dEaDINBURGH: Origins (Din Eidyn Corpus Book 3)

by Wilson, Mark

  I grind my teeth and crack the pub door a fraction, trying to gain some insight as Spike and James usher the pub’s occupants down into the cellar. Jackie descends the stairs last, face stern.

  Spike gives them assurances that they’ll be safe in their hiding place and that he’ll make sure that someone comes for them quickly. Jackie reappears and offers a beefy hand which Spike encloses in two of his.

  “I promise, Jack. Now go.”

  The big bartender gives him a firm nod and disappears down into the cool cellar with his customers.

  Spike wastes another twenty seconds closing the cellar door and shifting a rug over the top of it for camouflage.

  James has drained two cups of coffee. He’s alert now, but walking a fine line between sobriety and the shrill over-sensitivity to stimuli that a good dose of black caffeine brings.

  Peering through the door I watch people run past Bannerman’s all headed away from The Royal Mile, towards The Grassmarket. Bad news for us; our evacuation route takes us along Niddry Street, straight up onto The Royal Mile and along to Holryrood House where an underground bunker and/or chopper awaits.

  I close the door softly and double-check my sidearm.

  “You guys ready or do you have something else to take care of?”

  Neither answers. Instead they flank me, weapons ready, and we crash through the doors into a nightmare.

  Chapter 2

  Cammy threw the double doors open and they spilled out into the street. It was one of those moments, the ones you never saw coming but which changed everything you thought was certain about your world. The sequences and events a team prepared for hundreds of times in training and executed dozens of times – if you were lucky, and you were good – in the field.

  Secure, recon, eliminate threats, progress.

  They’d done this together so many times they had lost count. Each of them knew his respective role. The big men, so well-coordinated it looked like a lover’s dance, began to move in synchronised perfection.

  James had shaken off the last effects of the evening’s alcohol. A glucose tablet and two cups of strong black coffee in under a minute had brought his senses screaming back online. All he had left to fight was the encroaching shrillness of his hyper-alert state – and whatever was happening in the city. Despite the pressure, James felt calm, in control. His training and hard-earned experience taking over, he was a virtual passenger. His best friends by his side meant that he feared nothing. Business as usual, no matter how odd the location.

  Through the door, three men, back to back, pirouetted and scanned each section of their zones twice. Smooth, certain, decisive.

  That was normally how it went, at any rate. Cutting a look past Harry’s left shoulder, James’ eyes widened as they watched a young man in denims and a Nirvana T-shirt run directly towards them. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-one, just a kid but crazed and covered in blood and gore and sprinting at them, lips peeled back from blooded teeth, naked fury burning in his eyes. No, not fury... hunger.

  James moved his weapon up smoothly and issued the kid a warning.

  “Halt.”

  The kid kept coming. Snarling, he leaped over a shredded body and raised his hands as claws.

  James did not hesitate and fired three rounds centre mass into the kid’s heart.

  Whipping around he repeated the process, killing four more feral-looking people. The world transformed into a fury of teeth and blood and crazed eyes and death. His team had taken down around a dozen assailants but had expended almost all of their ammo.

  “What the fuck has got into these people?” James asked.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Cameron replied roughly. “Let’s move.”

  James and Cameron flanked Harry who covered their rear as his two guards progressed up the hill towards The Royal Mile. After ten steps Harry swore loudly in that refined voice.

  “What in the name of holy fuck?”

  James and Cammy swung around, facing the direction they’d come from.

  Every one of the people they had dispatched was somehow back up on their feet. Some looked dazed, others fixed on the three friends instantly. All had congealed jelly-like blood clotted where arterial spray should have been pumping out onto the pavement. They bared their teeth once again and ran at the team.

  Harry raised his gun first and put a single round into the head of the nearest man, a policeman in torn, bloody uniform sporting two bullet holes delivered to his heart by Cameron moments before. The policeman collapsed like a marionette with its strings severed and didn’t rise a second time.

  “Headshots,” Spike said, firing his last two rounds into the heads of a tourist with a rucksack on her back and an elderly lady who was running at him with the speed of an athlete. Both face-planted the cobbles, skidding to a stop a few feet from the group.

  Cammy turned uphill once more and brought down two new arrivals who’d been drawn down from The Royal Mile by the gunfire. All three men took advantage of a ten-second break in the onslaught to check their firearms, confirming what they already knew. Three rounds left: two for James and one for Cameron. Spike holstered his empty sidearm and drew two of his blades, big Rambo-esque knives with one sleek edge and a ragged one. One of them sported his house emblem, while the other, a gift from his grandfather, bore his name.

  The three men exchanged glances and sprinted the length of Niddry Street, dodging fallen people and shouldering further assailants from their path. Spilling out onto The Royal Mile they cut a quick look uphill and gasped.

  The famous thoroughfare’s width and length was filled to overflowing with people. Some crawled over cobbles and over each other, some ran… and all were screaming. Some of those screams were gargled, the thick blood torn loose blocking the path of their dying wails. Some were screams of fledgling hunger from the throats of new-born creatures already deep in the throes of an eternally-agonising appetite for flesh.

