by Wilson, Mark
Michelle reached into the shower cubicle and turned the flow onto maximum. Noting that a large, only slightly grubby towel hung on the towel rack, she set about removing the crusted clothing she’d woken up in and had so efficiently glued to her own body with the decayed fluids of The Ringed from the meadow.
Velcro-like tearing noises rasped as she peeled the shirt and trousers from her. Catching sight of herself in the mirror, Michelle laughed out loud at the sight of her gore-covered body. Her laugh held no humour; it was just a release. Tear tracks had ploughed rivulets along the remains on her cheeks, but aside from those relatively clear streaks, she was coated in filth. She looked wild, half-dead and crazed. She looked like one of The Ringed, which, she supposed, had been the point.
Stepping into the shower, she found a bar of carbolic soap on a shelf and used it to scrub her body and hair clean of the dead matter. Whatever was coming to her, she wouldn’t be leaving the safety of The Hub for the foreseeable future. If… when she chose to leave, she’d take steps to make sure that she didn’t look or smell so clean, but for now, clean was what she needed to be.
The intense cold finally drove her from the shower after fifteen minutes of hard scrubbing. Large towel wrapped around her, she made her way back to the storage room in search of clean clothes. Michelle found suitable items in the fourth box she looked in. Dressed finally in combat trousers with a belt yanked tight at the too-big waist, long kilt socks, vest, long-sleeve T-shirt and woollen pullover, Michelle fished a fleece hat from the box and pulled it over her head and ears. Making her way to the office area, she spent an hour or so flipping through documents, reading faxes – the primary means of communication to The Hub – and trying to figure out if she could or should attempt to communicate with the outside world.
The Hub had been installed primarily as a relay station and as such hadn’t been designed as a communication centre, despite the thousands of cables, fibres and feeds flowing into and out of the facility. Information and data, images and footage flowed in, were sorted and collated, then flowed back out again. The Hub’s computers weren’t enabled for internet access; they’d been specifically designed to not be able to communicate with the outside world, a measure insisted upon by Fraser Donnelly as a precaution, in case unauthorised personnel gained access to the facility. The technicians who occupied the centre were required to be isolated from the outside world for the duration of their stay. Company policy.
The image of Fraser hit her hard. She pushed all thoughts of him away violently, lest her anger shattered her logic. Absent-mindedly she rubbed her belly gently and considered her options.
She was no tech expert. Sure, with all of the data flowing through, there would have to be a way to use the feed to communicate with the outside world, but the knowledge to do so was not hers. Michelle considered sabotaging the systems, thus forcing technicians to be dispatched to investigate. What would be the point though? Even if the techs came, even if she could convince them that she wasn’t a survivor from inside the city but a company director from UKBC, it was clear that the company wanted her here. She’d only be putting the techs in the same position she herself was in.
With no immediate danger present, Michelle’s mind had lowered the shields around her sanity that had allowed the pragmatism that had brought her safely to The Hub to surface. Now, here and safe, the reconfirmation of the betrayal jolted Michelle to her knees and threatened to take her senses from her. No longer able to hold back the torrent of memories, they became an unstoppable storm – a deluge lashing her mind with unwelcome thoughts of the very recent past.
An office clinch with Fraser several months ago. An unplanned blip in their otherwise professional relationship. A moment of need shortly after her father’s death, and Fraser, an uncharacteristic shoulder to cry on, had made her feel something other than grief when she needed it. A one-off with consequences unexpected.
Weeks passed, papers crossed her desk, corporate wheels turned and people died inside the fences of dEaDINBURGH as surely as rainfall slanted on Scotland. She cursed her own failures in helping the people inside the dead zone.
In her office in The Gherkin, London, a phone beeped, the discreet contact from a security officer whose conscience was bothering him, begging her, the Head of Human Rights, to help him. She did. They met.
Michelle listened to what he had to say. She examined the digital logbooks he produced on his tablet. She told him – told herself – that it couldn’t be real. He showed her the raw footage from the security cameras inside the tunnels of the former hospital in Little France in the south of the dead city, and she threw heavy items around her office, cracking the plasterboard, scaring the man.
“I can’t live with this anymore,” he told her.
She wanted to throw something at him.
Within the hour she took the evidence to Fraser. Who else would she go to? Alone together in his office, he looked genuinely, truly upset as the images and the data passed as a reflection of the screen in his eyes, wobbling with the new moisture there. The pain carved onto his face. His voice trembled, just for a second. And then it was strong once more.
“I’ll deal with this immediately. Go home, Michelle. I’ll call you in an hour.”
She’d planned to tell him about the baby. Their baby. She would tell him soon, when this monstrous abuse of power had been dealt with.
Michelle went home and cried. She’d became angry; very angry. How badly she’d let down the people inside. How had she missed the importing of new victims? Why? Who?
Fraser called within the hour, as promised.
“We have to keep this quiet. I have several agents I trust on loan from a government contact. They’ve started investigating. They’ll want to speak to you as part of their enquiries. Are you home now? They’ll be with you soon…”
Michelle had answered the door, eyes rimmed in red, grateful to see the agents. She’d felt... unsafe. Three seconds after she opened the door, Michelle MacLeod crumpled to the floor as a needle was injected into her neck. She woke in the white room.
On her knees in the huge underground chamber, Michelle felt completely abandoned. She felt as though she’d been punched, hard, as the single inescapable fact kept screaming in her ear. He was the only one you told. He put you here.
Chapter 8
Winter
2032
Michelle winced with each carefully-placed step as she crunched her way through the snow along the wide cobbled road of The Royal Mile. The short journey from Niddry Street had brought her to The Brotherhood’s fence line where The Royal Mile met High Street. Running her hand against the fence, she traced her way along the barrier, looking for the scar left behind from a breach five years previously.
Finally bumping her fingertips against the protrusion in the interlinked wire barrier, Michelle noted that the repair had been good, given the resources at hand. She fetched the pliers she’d brought along with her from the pocket of the long, heavy wool overcoat she wore and stifled a gasp as another contraction pulsed through her body, threatening to bring her to her knees, or worse, scream out.
She accepted the pain and externalised it. As it passed she took a mental note and began cutting the makeshift lace links that stitched across the only breach in the fence’s perimeter. Two minutes apart. He’s coming.
He… Joseph.
Two days before she’d gone to Fraser with the security officer’s evidence, Michelle had paid privately for one of the new laser-amnio pregnancy scans. She’d asked her baby’s sex and cried when they told her she would soon be mother to a little boy. She watched his heart race and flutter and sobbed at the miracle of it. She watched him yawn, filling his lungs with amniotic fluid in a practiced flex of the diaphragm that would imbue the still-developing lungs with the strength to pull in air once he arrived in the world.
Michelle thought of the little racing heart, the lung practice and his jerky arm movements as she cut her way through The Brotherhood’s fences, pra
ying aloud that her son would be as strong as he’d looked in the laser scan. Strong enough to survive the world she now inhabited.
Having spent the best part of five months alone in stagnant air of The Hub, Michelle took deep breaths, gulping in the cold winter Edinburgh air as she slipped through the slice in the fence she’d just reopened. She breathed deeply, partly to enjoy the clean air but mostly to prepare for the next contraction she could already feel coming from somewhere distant inside her.
The Brotherhood was her one realistic hope of delivering her baby in safety. An isolated group of men and women, the cult worshipped the dead whom they called The Children of Elisha. They tended to the dead, even fed them, offering up their own blood in stone troughs along the length of The Royal Mile.
Most of the time, they stayed in their underground home in Mary King’s Close. Having chosen the source of the plague as their new home, The Brotherhood enjoyed the safety of the closed, dark chambers, only rarely coming to the surface to tend to the dead. They survived primarily because of the food they received in tribute from The Gardens, an agricultural community founded in the former Princes Street Gardens in the city below. Nobody at the UKBC was quite clear as to why the residents of The Gardens had taken this duty to care for The Brotherhood, but they did so with minimal to no contact between the two communities. Fresh supplies were left at regular intervals by a gate that separated the communities. One of the younger members of The Brotherhood would retrieve it and take the food below, but only after the farmers of The Gardens returned to their home. No ‘thank you’ was exchanged or required.
Michelle had watched the two communities with interest whilst on the outside of the city. Since she’d come to dEaDINBURGH, she’d observed them more closely from The Hub’s monitors. Until a few weeks ago, she’d planned to journey to The Gardens for Joseph’s birth. However, recent events in the farming community, a schism between the men and the women, looked to be about to cause a major incident and so she had shifted her plans.
With this in mind, she’d decided that the crypts of The Brotherhood would be a safer option for her and her child to see out at least the foreseeable future. She could always return to The Hub once the baby had arrived safely. In truth she’d have rather stayed in The Hub but had grown terrified of the delivery of her child the closer the inevitable date had come. With the relative safety of Mary King’s Close, their pacifist outlook and the presence of more than one former-midwife, Michelle felt that the short walk to their community was worth the risk. Before departing, she’d taken one last measure and recorded a message for her unborn son using one of The Hub’s computers. Just in case.
There were so few of The Ringed in the city-centre, particularly within and without The Brotherhood’s fences, and most of them were long-term infected, meaning that their bodies were decayed and weak having rotted for so long. Any livelier Ringed were usually taken care of by the legendary Zom-hunter, Padre Jock. Whilst Jock had been gone on an extended trip to the south of the city this past month, there had been a slightly higher presence of The Ringed, but the timing of Michelle’s visit was out of her hands. Her son was in a hurry to meet her.
Turning back to the breach she’d made in the fence, Michelle retrieved a length of smooth wire she’d brought from The Hub and began winding, pleating and pulling the opening in the fence closed once again. Working down the length of the gap, she pulled the two sides of the gash tightly together and tied the wire tightly at the bottom.
