dEaDINBURGH: Origins (Din Eidyn Corpus Book 3) (2 page)

“Looking forward to taking him through to Edinburgh next week for the New Year fireworks?”

Sharon smiles broadly.

“Can’t wait, love.”

Michelle MacLeod

Chapter 1

January 30
^th

 
2015

“Dad… DAD!”

“Oh, sorry, love. What did you say?”

Michelle smiled at her father, shaking her head slightly at his daydreaming. He’d been sitting in his chair reading and had drifted off, his thoughts meandering to and from who knew where. He’d been doing this more frequently of late. She nodded at the TV.

“I was asking what you thought of this stuff.”

Joe blinked a couple of times; long, slow, deliberate blinks. He reached under his reading glasses and rubbed at his eyes, bringing his thoughts back into the room. He looked over the top of his readers, taking in the comments of the man being interviewed on the evening news. He lifted his chin and gave his glasses a wee nudge back to the bridge of his nose and took in the information scrolling across the bulletin tickertape at the bottom of the screen.

Finally he looked over the top of his glasses again, towards Michelle. As he so often did, he replied with a question of his own.

“What do you think, love?”

It was an old habit. He’d always been the type of father who wanted her to think independently, to form her own opinions. Joe was happy to discuss anything with his fourteen-year-old daughter, but still habitually tried to guide the conversation, as dads do, despite her being almost an adult now.

“Daaad…” she protested.

Joe allowed a grin to part his lips.

“Okay,” he said, smiling more broadly, “old habits.” Joe coughed to clear his throat and sat up a little straighter in his chair, giving Michelle his full attention. He used his hands animatedly as he spoke.

“I don’t see that they have much choice at this point, Chelle. The quarantine has been in place for five days now. They’ve sealed the entire capital in one big loop, following the city bypass around the area. It seems to have worked. In those five days, there hasn’t been a single recorded case of infection outside of Edinburgh. Seems they did the right thing.”

Michelle’s brow furrowed.

“What about the survivors, Dad? They’ve just left them to fend for themselves in there along with those… infected. Some people are calling them
zombies.
”

Joe nodded.

“Yes, but the UK government has said they’re working around the clock to develop a screening process, a treatment and a protocol for removing survivors from the city.”

“A virologist from London speaking on the BBC news this morning said that process could take months. Maybe years. Will anyone even be left alive, let alone healthy by then?”

Joe shrugged. “I wouldn’t have thought so, Chelle. But the alternative is allowing potentially infected people to transmit whatever this is to the rest of the country, maybe the rest of the world. We were damn lucky that the armed forces were able to contain it as quickly and effectively as they did.” Joe lifted his eyebrows. “It’s a bit of a miracle, really.”

Watching his daughter mull it over, Joe supressed a smile of pride in her obvious compassion and her reasoning. After a few minutes she said, “There are people who want to go in there and try to help the survivors. Maybe set up a safe zone, or help treat the infected. Something. Anything.”

Joe’s face darkened.

“That’s admirable, but they won’t let anyone in or out of there. Edinburgh as we knew it is gone. It’s a metaphorical island, filled with disease and death and pain.”

“And people, Dad. It’s filled with people who just need help.” Michelle’s voice cracked a little.

“For the time being,” Joe said firmly. “It’s a dead city, Michelle.”

They spoke for another hour, discussing possible solutions and possible outcomes, Joe playing devil’s advocate, arguing against each suggestion or plan his daughter proposed would help the residents of Scotland’s capital. Finally he groaned in protest at his cramped muscles and stretched his good leg out in front of his armchair.

“Give me a hand up please, love?”

Michelle nodded and took her father by both hands. Leaning back, she pulled him up out of his chair and quickly slid her hands under his right arm to support his weight, noting that he felt lighter than ever. Slipping her arm all the way around his waist, she told him, “You’ve been skipping meals again.”

Joe didn’t bother to argue. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and leaned in against her, dragging his right leg as his daughter helped him from the living room into his ground-floor bedroom, once the family office. The leg wasn’t painful
–
only his pride hurt when his little girl helped him walk
–
but all of the once-busy relays of sensory and motor impulses were dead from his hip to his toes on the right side. He dragged his leg behind him when he walked with a pair of crutches, the muscles long-since atrophied and shrunken.

Joe had gone through more shoes in the last five years since the accident than he had in the previous thirty. Refusing to entertain the notion of a wheelchair, he accepted that the toes of each right shoe would be left, smear by smear, on the pavements he still insisted on dragging his limp leg along. Joe could only feel so bad about the injury to his spine and the resulting loss of shoe and sensation. After all, at least he’d lived through the accident that had taken Michelle’s mother from them.

Bouncing his rear end onto the bed, he reached out for his crutch and told Michelle, “Thanks, darlin’. I can manage from here.”

