The Risen

by Adam J. Smith

  Breathing out; “Some. Anything?”

  “No.”

  “What about the fridge?”

  “Never checked it properly. Not gonna be fire in there though.”

  “Might be something edible.”

  “It all smelled off.”

  Opening the refrigerator door, Ruby pinched her nose and went inside. She pulled a torch from her back pocket and shone it around. “Gross,” she mumbled, nasally.

  “Told ya.”

  “A-ha!”

  “What is it?” Nate joined her at the entrance.

  “Cured sausage, probably chorizo or German sausage or something. Oh god, I so need this right now.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever noticed my mouth actually drooling before. Bring it out.”

  They made their way by torchlight to a booth and sat. “Dinner is served,” said Ruby, dropping oblong-shaped white bundles onto the table. Paprika, pepper, salt; all these tastes assaulted their nostrils; it was like they tasted with their nose. They each grabbed the mould-encrusted sausages and tore them apart to get to the meat inside.

  “You mentioned a go-bag,” said Ruby, chewing.

  “Bits and bobs.”

  “You’ve been holed up a while, eh?”

  “Yeah,” Nate paused to catch a breath. “Been trying to wait it out, hoping for some solution to come along.”

  “We got tired of waiting,” she grabbed the torchlight and stood it on end, so the light shone up. “Got restless, I guess. This ain’t all bad,” she added, taking another piece of chorizo.

  “It’s alright.” Nate thought back to the poly-tunnel – the madness of it – and scowled. “It’s alright yeah.”

  Moths fluttered in the torchlight.

  Ruby’s face was half-lit; in shadow one brown iris was almost black, while the other stared back at Nate. Her jaw moved slowly and quietly, chewing, and though her face was slack each movement almost made it look like she was smiling.

  Nate dropped the scowl; she had bathed earlier, there was still the scent of soap despite everything else. He looked to her neck, the skin running from her shoulder to her ear; it glistened as the jaw muscles worked. For a moment he could taste her skin, her sweat; imagine kissing her there.

  He swallowed and looked up; the cone of light on the ceiling was like Batman’s spotlight. Only it didn’t reach the sky. Only Batman didn’t exist. Just the fluttering moths.

  “I’m tired,” said Ruby. “I think I’m going to bed. You too?”

  “Yeah,” he smiled, sedate, and caught her gaze again. “Just you and me again.”

  She smiled; inside his chest, beneath his ribs and lungs beat his very real, pounding heart. “For now.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  Sidling out of the booth, she said “Nothing. Anything can happen now, right?”

  “So long as it don’t mean you’re splitting.”

  “I’m not splitting.”

  *****

  They each went to bed that night in adjoining rooms on the first floor. It seemed somehow wrong to sleep in the beds on the top floor, not least because they still faintly smelled of their previous occupants, the sheets and pillows dusted with a skin of DNA, in beds that had been left unmade and unkempt. And surrounded by the relics of lives amplified the desolation; it was one thing to sleep in anonymous beds in anonymous rooms, quite another when family photographs, or their friends, were watching you invade their space.

  Better then; following the cold sausage meat, they had said goodnight and gone upstairs, Ruby to the same bed as the night before, Nate next door; and they had each lit candles and stripped to their underwear, and washed their faces in the still-running water from the taps in the en-suite bathrooms. Better the bar of soap within a wrapper, and small bottles of shower gel, then half-used bars of soap with fingerprints still engrained and upended bottles with residual shampoo pooling at the lip – despite Ruby’s earlier invasion which now began to feel like exactly that, since they’d allowed the space to be mauled by the Sam-thing, making things worse. Better the smooth freshly cleaned sheets against their skin – as fresh as they could be anyway. Ruby lay on the other side of her bed so her feet weren’t kicking the boot marks she’d made earlier. Better that exhaustion now crept into them, so that dreams – if dreamed – were at the farthest reaches of their subconscious, and their bodies could heal.

