dEaDINBURGH (16 page)

Chapter 19

Joey

Joey raked through the shrubbery searching for the plants Alys had found for them that morning. He wanted to duplicate the meal she’d so easily put together for them, but this time with some venison from the deer he’d killed an hour before. Alys was back at their camp cleaning the animal. The fur, meat, some of the organs and a few of the long bones would all come in handy at some point. The meat most of all could be wrapped in cling film that Joey had in his rucksack and would keep for a few days, maybe a week, in the current temperature. Most likely it wouldn’t even require cooking before consumption until day three or four.

Having initially planned to travel to the hospital, less than a mile along Craigmillar Castle Road, they’d had a change of heart after the morning’s events and had spent most of the daylight hours devouring Jock’s journal. Alys had patiently helped Joey through each page, assisting him in reading the contents. Waiting until he stumbled over a phrase, she’d softly correct him or finish a word rather than just read the whole thing for him. “You need to learn, and fast,” Alys had said several times as he’d complained about his ineptitude, offering her the book to read for him.

He wasn’t anywhere near so bad at deciphering the words as he’d expected to be. Jock had begun to teach him to read, but their practice sessions had been spent looking at street names on maps and on buildings they’d passed. The street names were always so clear, in black, printed capitals. Jock’s journal, filled with looping, swooping and curled letters held only confusion, embarrassment and fear for him. At least initially.

As he’d been forced by Alys to try to read through the hand-written text, he became aware that his perception of the individual letters and words was slowly improving. Initially he’d had to mentally convert stylised letters into their more capitalised equivalent. As he made his way through, page by page, this process became quicker and was beginning to feel instantaneous. Alys, despite how demanding she generally was, turned out to be a patient teacher. Whilst he doubted that he would be able to decipher every word on his own, yet, with her help, he was making quick progress through the journal.

Both he and Alys devoured the pages. Jock’s journal disclosed answers to questions they’d been asking their whole lives. Questions nobody seemed to want to give answers to and brushed off with “What difference does it make now?” in reply.

The book was filled with explanations of how the plague broke and how the city became sealed, and information about the world that had existed before the plague as well as the people who’d lived then and how they’d lived. It was simply the most exciting account of the history of their city they could have hoped for. They read of Jock’s family and his struggle to keep them alive. His own survival, the bouts of despair and depression he fought through. Joey’s mother’s horrific death, in more detail than either of them needed. They couldn’t and wouldn’t stop reading, though, until it was complete.

As the journal progressed, it became obvious that Jock had spent the last years of his life dedicated to watching over Joey and eventually to teaching him everything he needed to survive the dead city. He’d begun writing the journal in his time with The Brotherhood and it was clear that what lay inside the pages was meant for Joey’s eyes alone. He’d loved Joey as deeply as he’d loved his own children and had been determined to see him become a strong man.

Joey and Alys laughed and cried and raged and struggled through every word of the journal until it was done and the day had disappeared around them. They’d sat in stunned silence for maybe an hour afterwards before chatting over a few of the more shocking aspects of Jock’s account. The secrets they found inside, the revelations, and the discovery of them together brought them closer than they imagined possible.

The outbreak. The speed at which the city was abandoned. How horribly over-privileged and self-absorbed, how pampered and arrogant the people of Jock’s former world seemed to them. It was a shock to both of them. How easy the people of the early twenty-first century had life and how little they seemed to actually live those lives. They seemed so trapped
–
truly caged, not by fences but by the limitations they put on their own lives, by the things that they valued and the things that they didn’t. Their world seemed so dead to Joey and Alys.

The new insights horrified them and saddened them. It made them hate the people of the past. It made them pity those same people. It also made them glad, for perhaps the first time, to be born into a place where people actually lived instead of just existing. In a city of the dead their parents had built the first living, thriving, proactive and capable communities the country had seen in generations. It gave them both a strange sense of pride.

They looked at the dead, still groaning their dry groans, snagged on foliage all around them and saw the people of the past, shuffling blindly through their existence, focused on a goal that would never satisfy them. One group of Zoms, furthest from their camp, were gathered around the steaming corpse of a badger they’d brought down. Three of them tore chunks from the twitching animal’s flesh as their fellow dead watched Joey and Alys. Dozens of pairs of dusty eyes and hands followed the pair as they moved around the camp. Due to his upbringing, Joey had always felt pity for the dead and never more so than now.

They spent ten minutes folding away what little there was of their camp, saying nothing. The silence was a comfort to him. Along with the darkness it made him feel at peace, able to think. He and Alys had breached some of the walls that had stood between them and he felt more strongly than he had ever done for her. What those feelings were, he still didn’t know, but she was pretty much all he had left now that Jock was gone. He had no intention of losing her.

Alys grabbed at his left sleeve as he made his routine checks of his equipment.

“You hear that?” she asked.

Joey craned his neck to the side and signalled to her to stay silent. He rotated his head as he listened all around. They’d agreed to risk travelling at night because the number of Zoms who’d been drawn to their camp throughout the day had reached a level where the possibility of them breaching the tangle of shrubbery and trees into their camp, by sheer weight of numbers, was becoming a probability.