  Blood flowed in thick, fast rivulets between the cobbles towards the men. The soldiers noted immediately that a close, further along The Mile, was the likely epicentre of whatever the hell was happening. Cameron discharged the last of his ammo into the head of a heavily-built man in a kilt, slipped his knife from concealment and rammed it through the temple of another lunatic trying to force the big officer to the bloody cobbles beneath.

  James pulled at Harry’s sleeve to cajole him along in the opposite direction. His friend stiffened, resisting, and pulled his arm free. James watched as the man he was sworn to protect plunged the knife in his right hand through the top of a female tour-guide’s skull. Releasing the big knife, leaving it in her head, he continued his move by fluidly stepping on the back of a dead tourist and launching himself into a wide-arced leap. Adjusting in mid-air, he changed to a two-handed grip on his remaining blade and brought it down heavily into the base of the neck of a woman who’d made it through Cameron’s defences.

  James shouted at both men.

  “When you’re all done, can we get fuckin’ moving?”

  He nodded down the mile towards High Street. Despite the confusion and the terror and the river of blood and madness flooding their way, the men managed a tight grin.

  “Keep your knickers, Jimmy,” said Spike.

  All three men continued their sprint, feeling the crowd and the enemy thin out as they crested a little hill before High Street swooped down to Holyrood.

  They skidded to a halt just after the cobbles end at the entrance to a former church. Looking around at the people running past, James gasped.

  “What the hell is going on here?”

  Cameron shook his head and blocked a young man about to clatter into James, sending the man sprawling onto the tarmac. The guy regained his feet instantly and sprinted on without ever looking back.

  “They seem like they’re infected, near as I can make out,” Cameron said.

  Harry laughed, but there was no humour in it.

  “They look sick to you, Cameron?” he asked.
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br />   Cameron shrugged and opened his mouth to reply when one of the people who seemed to have gone insane came tearing along the street. The three soldiers watched in horror as the assailant pulled down an elderly woman and ripped at her throat, arms and legs with his teeth.

  Clinically, James started counting. He reached thirty when the madman tore himself away from the dead woman and snarled, sending blood and flesh spilling onto the concrete. He… it lashed at another passer-by, a middle-aged man this time, and began tearing at his face.

  James continued counting. At fifty seconds, the elderly woman jerked up. Moving smoother and significantly more quickly than she had before the attack, she sprang from the ground and fixed her eyes on them.

  All three men watched the transformation take her, burning away the frail pensioner. They stood open-mouthed and inert. A first for the unit.

  Cammy was the first to recover, but only by milliseconds. The trio, with a new vigour and previously untapped speed, resumed their run towards Holyrood Palace.

  Chapter 3

  Jim and Spike run further ahead of me, but only by a few metres. I hang back a little to cover the rear. We’re a mile, maybe less, from the Palace and seem to have left the lunacy behind us for the moment when a woman runs from a side alley out into Spike’s path. She’s carrying a child and is stumbling. Her left leg bears a deep bite. Spike reaches out to catch her and she hands him the infant. We form a defensive formation around them and nervously scan the area as Spike accepts the woman’s screaming child. She looks deep into his eyes. It’s obvious that she recognises him and is desperately grateful that it is him who she’s handed the love of her life to.

  No words but a thousand emotions pass between them before the woman, tears streaking like mercury, turns and runs off into the same alley she came from. I hear James counting again. He reaches forty and we run again. Despite his passenger, perhaps because of the newly-orphaned baby, Spike runs quicker than ever.

  To our left the heavy doors of the Canongate Kirk, a chapel, grind open. A man, dressed in black denims and shirt, who looks like a priest but moves like a soldier, steps out and waves us in.

  “Keep running,” I yell, but Harry skids to a stop. He’s caught sight of the people inside the chapel who’ve risked their own safety to offer us a haven. All three of us scan the entrance. Their fortification is ridiculously inadequate. They haven’t even closed the outer gates. When the legion of infected behind us reaches this place, the hundred or so people inside this building will be overwhelmed and devoured.

  I see the change in Spike’s eyes and yell at him.

  “No. We’ve a mission.”

  He simply shakes his head, nods down at the screaming infant in his arms and enters the chapel, thanking the tall man in black as he passes the threshold. James comes up behind Spike, eyes steely and determined. For a fraction of a second I think that he agrees with me – that we’ll have to clock Harry over the head and drag him out of there.

  That fraction of a second passes and I follow James into the Kirk.

  As soon as we enter Spike hands the infant to a man with a toddler who looks more able with children than we are. None of us have kids and plan to keep it that way. We slip into automatic pilot once again and begin fortifying the main chapel doors. The gates can wait until the building is secure.

  James takes three people and the man in black, who is clearly ex-military, to the rear of the church to secure any exits whilst Spike and I organise the people inside and begin issuing orders. A small group stare at Spike, trying to shake themselves from an already bizarre situation; he slaps one of them hard, drilling the man to his knees.

  “Take photographs later. Move your arses,” Spike yells.

  The rest get over their confused fascination quickly.