  They slept for about eighteen hours, and once again it was dusk outside; grey and full of swelled clouds waiting for the pin-prick of pressure to let loose the rainpour. Their covers were damp from sweat, the pillows greasy. They drank from the taps and allowed light into the room by pulling the curtains open. They returned to their bathrooms and looked at themselves in the mirror; Nate showed an onset of muscle he had always had, but never this much or this well-defined – he had enjoyed his junk food too much for that. Pectoral muscles bulged, biceps popped, a ladder of muscle climbed up his stomach. And it was a similar story in the room next door; Ruby had never really entertained a fitness regime, so to see her once near-anorexic body turned into an athletic tool caused her confusion and sent her out into the hallway. She knocked on Nate’s door and said “Look at me” when he opened it, and he did; above the rim of the white knickers she had found in a drawer upstairs, tiny, almost indiscernible lines of scar tissue criss-crossed across the slightly raised definition of a six- or eight-pack, and though obliques were normally just that – oblique – Ruby’s noticeably pulled taut up the side of her torso, twisting visibly when she twisted to the side. In profile, her breasts pressed against the too-small bra-cups, and the strap cut into her side along the serratus anterior, and dug in across her shoulders. She tensed a bicep and said “I’ve never had these before,” and then noticed that Nate was in his underwear too, a down of dark hair across his brown skin running up his own set of stomach muscles and across a pair of unearned pectoral muscles. “Did you have that six-pack yesterday?” she asked, to which Nate shrugged, trying to catch Ruby’s eyes. Lower; his hamstrings bulged and then tapered to the knee, where after his calves took over the steep incline and decline.

  “How do you feel?” Nate asked, as she passed her eyes up over his still-glistening body.

  “Hot,” she said, perspiration on her brow.

  Their nostrils flaring, their eyes piercing each other; their heart-rate climbing from a steady 80-BPM to a racing 160-BPM – and somehow them being aware of this – their lips moistening; Ruby’s arm going behind her back and unclipping the withholding bra, it falling from gleaming breasts and hard, round nipples; her hand trailing her spine to her buttocks and pulling her knickers down from a woven thatch of unkempt pubic hair; her feet taking small steps forward with her hands now gliding over her breasts; Nate’s thumb hooking into his boxer shorts and releasing the pressure of his erection which had grown to push against the fabric; her oily hand grasping his penis as the shorts fell to the floor; their feet inching ever closer to the bed; his hands sliding down her sides, cupping her cheeks and effortlessly lifting her so they were face to face, her legs and arms clutching like a vice; her nails digging into his back as they matched breaths, the slick of their stomachs inhaling, exhaling, skin rubbing against skin; eye to eye and breath to breath; he lowered her until he was inside her and her mouth parted and her eyes closed and they kissed: paprika and spice and saliva on their tongues, magnesium sparking white-hot but never burning out; when they breathed and their secreted sweat and scented-triggers fired – sweet ecstasy.

  Nate turned and lowered her to the bed, and in the failing twilight all their newly formed muscles worked until they could work no more.

  *****

  Moonlight filtered through the steamed-up windows and lit the bedroom. Outside, windscreens were made opaque with ice; inside, droplets of condensation dribbled down the inside of glass and seamed across the burning faces of Nate and Ruby, lying in a trance-like state that regained the normal rhythmic heartbeat, the typical rise and fall of the chest as the diaphra
gm contracted, expanded. In A-poses, they drifted in and out of consciousness, Nate’s right leg casually draped over Ruby’s left. Their arms, hands, did not touch, and they ached in their groins, simultaneously voided and empty, yet leaking.

  Sheets were strewn across the floor like a murder scene; crumpled and covering clues – lumps that once were lamps and photo-frames now splintered, or smashed – an upended bedside table with its drawers sticking out like tongues rested ardently between the wall and floor, creating a triangle where it perched. Relics had spilled from them and pooled beneath. The bed itself was pushed into the corner of the room, preventing the door to the bathroom from being opened.

  Exclaiming, “What just happened?” Ruby rubbed her hand up and down her stomach, feeling the tense muscle beneath and flicking the shallow pool of sweat that had built in her belly button. She rubbed the inside of her legs where the odd electric bolt still spasmed.

