The Rot (Post Apocalyptic Thriller) by Paul Kane

through the hall, then into the living room – where I found an old man sitting in a chair. Damn, he looked so much like Dad, that guy. Even more so because he’d clearly died there and no-one had come looking. No bottles of milk for the neighbours to see; no neighbours for miles, come to that. He’d just passed away and was rotting, skin grey and mottled, head back and his mouth wide.
    In his lap, open at the page he’d been reading, was a Bible – and as I looked around the room, wrenching my eyes away from him, I saw there were various crosses and framed religious passages. I returned my gaze to the corpse, taking a step or two. But I didn’t want to see the sections he’d been reading in that book, because of what I feared they might be; didn’t want to look upstairs – not just because the steps seemed as rickety as all hell, but because I was frightened of seeing something… someone in the bed. Maybe a wizened old woman, his wife. Not saying that makes any sense – and I probably should have made sure there were no nasty surprises – but it did to me at the time. So I simply sat down opposite the man and continued to stare at him.
    As I did that, suddenly things started to take shape. I remembered what I’d seen when that woman had pressed her face up against the driver’s side window. Something spreading up her neck, across her face – like the rust on the car, but slightly different: dead skin, like that of the man’s in front of me. No, not just dead… decaying. The same was true of those birds on the ground, I now recalled. Some of them bald in places – which could have been due to the hard landing, yet something told me it wasn’t. Flashes of things in my head, connections being made. This man, my father, the woman’s face… The birds, the crazy people, Mum… The buildings outside that were in such a state of disrepair, and those falling buildings again… The hole in the motor, the holes in the road… flaking, cracking.
    And then, I guess you could say I had a revelation. I knew what was happening, even if I didn’t know the reason for it. Everything – like this man, whether he’d died of natural causes or not; like my Dad had been after he’d taken his own life – was rotting away. The craziness that had been caused back in the facility, back in that town, had happened because the rot had somehow wormed its way into people’s brains – affecting them in the same way that terrible disease had affected my mother and so many others I’d witnessed when she’d been taken in. Maybe it had crept up the back, into the brain-stem – something that wasn’t visible straight away, something you had to look for specifically. It would explain the different kinds of behaviour anyway… and did you know – I certainly didn’t until I found out later on – that a bird’s brain and a human brain have similar wiring?
    And brains, like machines – like a car or helicopter engine, or even a gun – only have to have one faulty, one malfunctioning part for the whole thing to go to pot. But it hadn’t just got into people, into machinery this… this Rot . It had got into the roads, buildings. Organic, non-organic. As incredible as it sounded, it was fucking up everything around us. I couldn’t prove any of this at that time, of course – for that I would need to do some research, maybe find books that could help, do some tests, but it all made sense to me. For the first time since I’d heard the alarms, that gunfire back at the facility, it all made perfect sense!
    I don’t know at what point after I’d been thinking all this I dropped to sleep, but it was like my body needed to recharge, and now I’d reached this conclusion it could power down for a while. I remember dreaming about clouds again, about flying. No cats woke me up this time, however, I just opened my eyes when the sun came flooding in through the window, finding us in that living room. It had the capacity to make anything