dEaDINBURGH

by Wilson, Mark

Despite her mind’s best efforts at torturing her the previous night, Alys had fallen into a deep and peaceful sleep. The moss-covered former cycle path had been the most comfortable surface she’d slept on for a week or so, more so than even the hospital bed. As a result she was feeling alert and positive. The campsite was mostly silent; the only sounds breaking the silence were the crackle of fat spitting as it dropped into a fire and the ubiquitous groaning of the dead. Alys didn’t even register the latter. It had been the soundtrack to her life. She only paid attention to those sounds when they became desperate or aggressive or were close by; not the throbbing, passive need, the torture of eternal hunger that the undead felt and expressed habitually.

  Leaving the relative warmth of the tent, which smelled strongly of Joey as well as the roasting meat, she stepped out into the frosty morning air to find two rabbits, suspended above a small but very fierce fire, rotating on a hand-cranked rotisserie. Joey’s bow and quiver rested against the trunk of a sycamore.

  “Morning, Alys.” He smiled at her.

  “Hey, Joey.”

  “Feeling better about yesterday?” he asked.

  Alys sat cross-legged on top of a little camping mat he’d laid out for her.

  “Yeah. I still think we should check up on them, in a few months. Maybe just look in on them without letting them know that we’re there?”

  Joey made a little gesture, indicating that he was fine with that.

  He did that kind of thing a lot – made movements with his eyes, body or hands, instead of speaking. It wasn’t something she’d been used to in The Gardens, but a boy who’d lived in silent darkness for most of his life was bound to have a few odd mannerisms. When he did speak, he didn’t waste words. His softly-delivered statements always had purpose and he never spent them on idle chit-chat.

  “Thanks, Joey,” she said. Alys would go anyway, with or without him, but she’d much rather they went together. The realisation of this need made her harden her voice a little.

  “So, you’ve been busy this morning.” She jabbed a thumb towards the rotating bunnies and then another at his bow. “You use the bow?”

  He gave her another nod. Choosing not to speak once again, he indicated that she should choose a rabbit for breakfast.

  “Wait there for a minute.” She darted off into the wooded area around the cycle path.

  She scanned around the shrubbery, stepping between thorns and brambles, selecting an array of brightly-coloured berries, flowers, tubers and some unappetising-looking leaves, before returning to the fire.

  Removing the rabbits from their spinning stick, she picked them clean of meat, throwing the pieces into a food can along with water, leaves, flowers and some of the tubers, which she’d broken into chunks.

  “Give it half an hour,” she told him, placing the can into the ashes at the side of the fire to simmer.

  Alys handed him a handful of blackberries and raspberries.

  “These’ll keep you going for now.”

  Joey moved his nose over to the can and sniffed at the steam rising from it.

  “What’s in it?”

  “You never used local plants when you were out travelling the north with Jock?”

  Joey shook his head. “We just ate meat most of the time; never any shortage of that. I did miss the potatoes and onions The Gardens would bring up to The Brotherhood, though.”

  Alys prickled at the reminder, but hid it from him.

  She pointed into the pot. “That’s spinach, or close enough that we can call it that.”

  Shifting her finger around she pointed out green beans, mint, parsnip and carrot, none of which Joey recognised.

  “There’s good energy in the vegetables and the other leaves will make the meat taste better.”

  She watched Joey take another deep sniff of the steam.

  “Smells amazing, Alys.”

  “Yeah, well, are you going to sit there smelling your food all morning, or are you ready to discuss how we should approach the hospital?”

  Joey’s smile disappeared.

  “You think that Bracha is already there, don’t you?”

  Alys nodded.

  “I do. And not just because of the cut fence back there. He’s desperate to find this cure, Joey. He wanted help, but I reckon that he’s realised that he’s not going to get it and has opted for stealth instead of force.”

  “I’ve no problem hunting that… that man,” Joey said. “It’s just that after what I… we did to him last time, he’ll be ready for us, Alys. This guy’s a monster, more so than any of those things.”

