dEaDINBURGH: Origins (Din Eidyn Corpus Book 3)

by Wilson, Mark

  Michelle’s smile vanished and she allowed the anger she felt to show in her eyes. It was a calculated risk. So far she’d kept it light, put Solveson in his box and maintained an air of detached amusement. It was time to do the same to the boss.

  “On the contrary,” she said softly. “If you were to look at my holo-net log you’d have me down as an obsessive. Never miss an episode,” she said darkly.

  Generally speaking, corporate executives weren’t the brightest of people. Oh, they were educated enough and certainly skilled in the niche to which they’d devoted themselves, but true sharpness of mind – or perhaps it was an openness of mind – generally escaped them in their bubble of superiority and absolute authority.

  Fraser surprised her by absorbing her meaning and intention in an instant and brushing aside the small talk.

  “Know your battleground, huh?” he said plainly.

  Michelle hid her surprise quickly, but not quickly enough. She watched as the tug of a smile played at the edges of his mouth.

  Fraser’s face suddenly lost all humour. He tapped the table hard with his knuckles. “You have ten minutes, Ms MacLeod. Start talking.”

  Chapter 4

  Early Spring

  2032

  Michelle woke to find herself laid face-down on a very cool-feeling, white-tiled floor. The cool sensation wasn’t entirely unwelcome and helped her focus on something and pull her tangled thoughts together into a semi-straight thought process. Her hand went immediately to her abdomen and lay there for a few seconds. Unsure what reassurance she gained from the gesture, she welcomed it, regardless of how superficial it was.

  Rolling onto her back, her head swam and her neck ached with the effort. Opening her eyes seemed an insurmountable challenge, a mountain too steep to conquer. An image from her student days, waking on Darcie’s floor after a hard night’s drinking and dancing, came to mind but left as quickly as it came. Not many nuggets of information were presenting themselves to her increasingly alert mind regarding her current whereabouts or situation, but she knew for certain that alcohol hadn’t been a factor, having eliminated it from her life some fourteen weeks before.

  She blinked hard six or seven times and finally managed to get her eyes in focus. Nothing she looked at made any kind of sense. Michelle sat up groggily and rubbed at her gluey eyes. She felt her pupils contract in response to the clinically harsh, xenon glare of the lights blasting the unfamiliar too-white room and laughed at the absurdity of the dream she was surely having.

  Looking down at her own body, she found herself clothed in rags. A filthy sack-like canvas shirt covered her upper body loosely. Men’s trousers three sizes too big and rancid, really truly rancid, draped her lower half. She fought down a familiar nausea as the waft from them hit her senses. She wore no underwear and subconsciously pulled her arms around herself.

  As the brightness became normal, she became aware that she wasn’t alone. Far from it. Moving her eyes was painful, so she rotated her pounding head on aching vertebrae and scanned the room. Perhaps ninety people lay in various states of consciousness. Men, boys, women and girls lay around her on the pristine, sterile floor of the very white room.

  All were clothed as she was. Some looked at her for reassurance, like a child looks at a parent for answers, simply because she was the most alert-looking in the room. Many were too busy looking down at themselves or around the room, wondering at what they wore and where they were. Michelle’s eyes teared-up as they flitted from one face to another. Some were scared white. Others shook their heads, certain, as she herself was, that they’d awake somewhere warm and familiar at any moment. Most were starting to panic as they became fully awake. None of them looked to be anything other than very ordinary, very scared people.

  One man started laughing loudly, causing Michelle to jump at the suddenness and intensity of his Sid James-esque bray. In other circumstances she’d have laughed along with the man and described his laugh as the dirtiest she’d ever heard. Today, in this place, the man’s laugh was the sound of his sanity rustling as it left him and broke against the white walls. Today the laugh was truly terrifying and corrupting to the tenuous grip on reason held by the room’s inhabitants.

