dEaDINBURGH

by Wilson, Mark

“I wanted to give up once, I got tired of fighting,” Joey whispered through his tears. “And then my birthday came and my bow with it. That was you?”

  Jock gave a curt nod.

  “I’ve been so proud watching you master that weapon. I’ve no right to be, but I am. You’re going to need it where we’re going, son. If you’ll come?”

  Joey stood to look over the fence-line into the unknown part of the city. The Royal Mile and the underground town of The Brotherhood had been his entire world for fifteen years. Alys doubted that he could leave, that he’d even want to. She was desperate to leave her community’s fenced-in Garden, but only when the time was right. This boy had guts and some skill but he was nowhere near the fighter that she was and she wasn’t ready for that side of the fence yet, which meant that he certainly wasn’t. If she could have asked him to come with her, she would have.

  Suddenly Joey turned back to face Jock.

  “My mother, who was she?”

  Jock shook his head.

  “I don’t know, son. Here, come with me.”

  Alys followed along behind them as the padre led Joey along towards Mary King’s Close. She busied herself scanning the side buildings for any more surprises. It had shocked her how… fresh The Ringed who’d attacked her and Joey had been. They still had muscle and were fairly co-ordinated in their movements. They also had speed and that meant that they’d only crossed over a few months before. That was very unusual this far into the city-centre. Most of the dead found within the boundaries of their communities had been made in those first few days, as Mary King’s Close had been the epicentre of the outbreak.

  As they reached Mary King’s Close, Alys noted that the heavy doors leading down to the crypts were closed tightly, probably locked. Jock had been correct in his assertion that The Brotherhood didn’t care about pursuing Joey. Jock came to a stop at the arches of the City Chambers. Entering the first archway, Jock stared at the cobbles and spoke softly, pulling Joey close to him as he spoke.

  “This is where I found her, where I found you. She was in the last stages of labour and unable to mute the screams that brought you out onto these cobbled roads. The dead were many in those days and livelier than the ones we see so often now. Her screams, which should have signalled a new life for both of you, merely drew them to end hers. Perhaps they smelled the blood; there was enough of it. I was up there,” Jock pointed up at the battlements above the archway. “I’d just returned from a hunt. The Brotherhood paid me in those days, with food and shelter. I was charged by the founding Brothers with secretly dispatching the liveliest of the Children of Elisha. It went against the dogma but the founders knew that they wouldn’t be left alone by the most active dead, the freshest ones. Their methods didn’t work on the fresh ones.”

  Jock squeezed Joey’s shoulder, a gesture of reassurance and a question: should I go on?

  Joey merely stared at the spot on the cobbles that Padre Jock had indicated.

  Jock chose to continue.

  “By the time I’d dropped down, she’d bitten through the cord that attached you to her and had hidden you in that doorway over there.” Jock pointed into the darkness. “She ran from you. Blood left behind her like a trail of gruesome breadcrumbs for the dead who pursued. She led them from you. It was the bravest act I’ve ever witnessed, Joseph.”

  Joey cried freely again, absorbing the words. This time Alys did look away and gave him his dignity.

  “There were an army of them, forming a wall between her and me, but she saw me and pointed to the doorway as her last conscious act. I found you there, Joseph, fresh from the womb, still steaming, covered in your mother’s blood, lying in a puddle of it with a reflection of the moon beside you. You were silent. I couldn’t believe how silent you were. As I picked you up, I noticed some of the Brothers standing in High Street. They’d stood passively and watched the whole event. They would’ve let their precious Children eat you both. I threatened them, made them bring me to Father Grayson and made my deal with them to care for you. It was the best that I could do, son.”

  Alys had heard enough. Departing, she sent a silent prayer to Joey. Go with Jock. Don’t ever come back. And then she went home, content for the first time in years that it was where she belonged. For now.

  Padre Jock’s Journal

  In the first few hours of the outbreak people just assumed that the stories of monsters emerging, rabid from the depths of Mary King’s Close, couldn’t be real. Most of us thought that a trusted face would appear on the news telling us that it was all an elaborate hoax. That someone like Dynamo, the magician, had pulled a War of The Worlds type of event. Obviously we were wrong.

  The Ringed were all over the social networks and news channels, but we had become so numb to shock, so arrogant, we didn’t really consider that any real harm would come to us. We were used to our illusions of control, sure of our place in the world and our right to those privileges we enjoyed but never appreciated. Most of us expected an announcement to be made on the news channels that it was all just some clever marketing stunt and barely looked up from our screens. Almost ubiquitously, the prevailing attitude was one of “Go back to your reality shows, PlayStations or TVs. Everything’s fine.” Then all at once, it wasn’t confined to our screens. It was in our streets, in our homes, standing snarling at us in full glorious high-def.

  Even then you could see the shock and puzzlement on people’s faces as they watched the dead begin to bring down their neighbours, their family – hell, even their pets. Eventually it hit. This is real. Run.

