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

by S. A. Softley

  I snorted and shot her a glare over my shoulder, trying but not quite succeeding to prevent my eyes from flicking over her still glistening body.

  “Sorry,” I grumbled, “Couldn’t book the hot stone massage on such short notice.”

  “So what do we do?” she asked, her voice becoming serious and concerned once more. “There are a lot of them out there.” I could hear the tense fear in her voice but she was keeping it under control.

  I saw her point. We’d only brought as many shotgun shells as would fit in or on our guns. Each gun had four shells loaded in the magazine tube and another six or so in the bandoliers strapped to the stocks. It wouldn’t be enough to cripple all of them, but it probably would be enough to open a path.

  “They’re slow and frozen stiff. Save your ammo for the ones who get close enough to touch. We’ll be ok. We’ll head straight for the shop. No problem.”

  “No problem,” she echoed.

  Despite my words of encouragement, the involuntary sense of panic was beginning to set in once more. I was eager to display confidence for Megan, but I had the misfortune of knowing that I was talking out of my ass while she likely only suspected that I had no idea what I was doing. I knew nothing about any of this. Hell, did anyone? I was full of shit. I closed my eyes and tried not to allow my fear any place in my head.

  In my mind I knew that on just the other side of the door was a crowd that would swarm in on me once the door was thrown open. I was frustrated with myself, as I recognized that my panic did not stem from the fact that this particular crowd were bloodthirsty undead. Any crowd at all, I knew, would have caused the same reaction. I was disgusted. Once again I was allowing my claustrophobia to paralyze me.

  Chicken shit. Man up. You gonna let a bunch a fuckin’ kids push you around? It was a speech my father had given me after another bullying incident. I’d gotten into a fight, but rather than finish it one on one the other kid, a cowardly little bastard, had laughed and punched and kicked while his six or seven friends had circled around me in a tight knot, grabbing and pushing at me as they enclosed me. I could still hear them laughing as I hyperventilated, crippled not by the physical attack; an attack I easily could have withstood, but rather by the psychological attack, the feeling of the crowd closing around me like waves in a rough sea crashing over my head; the feeling of many hands grasping me and many faces pressing in and leering.

  I took a deep breath and forced an exhale. “Ready?”

  Meg nodded determinedly; a string of hair, still wet, lay stuck to her cheek, a bead of water running off it like a tear. She pumped her gun, expelling the unfired shell that had already been loaded in the barrel.

  “This isn’t the movies,” I chuckled, “no need to cock your gun every time you pick it up.” I bent and picked up the shell, handing it to her. She fumbled it back into the magazine.

  “Sorry,” she grinned nervously.

  “Get right behind me. On three. One, two… three,” I threw open the door without allowing time for my anxiety to build again and jumped as Megan fired into the crowd. Several of them stumbled back grunting from the force of the blast, though without a hint of pain or surprise.

  “Go! Go!” I shouted as the rest of the crowd closed in, drawn to the gunfire rather than repelled by it. I fired and pumped twice, knocking a few of them down. They continued to crawl toward us, their bodies grotesquely mangled and twisted. I heard Meg’s gun go off two or three times behind me. She might have one more shot before reloading or perhaps none at all. Not good. Everything seemed to move in high speed and slow motion simultaneously. My chest tightened until I thought it would be impossible to carry on. Stars and black patches clouded my vision. I forced myself to take a breath and hold it, exhaling slowly.

  The people in the crowd began to push me aside with slow but unrelenting strength. It was all I could do to bash and check them with the barrel, the stock and my elbows. I hacked with any blunt part of me I could get any force behind. I slashed with increasing ferocity. An animal strength exploded out of me as the automatic nervous system kicked in, triggering my fight or flight reflexes. With the crowd pushing in, I would have preferred flight, but I forced myself to stay put and bash a path for Megan.

