Scavengers: August

This is a work
of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual persons,
living, dead or undead, events, places or names is purely
coincitental.

No part of this
book may be reproduced or transfer red in any form or by any means,
without the written permission of the publisher. Uploading and
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Text copyright
© 2012 K.A. Merikan

All Rights
Reserved

http://KAMerikan.com

Cover art
by

Kat Merikan AKA
Katrina Conquista

http://KatrinaConquista.com

A massive THANK
YOU to all the people who have been supporting us and reading our
stories up till now. It has been an amazing journey with our
Polish-speaking readers and we are incredibly excited to be now
venturing into publishing in English.

Also, special
acknowledgement must go to Kat’s sister – Joanna, who has been
incredibly supportive and always willing to help with all the
technicalities of publishing but also kept motivating us to keep
writing.

Kat and Agnes
Merikan

(K.A.
Merikan)

WARNING:
Contains graphic m/m sex scenes, gore, zombies, violence, angst,
BDSM, lots of deliciously dirty talk and a confident, tattooed
ex-sailor.

Bunter – a very
cheap street harlot, practically a beggar

Madam – female
pimp or brothel owner

Pigs – the
police

Punter – a
prostitute’s client

Rentboy – male
prostitute

Toff – member
of the upper classes, slightly derogatory

Trollop –
slut

All these terms
had been used as slang in Victorian England.

August 17th,
1893

Lady Juanita
Shelley looked out of the horse-driven carriage. They were rare and
only the wealthiest could afford them instead of steam-powered
transport. Like any domesticated animals that weren’t used to
produce food, horses were considered a sign of pure wastefulness.
Food was scarce in times of the Undead Plague, so using it for
animals enraged many purists who postulated to feed them to the
poor. Juanita smiled as she watched a crowded street from inside of
the richly decorated coach. She was a beautiful woman, who looked
nothing like her thirty-three years. She looked dazzling, wearing a
tightly fitting, bright yellow dress with a decorative bustle,
accentuating her incredibly thin waist. Two stuffed chickadees
adorned her broad hat matching other avian motifs embroidered by
the revealing neckline of her gown and satin gloves.

The other
person in the carriage though, didn’t seem to pay a lot of
attention to her beauty. James Hurst was also looking out of the
window, with his temple pressed to the wooden side of the door. He
felt a bit uncomfortable in the presence of Lady Shelley, as he
wasn’t a master of small talk. But he wasn’t ignorant or blind
either. The woman had suddenly started immensely enjoying his
company after he had returned from his mansion in Kent just a month
ago. It was obvious to him that her new found affection had a lot
to do with the small fortune he had brought from the treasure
hunt.

Maybe if he
were less polite, he would have declined traveling to the
University together, but since they had lived in the same street,
it would have been incomprehensible rudeness.

Unfortunately,
he couldn’t avoid someone who worked with him in the Parliament.
James only inherited his place in the House of Lords after his
father died, but he agreed with the other Lords and couldn’t bear
that a woman, raised abroad at that and not even noble by birth,
had the same political powers that they had. Juanita Shelley was
only half British, but married a Baron and came back to her
mother’s homeland with him. Coincidentally, Lord Shelley died of a
heart attack soon afterwards. Being the industrious woman that she
was, Juanita managed to start a precedent that allowed her to
inherit her husband’s position. In effect, she was swiftly joined
by Lady Swanson, the only child of another deceased Lord.

Like a lot of
nobles, after the Plague, the Outbreak, or the Curse, however one
would call a situation when people come back from the dead as
flesh-eating monsters, James lost his land and a greater part of
his income. Being on the verge of poverty, broke and in debt, he
decided to try and retrieve the treasures his father had hid in
their family mansion. He and the man he hired barely survived that
mission but they had succeeded in their quest and now he was once
again a very rich man. As a reminder, he was left with burns on his
neck and jaw after a zombie had scratched him and the other man
suggested ‘helping’ him with a hot metal rod. That memory still
sent shivers down his spine, but as horrid as it was, it worked and
he did not get infected. Now, almost a month later, he was alive
and healthy.

His burns did
not deter the likes of Lady Juanita Shelley though. He imagined
that when she looked at him, all she saw was a big pile of gold,
with a diamond on top. On the other hand, she knew he was married
and he found it immoral that she was swirling around him like a
hungry fox. It made him think that maybe she was after some
pleasures of the flesh and that was what really made him
uncomfortable. James wasn’t unaware of the fact that he was not
only rich now, but also attractive. Twenty-five years old, tall,
quite slim but with broad shoulders and apart from the scars at the
bottom of his face, he looked handsome. His body was reserved for
his wife Katherine though and that was that... well... apart from
one slip up that turned his life upside down, but he did not like
to think of it, as it only caused him misery.

His chestnut
hair was tied neatly at the back of his neck with a dark, silk
ribbon, but apart from that touch, his clothes were balanced
between fashionable and elegant. He wasn’t fond of the strange new
fashions some people were bringing in from abroad. No one would
have heard of women in trousers before, or even worse - trousers
that were so short they could be considered pants. It was said that
some worked around all sorts of steam machines and even zeppelins
which produced such heat, that female operatives would work in just
their corsets and trousers. He couldn’t imagine that kind of
obscenity outside the docks and Soho, where most prostitutes worked
and he hoped to never see that kind of abomination. It seemed
unavoidable though. Lower and middle classes got drunk on new
technology and it all sped up the wheel of change. Even morality
wasn’t spared.

