dEaDINBURGH: Origins (Din Eidyn Corpus Book 3) (12 page)

Before leaving the Kirk, Padre Stevenson had asked us again and again if we were sure that this was the right thing to do. His family joined him, as did some of the volunteer team who’d helped us clear the grounds of the Kirk, in trying to convince us to stay and sit out the early hours or days of whatever was happening. “Give the troops time,” the Padre had pleaded. We’d thanked him, and promised to return if the road ahead proved too dangerous.

This is what I wanted to do right now as I stared out onto the cobbled approach to the Palace. I almost said as much to Spike, but one look at his steely expression told me I’d be wasting my breath.

Less than fifty minutes later, we’ve evaded, sped, dodged and fought our way into and through the Palace, via the east servant’s entrance and have made our way to Mary Queen of Scots’ Chambers, the last remaining fortified room we haven’t already searched. Our guns spent, James carries his knife and a heavy wooden baseball bat he’s scooped up along the way. I have a large knife and a table leg. Spike has found a nice set of golf clubs and has taken a nine-iron which he’s silenced at least ten of the infected with.

The Palace interior, scattered with only a few dozen infected, proves both welcoming and horrific with its heavy-doored rooms and the number of bodies and body parts scattered along its corridors and ostentatious rooms. Wealth and status, it seems, have proven no barrier to the infection or the monsters it has created.

We gather at the heavily-decorated, closed doors to the chambers. Each of us whispers a prayer that we might find some people safe inside. I press my ear up against the wood and strain to pick out any sounds from within We’ve been through this process many times already since entering the Palace, securing the building as we move.

 
Sometimes the sounds from within have warned of the infected, sometimes silence has emanated. Always we have found death and violence lying on the other side of the closed door. This is our final room; our last opportunity to find someone, anyone, alive.

I use a hand signal to indicate that the room is silent and we take formation. Spike throws a heavy-booted sole at the door and crouches low, knives raised as it crashes open. James and I dart through and immediately assess the room.

As one we turn back to Spike and rush him. Grabbing our friend, an arm each, we do our best to block his eye-line and prevent him entering the room. The long, guttural scream-cum-roar that rattles its way through his vocal chords and around his ancestor’s bed chambers tells us we’ve failed. We let him fall to his knees and re-enter the room.

The only infected in the room still moving fixes his glassy eyes on us but does not rise to his feet. Instead, stooped over like a jungle cat, he tears another chunk of flesh from his wife’s ribcage and swallows it whole. His eyes watch us. They promise violence and are filled with feral hunger, but their owner stays with his meal.

Spike’s cries make the creature’s eyes slip towards him. On some primitive level, he’s reassessing. The meat he has is still warm, otherwise he’d be on us in an instant. He continues to watch us and to rip more meat from the body of his love.

I slide my gaze around the room. Blood and death fill the chamber. A middle-aged man whose face and throat are no longer in place is beginning to reanimate. His legs are in shreds; strips of meat dangle from bone where strong quadriceps once moved the machinery of his limbs. He can’t stand or crawl. I look to Harry for permission. He nods once and continues to stare at the feral beast who’s feasting on his sister-in-law as I clunk my blade into the head of the creature who used to be Spike’s father.

A little arm protrudes from behind a fallen shelf. A toddler’s arm. Mercifully, it does not move. I silently thank no-one in particular, selfishly grateful that the rest of the infant’s body is out of sight.

The feeding infected senses something in its meal has changed and spits out a chunk of meat. The eyes fix more intently on Spike. The creature, who only looks like a man, launches itself at Spike whose face is a mask of grief and bottomless pain. Mechanically, on pure instinct, Spike stands, pivots at the perfect moment and forcefully clumps his nine-iron through his brother’s brain.

He reaches out to catch the lifeless body and they collapse together, limbs tangled, Spike holding the remains of his best friend and brother. His face is as blank as his dead brother’s. He looks… gone. Perhaps that’s for the best.

After many long minutes, James and I usher an almost catatonic Harry out of the room. We take time we don’t have to move the bodies of his family to the ancient fireplace and give them a respectful cremation.

Spike doesn’t watch. He simply stares into the distance, his mind somewhere else. Somewhere these blasphemies aren’t happening, perhaps.