  For several seconds I lost all conscious control as snarling faces crowded round, blackened with frostbite, their skin peeling, their eyes frighteningly similar to my own, haemorrhaged and bloodshot. Their eyes, unlike mine, were glazed and clouded, the lenses dried and opaque; frosted like the frozen streets they walked. There was only ferocity behind them. No spark of intelligence remained. I was becoming increasingly convinced that Megan had not been dramatic when she had described them as undead. I fought unthinking through the crowd in a state that felt almost comatose; my awareness pushed to the dark corners of my own head.

  Seeing them so close, mere inches away, I expected the smell of rotten flesh and disease to be overwhelming. The cold, while slowing them and making them clumsy, must also have been preserving their bodies. There was hardly any smell at all. Still, I fought down a spasm of gagging as I came face to face with them.

  Megan screamed wordlessly behind me, a sound of both despair and defiance. My mind snapped back, my visceral brain relinquishing control of my body. While the crowd in front of me had shrunk, the crowd had grown around her and was threatening to overwhelm her. She swung wildly at anything that came within striking distance, pausing at every opportunity to shoot and pump her shotgun. I’d lost count of how many shots I’d heard fired but I knew that any moment she would need to reload.

  Despite the panic and chaos around us, I realized that the dead were only attempting to get past me. None had attacked. Megan, however, was fighting off grasping hands and gnashing mouths, in danger of becoming overpowered. I could see the fog from her breath becoming increasingly irregular and rapid. She was tiring quickly.

  I bashed my way back to her side, hoping that she recognized me in the mob. I worried that any moment I’d feel the explosive force of a shotgun blast blossom in my chest or feel the sharp crack of hardwood against my temple.

  “Meg! Run!” I shouted, opening a small path for her. She didn’t argue. She threw off a grasping hand and ran. I fired twice more into the crowd and heard the trigger click on my third try, signalling the end of my magazine. My breath caught and I turned and ran behind Megan, my legs shaky and clumsy. I fumbled with the bandolier strapped to the stock of my gun. I managed awkwardly to push two more shells into the magazine by the time we reached the door to the sporting goods shop. Despite the manic resolution of their effort, the dead could not keep up with us. We’d left them well behind, stumbling stiff-legged on the other side of the street. A number of them boiled on the ground like a tangle of worms, their bodies broken by shotgun blasts.

  “Open the door,” I shouted to her, keeping my gun pointed at the slow-moving swarm. I couldn’t resist firing one more round across the street. It struck with little effect, spraying fluid from the bodies it hit. Moments later we burst in. Megan slammed and locked the door behind me. We sat with our backs against the icy glass breathing heavily. The door began to frost as our breath and sweat condensed upon the cold panes. Megan’s hair, still wet from her interrupted bath, hung limply on her forehead and shoulders.

  “Jesus!” she breathed. I looked her over. She had a bruise and a scrape on her cheek and the hood of her jacket had been torn from the collar and hung limply by a few tough strands of cloth. Otherwise she looked to be in good shape. Her cheeks and nose were red from the cold and exertion. She sniffed. I looked myself over. Though I felt like I’d been the target of a violent riot, it hardly looked like I’d been touched.

  Megan ran a hand through her hair and giggled nervously.

  “It’s frozen,” she chuckled, bending a lock of hair where it stayed for a moment before relaxing. I laughed as well.

  “We’ll have to be more careful. They must have heard us or something,” I said, exhaling heavily.

  “Did you notice s
omething? They didn’t seem to be interested in you. Why didn’t they go after you? It was like they didn’t even notice you were there,” Megan whispered, almost to herself. It sounded rhetorical. She didn’t seem to expect an answer and I couldn’t offer one anyhow.

  “They thought you were prettier?” I joked breathlessly. She gave a quick snort in response.

  “Look, I’m not trying to come onto you or anything…” Megan began, “but we need to check each other over. During the whole crisis here, there were tons of people who got bit or scratched and died quickly. They’d come back and go after others. The police… what was left of them, told everyone to check people over carefully for signs of injury. There were a lot of stories about people who’d get attacked and think they were alright; they wouldn’t feel anything, and then after… after it was too late, people would notice that they’d been injured by… them.” She spat the last word, nodding outside.