  Michelle shut the noise out and focused on a group of seven people who still lay prone near the only door visible to her. A few others had started to move towards them also, drawn by their relative stillness. As Michelle drew closer, she noticed that the members of the group of adults and children weren’t as still as they’d seemed from the other side of the room. They were twitching and jerking, although only slightly, like someone in the depths of a nightmare. Michelle felt a laugh of her own escape. Irony always had made her laugh.

  Pushing her way gently past the little group of stunned observers gathered around the apparently sleeping people on the floor, she mentally swatted away the mist of a thought that was beginning to surface and placed a hand on the nearest boy’s forehead. The boy was burning up with fever. A quick glance at the other sweat-soaked faces in the group confirmed that they all were feverish. And then she saw the wounds.

  Michelle’s eyes widened with horror as her subconscious pushed harder and filled her mind’s eye with thousands of images of people she’d seen in the same condition. People in the latter stages of infection. People who’d been bitten. Infected.

  Without guile or embarrassment she pulled the filthy clothes from her body and searched every visible inch of herself for bite marks. She pulled a man who stood next to her close and asked him to look in all the places she couldn’t see. Without asking, she pulled his shirt and trousers from him. Too stunned to protest, he allowed her to check for bites. Word spread, quickly. Within minutes everyone in the room was naked and checking each other for any signs of broken skin.

  Eventually each of the room’s occupants silently dressed once more, relief smashed aside with returning panic. Why? Why were they here? In the next five seconds three things happened to make their questions the last thing they needed to worry about.

  Chapter 5

  Early Spring

  2032

  A loud clang rang out and bounced around the tiles of the room. Many of the people jumped in fright. Some of them disappeared, dropping through the large trapdoor that had fallen open six feet from the pristine white floor into a barely-lit tunnel below, forming a slippery white-tiled ramp into the darkness.

  Many of the people in the room stood and gaped into the darkness, but only for a single second. Only until the loud scream of a child at the rear of the group snapped everyone’s attention around to the feverish group of almost-dead at the main doors. Now fully risen they were attacking the people closest to them with a bottomless, vicious hunger that tore flesh from bone and limb from socket. All of those present had seen the show. It didn’t need said, but one man, the still-laughing man, felt the need to shout out the obvious.

  “We’re in dEaDINBURGH.”

  He was positively gleeful – until a newly-reanimated Ringed tore his throat out with its clawed hands and devoured the flesh.

  Like a wave of pestilence The Ringed moved throughout the room, tearing, biting and clawing with the strength and speed of the newly risen at the room’s panicked occupants.

  Michelle MacLeod saw none of this. As soon as the trap door had slammed down into the darkness, she’d become a blur of movement. No thought, just deed. Launching herself along the tunnel, Michelle shouldered each of the people in her path aside. Leaving them in a wake of bewilderment, she cut through the darkness, one hand grabbing the loose waist of the men’s trousers she wore into a fist, the other reaching out in front of her, searching through the darkness.

  Her fingers cracked against a wooden panel, causing a jolt of nerve pain to lightning up her arm and the panel to dislodge. A slice of very strong sunlight lasered through the gap she’d made. She saw the dust and dirt she’d swept along with her swirl around in the biblical shaft of light that cut through the tunnel’s blackness and took a second t
o shout back to the other people, if people they still were.

  “This way. There’s a way out.”

  Shouldering through the panel of MDF, Michelle clattered onto the earth outside and shut her eyes against the brightness of the day. Beneath her eyelids, her eyes still hurt, such was the intensity of the Edinburgh sunshine and the contrasting darkness of the tunnel. Placing a hand over her closed eyes, she gave her pupils the dangerous few seconds they needed to contract and then tentatively peered from beneath her eyelids.

  The world was a cacophony of colours in the air and in the flora and fauna. She looked into a wild part of the countryside. Trees and bushes, grasses and shrubs, all filled with bright berries, flowers and fruit, shone alongside a straight, concrete path cutting through the beauty of the landscape. The fauna, perhaps a hundred yards along the path, hadn’t noticed her yet, but with the screaming coming along the tunnel behind her, their desiccated faces and mouldering teeth would turn her way soon.