Eventually we move him and secure a room in the servants’ quarters. We receive word through our dying military phones the next morning that the city is being sealed. We have one chance: to proceed to an extraction point in the Palace gardens.

Spike, still someplace else, does not resist as we walk him to the chopper. As I place my foot onto the landing skid, he springs out and uses all of his strength to pull away. The grounds aren’t secure. A troop of infected, attracted by the helicopter’s noises, have begun to sprint in our direction. I aim a blow at Spike, intending to knock him out and bundle him onto the chopper. He slips past it easily and runs back to the servants’ quarters. James and I abandon the chopper and catch up. We yell and beg and threaten and plead, but he’s slipped back, immobile and unresponsive, into oblivion once again.

“Spike… Harry, please. We have to go,” I yell in his face. “Harry!”

He starts to laugh the most humourless laugh ever set loose into the world.

“Harry’s gone. Harry’s gone,” he says. He repeats the phrase, laughing manically as the chopper drifts back into the air and disappears, its whoop, whoop pulling the infected along after it.

“Harry’s gone. Harry’s gone. Harry’s gone. Harry’s gone.”

Padre Jock’s

Journal

Part One

Chapter 1

Jock

Hogmanay

2015

I’m not a good man, Joseph. You should know this. Oh, I’m not a terribly bad man, not by this city’s standards at any rate, but good? No. I used to be. At least, I thought that I was at certain moments.

The weeks I’ve spent looking back at the pages in this battered old journal, adding to the stories, reliving them. The act of raking those old coals has sparked the living flames of many a painful memory. Thoughts and deeds I’d forgotten or perhaps buried somewhere deep in my subconscious.
 
Things I did… people I loved that I haven’t thought of in decades.

I’ve written everything I can remember. Thirty-five years of bad times, hard times, horror and precious little joy. It’s all I have to give you. Learn from my past. Learn to survive: you must survive this place. It needs souls like yours. Free, driven, joyful beyond circumstance. You have to be a good man, Joseph. Men like you can make this place more than just an ordeal to be endured. A life rather than an existence. Men like you can be better than men like me. If only you can learn from an old man’s failings.

The Brotherhood is the best place for you right now. I know that you can see the cracks, the futility of their dogma and their devotion to the dead. You will not be here forever. Perhaps one day I may summon the courage to do more than watch over you... to speak to you instead of scowling. To guide rather than manipulate. Perhaps.

I’m not mentor material, Joseph, and certainly not a father anyone deserves. This place, Mary King’s Close, and The Brotherhood who have claimed its crypts will keep you safe for now, but I know that you need more. Whether you leave with me or alone, you’ll leave. That’s a certainty. You won’t be ten years old forever. You won’t accept the limitations of this community for much longer. It’s a hard reality to accept, this place, even for me, but The Brothers have got you this far. Another few years of their pious ways won’t take too much of a toll. I won’t allow it to.

I almost knocked Father Grayson on his arse today. I’d returned from cleaning up some twenty-odd Ringed from the fence-line along at North Bridge. That’s what I do here. Nobody need know that the
Children
must be kept from The Brothers. That we’re not immune to their eternal hunger for flesh. That’s what I do. The price of them caring for you.

 
I was exhausted and in no mood for any of Grayson’s usual closed-minded decrees. Unfortunately I had to seek permission for something. Good God, having to ask anyone’s permission grates at me but doing so of this… man, Jeezus help me.

He argued with me for an hour but finally caved in when I asked him, ‘Who’ll guard your borders when I’m too old, or dead?’ Father Grayson scowled at me like never before, but eventually promised that you wouldn’t be put forward for Communion, not ever. He agreed that I could train you in a few years, if you’ll have me. More importantly, you would be allowed to keep the bow I’d acquired for you and the freedom to train with it.

I never wanted this for you, Joseph, living in these dungeons, worshipping the dead. You’re too clever. You have too much spirit for a life in The Brotherhood. Sometimes I pass you in the corridor and you look just like one of them with your head down and face passive. It makes me sorry that I brought you here. It makes me wish that I was a better man. A man who could be a father to you. I learned from my own kids that that’s not who I am. It’s better that you’re brought up here.

