by Wilson, Mark
In the week following Somna’s attack and Bracha’s betrayal, James and I argue many times. Believing that our friend is still under Bracha’s surface somewhere, he wants to go back, covertly, and extract him from The Exalted’s hands.
Following a storm of screamed accusations, recriminations and eventually, grudging acceptance, James has agreed to continue to the city-centre with me. God only knows what or who we’ll find once we arrive. We haven’t come near the epicentre of the outbreak since Hogmanay 2015, assuming that The Ringed will be most concentrated in that area. Our memories of The Royal Mile and outlying streets still wake us in the night, even after a decade of fighting… of surviving this city. For the moment, the city-centre seems like a gamble worth taking. Neither of us wants to be anywhere familiar right now. Everywhere we might camp or hunt in the south of the city is tinged with memories of him. We want to be gone from here.
James is broken, but he’ll heal.
I just want to start over, free of a responsibility which became a burden for the first time in my adult life.
I’m approaching middle age. Thoughts of a life, a family, someone to love, weigh on me. Is that even possible in this city? I don’t know. I have no clue what waits for us in the city-centre. Communities like those established in the south that we’ve encountered in our years amongst the dead? Fenced off areas where people survive that little bit easier inside the chicken wire barriers than they do outside?
Religious nutters? Killers? Streets filled with only The Ringed? Somewhere to heal and find peace?
We have no way of knowing. All I know is that whatever lies there, waiting for us, for the first time since Sandhurst it’ll be our choice what we choose to face. Who we choose to be. It’ll be our lives to live.
Padre Jock’s Journal
Part Two
Chapter 1
Jock
Two weeks after Grayson’s party left the Kirk I began to worry. After a third week passed, I took a team of five people to track them down. We had a good idea that they had been headed for The Royal Mile, Grayson’s ideal location. The main road from Canongate to the upper part of The Mile was a sea of The Ringed. We wasted the best part of another week travelling stealthily through closes and back-alleys. We lost two of our team, and the other three blamed me. It was obvious that Grayson’s team, including my children, were dead. I pushed on, they went back to the Kirk.
Finally, I found my way to the balcony atop the wall of the City Chambers, looking out onto The Mile. At the first arch lay signs of a feeding frenzy. Blood, gore. My son’s shoes. My soul shrank that day, Joseph. I felt part of it shake free and leave while the rest contracted to stone.
Numbly, I made my way back to Canongate Kirk in a day. I didn’t care about stealth anymore, I took the direct route. I have no idea how I made it and no memory of the journey. All I saw in front of me was the red puddle that had once been my kids.
Not long after I arrived the dead came to us. En masse they swarmed, their numbers bringing down our fences and our doors. Thousands streamed along Canongate devouring everything in their path. A bunch of students living in an apartment to the side of the Kirk must have found some batteries or something and had been paying Rage Against The Machine at a deafening volume for hours. Perhaps celebrating something. Maybe a suicide pact – there’d been plenty of those in recent months.
God knows what they were thinking.
It was over with in less than thirty minutes. The little community we’d founded, the dozens of survivors I’d helped keep alive, hoping beyond all evidence for a rescue, were torn to pieces, consumed, defiled. Sinfully, I knelt in the basement waiting to die, I didn’t even try to fight. I was destroyed inside, Joseph. Isabelle screamed abuse at me, and she had every right. They all died, each one of them. Isabelle left me in the basement to die. I laughed as she disappeared upstairs. I actually laughed at her. A cold part of my mind made me shout after her, “You said no heroics. Well, you’ve got it, Isabelle.”
The Kirk was rocked violently by an explosion. We’d kept liquid fuel and canisters of gas in the hall for heating, cooking, light. Perhaps someone had made a stand and lit them as a last measure. Perhaps they just went up by accident, I didn’t care. It didn’t make a difference to me how I died, Joseph.
