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

by S. A. Softley

  She sighed and muttered again, but lifted her head from the pavement, pulling herself upright with effort. As I drew near her, I could smell some scent I’d never smelled before. It was delicious. The hunger that had been eating at me since waking up roared from the background and took control of my senses. My mouth watered with thick, viscous saliva. The smell knocked the wind out of me. I’d never been this hungry before. The world began to spin and my limbs felt weak from starvation. I pictured the man who’d bit into me and wondered if this uncontrollable hunger was what he’d felt. Wondered if, robbed of his faculties, he’d just bit into the nearest thing he could find, unaware of what he was doing.

  I closed my eyes, held my breath and counted down from ten pushing aside all my thoughts. Collected at last, I knelt down and put her arm over my shoulder, grabbing her waist with my other hand. She was wearing a thin sweater. I’d be amazed if she didn’t have frostbite or hypothermia already. She wore low-rise jeans and tall leather boots made to be stylish rather than warm. She had no gloves or hat.

  I held my fingers to her wrist, checking her pulse. It seemed dangerously weak and slow. Her eyes were closed, her head lolled on the pavement at an uncomfortable angle. I shook her gently, trying to get her to wake up. She babbled quietly something unintelligible and then went silent again. I gently lifted her eyelids with a finger. Her unfocused eye rolled in its socket. I pulled out my LED flashlight and moved the beam across her face. Her pupils seemed slow to respond. The girl was in rough shape.

  I half supported and half dragged her back to the sporting goods store. She was semi-conscious the whole time, murmuring but saying nothing meaningful. It was good. As long as she was moving and talking, it meant she wasn’t succumbing to the final stages of hypothermia; unconsciousness and death. I wasn’t going to allow the first non-infected person I’d met die.

  I spoke to her, called her name as we walked. Told her it would be fine. I didn’t think she understood me, but hearing her name would help keep her conscious, would bring her mind back to the present.

  It had only taken me a minute, perhaps two, to cautiously walk the couple of blocks to the alleyway where the coyotes had been rummaging in the trash, but the return trip felt painfully long. The girl was delirious and stumbled all over the sidewalk, often dragging me down with her. I winced every time we stumbled. I knew that victims of hypothermia should be moved as little as possible since any jolt could destabilize the heart and cause a fatal dysrhythmia, but I had to take the risk; the store was only a little further. I continued to speak with her, trying to keep her talking, but she could not form complete words, let alone complete ideas.

  We made it to the door at last and I pushed her inside, locking it behind us. The girl hung awkwardly from my neck, her legs useless. We stumbled over to the cot and I put her down as gently as I could, but I heard a sharp cringe-inducing crack as her head struck the aluminum frame. A bump on the head was the least of her worries, I thought.

  She began to shiver uncontrollably. I turned all the propane heaters up as high as they would go and shuffled them as close to the cot as I could get them. I wrapped her in thermal blankets and put two pots of water on the burner. I had to find a quick way of getting heat right against her skin and core. Her less critical veins, arteries and capillaries would be tightening and closing up, shutting down blood flow to her extremities, starting with her fingers and toes and travelling upward in an effort to keep her vital organs warm and conserve oxygen.

  I knew I had seen an aisle with a variety of chemical warming packs. I’d packed up a few boxes of them in the Jeep, but I’d also left some on the shelf. If I could pack her in with those, I should be able to counteract the hypothermia.

  I left the girl on the cot and ran down a couple aisles to find the remaining packs. Eventually I found them and grabbed a whole box, cracking and shaking them one after another to get the chemicals mixing and heating up. My head swam, feeling hot, feverish and shaken, like the fluid in the warming packs.

  “Meg,” I called running back to the cot, “Megan, stay awake.”

  She was out, but still shivering. Shivering was good. I whipped away her blankets and started shoving warming packs up into her shirt against her chest and down into her pants against her groin and thighs. I didn’t have time to be abashed and neither did she. She was too far-gone to know what was going on around her anyhow. Warmth had to be placed around areas with the greatest blood flow. I pressed packs into her palms and wrapped her fingers around them and pushed them inside the toes of her socks. Those would be the first extremities she lost if they weren’t warmed.

