The Penance of Leather (Book 1): Ain't No Grave

by S. A. Softley

  “A couple days later,” she continued, her voice hoarse with disuse and dehydration, “they started some emergency operation or something; started quarantining people who were sick. We never saw any of them again. There were more news reports and they got scarier. More cities getting infected, more people… I heard on the radio that some cities in China lost thirty per cent of their population in just a couple days. Millions and millions.” She choked back a fevered sob. Her chest was expanding and contracting with quicker breaths, verging on hyperventilation. “It was hard to tell what was really going on… There weren’t as many reports, usually just footage that no one quite had an explanation for. The reporters and news anchors covering it started disappearing, probably infected, until most stations just had one or two anchors sitting in mostly abandoned studios showing grainy video and pictures that people uploaded to YouTube and other sites. I just remember videos of people panicking; rioting; losing it. Fires, explosions… bodies in the streets. Huge waves of people chasing through streets screaming… and snarling… acting like animals,” her voice sped faster and faster, the words almost incomprehensible as her desperation took hold. She trembled as though approaching some climax.

  “I guess it was probably around that time that the reports finally started surfacing that the infected were coming back to life.” She spoke the last words slowly and deliberately, in stark contrast to her previously manic speech.

  “Coming back?” I stopped her. She was becoming incoherent. It was time for her to stop. She needed to calm down. “I don’t get it, I mean, I can understand if the disease makes them lose their minds; makes ‘em act like zombies… but they can’t really be dead.”

  Megan took a long deep breath, closing her eyes. She took another breath and as she released it some of the hysteria seemed to drain from her. Her shoulders seemed to relax slightly, some of her tension released.

  “They’re dead,” she replied, her voice soft but distinct. “I saw it myself a couple times. The disease kills ‘em quick. I saw… someone… and he choked on blood; coughed it up; his eyes were bleeding. His face was turning purple…” Megan’s face had tightened into an expression of pain. I could see hot tears in her eyes; could hear that her throat was tightening, making it difficult for her to speak or swallow. Her face turned a violent shade of purple and she gasped, beginning to panic as she tried unsuccessfully to force breath into her clenched lungs.

  “Megan, it’s ok. You don’t have to talk about it,” I said, sympathetically.

  “No. It’s fine.” She said roughly, taking one last deep, wavering breath. “It was my dad,” she sobbed, “I saw him die. It was fast. He stopped breathing; had no pulse. We covered him with the sheet… and then ten minutes later he… attacked his wife. My step-mom, I guess. Never really called her ‘mom.’ She was still holding his hand…” She sobbed again and her voice cracked. A thin wail of pain escaped her slightly parted lips. Tears and mucus dripped down and coated her red face as her lip and eyelids trembled. I sat and watched her. I didn’t know what else to do. There was silence for perhaps five minutes.

  “Anyway,” she choked out at last, clearing her throat, “They just… come back. And they’re violent.”

  “Ok,” I nodded, trying in those two syllables alone to comfort her, to assure her that I understood; that I believed her. Trying to use the single word to lie convincingly, to tell her I didn’t think she was crazy. She’d been through such trauma. It was no wonder she was mixed up; confused.

  “The day after they started the quarantine,” she continued, clearing her throat, “the federal government enacted emergency powers. There was a curfew; they could enter anyone’s house without notice and take anyone to quarantine if they showed signs of infection. The big cities were having serious problems. The towns were quieter; less violence and trouble, but people were still getting sick; still dying. Half the town was deserted. They started burning the dead, right in the parking lot,” another tear fell down her cheek and her chin trembled again. She nodded her head toward the street in the direction of the large pile of bodies I’d found still smouldering. She shook her head and closed her eyes, squeezing out more tears as she did so. Trying, it seemed to me, to wash her eyes of the image of the burning pile that I, too, had discovered.