  I was thirty years old when the plague hit Edinburgh and had been a minister in the Royal Marines since I was sixteen. Padre Jock Stevenson. I’d spent the last three years based in Scotland and had come to Edinburgh for a weekend visit. Some timing, eh? I’d been up on the Royal Mile, doing all the tourist crap, taking tours, sightseeing, so I was at the epicentre of the outbreak. Twenty-four hours in, they cut the power, everything disappeared, the internet, television, cell phones radios; all gone. Everything electrical, dead. God knows what they were thinking.

  On day two I was barricaded inside St Giles Cathedral along with around a hundred other survivors. We fought hard to keep the cathedral free of the infected. We thought that if only we could hold out for long enough then the government would get control and rescue us. Four days later they sealed the city with all its residents inside their hastily-erected fences and left us to it.

  Initially we kept hoping that the fences were temporary. They’d built them so quickly, it must have taken all of the armed services. Only they could have done such an effective job so speedily. We told each other that they’d come back. That our families on the outside would demand they came in to clear the dead and rescue the uninfected. We clung onto a lot of fantasies in those days.

  As the weeks passed we became skilled foragers, leaving the safety of the cathedral at regular intervals and in teams, in search of food and supplies. We lost a lot of people in those early days, when the dead still moved so quickly; when they were still so fresh, so predatory.

  After a year had passed, people had given up hope on ever communicating with the outside world again. Some thought that the plague must have escaped, despite the fences, and the rest of the country, maybe the world, was in the same position as we were. Some preached that we’d faced God’s judgment for our consumerist ways, or His judgement of the gays, or whatever twisted notion they subscribed to. There was no shortage of doomsayers or bigots before the plague hit and the end of our city only strengthened those beliefs. Most of us suspected that we’d just been abandoned.

  Whatever they believed, people did what people always do: they fought. They chose sides and they built more fences to found and segregate communities. I roamed around for a few years, always making my way back to the city-centre for long spells. At times I took payment from The Brotherhood for keeping their community free of all but the most decayed dead. Eventually I stopped travelling around and stayed permanently in the cit
y-centre for fifteen years, watching over you, Joseph.

  I met a lot of people. I killed a lot of people and ex-people to keep my little corner of the world safe. I existed instead of living, until the screams of a woman delivering her baby into this hell brought me running.

  Three Years Later

  North Edinburgh

  2050

  Chapter 5

  Joey

  “Again,” Jock barked.

  Joey sighed, but didn’t argue and began repeating the series of exercises Jock had been teaching him. He made rotating movements of his legs over a short wall in a sweep across the wall; spin and repeat the process. The exercises Jock drilled him with were inventive, exhausting and hugely effective in developing the muscles he used when free-running through the city. Jock was a monumental pain in the ass and a hard task master but he knew how to get the best from a body.

  “Good, another centimetre higher with that right calf on the sweep, Joseph.”

  Joey listened and concentrated, making the adjustments Jock suggested. He’d long ago learned to trust the padre’s instructions.

  In the three years since they’d left the only home Joey had ever known on the Royal Mile, Jock and he had ventured throughout most of north Edinburgh. Leaving the confines of the inner fences of the city-centre communities, they’d made their way to the outer fence-line, which ran along the city’s north bypass, and had criss-crossed from Portobello to Corstorphine, traveling into the city and out to the fence periodically. They’d mapped most of the area and encountered many of the dead. Most of all, they’d talked and they’d trained together.

  In Jock, Joey couldn’t have found a more skilled mentor or a finer surrogate father. A far cry from the man he’d imagined him to be for so long, Jock seemed in his easy-going and positive attitude as happy to be free of the confines of the Royal Mile as Joey himself. As they’d travelled throughout the remains of the Edinburgh suburbs and districts, Jock had passed along lessons on survival, combat, navigation and strategy, all learned from his years as a Marine and decades as a Zombie-hunter on the Royal Mile.

  They’d become a lethal team, co-ordinated in their movement through the streets they travelled and lethal in their precision in silencing The Ringed.

  It had taken Joey a few weeks to get his head around silencing the dead. He’d been taught his whole life that the dead were to be revered, left to roam in peace, but long conversations with Jock and several dangerous encounters with the more aggressive, fresher dead had helped justify the silencing of the walking dead. Jock and he now saw this as a way of bringing the moving corpses to peace. To end their suffering.

  The Ringed couldn’t feel pain, as far as they could determine, but who knew what went on inside their brains, if anything? They simply had no way of knowing but genuinely felt that silencing the creatures was the safest thing for the survivors in the area, and it felt like the right thing to do.

  Jock mostly used his dual blades, one in each hand facing in alternate directions. He’d aim to the temple, base of the skull or the eye. These were the three best places to penetrate the skull and sever the fragile connection needed to animate the body.

  Joey had become a master with the bow. His own training regime had made him an excellent archer but Jock’s input had turned him into an almost infallible marksman. He could accurately strike even fast moving targets from a range of fifty metres and from a crouched or a standing position. They’d practiced hand to hand combat together for thousands of hours and had hundreds of lightning-fast combat sequences at their disposal to disarm, maim and to kill the living or silence the dead.