  Joey jerked his head in the direction of some of The Ringed who were tangled in brambles at the end of the pathway.

  Alys hadn’t met many males. Aside from Jock (barely), Joey and of course Bracha, she’d encountered maybe twenty of them on her Ranger patrols; a few of whom she’d spoken to, and some of whom she’d been forced to kill. Despite her lack of exposure to them, one thing that seemed common to all of them was that they misunderstood and completely underestimated women.

  Alys had been raised to believe that all men were weak and not to be trusted. She’d been taught that The Gardens were safer, better-defended without that weakness present. Whilst she hadn’t entirely bought into the notion, she had allowed those beliefs to shape her, to build her in body and soul into a lethally clever, immensely skilled and very dangerous woman. A Ranger.

  Every single one of the men she’d encountered had failed to see that. They’d been blind to the resourceful and determined woman who stood before them and had attempted to protect, molest, intimidate, control or ignore her in their exchanges. Alys pitied them and despised them in equal measures.

  And Joey was sitting here, trying to protect her from Bracha despite all he knew of her and her people, despite the history they shared, the connection and the provisions the strong women of The Gardens had given The Brotherhood who raised him. Despite the training he’d received from Jennifer. It was a cold, hard slap across her face and a startling reminder of her mother’s words, drummed into her since infancy. “They’re weak; they’ll try to control you. Pity them, but don’t trust them. Ever.” Alys was so disappointed in the boy with the bow.

  “You really think that you need to tell me that?” she asked, stone-faced, voice filled with contempt. “After what happened to Stephanie? I looked at that man for three seconds and knew everything about him, Joey. I knew how he moved in combat from the steps he took. I saw how lethal he was from the way his hands spoke for him; every gesture betrayed the deadliness of those hands. I saw the predator in his posture, in his eyes. Just like I see the warmth, the concern in yours.”

  It wasn’t a compliment.

  Alys stared hard at him, baring her teeth enough that she had to speak through them. Perhaps to keep the anger that raged through her from exploding onto Joey.

  “I see everything, Joey. I see how patronising you are and how weak your concern for me makes you. I’ve trained my whole life. You know what I can do in a fight, but you sit there telling me that I should be careful, like you’re better equipped than me or more able.”

  She lowered her voice, made it much more threatening.

  “Don’t ever think that I need you Joey. You’re so… arrogant. Soft. You don’t face your anger or your desire to make that man pay for what he did for Jock. You with your stupid rules, your checks, your mantra. No heroics.” She spat the phrase out. “You haven’t even had the guts to read that man’s journal. Who the hell did you think he wrote it for?” Alys glared at him for a second and hurled a final insult. “Jock would be ashamed of you. Coward.”

  His eyes filled with moisture, making her all the more convinced at how useless he was to her, despite his skills. He really was weak. Jennifer was right. She always was. It was time to ditch Joey and deal with Bracha on her own. Find the cure and be the hero that this clown was too weak to be.

  Alys stood. Turning back to the tent, she grabbed her possessions and began stuffing them furio
usly into her rucksack. She became aware that Joey was now standing, glaring at her through the tears that boiled down his own face, tracing clean tracks through the soot that covered it.

  “I can’t read it.” He wasn’t sad, despite the tears. He wasn’t angry and he wasn’t upset or hurt. He wasn’t any of the things that his tears suggested. “I can’t read at all.” He wasn’t hurt, no. He was embarrassed. “I’m not scared of you, Alys, and I’m not scared for you either.” He placed a shaking hand on the satchel that held Jock’s journal. “I was taught that survival was the most important thing. Not revenge. I want to kill that man so badly, but Jock wouldn’t want that.” Joey’s whole body shook with anger now. He was barely holding it back.

  Alys decide to push him a little harder.