  Soon, her clothes were lined with a dozen packs and her shivering subsided. She began to breathe normally and when I felt for her pulse it was steady and rhythmic. I breathed a sigh of relief. It looked as though she was going to be fine.

  The pots of water came to a boil. In one pot I dumped a large towel and left it steaming and cooling near the cot. In the other pot I dumped a package of powdered chicken broth. She’d need something hot with electrolytes when she came to.

  I sat in a nylon camp chair watching her as she slept away the dark sunless morning hours. I didn’t envy her the hangover and potential frostbite pains she’d feel when she woke up, but it looked as though she’d escaped the worst of it. Every so often I reached out to check her pulse, but it remained steady and normal.

  Sitting there, I began to allow myself to wonder about the strange sensation I’d had when I’d gotten close to her: that scent, the sudden urge to… I couldn’t bring myself to think about it; to think about the hunger I’d felt. I kept my distance from her.

  Eventually, dim rays of light began to shine through the window as the sun finally rose. The girl slept on. I had nowhere else to be, so I just sat in my chair and waited.

  Later in the morning, the girl was still showing no signs of life. Having had some experience with the after-effects of binge drinking, I knew it could be hours, maybe even a day before she woke up. I got a little fluid into her, tipping small spoonfuls of warm broth against her slightly parted lips. I could see her throat reflexively swallowing and I continued to carefully drip soup into her mouth until she’d had about a cup. I put the rest aside for later. Small amounts at a time. That was the key.

  I sat a while longer, but she didn’t stir. Sunlight was now streaming in through the frosted windows and I decided she was stable enough that I could leave her for a short while to check the radio and satellite signals in the police van. What I hoped to hear, I did not know.

  Eleven

  I unlocked the front door and looked back to the cot. The girl still hadn’t moved. I looked out the glass door, about to pull it open. The sunlight streaming through the glass storefront was bright: the undiluted brightness that characterizes the coldest winter days up north, the sun making up for the lost hours of light in the winter with dazzling intensity.

  I squinted against the light, but it seemed to burn through my eyelids into my retinas. For a moment I was blind to the dark recesses of the shop and equally blind to the sunlit street. I grabbed sunglasses out of my pocket and put them on. My eyes adjusted and the police van came into focus just outside on the sidewalk, where I’d left it.

  I held the door ajar and had stepped partway through when I froze. I hadn’t noticed with my vision blurred by the light, but I now saw five men and one woman milling around the front of the shop, about ten steps from the door. Falling victim to the sense of security that comes with daylight, I hadn’t thought to bring a weapon. One of the men was the guy I had seen shuffling down the street when I had hit the panic button on the Jeep.

  I barely recognized him. The disease had already taken its toll on his appearance the first time we’d crossed paths. In the short time that had passed since I’d seen him, he had changed so much that he hardly looked human, His clothes were torn and filthy, his nose had blackened with severe frostbite; the tip of it was missing altogether. Raw frozen flesh hung off of his face, blistered an
d ragged from the cold.

  It looked as though he’d lost a finger or two as well; and half of his left ear was gone. His cheeks, too, were beginning to blacken; the dark patches spreading like cancer across his skin. Nothing had been bandaged. I didn’t understand how he could still be alive.

  The group he was with had fared no better. All of them showed severe frostbite injuries and many were missing features. The woman was barefoot; her feet horribly disfigured. I looked at them in shock. Each of them had black bloodstains around their mouths and eyes from the haemorrhaging… like me, I realized. One of the men looked to be missing an eye altogether. Although, not quite altogether: I could see some flesh remaining in his eye socket, could see the muscle twitch as his good eye looked around, the empty socket trying to follow. My throat closed up and I felt myself gag.

