Free Slowly We Rot by Bryan Smith Page B

away.
              Aubrey screamed his
name several times, begging him to return.  The sound of it resounded through
the valley below, an endlessly echoing testament to pain.
              Noah kept walking.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

PART TWO:  OUT IN THE WORLD
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    12 .
     
    The walk down from the mountain took
up all the remaining daylight.  It was a sometimes treacherous journey down a
narrow, winding road, which had become overgrown in places through the years of
disuse.  Getting clear of the mountain range would take even longer.  He knew from
memory the road would eventually take him to a two-lane highway that stretched
snake-like throughout the Great Smoky Mountains.  From his many trips out here
in his youth, he remembered it as a scenic passage through nature at its most
breathtaking.
              A part of him was surprised
to find the highway still there when he reached the end of the barricaded
mountain access road, it’d been so long since he’d last glimpsed it.  There was
a closed gate at the end of the road.  It was secured with thick lengths of
rusty chain.  Parked alongside the gate facing the highway was an old yellow
school bus with flat tires.  Its hood was up and Noah could see as he
approached it that its engine had been gutted.  Whoever had parked it here had
taken pains to ensure that moving it would be extremely difficult.
              The reasoning behind this
had been sound.  With society collapsing, so many of the people with property
up here had feared being targeted by roving gangs of bandits and other
predators.  And there actually had been a few tense standoffs with some shady
people who came poking around in the early days.  But the incidents were
infrequent and soon ceased altogether, likely thanks to the devastatingly fast
spread of the plague.
              Noah circumvented the
gate and moved past the bus to take a look out at the highway.  Because of the
way the road curved, he could only see a short distance in either direction. 
The highway looked more or less as he remembered it.  The guardrail was still
there.  He spied a speed limit sign off some distance to his right.  But there
had been some natural erosion to the asphalt, which was dotted here and there
with potholes small and large.  Weeds had grown up through cracks in a lot of
places.  The erosion matched what Noah had imagined.  With no maintenance crews
to patch holes and occasionally put down a new layer of blacktop, nature was
free to encroach.  One day the roads out here would be fully overtaken by
greenery, a prospect Noah might have found depressing if he believed
civilization might one day mount a comeback.  But he had no such hope and thus
there was a kind of beauty in nature taking back the land and undoing the work
of humanity.
              There were other hints
of calamity.  The first Noah glimpsed was the burned-out hulk of a pickup
truck.  It had smashed into the guardrail some thirty yards to his left, in the
westbound direction, which was where he’d be heading.  The truck’s windows had
been blown out in the crash, its tires melted in the resultant fire.  At least
he supposed the fire was a result of the crash.  But maybe the fire had come
first, causing the crash.  Not that it mattered.  Whoever had been driving the
truck was long dead.  There might even still be remains in the truck’s cab. 
Noah had no desire to verify this.  He kept his gaze straight ahead as he set
off down the road and walked past the truck.
              The avoidance was pointless,
he knew.  The crashed truck would be just the first of countless examples of
how the world had died in chaos and flames.  He would encounter things far