  “Jock is dead.” It was brutal honesty at its best, or worst? But he needed to move on from the guilt and obligations to his surrogate father that he carried around like a dead weight. “Bracha will be back for you, or for me. Bracha might already have this cure, if it exists. Our survival is utterly dependent on removing this bastard from the face of the planet. Jock would tell you to kill him.”

  Suddenly Joseph MacLeod broke inside, right in front of her. His shoulders sagged, his eyes lost the fire of anger they’d possessed moments before and his legs lost their strength, dropping him to his knees onto the moss.

  Voice a whisper, he wept harder.

  “Jock told me that man had to die. He said we should kill Bracha the first day that we met him. I talked him out of it.”

  Alys walked towards him and placed a hand on his shoulder. He wasn’t weak at all; he was, in fact, a very strong man who hadn’t yet taken the time to grieve for the only parent he’d ever known.

  A memory of her own father itched at her, making her wince. Escaping from a long-forgotten cell in her subconscious, an image leapt across her mind’s eye. The man with the calloused hands, brown eyes and wide smile bounced her on his knee. She must’ve been four and was squealing in delight. He sang ‘Mary had a Little Lamb’ to her, whilst her mother scowled at him. She mentally shoved it back into the darkness.

  “Would you like to read Jock’s journal with me? All of it?”

  “Yes,” he said, with everything in him. “There’s nothing I’d like more.”

  Chapter 18

  Stephanie

  Feet side-on to her target, left arm solid but supple and holding her bow loosely from her body, Stephanie drew back the bow string smoothly, touching it to the tip of her nose, not to her cheek as her instructor continuously asked her to. She simply didn’t care what the archery teacher had to say. She’d seen Joey use this method and Joey was the best. So far. She was determined to be better.

  Her arms ached, having lifted and strained and pulled for over four hours, repeatedly loosing arrows at the target Joey had used during his time in The Gardens. He’d told her that when he fired an arrow, he visualised it hitting the target and then just made it do so. She’d been trying to do the same for weeks but Joey’s visualisation technique hadn’t worked for her until she began to see every target as Bracha’s left eye. Then she began to pile every arrow, one after the other, into the exact spot she wished them to go.

  She had the bow, perfectly made after fifteen attempts, from old plastic pipes and twine. She had the will and the technique and the motivation. Now she just needed to change herself, to build a body that wouldn’t betray her aim. That meant hundreds of hours of shooting. That required her to focus on combat and archery, nothing else. Not her friends, not her mother and not how much she was already missing Joey and her cousin.

  She had a long way to go, but had an endless engine of hate to propel her there. Any time she tired, she’d picture his face, touch her patch-covered eye socket and resume her exercises.

  Patience, she told herself with every draw of her bow. Patience, she told the jackhammer in her chest that threatened to explode from her body in white-hot rage each time she thought of Bracha. Patience; be ready; be ready for him. You’ll get your chance.

  With her back to the Castle, she loosed another perfect shot that travelled forty feet across The Gardens and struck the centre of a hay target that looked to her exactly like Bracha’s face whilst a group of kids her age watched her.

  Patience.

  Chapter 19

  Joey

  Joey raked through the shrubbery searching for the plants Alys had found for them that morning. He wanted to duplicate the meal she’d so easily put together for them, but this time with some venison from the deer he’d killed an hour before. Alys was back at their camp cleaning the animal. The fur, meat, some of the organs and a few of the long bones would all come in handy at some point. The meat most of all could be wrapped in cling film that Joey had in his rucksack and would keep for a few days, maybe a week, in the current temperature. Most likely it wouldn’t even require cooking before consumption until day three or four.

  Having initially planned to travel to the hospital, less than a mile along Craigmillar Castle Road, they’d had a change of heart after the morning’s events and had spent most of the daylight hours devouring Jock’s journal. Alys had patiently helped Joey through each page, assisting him in reading the contents. Waiting until he stumbled over a phrase, she’d softly correct him or finish a word rather than just read the whole thing for him. “You need to learn, and fast,” Alys had said several times as he’d complained about his ineptitude, offering her the book to read for him.

