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

by S. A. Softley

  Please take time to listen to the music of Jarred Albright of “Rye and Fairy Tales” at: www.ryeandfairytales.com

  S. A. Softley lives in Calgary Alberta, Canada with his wonderful wife. He is a teacher and musician with a number of album and writing credits to his name. When he is not teaching, playing music, reading or writing; he enjoys travelling and seeking out new experiences and adventures. Softley is a perpetual learner and graduate of the University of Calgary. To learn more, visit www.SoftleyBooks.com

  Thank you for reading Ain’t No Grave.

  Read on for a preview of

  Wayfaring Stranger

  The Penance of Leather: Part Two

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  I am a poor wayfaring stranger

  Travelling through this world alone

  There is no sickness, no toil nor danger

  In that fair land to which I go

  I’m going there to meet my mother

  I’m going there no more to roam

  I am just going down the river

  I am just going away back home

  I know dark clouds gather round me

  I know my way is rough and steep

  But beautiful hills will rise before me

  If I can pay the debt I keep

  I’m going there to meet my lover

  I’m going there no more to roam

  I am just going down the river

  I am just going away back home

  Traditional.

  American Spiritual.

  Wayfaring Stranger

  Introduction

  The Man of Leather was a terrifying apparition to face at any time; in any season, but when he came upon us in the dawn after that cold winter night, we felt a dread beyond that fear normally reserved for the mindless dead that hunted those of us that remained.

  He moved with purpose and intelligence rather than that instinctual, senseless and consuming hunger. He spoke in a low, dry rasp that was deathly quiet; deeply creaking like the wind through the winter woods. He moved oddly; stiff and inflexible, and yet with strength beyond that of living men. He never tired nor did he weaken, he was immune to fatigue and felt little physical pain. He smelled of wood smoke and hide. His hands were tough but lean; powerful like the branches of a weather-hardened tree. He was a thing of terror to those who did not know him and a source of strength and hope to those in need.

  I entered his story in terrible need, close to death and far from home. The Great Catastrophe, the Death Plague, hit us at our weakest. So dependent were we on the inheritance given to us by science and reason that we were helpless to survive without them. When civilization; which had grown into a colossal machine, incapable of running without the electrical currents and packets of information that flowed through its veins and arteries; collapsed, we were left to die, helpless in a dark world having lost the skills of our ancestors to survive.

  But even as one world died a quick but agonizing death, it gave birth with its last contractions to a new world. The scholars will say that it was, in fact, the rebirth of an old world. An ancient world. An Age of Legends and Heroes.

  The Man of Leather and the Lioness were two of those heroes. Stories comprised of myth and truth swirled and coalesced around them, sweeping them up in a maelstrom of deeds great and small; true and false. I cannot say who first told the stories of The Lioness; none ever claimed authorship. However it came to pass, she, like the Man of Leather, became a legend. The children tell stories of her, speaking in hushed voices of nights when she would slip from her skin and walk in her true form; as a great mountain cat, hunting the dead with silent ferocity. In the time I spent with her I never witnessed her change her shape, but the metaphor is a fitting one that entertains and comforts children – and adults, for that matter. It is reassuring to believe that the Lioness and the Man of Leather still protect us.

  The Lioness had found me but days earlier, only she had not yet become known by that name. To me she was Nina, though the nickname she was later given suited her best, perhaps. If the Man of Leather was smoke and shadow, dark and silent, she was white-hot fire, fast and fierce and changeable as the prairie sky, pale and hard as winter ice. They were two halves of a whole. Two halves that could never be made whole; at least not in this life.

  I flatter myself with the belief that I, perhaps, was important to them; it was they who protected me through that deadly winter of so many endings; so much loss. A winter, also, of beginnings. The beginning of his penance.

  It was he who left me the record of his penance, as truthfully as he could. I believe that he needed someone to know, to recognize what he’d done… to forgive. And I pass that record on to you so that the myths may be dispelled and the stories may become truth. These are the words of the Man of Leather, written at the dusk of the Great Catastrophe and at the dawn of the Age of Legend.

  -A.

  One

  I heard the sharp cry ring out again across the rolling dunes of snow. It echoed among the peaks and valleys and rebounded against the tin walls of the town. In the empty, snow covered landscape the sound was softened and indistinct. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. I looked around for a sign; for tracks, but in the moonlit dawn found nothing. It had been a child’s cry. Not a woman’s. I was now certain of that. It had been a cry of abject fear, the sort of cry that emerges from the dry mouth of some small, hunted animal when silence and stealth has failed.

