Slowly We Rot by Bryan Smith Page A

camp in the
woods was again seeming like his best option.  He figured he would do just that
in a few minutes, but he first wanted to check out the van’s front seats.  The
door on the driver’s side was open a crack.  He pulled on the handle and it
came open with a groan of rusty hinges, a sound that was disconcertingly loud
in the otherwise still night.  He poked his head inside and saw there were no
remains up front.  The partly ajar door on this side suggested the driver might
have attempted to flee.  Hell, maybe he’d even been successful.  Perhaps he’d
escaped into the woods and was living somewhere out there to this day.  It
would be nice to think so, even if it was extremely unlikely.
              Noah undid the
backpack’s painfully constraining straps, shrugged the pack off his shoulders,
and leaned into the van to wedge it into the front passenger seat.  He then did
the same with the rifle, taking care to ensure that it was in a stable, secure
position.  Once these things had been accomplished, he climbed into the van,
pulled the door shut, and settled in behind the wheel.  The decision to do this
was nothing but raw impulse.  He was acting on it before the idea had fully
formed in his head.
              Even after all the
years of mountain living, he’d never developed much of a taste for sleeping out
in the woods.  It hadn’t often been necessary, the rare exceptions mostly
limited to his extended scavenging missions.  He figured he’d seek to avoid it
whenever possible even now.  Sleeping in close proximity to the remains in the
back of the van wasn’t ideal, but they were just a bunch of old bones, really. 
He had nothing to fear from them.
              Noah closed his eyes
and fell asleep within minutes.
     
     
    13 .
     
    Noah woke up to a clicking sound
sometime shortly after sunrise.  He groaned and stretched, squinting his eyes
against the bright sunlight visible through the van’s grime-covered
windshield.  The clicking sound repeated, but it was very faint, and its
possible implications did not immediately register.  This changed when he felt
something sharp prod weakly at his ankle.
              Frowning, he glanced
down at the gap between the seats.  He gaped in frozen disbelief at what he saw
down there on the floorboard.  Then he screamed and surrendered to blind
instinct, shifting around in the seat and scrambling backward as he groped for
the door handle.  He got the door open after a few failed, frantic tries and
fell backward out of the van, screeching in pain as the back of his head
thumped against the guardrail behind him.
              He sat there panting a
few moments, still unable to process or believe what he’d seen.  Then came the
panic.  He sat up straight, ignoring the fresh burst of pain this triggered,
and pulled up the cuff of his right pants leg.  He pushed down the sock he was
wearing, turned his ankle, and examined the skin, sighing heavily in relief
when he saw it was unbroken.  He’d just managed to avoid infection by the
frailest half-zombie remnant he’d ever seen.
              After allowing himself another
moment to finish collecting his wits, he got to his feet and edged closer to
the van, peering carefully inside.  The frail dead thing was stuck between the
front seats.  Though it was immobilized and pitiful-looking, Noah knew better
than to treat it as anything other than what it was—a dangerous, potentially
deadly threat.
              There was no bottom
half to the thing.  In life, it had been a woman, he was pretty sure.  Clumps
of long blonde hair still clung to a badly rotted scalp.  The size of the bones
suggested a small person.  Thinking about it, Noah realized the zombie might as
easily have been a young girl, or even a boy with longer locks than the old
norm.  It really was little more than a pile of bones loosely connected by the
flimsiest bits of sinew and rotten