming she was still alive.
              Noah wasn’t deluding
himself on that count.  He knew she was almost certainly dead, but he couldn’t
help speculating.  If she had somehow survived the apocalypse, it was likely
she had spent the years since then locked in a desperate, never-ending struggle
to stay alive.  She would be a harder, tougher person now, but that probably
would have been true even if the old world hadn’t ended.  The unexpected death
of her parents had to have been devastating, had likely crushed her innocence
in one fell swoop.  It was something he'd thought about ceaselessly in the
first several months after slouching back home from school in defeat.  He’d
yearned desperately to hold and comfort her, to be her shoulder to lean on in
her time of need.
              Looking back on it now,
the idea of being strong for her was ridiculous.  He hadn’t been capable of
inner strength back then at all.  More likely, he would have made things worse,
dragging her down with his neediness.  The other thing about looking back from
this distance of years was the cynicism he felt now, which made it difficult to
keep seeing the whole period as some kind of sweeping romantic tragedy.  He now
wondered if the story about her parents dying was some kind of carefully
engineered ruse.  There had been something too neat in the almost surgically
precise way she’d been entirely cut off from him.  His gut feeling was that
Lisa’s parents hadn’t died at all, not back then, anyway.  Instead, maybe they’d
gotten together with some of her closest friends at the university and had
worked out a way to more forcefully intervene.  She’d been called back home,
and Noah had been walled off from her in the most ruthlessly efficient way
imaginable.
              The more he thought
about it, the more convinced he became this was close to the truth.  A part of
him felt like he should be angry about the deception, but he couldn’t muster
the emotion.  This was a different world now, after all.  Hanging onto ancient
grudges was senseless.  But there was more to it than that.  He wasn’t a kid
anymore.  If her parents had acted in the way he suspected, he couldn’t blame
them.  It’d been the right thing to do.
              In addition to the
picture, he had a scrap of envelope that had been stored along with it.  The
envelope was from a package Lisa’s parents had sent her prior to her
disappearance from Noah’s life.  Through some accident of fate, the empty
envelope had wound up among his things.  He’d hung onto the scrap with the
Ventura home address of her parents scrawled across it, thinking he might one
day fly out there and show up at their door.  This had always been unlikely. 
He wasn’t quite that crazy, at least not back then, but the idea had always
been there in the back of his head.  Until the world ended, that is.
              He put the picture back
in his pocket when he heard footsteps crunching through the brush at the tree
line to his right.  Picking up the revolver, he got to his feet and watched
Aubrey and Nick come into the clearing.  Nick had his rifle with him, but it
was slung over his right shoulder.  Aubrey was still wearing the grungy black
dress Noah had seen her in the other day.  There were bits of bramble stuck to
it here and there from the walk through the woods.  She had a smug look on her
sallow face as she came up to the porch.
              “I knew you wouldn’t
fight me on this.  Fighting’s not what you’re all about, is it?”  She laughed
and shook her head.  “No, definitely not.  But running away with your tail
between your legs?  That’s definitely like you.”
              Noah shrugged.  “See it
how you want to see it.  I don’t