Then I heard her. Isabelle was screaming, not for me, but in rage and in pain. The sound sent a lightning torrent of memories through my mind’s eye. Meeting Isabelle, how in love we were, the disapproval and then acceptance from my parents, her laugh, God, it was musical. I hadn’t heard it in so long I’d forgotten the effect that it had on me. Joyful, that’s what it made me.
Screaming and determined words from upstairs brought back images and smells and pain and elation from the labour ward. Isabelle had suffered terribly delivering Tricia. She’d collapsed again and again in the breaks between contractions. She’d risen again with the next and pushed and strained and screamed and yelled. Isabelle had taught me what courage, real courage, was in that little white room in Wishaw General. All her admonishments of “no heroics, Jock,” when she was the most heroic of us all.
I remembered who my wife was and who I was.
I bolted upstairs to find the hall engulfed by fire. Flames licked along the walls, consumed the wooden pews and brought sections of the ancient ceiling down. The roof didn’t look far behind. Another yell from Isabelle helped me locate her. She was on her back, fighting a small woman who sat atop her, snapping her teeth an inch from Isabelle’s throat. Only her right forearm wedged under the creature’s chin prevented Isabelle’s throat from being torn out.
I covered the distance between us in three paces, my fourth step became a powerful kick aimed at the woman’s head. She flew off Isabelle, who was on her feet in an instant. She slapped me hard across the face. No words were exchanged. We simply fled – there’s no other word for it, Joseph – we ran for our lives.
Together, we ran through the rear graveyard, shouldering Ringed from our path. Emerging out onto Calton Road, Isabelle found us a car we could use which we drove to Lochend Park. She insisted we went there. Somewhere remote. Somewhere quiet.
Isabelle died there maybe ten minutes after we arrived. Laid on a beautifully-carved oak bench surrounded by spring flowers at the lakeside, my wife died in my arms from the bite she’d received back in the Kirk. I silenced her before she reanimated.
I was utterly numbed, Joseph. Oh, I did the basics: I fought, I killed The Ringed, I ate and took shelter. I roamed around for years, always making my way back to the city-centre for long spells. Always standing at that place at the City Chambers, staring at the cobbles washed clean by the weather many times over since. The fences began to go up; I helped erect some of them. Many times I took payment from The Brotherhood for keeping their community free of all but the most decayed dead and building their barriers.
After maybe ten years, I stopped travelling around and stayed permanently in the city-centre. 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 walked away from people who I could have helped, Isabelle’s words echoing in my mind. No heroics.
For seven more years I existed instead of living until the screams of a woman delivering her baby into this hell brought me running to the very place my children died.
God forgive me for my sins. I have so many and so much more to tell you, Joseph. Not so that I’ll be forgiven, not because I believe in second chances for someone like me, but simply because I want you to learn from my weakness. All I can give you is my promise that we’ll leave here together one day soon, Joseph, and that I’ll give you my Journal to learn from.
Your friend
Jock
Chapter 2
Jenny
The grass was wildly overgrown, but that could be fixed. The soil beneath was rich, deep and nourishing. It looked good enough to eat, so that was a blessing. The fences around were strong iron and completely enclosed The Gardens. The Ringed who’d been trapped i
nside the locked gates had been few and easy to silence.
Jennifer Kinsella stood atop the northern slope of Princes’ Street Gardens, scanning the expanse, planning plots for peas, barley, onions and carrots. Who knew what else they may learn to cultivate?
Jenny smiled, satisfied that with the assistance of the new arrivals their fledgling community had a chance. Drawn up Castle Rock, her eyes misted for a moment as she replayed in her mind the previous day’s conversation with Padre Jock. Out of respect, gratitude, maybe guilt, she’d invited Jock to join her and Fiona in the safety of The Gardens after chancing upon him on a reconnaissance run along the fences of Grayson’s Brotherhood.
Thin, vacant and weak, he’d looked like a phantom. Part of Jennifer had sighed with relief when he’d refused her invitation. They needed strong people in The Gardens. People like Cameron Shephard and James Kelly, the two soldiers who’d arrived three days previously, agreeing quickly and gratefully to assist in founding their new farming community. Strong people, she thought, her eyes moving across The Gardens to the area that was being cleared to accommodate a training area. People had to know how to fight.