  “I guess it was a few days after that when they realized they’d lost. They had more people in quarantine than out of it. People were dying of the disease, and then waking up and attacking people who were still alive. Those… those things… A real life zombie fucking apocalypse,” she spat the words bitterly, her face and voice contorted in indescribable pain.

  “Instead of trying to get the sick away, they tried to get anyone who wasn’t infected to safe, secure places; remote military bases, islands, isolated facilities… places like that I guess. I was on a military bus that was supposed to go… Showed one of the younger cops my tits to get on… promised him more when we got somewhere safe. The cops, the government, the army; they abandoned the towns and cities.

  “They took whoever they could with them, but a lot of people were left behind… people they refused to take. The riots got worse. Not here, but on the news. Here things were mostly quiet. The town just sort of… burnt out. There was no looting. So many people were sick or dead already. Or… cremated.”

  “Explains why everything is just… here. Undamaged,” I muttered to myself. I’d wondered about that. Megan confirmed my suspicions. It must have happened suddenly. No time to panic.

  “The only violence I heard about, aside from those things attacking people, happened right in front of me. A bunch of people who were still alive but locked up in quarantine broke out and tried to get on the bus. They hadn’t turned into them yet. They were living, but sick and desperate. They tipped the bus over. The bus I’d gotten on. The last bus. I made it out of a broken window and ran. There were gunshots. People started beating each other with fists, rocks, broken glass… whatever they could find. It was a fucking free-for-all. Everyone just… fighting. I ran to the liquor store and blocked up the door and that’s where I’ve been ever since. They didn’t even try to get in.”

  I listened to the story in mute horror. We sat in the silence for quite some time, the only sound was the slow shuffling that came from outside.

  “So everything really is gone then,” I muttered, breaking the silence. “I can`t believe it.”

  “Believe it honey,” she replied with a sigh.

  “But what about those military bases?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know where they are. They might not even be there anymore. They might have been overrun. I doubt they’d let us in even if they are still there. I wouldn’t if I were them.”

  We sat another while in silence.

  “I made you some soup. You should eat. And you should have water; maybe some Gatorade or something. You’ve probably got a nasty hangover. You need to get your electrolytes up.”

  “Thanks,” she chuckled bitterly. I stood and handed her the soup, a couple of Advil and a bottle of water. She ate slowly. “You know,” she said between mouthfuls, “They’re already dead. You should kill them. You’d be doing them and us a favour. I would have done it myself, but I didn’t have a gun. Look at ‘em…” Her deep brown eyes burned with some emotion; maybe hatred. Her eyes blazed out toward the glass storefront. I looked out the window. She was probably right. Even if those people weren’t really dead, despite what Megan seemed to believe, they were obviously suffering. There would be no aid for them. I still couldn’t believe that they were ‘undead,’ but even if they weren’t, they didn’t deserve to continue freezing to death. They were literally falling apart bit by bit.

  “Maybe,” I said. I didn’t think I could bring myself to shoot a person in cold blood, even if I was doing them a favour. I stared into space while she quietly ate. Silence stretched again.

  “I was going to die, you know,” she said at last. “I’d made up my mind.” I looked up at her face and said nothing. The
tears still ran down her cheeks, but her face had become hard like stone, her eyes cold and distant. “I wanted to die.”

  I said nothing. There was nothing to say.

  Twelve

  “We need a plan,” I said at last, mostly to myself. Megan had been silent for hours. She had reclined back on her cot after she’d eaten and had stared up at the dark ceiling, hardly blinking. I’d busied myself with reorganizing our supplies, accounting for two people this time instead of one. I’d set up another cot and another set of heaters down a side aisle to give the girl a bit of privacy. I’d realized with mild alarm that I had now blown through two propane tanks, but wasn’t overly concerned. There were plenty left and no doubt I could find many more at any gas station.

  I had just taken a break to try to eat something, but it was still difficult to swallow the food and it sat uncomfortably in my stomach. It felt like eating sand.