“Okay, Daddy,” she said, but did a quick sweep around his room and to and from the en-suite. She fetched his nightwear and a few other items before sitting them on the bed next to him.

Michelle lay a hand softly on his prominent right cheek bone and tried not to wince at how frail her father felt to touch.

“I love you, Dad. See you in the morning.”

Michelle leaned down and Joe kissed her gently on the forehead.

“G’night my wee darlin’.”

Joe brushed his teeth and washed, then dragged his dead leg into bed to read for the next hour, trying not to listen to the sounds coming from the front room and kitchen. Sounds made by his daughter readying everything they’d both need for the day ahead tomorrow.

No matter how Joe admonished her, Michelle would lay out his clothes, breakfast utensils and plates and all of the items she anticipated he may require to make it through the day. Finally he listened to her ascend the stairs and creak into the room her mother and father had once occupied. Joe switched off his lamp and lay down as his daughter went through her nightly ritual of speaking to her mother. He buried his ears into the pillow beneath him and gave his girl her privacy. Whatever Michelle had to say to her departed mother was her business.

“Michelle… Pardon me, Ms MacLeod?”

Michelle snapped her attention back to the room.

“Sorry, Miss.” She looked up at Mrs Taggart who was standing over her desk, “Could you repeat the question?”

Her biology teacher gave her
that
smile. The one all the teachers at Bellshill Academy gave her since her mum’s death. It was meant to convey patience and understanding, but instead screamed at her
Ah, yes. You’re the damaged one we have to tip-toe around.

“Of course,” Mrs Taggart said. “To which compound does inorganic phosphate bind to, with the addition of energy, to form Adenosine tr…”

“ADP,” Michelle interrupted. “It bonds with ADP.”

Mrs Taggart bristled for a split second at the interruption before fixing
that
smile back on her face.

“Thank you, Michelle. Exactly so. Now Ms Grey…” Mrs Taggart turned away to quiz a classmate, the empty space her body had occupied now filled with the face of Heather Brown, who was glowering at Michelle.

“You’re such a dick,” Heather mouthed at her.

Michelle sighed and turned her attention back to her workbook.

Heather and she had been close friends all through primary school and had been frequent visitors to each other’s homes throughout their childhoods. Their parents were good friends also. Until the accident. Michelle had taken months to be able to face school again. Once a centre of her year group’s social hub, along with Heather, Michelle returned to find that she was no longer even a part of her group of friends anymore.

In her absence, they’d all moved on and designed for her a new existence, one in which she was the centre of rumours regarding her mental health. She had become suddenly the victim of a torrent of abuse and bullying. Mostly regarding her own mental health and her father’s disability.

At times during her self-imposed exile, she truly thought that she couldn’t face another day. Couldn’t find the will to rise from her bed. The only reason she did at all was to be the anchor her father needed to prevent himself being washed away on a tide of grief. At that time, Michelle couldn’t imagine ever going back to school again. Ever being normal, having fun again. Finally, she’d returned to school motivated, following
 
the pinpoint prick of light… of hope that her friends would help her return to a normal life
–
as normal as it could be, at any rate. Instead she’d met ridicule and abuse at the words, fists and feet of the people she’d imagined would be her support.

The first year had been the worst. The beatings, the circle around her chanting vile accusations, judgements and names at her and her father;
nutcase… spastic… Quasimodo…
Their inventiveness and cruelty had shocked her for so long. Of course, with recent events in Edinburgh, Heather had decided that Michelle’s dad deserved the new nickname of
zombie
. Michelle had begged the school to help her but, aside from a few warnings to her tormentors, they seemed powerless or uninterested in helping.
 
Now Michelle merely endured passively the beatings and the insults that still came her way, although less often, and hid the bruises from her father.

Two things kept Michelle sane: looking after her father and running. Her mother had been a long-distance athlete participating in many endurance trials like
Tough Mudder
and
Iron-Woman
events. Whatever genes her mum had possessed to make her ideal of build and mentality for endurance sports, she’d passed an amplified version of them to her daughter. Michelle was on the gymnastics team, the cross country squad and the judo team, some at county level, and international for running.

She would run the Lanarkshire streets and parks for hours, losing herself in memories and dreams. The repeated footfall strengthened her mind as much as it did her body, perhaps more so. Running was her solution to everything at present.

“See you after school, MacLeod.” Heather spat at her feet.

Michelle merely nodded.
Great…

Chapter 2

November

2020

dEaDINBURGH: First Broadcast

“It’s coming on, Chelle,” Darcie yelled, a few flecks of popcorn spraying onto the couch.

Michelle yelled in from the next room.

“’Kay.”