  He wasn’t anywhere near so bad at deciphering the words as he’d expected to be. Jock had begun to teach him to read, but their practice sessions had been spent looking at street names on maps and on buildings they’d passed. The street names were always so clear, in black, printed capitals. Jock’s journal, filled with looping, swooping and curled letters held only confusion, embarrassment and fear for him. At least initially.

  As he’d been forced by Alys to try to read through the hand-written text, he became aware that his perception of the individual letters and words was slowly improving. Initially he’d had to mentally convert stylised letters into their more capitalised equivalent. As he made his way through, page by page, this process became quicker and was beginning to feel instantaneous. Alys, despite how demanding she generally was, turned out to be a patient teacher. Whilst he doubted that he would be able to decipher every word on his own, yet, with her help, he was making quick progress through the journal.

  Both he and Alys devoured the pages. Jock’s journal disclosed answers to questions they’d been asking their whole lives. Questions nobody seemed to want to give answers to and brushed off with “What difference does it make now?” in reply.

  The book was filled with explanations of how the plague broke and how the city became sealed, and information about the world that had existed before the plague as well as the people who’d lived then and how they’d lived. It was simply the most exciting account of the history of their city they could have hoped for. They read of Jock’s family and his struggle to keep them alive. His own survival, the bouts of despair and depression he fought through. Joey’s mother’s horrific death, in more detail than either of them needed. They couldn’t and wouldn’t stop reading, though, until it was complete.

  As the journal progressed, it became obvious that Jock had spent the last years of his life dedicated to watching over Joey and eventually to teaching him everything he needed to survive the dead city. He’d begun writing the journal in his time with The Brotherhood and it was clear that what lay inside the pages was meant for Joey’s eyes alone. He’d loved Joey as deeply as he’d loved his own children and had been determined to see him become a strong man.

  Joey and Alys laughed and cried and raged and struggled through every word of the journal until it was done and the day had disappeared around them. They’d sat in stunned silence for maybe an hour afterwards before chatting over a few of the more shocking aspects of Jock’s account. The secrets they found inside, the revelations, and the discovery of t
hem together brought them closer than they imagined possible.

  The outbreak. The speed at which the city was abandoned. How horribly over-privileged and self-absorbed, how pampered and arrogant the people of Jock’s former world seemed to them. It was a shock to both of them. How easy the people of the early twenty-first century had life and how little they seemed to actually live those lives. They seemed so trapped – truly caged, not by fences but by the limitations they put on their own lives, by the things that they valued and the things that they didn’t. Their world seemed so dead to Joey and Alys.

  The new insights horrified them and saddened them. It made them hate the people of the past. It made them pity those same people. It also made them glad, for perhaps the first time, to be born into a place where people actually lived instead of just existing. In a city of the dead their parents had built the first living, thriving, proactive and capable communities the country had seen in generations. It gave them both a strange sense of pride.

  They looked at the dead, still groaning their dry groans, snagged on foliage all around them and saw the people of the past, shuffling blindly through their existence, focused on a goal that would never satisfy them. One group of Zoms, furthest from their camp, were gathered around the steaming corpse of a badger they’d brought down. Three of them tore chunks from the twitching animal’s flesh as their fellow dead watched Joey and Alys. Dozens of pairs of dusty eyes and hands followed the pair as they moved around the camp. Due to his upbringing, Joey had always felt pity for the dead and never more so than now.

  They spent ten minutes folding away what little there was of their camp, saying nothing. The silence was a comfort to him. Along with the darkness it made him feel at peace, able to think. He and Alys had breached some of the walls that had stood between them and he felt more strongly than he had ever done for her. What those feelings were, he still didn’t know, but she was pretty much all he had left now that Jock was gone. He had no intention of losing her.