by Wilson, Mark
“Okay. Go get your things, we’re leaving. We’ll put as much distance between us and him as we can overnight. Once we’re confident that we’ve lost him, we can set up camp and rest for a few days.”
Joey grimaced at the thought of leaving the comfortable building for a night on the road.
“It’s that or kill him,” Jock said flatly.
Joey huffed and went back inside for his rucksack. He hadn’t had the chance to unpack it, so it saved him the job of repacking now.
By morning, they’d made their way out to the Gyle Shopping Centre.
“Let’s keep pushing on,” Jock had insisted.
Spending the day working their way through Sighthill and another night working their way back on themselves to Murrayfield, they found a PC World building and made camp. Confident that their long trip had left Bracha far behind they fell into a deep sleep.
Morning brought a wonderful golden light through the office window where they’d slept. It fell on Joey’s sleeping face, gently warming him for an hour before he sensed it and woke.
“Oh, man I needed that.” He smiled over at Jock. His smile vanished the instant he saw the padre.
Jock was already awake, eyes wide open in quiet horror, staring at the ceiling. He had his index finger in the reopened hole in his neck and was sweating profusely with the effort he was employing to stay still.
“Jock!”
Joey stood over his best friend willing a solution to come to him. As he scanned Jock he noticed that a pool of blood had formed around and under him – a massive pool – that’d gone straight under the pallet Joey had slept on. The office floor was an inch deep in Jock’s blood. Despite the finger in his artery, Jock had slowly bled out. He was dying.
“Joseph. Bracha. In the night,” Jock croaked, voice as dry as one of theirs. “Bring my satchel,” he said weakly.
“What good’s a bloody Bible going to do?” Joey screeched at him in panic.
Jock tried to speak again, but couldn’t and pointed again at his bag.
Fetching the leather satchel, Joey paused for a split-second before opening it. In all their travels, moments of danger, heart to hearts and secrets they’d shared, Jock had never once mentioned the contents of this bag and Joey had never asked. At times he’d been desperate to know what it contained, and why of all Jock’s possessions it was the first he checked, the most important to the man. Yesterday he’d have given anything to know; today, he wished he wasn’t about to find out.
Reaching in, Joey’s fingers found the binding of a very thick leather-bound book. Pulling it out, he handed it to Jock without so much as glancing at the cover. It felt like a betrayal to look at it.
“Take it. It’s yours now. It’ll tell you everything I’ve done, everything I’ve learned.”
Looking down at the book that Jock had shoved back to him, he smoothed one hand over the surface of the cover before opening it to scan the title page. He couldn’t read the words, he’d never learned to read; few in The Brotherhood had.
It wasn’t a Bible, not even close. It was Jock’s journal, the story of the man’s life. He hugged it close to his chest and promised Jock he’d take care of it.
“You have to find a way to read this, Joseph. It’s important.” A violent spasm made him stiffen for a few seconds. Joey watched him accept the pain, absorb it and compose himself once more.
“More.” Jock pointed at the bag.
Joey stuck his hand in and pulled out a rubbery-feeling block. He noticed a seam and pulled, causing a lid to pop off and expose a metal rectangular end. Joey didn’t have a clue what it was.
“Flash… It’s a flash-drive. It stores information. You need a computer to see what’s on it.”
“What is this, Jock? What’s on it?”
“It was hers. She threw it to me as they took her life. I don’t know what’s on it, but she wanted you to have it. I really believe that.”
A painful cough suddenly racked Jock’s body. His finger fell away from his throat where it had been held for who knew how long.
“Her name was Michelle. Michelle MacLeod, your mother. She wasn’t from here, Joseph. The way she was dressed, the way she spoke, it was all wrong.” Jock whispered the words. Pain, emotional not just physical, screamed in his eyes. “Someone put her in here, from outside.”
Stunned, Joey was caught between the elation that he knew his mother’s name and had been given a gift from her, and the pain of losing his best friend. That his mother had come from the outside world barely registered in the whirlwind he was caught in.
He searched his mind for something he could do, something that he could say… anything. Suddenly he stopped trying and just looked at Jock’s pale, drained face.
Taking his hand he kissed Jock softly on the lips and thanked him for being his best friend, his brother and his father, in deed if not in fact. Finally he said goodbye to the only person who’d ever loved him.
When the morning came he buried the man who had taught him to survive and said a final goodbye, placing the last item he’d found in the bag gently against Jock’s grave. Before picking up the clumsy trail that Bracha had left and setting off towards Princes Street Gardens, he glanced back for a final look at Jock’s resting place. Throwing a blown kiss at the broken framed photograph that glinted in the sun of a young Jock in uniform, arm around his wife and two sons, he whispered, “Thank you, Jock. Rest easy.”
Then he set off after Bracha and towards Alys, the only other living person he knew or gave a damn for.
Chapter 6
Alys
Saint Thomas of Aquin’s High School
Reception Office
“Go to sleep, Stephanie. We have an early start in the morning.”
“Can’t,” Stephanie replied huffily. “Too much going on.”
She pointed a finger up at her temple.