  “Ok,” I said hesitantly. I was looking at the scratch on her forehead and was thinking nervously about the old bite on my arm.

  “Look, I know it’s awkward, but it’s important.”

  “No, it’s not that,” I replied, shaking my head. “First of all… you have a scratch on your forehead.”

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “Don’t worry about that one. I nailed myself with the… with this thing,” she pointed to the sight that jutted out from the muzzle of her shotgun. “I tried to beat one back with the butt and smacked my own head.”

  “Ok,” I hesitated, still thinking about the bite on my arm. She hadn’t seen it yet. I hoped it wouldn’t change her acceptance of me. She took it as hesitation toward her story.

  “Look I promise, ok? I swear I did that one myself.”

  “It’s not that,” I replied. I sighed and relented. “Look, remember the flight I told you about? I, um… I have an old bite on my arm. Just don’t freak out. Looks worse than it was. Like I said, it doesn’t bother me now. I’m not sick any more.”

  “Can I see?” she asked quietly. I nodded and slowly began removing layers.

  “Oh come on!” Megan whined. “Put a little effort into it! Decent male strippers are pretty hard to find these days.”

  I laughed. “I don’t see any money,” I replied. “I don’t come cheap.” In spite of the flippant exchange, when it came to revealing my wound I still felt intensely self-conscious; as though I was revealing myself to be the enemy; showing myself to be tainted and diseased. I knew she had accepted my bloody eyes; she’d done so without question, but…

  I stripped off my last layer, a cotton t-shirt, hardly feeling the cold. I surprised myself once more with how pale I’d become, although I suppose it was to be expected after having spent so much time in a pitch-black drawer. Meg examined my wound closely, a look of concentration on her face.

  “He took a big chunk out of you,” she said quietly. “Did it hurt? Sorry, stupid question…”

  “Actually it felt really strange,” I replied, thinking back. I hadn’t thought about that flight much. “I don’t remember much, it’s all a blur, but I remember… burning and then my whole arm went numb. I couldn’t feel anything in it except cold.”

  “And now?”

  “Now it feels… fine. I haven’t exactly felt one-hundred-percent normal ever since, but I don’t think it’s because of the bite or anything. I was unconscious for a long time. Probably on I.V. fluids for a while but there must have been a few days after the evacuation where I had nothing at all. No food, no water… I still feel a little messed up by it, like my stomach and my brain aren’t processing food properly or something.”

  “Can I?” she asked, motioning to my arm.

  “Sure,” I replied, unsure exactly what she meant. She began looking at it again, very closely, prodding a little here and there. I didn’t feel much around the wound at all. I figured there was probably nerve damage and thick scar tissue healing over it. She put her nose near it and sniffed a little.

  “Does that hurt?” she asked, touching it lightly.

  “No.”

  “It smells ok, seems clean.”

  “Yeah. Somehow I made it out ok. The guy who got me turned just seconds before he bit me… maybe the disease hadn’t spread to him fully or something. Or maybe they accidentally found a treatment at the hospital but didn’t stick around… or survive long enough to study me.”

  “Or maybe you’re immune,” she said seriously, looking into my eyes.

  “Maybe,” I admitted, though I found it hard to believe. “I don’t plan on testing that theory.”

  “You noticed, right? That they don’t seem to go after you? At least, not as much,” Megan said. Her voice was quiet and intense. A complete change had come over her.

  “Yeah, I s’pose I did,” I admitted reluctantly. She sat in thoughtful silence for quite some time while I watched her tensely hoping like hell I wasn’t losing her.

  “I guess we may never know,” she said after a long while. “No sense worrying about it now, anyway. You’re obviously fine and it sure is handy to have someone around that they don’t bother with.”

  I nodded sullenly, relieved that once more she had proven how understanding she was. Embarrassed at how much I’d doubted her; continued to doubt her at every turn.

