by Wilson, Mark
Slipping silently over the rails onto Princes Street, he looked over his shoulder, down at The Gardens to check that no one had seen him go. All clear.
Moving between the sluggish corpses on the main city thoroughfare proved simple enough with only a few of the more warmly-dressed ones reaching out to him or half-heartedly snapping their jaws shut when he passed. Taking Hanover Street, he headed downhill, along Dundas Street and down on to Brandon Terrace where he spotted the clock at the intersection Alys had told him to use as a marker. Turning onto Inverlieth Row, Joey spotted a faded maroon-coloured number 27 bus parked, two wheels up on the pavement. Inside, a warm glow flickered.
The area leading to the bus had been relatively free of Ringed but a couple shambled towards the bus, driven by the slope downwards as much as they were by the glow of the firelight. Joey sighed, drew his knives, Jock’s knives, and silenced the pair before tapping gently on the vehicle’s door.
Alys smiled through the fogged glass and pulled a lever to open the doors for him. The heat hit his face as he stepped onto the stairs to board.
“Any problems getting out?” Alys asked, shoving the lever in the opposite direction as soon as he was inside.
“None.”
Looking around the bus, Joey noted the fire in the space where disabled passengers once parked their wheelchairs. Jock had taught him what the little blue and white sign had meant in the old world. The disabled had been amongst the first to fall to the plague, for obvious reasons. In his entire life, Joey had met only one person in a wheelchair – a lady by the name of Suzanne Dalgliesh. At least that had been her name in the Old Edinburgh. Here in the dead city, she went by the name of Suzy Wheels.
Suzy Wheels occupied a bungalow on Groathill Avenue; she had since before the plague. With its modified ramps, access points and lack of stairs for shuffling feet at the ends of dead legs to climb, Suzy’s home should have been one of the first to be invaded. Anyone who’d ever met Suzy Wheels did not need to ask why that didn’t happen. A former Tai Kwando Olympian, Suzanne had been in a traumatic accident two years prior to the plague and wrecked her spine as well as her car.
She’d fought her way through eighteen painful months of physiotherapy and another six months in the gym, sculpting her upper body, building the functional muscle she needed and perfecting the technique required to fight from her chair. That had been her goal: enter the next Olympics, Rio 2016 – “The Olympics, mind, not the Paralympics,” she’d say – and kick asses from a seated position. Joey could fight, but he had no doubt at all that the sixty-year-old invalid could kick his ass all day long from the comfort of her modified wheelchair.
Taking a seat across from Alys, who had resumed her place at the other side of the little fire, Joey picked out a potato that had been baking in the flames and began eating it.
“So what’s up, Alys? Couldn’t we have just passed notes, same as always?”
Alys shook her head. She’d sent him a note asking him to meet at the bus via another Ranger and Stephanie. The other Rangers were slightly afraid of her and passed on her messages without asking any questions. Joey could relate.
“We needed time. A few notes passed slowly over weeks just isn’t good enough this time,” she replied.
“Okay,” Joey said through a mouthful of potato. “What’s the story then?”
Alys shifted her eyes to the fire.
“I want to go to the Royal Infirmary. I want to go after the cure, Joey. I want... I need you to help me.”
Joey took his time chewing his food, giving himself a chance to work out what to say to her. He needed an answer that wouldn’t earn him a burst lip.
“Alys.” He tossed the potato skin on the fire and began staring at the same spot in the flames she’d picked. “There is no cure. Jock said so. He’s been there.”
Alys continued to stare into the fire.
“To the hospital? He’s searched it?”
“No,” Joey conceded. “He hasn’t searched it, but he was confident that the cure was just a story made up to bring people to the area.”
Alys looked at him now, confusion and hurt showing in her eyes as the flames danced across her pupils.