She had eked every skill, technique and useful strategy from dozens of fighters, ex-soldiers, fireman, police and prison officers in the decade she’d been in the city. It was time to pass her skills along to her new community.
Weakness would kill them. That, Jennifer wouldn’t allow.
End of Book 3
dEaDINBURGH Will Continue
dEaDINBURGH: Vantage (Din Eidyn Corpus 1)
dEaDINBURGH: Alliances (Din Eidyn Corpus 2)
dEaDINBURGH: Collected Edition
These titles are available on kindle and paperback from Amazon, US and UK as well as other formats at Paddy’s Daddy Publishing.
Also by Mark Wilson:
Bobby’s Boy (Lanarkshire Strays)
Naebody’s Hero (Lanarkshire Strays)
Head Boy (Lanarkshire Strays)
Paddy’s Daddy
The Man Who Sold His Son (Lanarkshire Strays)
Lanarkshire Strays: Collected Edition
dEaDINBURGH: Vantage (Din Eidyn Corpus 1)
dEaDINBURGH: Origins (Din Eidyn Corpus 3)
dEaDINBURGH: Collected Edition
These titles are available on kindle and paperback from Amazon, US and UK as well as other formats at Paddy’s Daddy Publishing.
Dedication
For Martin and Tricia Ferguson.
"There's no other love like the love for a brother. There's no other love like the love from a brother." - Terri Guillemets
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank the following people for their support in writing this novel:
Tricia Ferguson for the trust she placed in me.
My editor/proof-reader, Stephanie Dagg. Steph is a wonder and I wouldn’t print a book without her input.
Thanks to my test-readers Derek Graham, Louise MacDonald, Tracy Stewart.
Very special thanks to Jayne Doherty and Gayle Karabelen for their continued support of my writing career and to Michelle Ruedin for her insights and enthusiasm for the project.
Special thanks also to fellow writers Keith Nixon and Ryan Bracha.
Thanks also to Paul McGuigan of PMCG Photography for lending me his talents shooting key locations from the book around Edinburgh on a very dreech afternoon.
A huge thank you, as always, to my wife Natalie Wilson for unwavering encouragement and support. I wouldn’t have written a word without your belief in me.
Author’s Note
I had a lot of fun writing this instalment in the dEaDINBURGH series. At least I did until it came time to write Padre Jock’s journal. Up until that point I’d been merrily torturing my favourite ginger Royal, slowly twisting him into Bracha. It was all fun, games and Zombie mayhem, and then I needed Jock to suffer a great loss.
Having established in Book 1 that Jock had been a father, I began plotting a minor but crucial role for his two children. I planned to kill them both, and his wife, to get him to where and to whom I needed him to be for the later (or earlier) books. Aye, I’m a sadistic wee shite with my characters.
Problem was, I had asked my friend Tricia if I could use her name and that of her late brother for Jock’s kids. I always try to use names that matter to me, but in this case, Tricia and I share a weird link through her brother and my sister. I wanted to do something to acknowledge this and to give Tricia a little memorial for her brother.
I barely knew Martin, but Tricia is one of the funniest, most engaged, engaging and vital people I know. That she loved her brother so deeply spoke volumes of him for me. She said yes straight away and sent me a long email describing her relationship with Martin.
Her trust in me was touching. I promised to do her and her brother proud and got to work.
Tricia and Martin’s roles in this book changed almost as soon as I began writing them. As often happens with characters, they began doing their own thing and took the story in a much different path to the one I’d had in mind. Kind of appropriate that Tricia Ferguson and her brother stole my story.
Thanks for trusting me with your memories, T. xxx
This book was inspired by Jonathan Maberry’s Rot & Ruin series. A gorgeous set of books.
You can find Jon at Amazon UK and US.
Thank you for reading my book.
Please consider visiting Amazon UK, Amazon.US or Goodreads and leaving a review.
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