  “Good. I’m going to need you to stick around.” She looked me over appraisingly. “So you spent weeks in a coma, huh? I don’t know if you always looked like that, but a liquid-only diet seems to have done wonders for your figure,” She said, her tone turning light again. I looked down self-consciously and laughed. I’d been in good shape working in the wilderness, but she wasn’t wrong. All the excess fat had melted away. My skin had become a thin veil over muscle and bone. I was lean and wiry like I’d never been before.

  It’s going to happen, I thought apprehensively. The sexual tension between Meg and I had been growing steadily, ever since her pronounced recovery. The increasingly flirtatious behaviour between us had suddenly escalated dramatically.

  The close brush with death had no doubt released endorphins and adrenalin in large quantities and had altered our judgement somewhat. That, and perhaps the fact that we’d had another reminder that we were alone and vulnerable in a nightmare world with no one but each other seemed to be encouraging us to seek comfort in one another.

  Megan insisted again, and with good reason, that we check each other over from head to toe. Though she knew of my earlier bite, she didn’t want to take any chances. We knew nothing about the disease and there was no guarantee that further contact with the sick or dead wouldn’t finish the job that my previous bite wound had begun. Megan herself wanted to be certain she’d suffered no injury that might infect her.

  “There was a man,” she said, her eyes glistening with a hint of wetness, “who was so sure he was ok. He’d been attacked in the street. I watched from a window down the street from his house. I couldn’t help it. He was yelling and crying and begging…” she fought off a thick sob at the memory. Her face was creased with the bitterness of it. “He begged and pleaded with his family. He swore he hadn’t been bitten. They had let him in. Anyone would have. It was awful to listen to. It… it broke my heart…” Her voice broke again and she sniffed heavily and cleared her throat. “The next morning, the authorities came. I saw them… I watched them clear the house of four bodies. They had to wrap the body bags in duct tape to stop their arms and legs from kicking and grabbing. Two of the body bags were… so small.” She broke off for a while, her shoulders heaving silently. I rubbed her back slowly, trying my best to pour comfort into the gesture. I couldn’t imagine that it helped in the slightest. Nothing could relieve the pain of witnessing such horror.

  “I knew the guy,” Megan said at last, her voice stronger. “He loved his family. I honestly don’t think he knew they’d got him or he wouldn’t have risked their safety. He would never have… If he’d known… That can’t happen. Not to us. We’ve got to check each other over. Fully. Every time we get anywhere near them.”

/>   I reluctantly agreed to the examination, but on the condition that underwear stayed on. I was convinced that Megan and I were on the verge of engaging in a physical relationship and I was equally certain that such a relationship, under the circumstances, would be incredibly risky. What if it made things awkward between us? What if there was chemistry for one of us but not the other? What if it changed our relationship so that we had difficulty working together; surviving together?

  Yes, it probably would happen eventually, one way or the other, I admitted to myself, but not yet. Not so soon. Not until we knew each other better; until our relationship was more concrete, more predictable.

  Despite my misgivings, I carefully examined Megan for injury. I ran my fingers through her hair, feeling for injuries that could be hidden beneath. Her dark hair was soft and smelled pleasantly of vanilla. I gently scooped the silken strands into a loose ponytail and lifted it to look over her neck and shoulders. I let my eyes run down her smooth naked back, her toned buttocks and her long, lean legs all the while feeling warmth and hunger radiate from my groin outward. Minute vibrations rippled in my stomach and within the muscles throughout my body that signalled the arousal, excitement and uncertainty that came with an intimate encounter with a new person. I closed my eyes for a moment willing myself to relax, fighting a losing battle against millennia of human instinct and evolution. A troubling thought occurred to me: why the hell had I let her go first? Now I had to try to get things back under control before stripping down and letting her examine me for bites and scratches.

  “Looks good,” I muttered to her and then rolled my eyes at myself. “I mean clear. No bites.”

  “Did you look for scratches? They thought it could spread even through small wounds.”

  “No scratches I can see,” I confirmed.

  “Aren’t you going to check my front?” She asked. I thought I could hear a mild teasing note in her voice.

  “Nah, you can check your own front,” I muttered grumpily. She was determined not to make this easy.