“Jock told me that there’s a group of men, dangerous men. He called them The Exalted, and they live nearby. He said that they’re killers on a massive scale, that they use stories of a plague cure to lure people in. Some of the things he told me about these guys were pretty grim, Alys. I never once saw Jock frightened of anything until he told me about The Exalted and their leader, Somna. He only told me to warn me to keep away.”
“Did he tell you where they are? Exactly where they are?” Alys asked.
It wasn’t the response he’d hoped for but there was no point in lying to Alys.
“Yes.”
Pulling a map from his rucksack, he began drawing lines around Drum Woods, The Royal Infirmary and Liberton, telling her everything that Jock had told him of the people and the area.
Alys sat back, leaning against the back of a passenger seat.
“There’s plenty of scope to get in, do a search for a few days and get out unnoticed, Joey.”
It was hard to argue, but he did anyway.
“If you’d seen Jock describe that place,” he pointed at Drum Wood, “and those people you wouldn’t want to go.”
Something slid over Alys’ face, changing her expression from that of his friend to the one that her mother wore. “I’m going and I’d like you to come, but I’ll go alone if I have to,” she said flatly.
“Why, Alys?”
She was on her feet standing over him in an instant, pulling him up by his jacket lapels. “You have to ask? The chance of a cure, Joey? Why wouldn’t we go?”
Joey didn’t resist her as she pulled at him, but brought his face close to hers until their noses almost touched. It was a dirty tactic – she hated intimacy – but it was the only way to make her back off a little. Anger or any physical confrontation would only earn him a new scar.
Pulling in until he felt her breath on his cheek, he told her, “There’s nothing there. Why are you so convinced that there is?”
Instead of moving away, she surprised him by staying close and bringing her hands up to his cheeks. Holding his face, she made him look into her damp eyes.
“Because of Bracha. He believed it. He believed it so much that he was trying to raise a group of fighters so that he could get in and out. He was scared of Somna’s men too; maybe even Somna himself. He believed it enough to face the monsters Jock was so frightened of.”
Joey took her wrists and pulled her hands away from his face. She allowed him to.
“Bracha is a lunatic. You’re taking a risk like this on the say so of the murderer who tried to kill your cousin?” Joey choked back a wave of emotion. “Who killed Jock?”
The coldness crept back into her face and her voice.
“I know what he did, Joey. Maybe we’ll get a chance to repay him. He’ll be headed the same direction, to the hospital, only I think that he wants to destroy it. I think that he loves the city the way that it is, and that he’ll find that cure, if it exists, and he’ll make sure no one ever benefits from it.”
Joey’s muscles had stiffened at the thought of getting close to Bracha again. He could feel that she’d noticed the shift in him. She knew that he had begun to consider the idea and she pushed a little harder.
“We simply have to go, Joey. For The Brotherhood, for The Garden community, for Jock.” It was her turn to play dirty. Joey flinched at his mentor’s name.
“We could be free, really properly free.”
A single tear had broken loose and rolled down Alys’ face. She truly believed the words she’d said to him. He ran through several weak justifications in his mind, the most pitiful being that it would be for Jock, this trip. It wasn’t: Jock would beg him not to go.
In his heart, he knew that she’d given him the only reason he needed to agree to go. She was his friend, his only friend, a
nd she needed his help.
“Okay,” he told her. “But we plan first. We do it my way. In and out. No heroics.”
Jock’s words coming from his mouth.
“Agreed?”
Alys tossed him a smile that reached her eyes for a change and punched his arm to seal the deal.
“Agreed.”
Chapter 12
Alys
A sudden push against the bus sent it wobbling to one side. Alys and Joey both snatched their weapons up and stood to look through the misted windows.
“Didn’t you have a check around before you arrived?” she snapped at Joey, more out of shock than genuine anger.
“Of course I did,” he said calmly.
Both turned their eyes back to the window. Alys stepped forward to rub some of the condensation away with the sleeve of her coat. She gasped as she looked out onto Canonmills. Joey pressed his cheek against hers to get a better look through the gap she’d made and let out a little sound of his own.