Alys understood. This was her little cousin’s first trip away from the confines of The Gardens. It had taken them two days to reach the little safe-haven that Alys had set up in the former High School’s office on a previous trip, but the journey time had done little to dampen Steph’s excitement, or slow down the torrent of questions she fired.
Alys was glad that she’d decided to bring her cousin this particular route. She’d travelled it dozens of times since she’d been made a Ranger and permitted to leave the fences of The Gardens by her mother. She knew the area’s safe places and she knew which places were best avoided. Most of The Ringed in this part of the city were old. Slow and severely decayed, one simply had to keep away from them for the most part. She knew a few of the survivors in the area also, forming loose friendships with some of the younger ones. She stayed clear of the others and they reciprocated. All in all it was a good section to bring Steph out to for her first trip.
What her journey with her cousin had taught her so far was that the younger girl simply wasn’t ready to be outside of The Gardens’ fences. Steph was too loud, too clumsy, too trusting of others to make for a good Ranger. She couldn’t pay attention to the simplest instruction and walked along completely oblivious to the many useful items, signs or places they passed. Of course this meant that the kid was oblivious to the dangers also. Essentially Steph treated being in the larger area of the inner fence that circled around Princes Street, down Lothian Road and along Clerk Street and The Bridges like a holiday outing rather than the precarious exercise in scavenging, mapping and networking that it was. They’d be travelling home by a more direct route tomorrow.
It wasn’t Steph’s fault that she was so flippant in her approach to life. Steph’s mother, Alys’ Aunt Fiona, hadn’t included her in Jennifer’s survival programme. Fiona firmly believed that children should be children and run and play whilst they still wanted to. Her sister, of course, disagreed and had convinced all of the women in The Gardens that the days when kids could be free and innocent, protected from life’s hardships, had died with the city and left with the men. She convinced all but her own sister to enrol their childre
n in her programme, but had succeeded in enrolling Steph in combat class in which she was at best a middling student.
Time had proven Jennifer correct in her strategy. The Gardens was a thriving community of women and a few young men, who’d been children of its first inhabitants, able to fend and provide for themselves. They were also more than able to defend themselves thanks to Jennifer’s foresight.
A spirited twenty-year-old when the plague-ridden corpses of Mary King’s Close had been released from their four-hundred-year entrapment, Jennifer Shephard had pulled and dragged her younger sister through the streets of Edinburgh. Moving them from group to group, Jennifer latched on to the most able people, the ones who would not only protect the girls but who could teach them to survive. Ex-soldiers, police officers and outdoors-types were made use of, drained of all they could teach and dumped for the next most useful category.
Right from the outbreak Jennifer hadn’t expected to be rescued from the dead city and set about her single-minded mission to learn what she could to survive, to fight. By the time her group had colonised The Gardens some ten years later, Jennifer was a fearsome, if inflexible, leader determined to protect everyone she travelled with.
Alys wasn’t sure when, why or how Jennifer had driven the men out. She’d heard stories from some of the older women who’d travelled with the Shephard sisters in the early days about rapes and sexual bullying. She’d heard that the men took what they wanted, in return for their ‘protection’. They’d apparently thought themselves in charge due to their perceived strength. Alys had heard that her mother had shown them what real strength was.
She had no idea why her father had left along with the rest of the men and simply had to accept that her mother must have had a good reason for banishing them. Maybe she didn’t have a choice. It was all just rumour and hearsay. Alys had given up asking Jennifer years ago about her father or any of the other men. Jennifer simply wouldn’t tell her anything, other than that they were safer this way. Stronger.
It was hard to argue with that. In the time she’d been a Ranger, Alys had encountered dozens of communities, established within the large inner fence. They ranged from a handful of strangers banded together and living in buildings, including the basement flats of the many townhouses, to whole families who’d joined other families and formed fenced-in communities not unlike the one at The Gardens. Some were religious, some purely pragmatic. Some had theories on why Edinburgh had been abandoned, but most didn’t care and were just trying to survive another day. None of the communities had the resources, organisation or safety of The Gardens, or even The Brotherhood.
Just thinking of The Brotherhood brought an image of Joey to her mind’s eye. She hadn’t seen him once in the years since she’d walked away and left him and Jock on The Royal Mile mourning the mother he’d never known. However, she’d heard stories about an old minister and a young man with a bow from some other travellers in the inner fence. It seemed that they spent their time travelling the north of the city. The people she’d met said only good things about them. A man she’d encountered in The Meadows, a former supermarket manager with whom she’d shared a fire and a meal, had told her that the padre and the boy had saved him from a group of Ringed, “the fresher ones,” he’d told her. They wouldn’t accept anything in return for their assistance, but had sent him in the direction of some food stashes they kept throughout their routes. According to the supermarket manager, they did this regularly for people in the north.
She’d met a woman who’d also spoken to them. The woman had been walking towards trouble, something about a maniac with zoo animals, and the pair had turned her onto a different route around where the man made his home. She’d described Joey as handsome, with blond hair, the greenest of eyes and a bow. The woman thought it amazing that someone had taken time to help her. “So few do, love,” she’d said.