  Nate replied that he did not know, and stared at the ceiling, allowing waves of ultraviolet to reflect back each crack. He rolled his body over and pressed his ear to her chest, closing his eyes, listening to the contractions of Ruby’s heart as it gullied blood and pushed it out again; listening to the gurgling and swishing as it made its way around her body; listening to the air as it swept in, swept out, in tiny, short breaths. “That was insane,” he said, running his nose up her neck, to her earlobe, breathing her in.

  She felt a stiff expansion spread across her stomach and held its heat in hers. “Had you been with anyone before?” she asked.

  “Not with sex,” replied Nate.

  As Ruby tried to remember any of her previous encounters, she said bluntly; “Yes, that was insane. I lost control, yet I was completely in control.”

  “I had to have you, the moment you were there, I felt this rush and Jesus, thank you god, you did too. Water?” Nate sat up and found one of his back-packs under a torn sheet, and pulled put a bottle of water from inside. They shared the bottle, gulping hungrily until it was gone.

  They sat opposite each other, with Ruby exclaiming “Did you take a Viagra or something?” still gently caressing him. “I can’t help it,” Nate said, stopping short of romantic claims of beatific, divine inspiration, for he knew it to be true. “Speaking honestly, as much as I like you, I hardly know you, but something about you just triggered this reaction.” He moaned. “Keep doing that and I wont be able to control myself again.”

  So she kept doing that until he picked her up and pressed her hard against the wall, his teeth almost breaking her skin as he bit down into her shoulder, lifting her up as she threw her arms over his back, allowing the fire to well and swell again. Walls thundered and rats scuttled from the decomposing bodies in the cellar.

  He lowered her from the wall and she turned and bent over the bed. Like ravenous animals unfurling from slumber, they lost control until dawn; from the bed to the shower to the cooling but unrelenting bathtubs brimming with water; to the landing and staircase and finally, out to the porch at the back of the building that was overlooked by the tops of poplar trees, the moon and the stars, where finally the heat condensed from their bodies and evaporated into the night air.

  Part Three: Roadkill

  The following morning, Nate gathered some wooden things from the Mitre Oak; bar stools, chairs and such, and piled them to the rear, near the children’s playground. He set them alight with the help of some siphoned gasoline from a car, and in a show of defiant normalcy, he and Ruby sat at opposite ends to each other around this fire, ‘warming’ themselves, wearing thick, woollen clothes and boots they had scavenged from the top floor. Above the fire, opened tins of beans and hot dogs bubbled, while yet more German sausage sizzled in a frying pan. The spicy scents drifted up towards the clear blue sky, causing Nate to remark that “This’ll bring any lurkers in the vicinity straight to us. As good as bacon.”

  “Yep, and we’ll cut them down to size.”

  The sound of an engine rumbled into existence just then, the volume ascending as the grating whine of a motorbike engine in need of a service came closer. They stood and looked towards the part of the road they could see. It sounded as though it was coming from the north, so it would be forced to stop at the road block.

  “I was just getting used to the thought of just the two of us,” said Ruby. The roar quietened as the motorbike slowed down, and as they both circled around the end of the porch, a leather-clad, fully-alive member of the human race was sitting there on his bike, contemplating his next move. He spotted them and immediately revved the bike – contemplating racing away or running them over, they weren't sure.

  Both Nate and Ruby waved and the guy quietened his revving, rolling slowly towards them and dodging the still-slain body lying in the road.

  "Food won't burn, will it?" asked Nate, lowering his hand. "You wanna take it off the fire?"

  "Probably wise," replied Ruby, turning back towards the rich smells emanating into the air. "Make sure he's friendly."

  "Hi," said the stranger, stepping off the motorbike and removing his helmet. "Name's John," he reached out his leather-gloved hands, which Nate accepted, saying his name. He noted the power that resonated in John's handshake, all forearm muscle and tendons – evidently a seasoned biker. His long black hair fell out of the helmet around him, straggly and greasy from lack of a wash. Around forty-years-old, his face perhaps looked older than he was because of a long, black beard. "Just the two of you?" he asked.

  Nate noticed dried blood on John's boots, but nowhere else that he could see – who hasn't got blood on their boots, their hands, anymore? – and replied "Just the two of us, as the song goes."