  The horse shook her head, her black mane and tail scattering like ash on the wind. She stamped her charcoal hoof and the muscle of her shoulder rippled powerfully beneath her deep tobacco skin. She was called Clea. She had been a gift from Ellison, the man who had saved my body and who had sent me to save my own soul, if such a thing exists. She was the only horse who had suffered me; had allowed me to ride.

  I was death; had died during the earliest days of the disease. I’d been infected on a crowded plane, soaring high above the frozen north. I’d awoken weeks later to my worst fear, a fear that had always paralyzed me for as long as I could remember: trapped in the deep dark of a coffin, feeling the weight of the walls press in, believing that the air was slowly being depleted; believing that I would suffocate or that my heart would burst under the strain of my claustrophobia. The nightmare had not ended with my escape from that coffin; from that morgue drawer. I’d found myself in the abandoned town of Lac d’Hiver, surviving in a deserted sporting goods store, unaware that I was cursed; diseased and dead like the others, but unlike them, left with my mind still intact.

  It was there I found Megan. Megan, who had herself been close to death. With all the living gone and the streets haunted by terrible nightmares, she had tried to end her life at the bottom of a bottle. I’d nursed her back to health and she had recovered. She had, I think, been happy. We were not legendary star-crossed lovers. Our love had not burned as bright as that, only to burn itself out, though ours had certainly been tragic.

  We were not struck down and smitten by immediate and undying love-at-first-sight, but I suppose we came to love each other after a fashion in those short days. We came to take comfort in each other. Perhaps, over time, we might have developed a love for the ages. We might… if it had been different.

  But I was dead and in that cold night, I killed her. She died because the dead cannot; should not love the living. I awoke to find her… lost. Her body remained, but there was no light in her eyes. She had no thoughts. Her heart beat no more.

  I won’t tell of those days again; they’re written elsewhere. Ellison found me, Lawrence Ellison, and he showed me the truth about myself. My body was dead. Rotting like those other creatures, but still I remained myself somehow as all others became mindless base creatures. He saved me, preserved me, turned my skin to leather and my blood to formalin. It was a terrible torture. The first payment on my penance; on the
debt I owe.

  Ellison saved me in memory of his wife Maggie. She had passed away long before the disease had struck. She had believed that everything had a purpose, a reason, a destiny. She believed it and so Ellison had worked to give me purpose. Ellison salvaged my body and mind in honour of his wife. To assuage his own guilt over his negligence that he felt had been responsible for her death.

  It was he that sent me off, sent me to seek out my own redemption. Not redemption in the eyes of some unknown and unknowable god, but redemption in my own eyes. He taught me to pay penance for the death of Megan. For the deaths of any others, those other souls I might have unknowingly doomed to a terrible purgatory prowling this world in decaying hungered bodies.

  I would save those I found still living and release those that continued to walk though they were deceased. They had to be released in fire and flame; their bodies turned to ash. Those that still lived, Ellison had offered to take in, to house and feed with what he produced on his farm. There would be enough to feed hundreds, I was sure, and he could teach them to farm for themselves and hunt and fish. There was plenty of land, plenty of seed, plenty of abandoned livestock and few people to cultivate any of it. I would send them to him and he would preserve them as he’d preserved me. He would begin again and teach some remnant of humanity, however small, to survive.

  Another shout. Not the same voice as before. This one was not without fear, but the fear had been masked by hot, unbridled rage. It was no child’s voice. It was a woman who had chosen fight rather than flight. She sounded desperate but determined. A crack rang out, the gunshot echoing around the buildings like maniacal cackling, scattering and reforming in descending ripples of sound.

  I slid my own shotgun from a bag slung round the saddle and waded through the deep snow, trying to jog. There was another shot. I thought this one had come from inside one of the buildings. The child screamed again. I was getting closer.

  I marvelled at my legs. Now that I knew what I was, now that I knew that my muscles could not tire, nor could my lungs burn for air, my body was relentless. Though I’d never tested the theory, I knew that I could run through the snow for days without a single breath. I was still learning to use the stiffer, tighter muscles that came with death. It made me clumsier, slower, more deliberate in my movements, but I was adjusting; learning to adapt. I pushed through the snowdrifts toward the building I suspected to be the source of the disturbance, limited in my strength but unlimited in my resilience, stronger in death than ever in life.