  I couldn’t tell exactly, their eyes were hard to read, but I didn’t think they’d noticed me. They still seemed to be in a daze, like the frostbitten man had been when I’d first seen him. I could hear them breathing heavily, almost as if they were sniffing for something. Two of the men had what was left of their noses high in the air.

  I should just lock them out, I thought to myself. They’re not my problem. I already got one invalid to take care of.

  I reached down for the deadbolt and my face set grimly as I remembered how I’d broken in. I’d felt so safe in that store, keeping it diligently locked. I saw the fist-sized hole I’d smashed in the glass next to the lock. Animals might be kept out, but people would get in as easily as I had.

  So much for that idea, I thought.

  “Hey,” I called. “You guys need medical attention and shelter. You need to bandage those wounds, get out of the cold…” I trailed off. They each slowly turned to face me, but their gaze was vague and unfocused. They looked past me as though I wasn’t there; they stared dumbly as though they couldn’t understand what I was saying. I shivered, but not from the cold.

  “Listen, I can help you but…” I began again, but it was no use. They went back to milling about. They looked as though they were searching for something but it seemed they couldn’t remember what they were searching for. They shuffled about in a random but repeating pattern, bumping into objects and each other as they wandered around, never more than a few feet from the door. Some sense was keeping them here and every time they strayed a few steps too far away, they performed a slow, clumsy arc and came back to the sidewalk. I had a sinking feeling in my gut.

  These people truly had lost their minds. I remembered the emergency broadcast warning about brain damage and aggression. I backed away slowly, letting the door shut quietly behind me. I carefully turned the lock, knowing that if they wanted to get in, there was nothing stopping them, but it might slow them down a bit. They moved awkwardly and perhaps they wouldn’t have the dexterity in their frozen hands to work the lock. It might, at least, give me enough time to get a gun.

  Hell, if they’d suffered brain damage, maybe they wouldn’t even be able to use a lock. They certainly seemed to have forgotten how to use or understand language. It didn’t really matter anyhow, seeing as the whole storefront was glass. Anyone could get in any time they wanted with nothing more than a big stone, just as I’d done.

  I backed away quickly, trying to keep the door in sight as I worked my way back to my fake campsite where the shotgun was sitting. I grabbed the nylon gun case off the aluminum card table without taking my eyes from the front window.

  “They’re out there aren’t they?” asked a gravelly voice from behind me.

  “Jesus!” I nearly dropped the gun, swinging around. Meg had woken up and was sitting upright in her sleeping bag, propped on one elbow. “Don’t do that!” I barked. “I thought you were asleep!” The truth was, I’d half forgotten she was there at all. With the exception of the radio and her slurred words yesterday, it had been so silent… days since I’d heard another voice. It startled me to hear something other than my own thoughts.

  “Sorry,” she said, but she didn’t sound like she meant it. “So are they out there?”

  “I assume you mean those…” I hesitated almost wanting to call them something else. “…people?” I finished. “The sick people?” Somehow it seemed inappropriate to use the term ‘zombie,’ a creature from so many B movies, in such a serious situation, but I couldn’t think of a better word for them.

  “Yeah, them. They’ve been following me,” she replied.

  “Following you?”

  “For days,” she nodded. Her eyes were puffy and red and her hair was a mess, but otherwise she was quite beautiful in a hopeless sort of way. Her voice was deadpan and her eyes spiritless. “I ended up locking myself in the liquor store. I don’t remember how many days I was locked in there. Didn’t think there was anyone left in town and no one’s ever coming back, so I started drinking. Seemed like it’d be better to die drunk than freezing or starving to death. It’s harder to kill yourself with alcohol than I thought. Kept throwing it back up.”

  She had a dull frankness in her voice which told me that she really had intended to die the night before.

  “How’d you get out?” I asked.

  “They headed down the street toward your gunshot when they heard it. I got out and made it past them. They’re getting slower; I think it’s the cold. They can hardly walk.”

  “You mean they’ve been out there in the cold this whole time? How are they still alive?” I looked at her in disbelief.

  “Honey, where the hell have you been? None of them are alive. They’re all dead.”

