by Wilson, Mark
For a fortnight, Marty had begged Tricia to leave. She would never leave her brother. Not while a breath remained in either of them. Marty understood and accepted. They would die here in this former clothing store, food for the dead.
The door sagged in at the top-centre, tearing the dusty air with a slash of bright light and the terrible sound of irreversible and fatal damage to the wood.
Marty was on his feet instantly, his eyes darting to the window.
“Tricia, please,” he pleaded.
She stood. Her face was a lesson in poker etiquette. “No.”
“Fuck ye, then,” Marty almost whispered.
He shot down into the storeroom as the door panels began to pop. Tattered and ragged fingers snaked through the new gaps, tearing flesh as they forced themselves through.
Marty reappeared, face red with exertion, eyes grim and determined. In his hands he had a lighter and a bottle filled with liquid, a rag stuck in the neck.
Pulling the little ornamental table from the window and toppling the sun-bleached mannequin, Marty pulled free a board they’d used to strengthen the window. Tricia screamed at him until she felt her throat rip in the exertion. Marty picked up a hammer, one of their only remaining weapons. Smashing the glass, he made an empty space where the window had been.
“What the fuck are ye doing, Martin?” A cough racked Tricia once again as the remaining infection in her lungs and the damage to her throat cracked her voice and made her choke on blood.
Her brother grinned, lit the rag and forced his arm though the gap in the boards, now filled with grasping hands and clacking teeth. He threw the bottle into a high arc over the heads of The Ringed who were crushing each other against the store front in lines ten-deep. Marty screamed as teeth tore the skin, fascia and muscle from his forearm. The bottle sailed over the dead, falling to a fiery splash a metre behind them.
Martin pulled his arm back through the boards, clutching tightly at the section where arterial blood sprayed. He pressed his eyes to the gap, watching row after row of The Ringed turn towards the fire, or follow each other through its flames, immune to the pain of the searing heat.
Tricia was on her knees, tears burning a path along her cheeks in grief. Bulleting towards the door, Marty loosed his forearm from his right-handed grip and began pulling the boards free from the doorway. His blood fountained, his face paled grey as he worked. Tricia tore the floor as she ran to him, arms around him, pulling at his chest. She didn’t care that they would die, or become one of them. She just didn’t want to do it without her brother. Martin elbowed her roughly back, sending her skittering three feet backwards into a rail of clothes. His face was tortured.
Marty did something simple. Simple but truly, innocently good. Something only her brother would do. Martin smiled at her through his own tears, mouthed “I love you,” and opened the door. Stepping out onto the cobbles of The Royal Mile.
Tricia raced to the open doorway. Her brother was perhaps fifty metres away already, running along the three-metre gap he’d made between the buildings and The Ringed. The infected had already sensed him and were beginning to turn in waves toward Marty. As a horde of The Ringed enclosed her brother, Tricia’s heart ripped inside her. She fell to her knees as her the dead brought him down at the arches of the City Chambers.
Her father’s voice in her head cut through the agony. Move, fucking move.
Tricia Stevenson did move.
She re-entered the little store at a sprint, ignoring the rising pain in her lungs. Reaching the rear window, Tricia dragged a plastic crate along the dusty floor, placing it under the narrow, horizontal pane of glass. Pushing the window out and up, Tricia took half a second to hope that somehow Marty would be racing through the door, that he would fit through the window with her and his distraction had saved them both. That he hadn’t been bitten… that he wasn’t dead. The word in her mind brought her violently to her knees.
Five badly shredded men and women dragged their partially crushed and devoured bodies through the shop towards her as Tricia took a full second this time to thank her brother. Standing, Tricia decided that her brother wouldn’t die for no reason.
“I love you, blondie,” she rasped before scrambling up the wall and out into the grass-filled alleys beyond.
