dEaDINBURGH (12 page)

Chapter 13

Joey

Pulling the bow string back to his nose, Joey let out a gentle breath and loosed the arrow. Another shot. Sighing, he ran along towards the traffic lights in which his arrow was embedded, executing a half-hearted somersault over a rusted traffic island as he went. Alys was very late and his bones had stiffened in the cold waiting for her outside the old Scotsman Hotel on North Bridge. Alys’ departure from The Gardens must have proven more difficult than she’d anticipated.

Joey had departed The Gardens a week earlier, thanking the women for his time there and for teaching him so many useful skills. Jennifer, stoic as ever, had simply told him “Goodbye, Boy.” He’d been tempted to give her a hug,
just because
, but hadn’t fancied nursing a facial wound for the next few days.

Saying goodbye to Stephanie had been a much more difficult experience. In his time in The Gardens, Joey had become very attached to the girl, who had taken to following him around whilst he performed his duties. Alys thought her behaviour the result of a crush on Joey, but it wasn’t that at all. She just wanted a big brother. In a way, she’d transferred her need for a male role model onto him, and he was quite happy with that. It was nice to have someone who simply liked him for being him.
 

What Alys felt towards him was a mystery. What were they to each other? Allies? Potential lovers? That didn’t feel right. He did have feelings for Alys – he loved her he supposed – but how did one know what love felt like? Best friends felt like the most comfortable fit for them. What he did know for sure was that he wouldn’t be asking Alys about it anytime soon. They had a job to do.

Steph was quieter than she’d been previously, according to her mother. She was more circumspect and spent long hours deep in thought watching Joey or the trainee Rangers go through their paces with Jennifer and her team. In the evenings, they’d sit together, she and Joey and her mother, sharing stories and laughing together. Steph and her mum were so easy to be happy around in stark contrast to many of the others in The Gardens. Spending time in their company made him feel part of a family for the first time. Gradually Steph withdrew from these nightly visits.

As the weeks passed, she’d retreated into herself a little more. With each passing day she spent more and more time alone. Gradually her self-imposed exile passed, but the Steph who emerged was quite different from the carefree kid she’d been only weeks before. She enrolled in her Aunt Jennifer’s Ranger programme. Initially refusing her niece, Jennifer had conceded to grant her admittance after Steph had turned up every day for a month, stationed herself right at the heart of the class and punished her soft body, copying the much more experienced trainees’ drills and exercises. Eventually, Joey had asked why being a Ranger was suddenly so important to her. “I won’t ever be a victim again, Joey,” she’d replied.

On the day he’d left, Steph had refused to speak to him and stood alone in the training field practicing combat drills and sequences as he left by the north gate.

Alys, on the other hand, was coming with him, or rather, he was going with her. She was still adamant that Bracha would be going to the Royal Infirmary in search of the cure. And she was still convinced that they had to stop him. She dangled the chance to repay Bracha for Jock’s murder in front of Joey. He had to admit, Jock’s death was still a raw scab inside him, and if he allowed himself, the urge to kill Bracha could consume him.

Jock had taught him better than that. He’d taught him to survive. Bracha would get his, sooner or later. Men and women like him always did. It didn’t matter whether or not Joey was there to see it. Still, if the opportunity arose, he wouldn’t waste it either.

Alys was due to return from her current Ranger tour a few days after he’d departed. The plan was that Joey would use seven days before meeting Alys on North Bridge to gather any supplies, clothing and tools they might need from the outdoor stores along Rose Street. Taking an indirect route along Clerk Street, they’d leave the inner-fenced area and then loop around Craigmillar to the hospital grounds. Their journey, of only four miles, should take around ten hours, what with the debris, cars and any Ringed they’d have to deal with or avoid along the way. Once they left the relative security of the inner fences, the Ringed population would likely be much, much denser as most of the land they would be travelling through was once residential.

 
They’d scheduled two days for the trip, to give them the opportunity to explore the area a little, and packed accordingly. Slow, steady progress was their intention. Stealth was more important than speed.

Most of the mountaineering shops had been emptied over the thirty years or so since the plague hit, but people had taken mostly the larger items – sleeping bags and such like. The smaller equipment, certain types of clothing and camping gear still lay in some of the stockrooms.

Whilst Joey scavenged for supplies, Alys would be speaking to her mother about her intention to leave the safety of the inner fence, travel south and look for the cure. As angry as Jennifer would certainly be, she respected her daughter’s abilities and her judgement. Alys would be here, sooner or later.

An hour later, Alys appeared, dressed for the weather and carrying an empty rucksack and a sour expression on her face.

“Your mum a pain in the ass?” he asked.

Dropping to one knee, she began stuffing the supplies that Joey had left in a neat pile for her into her rucksack.

“Let’s not talk about it, okay?” she said without looking up.

“How’s Stephanie?” Joey asked.

“She’s… determined.”

Joey jerked his chin up in a
how’d you mean
gesture.

Alys stuffed the last of her things into the rucksack and sat on top of it to look up at Joey.

“She’s still training really hard, working on compensating for the eye. She’s taken up archery.”

Joey’s eyebrows popped up, partly in surprise and partly in delight.