Other times I watch you from a distance when you think no one is around, up on the surface. I like that you show this small defiance to them. I promise we’ll leave this place one day, but only when you’re ready: only when you won’t die outside these fences. For now, the bow is yours and I’ve ensured that nobody will take it from you.

When we… or you do leave, this journal will be yours to learn what you can or wish from it. Will it be a reminder of a man you despise? A useful guide to the city, or the ramblings of a bitter old fool? I can’t know. Whatever it is to you, Joseph, know this: you are the reason I chose to endure this last decade. Your survival and happiness is the only thing I can give this half-life of mine. It’s no altruistic sacrifice I make, watching over you. My care is simply a debt, a promise I made to your mother. A minute part of me hopes that in you I may find a sliver of forgiveness for myself, or redemption for my past failings.

Irrespective of what my fate holds, I promise you this, Joseph. I won’t let you down.

Chapter 2

Jock

I’d been in the city for half a day, mostly complaining about the cold wind. You know what an Edinburgh winter is like, Joseph, so bitterly cutting your bones take six months to defrost, just in time for another season to pass and the cold to return.

I’d grown up in a little town in Lanarkshire named Bellshill. It had been a mining town and a steelworkers’ town amongst a heavy industry district at one time. Families prospered. The people hard, but genuinely warm and, good God, so funny.

 
Now, the town, its thriving people, main street, businesses and families were gone or struggling, but slowly emerging from decades-long recession, caused by the brutal devastation of the area’s industry at the hands of a seemingly sadistic prime minister named Thatcher.

I hadn’t lived in Lanarkshire for years by 2015 when the plague broke out onto Edinburgh’s streets, but my body, long-acclimatised to the marginally warmer west of Scotland, still struggled with that east coast Edinburgh chill funnelled along the narrow cobbled streets and wide thoroughfares of the tourist districts. I loved Edinburgh. It is… was a beautiful city, but my trip was purely business. I’d been asked by the Ministry of Defence to represent Her Majesty’s Royal Marines’ Pastoral Division at a ceremony for the reopening of Mary King’s Close, which had been closed for centuries.

My family had come on the trip. A last minute decision. Things had been… tense between my wife, Isabelle, and I for maybe a year, maybe more. The kids were pissed at us, but not half as pissed as we were with each other. The life I lived – travelling, re-homing the family, months abroad on tour in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria – it takes a toll on a marriage, Joseph. Sometimes the lifestyle takes a toll on the whole family.

We married young, Isabelle and I. She had fallen pregnant with our daughter Patricia when we were both sixteen years old. I joined the Marines three months before she was due. With the lack of opportunities in Lanarkshire and our age, lack of education or work skills, the services seemed a smart move. Our families were furious, then devastated and then very supportive when we told them that Isabelle was expecting

My dad, Paddy, was a minister in a small church in Uddingston and didn’t speak to me for a week. Finally he came to me, face twitching with barely contained anger and a smidgeon of contempt, and asked me what I planned to do about the
poor girl
. I tried really hard not to laugh at him in his patronising judgement of us. I didn’t do a good job. As soon as the smile formed on my lips, he struck me with a heavy back-handed clout. I was simply stunned. My father had never hit me before; he’d never even threatened to. He was a warm, tactile man with his children.

I held my cheek and watched his face drop. As it registered what he’d done, tears filled his red-rimmed eyes. We stared at each other for a long moment then rushed towards the other for a tight embrace full of apologies, salty tears and promises. I told him of my plans to enter Marine training in the pastoral division, to marry Isabelle and work my arse off providing for the new family. His eyes filled again and he told me he should have known better. He knew that his son was a good young man and had been more worried about his flock’s reaction than how I was coping with the situation.

Dad was a godsend. So was my mum. In the months of basic training, the deployments that followed and the unexpected but eventually welcome news that they’d be grandparents, my parents filed their hearts and days with love for my new wife and child. In the years that followed, they lived for Patricia – wee Paddy, my dad called her – for Isabelle and for little Martin, who came along two years later. Everything I missed, they were present for. My kids wore the mark of their grandparents’ love all over them. It was a good thing, considering how poor a father I proved to be.