Staggering through Crewe Toll, Tricia pulled at the tourniquet around her elbow with her teeth and free hand. She roared as the pain shot along her arm into her chest. The lancing pain brought her to a knee. She cursed loudly, rose for perhaps the eleventh time and ploughed onward through the crushing rain coming at her from every direction. Scottish rain. She’d been roaming vaguely west since leaving the city-centre and the remains of the Kirk. It had taken nine days to reach the Canongate Kirk after she’d left the little shop on The Royal Mile.
Through back alleys, closes, gardens and tunnels, Tricia had moved silently, taking rest when her fading infection forced her to. All she found when she reached her destination was ashes, death and heartbreak. From a darkened close, she watched newly-risen Ringed shuffle in and around the grounds. Some were burned, some badly mutilated by what must have been a legion of the dead. Many wore faces she recognised.
What had brought so many here?
Whatever it had been, barely twenty of the dead wandered the streets around the Kirk now.
Her heart breaking at the apparent loss of her mother and father, Tricia stepped out into the street, intentionally allowing her feet to make a noise the few scattered Ringed who remained would respond to. Pulling her hammer free from a belt loop, Tricia walked slowly at the nearest infected.
The woman, Jane McCready, had eaten dinner a few times with the Stevenson family. She was kind, gave more than she took and always wore a smile for those she met. Jane McCready’s worm-coloured lips were pulled tightly back from her gums in a twisted mockery of the warm smile her face previously wore.
As Jane rushed at her, Tricia sidestepped, elbowing the woman in the spine as she passed her. The move was not intended to cause pain to the dead woman, which was impossible. Tricia merely wanted Jane face-down. The shiny steel of her black-handled hammer flashed for a second on the low sun before smashing through the bone and soft matter of Jane McCready’s skull.
Tricia crouched on her back with one knee, taking a moment to confirm that the vicious spark that reanimated the dead had been snuffed. Rising to her feet, Tricia Stevenson welcomed her next assailant, and the next eight after him. Finally, unable to catch her breath or raise her hammer, Tricia, rage not even close to spent, decided that she wouldn’t die here today, no matter how much she wished it. There’d be other Ringed to kill another day.
Dragging her heavy legs she disappeared down a close. Speeding as her breath came back, Tricia zig-zagged through a few buildings and up several staircases. The Ringed didn’t do well with stairs. Eventually, confident that any pursuing Ringed were far behind, she stared into the horizon, deciding which part of the city she would head for. Anywhere but here.
Tricia’s journey west had presented her with ample opportunities to relieve herself of the anger that threatened at times to rob her of not only her reason, but her will to survive. She’d killed dozens of The Ringed in the last few days, always in locations with plenty of escape routes, never more than a few at a time, slow ones. Dozens dead and she wasn’t feeling any less pain in her soul. Dozens sent to true death and not a scratch on her until she’d sliced her right forearm on a tin of fucking peaches that morning.
She didn’t know the area well, but was looking for the Western General Hospital, hoping that she’d make it before she bled out and that she’d find some bandages and antibiotics. Rounding a hedge-lined turn into Groathill Road South, Tricia found a dry spot, shaded beneath an oak tree. She rested her butt on the pavement and her back against a little wall surrounding a white bungalow. Intending to consult her street map, Tricia closed her eyes for a second, enjoying the respite from the rain. A moment later she face-planted the tarmac path. The tourniquet o
n her arm loosened, allowing her blood to flow freely into the gutter.
She heard wheels, she was sure of it. Squeaking and crunching. Her eyes were too heavy, too comfortable. Something was pulling at her arm, not biting, not hurting, just… touching it. Tricia ignored the desire to stay unconscious and willed her eyes to open.
She was back in a seated position, resting once more against the wall. A woman sat in a sports wheelchair, appraising her. She was blonde, very leanly muscled, like an athlete, and had a first aid kit laid out on the pathway. In spite of wearing only a form-fitting vest and sweatpants, she didn’t seem to mind the rain.