“Made her own takedown recurve bow,” Alys continued. “Did you teach her that?”

“No. Not how to make the bow, or how to shoot one. She watched me make a bow though, and spent hours watching me shoot.”

“Crush.”

Joey blushed, more out of annoyance than embarrassment.

“It’s not a crush, Alys. She just needs something safe to focus on.”

Alys looked unconvinced.

“She any good?” Joey asked.

“She’s
very
good.”

Joey nodded. Steph had, knowingly or not, chosen the one weapon that her missing eye would actually give her an advantage with.

“So. We ready then?”

“Yeah.” Alys nodded over to the line of cars running the length of the Bridges and onto Nicholson Street. “Over the roofs?”

Joey grinned. “You up for it?”

“Yep.”

“Let’s go then.” Joey tightened his rucksack, laces and checked that his weapons were secure. The ritual was a comfort to him. He heard Jock’s voice in his head reminding him of the precaution each time

With a small hop, he placed one foot onto the bumper, then the trunk, then the roof of a rusted Honda Cr-V. Running along, slowly at first to gauge the grip of his all-weather hiking boots on the icy car, he found the rusted car body underneath the layer of snow and ice gave more than enough traction. He increased his pace, leaping from roof to bonnet to trunk to roof, throwing in the odd spin or whirl when the space allowed. Running along the line of rotting shells of cars was by far the easiest and fastest route along the rubble, debris and vehicle-strewn streets.

After clearing his tenth vehicle, Joey spun around on the roof of a Mini Copper to check on Alys’ progress. She was only two cars behind. Since the herd of Ringed at the bus in Canonmills, Alys had found a new appreciation for Joey’s method of moving through the city. “It’s so fluid, so fast,” she’d told him. Alys had asked him to show her the basics the very next day.

Like everything else Alys Shephard had put her mind to, she punished herself practicing the routines and manoeuvres associated with Parkour that Joey taught to her. Fortunately she had three things in her favour which allowed her to progress quickly. Firstly, she had been practicing gymnastics and unarmed combat for most of her life. The necessary strength, flexibility and basic balance were already at her disposal. Secondly, she was highly motivated. She hated being less able than anyone at anything. Finally, she was a total natural. She was beautiful and flowing in her movement across, over and through the city’s surfaces and objects.

 
Nodding at her, she gave him a signal to carry on. Joey smiled to himself, happy to share his world as they flowed along the cold metal. After an hour or so, they reached the corner of the inner fence where Clerk Street met Hope Park Terrace. They found a gap that someone else had made in the chicken wire fence and re-tied with copper wire, presumably after passing through.

“Bracha?” Alys asked, pointing at the scar on the fence.

“Could be anyone, Alys.”

Alys sniffed at him in reply, pushing her way past him to untangle the wire, reopening the hole.

“Ready?” she asked, nodding over at the group of the dead who were congregated in front of a Sainsbury’s store. Some of the creatures had turned towards them in response to the rattling of the fence.

“Let’s do it,” Joey said, stepping through after Alys.

Taking a sharp right, they took a pre-planned detour they’d discussed when planning the trip. The Hospital for Sick Children was barely half a mile from their position, and whilst in the heart of a packed residential area, student residences mostly, both agreed that it would be a good place to scavenge some supplies. Neither expected it to take them quite as long as it did to reach their destination.

Almost every step of their path to the children’s hospital brought another Ringed to them. Walking corpses in a myriad of varying states of decomposition barred their path in staggered waves, making them fight for every forward advance. Joey stood back and loosed arrow after arrow into the heads of the freshest-looking corpses as Alys whirled around, a flurry of Sai strikes, fists, feet, elbows and knees, dealing with the slowest ones sequentially. She was quite something to watch.

Clean, fast strikes, clinically delivered with no fuss, no energy wasted, no quarter needed. She scythed her way through the dead, stepping from one to the next as they fell behind her. It looked like a choreographed dance from Joey’s viewpoint, making the violence she engaged in strangely beautiful and totally terrifying. For every one of The Ringed that Joey’s arrows found, she silenced three. It was a devastating display of her abilities and one that showed Joey how easy she’d taken it on him in their sparring sessions. The disclosure of how much she’d been holding back for him startled Joey.

 
They fought and silenced former people of all description. Doctors, soldiers, students and children. An awful lot of children and teenagers. They sent them all to a peaceful existence, one in which they were no longer driven to wander the bitter streets of Scotland’s former capital for eternity trying to sate a bottomless hunger. That’s what they told themselves, anyway. They had to believe that the people they silenced were at last
truly
dead or the actions that they took would be meaningless. Closure for poor wandering souls trapped in rotting corpses was all they had to offer and all they had to cling to. Even though they called them The Ringed and occasionally Zoms,
neither of them ever forgot that they used to be people. In his mind, Joey still clung to the phrase
The Children of Elisha
, but in his deeds he did not.

Slowly but steadily, they made their way along Sciennes Road through a tide of the dead to the gates of the hospital. Both were glad of the hours they’d spent conditioning their bodies for sustained combat, but the training they’d endured couldn’t compare in intensity to the real-life gauntlet they’d run. Both were exhausted when they reached their destination. Both hid their exhaustion from the other.