  “That ain’t possible,” I said, shaking my head. I started to worry that the girl had lost it.

  “Where have you been?” she asked again.

  “I’ve been… uh… out of it for a while. I was in a coma… I think.” I was glad that it was dark in the room and glad I hadn’t taken off my sunglasses. I recalled how stricken I’d been when I’d caught sight of my own bloodied eyes in the mirror. This girl was on the edge. I didn’t think she’d react well to seeing that my eyes were the same as those of the people outside.

  “A coma?” the girl stared at me. “You were in the medical centre? Are you sick? You look so pale…” her eyes suddenly flashed, fully alert for the first time. I could see animal fear in her eyes.

  “I woke up there two days ago. I must have just… recovered. I feel fine now,” I half lied. Now was not the time to explain the various strange feelings I’d been experiencing; the hunger, the nerve damage, the wound on my arm… she didn’t need to know any of it.

  A noise from outside the shop brought my attention back to task that had been interrupted.

  “I’ve gotta go make sure they don’t get in,” I said, unzipping the gun case.

  “Is the door locked?” Megan asked.

  “Yeah but there’s a broken pane of glass. They can reach through and unlock it.”

  “Doesn’t matter. They can’t figure out doors unless they can open them by pushing against them. Doesn’t even need a lock, just a latch.” She said dismissively.

  “You sure?” I asked, sceptical.

  “I’ve been watching them for days. When I was in the liquor store, they pushed on the door; sometimes they hit it, but they never even tried turning the handle.”

  “I’ve got a Jeep loaded up out there. If we get past them, we can get out of here. It’s got all the supplies we’d need. We could survive for months…”

  “Where would we go?” the girl said, sounding bored. She laughed bitterly. “I’m sorry to have to tell you, hon, but the world’s gone. While you were sleeping, it all went to hell. You didn’t see the news the last few days… while it was still on?”

  “No, I didn’t. So tell me what happened.” I shot another glance toward the door and decided to trust the girl. I leaned the shotgun case up against the table and sat in one of the camp chairs next to her cot. I unzipped the case and pulled the gun out, calmly reloading it.

  “Well they never told us how it all started, but I gue
ss about three or four weeks ago they started with the news stories about some outbreak. They thought it was a bad flu or something.”

  “I remember that,” I chimed in. “I was up north at the time. Didn’t hear about it until I read a newspaper on my flight. I thought it was just the usual media circus, reporting like they did with SARS and bird flu or swine flu or whatever it ended up being. There’s a new flu scare every season.”

  “Exactly. I think most people felt the same way. Everyone I talked to was sick of hearing about it. A few people got the shots they were giving out, but the shots were no good. It wasn’t until two weeks ago that the strange stories started coming out. People were getting sick with some new disease. Not flu. Something they didn’t know about, something they couldn’t identify and couldn’t treat.

  “A few people got sick here in town and there were stories from other cities too; Vancouver, Seattle, L.A. Seemed like it was coming from the west coast. At least that’s what the news said, but they were losing a lot of credibility over how they were handling the story. They’d run with any story they got whether it was verified or not. Every other day they’d report on something and then retract or correct the story. There were other cities, too, in other countries, but I can’t remember now… I guess it’s not really important how or where it started anyway… it’s all gone now.”

  Megan rattled on. She hardly took a breath between her sentences. She spoke in an emotionless voice, but with such quick and unnatural phrasing that I was startled and almost unable to follow as her story washed over me in a rush of words and sentences. She spoke in a rapid and breathless torrent, as though the story had built up pressure in her lungs that had to be released with no time for pause or feeling. It was a symptom of shock and emotional trauma. She was rambling and agitated, the anxiety clear in the rapid rise and fall of her chest. Her eyes were unfocused and her pupils dilated. I wanted to calm her; to have her take a breath, a sip of water; to lie back on the bed and rest. At the same time, I selfishly wanted to hear the rest of the story; wanted to be caught up on all that I’d missed.