“You’re lucky I was home this morning, love,” she said. “You’re also fortunate that that wound isn’t a bite.” The woman glanced at her billy-club.
Tricia looked down at her injured forearm. It had been cleaned and dressed, very neatly, and was no longer bleeding.
“Thank you,” she said, finding her voice still weak from screaming it raw weeks before. When she spoke it felt that something had shifted in her vocal cords, or torn.
The woman gave a little bow of her head. “S’fine. What brings you here, love? The hospital?”
Tricia nodded.
“It’s back down that way,” the lady said, nodding in the direction Tricia had come from. “You walked right past it.” Humour danced in her eyes.
She offered a strong arm to Tricia.
“Let’s get you up and inside. Biters are on the move.”
Hauling Tricia to her feet, the woman steadied her for a moment.
“All right, love?” she asked.
Tricia felt the ground begin to tilt. Holding onto the woman’s arm, she righted herself, blinking hard to focus on something that wasn’t moving. Eventually the world stopped tilting.
“Is that okay?” she asked. “If I come in?”
The woman in the wheelchair laughed. “I think I’ll manage if you turn out to be a nutter, love? C’mon.”
Tricia pushed a hand out. “I’m Tricia Stevenson.”
The woman smiled warmly once again, taking Tricia’s hand in a firm grip.
“Suzanne Dalgliesh.” She jutted her chin at the bungalow. “Come away in, love.”
Ten Years Later
Bracha
Part Two
Chapter 1
“Any change?” I ask.
I know the answer already, but I’ve asked the same question at least once every day for the past ten years and it has become a part of our little routine. James doesn’t bother to look up from his book, but shakes his head.
“Any food?” he asks.
I throw two rabbits onto the table he’s resting his book on, followed by a carrier-bag full of potatoes, onions and wild garlic I scavenged from a nearby farm.
James pokes around in the bag and gives the rabbit carcasses a suspicious sniff.
“These fresh?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I reply. “Killed them a few hours ago but they’ll need cooked straight away. The heat’s a killer out there.”
James folds a page to keep his place, pushes his chair back from the desk and traipses through, food in his arms, to prepare a fire in our cooking area.
I remove a layer of clothes and throw my backpack into the corner after pulling a leather-bound book from it, which I tuck under my arm.
His door has been opened today, most likely for him to take a run or spar with James. Those are pretty much the only reasons he leaves his room anymore. Aside from hunting The Ringed. The door is closed now. From a lifetime’s habit, I consider knocking, but there’s little point. He won’t reply.
I shove through the door into his room, a former quiet reading area of Morningside Library, where we’ve been living for the past three years. He looks up and offers a gentle nod. This is probably the first time he’s looked at me in around six months, outside of sparring sessions.
I lay the book face-up on the table beside his makeshift cot.
“Another Greek mythology volume,” I tell him.
He gives me another fraction of a nod. I resist the urge to thank him for his time and leave, swallowing my anger.
Since leaving Holyrood Palace on Hogmanay, 2015, James and I, with our red-haired charge compliantly following along, have criss-crossed the city, testing perimeter fences and assisting the developing communities where and when we can. The speed at which the city was quarantined and the permanent barriers erected along the path of the former city-bypass was astonishing. By the time Spike had emerged from his catatonic state and we’d left Holyrood, the city was completely sealed and its survivors left to their own devices. Six months: that was all it took to completely isolate a whole city.
Clearly the government had felt that containment was their only recourse and had mobilised an unprecedented number of servicemen and women to build the structure, looping around the entire city. Even in our isolation, tending to an unresponsive Spike, the brutality of this action was a stab to the heart. No rescue was coming. No rescue would ever come.
They key to surviving in those first three years or so – aside from avoiding or dispatching The Ringed, as we now called them – lay in accepting that we were abandoned, that the confines of the massive fences stretching around Scotland’s capital were our entire universe for the foreseeable future. James and I slowly became used to this new life. Spike could be anywhere and it wouldn’t have made a difference to him.