  Another cry sounded from the woman. She was wordlessly ferocious and animalistic in her roar. The child’s voice rose over hers, the pitch reaching new heights, seeming at once more terrified and more reassured. Some of the woman’s fierceness had percolated into the child’s voice.

  I reached a dark window cut into the aluminum siding. Splinters of glass clung to the frame. Glittering shards had slashed into the snow outside the window leaving fine diamond scars in the ground’s otherwise unblemished white skin. The window had broken from the inside out.

  I peered inside, my eyes adjusting slowly to the darkness. Two shapes were running toward the window, too shadowy to make out. They ran like the living rather than the dead. They ran with fear and exhaustion pulsing through their murky forms. Behind the two, a number of them, the dead ones, lurched… half a dozen… a dozen… too dark to count. They moved in their grotesque way, frozen in the cold, their limbs failing to respond properly to the instinctual signals sent from what was left of their minds.

  The taller of the running shapes shouldered a long gun, aiming at the window; aiming at me. I dropped to the ground just as the shot rang out, steel pellets pinging against the tin wall. A curiously delicate tinkling sound followed as more small pieces of glass were thrown free of the windowsill.

  “Did you get it?” a child voice asked, its voice barely a squeak of terror and breathlessness.

  “Don’t know,” came the other voice. It was a feminine voice, but unusually deep and velvet smooth. “Climb up,” she said, breathing heavily, “I’ll lift you through. Run as soon as you touch ground. You’re faster. It won’t be able to catch you if it’s out there.”

  The child did not protest. Looking up, I saw a miniature pair of heavy winter boots emerge from the window. Legs followed, clad in thick crinkling snow pants. The torso squirmed back and forth, levering itself slowly out of the window, the boots scrabbling against the wall, searching blindly for purchase on the ground.

  Another shot cracked from the window and the child let out a startled shriek and slipped from the window into the snow, landing on its back. The low voice still inside the room growled menacingly at the pursuing creatures and fired again.

  “Hey kid,” I said, my dry voice surprising me with its rough gravel sound. “Don’t worry,” I continued as the child let out another shriek, this one more panicked than before. The kid was wrapped tightly in thick winter gear and struggled to sit up, rolling on the ground in a desperate attempt to get further from me. Wrapped in thick warm clothing and with a woollen hat and scarf obscuring its features, it was difficult to tell whether the child was male or female. I did not spend enough time around children to be a good judge of age, but I figured that the kid was ten or eleven. “Don’t worry, I’m here to help. Won’t hurt you.”

  The child’s face remained fearful. I doubt that my words had worked through the haze of panic that clouded its eyes.

  “Hey,” I called through the window at the other person, staying low against the wall in case she sent another shot through it in fright. “Hey! Don’t shoot!” I rose up, peering over the windowsill at a figure whose back was still toward me, just on the other side of the wall. Her face was turned toward mine, yellow-green eyes wide in surprise, her pupils dilated in fear. “Jump through! I’ll cover you.”

  There was a hiss of alarm as the woman sucked air, but her reactions were quick. She was not paralyzed by surprise or terror. Just as one of the creatures reached a clutching hand toward her, she dove headfirst through the window and into the snow. I fired as soon as she was clear. It’s arm shattered and the sinew and bone hung limply above the elbow, large pulpy masses dropping to the ground, thudding like frozen meat. The thing showed no reaction to the devastating blow and carried on, clutching and grasping toward the window with its remaining good arm.

  I fired again, the child yelping behind me. At point blank range, the shot blew through its chest with explosive force, tearing up organs and ribs and erupting through the back. The thing crumpled to the ground, still hissing and gurgling through the multitude of breaches in its body.

  “Go,” I grumbled, pointing up the hill I’d scrambled down. “That way. See the horse?” Clea stood where I’d left her, picking through the snow cover with indifferent boredom. “Go,” I repeated, turning back toward the window to watch as more of the creatures pressed into the room, driven by single-minded hunger. A hunger I knew all too well.

  The woman scooped the child up in her arms and started moving through the snow, kicking her legs powerfully to plough a path as she climbed. I followed, keeping one eye on the dark window that peered out like the black eye-socket of a skull against the bleached bone of the metal wall.

  Inside, just visible in the dim light, the dead boiled like maggots, arms stretching out of the window. Either because they were too stiff and frozen or because they did not possess the faculty, they clawed and reached and squirmed, but none managed to pull themselves through the broken window. I turned my back to the building and clambered up the hill, the two figures now far ahead of me, heading toward the dark horse standing atop the hill.

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen
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  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty