Aubrey wiped tears away.
“I tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen. I was just mad. I was…”
Noah snorted. “Right.
You were punishing me. That’s what you said last time, right?”
“Noah--”
“Shut up.”
Nick appeared in the
doorway behind Aubrey, his features arranged in an expression of stern reproach.
“You can’t talk like that to your sister. Show some respect.”
Noah took another long
slug of bourbon, feeling the anger rise up inside him again at this rebuke. As
always, the booze fueled the anger, twisting up his feelings and making him see
every perceived slight as ten times worse than it really was.
“Fuck you. Fuck
both
of you.”
Noah regretted these
words as soon as they were out of his mouth. They were no worse than the other
ugly things he’d said to Aubrey already, but he knew he was being petty and
hated himself for it. He owed these people his life. Owed them everything. But
there was no taking the words back, at least not right now, while the alcohol
was doing its usual dark work.
He turned away from
them and began a rapid, grim march across the back yard of the old man’s
house. The unfenced yard was bordered by a dense expanse of forest. Noah was
nearly at the tree line when he heard Aubrey calling out to him, pleading for
him to return. He ignored her and plunged through the tree line, not bothering
to slow down once he’d entered the woods. He shouldered his way through
low-hanging branches as his feet crunched on undergrowth. As he walked, he
took many more slugs of Maker’s Mark. All the booze he was pouring down his
throat would be hitting his system in a big way soon, he knew. His thoughts
were already turning foggy by the time he came up over a slight rise into a
small clearing and saw the pit full of bodies.
23
.
Six years ago…
The cab driver who picked Noah up
the day he was discharged from Discoveries had been instructed to take him
straight back to his parents’ house. His father had paid the fare in advance.
There were to be no stops or detours along the way. Noah felt like a high-risk
inmate being transferred from one prison to another. In his view, this
impression wasn’t far from the truth. His stay at the clinic had been so
tightly regulated he couldn’t imagine minimum security incarceration being much
different. And now he was headed home for a stay of indefinite duration, where
his father would be watching him like a hawk, ready to give him the boot if he
slipped up even one more time.
Noah had exactly forty-one
dollars in cash on him. He’d turned the money over—along with his wallet, cell
phone, and keys—upon checking in at Discoveries. Now it had been returned to
him. As the driver, a middle-aged Mexican, steered the cab through sluggish
city traffic, Noah removed the bills from his wallet and offered the money in
exchange for a stop at a convenience store. Heedful of his customer’s strict
instructions, the driver was initially reluctant, but it was obvious he found
the bit of extra cash tempting. Noah made a pained face and feigned a dire
need to get to a restroom. He swore he’d be in and out of the store inside of
five minutes, not nearly enough time for his father to suspect a deviation from
the planned route.
The driver pocketed the
money and stopped at a Speedy Mart. Noah went in and took up a position in a
corner at the back of the store to get the lay of the land. The shop wasn’t a
big one. Only one clerk was on duty, a teenager currently busy with a fat
white woman in a cringingly small halter top who was apparently set on spending
her week’s wages on lottery tickets.
Satisfied that the
circumstances were optimal for committing petty theft, Noah sidled over to the
beer cooler, eased a door open, snapped a tall can off a random brand of beer,
and tucked it away in his jacket. The clerk barely glanced at him as he walked
back out of the store and got in the cab. He took the can out of his jacket and
popped the tab with practiced, quiet precision as the driver pulled back into
traffic. Noah had been inside the store for maybe two minutes. The driver made
lingering eye contact with him once in the rearview mirror to show he had not
been fooled, but otherwise he did not acknowledge what Noah had done.
He was dropped off at
his parents’ house in the suburbs just shy of a half hour later. By then Noah
had finished the tall can of Miller Lite and had shoved it back into his jacket
pocket. His father was waiting for him on the long porch of the two-story
Plantation style home. The old man’s face was impassive as he acknowledged
Noah with a nod before tipping the driver.
They faced each other
there on the semi-circular driveway, neither saying anything for an extended
period.
His father’s expression
was still unreadable as he broke the silence by saying, “Is that beer on your
breath?”
Noah nodded. “So is
this the part where you put me out on the street?”
His father shook his
head, the impassiveness giving way to a look of disappointment mixed with
sadness. “No, son, it isn’t.”
“But I thought I
couldn’t slip up even once. I mean, that is what you said. I was there. I
heard you. You don’t forget shit like that.”
His father shrugged.
“What I said was said in anger. You’re my boy. I’m not giving up on you that
easily.”
The effect these words
had on Noah was instantaneous and intense. He broke down sobbing where he
stood. His father, so taciturn usually, came to him and embraced him while the
toxic emotions that had been dammed-up inside him came flooding out.
After that, Noah
commenced a much more sincere effort to finally get his shit together. And it
wasn’t that hard for a while. His parents’ house had been purged of anything
containing alcohol prior to his return. This included not only booze but cough
medicine, cooking sherry, and rubbing alcohol. While he was in the house—which
was most of the time those first few weeks—he was able to stay on an even keel.
The problems began
about a month later when Luke Garraty got in touch with him via a Facebook
message. He had just been discharged from Discoveries and expressed a desire
to stay in touch. After their contentious first encounter in group, Luke and
Noah had bonded. Their relative youth compared to most other patients at the
clinic fostered a tentative kinship. Now that they were both out in the world
again, Luke suggested they could use each other for support to stay sober.