Alys’ heart swelled when she heard that they were safe, that they were the good people she’d taken them for. This was the one instance in which she’d disobeyed her mother and the one instance when her mother had been wrong. Some men could be trusted. Alys sighed, brushed Steph’s hair over her right ear with her finger and told the twelve-year-old to go to sleep again.
Walking outside onto Chalmers Street, Alys looked up at the clear night sky and wondered if the stars had been so visible back when the city had been alive. Had people even noticed them if they were? Mum said that the people of old Edinburgh were worse than the ones who lived here now. “Self-absorbed,” she’d called them many times. “Always in a rush, always too important to talk.” According to her mum many people were like that in the old days: living, but not really living; focused on shit that didn’t matter. Alys never really understood what she was referring to but had nodded along in agreement to keep the peace.
After a final check around the front of the building, Alys made her way back inside, barricaded the office door and lay beside her cousin. As she drifted off to sleep, she wondered if Joey looked at the stars. She decided that he did; he’d been underground for so long, he’d appreciate them more than most. Alys had thought back to the night she’d met Joey and Jock many times in the three years since, replaying the events frame by frame in her mind’s eye. No matter how many times she scanned the images, she couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment that she’d chosen to trust the boy with the bow; when she’d stopped resenting his freedom and began to see him for who he was – someone as trapped as she’d been at the time.
Sometimes, when she thought of him, she wished that she’d taken him to The Gardens, but Jennifer would have sent him packing, or worse. She’d spent hours examining that day, trying to decide why she’d trusted him, and why she still missed someone that she’d only met for the briefest of moments. Finally it had come to her. After spending her whole life training, punishing her body and preparing for being a Ranger, he’d been her first and her only friend.
Chapter 7
Joey
Having spent three days, three sleepless days, tracking Bracha from Murrayfield to the West-End of Edinburgh, Joey was exhausted. But hate pushed him onwards. Bracha hadn’t slept in that time either; if he had, Joey would have found him by now. Travelling along the main routes, through Corstorphine and Haymarket, he’d made no attempt to hide his trail. It was plain arrogance on his part. Nothing else would explain his carelessness in taking such an obvious route or in leaving so many signs of his passing. He clearly thought that Joey wasn’t a threat.
Reaching the inner fence-line at the junction of Lothian Road and Princes Street, Joey ignored the urge to push on and follow Bracha into the city-centre. Every cell in him screamed at him to go after Bracha, not just for Jock but to warn the women in The Gardens. They didn’t exactly need his protection, nor would they welcome him from what he’d learned of them, but forewarning of a threat benefited anyone whether they welcomed it or not.
Finally he ignored the urge to pursue, to kill Bracha, and listened to the voice of Jock that had nagged him for to be safe, make the smart choice; no heroics. He returned to the small, fenced-off garden he’d spotted back at Coates Crescent. Sleep was a must, as was food if he was to be fresh enough to face the madman.
Edinburgh was littered with these gardens, surrounded by fences and often locked gates. They were assigned to residents or individuals who lived in the nearby townhouses. Jock and he had used these types of gardens often, finding that they were perfect for allowing them to relax. They could be confident that one of The Ringed wouldn’t stumble across them in their sleep. They’d only had to worry about the living in these camps and they had plenty of improvised first-warning devices they’d designed for that task.
Jock. Grief slapped him hard across the face as he realised that he’d be setting up his first camp alone.
Deciding to do Jock proud, he stretched some light nylon rope between the boughs of two trees, draped a camouflaged tarp over it and pegged the edges into the soft mud with the metal spikes he had in his rucksack. He�
�d considered taking some of Jock’s supplies – he had many items that they’d chosen not to duplicate – but had pushed the notion aside, opting to find new ones on the road rather than disrespect Jock by raking though his rucksack. Jock would have called him an eejit for his decision.
Spreading his second, smaller tarp on the ground, Joey busied himself with building a small fire. He could take the risk of The Ringed seeing the glow, as the fencing would halt their attempts to reach it. Dinner was a few leftover scraps of rabbit meat and some tomatoes he’d taken from a greenhouse in Corstorphine on his journey. Tomorrow, he’d pick up Bracha’s trail.
Chapter 8
Alys
Alys had slept well and had finished packing her own things and Steph’s, when a flash of movement outside the window caught her attention. Raising her eyes, expecting to see her cousin running around, she stiffened as she caught sight of a tall, oddly-dressed man standing a hundred yards or so from the girl playfully swinging a metal pole around.
Dropping her things and performing a quick check of her weapons in transit, she sprinted along the short corridor to the school’s main doors. Halting for a single second to compose herself, she pushed the door open slowly in order to not startle the man. Alys kept her face relaxed.
“You must be Alys,” the man said cheerfully and very politely. He had closed the distance between himself and Steph, who predictably had walked straight towards the stranger, curious about his unusual outfit.
Alys nodded.
“Stephanie, come here,” she said.
“But Mr Bracha was about to tell me a story.”
“Now,” Alys said flatly.
Sighing loudly and making a big show of rolling her eyes and tutting, she stomped back to her cousin.
“Inside, and lock the door,” Alys told her huffing cousin, watching the petulant youngster slam the door after her, but keeping her peripheral vision trained on Bracha.