  Michelle blinked stupidly into the sun and let out a quiet sneeze. She’d always been a sun-sneezer. Her friends had mocked her playfully for it, but she’d always liked the trait she shared with her mother. In this place it was no longer a cute quirk of genetics: it was a bloody liability.

  Her eyes darted to a meadow to her right and picked out the unmoving body of a dead, truly dead, Ringed. She moved with speed towards the partially-rotted pile of bones and decayed flesh that not even the maggots feasted on.

  Picking up the fleshiest part she could see – badly putrefied quadriceps – Michelle covered her exposed flesh and already rancid clothing in the black, jelly-like fluids of the decaying Ringed. She coated her face, and carefully applied congealed fluid that had once been blood as though it were her favourite make-up. Taking her time, she flicked away the little clots that threatened to make her vomit despite the state of cold calculation her mind had entered, and smoothed foul, blackened paste-like flesh over her own skin, raking it through her hair as though she were applying the most luxurious of oil treatments. When Michelle had finished her task she looked as though she’d fallen into a container of rotted offal.

  Taking a belt from the trousers of The Ringed she’d coated herself in, Michelle tied it around her waist, gathering the folds of fabric together before hurting her waist with the tightness of the leather. She shut herself off to the loud moans of dusty hunger and the wet tear of cracked teeth on living flesh coming from the cycle path at the tunnel’s exit.

  Nothing to do. Nothing I can do. Just move.

  Years of images flooded her mind once more. Information on operations she’d been privy to as a board member of the UKBC flooded her mind, along with detailed layouts, blueprints and maps of the dead city.

  Subconsciously she placed her hand above her slightly swollen uterus, absorbed strength and purpose from it, decided on a destination and used the other gift her mother had given her. A lifelong stamina athlete, Michelle MacLeod ran like she’d never run in her whole life.

  Chapter 6

  Early Spring

  2032

  After three hours of combined hard running – when none of The Ringed were nearby – and excruciatingly slow shambling – when their dusty, milk-filmed gaze fell upon her – Michelle reached the lower Banshee Labyrinth, a former underground bar whose site had utilised an underground chamber or vault left behind from the Middle Ages. Approaching the smaller double doors to the left of the main entrance, Michelle placed her right index finger onto a lichen-covered but very modern-looking keypad. Closing her eyes she searched for fleeting memories of documents, meetings and data she’d been privy to in her role as Director of Human Rights with the UKBC. Finally her brain offered up a six-digit code and her fingers moved. Smiling as a green light beeped and a heavy lock disengaged, the gore-covered former director glanced quickly up and down the length of the narrow, cobbled street before pushing through the doors into the relative coolness and safety of the former bar and present UKBC communications hub.

  Placing both of her hands on the heavy door, Michelle pushed slowly but firmly on them, bringing the doors together and feeling for the lock which she slid back into place. Refitted in the early days of dEaDINBURGH being broadcast, The Hub was one of the most secure facilities the company had built. The bunker’s primary function was to serve as a relay station for all of the newsfeeds, footage, images and sound streaming from the cameras, both mobile and stationary, throughout the city.

  Once a year The Hub was occupied by technicians for three-month shifts. The technicians were brought into the area by tunnel from the main complex out at Little France and spent their twelve-week isolation in The Hub maintaining and upgrading the hardware and the software so crucial to the content of the show. In her role, Michelle had assisted in planning the safe transport of the technicians through the purpose-built tunnels to Cowgate. Competition between techs for placement in The Hub was fierce, simply because the bonus offered was so high.

  Michelle leaned back against the secure doors and sat on the dusty concrete floor of the massive chamber. She cried silently for almost an hour.

  Finally, exhausted, shivering and defeated, she rose to her feet. The last of her sobs blubbed out and she whined like an infant who’d been crying uncontrollably despite having long ago forgotten why they’d begun. She almost laughed, but gasped again to stifle it, fearing that she was losing the tenuous thread of reality she clung to. Her hand shook with cold and fear as it reached for the power switch at the left of the entrance she’d used. An itch at the back of her mind told her to switch it on, as the windows and doors were specifically designed to not allow a scrap of light, heat or sound to escape from the underground hub of blinking red LEDs and busy processors. The part of herself that had been in charge since the white room’s trapdoor fell said leave it.

