dEaDINBURGH: Origins (Din Eidyn Corpus Book 3) (18 page)

Chapter 3

“Bracha?” James asks.

I’m too busy choking back the rising anger to say a word. He performs a showy bow, bringing his head to his knees, twirling his hands at his sides.

“Pleased to meet you, dear fellows,” he laughs inanely.

I swallow a lump of heated bile and turn my back on him, just in time to catch sight of the man with the missing eyelids strolling casually through the gates once more. He’s applauding and nods respectfully at us.

“Gentlemen, I’d like to invite you to parlay. Your skills,” he motions to his butchered comrades, “are impressive.”

The man turns to Spike.

“Bracha, is it?” he asks.

Spike winks at him.

“Indeed. And you are?” he asks.

The man in black ignores the question. “Bracha… ‘God’s chosen’ in Hebrew, I believe.”

Spike’s bearded face breaks into another toothy grin. “Exactly so, my dear boy.”

The man nods serenely and retreats. As he backs away through the gates once more, Bracha scoops up his golf club and follows him, practically skipping after the man in black.

James looks across at me and I sigh, conceding that we may as well follow, out of the habit of shadowing Spi… Bracha if nothing else. As James and I emerge out onto Liberton Brae, the gathering of people shocks us.

A sea of tattooed faces, each carrying ravens of differing types and number, looks towards us. The people of this… tribe, or community, are each attired similarly to the young man with the carved eyelids. Boots, denims, jackets and T-shirts – all black. Perhaps five hundred are present. Their number is startling. People do not tend to travel in large groups in this city. Too much noise, too many Ringed.

At the front of their number, flanked by twenty or so large, strong-looking men, is a flotilla. With its brightly coloured sides and raised platform, it looks like something from a gala day parade. Atop the barge is a dead man. Reanimated and bound to bamboo poles, he wears a Manchester United Strip – number seven emblazoned on its back – complete with shirt, shorts, socks and football boots. The man is held in place by wire and catgut, held in a pose that mocks, or perhaps celebrates, his former life. An arm raised for balance, the other at his side, one leg firmly bound to the bamboo pole, mimicking standing, the other raised to kick a partly deflated premiership football at his feet.

Despite the advanced decomposition, the hungry snarling and the horrifically permanent look of his bonds, the man is still recognisable as a very famous former-footballer.

“That who I think it is?” James asks in a whisper, nodding at the restrained Zombie.

I nod once then jut my chin along at Bracha, who is hopping from foot to foot in admiration at the spectacle.

The man in black steps forward, giving me the best look I’ve had at him so far. He’s younger than I first thought, definitely no older than twenty. Up close his height is imposing; I guess him at around six-ten. He’s athletically built despite his size, body all coiled springs of speed and efficient power. From the way he moves, the bunching and tensing of muscle under his black clothes and the lightness of his step, I can see how dangerous the man is. This is a powerful fighter and a seasoned one.

“My name is Somna,” he says simply, his voice soft, totally at odds with his appearance. He gestures to the men and women gathered in the road. “These are my people, The Exalted.” His hand rests lightly on the flotilla. The bound Zombie snarls and bites at the air. “And this is our king.”

My gut lurches as my brain whispers to me.
We’re fucked.

This guy, despite his youth, is immensely dangerous and completely in control of the moment.
James doesn’t look any more optimistic than I do, but keeps close to Bracha. Loyal to a fault, our Jimmy. I slip a blade discreetly from a sheath on my forearm into my palm, top resting on my hand, the hilt held under my cuff. From our position – backs to the cemetery gates, front and side routes closed off by Somna’s people – it’s clear that we have only one egress: back into the cemetery and hopefully find a low wall or fence we can scale.

I watch Bracha slip around the flotilla on light, skipping steps, assessing the bound Zombie-king.

“Just wonderful, my boy. Simply spectacular presentation. So imaginative, but authentic also,” Bracha says cheerily to the leader of The Exalted.

Somna steps towards Bracha, eyeing him. James’ body tightens in response. Bracha simply steps into Somna’s path and takes the man’s right hand in his own.

“Well done,” he gushes, pumping away with the handshake.
 

“It is a mark of respect to our God-king,” Somna says to him gently. He’s still deciding whether Bracha is genuinely excited or mocking him and his king. “A tribute to his former life and a throne for our king.” Somna’s drying eyes, bloodshot and lidless, remnants of muscles straining to blink in the bright sun, move over Bracha once more. His body tightens. Something is about to happen.

Bracha, of course, reads every twitch from the man. He performs one of his ridiculous little bows, half courtesy, half oriental stiffness.

“So perfectly appropriate, my friend. Lovely.”

Somna relaxes, nodding his gratitude. They wander around the flotilla, Bacha admiring the king, Somna sharing his tribe’s credos. As they exchange words, I signal James to back up a little towards the cemetery gates. This situation has turned to shit too quickly. We need to be leave. He ignores my signal and keeps his eyes on Bracha.

