Slowly We Rot Read Online Free PDF

see, wrecked cars everywhere.  Hordes of those
fucking dead things.”
              Noah shook his head,
picturing it.  It was pretty much as he’d always imagined.
              “You should have come
back.”
              “We never should have
left, but daddy was determined.  He would have done anything, whatever it took
so I could get well again.”  A very faint smile touched the edges of her mouth
and then disappeared.  “We’d made it a few miles through all that madness
before a man in a highway patrol car blocked our way.  We thought he was gonna help
us, but he really just wanted to get to me.”
              A deep dread took root
in Noah then.  “You don’t have to talk about this.”
              “But I want to talk
about it.  I want you to know what’s been happening to me all these years while
you’ve been enjoying the good life up here on the mountain.”
              Thinking of those years
of crushing loneliness, Noah just managed to hold back a burst of bitter
laughter.  He wondered what Aubrey would think if he tried to tell her about
his life of hopelessness and isolation.  Would she finally feel something for
him other than anger and hatred?  And what if he told her about all the times
he’d come so close to taking his own life?  Maybe then she’d feel some level of
empathy.  But Noah restrained the impulse to argue with her.  It was clear her
bitterness ran too deep to counter effectively with logic.
              Noah waited for her to
continue, but she had fallen silent.  He glanced at her and saw she was looking
at him with an expectant expression, as if she’d been hoping for the argument
he’d opted not to pursue.  The look on her face hardened as their eyes met. 
“Don’t have anything to say for yourself?”
              “There’s plenty I could
say, but you wouldn’t listen.”
              “You’re right.  I
wouldn’t.  I lost any interest in hearing your side of things after years of
being held prisoner in a pervert’s basement.”
              Noah looked out at the
clearing, unable to hold her gaze any longer as his eyes misted again.
              “That’s right, look
away.  You shouldn’t be able to look at me, if you’ve got any kind of
conscience left at all.  The pervert was a cop before the end of the world,
which was how he was able to fool daddy into getting out of the SUV.  The sick
fuck was wearing his uniform, made us think he was still on the job.  He killed
daddy and he took me.  I was too weak to resist.  Once he had me locked up in
his basement, he fed me a bunch of antibiotics and I got better.  It wasn’t
long before I was wishing he’d just let me die.”
              Noah let out a breath
and uttered two barely audible words:   “I’m sorry.”
              Aubrey snorted. 
“Apology not accepted.  He raped me, of course.  More times than I could ever
count.  And he got me pregnant.  I had the baby.  He killed it moments after it
came out of me, while I was crying on that filthy fucking floor and begging to
hold a goddamned rape baby because that’s what my instincts told me I should
do.  He laughed at my tears and tossed the thing out in the woods.” 
              Noah grimaced. 
“Jesus.”
              “Jesus doesn’t have
shit to do with it.”
              Aubrey got up from the
rocking chair and stepped off the porch, positioning herself in front of Noah
with her hands on her hips.  “All that time I had one hope, one idea keeping me
barely sane, and that was the belief that you were out there hunting for me,
that one day you’d find me and set me free.”  The sharp twist of her mouth
betrayed a deeply entrenched, malignant bitterness.  “But, of course, you
weren’t doing any such thing, were you?”
              Noah at last summoned
the will to defend himself.