The bus was surrounded by The Ringed. Every panel, front, side and rear, was being pushed upon by a herd of them, three deep in parts. Each of them was completely fixed on the bus, lips drawn back from snapping teeth.
“Where the hell did they come from?” Joey asked. “You ever see that many in one place?”
Alys shook her head.
“You?”
Not like that,” he replied. “They’re all pretty fresh.
By fresh he meant fast, vicious, dangerous and, of course, hungry.
There was little chance of them pushing the bus over; they simply didn’t have the strength or coordination for that, unless they got lucky. The greatest risk to them was that the hands that had begun to slap against the windows would eventually break the glass. Neither of them was particularly worried about a Ringed climbing through a broken window – they were too high for that – but that smashed glass would definitely mean exposure to the bitter winter wind howling louder than the groans of the dead outside.
“Upstairs,” Alys told him, leading the way to the top deck.
From the top they gained a better view of what they faced. Alys guessed maybe sixty Ringed, all fresh, had surrounded the bus. She rubbed her temples thinking, What the hell brought so many of them here?
Canonmills was outside the inner fence, but only just, and so generally was fairly clear of the dead. Those she had encountered recently in the area had been older ones, slow and part-frozen with the winter frost.
Glancing along the aisle of the bus towards Joey, who had his face pressed against the rear window, she gave him a sharp whistle. When he turned, she pointed up at the ceiling, eliciting a conspirational grin from him, followed by a quick nod of approval.
Stepping on Joey’s interlocked hands, she boosted herself up towards the skylight, pushed it open and climbed through, out onto the snow-covered roof, before dangling her arm through to help Joey up.
“I’m cool,” he told her. As Alys withdrew her arm, Joey’s hands grabbed the skylight and his feet suddenly shot through, followed by the rest of him, head last. He landed lightly on his feet in a crouch.
“Show off.” She shook her head at him. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”
She headed towards the edge to lean over. Her sudden presence above brought a surge of hungry groans from below.
“You think you can shoot them off? Maybe just clear a section for us to break through?”
Joey had a quick peek over.
“Na. Too few arrows, too many heads to shoot. How about we go back to the lower deck and just start braining them through the windows after they’ve broken through?”
Alys scowled. “Too risky. Too easy to get grabbed or bitten whilst reaching out.”
Joey’s face suddenly broke into a wide grin. Hooking his bow over his back, he went through his ritual of checking his weapons, tightening his laces and pulling his hood up, before cocking an eyebrow at her and flashing an even wider grin.
“Back in a minute, Alys,” he laughed and leaped from the roof onto the nearby bus shelter, from where he did a tight sideways somersault, landing on top of a phone box several feet away. With a final cartwheel-tuck, he spun off the phone box, landing catlike on two feet behind the row of The Ringed, who still faced the bus.
Launching into a song, he took off up the hill towards a burnt-out Esso petrol station, sixty-odd dead shuffling behind him like a grotesque parade.
“Searching for answers and finding more reasons, not to believe in the bullshit they feed us…” Joey sang loudly and out of tune, laughing as he ran and tumbled and spun his way up the hill away from the bus.
He’s entirely too full of himself, that boy, Alys thought, supressing a smile.
Returning a few minutes later, Joey had doubled back around The Ringed who were still headed up towards Rodney Street. Joey was walking towards her, arms wide in a what d’you think gesture. Alys shook her head.
“Nice singing, Joey.”
He laughed loudly. “You like that? Jock taught me it.”
He launched into another verse, ducking as she launched a right-hander at him.
“Shut up, idiot. You’ll have them back down here.” She nodded up at the herd of Ringed. Some of the rear ones had lurched around and were looking in their direction, teeth bared.
“Okay. Let’s go tell your mother that we’re running away to find a cure at The Royal Infirmary, which is, by the way, surrounded by murdering madmen who worship a Zommed-out footballer. That’ll be fun.”