“Our king converses with only me. By His command, we have been charged with a sacred duty. The rigours and demands of serving our king are not for everyone, but to execute our mission, we need people.” He places a hand on Bracha’s shoulder, then cuts us a look. “We have two openings at present, Bracha. Choose one of your friends.”

He raises his eyes to us.

Despite everything, the decade of silence and detachment, the mocking, his brutality with The Ringed, my own certainty that the man I once admired so much had been damaged beyond repair, I still expect a signal from him. Some look or gesture to tell us, his lifelong friends, his intentions before he attacks Somna. I expect him to move through The Exalted, join us in fighting them off. Be a unit with us. Same as always.

Instead I see his eyes glaze. He looks bored.

Tossing a hand over his shoulder, he turns his back to us and fixes his eyes on the bound king.

“I’ll leave that to you, Somna my friend,” he says. “You decide.”

The men and women of The Exalted do not wait for a command, they move on us as one. The three metres between the nearest armed man and I gives me a spilt second to look across at the mask of horror James’ face has morphed into. Betrayal, disbelief and simple pain are etched there. Fortunately, his instincts snap him back to the moment in time to step back and pull his face away from the slashing hack of a wood axe.

We move together, kicking and slashing at only those killers who are within reach of us or who might block our path. As soon as the first wave of assailants is down, we each turn and run into the graveyard.

“Only one need die,” Somna yells to his tribe as they pursue us.

James and I zig-zag, sprint and leap around and over gravestones and crosses, dozens of armed killers on our heels. James cuts a look at me as we sprint towards the shortest wall at the north of the cemetery. He’s trying to tell me something, but his expression is unreadable to me.

We both hit the brick work at the same time and scramble up over the slick, mossy surface, landing with a roll on the other side The Exalted crash against the wall, their number and momentum preventing the fastest of them from slipping up the surface as quickly as James and I did. Their lack of training halts their progress for the moment, but they’ll
 
get some bodies over the wall soon enough.

Landing on Wolridge Road, we form up back to back, scanning the length of the road. Mercifully, none of The Exalted are on the street. James tugs at my sleeve and points up Orchardhead Road. I nod once and follow him north at a sprint. As we cut a left along Orchardhead Loan, I hear people landing on Wolridge Road behind us, having scaled the cemetery wall. Cutting through the bungalows and out onto the main thoroughfare of Liberton Brae, we sprint for one full mile, emerging onto Old Dalkeith Road.

Slowing to a fast run, James and I silently dispatch any Ringed who get in our way until we reach Bridge End, where we use the alley to take shelter in a dilapidated Royal Mail depot. As we catch some breath back, each of us secures the building and eliminates any evidence of our entering the site before slipping into what was once a side office in the building.

I’m reasonably confident that we’ve lost our pursuers. Despite their number and obvious menace, none of the tribe looked to be individually very capable. If they had trained men, military or even police force in their ranks, we might have some visitors soon, but we should be able to rest for an hour or so.

James sits in the corner, back against the wall, heels at his butt, head resting on his knees. Hs body moves with each sob. Crying seems like a reasonable response, so I choose a wall, mirror his pose and join him in mourning Captain Wales. Mostly, though, I weep because I’m finally free of the bastard he’s become.

In the week following Somna’s attack and Bracha’s betrayal, James and I argue many times. Believing that our friend is still under Bracha’s surface somewhere, he wants to go back, covertly, and extract him from The Exalted’s hands.

Following a storm of screamed accusations, recriminations and eventually, grudging acceptance, James has agreed to continue to the city-centre with me. God only knows what or who we’ll find once we arrive. We haven’t come near the epicentre of the outbreak since Hogmanay 2015, assuming that The Ringed will be most concentrated in that area. Our memories of The Royal Mile and outlying streets still wake us in the night, even after a decade of fighting… of surviving this city. For the moment, the city-centre seems like a gamble worth taking. Neither of us wants to be anywhere familiar right now. Everywhere we might camp or hunt in the south of the city is tinged with memories of
him
. We want to be gone from here.

James is broken, but he’ll heal.

I just want to start over, free of a responsibility which became a burden for the first time in my adult life.

I’m approaching middle age. Thoughts of a life, a family, someone to love, weigh on me. Is that even possible in this city? I don’t know. I have no clue what waits for us in the city-centre. Communities like those established in the south that we’ve encountered in our years amongst the dead? Fenced off areas where people survive that little bit easier inside the chicken wire barriers than they do outside?

Religious nutters? Killers? Streets filled with only The Ringed? Somewhere to heal and find peace?

We have no way of knowing. All I know is that whatever lies there, waiting for us, for the first time since Sandhurst it’ll be our choice what we choose to face. Who we choose to be. It’ll be our lives to live.

Padre Jock’s Journal

Part Two

Chapter 1

Jock

Two weeks after Grayson’s party left the Kirk I began to worry. After a third week passed, I took a team of five people to track them down. We had a good idea that they had been headed for The Royal Mile, Grayson’s ideal location. The main road from Canongate to the upper part of The Mile was a sea of The Ringed. We wasted the best part of another week travelling stealthily through closes and back-alleys. We lost two of our team, and the other three blamed me. It was obvious that Grayson’s team, including my children, were dead. I pushed on, they went back to the Kirk.