Noah remained wary because of Luke’s prickly personality, but he could see the
wisdom in the idea.
Two weeks later Luke
suggested they go to an AA meeting together. According to Luke, he’d been
going to meetings daily since his discharge. Noah, however, had yet to attend one.
The counselors at Discoveries had relentlessly stressed the importance of daily
meetings in those first few post-rehab months. When Noah told his parents
about his plan to head into Nashville to go to a meeting with his rehab
“friend”, they’d been all for it, seeing it as a positive development in their
son’s ongoing recovery.
By then Noah had a
“new” car to replace the second wrecked Camaro, a decades-old beater that cost
less than two grand. His license had been suspended, but it had been
reinstated upon completion of his rehab stay. He had the lenient judge who’d
presided over his case to thank for that. The Pontiac had little in the way of
bells and whistles, not even a working radio. But this didn’t bother Noah, who
was just grateful to have a roadworthy set of wheels. On the day he drove away
from his parents’ house to meet up with Luke, he did so with every intention of
attending the meeting and staying on the straight and narrow. It was the first
time he’d been out of the house in nearly a week and a half.
He was three miles from
home when he pulled up at a traffic light that had just turned red, glanced to
his right, and saw a Kwik-Stop convenience store. In the next moment, an image
of Lisa Thomas popped into his head and triggered a strange swelling of heat in
his chest. Until then, he’d done a decent job of making himself not think
about her. For the first time since the day he was discharged from
Discoveries, he had a recurrence of that old feeling of the universe conspiring
against him. It was as if some dark, malevolent force had picked just the
right moment to taunt him with her memory.
The light turned green.
Horns honked behind
him.
Noah’s hands tightened
around the Pontiac’s steering wheel in a death grip. The honking became more
belligerent. He closed his eyes for a moment and counted to ten. When he
opened his eyes, he cranked the steering wheel to the right and pulled into the
Kwik-Stop’s parking lot.
His father had been
giving him forty dollars cash a week, what he jokingly called a “modest
stipend”. The intent was that he’d have a bit of walking around money if he
needed it. Because he spent so much time at home, the money had been piling
up. As he sat there behind the wheel of the Pontiac and tried to talk himself
out of what he knew he was about to do, he had just over one-hundred and forty
dollars in his pocket.
It was more than enough
to go completely off the rails for one night. After several minutes of sitting
there, Noah got out of the car and went into the Kwik-Stop. Shortly
thereafter, he reemerged with a twelve-pack of Bud. Back in the car, he ripped
the pack open, popped the tab on the first can, and headed out to Nashville to
meet Luke.
By the time he arrived
at his destination, he’d finished off three more.
24
.
Noah stared dazedly up at a patch
of clear sky for a while before realizing he was flat on his back, freshly emerged
from a state of deep unconsciousness. At first he was too groggy to have
anything but the vaguest sense of where he was or why he felt so terrible. The
ache in his head was so monstrous it compelled him to squeeze his eyes shut
against the glare of the sun. His mouth was uncomfortably dry, which suggested
alcohol had played a role in whatever had happened to him.
Fragments of memory
came drifting back in the wake of this insight. He remembered the hurt look on
Aubrey’s face as he lashed out at her. Some of the vicious things he’d said
echoed in his head now, making him wince. His sister might have earned some of
his ire, but he'd gone too far. After all, she’d come to his aid in his moment
of deepest despair. She deserved gratitude and forgiveness. Instead she’d
been subjected to the return of an older nightmare, Drunk Noah, mean and bitter
as ever.
Shit.
The bottle of Maker’s
Mark was still clasped loosely in his right hand. Noah lifted it slightly and
gave it a shake. The lack of a sloshing sound told him it was empty. He let
it go with a sigh, his thoughts turning immediately to the one remaining bottle
in his backpack. At least he still had that. Or did he? Panic gripped him as
he pictured Aubrey pouring out the bottle’s contents after a search of his pack.
The image wasn’t baseless paranoia. His parents had done similar things after
uncovering booze stashes in his room. Aubrey had been there for that, witnessing
his embarrassment and hearing all the shouted, bitter recriminations.
She would have searched
the backpack, he was sure of it. And she would definitely have dumped out the
bottle. Hell, she might even have gotten rid of his weed, an even scarier
prospect. He could do without booze if he had the weed. A good pot buzz
always eased the cravings for what he really wanted.
He needed to gather his
strength, get up off the ground, and head back to the house, hopefully arriving
in time to avert total disaster. He was convinced Aubrey would let him keep the
weed if he could just explain things properly. As he stretched and twisted his
sore back, however, he realized there was something very wrong about the
texture of the ground beneath him.
Noah turned his head
first to one side and then to the other.
After a brief,
horrified moment of recognition, he sat bolt upright with a screech of fright
and repulsion. He was down in the pit with all the bodies, resting atop some
of them. There were dozens in various stages of decay. They were all around
him, a couple layers deep at least. A slight shifting beneath him suggested
the presence of reanimated remains somewhere in the midst of this mass of
putrefied flesh. Something that wanted to get to him and turn him into another
hungry dead thing. Even in the grip of deep repulsion, he experienced a moment
of intense self-awareness. This kind of situation kept recurring. It was hard
not to take it as a sign from above that his ultimate fate would involve
similar circumstances.