  “What?” Megan muttered from her cot. I came out from behind a tall shelf. She was sitting up, her head hanging heavy. I was startled. After a confused moment, I realized that she was asking what I had said. It had barely registered that I’d spoken aloud. I wasn’t used to having another person around.

  “I, uh, said we need to have a plan.”

  “A plan for what?” she asked in a hoarse voice.

  “For…” I was at a loss. I realized that I had been living day to day. I didn’t know what to make plans for. Survival? That was a start, but it wasn’t an end. We needed a better plan than just survival. Despite the new information I’d received, I hadn’t really changed my outlook that I might have to survive for a week or a month or a few months until someone - the government, I suppose - came to the rescue and got things back to normal. If Megan was right, there was no one left to come to the rescue. If she was right, the cities had been wiped out. Hell, even the isolated towns in the north were gone if this one was any indication. All population centres… Two people making do, day to day, every day for the rest of their lives: that was not a plan.

  “Well?” Megan said, looking up, her expression a mixture of a disdainful sneer and a look of condescending pity; as though I was a child who just didn’t get it.

  “I don’t know. We’ve got to survive,” I replied at last.

  “Why?” she said, shaking her head. “There’s nothing left. Nothing here,” she motioned around her, “and nothing out there. It’s all over. Everyone’s gone.”

  “Not everyone. You and I are here. There must be more people out there. We can get the supplies we need to survive. It ain’t over till it’s over.”

  “Look,” she stared at me with a cold, hard, unwavering gaze. I shuddered. There was no life in those eyes. “Look, all I want is to die quietly; painlessly, and without that… disease. I don’t want my body to get up and walk around after my mind is gone. After my soul is gone… I just want to die now while I still have control. Ok?”

  “No.” I replied harshly, startling both of us. The silence stretched and the anger I’d poured into the single word seemed to reverberate around the room. “Listen,” I began, more gently. I realized I didn’t know what to say. I’d never met anyone who had wanted to let go so badly. I was desperate to keep her alive with me. I didn’t know her; didn’t particularly like her now that I saw how cold and distant; how damaged she was, but I wanted her to stay. Suddenly, I didn’t care who was with me so long as I was not alone. All those years seeking out solitude and now I was desperate to be in the company of another person.

  “Listen,” I started again, “we can make it through this. We can find other survivors. You and I just happened to bump into each other and this town is tiny. I bet there’re groups of people in lots of towns. We just gotta find ‘em. We’ve got the supplies to survive a long while; we can salvage whatever we need from here or wherever. I’ve got survival skills. I spent months at a time living out in the bush in the oil field with not much more than a backpack. With all this,” I waved my hand vaguely, “I reckon I could get us living in… well, maybe not luxury, but not too bad.”

  Megan stared at me blankly. She was silent a long time and her face remained expressionless and cold.

  “Alright, I’ll try it your way… for a while,” she said quietly, her voice barely more than a whisper, as though she didn’t want word getting out that she’d changed her mind.

  “Good,” I said, nodding.

  “So what’s the plan?” she asked, but her voice was still distant and disinterested.

  “Let’s set up a proper home. I’m tired of living in a store. Like I’m a human camping display. We should find a place where we can get fresh water when the bottles run out, where there’s land to grow food on; we’ll need fresh veggies at some point soon. We should be able to collect some livestock too…” I trailed off and then chuckled.

  “What’s funny?” she asked.

  “Well, I was just realizing: when all is said and done, we ain’t got it too bad here. This is a good place to make a go of it.”

  “Yeah? How’s that?” she asked, her voice sarcastic, her expression scrunched with distaste.

  “Well, I just mean that this is a good place to survive; better than most of the rest of the world, anyway. Fresh water will be easy; most of the farms and cabins will have wells. The lake water would probably be fine if it came to it; there are purifiers and filters here in the shop that’ll last a long time, too. Food should be easy; I bet we have enough non-perishables in town to last the two of us years. There’s plenty of fish, fowl and game out there; hell, I bet there’re herds of livestock just standing around waiting for farmers to come back and spread their feed.