Finally, I found my way to the balcony atop the wall of the City Chambers, looking out onto The Mile. At the first arch lay signs of a feeding frenzy. Blood, gore. My son’s shoes. My soul shrank that day, Joseph. I felt part of it shake free and leave while the rest contracted to stone.

Numbly, I made my way back to Canongate Kirk in a day. I didn’t care about stealth anymore, I took the direct route. I have no idea how I made it and no memory of the journey. All I saw in front of me was the red puddle that had once been my kids.

Not long after I arrived the dead came to us. En masse they swarmed, their numbers bringing down our fences and our doors. Thousands streamed along Canongate devouring everything in their path. A bunch of students living in an apartment to the side of the Kirk must have found some batteries or something and had been paying Rage Against The Machine at a deafening volume for hours. Perhaps celebrating something. Maybe a suicide pact – there’d been plenty of those in recent months.

God knows what they were thinking.

It was over with in less than thirty minutes. The little community we’d founded, the dozens of survivors I’d helped keep alive, hoping beyond all evidence for a rescue, were torn to pieces, consumed, defiled. Sinfully, I knelt in the basement waiting to die, I didn’t even try to fight. I was destroyed inside, Joseph. Isabelle screamed abuse at me, and she had every right. They all died, each one of them. Isabelle left me in the basement to die. I laughed as she disappeared upstairs. I actually laughed at her. A cold part of my mind made me shout after her, “You said no heroics. Well, you’ve got it, Isabelle.”

The Kirk was rocked violently by an explosion. We’d kept liquid fuel and canisters of gas in the hall for heating, cooking, light. Perhaps someone had made a stand and lit them as a last measure. Perhaps they just went up by accident, I didn’t care. It didn’t make a difference to me how I died, Joseph.

Then I heard her. Isabelle was screaming, not for me, but in rage and in pain. The sound sent a lightning torrent of memories through my mind’s eye. Meeting Isabelle, how in love we were, the disapproval and then acceptance from my parents, her laugh, God, it was musical. I hadn’t heard it in so long I’d forgotten the effect that it had on me. Joyful, that’s what it made me.

Screaming and determined words from upstairs brought back images and smells and pain and elation from the labour ward. Isabelle had suffered terribly delivering Tricia. She’d collapsed again and again in the breaks between contractions. She’d risen again with the next and pushed and strained and screamed and yelled. Isabelle had taught me what courage, real courage, was in that little white room in Wishaw General. All her admonishments of “no heroics, Jock,” when she was the most heroic of us all.

I remembered who my wife was and who I was.

I bolted upstairs to find the hall engulfed by fire. Flames licked along the walls, consumed the wooden pews and brought sections of the ancient ceiling down. The roof didn’t look far behind. Another yell from Isabelle helped me locate her. She was on her back, fighting a small woman who sat atop her, snapping her teeth an inch from Isabelle’s throat. Only her right forearm wedged under the creature’s chin prevented Isabelle’s throat from being torn out.

I covered the distance between us in three paces, my fourth step became a powerful kick aimed at the woman’s head. She flew off Isabelle, who was on her feet in an instant. She slapped me hard across the face. No words were exchanged. We simply fled – there’s no other word for it, Joseph – we ran for our lives.

Together, we ran through the rear graveyard, shouldering Ringed from our path. Emerging out onto Calton Road, Isabelle found us a car we could use which we drove to Lochend Park. She insisted we went there. Somewhere remote. Somewhere quiet.

Isabelle died there maybe ten minutes after we arrived. Laid on a beautifully-carved oak bench surrounded by spring flowers at the lakeside, my wife died in my arms from the bite she’d received back in the Kirk. I silenced her before she reanimated.

I was utterly numbed, Joseph. Oh, I did the basics: I fought, I killed The Ringed, I ate and took shelter. I roamed around for years, always making my way back to the city-centre for long spells. Always standing at that place at the City Chambers, staring at the cobbles washed clean by the weather many times over since. The fences began to go up; I helped erect some of them. Many times I took payment from The Brotherhood for keeping their community free of all but the most decayed dead and building their barriers.

 
After maybe ten years, I stopped travelling around and stayed permanently in the city-centre.
 
I met a lot of people. I killed a lot of people and ex-people to keep my little corner of the world safe. I walked away from people who I could have helped, Isabelle’s words echoing in my mind.
No heroics.

For seven more years I existed instead of living until the screams of a woman delivering her baby into this hell brought me running to the very place my children died.

God forgive me for my sins. I have so many and so much more to tell you, Joseph. Not so that I’ll be forgiven, not because I believe in second chances for someone like me, but simply because I want you to learn from my weakness. All I can give you is my promise that we’ll leave here together one day soon, Joseph, and that I’ll give you my Journal to learn from.

Your friend

Jock