So we found ourselves in Edinburgh on Hogmanay, attending a series of boring lunches and speeches given by representatives of the Scottish Government and Edinburgh Council leaders. Lots of apologies, lots of commitments to atone for what had taken place in the city centuries before. A lot of faux-guilt and champagne and political posturing took place with the contrition for victimising the poor of seventeenth-century Edinburgh the excuse for parties and political alliances. Mary King’s Close would be reopened that night, at the stroke of midnight, three hundred and seventy years after men, women and children had been sealed underground to spare a city from the Black Death. It was a sad story, the history of Mary King’s Close.

In 1645 the bubonic plague, or Black Death as it was known, raged through the populace. Millions had died worldwide and the city’s residents were beginning to feel the effects of the disease. In a barbarically desperate attempt to isolate the infected and to save the remaining residents, the council leaders forced the sick and dying into the underground streets of Mary King’s Close and sealed them in. Beneath the cobbles of old Edinburgh the infected suffered and were ignored. Eventually forgotten, they were abandoned and left roaming the underground streets of the crypts below.

Above, on the surface, the children danced on Edinburgh’s cobbles, joyful that the plague had been contained. According to legend they sang,

Ring-a-ring-a-roses,

A pocket full of posies;

Atishoo! Atishoo!

We all fall down.

A rosy rash, they alleged, was a symptom of the plague, and posies of herbs were carried as protection and to ward off the smell of the disease. Sneezing or coughing was a final fatal symptom and
all fall down
was exactly what happened. The people of Mary King’s Close were abandoned mercilessly.

At midnight, New Year’s Day 2015, the city leaders reopened The Close with the intention of erecting a memorial to the ancient plague victims and using the newly-opened Close for tourism. Instead, its residents poured out from their tomb and spread a new plague through the city. One that killed and hijacked what remained of its host and was characterised by the rash – that and the fact that the host was dead but somehow walking around with a hunger for human flesh.

As all bacteria do, the plague bacteria evolved and the disease mutated.

Underground for hundreds of years, some survivors had had children. They’d become something other than human: undead, shuffling through the dark crypts racked by a four-hundred-year hunger, a ring-a-roses rash emblazoned on their left cheeks marking them as infected.

The kids, Isabelle and I were in the assembled crowd, shivering in front of the heavy wooden doors to the crypts below. The outer barricades had been removed earlier in the day, giving the assembled dignitaries a purely ceremonial task of removing the final security bars and locks. In hindsight, the arrogance of those assembled was atrocious. Hundreds of the poor and sick had been forced into the dungeons below and all that represented to these people was a photo opportunity and access to a tourist attraction.

The former First Minister of Scotland gave a short speech, checking his watch as he mouthed half-hearted prayers for the souls abandoned. I pulled the kids in close, one in each arm, and sighed in acknowledgment of how much they’d both grown and how resentful they were of their father’s embrace.

As the politicians had their moment, my mind drifted to a time when Isabelle and I truly believed that could make it work. That we knew something our parents and teachers didn’t reckon on: love.

We had loved each other, no doubt, but the hardship and monotony and emotional rollercoaster of being a new parent had taken its toll on her. I was never there, she had to do everything alone. The late-night feeds, the school runs, the trips to hospital and fevers of childhood illnesses and the tears.

I thought that working hard, providing for them, was enough. I was a fool. The kids resented me as an infrequent interloper in their daily routine during my visits. Isabelle didn’t care anymore where I was. She’d found a new love in alcohol. Each one of them blamed me for the gaps in our lives and the pain the kids felt at carrying their mother upstairs, slurring and crying of how lonely she was. The blame was fairly and firmly placed on me.

So I stood shivering with the rest of those deemed necessary to the event, nodding at apologies and platitudes for the ancient dead that no-one gathered cared for, with a drunken wife, an eighteen-year-old firecracker of a daughter who detested me and a sixteen-year-old son, permanently angry, who thought that I was the reason for everything that caused him and his mother pain.
 

The doors eventually creaked open and the world ended for us that night. Not straight away, but it was over, bar for the passing of the web-thin tendril of love that held us together as a family. For a while, at least.