  John laughed; "There ain't no music any more, kid." He looked up at the pub, and sniffed. "You cooking?"

  "You timed it well – we were just heating some shit up on the fire. Hungry?"

  "Oh, kid, don't you know it. I could eat a horse – have done! Tastes like dog-meat though. You're not barbecuing up some exotic animal are you?"

  It was Nate's turn to laugh; "Follow me," he said, leading the way. "Ain't much better, believe me."

  Around the rear of the pub, Ruby was just lifting the pans from the fire, smoking its grey swirls into her face with a gust of light wind, causing her to cough. "Ruby, this is John," said Nate, sitting down on one of the chairs waiting to become firewood.

  "Hi," she coughed. "Hope you don't mind beans."

  "What else is there?" smiled John. He accepted a dish of beans topped with the heads of hot dogs poking up. "Don't suppose you got beer? This being a pub?"

  "Umm, maybe, the place was pretty well looted of alcohol, though there's plenty of wine. You'd have to go on a scavenge I think. You say so?" Ruby asked Nate.

  Nate spooned some beans into his mouth and mumbled "Probably find the odd bottle somewhere if you looked hard enough."

  "I'd go for the hard stuff," said John, "but I'd like to keep moving if possible and don't wanna end up in a ditch. This place – it safe?"

  "Safe enough," said Nate, watching Ruby sit down in her own chair.

  "You kill that zombie out front I take it?"

  "Sure," said Ruby, "I killed it."

  "You call 'em zombies then?" asked Nate.

  "Easiest, ain't it?" replied John with a mouthful. "A hot meal – got so used to eating chocolate and crisps and cold, mouldy sandwiches, swear I'd get diabetes or something. This apocalypse will be the death of me. You guys from round here?"

  "Yes and no," said Nate, Ruby's eyes clouded by the smoke, but she was looking at him. "You?"

  "Brum. It's a fucking state up there. If it wasn't the zombies it was the army. You got a fucking gun, you'd think it'd make you feel safer, but it just made 'em more paranoid. Fucking psychos. I tell you, there ain't nothing north but a blood bath."

  "I came from there too."

  "So you know. I was in a hotel – a fucking hotel, man, not even at home with my family..." John choked momentarily and lowered his head. "Man, that fire's nice on my skin," he sai
d quietly. It made his pink face redder, from the glow and heat. "I locked myself in the top room of the Ramada and watched as zombies attacked and ate and rose and attacked more and more people until the streets were just swarming, and, you know, the centre of town, it's a busy fucking place, mayhem just everywhere. It got so I couldn't even see anyone who was alive anymore. People had been running up and down the corridor, even banged on the door, but that all stopped, and after a while, all that were in the streets were the zombies."

  "You shouldn't call them zombies, though."

  "They move too quick for one thing."

  "I know, I know all that," said John. "I even seen 'em start on each other. I thought to myself – yes! – and this was after I couldn't get through to my wife on the mobile anymore – I thought to myself, maybe they'll kill themselves off and that'll be that. I didn't even think of a cure being possible, I just wanted them all dead! But I would look out and still see them, dressed as normal people, dressed as the army, but I knew they weren't real people, they couldn't fool me. Why's they didn't kill each other all off, I don't know."

  "But you escaped. You got out," said Ruby.

  "I got out," he replied, looking up. "I got out!" he shouted exultantly, raising arms and head to the skies. "Praise the motherfucker-in-the-sky, I got out!"

  Ruby and Nate shared a glance.

  "Sorry, it's been a while since I spoke to anyone who hasn't just thrown me something and run off. No-one wants to sit down and talk these days."

  “Have you seen many people?” Nate enquired.

  “Some. People are either too scared or they’re looking to take advantage. You’re the first lot who’s invited me in, so to speak. Mind if I?” John pointed to a pile of wood. “One thing you miss about the old world is warmth, eh?”

  “Go ahead.”

  The fire crackled beneath the new influx of table and chair legs, fireworks of embers spitting up and dissipating. John remarked how nice it was to be able to relax – “It’s harder to relax when you’re on your own, you know, least with other people there’s more of you to deal with any shit that comes along. You two been together since before all this?”