Pulling off the battered running shoes she’d been wearing, Michelle wiped herself down with a gym towel. Grabbing a bottle of water from the fridge, she plonked herself onto the sofa beside her flatmate.

“I can’t believe that they’re actually going through with the broadcast,” Michelle said.

Darcie shrugged. “Of course they are. You didn’t think that a little thing like morals or hundreds of thousands of people protesting in George Square would change their minds, did you?”

Michelle grinned bitterly at the sarcasm.

She and Darcie had been present at the massive protest against the decision to broadcast the newest UKBC
show
. Almost since formation, the UKBC was, by a huge margin, the largest broadcaster in the world after absorbing the former BBC, Sky, ITV and US-based HBO networks. Its newest show had been proposed as a possible venture for the fledgling, gargantuan broadcast company at its inaugural board meeting.

Thanks to the bewildering interest of a voyeuristic general public, some very strategic spin from the UKBC marketing director and funded by a compulsory monthly license fee enforced by the state that proposal was now reality. Tonight was the
premier
of what many people thought was the single vilest display of exploitation and cruelty the world had seen. Unfortunately, many, many more people were actually thrilled at the concept and had whirled themselves into a state of unprecedented excitement over it.

dEaDINBURGH was about to air. Not a single episode had been broadcast; only that dreadful upper/lower case logo had appeared, along with a few crass images of buildings and, of course, The Ringed, but in the few months the UKBC had been promoting the upcoming show, dEaDINBURGH had become a marketing phenomenon.

The friends sat watching the images flash across Darcie’s new Holo-Screen, a gift from her parents, as the UKBC trailed yet another series of promos and images from inside the city. As media students attending Glasgow University, Darcie and Michelle had followed the rise of the UKBC closely and with a growing sense of dread at the extent to which the massive company had become so intrinsically tied into the UK government.

Following the Scottish referendum in 2014, the widely discredited UK mainstream media were there for the taking. Initiated by the newly-in-power Conservative and UKIP coalition government, and emboldened by their success in keeping the UK together despite a massive political movement demanding that federalism be employed throughout the island, the new government passed law after law and formed the single most powerful broadcasting corporation of any age or nation. Government and public-funded, of course.

The UKBC was touted as a network for the people and a mandatory license fee instated. The people loved the concept, the sense of ownership, of belonging.

An infomercial played out as the friends crunched on their popcorn. The UKBC was showing how it had tapped into the dead city’s former CCTV network and was using a powerful fibre-optic broadband network, along with a city-wide Wi-Fi network, to transmit images from the quarantine zone. The networks had been installed shortly before the city fell. Edinburgh’s power had been cut years before and all communication networks severed. Any devices that could be employed to utilise the newly-reinstated network had long since lost their capacity to do so, but the UKBC had measures in place, just in case.

As well as utilizing the existing resources, the UKBC had developed miniscule cameras and microphones. Connected to suitably-sized insect-like robots, the cameras and mics had been distributed in their thousands throughout the former Edinburgh and had been wirelessly broadcasting their images and sounds successfully for months.

 
The images, seen only by a handful of technicians and reporters so far, were as compelling as they were horrific. The executives knew that they had a hit on their hands before the first image was even made public and were more than happy to fill fifteen minutes in the run-up to the premier showing the viewers how clever their team had been.

The final trailer told of the good work of the UKBC’s charity foundation. An undisclosed percentage of the proceeds from its new cash-cow would be ploughed into researching the infection in the former Scottish capital and other worthwhile projects, including financial support of the quarantined people’s relatives.

Michelle tutted loudly and left the sofa. Leaning on the window ledge, she surveyed the streets outside their first-floor flat in Glasgow’s West End. They were virtually empty. It seemed that everyone, whether for entertainment or because of outrage, was inside anxiously awaiting the UKBC’s new crown jewel. Most of her classmates had opted to go to one of the local bars or had gathered en masse in the living room of a friend who had the latest HD-Holo-screen, like Darcie’s.

She and Darcie, all too aware of how unpopular their views on the UKBC generally and dEaDINBURGH specifically were amongst their peers, had opted to watch the show alone.

Two commercial-free hours later, she and her best friend sat gaping, open-mouthed at what they’d witnessed. Unable to speak, Michelle slid her finger across the screen of her iPad and watched as Facebook lit up with comments on the show.

Post after post, image upon image filled her newsfeed. Memes with moments from footage just aired mocked this survivor or that Ringed.
 
Little videos of ‘great kills’ or favourite Ringed or survivors began to gather momentum. Footage of a former marine minister fighting an overwhelming number of The Ringed and surviving went viral. Almost instantly the man became the biggest
celebrity
who’d ever existed.

Michelle ran to the little apartment’s bathroom and vomited violently. Darcie sat silently on their sofa trying to absorb what she had seen.