A scuffing sound behind her made her start, her next contraction folding her in two as she turned to see a handful of The Ringed, drawn by the clanging of the metal fence, shuffle towards her. They were a hundred meters or so along the cobbled road and moving slowly. Forcing herself to stay calm, Michelle breathed deeply, loudly and willed the contraction to pass. Finally, as the shredding pain began to become less intense, she moved into the shadows and along the edge of St Giles’ Cathedral’s walls, avoiding the snow with her footsteps. Her movements were swift but careful and deliberate. She made no noise whatsoever.
The unblinking eyes of The Ringed hadn’t traced her movement but had instead remained fixed on the repaired part of the fence where they’d detected the initial noise. Michelle pressed herself against the ancient stone of the Cathedral’s walls and willed herself to remain still. She couldn’t fight in her condition. Judo was not a friend to a heavily pregnant woman, and besides, a martial art where you grapple or throw an opponent wasn’t exactly appealing against The Ringed. Stealth was her only option.
Watching the group of Ringed shamble past her, she noted that they were much more recently infected than she would have expected to find this close to the centre of the city. But then, and she knew better than most, there were always newly-infected arriving or being created in the dead city. As The Ringed made their way clumsily down the gradient towards the fence, Michelle took two tentative steps, pressing her foot softly into the snow. Checking downhill to her right, she confirmed that the group were still focused on the fence. She stole a look upwards to her left, noting that another group of the dead were staring up at a pigeon perched on a statue. She breathed deeply once more and quickly but lightly crossed over to the heavy doors of Mary King’s Close.
Pulling at the rope leading through the stone wall beside the door, Michelle listened for the tinkling of the bell whilst scanning both ways along The Royal Mile once more. Another contraction spilt her in two and threw her to the snow-covered cobbles. They were coming so quickly now. Hardly any respite lay between the periods of intense agony that heralded the arrival of her child.
A small hatch opened at head height on the heavy wooden door and a man watched her passively with glazed eyes as she fought through the contraction. Standing on shaky legs, Michelle caught her breath.
“I need Father Grayson,” she hissed through gritted teeth. The man gave a single slow nod and closed the hatch. She could hear his footsteps disappear down a staircase.
Yet another contraction racked her body as she waited. This time she did scream out in agony and this time the eyes of The Ringed near and far along The Royal Mile rotated lazily and fixed directly on her. She reached out and pulled the rope again as dozens of pairs of shabby feet scuffed and tripped their way towards her.
The hatch opened and Grayson’s face appeared. He took her appearance in silently.
Despite her months in The Hub and the clothes she’d scavenged there, Michelle still looked out of place amongst the city’s residents. She knew this and had spent little time out of her sanctuary for this reason. In truth, with her roots a different colour from the rest of her hair as the dye grew out, her very bright teeth, her much too clean skin and hair and the purpose with which she walked, she stood out like a shining light amongst an abandoned people.
She watched for a second as Grayson noted these things. She’d studied the man also, how he talked and how he thought. She had prepared her words carefully.
“Father Grayson. My name is Michelle MacLeod. I’m in labour and respectfully request assistance and sanctuary.”
Even before he spoke she could see on his face what his answer would be.
“You do not belong with us. You are not of this place.” His voice was stern and the tone absolute. The moaning around her took on a new urgency and grew closer.
Michelle stole a look at the street to her left and right.
Several small groups of The Ringed, drawn by the noise of their brethren and the smell of fresh meat, were making their way towards her. In a few seconds’ time they’d close a semi-circle of decaying bodies and endless hunger around her. She could feel the next contraction coming. Joseph’s head pushed down. Waxy, white lips peeled back from brown-green teeth. The moans grew nearer, teeth snapped at the air in anticipation of flesh. They had her scent and it drove them hard towards her.
She looked up into the patriarch’s eyes and flooded her own with a piteous pleading for help for her unborn son. She took her last gamble and pulled an orange
, rubbery object from her pocket. A USB device.
Holding it up to the hatch she handed it to Grayson, whose face wore a look of mild interest. He took the flash drive from her.
“I have access to electricity, food, heating and computers,” she blurted.
Grayson examined the device for one second before dropping it back through the hatch to the snowy ground.
Grayson closed the hatch.
Michelle abandoned all pretence of stealth and began raining fists onto the doors. She screamed and cursed and pleaded. No-one answered. The doors did not open, only the jaws of The Ringed did that.
Rotted hands reached for her shoulder. Fingers much stronger than she’d imagined began to close around her. Michelle snatched up the flash-drive then pulled a flare from her coat pocket. Sparking it, she waved it and jabbed the bright red glow near the face of the closest Ringed, a large man dressed in a tattered suit. He did not flinch, but his eyes and all the other glassy dead eyes followed the flare’s light. She tossed it over their heads, up the hill behind them, and said a silent prayer as they followed the flare.
Michelle tore herself away from the door, so ruthlessly and casually slammed on her last hope. Moving bow-legged to her right, she felt her son move lower into her pelvis and slipped under the archway of Parliament Square. Leaning heavily with her back on a table-like stone altar, Michelle brought her son into the city.
Holding Joseph’s crown as it slid from her body, Michelle MacLeod screamed as her world was torn apart and her son slipped into her waiting hands.