  They had a handful of pre-prepared, smooth tactics and strategies they used most often to dispatch The Ringed and code words for each of them to synchronise their attack or defence. More often than not, they favoured the Donald Duck. Joey wasn’t sure where Jock had gotten his code names from but they were always a little silly. The Donald Duck involved Jock attracting the attention of the creature, whilst Joey crept behind and silenced it with a blade to the base of the skull. Very simple but effective.

  In the last twelve months, they’d concentrated on teaching Joey to work with two blades. He was far from a natural with the weapons, but Jock insisted that he needed a close-range weapon for times when his bow wasn’t a good option. Joey had argued that he would simply use his bow as a staff, but Jock had countered with a nod towards his missing middle finger, so knives it was. He’d never be any use in a knife fight against a highly-skilled living person, but had become confident enough to deal with The Ringed using them.

  “Right, good work, wee man.” Jock flung an arm around his charge and pulled him in for a one-armed hug. “Let’s get something to eat and get our heads down for the night.”

  Still a little uncomfortable with Jock’s warmth and easy affection, Joey patted the padre on the back and smiled.

  “Right, old man. Soft play?” Joey asked.

  “You saw that, did you?”

  Joey had spotted the former pub with attached kid’s play area as they’d trained. Clad in still-colourful padded mats, the soft play areas they frequently came across on their travels made for excellent accommodation. The play areas were normally in a fenced-off part of the building and padded to a greater comfort level than the back of a car, their usual camping choice.

  “Yeah, I’ll go do a quick check around the building. You want to get inside?”

  Jock raised his eyes to survey the coming storm clouds. “Good idea,” he smiled, subconsciously rubbing at his arthritic right shoulder. “I’ll get the rabbit on, son. Be careful.”

  Nodding in reply, Joey did a quick check that his bow and his knives were primed and his boots laced tightly. He pulled his hood up far enough to shelter him but not obscure his peripheral vision. The checks were automatic after years of being on the road with Jock. The padre had stopped needing to remind him of these precautions months back.

  Fully prepared, Joey watched Jock retreat into the pub, knife in each hand. Jock would do a sweep of the building interior before setting up their sleeping area and cooking the game they’d trapped earlier in the day. One thing they were never short of out in the suburban expanse between inner and outer fences was rabbits. The local woodland wildlife had taken the absence of humans as their cue to colonise former homes, gardens, schools and anywhere else they could feed, breed and avoid the dead. The abundance of food was something that Joey hadn’t expected when they’d crossed the fence-line of The Brotherhood three years previously.

  Jock had taught him everything he knew about survival in the no man’s land the two of them had spent their days, weeks, months and years exploring. Food, water, and shelter had become easy to find for the pair, but still they roamed looking for who knows what. They were living: not surviving, living. They’d met people, some good, some not so good. Occasionally they helped people out, sometimes they even had some fun. Joey had never expected to be so happy, so free.

  Supressing a smile, Joey focused on stalking the perimeter of the building. As he moved silently along, staying close to the moss and lichen-covered walls, periodically he’d reach out three feet or so, stick a little tent peg into the ground and wind some cat gut around it, stretching it along to the next peg and the next until the building’s perimeter was surrounded by a line of cat gut with little bells at regular intervals. This was a first-warning device they’d cobbled together from fishing line and those wee bells that were once found in budgie’s cages which they’d scavenged from various shops on their travels. The cat gut was very difficult for the living to see and The Ringed rarely fixed their sight on anything except a meal, so it provided an effective warning device.

  He and Jock were always assessing and reassessing which items were vital in their respective rucksacks. Camping and mountaineering stores on Rose Street had provided them with outdoor clothes in the first days after their departure from The Close. Joey still enjoyed the comfort of dressing in his black denims and hiking boots, but he
’d traded his battered old boots for a more practical pair of Berghuas walking boots. Both had scavenged base layers, waterproofs and jackets, Joey taking a leather jacket with windproof inner layer that Jock had cursed the store for not having in his size. The leather was perfect for allowing free movement but gave none of the swooshing, rubbing noise of some of the man-made waterproof jackets.

  It was a constant battle, choosing between what was essential and what wasn’t; which items were worth each of them carrying, in case they were separated, and which it was a waste of energy to duplicate. They both carried the items they agreed that they couldn’t do without and personal preferences guided their decisions for the rest.

  The only exception was the pouch of Carrionite Joey had scooped up on his hurried departure from The Close, which still lay at the bottom of the rucksack. Why he’d chosen to keep the substance, Joey couldn’t say.

  Completing his sweep, Joey returned to the pub’s entrance, closed and barricaded the door behind him, and walked towards the flickering lights of Jock’s fire at the rear of the large room. Noticing a few of The Ringed with damaged temples, he assumed correctly that Jock had silenced them. Crouching, he stole a quick glance at the condition of them. They were pretty old and decayed. Mostly dried out, they’d reached that point in the decomposition process where the decay seemed to halt. It was one of those unexplained things they’d noticed on their travels. The creatures would decay to a certain point and then remain in that state. It made it very difficult to guess when the person had died. With Ringed like these ones, usually the best sign of when they’d turned were the clothes they wore. These two were dressed in the striped uniforms of soft-play attendants, with plastic My name is John, My name is Evie badges still visible amongst the rags.