Scanning around, he signalled again to Alys to extinguish the burning torch she carried. Joey’s eyes had begun to adjust to the creeping darkness but he wanted the light completely gone so that they could reach their peak.

Standing still for several minutes, listening, watching, he noticed Alys crouch beside him. She was more silent in a crouched position.

Joey’s ears and eyes did their work, piercing the darkness, seeking out the smallest movement. Snapping of twigs, dry, dusty groans that grew louder, clumsy footsteps. He counted, and counted, and counted.
Five, twenty, forty.

Eventually the sounds became less distinct and formed a din rising all around them. The dead were hungry. They’d sensed a meal and had gathered in number. Joey’s best guess was that there were well over three hundred walking corpses, obscured behind the twisted and moss-covered trees and shrubs that lined the one-time cycle path. They leaned against the natural barrier; a unit, pressing, pushing, and reaching.

Alys tugged at his trouser leg.

“How many?” she mouthed.

He watched her jaw stiffen as he mouthed a reply.

She nodded and stood, bringing her mouth close to his ear to whisper.

“We’ve no choice, Joey. We have to run.”

The heat from her breath in his ear brought goose bumps to his skin that even the realisation of being surrounded by the dead hadn’t provoked.

He turned his head to whisper into her ear.

“Let’s wait until one breaks through.”

He pointed at a swaying, creaking section to their left.

“Once they break that section, they’ll funnel through it together. They always follow each other, right? We should be okay if we keep ahead and run towards the hospital.”

Alys shook her head. “They’re just as likely to break through several sections at a time. Besides, they’ll keep following after us unless we give them something else to chase. They don’t tire, remember? We do.”

“Just go for it, then?”

Alys gave him a sharp nod and sprinted off along the cycle path. Despite the danger, Joey grinned broadly at her receding back before pushing off after her.

Almost immediately the foliage to their left began to collapse and the dead poured through. As Alys had predicted, section after section broke, releasing Zoms in varied states of readiness and decomposition into their path, ahead and behind them. Most were old, dried and badly decayed, but some were fresher, dead maybe a year at most. Almost all were dressed in the tell-tale uniforms and pyjamas of hospital staff and patients.

A quick exchange between them communicated that the thinnest group lay ahead. Joey drew his blades, one in each hand, and turned on The Ringed to their rear whilst Alys and her Sai ploughed through three Ringed like they were made of paper.

Joe silenced five, one after the other, with kicks, blows from the handle of his right blade and the edge of his left blade. One of those he kicked, a man in a shredded business suit with his throat torn wide open, picked himself up from where Joey had knocked him to the path, still very much in the mood for a snack. He chomped down onto Joey’s right foot, dislocating his jaw as he slid his mouth around the toes. Joey’s right hand flashed down, driving his blade through the back of the creature’s head as he felt pain shoot through his foot and up his leg. He kicked the Ringed off him and stamped the back of its head in a rage of fear.
It bit me!

Joey whirled around and saw Alys, ten Ringed at her feet and a clear path ahead, staring at him with wide eyes, filled with shock.

“Move,” she yelled at him as another large group burst clumsily through the treeline behind him.

They ran hard, punching, kicking and stabbing a path through the seemingly never-ending stream of Ringed, crashing like a flood onto the path behind them, in front of them, beside them. Adrenaline drove them and allowed Joey to ignore the pain in his foot and the fear in his heart. He had one thought:
get Alys out of this before I turn.

Suddenly the narrow, tree-lined path filled with the hungry dead opened out into a wooded area. Joey and Alys shot out from the narrow path into the open space, taking formation in the centre of the clearing, back to back. The wood was filled with the dead also.

 
They were surrounded, front, centre and rear. Hundreds poured along the cycle path in a raging torrent of hunger and death to join hundreds more of their undead brethren already shambling their way along. Joey and Alys took their stances and began fighting.

Wave after wave of green splintered teeth, broken-fingered hands, foul-smelling feet grasped and clawed for them. Alys had pulled her sharpened Sai and was spinning it along with her standard one, severing hands, puncturing skulls and breaking faces. Most of the former hospital residents and staff were in the final stages of decay, meaning that bone and structure disintegrated easily under the lightest blows. The fresher ones were getting closer, though. When they reached the pair at the centre, the fight would be a different beast.

Joey hadn’t bothered pulling out his bow. He felt sick, dizzy and weak.
The bite?
Besides, The Ringed were far too close. He continued stabbing, clubbing, tearing and silencing the dead, making his shoulders ache and his legs tremble.

Tirelessly the dead shambled towards them. Relentless in the eternal hunger, they crawled and tripped and shuffled over their fallen comrades. The fresh ones, faster, more powerful and more resilient, finally reached the centre.

Joey stole a glance at Alys. She was a lethal whirlwind of death with a hundred Ringed in pieces and at peace at her feet. She had never looked fiercer, calmer. She’d never looked more beautiful. But even Alys couldn’t keep this pace forever. She wasn’t tiring yet, but it was in the post and he himself was only standing out of sheer bloody-mindedness. He hit another Zom and glanced back at her. She seemed to be working herself a little room, an exit route he hoped.