Din Eidyn Corpus (Book 2): dEaDINBURGH (Alliances) (4 page)

Retrieving an old-fashioned mobile phone from his briefcase, Donnelly snapped it open and held down the number one. As the speed dial beeped away, he took another pull on his whisky.

After ten rings, the line crackled into life. There were no hellos, no greetings. Only he and the man at the other end of the line ever communicated in this way.

Fraser spent less than a minute relaying his request to his agent inside the city. As usual, his man had his own agenda, but was easily motivated to see things Donnelly’s way.

“That timetable is what is required of you.” Fraser spoke sternly into the mobile phone.

The gentle voice from the other end grew a little colder.

“The items we discussed. If we’re to see through the winter and are expected to be in fighting condition come the spring, we’ll be needing everything I mentioned.”

“That won’t be a problem. Remember, timing is crucial. No sooner than April and I want every home, every person in the city-centre dead. No-one should be spared.”

A long pause…

“Deal.”

Interlude

Bridges Broken

An inhuman groan began, followed by a screech so loud the survivors in the north of the dead city – Newhaven, Granton, Cramond, Leith – all of them clasped their ears with firm hands, guarding against the explosion of sound threatening to burst ear drums and shatter structures.

Metal, abandoned and bent by years of neglect and weakened by oxidation on a massive scale, finally surrendered to gravity.

Tarmac cracked, split and fell in large chunks. Riveted steel girders and plates, fixed together by strong, skilled hands and engineering brilliance and kept together by dogged maintenance, finally gave and let gravity have its way. Deemed a relic, too close to the dead city, the Forth Road Bridge gives its final death rattle.

As thousands of tonnes of iron and steel splashed and crashed into and onto sea and land, an ocean of cameras, placed on the north shore of the Firth of Forth, captured the last moments of a monstrous and humbling feat of engineering slipping into the water and sent the images over the Holo-Net in a special broadcast.

Inland, to the north, heads human and Ringed alike, turn towards the noise. The survivors cower in their shelters or arm themselves and walk into the morning sea breeze, wondering what else is about to befall them. The dead walk towards the noise. Some make it past barriers, fallen with the weight of their numbers, and passively enter the Firth of Forth, still following the catastrophic noise.

 
Underwater, they walk and crawl and stagger until they hit the barriers five hundred yards from the north shore. Spiked, impassable, they hold the dead back, as they have for decades. Most of The Ringed are swept west by fierce currents, hitting a twin underwater barrier placed beneath the bridge. They will rot and bloat there. Some are smashed by tons of metal crashing down or simply blocked by metal already on the sea bed. Some float to the surface. Inert, they bob around, snarling for eternity.

 
 
South, miles away inside the fences, tens of thousands of The Ringed turn north and head toward the city-centre.

Chapter 4

Alys

A grinding noise squealed, reverberating through the ancient stone buildings. Thundering along the narrow stone streets above and below ground, the metallic cacophony reached and rattled the metal grates on the windows of the shop, formerly Forbidden Planet, waking Alys and Joey.

Alys pulled at a sleeping bag covering her head and emerged from beneath the layers of man-made warmth.

“Hell, what was that?” she asked, turning to Joey.

Groggily he groaned.

“Dunno. Was pretty loud though.”

Alys sat up, eliciting a complaint from Joey that she was letting the heat out. Watching her breath fog in the air, she cocked her head and listened for a few seconds. Something was… off.
 

The sound had vanished completely, but the world felt changed by it. Something in the fabric of the city had shifted.

Alys pulled herself free of their bedding and walked to the thick plate-glass window. Joey groaned like a Zom again and pulled the sleeping bag over his head.

“S’freezing,” he grunted.

“Wheesht,” she said, wiping at layers of grime and mildew with a wadded fistful of half-rotted paper she’d scooped up from the shop floor.

Pressing her nose to the glass, Alys squinted through the low morning sun, trying to catch sight of whatever had her feeling so uneasy.

She shook her head.

“Joey, something’s not right.”

From beneath the layers of sleeping bag she heard a series of muffled complaints and insults.

Kicking at the pile of bedding, she said, “I’m serious, Joe. Get up.”

Joey obviously detected from her tone that she was concerned and was up on his feet by the window with her in a second, fully alert.

He rubbed himself a porthole in the grime. Together they listened and watched.

After several quiet moments, Joey spoke.

“Bit of movement this morning.”

There were a few of The Ringed shuffling around, more than usual. Alys didn’t speak but offered a nod.

Joey turned his back on the window. He held a finger up to his lips, asking her to be quiet. Alys watched as he closed his eyes and began moving his head around, like a dog might, cocking his head this way or that.

Raised in the impenetrable, perpetual darkness of Mary King’s Close, her best friend was happiest in the absence of light, his eyes having adapted to almost complete darkness over a decade and a half. He also made much better use of his other senses. Joey could detect and interpret sounds that she was simply deaf to.

Holding her breath whilst he listened to the city, Alys watched The Ringed through the clear pane of glass she’d made and worried at the itch in her subconscious. Her instincts were screaming that something obvious and dangerous had shifted irrevocably.

Watching the dead move, she gasped as the answer came to her.

Joey reached out and squeezed her arm gently. She assumed it was due to the noise she’d made breaking his concentration. Sometimes when he was listening intently, small noises could hurt his sensitive ears.

 
“Oh, sorry, Joey,” she said, looking at him.

“It’s not that,” he replied, nodding towards the street. “There’s hundreds of them, all around the area.” He looked worried. “Mostly old ones though. But still, lots. Especially this far into the city.”