  As Spike starts directing his new friends in dragging the heavy wooden pews to the main and side doors, I risk a step outside to determine whether getting that main gate closed is an option or not. With the perimeter surrounded by tall iron fences, the closed gates will seal the Kirk in and will be an invaluable barrier. From what we’ve seen so far, the infected don’t appear to have much in the way of physical coordination outside of running, biting and grabbing. Climbing fences seems like it would be beyond them, but really, who knows?

  After a second or two of holding my ear to the wooden door, I decide that either the courtyard is empty or the wood’s too thick to hear through and begin to unfasten the heavy latch on the door. Immediately I feel the weight of more than one person pushing the door inwards and roar for help. Three terrified-looking men and two women rush towards the large door and jam their shoulders up against it. Together we close the gap over, but not before a hand with torn and bloodied fingers slips through. The hand is crushed between the door and its frame without hesitation and severed fingers flop to the red carpet inside the church.

  One of the women, a dark-haired girl, slips around me and pulls the heavy latch back into place. I feel fluid warmth spill onto my ankles and panic inwardly that I’ve somehow been bitten. I look down and see one of the men who helped push the door closed on his knees, retching his dinner out onto the white marble floor, luxurious rug and the boots of one Captain Cameron Shephard.

  I pat him hard a couple of times on the back as he empties his stomach.

  He spits a last blob of congealed matter out with force and looks up at me.

  “Fuck. Sorry, mate.” His voice is acid-hoarse.

  I give him a final pat, on the shoulder this time.

  “No bother, son. Right, up ye get.”

  I direct the group to merge with Spike’s team and we secure all three of the front doors with a solid lattice of wood from complete and broken pews. The pews are heavy, so with the combined weight and the solid doors there’s little chance of unarmed people, no matter how great in number, coming through.

  Walking to the rear of the Kirk, I call out for James.

  “How’s thing’s, Jimmy?”

  Some grunting sounds emerge from the shadows, but they sound like human exertion, not the primal sounds growing in volume from the front entrance.

  “Jimmy.” I shout this time.

  “Aye,” he roars back at me. “Secure.”

  Seated on a white wooden pew, near the altar, I take a moment to process the last half an hour of my life.

  Bites. A pathogen. Insanely quick transmission and incubation time. Violence, madness. I mentally go through the list of obvious causes. The list is short and I keep coming back to bioweapon. Letting out a long sigh filled with questions and doubts, I take in a lungful of purpose and confidence just as James reappears with the priest-soldier by his side.

  He lays a hand on my shoulder.

  “You doing aright, pal?” His voice is rough. He’s definitely a soldier of some description: his posture, facial expressions and bearing tell me this. Sitting back a little more relaxed on the pew, I look up at the big man.

  “Aye, I’m good. Thanks for letting us in,” I say.

  He raises an eyebrow. “You didn’t look too keen, to be honest.”

  “No,” I admit. “Our mission is to… be somewhere else.”

  His eyes narrow.

  “You were here for this?” The big priest looks annoyed, suspicious, and jabs a thumb at the door indicating the madness outside hammering at the red wood.

  “No. We were seeing the bells in with him.” I nod over at Spike and look for my man’s reaction. He clocks the famous face fully for the first time and lets a wee snort escape.

  Standing, I appreciate fully for the first time how big this guy really is up close and offer him my hand.

  “Captain Shephard, His Majesty’s escort,” I tell him, a hint of sarcasm in my tone as I nod over at Spike.

  He screws his face up like he’s just smelled shite.

  “Och, I’m sorry to hear that, pal. That’s a tough duty.”

  A warm smile passes over his face and his eyes dance with familiar camaraderie. Clutching my hand in
a firm shake, he broadens his grin.

  “Padre Jock Stevenson, Her Majesty’s Royal Marines.

  Chapter 4

  James left Cammy and Padre Stevenson discussing how to further secure the building and strolled over to Harry, who was speaking quietly to a group of around fifty people, most of whom sat sprawled across the Kirk’s pews with their heads in their hands. Glancing up to the little balcony above the main doors, James noted the three ornamental windows and considered how beautiful they’d be with the morning sun shining through. If they survived long enough to see the light, it’d be a miracle worthy of such a beautiful church.

  Another group of… survivors, he supposed was the right term, were arranging coats and blankets from the Kirk, spreading the textiles out onto the floor. There was little chance of anyone sleeping with the violence spilling through the dark gothic streets outside, but people tended to do this with and for each other in sieges.

  Grainy, black and white TV images of Londoners sleeping on bunk beds in the city’s underground platforms during the Blitz flashed before James’ mind’s eye.

  The survivors clearly sensed that they might be here for a while.

  Tuning into Harry’s conversation, he listened as his friend’s calm voice drew the survivors on the pews slowly back from their growing despair.

  “We’re safe in here now, folks,” he said softly but firmly. That accent of his conveyed a subconscious authority, ancient and familiar. The casual, innate confidence emitted from him like light wherever he went and bathed – no, infected – people everywhere. James felt that presence spread through the high-ceilinged church hall, soothing and reinvigorating his little captive audience.

  “The armed services will have been dispatched and most likely have already begun the process of containing these people.”