Alys cocked an eyebrow at him. Deadpan she said, “Okay.”
Padre Jock’s Journal
I almost knocked Father Grayson on his ass today. Having returned from cleaning up some twenty-odd Ringed from the fence-line along at North Bridge, I was exhausted and in no mood for any of his usual closed-minded decrees. Unfortunately I had to seek permission for something. Good God, having to ask anyone’s permission grates at me but doing so of this… man, Jeezus help me.
He argued with me for an hour but finally caved in when I asked him, Who’ll guard your borders when I’m too old, or dead? Father Grayson scowled at me like never before, but eventually promised that you wouldn’t be put forward for Communion, that I could train you in a few years, and more importantly, you would be allowed to keep the bow I’d acquired for you and the freedom to train with it.
I never wanted this for you, Joseph, living in these dungeons, worshipping the dead. You’re too clever, have too much spirit for a life in The Brotherhood. Sometimes I pass you in the corridor and you look just like one of them with your head down and face passive. It makes me sorry that I brought you here and wish that I was a better man. A man who could be a father to you. I learned from my own kids that that’s not who I am. It’s better that you’re brought up here.
Other times I watch you from a distance, when you think no one is around, up on the surface. I like that you show this small defiance to them. I promise we’ll leave this place one day, but only when you’re ready, only when you won’t die outside these fences. For now, the bow is yours and I’ve ensured that nobody will take it from you.
Chapter 13
Joey
Pulling the bow string back to his nose, Joey let out a gentle breath and loosed the arrow. Another shot. Sighing, he ran along towards the traffic lights in which his arrow was embedded, executing a half-hearted somersault over a rusted traffic island as he went. Alys was very late and his bones had stiffened in the cold waiting for her outside the old Scotsman Hotel on North Bridge. Alys’ departure from The Gardens must have proven more difficult than she’d anticipated.
Joey had departed The Gardens a week earlier, thanking the women for his time there and for teaching him so many useful skills. Jennifer, stoic as ever, had simply told him “Goodbye, Boy.” He’d been tempted to give her a hug, just because, but hadn’t fancied nursing a facial wound for the next few days.
Saying goodbye to Stephanie had been a much more difficult experience. In his time in The Gardens,
Joey had become very attached to the girl, who had taken to following him around whilst he performed his duties. Alys thought her behaviour the result of a crush on Joey, but it wasn’t that at all. She just wanted a big brother. In a way, she’d transferred her need for a male role model onto him, and he was quite happy with that. It was nice to have someone who simply liked him for being him.
What Alys felt towards him was a mystery. What were they to each other? Allies? Potential lovers? That didn’t feel right. He did have feelings for Alys – he loved her he supposed – but how did one know what love felt like? Best friends felt like the most comfortable fit for them. What he did know for sure was that he wouldn’t be asking Alys about it anytime soon. They had a job to do.
Steph was quieter than she’d been previously, according to her mother. She was more circumspect and spent long hours deep in thought watching Joey or the trainee Rangers go through their paces with Jennifer and her team. In the evenings, they’d sit together, she and Joey and her mother, sharing stories and laughing together. Steph and her mum were so easy to be happy around in stark contrast to many of the others in The Gardens. Spending time in their company made him feel part of a family for the first time. Gradually Steph withdrew from these nightly visits.
As the weeks passed, she’d retreated into herself a little more. With each passing day she spent more and more time alone. Gradually her self-imposed exile passed, but the Steph who emerged was quite different from the carefree kid she’d been only weeks before. She enrolled in her Aunt Jennifer’s Ranger programme. Initially refusing her niece, Jennifer had conceded to grant her admittance after Steph had turned up every day for a month, stationed herself right at the heart of the class and punished her soft body, copying the much more experienced trainees’ drills and exercises. Eventually, Joey had asked why being a Ranger was suddenly so important to her. “I won’t ever be a victim again, Joey,” she’d replied.