  She listened to that voice. It had got her this far. Wrapping her arms around herself, Michelle staggered towards a large couch she could see bathed in the greens and reds of the clicking and whirring systems. She lay across the cold leather, pulled a heavy, woollen throw from the rear of the couch over her trembling body and slept.

  Chapter 7

  Early Spring

  2032

  With heavy limbs and heart, Michelle woke twenty hours later and returned to the master power switch. She had no idea if night or day awaited her outside, nor of how long she’d slept, but in the safety and darkness of The Hub, time was her least pressing concern. Her stomach growled and sent a wave of cramp across her abdomen. She was just shy of four months pregnant. Developing foetuses didn’t tolerate long fasts.

  Pulling down on the master lever, Michelle winced as cold, clinical, bright light flooded the chamber. Bats flew from their perches and retreated deeper into the dungeon, perhaps to a former keg store. Dust sparkled like Christmas in the halogen glow as she gradually opened her tightly-shut lids to take in the room.

  The high, dome-shaped ceiling, carved from solid rock, was covered with massive halogen floodlights whose harsh light bathed the room in unnatural brightness. Michelle took in her surroundings. Most of the processers and servers were covered loosely with light, thin dustsheets that did little to block the blinking lights she’d noted upon entering The Hub, but succeeded in keeping the worst of the centuries of dust from clogging vents and fans. She couldn’t help but conjure an image of Chris Nolan’s batcave.

  To the rear of the chamber was an office area. Box files, stacked tidily atop each other, lined a wall, and several desks with laptops, their charging lights blinking, filled the rest of the area. Walking unsteadily and with her throw still guarding against the coldness of the former dungeon, Michelle explored the remainder of the chamber, finding a sleeping area with comfortable-looking bunks, a shelf holding around a hundred fiction books of various genres and a functioning halogen heater.

  Michelle flipped several switches on the heater. Pulling a comfortable, reclining chair towards it, she sat upright, bathing her hands in the orange glow. It took almost th
irty minutes for the warmth to reach her bones and longer still for the chill in her spine to melt.

  Standing once more, Michelle made her way through to the final area she’d yet to explore and found herself whispering a prayer. Please let the stores have been restocked.

  Reaching the storeroom door, she found a heavy steel doorway with a spinning wheel mechanism in the centre. She closed her eyes, offering up one final bargain to God. Let the stores have been restocked. Let there be food, and I swear I’ll thank you every day. The wheel turned smoothly on its spindle. Michelle shoved it inwards and groped around the wall inside the door for a switch. Clicking the lights on, she gasped.

  Floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with supplies made her think of Christmas for the second time. Dried cereals, long-life UHT milk, massive containers of water, dried fruit and dozens upon dozens of tinned goods. Peaches, meat, vegetables, beans, spaghetti – more than enough to last a single person for months. A long, slow sigh escaped her lips and some of the tension she’d been feeling since waking in the white room melted away with the frost in her bones. She could survive. She could feed her unborn child.

  Scanning around the rest of the store, Michelle found good stocks of various supplies. Matches, camping stoves, duct tape and boxes of clothes which seemed to have come from the Salvation Army HQ in the next building.

  She broke open a box of Mars bars and groaned like one of the hungry Ringed as she chewed the first mouthful. The creamy, sugary chocolate lifted her spirits, making anything seem possible.

  Michelle closed the storeroom door behind her and went looking for bathroom facilities. Finding a small washroom and toilet in the next ante-chamber, she was unsurprised to discover that running water filled the toilet and gushed through the taps. The company hadn’t bothered to turn the running water off into the city. Why would they? They needed their survivors alive to entertain. Hot water wasn’t an option, though, not even here in The Hub.