A sudden touch
to his knee brought him back to reality. The woman was leaning
forward slightly with an innocent look on her face, but in this
position, he could almost look between her cleavage, enfolded in a
bed of soft feathers that decorated the neckline of her dress. “Are
you not feeling well?” she asked.

“No, no! I’m
fine.” He looked out of the window. “We are almost there.”

“You know the
city so well!” said Juanita in an appreciative tone. James couldn’t
bring himself to think of her as a ‘Lady’, especially with being
touched by her like that!

She had moved
to London two years ago, after marrying Lord Shelley. Raised in
Spain, she had only visited her mother’s native Britain two times
before the Plague. Her breasts shook a bit, as the coach stumbled
over something and James averted his gaze back to her face, feeling
extremely uncomfortable. He wished she would take her hand off his
thigh.

“Not all of its
parts,” he felt the need to underline that fact.

“Oh, you are
much too modest!” the woman exclaimed, pouting slightly.

“Modesty is a
virtue,” he couldn’t help but say, even though it could have been
considered an affront to Juanita’s dress.

“Perhaps you
know where the Johners Walk is going to take place? We could watch
it together,” she answered in a sweet tone.

“I do not think
it will be a pleasurable thing to see,” he said and even the sole
thought of the Witnesses of the Apocalypse, or ‘Johners’ as they
were called, made him lose his temper and scowl.

“Oh, their
postulates might be a bit over inflated, but I do believe that
there is quite a lot of sense in it, actually,” Juanita stated,
smiling sweetly. “After all, what do we have left now but
ourselves?”

“I beg your
pardon, Lady Shelley, but what is it that you mean? These people
consider the Book of Revelation their guide in the new world. And
what they mean by that is abandoning all hope and giving in to the
Plague. I must admit those postulates do not appeal to me at all.”
James shifted in his seat, waiting for the god forsaken carriage
ride to be over.

“But don’t you
agree that the situation is hopeless?” she breathed, slowly
stroking his thigh. “We should be enjoying the time we have left.
No need to think about further generations, as they will perish
too.”

“I have no
appreciation for such nonsense,” he said. “As nobility, we should
be the ones setting a good example to both the lower classes and
future generations. Johners ideas of going rampant are out of the
question. Soon enough we will see them fornicating with the
undead.” An expression of disgust was present on his face as he
spoke.

“Good heavens!”
she laughed in disbelief. “How in the world could you even imagine
such a thing! Your mind cannot be as pure as you claim, my dear
Lord Hurst!” she teased, fluttering her thick eyelashes.

James felt heat
climb up his neck but to his luck, he was saved from answering as
they finally arrived at the University of St Catherine. “Here we
are!” His smile was a bit stiff but he felt relieved nonetheless.
The institution was situated in a large complex of elegant
neo-gothic buildings with tall windows and numerous stone
decorations on the elevation.

“Oh... that was
not very far,” Lady Hunt said, sliding her delicate hand from his
knee in a slow stroke.

He was so
relieved, in fact, he exhaled quite loudly. “It is not,” he agreed,
“but I did not want you to walk through those dirty streets.”

The coachman
appeared behind the window and opened the door for them. “St
Catherine’s,” he informed, with a short bow.

Because the air
in the city had become so dirty in recent years, everyone that
could afford it wore protective masks, both for the sake of
appearance and health. That being so, James donned his elegant gas
mask made from brown leather, to match his shoes. He was the first
one to leave the steam carriage and once outside, he held out his
hand to Lady Shelley. Her mask was covered with a layer of nacre
and shaped like a canary’s beak. Instead of putting it on, she held
it by her face with a silver handle. The woman took James' hand and
exited the coach gracefully.

The pavement
was relatively clean, so there was no need for her to continue
lifting the hem of her dress once she was on the ground. James
smiled and they started walking towards a group of men already
standing at the top of the marble stairs. He really hoped someone
would get Lady Shelley’s attention off him. Five years after the
appearance of the new, terrible illness, a professor Hiltrub
established the first department of morphysiology in the British
Isles, which was second only to the one at a University in Berlin.
The new branch of science was concerned exclusively with the
physiology of the undead and was supposed to find a cure in the
long run.

A young
professor who was supposed to be their guide in the building was
introduced to James as Arthur Fairfax. After a short welcoming
talk, the whole group entered the university. James didn’t know
much about medicine but as one of the parliament's representatives,
he tried to learn, and inspecting the new department was one way to
go about it. One of the conservative lords, Richard Barnett was
strongly opposed to this new development, but the majority
supported the research in hope of helping the ill and preventing
further spread of the Plague. Another major advantage of having
undead subjects in a medical faculty was the possibility to learn
about the functioning of a human body on a working organism. Undead
bodies did work, even though their physiology was much slower than
that of regular humans. This not only accustomed future surgeons
with functioning bodies, but also presented the possibility to
observe how they worked.