  “There’s miles and miles of good farmland, too, and it won’t be hard to find seed. Winters should be ok; the houses are all well insulated and I bet half the old farm houses are still set up to be heated pretty well just by burning wood. Even so, we’ve got a town’s worth of gas and propane, not to mention all the fuel supplies on the nearby farms.” The more I talked, the more I convinced myself that everything really would be fine. I just hoped Megan was convinced, too.

  “And,” I continued, “since there weren’t many people here to begin with and most of those were evacuated or…” I thought of the remains of that horrid bonfire in the centre of town and halted, my breath catching in my throat. “Well anyway, we won’t have many… um… diseased people bothering us either.”

  Now that my plans had been loosely sketched out for another person to hear, they seemed concrete. It felt as though acting on them would be the easy part; it was this first step that was hard. It was that difficult stage of grief on a global scale: the first step was acknowledging the death of human society; recognizing that to survive, we would have to pick from the carrion of civilization like scavengers. Recognizing that the people who had owned all the things we would benefit from were never coming back. That was when the next part of my plan formed, or perhaps it had been there all along, waiting for a chance to be recognized.

  “Once we’re set up, we can go and search. We’ll find the people who are left. If you and I are still here, there’re probably a lot of people around looking for a safe place, a way to survive. We all got to stick together now.” The excitement that had been building up in my voice simmered to a quiet boil with these last words. I knew at that moment that this would be our most important job: finding others. Survival was all well and good, but people needed people.

  “Ok,” Megan said quietly, barely a whisper. She said nothing else.

  Thirteen

  “We have to do it,” Megan hissed, “It’s better for them and better for us. We can’t go around with them in our way all the time, following us; coming after us. They’re dead already.”

  “But they’re people, Meg,” Deep down I wondered if she was right, but I couldn’t admit it just yet, so I continued to argue, hoping it would make me feel better. The diseased people who had followed Megan to the sporting goods store were still milling around on the sidewalk in front of the building. A few mo
re had shown up in the meanwhile. We watched with morbid fascination as they mindlessly wandered in seemingly random directions, always staying close to the door, as though drawn to the warmth or the people inside.

  “They aren’t people anymore. Look at them. Did you ever see a living person survive at minus twenty for days without heat? Besides, you haven’t seen what these things can do.” As she spat the word things her face changed, an expression of loathing, hatred and fear spreading across it like a dirty smear.

  “I’ve seen what they can do,” I said in a quiet growl. The image of the huge man attacking me on the plane flashed before my eyes. For a moment I imagined feeling the flesh ripping on my arm; the claustrophobic fear I had felt on the plane closed on my chest.

  “Well then you know that we have to do this,” she said defiantly.

  Hell, I thought to myself, at least I got her caring about something now.

  I stood, looking silently through the glass at the creatures on the sidewalk for a moment and then without another word, I turned the latch, opening the front door’s lock, a shotgun in my other hand. Megan stepped forward toward the door. I pushed her back.

  “I’ll do it,” I growled.

  As soon as the door opened, it was as though a switch had flicked on in the diseased people before us. A hunger replaced the dull emptiness of their eyes. Their passive faces instantly became snarling and fearsome. Their gaze shot toward us and they breathed in deeply through their noses, catching a scent.

  I could see the animal effort in their movements, pushing single-mindedly toward us, against frozen limbs, with an all-consuming hunger. Their cold bodies resisted. They could not move fast enough. Their joints locked and their extremities swung and grasped clumsily, the cold slowing them.

  One of them, a big man with the remnants of a beard clinging to his peeling face, stumbled and toppled over, I could hear the sound of his frozen leg snapping and tearing, bending the wrong way beneath him. My mouth turned down in horror and I froze, forgetting what I’d set out to do, forgetting the shotgun in my hand.