Since dispatching the walking corpse that had formerly been his brother, Spike had fallen into a psychological hole that seemed so deep in his submissive but disengaged state, we held out little hope of ever bringing him back. After six months of silence from him, during which he mechanically ate and occasionally walked around the grounds of Holyrood Palace which James and I had cleared of The Ringed, Spike eventually began to engage with the world around him, but only to a limited, muted degree.
He continued to eat but resumed his lifelong, punishing exercise regime. He ran, performed combat sequence drills, sparred with us, and helped in clearing The Ringed or defending us when we travelled from place to place. He did not speak during these activities. He communicated during combat with our unit’s hand signals, but that was the extent of his direct interaction with us. He hadn’t spoken a single syllable for over ten years.
What he did do, every single day since, was hunt The Ringed. Mercilessly. With needless brutality he hunted the creatures several hours each day. He didn’t seem to care if they were a threat or not, their mere existence was reason enough to engage them in the most vicious manner. On the surface, he seemed determined to punish them. Every one of them, but that simply wasn’t the real motivation for his crusade against them.
He was practicing.
He was killing in so many new ways. With a seemingly never-ending parade of The Ringed at his disposal, Spike had developed increasingly creative methods of dispatching them. More worryingly, he never went for the head shot – the kill shot – straight away, but would stab and strike at nerve clusters, ligaments, tendons, testing their effect on the organism.
James was unconcerned and actually encouraged by Spike’s focus and determination in improving his abilities. To my mind, the shell of the man who had been my best friend for half my life was merely training to hunt humans.
Passing James in the kitchen, I storm through the main door and out into the street. I feel like kicking something but the only thing around, aside from a few Ringed shambling towards me in response to the racket I’ve made, is a red post-box. I cut a look along the street to the group of Ringed who’ve begun to make their way along the street towards me. Three women and a boy, and old from the looks of them. They’re rotted and moving in that disjointed manner those in advanced decomposition stages do. They look to be almost at the point where the rotting seems to slow, even stop. None of the doctors we’ve met these last few years have been able to explain one damn thing of any use about the infection.
I watch the kid as the group scrape their rotted feet along the conc
rete. He’s probably sixteen or seventeen. Dressed in the rags of a football top and denims, his skin is tattered either from the weather or decay. He’s missing an eye. His remaining one, milky and grey, hangs slightly loose from the rotted socket around it. His jaws are working, his green mouldering teeth already chewing at the air, in anticipation of a meal.
My mind flits back to school and then to basic training. Meeting Harry and James. Training together, fighting, bleeding, crying and struggling to survive. Laughing. We did a lot of laughing. He… Harry… was a daft bugger at times, despite his skills and his deadly mindset. I miss laughing with them. All we do is survive. We have no life anymore, or him. He won’t even answer to his name. It’s becoming more difficult with each passing day to see a single part of my friend in the man’s face anymore. All he does is exercise, read and brutalise these poor creatures.
The kid in the football top is a few paces from me. I don’t want to silence him or his companions, but if I don’t their scraping and moaning will most likely bring more to our door. With no rush of adrenaline, I robotically evade and end each of them before returning indoors.
Chapter 2
James turned his face to the right and accepted the gentle burn of the sunlight against his skin. He’d always enjoyed being invigorated by strong, warm sunshine, and never more so than now when there was so little in their daily lives to bring any joy.
Out of habit he glanced at Cammy, hoping to see the same enjoyment, but his friend’s face was set and grim. Cameron rarely smiled anymore. James didn’t bother checking Harry’s face. It had been a blank slate since Holyrood Palace ten years previously. Harry followed along behind the others, golf club twirling and glinting in the sunlight as he moved. With his red hair grown out and lightened by age and the outdoor life, and a bushy beard covering most of his face, the now very lean Harry was almost unrecognisable in appearance or in personality.