Both were relieved that Joey had detected mostly old Ringed. Badly decomposed and poorly coordinated, any dead the friends found in this state were easy to go around. They only silenced them if threatened or cornered. These Ringed were still dangerous but a daily fact of life that had become routine for people born in the city. The freshly reanimated Ringed, however, were another matter.

Alys let out a breath. “Look at them, Joey. They’re all headed north.”

Joey narrowed his eyes and took another look.

“Yeah. Creepy, huh?” he nodded.

Normally The Ringed would move randomly, for the most part. Sometimes they followed the curve of a street downward, or the smell of the living. Sometimes a light, some movement or a sound caught their attention. It wasn’t unknown for a group to follow something, or each other, like sheep. But always, a few remained in place or headed the other direction. What they were watching here was different.

Every one of the dead, without exception, was shuffling, limping or crawling towards the sound that it seemed had come from the north. Alys watched corpses pass the window, snarling and biting. Normally they’d follow a sound for only minutes, then be distracted again, but this crowd seemed transfixed by the unseen, and now silent, force they followed.

Alys glanced at the ground watching a Ringed in the tattered remains of a policeman’s uniform drag itself along the slippery, moss-covered pavement. Pulling itself determinedly along with the one limb it had remaining, it clawed with bony, white fingers at the pavement and made the macabre march along with its brethren.

Alys had lived alongside these creatures her entire life. She was wary of them, but unafraid. She was most likely, along with Joey, one of the ablest survivors in the city. There was little she feared or hadn’t prepared herself for in this desperate city. As she watched dozens of The Ringed purposefully make their way along South Bridge towards her home, she felt a cold prickle move from the base of her spine to her neck.

Stuffing her things into a rucksack, she shouldered the bag and headed outside.

“Let’s get moving, Joey.”

“Yeah, about that.” Joey rubbed at the back of his neck as he followed her out into the street. He looked embarrassed.

“Joey, I need to get to The Gardens. It’s my job. I’m a Ranger, remember? I have to make sure the perimeter isn’t breached.”

They’d spoken in hushed voices the previous night, hoping that their conversation and tears went unheard by any UKBC devices, discussing the best way to deal with their new knowledge of the outside world.

Both had agreed, eventually, that there was nothing to gain from telling other survivors in the city what they’d discovered. There was nothing that either of them could do to change or even improve the situation. Why add to the burden of the survivors’ lives? They’d also agreed that the UKBC would likely kill them, and perhaps their friends and family too, if it discovered that the pair knew of the cameras and their purpose. There had been a lot of arguing and justifying those decisions, but they’d made a pact to stay silent.

She and Joey had also agreed that after visiting The Gardens for day or two, they would begin the process of finding someone Joey was comfortable with to look at the contents of his mother’s flash drive and the laptop they’d taken from the Infirmary. Both were a little worried over how long the charge may last in the device, but they needed to rest a while. Joey’s foot, where his toe had been severed, needed attention, and both teens were emotionally badly bruised and in need of quality sleep in a safe environment.

“I’m going now.”

He held the little orange device in his open palm for her to see.

A dozen reasons why he should stick to their plan flashed through her mind. None reached her lips. It was his choice to make. His need to know. She understood better than most the gap an absent parent leaves in the soul of their child.

Coming close to him, she hid her disappointment and her concerns.

“Meet you there in two days?”

Joey smiled. Judging from his expression, he’d been expecting an argument.

“Thanks, Alys. Do you need me to go over the location again?” he asked.

She punched him hard in the arm. Their version of a kiss.

“Na. I’m good.” Turning to leave, she swallowed the urge to argue and threw him a half-hearted smile.

“Say hi to Suzie for me.”

She left at a jog towards home.

As she crested the gentle hill at North Bridge, Alys noticed a man at the entrance to The Scotsman Hotel and slowed her pace. He was dressed entirely in black, mostly the practical mountain-wear clothing that Joey favoured. His hair was dark brown and he wore a black raven tattoo under his left eye. He leaned his backside against the sill of a broken window and was watching the last of The Ringed who’d passed her earlier move onto Princes Street. He turned when he heard her approach and offered a warm smile. He had a hard face, but kind eyes.

Her eyes missed nothing as she took in his appearance. A person’s body language, the firmness or lightness of their step or touch, their fluidity of movement, all of these easily-observed aspects of appearance that most missed were like reading a person’s résumé to Alys. Trained since infancy, musculature, movement and violence were a first language to her. Alys found nothing in reading this man to make her fear him or his abilities.

She walked towards him, unfastening her rucksack and placing it in the centre of the same little traffic island she’d met Joey at on the day they left for the Infirmary. Mirroring his pose, she leaned against the rail surrounding the traffic island and placed both hands on the pommels of her Sai.

“You followed us?” she asked, tightening her grip on her Sai.

The man in black shook his head.

“Figured you’d come this way.” He grinned as he spoke.

He was pleased with himself and didn’t bother trying to hide it. Alys laughed despite her rising annoyance. He was almost exactly as she remembered him from her childhood. A little more grey flecked through his hair and stubble, and a few more scars on his face alongside a fresh bruise, but still cocky.

“You look good, Alys. Strong,” he said with genuine warmth.

Alys choked back a lump that threatened to rise in her throat. His easy familiarity brought a torrent of childhood memories to her.

“Yeah… Mum, you know.” A glint of recognition passed between them. Shared history, knowledge.

He nodded. Of course he knew. They both knew that, of all people, Jennifer Shephard would have prepared her daughter for this world.

Alys ignored the tide of memories and hardened her stare. She painted her poker face in place.

“I’m in a hurry. You’ve got five minutes to explain why you’re here, Uncle James.”