Slowly We Rot Read Online Free PDF Page B

“I couldn’t possibly have known what you were
going through or where to even start looking for you.  You must know that.  You
could have been anywhere in the world.”
              Aubrey’s sneer deepened. 
“I don’t give a fuck about your excuses, brother.  I was depending on you and
you let me down, bottom line.  But guess what?  Mr. Rapist died a few months
ago.  Heart attack or something.  But I was still chained up in the basement
with no way out.  I might have died down there, too, if Nick hadn’t come along
and saved me.”
              Noah frowned.  “Who’s
Nick?”
              “He’s the friend who
has you in the crosshairs of his rifle as we speak.”
              Noah gaped at her in
astonishment.  “What?”
              “You heard me.”
              Noah’s head snapped to
the right, his eyes scanning the line of trees at the edge of the clearing. 
The laughter he’d heard last night had come from that direction.  Assuming this
Nick person wasn’t some figment of Aubrey’s imagination, he was probably
somewhere out there.
              “You look scared. 
Good.”
              Noah swallowed a lump
in his throat and forced his gaze back to his sister.  “So you’re here to kill
me, after all.”
              Aubrey shrugged.  “Nick’s
just protecting me.  For now.  I had him hang back because this needed to be
between just you and me.”
              “How do I even know this
Nick person is real?”
              Aubrey lifted an index
finger, pointing toward the sky.  The loud crack of a rifle made Noah flinch. 
A high caliber bullet hit a corner of a support beam at the end of the porch,
resulting in a spray of splinters.
              Noah gasped.  “Holy
shit.”
              “That was my signal for
a warning shot, in case you couldn’t guess.”  Aubrey lowered her hand and smiled. 
“I’ll be on my way now, Noah.  I’ve done what I came here to do, which was to
make you face up to the damage you’ve done.  I hope we never see each other
again, because if we do, I can’t guarantee I won’t have Nick kill you.  My
advice?  Stay in your little area here and don’t ever leave.”
              Before Noah could say
anything to that, she turned away from him and headed for the woods.  In a few
moments, she had disappeared through the tree line.  Noah stared in that
direction for a long time, his thoughts a confused jumble and his emotions in
turmoil.  Now that Aubrey was out of sight, her reappearance seemed like
something out of a dream, like something that couldn’t possibly have actually
happened.
              The impression was
compounded by the memory of how his sleep had been plagued by troubling, often
gruesome lucid dreams for many months after his sister and father disappeared. 
These dreams were always full of foreboding and usually focused on their
unexpected return.  Sometimes his family members came back as zombies, other
times as ghosts.  Still other times they would initially seem normal, but the
illusion would crumble as the dreams took a horrific twist.  Noah had spent
that time feeling like he was being tortured by his brain.
              And now he found
himself wishing this morning’s revelations really had been nothing more than
just another resurrection dream and that, as he’d always assumed, Aubrey had died
somewhere out there in the world years ago.
             
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

7.
     
    Noah spent little time outside
the rest of the day, emerging only when he needed to visit the outhouse.  He
sat on the sofa, smoked weed, and stared at the dead TV screen for hours, his
thoughts unfocused and drifting much of the time.  Now and then one of the many
hurtful things Aubrey had said to him would flit through his mind, but he
always let the words fly away without